Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Sometimes Carlotta showed her the day’s sketches. In no matter what pose, the body had a still attentiveness Roxanne recognized as her own, but the skeletal length of bones was exaggerated. Carlotta was taller than Roxanne. Roxanne was wearing Carlotta’s skeleton under her own inquiring flesh.

  “I don’t want to do that,” Carlotta said. “But I’m afraid to make your bones less important than mine.”

  “They are less important,” Roxanne said, putting her length of arm next to Carlotta’s, their hands side by side. Compared to the articulate instrument that was Carlotta’s hand, Roxanne’s looked like a small, timid animal.

  “Your flesh is human. I’m not sure mine is,” Carlotta said, musing rather than judgmental.

  Roxanne touched Carlotta’s arm with her fingers. It was hard and cool. She wanted to see Carlotta naked, curious to know the shape of her breasts, the line of hip and thigh. Roxanne assumed Carlotta had not made love with Alma because Alma had not initiated it. Alma had not out of nearly willful ignorance but also because this minimal flesh was worn like armor and kept chilled. Carlotta turned away and reopened the windows. Dutifully Roxanne put on her peacoat and left.

  She went on touching Carlotta casually when she felt like it. The temperature of Carlotta’s resistance was constant, though her interest increased. Some of the poses she asked for were frankly erotic.

  “For Alma’s birthday,” Carlotta said wryly.

  The weekly present Carlotta was sending Alma was Roxanne’s intense sexual energy, and Roxanne suspected that was all Alma would get.

  When she herself was exasperated with Alma and refusing to see her, Roxanne asked, “Why are you so angry with Alma?”

  “She’s convenient to be angry with. She’s near enough to know that I am, and she cares … not enough, of course.”

  “And Mike isn’t?”

  “Isn’t he ever going to come back?”

  “I don’t know. He’s asked for the boys for the summer. If Alma agrees to that, he may come to get them.”

  “And her, too?”

  “I don’t think so,” Roxanne said.

  “He would if he could, even now.”

  “Do you really want him?”

  Carlotta stopped her more and more agitated sketching and looked at Roxanne as if she had just arrived in the room to interrupt Carlotta’s work. Roxanne was disconcerted by the shift, nearly embarrassed.

  “I’ve always been jealous of her. Why shouldn’t I have at least what she doesn’t want? But he’s nothing but crumbs from her table; that’s all that’s left of him.”

  Carlotta was crying, sounds more frustrated than grieving. Roxanne would have gone to her then if she hadn’t felt she would be only more crumbs until Carlotta raged, “Why don’t any of you ever want me?”

  Naked, their bodies were remarkably similar except in skin tone and hair color, but Carlotta was not interested in posing for Roxanne. Her appetite was impatient, melodramatic, sex a contending struggle, full of squeals and hisses, until for Roxanne it was rather grandly funny. She felt like the driver of one of those bumper cars at the Pacific National Exhibition, crashing into Carlotta over and over again until she was trapped, stalled, and whimpering at the gentleness Roxanne forced on her.

  “I won’t come. I won’t come,” she chanted, and Roxanne listened to the changing rhythms of it, letting it guide the pressure and rhythm of her tongue until she felt Carlotta coming and held her, gripped like a bowling ball that couldn’t roll away.

  There were three or four occasions like the first one before Carlotta made love to Roxanne in return, with a roller-coaster wildness and uncertainty, rushing over and over again toward climaxes that dropped away in violent changes of direction, until Roxanne was nearly sick with hilarity, and Carlotta moaned and swayed like a trestle about to collapse.

  “This is terrible, hard work,” Carlotta said, “and I’m no good at it.”

  Roxanne laughed and hugged her. “We’re not in jail. You don’t have to.”

  “Anyway, it gets in the way of work. We don’t have time for it.”

  Carlotta was more cheerful, even humored, than she had been before as if some point had been proved and could now be let go. The drawings began to look more like Roxanne in bone as well as stance. Before Roxanne moved in with Alma, she had put her clothes back on for the portrait Carlotta could now paint.

  Roxanne told Alma nothing about Carlotta. She did not trust Alma’s use of such information, which might, in her hands, turn into some new form of self-punishment.

  The only person she did talk to was Pierre, who had an elaborate understanding of the personal, being interested in nearly nothing else. She and Pierre shared attitudes which were foreign to the others.

  “Allen says the gods are not supposed to be moral, just larger than life. That’s why I’m always attracted to big men. It doesn’t matter about people’s flaws, which, after all, are in proportion to their size.”

  Pierre didn’t forgive Allen his absences, his cruelties, his pride. Pierre accepted them, often loudly complaining but neither expecting nor desiring reform. Allen wouldn’t be Allen without them any more than Alma would be Alma without her monumental selfishness and misplaced guilt.

  “There’s no point in telling either of them the truth,” Pierre explained. “I would screw you if I absolutely had to.”

  “Of course,” Roxanne agreed, as little able to imagine it as he was.

  “It’s not necessary. He likes to imagine that he seduces me away from heterosexuality every time he comes home. If it made me more attractive to him, I’d not only pretend to keep a harem, I’d have one.”

  It was a fiction modestly costly for Roxanne since Alma got no pleasure from pretending to rescue Roxanne from Pierre and would have been reassured to know it wasn’t necessary, but Roxanne had to be loyal to Pierre, who was like a younger sibling, sister and brother in one.

  “What Allen doesn’t understand is that we need taboos just like anyone else. Simply because I didn’t grow up with a sister I couldn’t screw doesn’t mean I can now or want to, any more than he wants the women he squires around. Does Alma ever pretend she’s having an affair with him?”

  “No,” Roxanne said. “She does think he’s attractive.”

  “I should think so!”

  Pierre loved any excuse to talk about how attractive Allen was, from the way his hair grew at the back of his neck to the arch of his beautiful foot.

  His worship of Allen’s body was very like what Roxanne felt for Alma’s, a perpetually renewing wonder that was joyful and holy. She and Pierre had been born again in the same faith. They celebrated and suffered as true believers.

  “They don’t love us the way we love them, of course. Allen is too much of a man; Alma is too much of a woman.”

  Roxanne at that kind of invitation took her turn to praise that too much of a woman, Alma. Pierre was more sympathetic to Roxanne’s passion unrequited than he was to her present sexual pleasure. Alma could be interesting to him only as the embodiment of an idea of love, not as a female body, about which he had deep aesthetic reservations.

  “I’d rather not lie,” Roxanne said, “and I’d like to be happy.”

  Pierre lifted his eyebrows.

  “I don’t lie to you,” Roxanne continued.

  “You’re not in love with me.”

  “That’s not the reason. She’s so safe she doesn’t know what’s dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “I worship that.”

  “I know.”

  “She doesn’t go out, you see. When she asks me about my day, I have to lie or skip parts. She doesn’t know that every day is a trail of dead cats, arrests, whatever. … You know that. That’s why you don’t go out. I don’t surprise you.”

  “No, but, if Allen was tight with money and made me go out to work, I’d think he didn’t really care.”

  “I don’t mind working.”

  “Well, at least you can stop worrying about dying
alone, which is more comfort than Allen gives me.”

  “She doesn’t ever think about dying.”

  “Neither does he,” Pierre said, “except for committing suicide, and he thinks that is a matter of choice.”

  “If I ever told her we’re all dying of cancer, she’d think I was crazy.”

  “Do you think I can say that to Allen? He couldn’t live with it. He just couldn’t. He thinks I’m paranoid because I won’t let him have his shaving cream in aerosol cans.”

  “I don’t say why about things like that. I just say I don’t like it, whatever it is, and she throws it out. I think she thinks I’m whimsical.”

  “It’s a trick to be a bodyguard for someone who doesn’t know it.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But don’t get uptight about it,” Pierre insisted.

  “I’d like to be happy.”

  “You are, compared to me.”

  Roxanne was certainly neither bored nor lonely. Her lack of equipment or place to work daunted her only briefly. Since she could collect but couldn’t arrange the sounds of the house, she had simply to think about it. In thinking, she discovered the house too small for the mapping she wanted to do. So was the neighborhood. Roxanne wanted to make a sound map of the city. The moment that idea occurred to her, she realized that it was a project she was already in the middle of. If only she could hear what she already had recorded on those thousands of feet of tape stored in Alma’s basement, she would know exactly what to do. Instead she had to remember, make notes, describe.

  “I need that wall,” she said to Alma as they lay in bed early one morning.

  “What for?”

  “A map of Vancouver.”

  “What will you do about the closet door?”

  “Include it.”

  “You’re going to draw right on the wall?”

  Roxanne got out of bed, found a pencil, and then, kneeling on her own pillow, she drew over the headboard a small compass. Then she handed the pencil to Alma.

  “You’re daring me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t do that to a house you own. You do it to someplace else.”

  “It’s your house,” Roxanne said. “You can do what you want.”

  “But you want to draw on the wall.”

  “Yes.”

  Alma didn’t agree then. She brought it up again at breakfast after the boys had left for school and was still undecided when Roxanne left for work. If Roxanne hadn’t had good training in foster homes, where it was made just as clear that she had no property rights, she might have been more exasperated with Alma than she was. If Roxanne had asked to tattoo obscene poems down the insides of Alma’s thighs, she would have stretched out naked and waited. To touch her bedroom wall was another matter.

  “How do you feel about the garage door?” Roxanne asked that night at dinner.

  The boys were puzzled. Alma explained to them, “Roxanne wants to make a big map of Vancouver, and I don’t think it ought to be in my bedroom.”

  “Do it in my room,” Victor suggested. “I like maps.”

  “She’d never get in over the junk.”

  “Well, what about the garage door?” Tony asked.

  “It seems awfully public,” Alma said.

  “You let Daddy work in the shed,” Victor said.

  “Daddy had a studio,” Tony said.

  “I just need a wall,” Roxanne said.

  “Well, why not right here?” Alma suggested, making a nervous gesture at the dining-room wall.

  That evening Roxanne established the basic grid of streets across the wall she faced domestically twice a day. It would have been better if she could have wakened to it every morning, but, if she got up as soon as she woke, she could work awhile before breakfast. At first she intended only to make notes, a word or two to remind her of the sound she had recorded or wanted to record, but because the wall was first an issue and then a curiosity, Roxanne began to see the map as a thing in itself as well as a score for work to be done. She cut pictures out of magazines, everything from air-conditioning units to national flags. Directions were color-coded, green to indicate what did happen on that particular corner, red to indicate what might happen, gold to suggest what should happen.

  “Are you trying to make it look the way it’s going to sound?” Tony asked.

  “Not exactly,” Roxanne said. “I’m just trying to see what it sounds like.”

  “Oh.” He was sitting at the dining-room table, cutting out a picture of the B.C. Hydro building. “Is it going to happen where you show it on the map or somewhere all at once like at the Playhouse?”

  “I don’t know,” Roxanne said.

  “It’s actually good-looking,” Alma said as she set the table for dinner.

  They were expecting Allen and Pierre, and for the first time Roxanne was uneasy about the map. Alma’s parents had seen it; so had Ann Rabinowitz, and they had all responded with the same bland incomprehension to which Roxanne did not have to reply. Pierre would be playful, as he always was about her projects, and she could handle that, but Allen would see the entirely unrealistic scope of it and know that she was serious. He was quite willing to treat her like a precocious child, though they were the same age, but Roxanne doubted that he’d accept the idea that she was ready to do something with her work. She wasn’t sure herself, partly because she had no idea how it could be practically realized. Still, at this point she did not want to be discouraged. She felt the way Alma did about her stories, that she wasn’t sure they were good enough to stand rejection. Roxanne asked Alma to seat Allen with his back to that wall.

  Allen and Pierre hadn’t been there five minutes before Tony said, “Can I show them your wall, Roxanne?”

  She hadn’t realized until then that Tony was seriously involved. As he explained the images, the color coding, he was much clearer than she could have been, able to give some sense of the map as map, as score, as a number of possibilities, and his audience was far more attentive to him than they would have been to her.

  Allen stepped back and looked at Roxanne. “Are you really going to do this?”

  She shrugged, aware of how impossible the whole thing really was. If you could get jailed for two years for playing someone else’s equipment after store hours, what would you get for playing a whole city?

  “I guess it’s private property.”

  “What is?” Allen asked.

  “The city … the streets and all.”

  “No, it’s not,” Tony said, indignant. “It belongs to everyone.”

  “Do you know any of the people in the music business?” Allen asked.

  “No,” Roxanne said. “I’m not really interested in music. I’m interested in sound.”

  “That doesn’t matter. What you need is money—obviously, lots of it.”

  “Not really all that much—if I had the machines—a place to work.”

  “Alma, why hasn’t Roxanne a place to work?”

  “She has. She wanted a wall; here’s the wall.”

  Allen and Pierre both laughed, and Roxanne couldn’t resist a smile. What was so obvious to everyone else—Alma’s reluctance to give an inch—she didn’t recognize at all.

  Before the evening was over, they had explored the basement, paced out a workshop area, and Allen had extracted a promise from Alma that she would pay for the materials if the work was volunteered.

  “You don’t know how to do things like that, do you?” Alma asked him.

  “No, of course not. I play at being butch, but I don’t work at it.”

  “Joseph will do it,” Pierre said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t have Joseph …” Alma began.

  “He needs something to do while he can’t teach.”

  “There must be plenty of things for him to do …”

  Alma didn’t want Joseph in the house. Allen was going to insist. As he and Alma grew closer, he bullied her more frequently and successfully. She gave in to give in, not because she agreed wi
th Allen, and that pleased him. Roxanne would almost always rather give up her own way than be accompanied reluctantly. But Alma did need bullying since she did not really know about needs other than her own. She had to be told that you let a crazy friend help you, whether you wanted to or not, simply because he happened to be on the other end of the teeter-totter.

  “I don’t really know how to handle him,” Alma confessed. “He’s never really liked me, and he doesn’t approve of us. Honestly, sometimes Allen goes too far.”

  “I’m very pleased about the workroom,” Roxanne said.

  “Of course, you are. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it months ago.”

  “It will give Joseph a chance to like you.”

  “I doubt that. You know, I don’t really think I understand men at all, except for men like Allen. They always seem to be disapproving of something and expecting an apology. Who’s Joseph to disapprove of me?”

  He came, arriving while everyone was still at breakfast. The matter with Joseph, Roxanne and Pierre had long ago decided, was that he knew and pretended he didn’t. He knew everyone was dying of cancer, and he knew there was a point to being careful and loving. He couldn’t stand to know. Now mostly he didn’t have to pretend because he did forget, really forget, but forgetting wasn’t the same as not knowing, like Allen and Alma. Only real ignorance could make you strong. Joseph lacked that.

  “I want to tell you something I just remembered, Roxanne,” he said, smiling at her. “I just remembered that walk we took across the bridge while you listened to the traffic. Do you still listen to the traffic?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed his single note of distress.

  “I remember because the baby does, too. She stands on the parking strip and claps after a car goes by.”

  “Funny!” Victor judged.

  “Before babies learn to talk,” Tony said, “they can hear everything.”

  “Where did you learn that?” Alma asked.

  “I don’t know—Mary Poppins? Didn’t the babies understand the birds?”

  “They do say,” Alma told him, “that babies make every sound and then only remember and repeat sounds they hear back. That’s why, for instance, Pierre forgets his th’s. He didn’t hear them as a baby when he was learning French.”