Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “This Allen Dent’s friend’s concert?”

  “It isn’t exactly a concert,” Roxanne said.

  “Well … whatever. No place to sit?”

  “The floor.”

  Roxanne was cheered by the smallness of the audience because it meant their own contribution to the sound in the room would not be overwhelmingly unpredictable. At the moment that was frankly all that concerned her. She didn’t want to be distracted from her own listening since she hadn’t been able to hear her own work for so very long. And she wanted Alma to be able to hear. Anticipating that was very like anticipating making love.

  At Alma’s nervously questioning look, Roxanne nodded and walked over to the tape decks, bunched together on the floor, crouched down, and started up each one until ten tapes were each performing.

  For the first few minutes, she stayed crouched there, listening, measuring the distances between messages, their volumes, for it was very important for them not to seem to compete. Then she got up and began to walk around the room, stopping to listen every step or so, like a bird-watcher bemused by a large migration of birds.

  She had never had so large a space before, but, though it was exciting to her and she could hear more and more variously than she ever had before, she knew, too, that she did not want sound trapped in a box, even as big a box as this room. If there had been windows to open, she would have opened them, for sound is meant to escape from the prison of its source and die in freedom. That’s what she needed, the whole city and time, real time. But even in this confinement of space and time, she heard the positive gatherings of sound so important to her. Sometimes she laughed out loud. Sometimes she clapped. Sometimes she danced a little, her head tilting from one sound source to another.

  The others made small clusters in the room, the young strangers on the floor, Joseph’s whole family and the boys backed up against one wall. The old gentleman stood in the middle of the room, braced as if in a high wind. The music critic leaned against the exit door. Only Alma also moved around. Pierre was curled up by himself under the tent of his dark, curly hair. Carlotta watched from an isolated corner. Roxanne was aware of them all for perhaps the first half hour, but then she grew too absorbed in the complexities she was risking to be able to notice anything else. When Alma touched her arm, Roxanne started out of a working trance to discover that they were all alone in the room. All the speakers were silent.

  “You’ve been squatting there for an hour,” Alma said. “Everyone’s gone home.”

  There was a write-up in the Sun, which quoted extensively a retired musicologist who said Roxanne was a romantic primitive, who was not self-taught so much as self-teaching, as dangerous as it could be refreshing, and the evening had been both. The music critic described Roxanne as someone who seemed to grow out of her own shoes. The headline was: “Yet to Find Her Audience.”

  Roxanne wasn’t sure there was an audience to be found, and she wasn’t sure that it mattered. Oh, her friends were all loyal, but aside from Tony, who had glimmerings of what she was about simply because he’d hung around and asked so many questions, Roxanne realized that no one had a clue to how to listen or what to say.

  Only Alma was confident enough to say, “I don’t pretend to understand it, but I find it fascinating.”

  Roxanne said, “I don’t think there’s anything to understand.”

  “Anyway,” Alma said about the write-up, “it’s not only happened, it’s been noticed.”

  “And you’re out of pocket.”

  “Not badly,” Alma said. “I think I’m discovering what Mike discovered. Your own money is your own money. You can do what you want with it.”

  “Alma, it was marvelous for me, really.”

  “I know,” Alma said. “And I do understand that. It has to happen again.”

  As far as Dale Easter was concerned, it could happen once a month, and he hoped he’d be in town to attend. Allen wanted a chance to show them how to promote it properly and was delighted that he might have the opportunity.

  “He says he’ll be home next week,” Pierre reported.

  “You look seedy,” Roxanne said.

  “I’ve found my first lump.”

  “Where?”

  “In my throat,” Pierre said.

  “You’re joking?”

  “A little,” Pierre said. “You know it will have to be my lungs—I don’t want to deny my origins. Everyone in Quebec dies of their lungs. Read Marie-Claire Blais.”

  “Allen’s been away too long.”

  “Do you think he lies to me?”

  “You say everyone in love lies,” Roxanne said.

  “Maybe he’s not in love. We’ve been together so long he won’t let me keep track. He hates to be reminded I’m over twenty-one. What happens when I start to get gray?”

  “Dye it,” Roxanne said. “Allen will never leave you.”

  “He leaves me all the time.”

  Was part of being in love that constant anxiety? Roxanne was learning that Alma’s jealous outbursts were simply the language of that dread. If Roxanne hadn’t felt it herself so that she heard Alma’s fear but listened to her rejection, Roxanne could have, at those moments, comforted and reassured. Instead, she withdrew, which increased Alma’s anxiety. But they did come together again in a joy that denied any real doubt. Roxanne imagined similar sexual affirmations between Allen and Pierre. It was time for Allen to come home.

  Alma and Roxanne both got home from work so late that they were sharing a glass of sherry while they worked together on a last-minute supper. Victor was watching the cartoons. Tony had set the table and was reading the paper.

  “Have you seen it?” he asked Roxanne as she poured the milk.

  “No,” Roxanne said.

  “Is Allen in Toronto?”

  “I’m not sure. Why?”

  Tony offered her the front page, a thumb indicating the article he had been reading. Roxanne saw the headline, “Pederasts’ Party Over,” and took the paper from Tony to read about the vice squad breaking into the apartment of a prominent Toronto businessman to find a number of men in the company of boys as young as twelve. An MP and a college professor were named. So was Allen Dent, one of Canada’s best-known photographers, who had attempted with his camera to jump out a twelfth-floor window before he was apprehended and taken into custody.

  Roxanne read it all twice, then three times. Something like that couldn’t happen to Allen—to Pierre, to herself, sure, they were never really safe, but Allen was the man who bailed you out because he knew all the rules, had the money, and never made silly mistakes.

  “What is it?” Alma asked coming into the dining room with plates of food.

  Roxanne handed her the paper.

  “What? That’s absurd!” Alma said. “It must be some other Allen Dent. Allen doesn’t go to that kind of thing. He told me he didn’t.”

  “What does ‘pederast’ mean?” Tony asked.

  “Homosexual,” Alma said.

  “Is that against the law?”

  “No,” Alma said, “not for adults.”

  “Was he taking pictures?” Tony asked.

  “How do I know?” Alma snapped. “Don’t ask so many questions.”

  “Pierre,” Roxanne said. “He won’t know unless Allen can reach him. Pierre never reads the paper.”

  “Someone will tell him,” Alma said. “Everyone else will know.”

  The phone rang. No one moved to answer it. Then all three did, but Tony and Roxanne gave way gratefully to Alma.

  “Allen!”

  Roxanne and Tony waited. Alma said nearly nothing. She listened and agreed.

  “He wants us to keep Pierre from finding out until he can get home. He’s flying in tomorrow.”

  Roxanne picked up the phone and dialed Pierre. There was no answer.

  “He’s never out,” Alma said.

  “I’ll go over,” Roxanne said.

  “Won’t you eat something first?”

  “No.”


  “But if he’s not home … ?” Tony asked.

  No one answered the door, which was locked. Pierre could, of course, have gone out, but, as Roxanne stood on the porch, her apprehension grew. She went around to the back door, which was also locked. There was a good-sized stone at the foot of the back steps. She took it and hurled it at the window in the back door. The door handle, when she reached it, wouldn’t open from the inside. Of course, their doors would all be double deadlocks, a way to reassure Pierre when he had to stay so much alone. Feeling increasingly silly but determined, Roxanne found another rock and broke the breakfast-room window, which was low enough for her to climb in. There would be a lot of explaining and glass replacing to do at a time when no one would have much sense of humor, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Pierre was on the living-room floor, dead, his brains blown out by a gun still in his mouth. Roxanne knelt down and touched the frail arm in the shirt she had so recently swapped with him, wanting to wake him from the horror of it, remove him from his own death. But there was no Pierre, just an animal carcass, struck and broken like any other stray. Roxanne’s heart was pounding so loudly that, at first, she didn’t realize someone was also pounding on the door. She wanted to hide the body, hide herself.

  “Pierre? Pierre?”

  It was Joseph out there, come with the same anxiety, the same knowledge. At so crucial a time, he could not forget. She couldn’t find a key to open the front door. Finally Joseph also had to climb through the breakfast-room window. His calm didn’t seem the heavy tranquilizing it must have been. It made Roxanne aware of how comparatively crazy she felt.

  “Have you called the police?” he asked.

  “Of course not!”

  “They have to be notified.”

  “It’s not an accident. It’s not a crime.”

  “He died of natural causes?” Joseph asked wryly, looking down at the violent mess on the floor.

  “Joseph, they’ll search this place. What if they find—oh, I don’t know—pictures?”

  “There’s no way to protect him now,” Joseph said, “from any of this.”

  He went to the phone.

  “Before you call,” Roxanne said, “do you understand? I can’t stay. They mustn’t find me here.”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong,” Joseph said.

  “I broke the windows,” Roxanne said, and laughed, hearing inside the sound the waver of hysteria. “I have to get out.”

  She didn’t go right home. She wandered, unable to take hold of or put down the complexity of betrayals she did not know how to feel guilty of and yet did. Finding Pierre made his death a fact, as if she had invented it. Leaving Joseph there with the body would drive him crazy all over again. Letting him invite the police into the house … that was simply past her comprehension. She could not think about Allen at all. The dread that grew in her was for and of Alma. Roxanne could not face telling Alma.

  “I don’t believe it,” Alma said. “I just don’t believe any of it.”

  Good, Roxanne wanted to cry out. Stay ignorant. Somebody’s got to, or I can’t stand it. She kept very quiet, terrified of an outbreak of Alma’s own guilt.

  “Make love to me,” Alma said.

  She didn’t know. She really didn’t know. The ignorance of that body was what Roxanne worshiped, all its juices, even its blood, fertile, vulnerable only to greater and greater pleasure, with no foreknowledge of itself as a bloody and meaningless corpse. Roxanne could not forget, but she could reaffirm the precious, the sacred in this beautiful body which gathered her into its own desires until they were hers as well. They would make love, if they had to, all night against the coming morning.

  “Is he going to be buried?” Tony asked at the breakfast table. “Can you record him being buried?”

  “What are you talking about?” Alma demanded.

  “It’s on the map,” Tony explained, “in gold.”

  “It shouldn’t be in gold,” Roxanne said, trying to think of a way to deflect Tony, to distract Alma, because none of them could handle this subject now, or maybe ever. “You and Vic need to get ready for school.”

  “It’s Sunday,” Victor said impatiently. “Don’t you even know the day of the week?”

  “Is killing yourself against the law?”

  “Not exactly,” Roxanne said.

  “Even if you’re a child?” Tony persisted.

  “He wasn’t a child,” Alma said, and then, with obvious, deep-breathing self-control, she suggested that both her sons be excused from the table. “We aren’t really ready to talk about it, okay?”

  After the boys had gone off to their rooms, Roxanne and Alma sat in silence for a good two minutes.

  “Did you get his flight number?” Roxanne finally asked. “I guess we ought to meet the plane.”

  “We’re never going to see him again,” Alma said quietly.

  “What?”

  “We’re never going to see him again.”

  “But we can’t do that!” Roxanne protested, “he’s our friend. He’s bailed me out of jail. He’s got you a job. And he’s in terrible trouble, and who has he got?”

  “Roxanne, my sons are twelve and nine years old. Allen is a pervert.”

  “We all are!” Roxanne cried, tears streaming down her face.

  “Not like that!” Alma shouted. “You must promise me. You must promise me …”

  “I don’t see how I can.”

  “You must,” Alma repeated, an urgency in her voice that was not an order so much as a fact of possible life.

  Allen Mourning

  AFTER THE INITIAL SHOCK, the sense of somehow mistakenly being caught in the flash of his own camera, Allen had been cool enough, convincing himself as well as his lawyer and then the judge that his presence at the party had been professional, that he had not known ahead of time what kind of a party it would be. He did not say his intention would have been to get evidence to turn over to the police, but he didn’t stop his lawyer from indicating that might have been his natural course. The photographs were already in police hands. Allen’s sharing in the guilt would do nothing to help his host, who had obviously been set up by one enemy or another. Charges against Allen and several others were dropped.

  Allen was angry with the newspapers, but he was too much in the business himself not to know that abusing friendship was a daily minor cost of getting out the news. He did know that dropping of the charges would be duly reported. Not as many people would read that. Some of those who did would assume some sort of payoff. He would get no indignant sympathy in any quarter. He had served too many scandals in a professional capacity to claim the protection of any ordinary citizen. Nobody is ever on the side of the photographer, even at a wedding, and so Allen thought it should be. What was harder to calculate was who would care enough to let it interfere in any way with giving Allen assignments. Certainly the homosexuals in high places in government would avoid him. He’d had his last season in Ottawa for a while.

  If editors of magazines ran into outright refusals there, they might be leery of giving Allen the kind of assignment he’d been particularly good at in the past, which was convincing people who were camera-shy and not in need of publicity that it was a privilege to sit for him. He could get into great houses or hospital rooms by indicating that his photographs would serve the real importance of the person or event. He understood people’s fear of being trivialized or exploited along with their need to be acknowledged. His job was to allay the fear and nourish the need while getting the best picture he could for his own purposes. His own purposes were always professional. He did not indulge his prejudices. Now his question was how many other people would indulge theirs against him, technically innocent or not.

  It had not occurred to Allen that the story would be picked up by the Vancouver papers. No national figures were involved, unless he could make a modest claim for himself, and he didn’t ever publicly identify himself with Vancouver. His telephone answering service was in Toron
to. He only worried that Pierre might somehow get the story through the gay grapevine before Allen had a chance to explain it properly. He hoped Alma had taken care of that.

  On the plane, though he brooded about threats to his income and about the dirty political games being indulged in to put men in jail for such frivolity, as he neared Vancouver, his spirits began to lift. He decided he had managed the whole business remarkably well, given what could have happened, and he’d soon be looking at it as one of the many narrow escapes his life seemed to be made up of. He even toyed with the possibility that he wouldn’t have to say anything at all to Pierre. There were the familiar mountains, white with their first winter snows—a marvelous time of year on the coast where you could still sail on a bright November day—out there right under the nose of industry. He probably couldn’t persuade Pierre, whose blood had grown thin all these years in a mild climate. It was enough simply to see the sailboats out in the bay. He was home, and he was going to stay at home for a good long while now, the Rocky Mountains between him and the public world, safe even from his own taste for it.

  Joseph did not so much meet Allen as join him as he left the airport. Allen’s first impression was that it was an odd coincidence, Joseph walking there beside him.

  “Is Ann meeting you?” he asked.

  “No, she’s home with the children.”

  “Shall we share a cab?” Allen was efficient in stowing his luggage and settling them both. “I’ll drop you off then, shall I?”

  “I’d just as soon go back to your house,” Joseph said.

  Used to Joseph’s idiosyncrasies, Allen gave his own address and then asked, “So where have you been?”

  “Nowhere,” Joseph said. “I came to meet you.”