Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Allen stiffened to new attention, but surely there was nothing wrong. Joseph’s face was tender; it was always tender. No one would send Joseph as a messenger of bad news.

  “That’s very nice of you,” Allen said. “Even Pierre can’t be bothered anymore I’m in and out so often. You’re looking well.”

  “I am well,” Joseph said. “Allen, the Toronto business … it got into the papers.”

  “Hell!” Allen said. “Pierre hasn’t seen it, has he? He never reads the paper. Anyway, I phoned Alma last night. Joseph, what is it?”

  “Pierre’s dead. He killed himself.”

  Allen felt as disoriented as he had when the police arrived at the party. Perhaps he was simply in the wrong cab being mistaken for the wrong person, even in the wrong city, though the bridge over the Eraser was familiar enough, and Joseph was no stranger to him. But Joseph, of course, was crazy.

  “I’m sorry,” Allen said, wanting to be gentle, for whatever Joseph’s grief was, it was real to him.

  “I had to notify the police,” Joseph said. “Roxanne was afraid, because of the papers, that they’d search the house, but they didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Allen said cautiously. “They’ve dropped the charges in Toronto.”

  “That’s good,” Joseph said, a stammer there underneath the will in his voice.

  “So,” Allen said, taking a deep breath, which he spent on a silly laugh. “Maybe we can get all this straightened out.”

  “Roxanne had to break a couple of windows to get in because of the double deadlocks.”

  “That’s all right. What’re a couple of windows?”

  The journey seemed to take hours. Allen staked his patience on arriving, being able to get out of this irrational script and into his own house. Even after they finally arrived, Allen paid the cab driver attentively, remembered his luggage, and he noticed the combination of red berries on the mountain ash and the second bloom of the dogwood, almost as satisfying a signal of the time of year as white sails against white mountains. As he turned the key in the front door, he also controlled a sharp desire to call Pierre’s name and end this sinister charade, but he could not yet seem to break that free of it.

  Once inside, Allen left Joseph standing in the living room. From room to room Allen went, and there was no one there. He went through the house again, this time as if he had taken out a search warrant, hurling open closet doors, bureau drawers, cupboards, flinging clothes and papers on the floor. Joseph did nothing to restrain him, and he could not restrain himself, though he had very little idea what he was doing. Pierre could not possibly be dead, not with all this evidence: his shirts, his childish underwear, his miniature shoes, his French Canadian novels and cookbooks. It was a silly trick, and Allen would find the clue to it or find Pierre. Finally Allen came out of their bedroom, exasperated.

  “All right. I give up. Where is he?”

  “At the morgue.”

  “This is enough of a joke!” Allen shouted. “I’ve had it! Do you hear me? Where is he? What have you done with him?”

  “He couldn’t be left in the house,” Joseph said. “Allen, sit down. Allen, listen. I have to help you understand. Pierre’s dead.”

  “I don’t like that,” Allen said.

  “I know.”

  Surely he could call his Vancouver lawyer. They’d bailed Pierre out of silliness before. It didn’t matter how much it cost. Allen was staring at a new stain on the living-room rug. He knelt down and touched it with his fingers, then drew back from the dampness.

  “I cleaned up as much as I could,” Joseph said.

  Bloodstains on the carpet? It was like something you’d see in London at a matinee with your aunt. Allen had always told Pierre, if there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was straight camp. Pierre had never betrayed Allen’s taste before.

  “I’m embarrassed,” he said aloud, surprised. Mortally embarrassed.

  In the days ahead, Allen came to believe that was Pierre’s exact state when he killed himself, his own taste having been so badly betrayed. Guilt made Allen wretched; loneliness was physically painful; the terrible stupidity of it tipped his accustomed cynicism into bitterness.

  The only business calls he had were cancellations, some curt, some—usually from magazine editors—nervous with false sympathy. None of it mattered to Allen. He couldn’t have worked if he’d wanted to, his hands having developed a palsy which would make holding a camera impossible. But he didn’t want to. He had worked for Pierre.

  At first he saw no one but Joseph, that because Joseph had come unbidden and stayed. He was a curious comfort. Allen felt less exposed by his own craziness since Joseph had lived through and witnessed all kinds of derangements. But Allen didn’t indulge in any false displays of grief either, as he might have with someone like Alma. Joseph had gone through enough pain to be spared anything but what was essential, which was what couldn’t be helped.

  “I try to blame them instead of myself,” Allen tried to explain. “I try to say they killed him, not I.”

  “He killed himself,” Joseph said, as a matter of fact.

  At some moments, Pierre seemed to Allen the supreme good example, and Allen wanted to follow him in it, not just to be done with living but to have the last word, a martyr’s revenge. Pierre’s death had not been publicly linked with the Toronto arrests. Allen’s would be, but his pain was too severe for him not to want to see the results of whatever action he took.

  “Ann says you must have dinners with us for a while,” Joseph said.

  Allen didn’t want to go, but he had lost his firm hand metaphorically as well as physically, and he had to use anyone else’s kindly decision as a way to get from one moment to the next. When that plump, bespectacled little woman gave Allen a sisterly kiss in greeting, he felt himself shaking with a gratitude that also appalled him. He had not known her power to reject until she welcomed him. How could he survive such vulnerability?

  Rachel and Susan, who had been such grave, flighty children, had moved into a new season Allen didn’t understand. One moment they presented themselves as interesting, intelligent people, but, if you responded in kind, they dissolved into wriggling self-consciousness. If you dealt with them as the silly children they’d become, they resented it fiercely. Allen delighted in the coquettishness of boys that age, who didn’t seem to him a mass of emotional contradictions; they were greedy, tender, loyal, self-centered, all of a piece, and they responded predictably, as girls did not. Allen, who had none of Pierre’s aesthetic prejudices against women, could only appreciate and understand a female when she had become a mother, that faint fragrance of blood and milk that could linger about a woman years after she had nursed a child, on beyond menopause. Ann, obviously sensing that the girls would be no entertainment, called them away to tend the baby and set the table, leaving Joseph and Allen alone together, as they had been for great stretches of time over the last few days.

  “I’ve just assumed you aren’t teaching,” Allen said, normal concerns suddenly occurring to him as they hadn’t in days.

  “I asked for a few days off. By now they don’t ask questions.”

  “I hadn’t even thought.”

  “I’m really well,” Joseph said. “I won’t even need my regular amount of sick leave this year.”

  “That’s really good.”

  “I thought it was the tranquilizers, but I’ve stopped taking them, even in the last few days.”

  “Is there anything to drink?”

  “I’m sorry,” Joseph said. “Of course. I forget—I still do forget.”

  Allen wanted Joseph to be able to talk about himself, his illness, his health, his job, his children, anything. Listening made Allen nervous. He couldn’t concentrate on what anyone else said, even Joseph, who was so quiet and brief. All Allen seemed able to do was pick up the broken pieces of these last few days off the floor of his mind and offer them to someone—Joseph—for verification. Joseph had reconfirmed Pierre’s suicide a
dozen times a day. Allen had progressed to offering it himself as a statement rather than a question. And he had done some of the practical things, disposing of Pierre’s body, with Joseph’s help. Allen did not identify it. He couldn’t have. He simply wrote the check for cremation. He had felt like the commandant of Buchenwald, sending that beloved body to the furnace, but the hysterical grief of that violent act was soon over as grief at gradual decay would not have been. Joseph had also helped him bundle all Pierre’s clothes into the car and take them to the Salvation Army bin in the Safeway parking lot. Allen would have felt safer to have them burned, too, fearing their resurrection on another slight-bodied creature, fearing things more nebulous, evidence of a crime. Joseph had let Allen talk when he could, cry, wander off.

  “Thank you,” Allen said, accepting vodka on ice. “I want to be able to listen to you. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Joseph said. “When we both were good listeners, we weren’t as good friends.”

  Sitting at Joseph’s table, Allen had a sudden insight into the reason Joseph had kept his domestic life secret for so long, protecting it even more rigidly than Allen had protected his own. It had taken Joseph these years to master the ordinary, be really at home in it. Joy sat next to him in her high chair, kicking a bedroom slipper into the stew which he was trying to dish up. Susan initiated a low-pitched, lusty giggle, but before Rachel could take it up, Ann had signaled them both so that they sat in precarious grown-up postures, waiting for their food. Joseph lived among and for these four females. Allen could have expected antlers to begin sprouting out of those tufts of feathery hair.

  Ann was the sort of woman all men idealized if they noticed her, but very few men would have the courage or sense to want to marry her. Men married for lust, for money, for power, for safety and convenience, rarely to be companion to woman as they dream her to be, faithful, fertile, enduring, tender.

  The male does not endure—he sells out, goes crazy, kills himself.

  “Eat, Allen,” Ann said, a hand on his arm.

  He picked up his knife and fork dutifully. For her sake, he even made an attempt to notice what he was eating. At this table he could not be pariah, saint, or lunatic if he could help it. He had to be a man, eating his dinner. It had taken Joseph years to master it, but he had. There he sat at the head of his table, feeding his child.

  Allen suddenly remembered Joseph standing shivering in his shorts on that first cold day on the beach. His willingness had turned a mildly sadistic joke into an abiding friendship. Why couldn’t I have risked being ordinary? Allen wanted to cry out. Why isn’t this my table? But he kept silent and went on eating.

  Joseph seemed in no hurry to go back to work, but Allen, once he understood, could not accept Joseph’s truant company.

  “I’m perfectly all right. I have other people I ought to see, some tactful silences to break.”

  “Oh,” Joseph said. “Alma is … She told Roxanne she didn’t want … It’s the boys … and Mike. Anyway …”

  Allen grabbed Joseph by the arm. “You can say Pierre is dead with ease. There shouldn’t be anything harder.”

  “Alma doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Roxanne?”

  “Alma doesn’t want her to see you. She’s afraid of Mike, of losing the boys …”

  “I should have known,” Allen said. “What an incredible, healthy bitch she is!”

  “I don’t like her,” Joseph said.

  “Well, no, you never have. I do.”

  “Even now?”

  “Particularly now—she’s being vintage Alma,” Allen said. “I’m just sorry I’m being excluded from watching the show.”

  “Roxanne minds.”

  “Tell her she can’t afford to,” Allen said in short dismissal. “None of us can.”

  It was a relief to be alone, to have his obligations of friendship limited to Joseph and his family. Oh, eventually Allen would have to deal with acquaintances, but they all were of the sort to be as glad to delay meetings as he was, if not for the same reasons. Allen did not know whether he had to pull himself apart or pull himself together, and he had to be alone to find out.

  Sinking down gradually through layers of shock, guilt, and grief, at bottom what Allen stood on was anger, an emotion far too expensive and dangerous for him ever to have reached it before. But now he was alone. If he made a mistake, he could damage only himself. At first it was like a huge machine, far too heavy and violent for Allen to master as a weapon against anyone but himself. Every muscle in his body ached, and he tried to hold himself in his own arms, whimpering for comfort. Before he could more than catch his breath, it was his anger he was embracing, and the whimper turned to a roar—at Pierre for leaving him, at himself for his cosmic carelessness for his own and Pierre’s safety, at the world determined to teach them to kill themselves, the humane and inexpensive alternative to castration or capital punishment.

  Sometimes he tried to defuse it, calling himself a closet romantic full of melodramatic unreason, a self-indulgent escape from the cool cynic he had trained himself to be, but, when he tried to retreat to that old security, there was no room in it for Pierre to be dead. Pierre could lie dead in Allen’s heart only when it expanded with anger. Gradually, instead of being debilitated by it, Allen was learning new strength to master and use it to some purpose. He was going to have revenge, of what sort he didn’t yet know. He only understood that at the deepest level he rejected Pierre’s death as punishment. Pierre had to be seen as a martyr in a war that had been going on for centuries because only one side admitted to fighting.

  For an hour at a time, Allen could do simple things with his hands like cooking and washing dishes. When the shaking began, he clamped his hands into his armpits and waited, saying, “You’re not frightened or ashamed or embarrassed. You’re angry.”

  He had been at home a week when Carlotta telephoned.

  “I want to intrude,” she said. “I want to do your portrait.”

  “I want to buy Pierre’s,” Allen said.

  “I’ve told you, Allen, I’m not selling any of them.”

  “Not even now?”

  “Particularly not now.”

  “Could I just … have it?”

  “No,” Carlotta said.

  She came over, somberly dressed for her own sort of mourning.

  “With no funeral,” she said, “with no memorial service, we have to do something. At least you should wear a black armband.”

  “I’m thinking of wearing the gun that killed him strapped to my heart.”

  “Marvelous!” Carlotta exclaimed. “It’s so grossly Freudian.”

  “But basically practical,” Allen said. “I’m thinking of killing some people.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I’ll paint you as a potential murderer.”

  “What do you want me to wear?”

  “The gun, a white shirt.” Carlotta studied him. “Do you remember saying I should do a Dorian Gray portrait?”

  “No,” Allen said.

  “So that it could age and you wouldn’t.”

  “And bear my corruption so that I could hide it,” Allen said. “What a cooperative bunch we’ve mostly been. “You know, I’m beginning to be angry with Pierre.”

  “It isn’t corruption,” Carlotta said. “It isn’t anger either.”

  “What is it?”

  “Age,” Carlotta said, “the bones beginning their long quarrel with the flesh.”

  “How old am I?”

  “Thirty-four,” Carlotta said. “We all are.”

  “I don’t look it.”

  “No, you don’t,” Carlotta said, “but it’s there. I can see it.”

  “I have a good face,” Allen said.

  “Yes, you do. You’re a good man,” Carlotta said. “A good man with a gun over his heart.”

  Allen’s tone, like his hands, could stay steady for as long as an hour, in arrogance or self-mocking,
but then it broke in nervous laughter or tears. He agreed to pose no longer than forty-five minutes three times a week. It was the beginning of a new structure. On that slight commitment he would build his week.

  A month had passed before Allen realized that there would be no work at all from the sources he depended on. He was going to have to look for it, something he hadn’t done for several years. He was reluctant, rationalized that another month should pass before he did anything himself. He needed the time to steady himself, and the public air needed that time to clear.

  Joseph told him about Roxanne’s concert.

  “It would do her good to have you there, and there’s nothing Alma could do about it.”

  Far from feeling the loss of Roxanne, Allen had been relieved not to see her. She was so bound with Pierre that her presence could be no comfort to him. He was not as sanguine about Alma as he insisted on seeming to Joseph. Allen did understand her—oh, very well. He did not forgive her her lack of loyalty and ingratitude. His decision to attend was based on his anticipation of her discomfort.

  Allen, who usually kept his hair very carefully trimmed and not quite short enough to be accused of being military, hadn’t had a haircut since he got home. He wasn’t letting himself go. He showered and shaved with the same regularity every morning, once a week did his laundry, changed his bed. He simply couldn’t face his barber, in body type and manner so like Pierre, who would have heard and would be tender. Allen could cope with Joseph’s sympathy, there was no sexual question in it. And he could deal with Carlotta’s, too, partly because she was so ready to withdraw it if he tried her patience at all. Allen could not risk being with anyone for whom concern could be physically expressed, even with the briefest gesture. It would tear his control like a piece of threadbare cloth. So he combed his hair over instead of behind his ears and knew, though it was common enough among men these days, it gave him an air of decadence he had never approved of. His prudishness was nothing but self-protection, about which he no longer had a choice, except with people who did not know who he was. If he had to present himself to Alma as a child molester, he might as well look the part.