Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  His mother had, in fact, liked Alma, but Mike knew his mother would no more find fault with him than she did with Jud. Her loyalties were simple and absolute. Yet he had not been able to go to her, as Jud had, with so practical a request. Even if Jud hadn’t been five years ahead of him in this, as in everything else, Mike hadn’t established himself confidently enough to provide such a solution. And he doubted that he could live with it, if it had been an option.

  He was driving east to Las Vegas, on his way to Phoenix, feeling in a hurry and in doubt by turns. The speeches he had composed for his brother seemed less and less likely every mile he drove. And his mother’s uncritical approval tasted like nothing more than borsch and perogi. Since Alma had mastered both, he might find himself more horribly homesick for her than ever. But where else could he go?

  He looked toward the next road sign, growing larger and larger as he approached. Death Valley. It felt more like laughing at a bad joke than making a decision as he took the exit several miles farther down the road.

  What Mike expected to find were the skulls of old cars and cattle in an enormous dried-up mud hole, the only glamor in such facts that the valley was below sea level and had taken a number of lives, some recently, of people who had tried to cross it unprepared in the height of summer when temperatures rose to the 120s. Death Valley and the Arabian desert were confused in Mike’s imagination; Peter O’Toole could have appeared in either, swapping robes for chaps and boots.

  Crossing over the mountains to get there, Mike was chilly enough to turn on the heater, but as he dropped down into the valley in the early afternoon, it might have been a summer day in the north, the fresh clarity of air Mike had nearly forgotten in the smog-ridden city. He had thought of barren land always in negative terms, a lack of vegetation, an absence of green. He did not know, until he saw it, that color bloomed in rock, great strokes of ocher, ridges of red, cliffsides of aquamarine. Unlike the northern mountains, clothed in trees, this naked rock exposed the violence of its coming, layers of geological time heaved up to benign light.

  Signs, which nearly everywhere in the south had interested Mike more than any view from the freeway, hardly caught his notice here, although they could have fed his schoolboy fantasies, warning of flash floods, of roads patrolled only once a day by helicopter, of the necessity of carrying water, staying with your car if it broke down, under it if the sun was hot. He was watching the mountains, a man driving at the bottom of a vanished sea through sand dunes onto salt flats where crystals had grown up off the surface like the arms of a thousand drowning men, occasionally an oasis of trees, kept alive by hot springs, where there were cabins to rent. Mike stopped at one of these for a local map and information.

  Like so many other places along this coast where the Indians had chosen to live, white men had passed through, unable to tolerate what couldn’t be cultivated, irrigated, built on. Here the earth’s surface was so fragile that half an inch of rain could wash out a road.

  At the lowest point in the valley, Mike got out of his truck and looked up to a sign high above him on the cliff face, Sea Level. Here Indians had lived in a tide governed by seasons rather than the moon, on the valley floor in winter, rising to the mountains for the summer, following whatever paths the winter rains or wind had made, leaving no more signs of their presence than a few arrowheads and bones, fossilizing with the bones and shells of other living things, preserved in these monumental pallets of rock.

  A death wish as innocent as breath left Mike empty of everything that had tormented him, reconciled with stone, which did not need to be redeemed of anything.

  He traveled up out of the valley, free of guilt or desire, free of memory until he was shocked back into himself by the enormous, almost unbelievable vulgarity of Las Vegas and recognized in it his own answer to the desert: the vulgarity or elegance didn’t matter so much as filling the space.

  By the time Mike reached Phoenix he was running a fever, and it was some days before he was more than momentarily aware of his mother’s face or his brother’s fading in and out of his dreams, in which he was nearly always dead but not in the serene place of death, images taken from there and transposed so that he was a grotesquely growing tree of salt crystals at his own dining-room table, a flash flood invading his own house, a natural catastrophe rather than a man, whom his wife and children fled from down a road marked by enormous warnings he could not read.

  When the fever finally broke and he woke, he was on a couch in a small living room, crowded with old furniture he dimly recognized. There, for instance, was his father’s armchair, maroon vinyl cracking, beside it the high square table with the ashtray that had held his father’s cigars. It was an L-shaped room, and in the L was the large old kitchen table, over which was a plastic chandelier with bulbs shaped like flames. Though Mike had always fiercely defended the furnishings of his childhood against Alma’s, waking to them here was like trying to recognize his father’s face in the last stages of illness. He wondered why Jud had let his mother haul this pathetic junk from British Columbia to Arizona. “Was he sentimental about it as Mike had thought he was himself? Then he was aware of the sound of quiet breathing just behind him. He turned his head and saw his mother asleep in a chair. His movement woke her.

  She rose slowly, looked at him, put a hand on his forehead, smiled, and said, very quietly, “I’ll get you some tea.”

  They had a quiet hour together in what Mike realized had been dawn light, before Jud woke, and then the children, who were no longer children, young David with a voice as deep as his father’s, several inches taller, a shadow of young beard, Judy with breasts and eye makeup. The room was terribly crowded with them all in it until they settled to the table under that awful chandelier for the breakfast his mother was cooking for them.

  Mike had assumed his brother was modestly successful. He owned a mobile home dealership and had business all around the state. Was he overcapitalized that he kept this large-bodied family in this cracker box of a house? They all could not have sat together in the living room while Mike lay on the couch. He moved to sit up and was too weak to manage it. He was glad no one had noticed, all of them eating in silent concentration. Was that habit, or was it a silence for his benefit? Mike felt like a corpse in the parlor.

  When the other three had gone to work and to school, Mike protested to his mother that they should have sent him to the hospital.

  “Not here in this country,” she said. “It costs the earth. You pay even for the bedpan and the aspirin.”

  “Is this where you usually sleep?”

  “No, no. I have a bed in Judy’s room.”

  “It seems awfully crowded.”

  “Jud says how could he sell them if he was too good to live in one.”

  “This is what he sells?”

  His mother nodded. “All over the state. Every one has two bathrooms.”

  When Mike was strong enough to move around a little, his mother put a deck chair out in the driveway for him. There was no yard except for a patch of stones barricaded by ornamental cacti. It was not so much a neighborhood as a kind of permanent camp, as if pioneers crossing this desert had been suddenly petrified. The houses, like wagons, were more places of storage than spaces to live in. The screened porch which ran the length of Jud’s house was the only pleasant place to sit.

  The only person who did sit for periods of time was his mother, always with knitting or mending in her lap. The others gathered only when they were waiting for a meal, and then they watched television. In the evening the kids took off to the library, the bowling alley, the movies, and Jud, if he’d come home, went back to his office. He traveled so much he was always behind with his paperwork.

  Jud apologized to Mike about being there so seldom. Though he had a secretary, a part-time accountant, as well as two salesmen, he wanted to delegate as little authority as he could in order to keep in touch with every aspect of his business. Jud suggested that, once Mike was feeling up to it, Jud would not onl
y show him the layout but take him on one of his trips, if only just out into the suburbs of Phoenix.

  It was not his certainly returning strength so much as his restlessness which made Mike accept any excuse to get away from the cramped space of not only the house but the camp, which covered remarkably few acres for the number of dwellings. There was really no place to walk; roads were designed as a series of small half-moons with an occasional straight spur that dead-ended in desert. Though the houses were different colors and the small patches of ground expressive of different tastes, air force insignia in colored stones here, stone mushrooms and tin roadrunners there, they all were essentially the same.

  He would go back to try to talk with his mother.

  “People like it the same,” she explained to him. “There’s room for competition, but not much.”

  It wasn’t her own idea. She was speaking for Jud. Mike didn’t remember her speaking for his father in that way, but his father had had defenses rather than real ideas or explanations. Mike would have liked to lodge some of his own notions in her mind, but when he tried to talk with her about art, she didn’t even try to hide the fact that it was beyond not only her understanding but her interest. For any other subject—marriage, money, child rearing—Mike had excuses rather than conversation. He was superior to his father only in that he knew it, but Mike had been jarred into that insight as his father never had. Mike could not talk to his mother. He was reduced to watching the quiz shows she liked when he needed to be companionable. She was visibly pleased with him when he began oiling door hinges and trying to figure out how to stop the kitchen floor from squeaking right by the sink.

  “You’ve learned to fix things.”

  “I probably should have been a plumber or a carpenter.”

  She nodded to the logic of that.

  Mike had been there two weeks when he asked Jud to show him his office, which was, Mike discovered, just down the road at the edge of the camp. Jud corrected him twice, calling it a development. The office, too, was one of the same structures, the larger bedroom Jud’s office, the smaller one full of office machines. The secretary, a woman in her fifties with blue hair and a great deal of Indian jewelry, had a desk in the dining L where she could greet customers and salesmen, for whom there were comfortable couches and chairs. All the furniture was blandly modern and expensive. The kitchen was well enough stocked to make it clear that Jud, even when he was in the neighborhood, lived here rather than with his mother and children.

  For a couple of days he let Mike hang around to listen and ask questions, to get some idea of the scope of the business.

  “You’re not just a supplier then. You’re getting into development.”

  “You bet,” Jud said. “This is the retirement center of the country, aside from Florida, and we’re getting ready for the baby boom of the forties. It’s the last big wave of population that’s coming through, and the service people are already arriving. It’s going to last just long enough to see me through.”

  “What then?”

  “Who knows? Who cares?”

  Mike drove with Jud to development after development, almost all of them planned around a central clubhouse with swimming pool and tennis courts, often a golf course, a great green serpentine to distract and rest the eyes from the miles of open, flat desert. Nearly none of these places accepted children, and visiting grandchildren under eighteen had to stay pretty well out of sight. As far as Mike could judge, about three-quarters of the population were impressive health freaks, out on the golf links and tennis courts early in the morning, at the pool after a dietetic lunch, in bed mildly sedated by bourbon at nine o’clock. The other twenty-five percent were helped in and out of the hot therapy pool and played cribbage in the shade. Their stroke-distorted speech, arthritic backs, heart coughs did not seem to depress so much as inspire the others to make full use of their own healthy bodies. Nowhere did Mike see anyone reading, not even a newspaper.

  “They don’t want to know,” Jud said. “This is the one I’ll move into as soon as Judy’s eighteen. I’ve already got two houses here, renting at seven hundred dollars a month for the season. All the land west to the mountains is going to be developed as soon as some details are sorted out with the Indians and the government.”

  “Maybe I should come down and open a crematorium.”

  “Seriously, in about a year I’m going to have to expand. I want to do one of these places myself, and I need a partner.”

  “Oh, hell, Jud, I don’t have any money, maybe five thousand, and I don’t know a damned thing about the business.”

  “I don’t need money so much as someone I can trust. You could learn the business in a month. And with your talent you could mount an advertising campaign to leave these other jokers way behind. Mike, I want a chunk of this, and if you’d come in with me, we could have a fair-sized chunk. The money makes itself.”

  “What do you do with it once you have it?”

  “Anything you want,” Jud said. “Just anything you want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing but the kinds of worries I’ve got now.”

  “I’m an artist, Jud, not a businessman.”

  Jud squinted at his brother. “What’s to stop you being both? You have to earn a living now.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have to think about it.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you did?”

  “I’ve got a lot of other things on my mind.”

  “Like what? Killing yourself?”

  Mike looked at his brother, startled, and then laughed. “I’ve got no immediate plans.”

  “Good,” Jud said. “Come on. I want to show you the piece of nothing we could make into a gold mine. I’ll show you some convincing figures when we get back to the office, but imagination is all you need. Imagine, say, one of your sculptures and some sort of fountain at the entrance, which would right away make the place distinctive.”

  His brother wanted to save his life. Mike, who felt he should have been insulted, was absurdly touched.

  The next morning, alone at the old kitchen table while his mother did the breakfast dishes, Mike opened the divorce papers being served to him. At first, the only thing he was able to read was his name, after which was typed: “of no fixed address.”

  Alma Writing

  MY THIRTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY. Did I ever once, in the ten years I lived with Mike, tell him I wanted to write? I’ve never told anyone. Yet he gave me this absurdly pretentious blank book, which has been sitting on my night table now for three months, growing more pretentious and blanker each day. If it had been a house plant, it would have been dead of neglect in a couple of weeks. The only way to kill this book is to fill it with failed hope. Do I always begin things already knowing they won’t work? Like school? Like Mike? Like Roxanne? Like this? If I were going to write something real, I’d have to make it up. Scribbling in this reminds me of Vic filling pages with what writing looked like to him because Tony was really learning how. So I read Sita and think, enviously, “Anyone can do that,” and set out to show myself up because, even if I did know enough about language, my life, unlike Kate Millett’s, is only life-sized.

  If my chief excuse for living were writing it down, would I live very differently? I’d have to. The moment I got out of bed this morning, I’d have to start packing my bags because I wouldn’t be having dinner with my parents and sisters and sons—what a crowd that sounds and is—I’d be going off to Roxanne instead to celebrate my real birth. But even if I did that, I’m far too amazed by loving her to be able to write it down. And anyway, when I get up, I’m going to put on the yellow pantsuit Mother gave me yesterday, my yearly birthday suit, which remakes me into a daughter, and live through the day here in my parents’ house, where no one will suggest—perhaps because they don’t even think it—that I am an embarrassment or a burden, failed wife, apprehensive mother, with no idea what to do with myself or my children because the one thing I want to do is impossible even
if I had the money to do it. And I can’t leave this house until I’m sure I won’t do it.

  When I asked Carlotta all those months ago, right after Mike left, if she’d ever made love with a woman, she said, “Other than myself? No.” I let that shut me up. It needn’t have. Even when Carlotta didn’t want to listen to me, she would, then anyway. I suppose I’ve been half in love with her all these years, and I felt—feel—as guilty about Carlotta as I do about Mike. In a way, Roxanne didn’t have anything to do with Mike, or Mike and me, except as a way of showing us how bad it really was.

  Is that true? I am so guilty in every direction that I can’t understand anything.

  I suggested to Dad that maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist. He didn’t say no; he wouldn’t. He simply said, “Why don’t you give yourself some time to think things over for yourself? Then, if you still feel it might help, of course.” I’ve spent most of my time trying not to think things over. I haven’t the faintest idea what I’d ask a psychiatrist if I saw one …

  Why did I marry? Why did I marry Mike? Aside from the fact that he asked me. Probably aside from the fact that he still, even strained and thin, is the handsomest man I have ever seen, and initially that made me feel that I must be attractive myself, not just a great oversized cow of a girl. Surely not aside from the fact that I thought he was an artist, which made me imagine sensitive depths beyond the repetitive pigheaded nonsense which I thought was simply the surface of his mind. Yes, aside from that, too. Those are my excuses.

  Because when I was an eighteen-year-old virgin who had never been on a real date except when it was arranged by my parents, my friend Bett, who had already been “ecstatically” married for two years, taught me the facts of life. She told me I was too tall and too womanly (read: one of monstrous tits) to attract boys and too dumb to attract men. She said “shy.” I had to get in touch with my own body, and she could show me how if I could just pretend, while she was doing it, that she was a man. It took her three weeks to get my clothes off, another week to get her hand between my legs, and I never did imagine it was anything but her hand. I was so wet I thought I was hemorrhaging, and I was terrified by what I felt, as if I were being raped not by her hand, but by my own body, which had set fire to itself in some Dickensian spontaneous combustion.