Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  At just past eight Carlotta turned up. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Alma didn’t like her picture in the show. I wouldn’t take it down. So her father had the building closed down.”

  “Dale’s not going to stand for that, is he?”

  “Even if Dale offers you his gallery for a show, don’t accept,” Allen said. “He just doesn’t have the feel for things Canadian, you know?”

  “But he was so enthusiastic about it. What’s really going on? What kind of a game are you and Alma playing?”

  “It’s called ‘Fighting for Your Life,’” Allen said.

  “Are you going to give it to the papers?”

  “No,” Allen said. “I’m not going to do anything. In two weeks I’ll get it to Edmonton, and it can start there.”

  “But this is your town. Before I’d let Alma’s father shut me down, he’d hear about it first thing on ‘Good Morning Radio,’ second thing in the Province for breakfast, and throughout the day. How can you let him run you out of town?”

  “It doesn’t much matter to me here, to tell the truth. This is really a Toronto show taking its time about getting there.”

  “You know, that’s the trouble with you continental types. You don’t recognize home ground even when you’re ankle deep in it. Vancouver needs this show, Allen. You can’t let it be shut down—not even by a bunch of red-necks, for God’s sake, but by a crazy personal friend.”

  “By now Alma means more to me than that. She’s closer to being my wicked fairy godmother.”

  “Well, since I’m all dressed up with no place to go, and it’s your fault, perhaps you should take me somewhere for a drink.”

  “You are looking very elegant,” Allen admitted, “but I’d just as soon not meet other people on the prowl because the show didn’t open. I don’t want to have to explain.”

  “Well, I do,” she said, gathering a great web of black shawl around her.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Allen said, hoping the mildness of his request would be more effective than a more dramatic command.

  The item in the following evening’s Sun said simply, “It was doubly disappointing last night when the fire department closed the King Gallery. This was the first time its owner, Dale Easter, had agreed to show not only a Canadian but a local artist’s work. Allen Dent, who has an international reputation as a photographer, had mounted a fifteen-year retrospective, which will now not be shown in Vancouver at all but open in Edmonton in two weeks. Dale Easter has no plans for other shows and therefore is not interested in going to the expense of complying with fire regulations. Vancouver art lovers have missed their one opportunity to see the King Gallery as well as the work of one of our most well-known native sons. Allen Dent was born in Surrey …”

  From there on it read like an obituary, which seemed appropriate enough. There was nothing, Allen was relieved to see, that suggested motives more complex than safety. If rumors had begun to circulate, they were nebulous enough for the media to ignore. By the time the public had actually been exposed to the show, rumors would be too specific for the media to do anything but censor them.

  Most of the world was, after all, like Joseph, for less salutary reasons. It didn’t occur to Joseph to question the fire department’s action, though he lamented it. What Allen needed in the cities ahead of him were several more Almas with no personal investment in closing the show down but with enough perception to recognize what he was doing and enough malice to report what they knew at the right cocktail parties.

  Allen had cleaned out the house of everything but furniture the real estate agent said would be helpful to sell it, and he had arranged for that to be stored as soon as the house was sold. He was packing a generous couple of suitcases to take to Edmonton and on across the country when Roxanne arrived.

  “I came to say goodbye,” she explained, and when Allen expressed neither gratitude nor admiration for her courage in coming to see him, she added, “because I’m leaving Vancouver.”

  “Going south with the migration this time?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m going alone.”

  “Then there is a straw that breaks the camel’s back? By now I could as easily believe in the Easter bunny.”

  “I don’t agree with Alma about a lot of things, too many, I guess, but I wish she could have figured out how to burn down as well as shut down that show.”

  “You?” Allen asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, me. It’s a terrible thing you’re doing.”

  “Justice can’t always be good-looking,” Allen said, liking the cynical flippancy of tone that had gradually come back to him.

  “If what you’re doing is just, then what the police did to you in Toronto was merciful.”

  “That’s certainly Alma’s view.”

  “No, it isn’t. She hasn’t got a view, really. She’s too frightened and guilty and self-righteous to think, and so are you.”

  “On the contrary,” Allen assured her, “I’ve thought very carefully. It was you who suggested I make a political statement in the first place. This is my political statement.”

  “What’s political about betraying your own people?”

  “Some of us require betrayal to see the light … like me. I’m doing unto others what’s been done to me.”

  “You really are too much, you people,” Roxanne said, shaking her head. “Where do you get the crust to be so sure you can get even and have the right to?”

  “I’m nothing more than poor white trash from Surrey you know,” Allen said. “I still don’t have to grovel.”

  “Don’t knock your mother. She raised you. If she was still alive, if Pierre was still alive, you wouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Of course not. It took me awhile to see that I was without obligation and could do what I think is right.”

  “It’s not right! It’s what you want to do to get even. It won’t work.”

  “How do you know?” Allen demanded. “What could you know? You’re not just innocent of the real world; you’re stupid about it. You should go out and do some dealing with it before you come here telling me what to do. You, who betray all your friends, neglect your work to be not even Alma’s lover so much as her housemaid, babysitter, caretaker, who gets paid in bed privileges rather than cash, because Alma’s tighter with her purse than her cunt—you come here to teach me what’s right?”

  “Something horrible seems to be happening to all of us,” Roxanne cried. “You used to be a person I trusted.”

  “I could have said the same about you.”

  “But you understand what I was trying to do, don’t you? You understand I was only trying to love her.”

  “Of course, I understood. You understand me now. We just don’t approve of each other.”

  “I am your friend, Allen.”

  “Where are you going … anywhere in particular?”

  “Dale keeps telling me about L.A. and San Diego, and I know some women who’ve gone down there.”

  “What did make you decide?”

  Roxanne hesitated, then shrugged. “Since she hasn’t told me, I guess technically … oh, what difference does it make? She’s pregnant.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That woman does nothing by halves!”

  “Or everything,” Roxanne said wryly. “Anyway, you probably ought to take her out of the show, for credibility, if nothing else.”

  “Not on your life!” Allen said. “She stays.”

  “Why? Why does it matter to you so much?” Roxanne asked.

  “It’s a beautiful show, Roxanne, with perfect moral balance, perfect ambiguity: funeral and resurrection, betrayal and tribute, vengeance and justice. I’m obliged to nothing else now … surely not the likes of Alma. Why should you be pleading for her even now on your way out?”

  “I love her,” Roxanne said.

  “Love excuses far too much.”

  Allen looked at her thoughtfu
lly—the toy he’d found in a record shop and brought home to Pierre, another joke turned into a friendship by its victim because she was so attentive and detached. The people closest to Allen shared an indifference to being seen as foolish, unlike himself or Alma, so endlessly and vainly self-protective.

  “I’ll send you a postcard somewhere along the way,” Roxanne said.

  “I hope you never come back,” Allen said.

  “I hope your show burns down in Edmonton,” she said.

  They caught each other in an awkward, hard embrace, each the size but blatantly wrong sex of the other’s lover. For a moment after Roxanne left, Allen wondered if they both were being blind, but he quickly decided he, at any rate, was not. Allen might have settled for the negative solution Roxanne would be for him, but Roxanne had a different kind of future. She went south, her attention intact. Allen left for Edmonton, an artist at last, without the grace to be amazed that he could have been driven to it.

  Carlotta Painting

  KNOWING ALMA WAS ALONE and pregnant should have encouraged Carlotta to effect their reconciliation. Her anger with Alma had never been much more than a convenience, Carlotta’s defense against Alma’s preoccupation with Roxanne. But as long as they were estranged, Carlotta could put off thinking about a portrait of Alma. Eventually it had to be done, but Carlotta postponed it as long as she could by practicing on other people.

  “But I’m nobody special,” Ann protested. “I’m not really one of you at all.”

  “What kind of a group do we seem then?” Carlotta asked.

  “You’re all so very clever, aren’t you? I knit.” She laughed at the comparison.

  “I’ll do you knitting. Then it won’t seem such a waste of your time.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you to think I’m too busy …”

  “Then say you will.”

  “Of course, I will,” Ann said.

  Carlotta decided to work in Ann’s kitchen. She liked the irony of light from the kitchen window which looked out onto the sculpture she had used in her portrait of Mike.

  “Is it really all right if I knit? May I keep my glasses on?”

  Ann was the only one who did not assume she was doing Carlotta a favor. Carlotta was not used to being asked for this kind of reassurance, and she was surprised that her simple attention was enough to keep Ann’s color high, her body alert. If Carlotta hadn’t baited Joseph occasionally, she might as well have been studying a sack of potatoes. Pierre disappeared into a dream that left his face blankly idiotic. Sometimes Carlotta debated painting each of them as they were reduced by stillness; she had sketches of Joseph as more bundle than person, Pierre as a retarded child, Allen’s face cooked with grief. Her only sketches of Mike were done badly from memory, obsessive pages of his genitals with a hand, foot, ear, hairline, sometimes faintly drawn on the same page to suggest an actual sexual view.

  Mike, after all, was the first one. Carlotta’s motives had been so confused it was a wonder she had accomplished anything at all. She could look at the painting now with some detachment. It was so obviously the image of Mike she had wanted him to have of himself so that he’d finally have the courage to take the great risks his dreams required. Instead, inadvertently she had exposed his fantasy to him as a fantasy and he had rejected it. But he would have rejected even more violently any image that had revealed him as the stunned and drifting man he actually was. Carlotta could hardly have discovered the idea of himself that had emerged in Mike when he went to Arizona.

  Carlotta wondered what kind of idea of self Ann held, who so obviously expected to be exempt from Carlotta’s professional attention, Ann did not think of herself as clever, did not think of herself as anyone else’s subject matter, raw material. Yet Allen had taken dozens of pictures of her, and in them Ann seemed perfectly serene under his attention. She was not exactly self-conscious now, posing with her knitting for Carlotta, but she was aware and wary.

  “I didn’t get over the shock of you for a long time,” Carlotta said. “In a sense, you were more of a shock than Joseph’s crack-up. Not just to me, to all of us. He’d been getting odder and odder for some time. I understood him by thinking of him as very lonely without a life of his own, living at the edge of other people’s. And all the time there you were … and the children.”

  “You were a bit of a shock to me, too,” Ann said, smiling.

  “Me? Or all of us?”

  “All of you. Well, not so much Mike, though he seemed an awfully definite person.”

  “He felt cheated, you know. He assumed, once he’d discovered you, that all of us had secret lives.”

  “I knew Joseph had friends. I think he thought of me and the children as … vulnerable? or maybe simply not fitting in.”

  “We didn’t fit in surely.”

  “I would have thought Joseph would have chosen friends more placid.”

  “You thought we’d probably driven him crazy.”

  “Well, yes,” Ann admitted, “in a way. You’re all so agitated so much of the time, and so was he, but, of course, that really made him feel less peculiar. And he seems to … not exactly understand but have no trouble with what you do. To this day I can’t imagine why Mike went to the trouble he obviously did to build that thing in the backyard. Those evenings Roxanne put on didn’t make any sense to me at all. I don’t know what to listen to or how to take it. Joseph said he didn’t either really but it finally reassured him because a lot of energy, agitation, was under control.”

  Carlotta laughed. “What a marvelous definition of art!”

  “Is it?”

  “When I’m working hard, anxiety turns into excitement.”

  “Is that why creative people lead anxious and unhappy lives?”

  “Do you think we do?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well,” Carlotta said, feeling goaded and not liking to be victim of her own technique, “I don’t think of anxiety as a sort of style we’ve all adopted. It’s just there pretty constantly to be dealt with.”

  “But most of us avoid a lot of anxiety.”

  “How?”

  “By not being ambitious, I suppose.”

  “Joseph’s never been ambitious,” Carlotta said.

  “Spiritually he has. He’s called himself the father of God …”

  “Drugs can do that to anyone,” Carlotta said. “I’m not ambitious, and, though I’m over being suicidal and don’t even fast anymore, I stay this side of insanity only by painting.”

  “But you’re very ambitious,” Ann protested.

  “Oh, in a sense. We all have our contracts with the world. I wouldn’t object to a show in Toronto or Montreal or even New York. But that sort of prestige isn’t necessary. Selling is, so when yet another gallery here folds, and people like Dale Easter are above dealing with local talent, I can worry but that’s different. The anxiety I’m talking about doesn’t attach itself to any convenient meaning. It picks up fear like radio messages from a door hinge, a flower in someone’s hair …”

  Carlotta had stopped painting, moved to the kitchen window, and finished her sentence, staring at Mike’s “School Days,” on which Joy had begun to climb.

  Why did Ann’s assertion that Carlotta, that they all were ambitious seem an accusation she had to defend herself against? She turned back to Ann.

  “I think maybe we’re all anxious because we haven’t been ambitious enough.”

  Were anxiety and ambition linked? Was there anyone in the world who wasn’t, at least secretly, anxious for—if not working for—a special destiny of some sort? Carlotta didn’t want to pose those questions to Ann, whose small, full lips had gone smug, whose eyes behind her glasses were distressed. She had no ambition because her life was what she had been promised all along. How unfair a judgment that was! Ann had buried one husband and seen another through a bad crack-up. She was one of the world’s real heroines. Carlotta had no idea how to represent that because she couldn’t feel it, except as a kind of resentment. Her mend
ed little finger and heart were no match.

  Carlotta’s abiding passion was envy. She had envied everyone everything, yes, even Joseph his madness, Pierre his suicide, Allen his grief. Everything outside her own experience was not her own so that her potential for poverty was limitless. She had tried to believe in that poverty to live in terms of it, not only materially but in her work, painting only her self. When it became clearer and clearer that it was so slow a suicide as to take the form of a long life, she began to doubt her choice. These portraits were exercises in self-doubt, extreme exposures to envy in order to die of it or become immune.

  “My mother’s a religious fanatic. She believes in humility and pain,” Carlotta explained. “Mike said he was jealous of kids with new clothes, with bikes. I was jealous of anyone with a broken arm. I used to lie awake at night to figure out how I could break mine without more pain than I could stand. I’m a coward about pain. What were you jealous of?”

  “Talent,” Ann said. “Obviously I still am.”

  “But you have a talent for living,” Carlotta said, amiably combative now.

  Ann might really be able to teach her how to confront other women without feeling as though she were dealing with some aspect of herself which might be her enemy: Roxanne’s lesbian sensibility, Ann’s motherhood, both of which seemed to Carlotta extremes of femininity which challenged her own narrow and self-protective taste for men, whom she also envied but in a more natural and less confusing way.

  What little pity she had, Carlotta reserved for men. It was certainly there in the portrait of Joseph, done during the time he still longed for invisibility. She had made him, therefore, transparent. The image did not become insubstantial because she set him down in Queen Elizabeth Park in May. He hadn’t actually posed there. At that time he couldn’t have been among so many flowers without a straitjacket. His torso burned with tulips. His brain was a blooming tree.

  Pity outlined the portrait of Allen, his definition so sharp he looked something structured of the most fragile glass with only the thinnest veil of undisguising flesh, the gun more like a vital organ torn from his chest than a weapon clutched to it, his eyes the empty room he lived in.