Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “Am I bleeding to death?”

  “That’s sex, sweetie.”

  When I refused to play her part, which she wanted me to do just in order to see that I understood how it worked, she lost interest in the enterprise. Since I couldn’t even think about her without beginning to shake, we found it easy enough to avoid each other. Someone told me the other day that she’s just married for the third time.

  I’m not so worried about what a psychiatrist might make of that as I am of the fact that it didn’t occur to me until a year ago today that Bett had been attracted to me or I to her. I let myself believe for all those years that I allowed that long, ridiculous seduction in the interest of nothing but self-knowledge. In a sense, because I certainly wasn’t in love with Bett, I was right, except, of course, that I didn’t want to know. I was so afraid of being betrayed by my own body that feeling nothing but mild discomfort with Mike was a relief. When I realized that at his inaccurate touch I wouldn’t begin to melt down my own thighs and burn to my tits, I stopped fighting him off and let him do pretty much what he liked or needed to do as long as it didn’t involve me in any active or important way.

  One of Mike’s arguments for getting married was that women like sex better after marriage, as if the ring had an ancient erotic power. I was nearly sure by then that it didn’t. He’d been fucking me on a mattress in the back of his truck twice a week for six months before he tested his theory on a wife in a proper bed in a bridal suite at the Bayshore Inn. I used Vaseline then. I wanted to please him. It wasn’t until after Tony was born … What is this myth about forgetting birth? If that kind of terrible commotion could go on, juices spurting out everywhere for an audience of people, of strangers, and afterwards I felt a smug exhibitionist, my breasts full of milk, why on earth was I frightened or ashamed of the wet animality of my own pleasure? I used to want Mike to fuck me just after I’d nursed Tony or even, if he could have been gentle about it, while I was. He was embarrassed even to see me nursing, and when a spot of milk seeped out onto my blouse, I had to change at once. I felt almost innocent in my indignation, married to this prudish ape of a man, a sexual illiterate in an age of information overkill. I even pretended to myself that he was perfectly satisfied. He got it up; he got it in; he got it off. And he was on his way to getting the army of children his vanity required, who, in fact, irritated him to violence for the first three years of their lives and were too expensive for him to support after that.

  Why did I marry? Why did I marry Mike? To put off for good knowing that I did not attract men because they didn’t attract me. I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that the only kind of man who insists on marrying a lesbian is a man like Mike, for whom even fucking a brick wall is a test of his virility. Oh, there’s the other extreme, a man who wants to pass no tests at all. A man like that could not have protected me from myself for so many hard, safe years.

  I was safe. Mike did protect me, and he would have gone on even without the children he still wanted, and I would have gone on, yes, even after Roxanne (she might even have made it easier), if I hadn’t finally really seen his pain, not hanging there in the shed but on Joseph’s face, in Joseph’s simple, humiliating words, “He’s unhappy.”

  I don’t know how Joseph’s wife feels about his going crazy. Maybe she isn’t responsible and so doesn’t feel betrayed. But if Mike had actually had to kill himself to get away from me, he would have killed me, too. I would have died of exposure. I still have nightmares about the truck smashed up in a pile of cars or going over a cliff, and almost always Mike in miniature is hanging there on the rearview mirror, where he had a nude doll when I first met him.

  I couldn’t possibly want to get even. In public measure I’m probably way ahead, as long as Mike doesn’t contest the divorce. Dad didn’t want me to accept the last check, but I told him that would rile Mike, and I don’t want Mike angry even as far away as Arizona. He could so easily, if he wanted to, take the children away from me, have me declared unfit as a mother.

  I don’t see Roxanne more than once a week. She knows, because of the divorce, I have to be very careful, and even once that’s over, we can’t possibly live together, not while I have the boys. But at least we’ll be able to have an occasional weekend together. I can always leave the kids here. Roxanne doesn’t ask for anything. I’m the one who gets hysterical about not being able to see her. I’m the one who suggests crazy escapes, even without the boys. She shakes that great flower of hair against my belly and says no into my navel.

  I love her thinness. I love the tiny cups of her breasts, the way she shows them off in tank tops and see-through shirts. I love her low-slung trousers, so beautifully indecent when she leans over; her cleavage, she says, inviting my finger down to tease the pucker of her ass hole. I touch her wherever and whenever I like. She’s as greedy as a cat.

  And now I’m trying to be Violette Leduc, writing with one hand, masturbating with the other, and I don’t think it’s disgusting, but it is stupidly, stupidly lonely to lie here in bed on my birthday, my cunt weeping with greed, while Mother indulges me by cooking breakfast for the children. This should have happened to me when I was fifteen. Is conscience always perverse? I had enough sexual shame for a nun at fifteen, but I had no trouble lying in bed any morning while the bacon cooked. Now, with no sexual shame at all, the smell of this morning’s bacon makes both hands equally guilty.

  Get up, woman. You’re thirty-one years old today even if you are lying in bed in a room that still suffers traces of your childhood. In twenty minutes Vic and Tony will have to be driven across town to school, and Mother may or may not refrain from saying, “If they transferred schools, they could walk.” I can’t really tell her the truth: that I don’t transfer them because once a week, on Roxanne’s day off, I can go to her from dropping the boys without having to explain anything to anyone.

  I wrote that three weeks ago. Obviously this isn’t going to be a diary. There’s really no point in filling it with silly excuses and half-baked explanations and guilty confessions, though that’s certainly the garbage in my head. I do feel retarded, here in this little girl’s room, in a house where I increasingly feel more like a big sister than a mother to my children, whose manners are improving so drastically that something’s going to have to give somewhere. Tony will start shoplifting. Victor will be sent home for obscene behavior on the playground. It’s hard to believe I’d ever miss the foulmouthed bellowing I put up with for years, but one good “Fuck off!” or “Stick it up your ass!” would sometimes be a real relief. Has Mike ruined me for genteel life?

  I tried to talk with Dad the other day. He’s been saying, “Wait until you have your divorce. Plenty of time then to sort out what you want to do.” They not only don’t mind having us here: they’re getting used to it, and I shouldn’t let that happen. But if I suggest moving out, what I’m suggesting is Dad’s paying the rent on another place, and he wouldn’t hear of my going back to Kitsilano. I could get a part-time job, but short of making enough money to be really independent, what is the point?

  I’ve had another check from Mike. I’m putting them in a savings account for the boys, building them a fantasy independence so that they won’t need to come running home at thirty.

  It’s what Mike has done, too. What a couple of great babies we are! And always were, playing house in that ridiculous place, Mike carrying out some movie version of the working-class husband, I the superior wife, or he was the abused and I the secret genius. We were unreal. We still are, he pouting over his mother’s perogi, I putting off getting dressed for chamber music, from which Mother is staying home to babysit so that I can have a night out with Dad.

  Most men Dad’s age have other women. When Dad gets restless, he squires one daughter or another around town. How can I help feeling guilty—appalled—that all I really want to do, if I can’t be with Roxanne, is lock myself into this room like a mooning teenager pretending to be Canada’s Rita Mae Brown or whoever? I hide the books I borrow
from Roxanne, not because Mother would rummage through my room; she never has, and there would have been nothing to find when I was growing up. I hide the books as I hide so much of myself to be the wholesome daughter of a wholesome father who is waiting patiently for me downstairs.

  One of the rare, interesting fights Mike and I had—I didn’t usually fight with him since silence daunted him far more—was about language. I told him I was sick not of his feelings so much as the way he belched them out in such vulgar clichés. Did everything from a miscooked egg to an offensive political statement have to be shoved up somebody’s ass? What was appropriate about it as a storage for everything he disliked? From what I’d read, it was for men the only secret pocket of the body for storing valuables, contraband.

  “It’s the working-class equivalent for putting sand in somebody’s piggy bank,” he said, surprising himself out of sarcasm by how interesting the idea was to him. “What I call tight-assed, you call cheap. Everything you don’t like is cheap or vulgar. The money metaphor can get fairly boring, too. You’re not going to teach me to price-tag people. I’m not interested.”

  I went on flinching at “cunt” and “prick” and “ass hole” mostly because I didn’t want the children using that kind of language at school or in front of their grandparents. But Mike didn’t either. He cuffed them away from his vocabulary as regularly as he did from his tools, and it worked. The only time Victor ever called me a cunt, I was relieved that he had a word to tell me I had humiliated him.

  I went on calling people and things cheap and vulgar but with a new self-consciousness about my tastes … and my flinchings.

  Mike’s proudest possession is his body. He’s most comfortable in nothing but a pair of cutoffs, most himself. A suit is a uniform that, like all uniforms, diminishes individuality. “You look like a million dollars, Mike,” my father said as we arrived for dinner. Mike didn’t flinch. I did.

  Looking like a million dollars was all I’d ever tried to do. Something that expensive would have to be all right. The only time I’d ever had any confidence in the body underneath was when I was pregnant and when I was nursing a baby. I was then sacred but repulsive to Mike, who, for all his graphic language about everything else, was reduced to talking about buns in ovens. Well, he did finally get over that when I was carrying “Victor.

  The problem is that I have no language at all for my body or Roxanne’s body that isn’t either derisive or embarrassing. I don’t like to write about fingering her ass hole, which immediately becomes personified for me as a belligerently stupid male, a surreal genie, metaphorical fart emanating from that … anus? I think of licorice, which I don’t like. We make love without nouns as much as possible, speak directions instead. “There.” “Here?” “Yes, there.” Adequate for the lovely circumstance of two very present and visible bodies which are wonderfully familiar in fact as well as practice, but a love letter filled with nothing but adverbs is ridiculous. Gertrude Stein tried to invent a new language for lovemaking, but it was more a code to be cracked than a communication. Imagine the limitation of that when scholars are still debating whether “cow” means turd or orgasm.

  I heard a psychologist the other day say that when you teach children names for all the parts of the body, “ear, eye, elbow, leg, thumb,” and then say, “This is your wee-wee or pee-pee,” they know something’s funny. We, my sisters and I, called our own our cracks when we were little. Now we don’t talk about our bodies except in gynecological terms. We’re graphic about Pap smears, D and Cs, loops, pills, stitches, and itches, but we might have been artificially inseminated for all our talk about fucking. This is an accurate word for what Mike did to me, if you add “over.” And maybe that is what goes on in Margaret’s bed and in Joan’s. We don’t talk about it.

  I didn’t miss a language with Mike, only felt assaulted by his. Roxanne doesn’t need a language. She makes sounds that begin somewhere deep in her chest, like the startling wind of underground caves, that are measured by her percussive heart, rise out of the tunnel of her throat, in glottal clickings and whole tones, a narrative song repetitive as any legend so that I now know by heart not only what my fingers and tongue experience but what she experiences as the landscape of my adventure. I listen sometimes at her mouth, sometimes at her chest, sometimes ear pressed to her belly as to a shell to hear her gathering tides. She is like a shell, so fragile and intricately interior, sounding and tasting of the sea. I understand why the clitoris is called a pearl, hidden in oystery frills. I am inside her one of the instruments of her song; also, she is the instrument I play, music a faint imitation or memory of the staccato tonguing, accurate fingering, long bowing that makes her body into song. I think, if there were ever a female Beethoven, the climax of such music couldn’t be politely endured.

  Roxanne said this morning, “I will call something one day ‘Alma’s Coming.’”

  “Do I make a sound?”

  She laughed.

  Roxanne doesn’t call herself a composer, though that surely is what she is.

  “I document sound,” she says, if pressed to say so.

  She is not a talker about her work, as Mike is, needing to make a theoretical point for every nail he hammers, until words are nervous propaganda for something he needs to believe in and doesn’t quite. When Roxanne is caught up in work, she is usually listening and invites me to listen, as if we were audience together to something as accessible to me as to her.

  I didn’t want her to be an artist of any sort, sick of them, all those pretensions and terrors of ego. Mike’s sort of art is like Mike’s sort of sex, an attack against foreign material. Carlotta’s is too often an invasion of herself, masochistic.

  Roxanne isn’t either pretentious or afraid. Her seriousness is more like a child’s, like Tony’s, when he is caught up in watching something. Like that incredible picture of Picasso and his son at a bullfight, the child behind his father, with a finger in his father’s mouth.

  Now when I’m invited to Allen and Pierre’s, Allen comes to pick me up. He knows I have my own car, but Allen has certain masculine formalities which are important to him. They are his passport to the foreign worlds he visits even in his own city; therefore, he carries them everywhere. I didn’t think anything about accepting their first invitation after I moved in here. I had not been invited before, but Mike and I never were because of his job. Anyway, he wouldn’t have gone. I couldn’t ever quite believe in Mike’s hostility toward Allen as disapproval. I think Mike was envious. Being free to accept was delightful, and, of course, Roxanne was there.

  The next morning at breakfast Dad said, “Very nice fellow, that Allen. But I wonder—I hope you won’t think I’m being old-fashioned or overcautious—if it’s wise to see him while the divorce is still pending.”

  “It’s perfectly safe, Dad,” I assured him. “Allen’s gay … homosexual.”

  It gave me the thrill of fear without the fear itself to use those words in front of my parents.

  “Are you sure? What a shame.”

  “But he’s such a nice-looking boy,” Mother protested.

  She would probably protest the same thing about me, though I think she’s mildly alarmed by the size of all her daughters; our big bones come from Dad’s side of the family.

  “He’s perfectly happy,” I said, something I don’t believe about any of my friends. Being just over thirty and happy is a contradiction in terms. “He lives with a French Canadian boy who makes him a better wife than most women would choose to be, given how often he’s away.”

  My parents are too polite to attach moral issues to real people—that is, people they have met in their own front hall. And I am too old to be told that such a subject is inappropriate at the breakfast table in front of Tony and Victor.

  “Pierre even looks like a girl,” Tony explained to his grandparents.

  “Well, with all the long hair around these days, just about everybody does,” Mother said cheerfully.

  “Dad won’t let us,” Vic
tor said.

  Victor with hair to his waist would be more of a Samson than ever. Tony is a different matter. If he doesn’t want to deal with ambiguity he’ll have to wait to grow his hair until he can also grow a beard.

  Do I not care, as Mother later in private suggested to me, whether the boys grow up straight? The little sermon I preached to her was pure self-defense, and I was even nervous that she’d wonder why I’d gone into the matter so thoroughly as to know the date the American Psychiatric Association voted homosexuality out of the sick and into the personality trait category. But she was too caught up with the argument.

  “Then it’s a bad personality trait,” she said.

  “I think being able to love anybody is a step in the right direction.”

  Well, I do, but if Tony grew up to be a gay militant, I’d feel like the original castrating mother, and Mike would kill him. Still, I know it isn’t something mothers do to sons, fathers to daughters.

  I love Roxanne like a blade of grass breaking concrete to get to the light. And if Tony had to love like that, couldn’t I have the courage to be glad? I haven’t even the courage to face all I’m breaking. I pretend it’s not going on, as if all these months were a long holiday from a self I’ll go back to in a house I take care of with Mike banging in and out. Yet every time I’m with Roxanne, I know I’m already leading the life I say is impossible. The more I protest to myself that I can’t live with her, the more determined I am to risk everything, even my sons, and that terrifies me.

  Allen and Pierre aren’t the ideal couple I make them out to be, and if they had a couple of Allen’s daughters from a previous marriage, well, I can’t imagine. But Roxanne isn’t the child Pierre insists on being. She can enter his fantasy: they play dress-up together for hours the way my sisters and I did. It would bore Allen if he had to pay too much attention to it. His game, another of his masculine affectations, is chess, and I play well enough to distract him. Am I his real counterpart, carrying my feminine affectations around to cover an essentially masculine nature? I don’t feel at all masculine, least of all making love with Roxanne, who is so enthusiastic about my breasts I have a dream of having a daughter for her so that Roxanne could taste my milk. And she is not playing at being a boy when she dresses in Pierre’s clothes, which are often more feminine than her own. She is entertaining him as I entertain Allen.