Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  Joseph no longer walked with the obsessive regularity he had in the days when he and Allen had first met, but at least once a week he suggested Allen go with him along the winter beach or through the bleak scrub of the university grant lands. On these walks Allen got into the habit of asking questions: “What was it like when you sat for Carlotta?” or “Do you think, as Ann seems to, that goodness and happiness are at odds?” Sometimes it seemed to Allen, in the rhythm of that walking, they were not in dialogue so much as in duet, now one carrying the melody, now the other, a theme introduced by one, developed by the other. He often felt more instrument of an idea than its source. There was a detachment he could not reach with Carlotta because there was never a moment when conversation might not turn into contest. And so he could ask, “Is there always a battle between the sexes even when there’s no sex?”

  “Ann and I don’t fight,” Joseph said.

  “Did you with Carlotta?”

  “No, not really. I often felt Carlotta was very impatient with me, but I didn’t take it personally. I decided she had to be irritable the way she had to be cold while she was working.”

  “I don’t know why Mike was her great love,” Allen said.

  “He’s very attractive to women.”

  “He’s very attractive, period. But he’s … unconvincing. Women don’t seem to notice that so much, or they don’t mind.”

  “He’s a touching man.”

  “Surely not to Carlotta!” Allen was sometimes shocked by Joseph’s tenderness.

  “No. I wonder why what is most appealing about people is so often overlooked or misjudged. Mike’s being unconvincing redeemed him for me.”

  “It embarrasses me,” Allen said, and heard the irritation in his voice.

  Joseph, however, was not challenging, always only offering what was true for himself. For an hour, sometimes two, Allen could be nearly deprived of his grief even while he turned some of its themes into this long duet.

  But much of what Allen had to deal with couldn’t be debated while he modeled or sang in the open air. His obsession with Pierre’s body, which had been shocked out of him at its cremation, returned first in dreams, sexually explicit without arousing Allen. He would wake in tears, his body aching as if he had flu or had fallen down a flight of stairs. At night, sitting in front of a television program he couldn’t watch, he would see instead Pierre in all his sexual guises, and Allen was as sexually unmoved as he was with any stranger. Sometimes it seemed to Allen his body’s angry revenge against Pierre’s terrible desertion, but in his mind he couldn’t be angry with Pierre. He wept for Pierre’s fear, horror, sense of betrayal, alone in a house Allen now knew could be as much a jail as it was a safe haven. And wasn’t safe. Why did he have to betray Pierre again now in feeling nothing, nothing at all?

  He should go away. He should look for work. He should sell the house. He sat. His hair grew.

  “I’ve come to give you a haircut,” Roxanne said, standing at the door with a black satchel, halfway between doctor’s bag and salesman’s sample case.

  “Alma doesn’t want you here.”

  “Alma’s in Arizona,” Roxanne said.

  “For Christmas?”

  “Yes. She thought a family Christmas would be nice for the boys, and she’s tired of the rain.”

  Allen realized that she was trying not to look around, not to look down at the floor. The last time she had been in this room she had broken in and found Pierre lying dead on the floor. Joseph had let Allen work through his own morbidity, tracing the body’s position on the rug, knowing what of the head had been torn away repeating every nauseating detail until Allen could see it himself though he had not been able to look, in fact, at the dead body at the morgue. Roxanne, like Joseph, had seen. Her exorcising would be of a different order, and Allen could never ask her about it, though he could see it in the vulnerability of her attentiveness.

  “I’m not sure Carlotta would approve of a haircut. She’s not finished.”

  “She asked me to,” Roxanne said. “Not short—shorter. She says physically we all have one thing in common: we all have amazing hair.”

  “Joseph?”

  “Well, his is peculiar.”

  “Have you seen him lately?” Allen asked. “He’s so much better.”

  “No, I haven’t seen anyone really except Carlotta this morning and now you.”

  “You look as if you’d taken up Carlotta’s fasting,” Allen said, trying for a flippancy of tone he’d apparently lost; he simply sounded concerned.

  “I eat,” Roxanne said. “I don’t sleep well. I get tired.”

  “I should be offering you something,” Allen said. “People who live alone develop very bad manners.”

  She asked for a glass of milk and followed him out into the kitchen.

  “Is Alma staying with Mike?” Allen asked.

  “As far as I know,” Roxanne said. “She wasn’t specific, and I didn’t ask.”

  “That surprises me.”

  “Alma’s a surprising woman,” Roxanne said without irony.

  “To me she’s usually overpredictable,” Allen said. “I’ve been hurt by her but not surprised.”

  Roxanne nodded. “Were you surprised at me?”

  “To be honest, I didn’t think much about you. I was glad at first not to have to see you. You were too close … Just now, when I opened the door and saw you, I was going to say, ‘Pierre isn’t home.’ Still.”

  “You look sort of awful … not the hair. Actually I like that, except it makes you look like some other kind of person.”

  “What kind?” Allen asked, throwing his head back in a gesture he had learned from his hair.

  “More of a brave fool. Carlotta says you’re carrying a gun and talking about killing people.”

  “Did she send you over here to be some sort of Delilah?” Allen asked.

  “I don’t think so. She says Joseph says you aren’t serious because you haven’t mentioned it to him; you’re putting her on.”

  “If I kill anyone, I won’t kill anyone we know,” Allen said. “Not even Alma.”

  “She’s frightened of all the wrong things.”

  “I understand that,” Allen said. “So have I been. I still am. So much for self-knowledge. Roxanne, are you going to leave her?”

  “She’ll probably leave me,” Roxanne said. “She may have already.”

  “I can’t see her being that kind of fool.”

  “You’re not that much alike,” Roxanne said. “Let me give you the haircut.”

  Nor was she, after all, much like Pierre, though they could wear the same shirts. It suddenly occurred to Allen that he should have offered Roxanne some of Pierre’s clothes. Well, he might have thought of it if she’d been around. Unisex was a fad, not a fact. No woman, no matter how deprived of flesh, could have the leanness that made Pierre so fragile and elegant. The flattest female chest promised swelling, the flattest belly a potential birth bubble. Roxanne, so thin she was nearly a stick figure, brought to mind images of stiff toys. She was, like other small women Allen had known, heavy on her feet, and he had seen more boys than girls with her head of sandy mist. Still, her body was, by its nature, amorphous. How well Allen had understood Joseph’s confession that he was reluctant to father a child, not just because of the child but because of the awful transformation that took place for Ann.

  “I haven’t told Carlotta that I didn’t get my hair cut because I couldn’t face my barber. I could have gone to someone else, I suppose.”

  “You’ve got to get something to do,” Roxanne said, “or find somebody willing to worry about you on a domestic level.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the way I keep house.”

  “You’re not keeping heart,” Roxanne said.

  “Isn’t that what’s the matter with you?” Allen asked gently.

  She sat down at the kitchen table, put aside her scissors and comb, and neither looked at him nor spoke for a moment.

  “It
seems important,” she said then with slow difficulty, “to keep heart—and so nearly impossible. It must be that much harder for you with Pierre already dead. If we can’t really care, it’s just too awful.”

  “Yes,” Allen said, “there’s limited energy for what’s left to do: figure out whether you’re dying of grief or shame or anger.”

  “I want to be happy,” Roxanne said.

  “Is that word part of some new feminist plot?”

  “I doubt it,” Roxanne said.

  “Roxanne, anything outside our own hands is out of reach.”

  “But it’s not outside my own reach,” Roxanne protested. “I’m happy when I’m working. I’m happy when I’m with the boys and Alma.”

  “She’s left you,” Allen said.

  Roxanne stood up again and went back to cutting Allen’s hair. Allen felt like a drowning man, clutching at Roxanne’s buoyant desire, which, since it wasn’t strong enough to save him, he dragged down into his own despair. He could not have her bobbing there, a decoy to the great lie.

  “Pierre was never happy,” he said.

  “Of course, he was,” Roxanne said impatiently. “Whenever you were home, he was very happy.”

  Allen moved suddenly out of Roxanne’s range and shouted, “My work made it necessary for me to travel!”

  “Sit down. Stop yelling. I didn’t come over here to fight with you. I came over to give you a haircut.”

  “I wonder if Joseph ever got to feeling the way I do now, sick of the institutional kindness.”

  She had left the wings of hair over his ears, and by now, used to the greater length of it, he felt protected rather than exposed.

  “I ponder growing a beard,” he said, inspecting her job and himself in the bathroom mirror.

  He hadn’t. He had contemplated lying on his bed and letting hair grow as if he were a corpse until years later he’d be discovered entirely blanketed with hair, his own final curtain.

  Roxanne came every day through the holiday. Allen had declined Christmas with the Rabinowitzes; so had Roxanne. Carlotta seemed to disappear to undisclosed relatives somewhere in the interior.

  Roxanne didn’t ask Allen to Alma’s house, obviously because that was what it was. Left behind alone, Roxanne became caretaker. Instead, she brought the meal to him, basically duck and wild rice, but it was the trash of Christmas that was her real contribution, broken candy canes, defective paper bells, a Santa on skis who kept falling over, a music box that played the first three notes of “Silent Night” and then groaned like a fly in a trap. She had dozens of things, all collected from the wreckage of Christmas Eve at her drugstore.

  “Can you imagine? Nobody else wanted any of it. Nobody seems to have kids any more, or the kids mustn’t have anything but the best.”

  At first Allen only sat to watch what Roxanne took out of bag or box and played at being mock alarmed or offended by whatever she set out on table or sill, hung about the room at random, but then he became intrigued with a plastic drummer who was supposed to drum as he was pulled along and didn’t.

  “He’s not broken. He’s just out of line,” he said, and in a moment the drummer gave a smart report.

  Lots was beyond fixing.

  “The Liberty Bell is cracked,” Roxanne said. “Why should a Christmas bell with just a bashed-in corner be rejected?”

  “What’s the matter with this hand puppet?”

  “Turn it around; some kid put gum in its hair. I can cut that out.”

  “Best barber in town,” Allen said.

  When they left the living room to sit down to dinner, it looked as if half a dozen children had been called away from play.

  “What are we going to do with it all?” Allen asked.

  “Give it to the children’s wing of the hospital or the Salvation Army.”

  “What kinds of Christmases did you have as a child?” Allen asked.

  “Different kinds, lots of different kinds. Maybe that’s partly where I got the idea that we ought to be happy because, when people make an effort, that’s really all they want.”

  “Are you absurd enough to tell me you’ve been trying to make me happy?”

  “I guess so,” she said. “Anyway, I am.”

  Did he have to be humble if he couldn’t be haughty in his grief? Allen had rarely been given anything that really pleased him. Even when he was given what he’d expressly asked for, he found fault with it. The blue of the sweater wasn’t the exact blue he had in mind. He wanted the paperback rather than the hardback of Lawren Harris; the hardback was too much a coffee table book. He had never wanted to be given anything for the house; the house was Pierre’s, to be given to by Allen. He had been that way since he could remember. He had been afraid not so much of being bought as of being changed by what other people wanted for him.

  “Do you have any family left?” Roxanne asked.

  “No, no one close. I never knew my father. He left my mother before I was two. Mother died—oh, about a year before Pierre came to live with me.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She had that kind of cold, prim prettiness women develop who’ve been badly treated by men. She was intelligent; she was ambitious for me.”

  “How did she raise you?”

  “Her parents helped at first. Then she was a librarian. We didn’t really like each other. There was a sort of wary gratitude between us, but once I was grown, I think she was afraid I might dive into her blouse again or mount her. And she kept buying me things like rifles and stories about the sea. Once she bought me a dog. I made her take it back the next day. I’ve never been able to stand extravagance unless there’s money to pay for it.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “Surrey—British Columbia’s Orange County, without the money. I expect some of our old neighbors are responsible for the trash mail that’s come in in the last several months. They’ve even got morality and the last judgment down to comic-book formula. Have you ever seen any of it?”

  “No,” Roxanne said.

  “At first I threw it away. Then it began to amuse me.” Allen got up and went to his desk, opened a drawer, and found three objects that looked like books of raffle tickets. “Take a look.”

  They were titled things like “This Was Your Life” and “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Each page was one strip high and two frames long; all ended in the flames of hell.

  “Nobody who sends this stuff ever signs a name. I wonder why righteousness needs to be anonymous.”

  “Because you have a gun,” Roxanne said. “They believe in evil.”

  “Well, perhaps that’s as well,” Allen said. “I believe in justice enough not to shoot anyone I lived next door to as a child simply on spec.”

  “Pierre kept talking about killing himself or your killing yourself, and then he did. Now you’re talking about killing other people.”

  “I don’t know how else to say how murderously angry I am,” Allen said quietly. “That’s all.”

  “Why don’t you come out?” Roxanne said.

  “Come out? Where do you think I’ve been since I was arrested? I haven’t been offered a job since. How out can you get?”

  “But I mean, say something about it. Make a political point.”

  “For what? Some of your silly little gay rags that are read by twenty-five people who advertise for each other’s cocks every month?”

  “There’s something I want to say—there is no point in my defending gay politics—but there’s something both you and Alma are very mixed up about. You can be superior to people like Pierre and me, that’s fine, but you can’t be superior to yourself. You’re as much a cock-sucker as anyone in the want ads. You’re as much a fairy and as much a victim. If even Pierre’s killing himself isn’t enough to jar you loose, maybe nothing is.”

  “Loose from what?”

  “Your worship of the straight world. Your hatred of your own.”

  “It’s not a world. It’s a street scene.”

  “Alm
a’s coming home tomorrow,” Roxanne said.

  “You get tired of an argument awfully quickly,” Allen said. “Well, anyway, I won that one. Alma’s coming home.”

  After Roxanne had gone, Allen paced against the offense she had been to him. Though he had, at one time or another, called himself every ugly sexual name there was, no one else had ever dared to. Allen had not put himself in that kind of sordid situation where he could be degraded. Even his first sexual experience had been with a teacher who was sensitive, guilty, but never vulgar. Yet that little cunt he’d more or less fished out of the gutter, who didn’t have the loyalty to call on him unless that bitch Alma was out of town, felt free to call him a cock-sucker, a fairy, a victim!

  He slammed his fist into his palm and said aloud, “I am a man!”

  Then he found himself laughing, not on the edge of lunacy but in relief. It was exactly what he had to say not only to himself but to the world, in Weekend, The Canadian, Saturday Night, and Maclean’s.

  It did not occur to Allen that, once he made up his mind to make a full statement, no one would want it.

  “That sort of thing went out in the sixties with Paul Goodman and his crowd, didn’t it?” one editor asked.

  “A quiet sort of confession, maybe,” another began dubiously, “but stuff about not finding work, about suicide—well, excuse me, but that self-pity and melodrama are just what the rest of us are pretty tired of. It may sound unfeeling, but it’s like we know old people ache; we don’t want to go on hearing about it.”

  “Allen, look, we haven’t dropped you, damn it! You’ve dropped us. You haven’t been here in months, and you know, the grapevine did let us know maybe you needed to take a holiday. Toronto isn’t a hick town, what do you think? There’s plenty of work. I’d have given you this article on the asbestos strike except I assigned it just this morning.”

  “Take my advice,” said yet another, who had been spared the raid because he had been home with the flu. “Just let it keep blowing over. Take an assignment here and there—turn them down, too, if they’re at all, you know—and in six months, a year, you’ll be right back where you were. I can’t begin; you can see that, but once other people do, I promise you …”