Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  He went into an art supply shop to buy himself new sketching pads, and there he decided to buy for his sons what he had always guarded fiercely for himself: the drafting tools and papers they had never been allowed to touch. In the pleasure of starting again, he chose generously, buying two of everything so that there would be no cause for envy or argument, each one to be equipped for the solitary activity that had given Mike so many hours of concentrated peace. He could stay alive in their hands and dreaming shapes. The clerk gave him two large boxes he’d later tie elaborately with string, a macramé Santa Claus for Victor, a cross for Tony. On the way out of the shop, Mike paused to look at a large, handsomely bound notebook with its blank pages of fine paper. Always a grumbler about cost, Mike had never given in to his own coveting of such objects. He worked with good materials, but elegance was in the extravagance of his imagination, in the poise of line, not in such things as this. On an impulse he bought it, not for himself but for his wife, though he had no idea what use she could put it to.

  After he had phoned and asked her when he might drop by to see the boys, he felt as uncertain as a man courting. Would she, would they all see these gifts as just another indication of his self-absorption instead of the hopeful offering of what mattered to him most to share with them?

  Several weeks ago Ann had said she’d put off buying the girls shoes because Joseph liked to take them shopping for those and always turned it into a special occasion. She obviously thought it both funny and endearing since, aside from his teeth, Joseph most begrudged spending money on his own shoes. Mike had always thought of fatherly chores as starting his sons out in skills and pleasures, not in things, but part of his pride had been a defense against his father-in-law’s obsessive generosity. Might Mike have discovered the innocent pleasure in things if he’d chosen Tony’s first pencil box, Victor’s first lunch pail, the very things he had scorned because he’d envied them himself when he started school without the stub of a pencil or anything to eat?

  The boys were out playing on their grandparents’ expansive front lawn when Mike arrived. Victor was the first to spot his truck, shouted out, “Hey, Dad!” and came at a run. Standing on the parking strip, watching the chunky power of his younger boy’s body, Mike wanted to reach out his arms not to some vision of a lost future but to this child, whom he’d tended and taught, rebuked and encouraged, loving him simply as he could never love Tony because Tony had always stayed aloof, as he did now, watching his younger brother greet his father. Mike didn’t catch Victor up in his arms, hug him, weep into his tender child’s neck, tell him how bitterly Mike had missed him. Victor was a son, not a daughter. And Victor, so like his father in his own requirements, jammed to a stop only a couple of feet from Mike, nearly falling down, and said in a soft, breathless voice with a shy, tough toss of his head, “Hi.”

  Mike put a hand on his shoulder and a playful fist into his jaw. Victor returned the greeting with a fist into Mike’s thigh hard enough to make him wonder if he’d have to limp into the house.

  “What are you doing? Practicing for a knockout?”

  Victor buried his face against the flesh he had struck, his arms around Mike’s leg, as if he might anchor Mike there forever, half wrestler’s hold, half hug. Mike tousled his hair, already darkening as Tony’s was not, and looked across the lawn at his fair-haired boy, who had not moved.

  “Hey, Tony,” Mike called. “Get a leg on. I need help with parcels.”

  It worked. The boy was released into his own running. He was much more graceful than Victor and was already a good skater, one of the many such accomplishments Mike didn’t have.

  “How’ve you been?” Mike asked.

  “Okay, I guess,” Tony answered. “You been in a fight?”

  Mike touched the scratch on his face and saw the cuts on his hand. “Would you believe I had an argument with a perfume bottle?”

  Tony had his mother’s reluctant smile, which made it a pleasure to win it from him.

  “Can we open them right away, while you’re here?” Victor asked the moment he saw the presents. “Hey, that’s funny!” he said, pointing to the knotted Santa.

  “How did you do that?” Tony asked, looking at his knotted cross.

  Mike wished he’d thought to include balls of string.

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  “Are you coming in?” Tony asked, a note of uncertainty in his voice.

  “I’m not going to stand out here and freeze.”

  “Aunt Margaret’s in there,” Tony said, “and Uncle Peter.”

  “They just came,” Victor added.

  Mike felt the anger in him begin to rise. Did Alma think she needed protection? If so, she should have found someone other than that prick of a brother-in-law who couldn’t have protected his prize camellia from his wife’s Pekinese.

  They were all there, his in-laws, and the term seemed to Mike aggressively legal as he shook hands first with Alma’s father, then with Peter. The women had not come to the door. Alma and Margaret sat on the couch in front of the brightly burning fire. Alma’s mother stood fiddling with the Christmas tree, which was as formal and expensive as everything else in this house. Alma did rise to greet him, a coffee table between them. He was glad he had a box to offer her and saw that she was surprised by it.

  “Can we open ours now while Dad’s here?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Alma said.

  “What’ll you have, Mike?”

  “Whatever’s going,” Mike said.

  Alma’s mother was offering him a plate of fruitcake, stuffed dates, and some of the same cookies Alma had served him … was it only yesterday?

  “Eggnog?”

  Normally Mike would have remarked that eggnog tasted to him like milk pissed in by a diabetic. This afternoon he said, “Fine.”

  Victor was struggling to pull off the macramé Santa Claus to get at his present. Tony held his up to his father.

  “Can I get it open without undoing the cross?”

  Mike took a knife out of his pocket and cut the string to keep the cross intact. He did the same for Victor, wishing he had also bought them knives, wanting them to have everything he did that gave him pleasure.

  “You always do such clever things with your hands, Mike,” Margaret commented pleasantly. She was the sister who had given him boxing gloves.

  He picked up the extra string and quickly tied her two intricate knots.

  “Where did you learn how?”

  “On the docks when I was a kid … from the sailors.”

  “A compass, hey, funny!” Victor exclaimed.

  Tony did not say anything as he looked at graph paper, sketching pad, a numbered range of pencils, pen and ink, ruler, but the pleasure in his touching with hands so like his father’s was obvious.

  “Everything’s just the same,” Victor discovered, looking into his brother’s box. “I’ve got everything he’s got.”

  The adults laughed, knowing that fact would give status to a bottle of vitamin pills.

  “Can I draw something right now?” Victor asked.

  “Sure,” Mike said. “Why don’t we just go in to the dining-room table?”

  “I’m sorry,” Alma’s mother said. “It’s set for dinner …”

  “Use the table in my den,” Alma’s father suggested.

  Mike wondered if he had all the money in the world whether he’d ever be comfortable in the wasted showplaces of a house like this. Alma’s father probably sat at that desk once a month to do domestic paperwork. His office was downtown. The only real use for the den was the shelter it offered sons-in-law to watch football games and grandchildren at moments like this. The boys sat down at the library table. Tony decided to block out a town on graph paper. Victor began to draw a plane to bomb it.

  Alma came to the door and stood watching. Mike walked over to join her.

  “They’re wonderful presents.”

  “Alma, I’m leaving town for awhile, maybe a month or two. I’ve taken wh
at I need out of the house. You can do whatever you want about it.”

  “What about your job?”

  “I quit, but don’t worry about that. I’ve got money set aside. I’ll send you the usual.”

  “You don’t really have to do that, Mike.”

  “Those are my kids.”

  “Sure, but if you’re not working … Without us, I thought you might be able to get on with your own work, really concentrate, without the burden …”

  “A family isn’t a burden.”

  “Mike, you should know I’m going ahead with the divorce, and I don’t want alimony or anything.”

  “Are you going to go out and work?”

  “I thought maybe, part time.”

  “I don’t want that. I want you at home with the boys. I’ll send the money.”

  Alma began to protest again and then shrugged. She rarely argued to get her way.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “In a day or two.”

  “Take care of yourself, won’t you?”

  “I’ve got no choice,” Mike answered.

  The scene was too strange, the boys peacefully working at the library table, Mike having a civil conversation with Alma about the uncivil and unholy thing she had decided to do. Mike could hear the nervous joviality of the conversation in the living room with its silent gaps while they listened for an angry raising of voices or a slap and a scream. Mike had a momentary image of himself, the superstud, beating the shit out of Alma’s father and Peter while the women stood by in terror and admiration, but he had already won the princess’s hand and lived happily ever after. His father was right. Life was much too long, and Mike was deathly tired of it.

  “Thank your father for this sweet piss,” he said, handing Alma his empty glass.

  Without saying goodbye to his sons or the rest of the assembled guard, he left the house. He stood for a moment on the front steps to acknowledge the admirable and serene view of Howe Sound, the water sapphire blue today, the great mountains white with unviolated snow. From here the city might not have existed, people piled on top of each other thirty stories high in the lonely close quarters of their lives, the long drunk of Christmas just beginning, the taste already cloying.

  That duty done, Mike regretted having agreed to be with Ann and Joseph the next day. He wanted to get into the truck and begin driving—south out of this cold country. But he also needed to eat and to sleep. He wondered about treating himself to a meal in a restaurant, but his extravagance had spent itself. Instead, he stopped at a supermarket to buy hamburger, a can of corn, a bag of apples.

  In the lineup Mike caught sight of Pierre, three cash registers away, wearing a kerchief over his long dark curls, carrying a woman’s handbag. He seemed to be alone. Mike despised Allen, who chose not to be a man, not to be an artist, degraded himself with that embarrassing and pathetic mistake of a boy, with work about which he was entirely cynical, fawning over Alma, condescending to Mike. Pierre was simply pitiful, trying to pass as a little French housewife; he needed a shave. At that moment Pierre caught sight of Mike and gave him a radiant smile. Mike nodded.

  Pierre was checked out first and came to stand with Mike while the clerk rang up his few purchases.

  “Is that your dinner?” Pierre asked, peering over his own large bag of groceries.

  “Just a snack,” Mike answered defensively, not able to abide sympathy from Pierre.

  “You’re not eating properly,” Pierre said, a surprising sternness in his voice. “Carlotta’s no sort of cook. You can tell that by looking at her.”

  “My friends aren’t feeding me,” Mike said haughtily.

  “I can see that,” Pierre agreed. “I wish … well, the trouble is at Christmas we go gay with a vengeance, and, though you’d be very welcome, of course, I don’t think …”

  “Thanks,” Mike said. “I’m having Christmas with Ann and Joseph.”

  “I did know that. Joseph told me last week. I’m so glad he’s getting out of there. Every time I went out to see him I was sick to my stomach for hours afterwards. I told Allen, when I go crazy, he can just put me in a cage in the backyard …”

  Mike accepted change with one hand, picked up his groceries with the other, refusing to meet the amused eyes of the clerk. “Merry Christmas,” he said curtly to either of them, and walked away from their rejoinders.

  It was after nine o’clock, the stores all shut, when Mike thought he should also have bought gifts at least for Rachel and Susan. Could he make them something? He looked around his crowded studio space. There wasn’t time to make anything elaborate like a doll’s house. Chairs? He didn’t have the right sorts of scraps, and they’d anyway outgrow them too quickly. He was staring at the piece Joseph called “School Days,” the one he had the most trouble keeping Victor from climbing on the several times he had the boys with him here. “It’s not a fucking jungle gym. It’s a piece of sculpture, a work of art, you little barbarian!” Tony had never had to be told, though he could put on his mother’s expression of skepticism at such statements, which angered Mike far more than Victor’s innocent energy. Climbing in it did no harm. It was sturdily enough built for a dozen kids to play on. Mike himself climbed about on them all, “like an angry ape,” Joseph said.

  Well, why not? It came apart in pieces he could easily load into the truck by himself. It wouldn’t take half an hour to put the structure together again in Joseph’s backyard. That problem solved, Mike finally slept and dreamed of apes and children playing in the wreckage of his art.

  Joseph, in trousers now too large for him, an old man’s cardigan, and carpet slippers, looked more diminished than he had even in the hospital. Beside him Ann, now clearly pregnant, looked a member of another species. Not for the first time Mike wondered why a woman so calm and fruitful had twice been bound to men so obviously mortal. Though he knew it could not have been conscious choice, she seemed to him the female counterpart of those men who chose dangerous occupations, the constant threat of death giving them a rare radiance.

  “Can we let him do this?” Ann was asking Joseph as they stood by the truck, watching him unload the pieces of sculpture.

  “What is it?” both the children were asking.

  “A special sort of jungle gym for the backyard. Your dad calls it ‘School Days.’”

  Together they chose a place next to the sandbox Joseph had built them. The day was too cold for standing about. Mike insisted Joseph and Ann go back indoors, but the girls, in bright new ski jackets, stayed with him.

  “Are you a daddy, Mike?” Rachel asked.

  “Of course, he is,” Susan said.

  “How do you know?” Rachel asked.

  “Because he acts like a daddy.”

  “Not like ours.”

  “Ours is sick.”

  “Our other daddy got sick and died,” Rachel informed Mike matter-of-factly. “But Daddy won’t. Mother says he’ll get well after a while.”

  “Of course, he will,” Mike said.

  “Where are your children?” Rachel asked.

  “With their mother.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Six and nearly nine.”

  “We’re older,” Susan said. “I’m nearly ten.”

  “I’m eight.”

  “Don’t stand on that until I’ve got it fixed,” Mike said, tempted to suggest that both of them go in to help their mother.

  Before when he had been there, they had been very quiet. Now they seemed much more like his own nuisancy kids. You did something for children, and they thought it gave them new rights with you instead of obligations. When did that change? With women it didn’t. Maybe that was why you could go ahead and spoil daughters since it was their nature to live their lives getting what they didn’t earn as the right of their sex.

  “Are you cross?” Rachel asked.

  “No,” Mike said, lifting her up and putting her down on the bare branch of an apple tree, “just busy. I’ll be finished in a minute if you’
ll stay there.”

  “Look how high I am!”

  “You, too?” Mike asked Susan.

  She was more like Tony, he realized. Did first children have to be more watchful and testing?

  “Okay,” she said, and held out her arms to be lifted.

  She hadn’t the weight of his six-year-old. Once established in the tree, she began to giggle, a pitch low for a girl child and surprisingly sensual. When she stopped, Rachel started up an imitation. For a few minutes they played catch with their laughter, then struck up a silly duet until they seemed nearly demented.

  “I’m going to wet my pants,” Rachel said.

  That set off an hysteria that shook the tree. Mike tightened the last bolt and climbed up on the structure of carefully broken forms to test its stability. The sight of him standing higher than they were sent them into new convulsions, and his threatened irritation, as he looked down at those tiny-boned, curly-headed children, weak with silliness, hugging the trunk of the apple tree, vanished. Christmas morning, with their frail and subdued father, must have been tense with doubt as well as excitement, all being spent now in this paroxysm of laughter. His boys would have been having an only half-playful fistfight. Maybe at this moment they were, except without him there to permit it, understanding the necessity of spending pent-up anxious excitement, their mother would stop them. Little girls giggled.

  “Come on,” he said, jumping down. “Now you can try it.”

  He lifted one, then the other down from the tree. They staggered about a moment, unsure of their balance, then made a game of the staggering, until Susan with a quick grace swung herself up onto the first stage of the structure, and Rachel followed.

  “Hey this is fun!”

  “Come up here. Come to this part!”

  “Mike, look at me, look at me.”

  What he saw was not the success of his present to two small girls, though they did not interfere with his pleasure. It had been years since he’d actually been able to see what he had made in a space of its own without other structures competing for attention, in bright daylight. It was elegant.