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 mended 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.

Carlotta had struggled so negatively hard to keep Roxanne from being nothing more than a failed self-portrait that finally she had caught no more than Roxanne’s attention—victory at a basic level, but that was all. Their peculiar sexual encounters did accomplish the one thing: distance. Though Carlotta had anticipated its opposite, she could use what she had instead. Intimacy with anyone else had put Carlotta almost immediately in touch with the violence and vulnerability she had assumed was at the center, in one form or another, of everyone. But she had known only men. Roxanne was no more vulnerable naked than with her clothes on, maybe because she went around exposed by choice. The only thing she had to impose as a lover was gentleness, which had made Carlotta feel childishly immodest, as if she’d been caught masturbating by an adult too timid to punish her.

It was nearly as hard for Carlotta to admit to herself that she included Roxanne’s finger up her anus in her masturbating fantasies as it was to know how much more often she recalled Mike’s raping her than any of his gentler lovemaking. Pierre’s suicide had shocked her into knowing that her own toying with that violence had to be put down and left behind once and for all. With it went the fasting, which had always produced more negative hallucinations than she should have lived with. But sex unflavored with some sort of humiliation, defeat, would be without climax. It wasn’t really the physical violence that had excited her. Carlotta, if she wanted sex, usually had to make the first aggressive suggestion. To know Mike wanted her whether she wanted him or not was her triumph in that affair. She had had the power to make him violent and ultimately vulnerable … for a few moments anyway.

It had taken her months to admit that, if he hadn’t left, eventually Carlotta would have driven him away. She didn’t attract, entrap, whatever the talent was, men domestically not, as she always supposed, because she wasn’t as attractive as Alma, but because she didn’t want them.

Ann obviously did. There was not much else about her that could attract. Oh, she wasn’t bad-looking, and she had a good deal more presence than Joseph. Once you really looked at Ann, you didn’t forget her. Men as different as Allen and Mike tended to idealize her, but the woman they courted was Alma.

“Do you think men are more vulnerable than women?” Carlotta asked because talking with Ann was a way of keeping her mind on Ann.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ann said.

She had been in the middle of counting stitches, and she held her hands still as if they could remember the number while she was distracted.

“Ah,” Carlotta said, “that is what I want. Exactly.”

What everyone in the world wants, just that kind of attention.

Roxanne and Ann rather than Joseph and Ann would be companion pieces.

With Pierre dead, with Roxanne and Allen and Mike all gone from town, with Alma banished, Carlotta was more alone than suited her. But she was also too much in the wrong company of Ann and the children to have energy in the evening to go out to find people. She read a little, but she had a limited tolerance for the printed word. She didn’t own a television, not because she scorned it but because she was afraid of it, as she was of alcohol and drugs. Escapes from anxiety were not cures; only confronting and controlling it were.

That was why doing Allen’s portrait, which should have been the hardest of all, was so simple, so clear from the beginning. He was such a manifestation of her own existential anxiety with its murderous terrors, except that he had a focus: Pierre.

Carlotta brooded about Pierre, his awful loneliness, a child playing dress-up day after day in that empty house. He had called more often than Carlotta remembered to call him, and she did his portrait more as a way to keep him company than as a requirement of her own imagination. He had become really interesting to her only now that he was dead. If you had to worship something, it was obviously better to have the object of worship something less fragile than another human being. Pierre should have stayed Catholic. Or maybe he had. Maybe suicide was his only escape, the only renunciation that worked, Allen only incidental to it.

She had a message from Allen that the show had been well, if silently received, until it got to Winnipeg, where it was not only announced and noticed in the paper but reviewed there and on local radio with as much “pretentious snot as could be found in Susan Sontag.” The tone was definitely Allen, and Carlotta tried to feel reassured. She wished she had been able to see the show herself, not just the catalogue. The rumor around town was that there had been too many famous queers in the show. Even though homosexuals were said to be not only willing but anxious to oppress each other, surely Dale Easter hadn’t shut it down for that reason. Allen’s own explanation of Alma’s displeasure sounded like her imperious self but wasn’t really plausible either. Uneasy curiosity about that made Carlotta both wish to see Alma and put it off.

Then Mike phoned.

“I have a favor to ask.”

“Where are you?”

“In Phoenix.”

“Oh.”

“Listen, Carlotta, I got married last week. I didn’t want to say anything beforehand to Alma. It’s not as if I should ask her permission. But probably she ought to know. Could you just sort of let her know?”

“I don’t suppose you really are a bastard at all,” Carlotta said. “You just sometimes seem like one—a matter of method probably.”

“Well, look, I can’t send her a formal announcement.”

“How about a warm, personal letter?”

“She’d have to answer it.”

“How long has it been since you’ve heard from Alma?”

“Months,” Mike said. “Since Christmas.”

“All right. I’ll tell her.”

“You know, just so she knows.”

“I hope it’s a good idea,” Carlotta said.

“Oh, it’s great.”

“Does she have a name?”

“Bunny.”

“Bunny.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Trasco, good luck.”

Carlotta didn’t phone. She went directly to the house. She was not accustomed to Alma out in West Point Grey, tended to think of her still in the neighborhood, but this house, ablaze with azaleas, open to the whole view, did suit her much better. Victor answered the door.

“Is your mother here?”

“Yeah. She’s in her room.”

Since he didn’t offer to go get her, Carlotta asked, “Where is that?”

“Upstairs at the end of the hall.”

It was easy to find behind the only closed door, on which she knocked. There was a pause and then a surprised “Yes?”

“May I come in?”

“Lot!”

The door swung open, and Carlotta was caught in an uncalled-for embrace.

“You’ve put on weight,” Alma said as she finally let her go. “You look almost healthy.”

“So have you. Are you still pregnant?”

“How did you know? Who told you that?”

“Allen.”

“But how did he know?”

“Roxanne told him on her way out of town. He told me on his way out.”

“But she didn’t know! I hadn’t told her!”

“She knew.”

“What an unholy mess it all is! I wonder if anyone, leaving home, ever actually says good-bye. Mike said he didn’t know he was leaving until he’d been away for weeks, but Roxanne knew. She packed and moved all her things while I was out of the house, and she did say good-bye to Tony and Victor. Why didn’t she say?”

“She probably wondered the same thing about you.”

“I hadn’t decided what to do, that’s all. I thought Roxanne would probably love a baby, me having a baby. But when I actually was pregnant, it seemed more complicated than that. If Mike were like most men and didn’t really care about children, it would be fine. He’s very possessive about his children.”

“It’s Mike’s?”

“Well, of course, it’s Mike’s. Who else could it be?” Alma asked impatiently. “And I was afraid of making her jealous. Roxanne’s terribly jealous.”

“But you’re still pregnant?”

“Well, she’s gone. If she’d asked me to have an abortion, maybe I could have.”

“Is it too late?”

“I suppose so. Anyway, I’ve decided to have it.”

“Will you tell Mike?”

“I was just trying to write to him,” Alma said, gesturing to a mess of papers on her bed.

“You weren’t thinking of going back to him …”

“Well … oh, Lot, can you understand this: can you understand that knowing I’m lesbian hasn’t really turned out to have much to do with the way I want to live? I did try. I even tried to turn myself into a feminist. The first time Mike came back, just going out to dinner with him, just walking along the street … to feel so blissfully ordinary. And then at Christmastime to see the boys with him, Tony particularly—I don’t know how to keep him from veering off. All the time Roxanne was here, I kept worrying …”

“But you haven’t been in touch with Mike for months.”

“I’ve felt so guilty, you can’t imagine. It isn’t as if I didn’t care desperately about Roxanne. When I first realized, I really did wonder if she and I could somehow … and then she just left. That’s been devastating. I couldn’t really think for a while. Maybe going back to Mike is a crazy idea, but what else can I do?”

“Something,” Carlotta said. “Mike just phoned me to tell me he’s married again. He wanted to let you know without exactly confronting you with it.”

“What’s her name?” Alma asked.

“Bunny.”

Alma’s incredulity shattered into laughter. Carlotta joined as well as she could. She knew this was as close to tears as Alma would get. When Alma recovered, she walked over to the window and looked out over the view.

“I’m going to be thirty-five day after tomorrow. It seems old to be an unwed mother.”

“Can’t you get rid of it?”

“I wouldn’t,” Alma said. “I’m not a secret Catholic or anything. I’ve even marched in abortion parades. But I wouldn’t have one.”

“It would be preferable to throwing yourself off Lion’s Gate Bridge or anything like that.”

“Not after Pierre, thanks, and there’s Victor and Tony.”

“How will they feel about your having a baby?”

“I’ve already told them. Victor called me an old fart, but he’ll get used to it. Tony’s the problem. We haven’t exactly been on speaking terms since Roxanne left. There was getting to be too close a thing between them. I guess he blames me. What am I going to do? I’ve been asking that question for the last five years, and every time it’s about something worse.”

“Ann Rabinowitz thinks we all lead very agitated lives.”

“She’s such a nice person, why can’t I be like that? Bunny. Did you really say Bunny?”

Carlotta nodded.

“I feel sorry for her. Isn’t that awful? I don’t really think I’m quite in focus. I shouldn’t feel relieved. Or anyway, I shouldn’t say so, particularly in front of you. You’ve always really disapproved of me, but you never used to mind. Have you come back just to say this for Mike?”

“No. I’ve been meaning to come. I decided I didn’t know why I kept aspiring to teach you a lesson, since no one else was ever going to. Everyone else I was trying to be loyal to has left town. I’ve run out of perfume.”

“But everyone is teaching me a lesson.”

“Maybe inadvertently.”

“It’s all revenge. There’s nothing to learn from that, is there?”

“Nobody’s being vengeful.”

“Allen is,” Alma said.

“What’s all this about Allen?” Carlotta asked.

“Didn’t you ever see the show?”

“How could I? According to Allen, you’re the one who had it closed down.”

“I had to, for all of us. You were in it, too, you know.”

“I did know,” Carlotta said. “Frankly I was flattered, and it was a good picture. Did you really object to being in Auden and Isherwood’s company?”

“But it was everybody,” Alma said, “from his personal friends to a United Church minister, a college president, a member of Cabinet—all gay; that’s how he chose.”

“I hardly feel I qualify,” Carlotta said. “How do you know? He couldn’t have told you since you weren’t on speaking terms.”

“I didn’t have to be told. Allen’s gossiped to me for years about these people. I could see for myself.”

“How very clever,” Carlotta said.

“He won’t get away with it, not once the show gets to Toronto,” Alma said.

“I think he may.”

“Anyway, Roxanne did agree with me about that. She did think it was a despicable thing to do.”

“Why?”

“He’s doing exactly what was done to him, only to dozens of people—and his friends. How many suicides does he want committed? What does he think he’s proving?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why is it so hard for you to disapprove of nearly everyone but me?”

Carlotta laughed. “You have all the privileges, why should you have the rights as well? And you do do awful things, awful things.”

“I didn’t ever make love with your husband.”

“I didn’t have one.”

“Or your woman lover.”

Alma’s voice dropped a tone, and Carlotta realized that her frivolous attempt at intimacy with Roxanne had troubled Alma a good deal more than Carlotta’s much more important affair with Mike.

“At the time you seemed to be through with them. …”

Alma was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed, the now-pointless letter to Mike scattered about her. There was no energy in her for an argument, and perhaps there was no point in trying to distract her with it. It hadn’t been Carlotta’s intention to paint her friends at the crises in their lives, but over and over again that seemed to be when their need and hers coincided. Or they were always in crisis, as Ann thought.

“Don’t leave me alone now, will you?” Alma asked. “You’re the only one left.”

“No.”

Carlotta hadn’t before begun a portrait while she was still working on another. Once she had started Alma’s, she wondered why she had put it off so long. The tension Carlotta often had to create between herself and her subject was natural between herself and Alma, who never cared whether she pleased Carlotta or not as long as she was interested. For the first time, since doing Mike’s portrait, Carlotta’s attention was caught rather than forced. Though she privately thought Alma was risking far too much to have another child, she was as a goddess of fertility irresistible, except apparently to Roxanne.

“I used to think that it was you I wanted to go to bed with, you I was leaving,” Alma said.

Carlotta snorted.

“I still have rape fantasies about you. I was jealous of Mike, you know, not of you.”

“Well, I was jealous of you and always have been.”

“It’s flattering,” Alma said.

“Women are meant to be rivals, not lovers.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes. That’s why all this attention to Persephone and Demeter can’t explain anything. The myth for women is Arachne and Athena.”

“I’m your Athena?”

“Exactly. Women don’t worship their goddesses; they correct them. We have to because all our goddesses, like you, are prosocially aggressive.”

“I must have missed that particular lecture.”

“You’re for the status quo, for marriage, for motherhood, and no matter how often, how clearly, how passionately one of us spins out the errors of that life, you banish us. You turned Roxanne into a spider. You turned me into a spider years ago.”

“That’s very exciting,” Alma said, brushing a long, heavy strand of hair behind her ear. “I could have seemed simply dull instead.”

“You’re never dull, just stupidly mistaken and immortal.”

“You’re very hard.”

“I wear my skeleton on the outside, which is your doing. Don’t complain.”

Carlotta liked the irony of their sexual discoveries, useless to each in the way she wanted or needed to live, the natural envy of their bond, the deep familiarity. She even half believed what she said: artist as finder of the flaw, which was always discovered in the distance between an idea of the self and its needs, but she was really more interested in the idea, more concerned with portrayal than betrayal, unlike Allen.

“I did try writing,” Alma said. “I worked at it. Then I collected a lot of rejection slips, and I realized I was too old for that kind of failure. I’m too old for any kind of failure really.”

“That’s why it’s called the prime of life.”

“What’s so lovely about being pregnant is you don’t have to ask, ‘What’s the point?’ Finally it isn’t yours to make or even necessarily to see. There may be generations of people born just to make one possible—a Joan of Arc or an Einstein.”

“Genes don’t make geniuses,” Carlotta said. “Cultural necessity does. If you lived in the States right now—I mean, if you’d been raised there, you wouldn’t be having another baby; you’d be getting on with writing and probably publishing it.”

“No, I wouldn’t … I’m not as much of a conformist as you think, and anyway, it’s not all that different down there. You never go there. You just read books about it.”

“It’s cheaper.”

Carlotta didn’t really mourn the loss of Alma’s stories to the world, or even to Canada, so why did she taunt? Because Alma’s self-justification was so simpleminded and smug, because Carlotta’s own, if she ever voiced it, would sound both pretentious and preposterous. Canada no more needed painters of uncertain direction than writers of dubious insight. Certainly she wasn’t painting in response to any cultural necessity. Was her drive then no more than the idiot goading of one great-grandmother or another in her blood who otherwise would wait out eternity without a point?

“Why do you paint?” Alma said.

“To say ‘See, we exist.’ It seems a lot of work when any mirror has the same message.”

“A mirror doesn’t say it matters.”

Carlotta looked up sharply to catch the color of Alma’s fading blush. Then they both laughed.

“I’d forgotten you do that when you’re pregnant.”

Working as hard as she was, Carlotta sometimes forgot to eat. Ann could read hunger in her face, would cook her something or make her a sandwich. Alma didn’t notice, her own sudden cravings the prerogative of pregnancy from which Carlotta was excluded.

“One of the things I wondered about when I was writing was what could a portrait possibly say? What does a face say?” Alma asked.

“Start with the obvious: though any portrait may not, it can say sex, age, ethnic background, nationality class, occupation, marital status, all the vital statistics. Character is in the bones, the set of the mouth, the eyes. Psychological history is the skin.”

“You mean scars and whatnot?”

“Obviously, yes, but if I only meant that, you’d have no psychological history at all.”

“But isn’t most of it clichés out of old wives’ tales: the weak chin/weak character, long nose/long cock sort of thing?”

“I’m not inventing your face. If I exaggerate characteristics, I move toward cartoon. Faces are, after all, a lot easier to read than books.”

“I don’t agree,” Alma said, “except faces of people you know well.”

“I only paint people I know well, and the only thing I can’t paint is our hot air,” Carlotta said.

“But nothing anyone says is irrelevant really.”

“Neither is the color of your eyes.”

Carlotta stopped on her way out of the house to look at Roxanne’s wall. She had thought she wanted Alma in some kind of relationship with the view. She had done sketches of Alma standing by the window, sitting up in bed. But maybe she should be painted into Roxanne’s sound map of the city.

“Tony won’t let me touch it,” Alma complained.

“Quite right,” Carlotta agreed. “It’s an extraordinary piece of work.”

“You mean to look at.”

“Yes,” Carlotta said. “What baffles me about Roxanne is that she does complex things like this but is so … simple? ordinary? … as a person. Is she?”

“I don’t know,” Alma admitted. “Sometimes I think she’s just so tactful she should be a secret agent. Why didn’t she say she knew I was pregnant?”

Carlotta shrugged, still studying the wall, instructional and aesthetic, only inadvertently redeemed from usefulness by the impossibility of Roxanne’s living here.

“It’s the only thing she left behind. It would be easier to live with if Tony didn’t make it into a shrine.”

“Maybe she intends to come back,” Carlotta said. “Would you have her back?”

“Not if I could help it,” Alma said. “I treat her so badly, for one thing.”

“Yes.”

The puzzle was Roxanne didn’t seem to notice or, if she did, didn’t seem to mind. Carlotta remembered how lightly Roxanne took Carlotta’s weary disgust in that kind of sexual requirement. Carlotta didn’t even know how impersonal a revulsion it was until Roxanne accepted it without offense. Was she stupid or insensitive, or did she have a deeper instinct for self-preservation which didn’t depend on anyone else’s concern? Carlotta had been able to lie under the weight of Mike’s first revulsion until it passed. But to laugh at it as if it had nothing to do with her and then to excuse him from the chore of her desire she could never have done. She had wanted to be in love with him. Roxanne obviously had no interest in being in love with Carlotta.

“I started out this project,” Carlotta said to Ann, who was counting stitches again, “making love with my model. If being a ménage à trois had occurred to us all those years ago, Mike and Alma might still be together. It didn’t occur to us. It didn’t occur to me. Are you absolutely heterosexual?”

“I don’t suppose so,” Ann said. “They say nearly nobody is.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, I can imagine it partly because of the way I feel about the children. If Joseph were a woman, I can imagine still being attracted to him. That’s all pretty theoretical, I admit. Only after Alma told me about herself and Roxanne, that’s what I imagined.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s place to judge. Oh, I felt terribly sorry for Mike. You do feel sorry for the one left. Love can feel like bleeding to death when there’s no container for it. I’m awfully glad he’s found another woman. He sounds happy.”

Carlotta was angry with Ann for being able to describe inadvertently so accurately the way Carlotta had felt after Mike left. It should have been her unique hemorrhage, not something that could be ascribed to Mike because it was also obviously the wound Ann had suffered at John’s death. There should perhaps have been comfort in such evidence that Carlotta was an ordinary member of the human race, but she resented it. Why should Ann so comprehend Mike’s suffering when Carlotta had been in the process of describing her own?

Carlotta noticed that Ann did the same shifting of center with the children and with Joseph. She didn’t take anyone down so much as over a peg so there was less jostling for attention. When occasionally Carlotta stayed for supper, the aura, as distinctive as burning candles, was limelight defused.

Carlotta’s mother had set up such competition for her attention and approval that all her children thought of their siblings as their worst, because most knowledgeable, enemies. Carlotta hadn’t spoken to a brother or sister in years. She had gone so far as to drop her last name from everything but documents which absolutely required it.

The Rabinowitz children got such carefully divided attention from both Ann and Joseph that they had little practice at grandstanding. Carlotta was not surprised to hear that neither Rachel nor Susan excelled at anything. Aside from having no need to, they could also sense their parents’ fear. It was amazing that Ann risked calling the baby Joy. They were so concerned about the disfavor of the gods they might instead have named her Sorrow or at least Doubtful.

Alma’s boys, by contrast, were exceptional in everything they did, not always to anyone’s pleasure. Victor’s specialty these days was breaking rules no one had ever thought to make up like: “No chalk-eating contests at lunch hour.” The only thing you could be sure about Tony, Alma said, was that, if everyone else got there in a downhill race, Tony would be doing it cross-country. Carlotta understood that. She hadn’t known, until she got to know the Rabinowitzes, that there were more than two options: the limelight or the dark.

“How could you avoid knowing?” Ann asked. “Most of us do live in the ordinary light of day.”

It must come in through the window, a kind light that would temper even John’s death in her attentive face.

Often the worst time for Carlotta came in the early morning, when, half awake, she would dream her breaking bones. Because she was too busy with the portraits to paint what she had dreamed, she tried sometimes to retrace and explain dreams to herself as a way of stopping the noxious metallic fear in her mouth which otherwise could go on all day. Anxiety, like all other negative emotions, can develop strong immunities, and soon the explanation became a dwelling on dreams which served to increase their power. Once, impatient with the burden of what the night had dragged in like a cat hunting down her nervous system and bloodstream, Carlotta said aloud, “That’s silly!” She felt marvelous all day. It was so simple she didn’t like even telling herself about it. If banishing a neurosis were really that easy no one had any business having one, a point Ann had been making one way or another for a long time. It was with some ironic but real relief that Carlotta discovered her minimizing scorn could also be incorporated into her anxiety, so that soon she was not only afraid of her phobias but newly ashamed as well.

“I’m getting a headache every time I go to Ann’s,” Carlotta confessed to Alma. “I sometimes wonder if I simply can’t stand kindly normality.”

“I never realized you worked so slowly. You must get so bored!”

“No, just anxious.”

“It must be like trying to ride a bicycle an inch a minute. I don’t see how you don’t fall off.”

“Are you getting bored?”

“Resigned,” Alma said. “I thought at least you’d ask me to bare my breasts.”

“I’ve decided envy in me is a kind of lust, and I must curb it.”

“You did decide on the bed.”

“Only because you obviously live in it.”

“On the contrary. These days I’m rarely in it except for you.”

“Dale working you fairly hard?”

“He’s gone most of the time. But there’s been a real increase in interest. It has to do with inflation. People are investing for capital gain. It often feels to me more as if I were a stockbroker than an art dealer. I don’t so often talk about the quality of the painting as I do the potential of a rising market for one particular painter or other. I made five thousand dollars last month.”

“What I make in a good year,” Carlotta said.

“I need the money. I’ve had a real row with Mother and Dad about this baby. They want me to go away to have it and put it up for adoption. For the baby’s sake, they say, so that it won’t grow up with the stigma of being illegitimate. Nothing to do with their own good name at all. At one point Dad—without actually coming out with it—threatened at least a cut in my allowance. I realized I could get along without him. I don’t really need Mike or his money either.”

“Can you go on working?”

“Dale’s perfectly agreeable. Why didn’t you ever tell me that living alone is so delightful?”

Carlotta wondered how she could paint the gulf between them. It was not simply that Alma had twenty times the money, lived in a painting world entirely alien to Carlotta, and thought living with two and a half children was living alone; Alma didn’t see the differences.

Allen sent a note to say the Toronto opening was next. He was sorry none of his close, personal friends would be at his possible crucifixion. If Carlotta had had money to spare, she would have flown east for it. She couldn’t feel the easy condemnation that Alma did, though Carlotta didn’t doubt that at least part of his motive was character assassination. She was surprised to find she did not feel threatened. If anything, she felt modestly unworthy to be among those martyred.

The review in the Globe and Mail was superb. It compared the photographs of Pierre to the circus boys of Picasso’s Blue Period, but it credited Allen with insights beyond those of even that genius. Many people had recognized the androgynous in the very young and in the old before our masks for the world had formed and after they had dropped away; few people had really explored the essential bisexuality in all of us. Allen had been able, so the reviewer claimed, to reveal, even in the most delicate face, a subtle masculine component. In portraits of our leading politicians, he could discover a surprised tenderness, a delicacy of gesture. We are all revealed as creatures not so polarized as the bra burning, etc. etc. etc.

Carlotta went to her mirror to see if she could spy in her self that subtle masculine component which might make her whole and self-sufficient.

“It makes me just sick!” Alma said. “How can he get away with it? Imagine turning that sort of cheap, dirty trick into some kind of testimony about our essential spiritual selves.”

“I think it’s magnificent,” Carlotta said. “It might just release the humanist locked up inside Allen.”

“Don’t they remember the gross indecencies he was charged with not even a year ago?”

“He’s not a mere photographer now. He’s an artist. Gross indecency is supposed to be his raw material which, by the alchemy of aesthetics, is transformed into illuminated beauty. Do you know how?”

“I certainly don’t.”

“It’s because you’re so successful at disguising self-loathing as self-righteousness. Allen really stinks of nothing but your guilt.”

“I have no sexual interest in children.”

“But what you’re terrified of is that you’ll be accused of corrupting them by living with Roxanne. “You want to pretend that’s no sexual influence at all. And of course, it is—probably a good one for the world they’ll have to live in, though it’s hard to know.”

“Tony and Victor have absolutely no idea—”

Alma stopped in mid-protest. For once even she could read Carlotta’s face.

More sins were probably committed “for the sake of the children” than made any sense unless they really were the incarnation of Old Nick they sometimes seemed to be. Children, all innocent inadvertence, tempted parents not only to Alma’s blind hypocrisies but to her greed. All selfishness and unloving piety are sanctified “for the sake of the children.” For their sake, too, sex is kept disgusting.

Carlotta had begun to sketch the children, not with any notion of doing their portraits but because their body stances were so much more speaking of their moods and needs than those of most adults. It took a great deal longer to teach children to express emotions only in guarded, preordained ways than it did to housebreak them. Their faces generally didn’t interest her much, aside from genetic recognition.

“Oh, they interest me,” Joseph said. “I know erosion shouldn’t sadden, but it does. Young faces are so intelligent, even the ones that turn out to be not very bright. And they’re so beautiful.”

“I resent them, I suppose,” Carlotta admitted. “They have nothing to do with me.”

Lack, resentment, envy—they drove her to work toward a remarkable generosity because she represented what she envied in others rather than her envy of it. She had worked so long on manifestations of her self that the act of painting became associated for her with what was essentially hers. In work she, therefore, had the illusion of possessing what she admired. Instead of projecting herself onto her subject as she had had to struggle to avoid with Roxanne, she was learning to let the subject overtake her.

It was the brooding power of Alma’s self-righteousness rather than its hypocrisy that became more and more obvious on the canvas. The bed began to look like a relief map of a large country, and behind the bed, Carlotta decided to put Roxanne’s map.

“That’s where she wanted it in the first place,” Alma said ruefully. “I can’t think why I didn’t let her.”

Would Roxanne feel an ironic triumph to have her work finally given place in Alma’s bedroom? Or would it seem to her blatant plagiarism? If she felt anything at all, she would be too tactful to say. Carlotta realized she was waiting for Roxanne to come back. She had had a couple of cards without return addresses saying no more than any holidayer would.

Carlotta was also waiting for both Allen and Mike to come back. For her, places like Toronto and Los Angeles were not real. They were an illusion, into which actors went when they stepped offstage. Carlotta thought of all her absent friends as wandering in shadowy places, among ropes and unused props. She had never traveled, not only because she didn’t have the money but because she could not imagine herself anyplace else. Once the painter Joe Plaskett had asked her to call on him in Paris. He might as well have suggested she could step into one of the paintings of his Paris room and find her face in one of its mirrors. But she had understood him. He was as obsessive about himself, his room, his faces, as she was about her physical and psychic territory.

What made an artist was perhaps the lack of that imagination which was supposed to be at the heart of their craft. Even Carlotta’s friends in town, if not objects of her intense concentration, soon became nothing more than scraps of gossip, rags of memory. “I can’t imagine!” was for her a cry of pain at the center of her anxiety. Perhaps only those who suffered a poverty of images for their emotions had to paint or write to survive. Mike was then not a failed artist but a man restored to a life he could imagine. Carlotta could not. He was by now far realer to her as an object in her painting than he was as a man she had tried to love.

“We have less imagination than other people,” she explained to Ann.

Carlotta would never say such a thing to Alma since Alma was one of those Carlotta was presuming to explain to Ann. Carlotta never made common cause with Alma to her face.

“The most disgusting thing has just happened!” Alma announced before Carlotta was even through the door, and she looked where she stepped in case it was something which left physical evidence. “This creature came to the door, size forty-six tits in nothing but a T-shirt, a voice deeper than Daddy’s, saying she’d come all the way from Toronto because she’d fallen in love with my picture in Allen’s show.”

“Wait until people see my portrait of you. There will be double lines around the block,” Carlotta promised cheerfully.

“Lot, did you hear what I said?”

“Of course, I heard.”

“This is exactly the sort of exposure and humiliation Allen intended.”

“You’re such a spoiled woman. I’d probably have been flattered.”

“How can you joke?”

“Because it seems to me funny. I suppose it gives you some sense of justification about shutting the show down here in Vancouver.”

“Ask if I needed any!”

“What did you say to her?”

“I ordered her off the premises and told her I’d call the police and charge her with trespassing if she came back. You can actually do that. It’s the way Daddy got rid of a boy Joan didn’t want to see anymore.”

“The concept of sisterhood hasn’t much touched you,” Carlotta observed.

“What would you have done?”

“I don’t know. I have never had a chance to practice rebuffing anyone.”

“What a liar you are! Just between Mike and me, you’ve practiced for years.”

“Oh, you.”

“Well, it’s true. If I ever did run off with a bull dyke from Toronto, it would be entirely your fault.”

“So you pretend to be outraged, and, in fact, you’re intrigued.”

“Sometimes I think we live in different worlds,” Alma said.

Since Carlotta always thought so, it was perverse of her to say, looking out Alma’s bedroom window, “But we have almost the same view.”

A fact of Vancouver was that the million-dollar views weren’t yet reserved for millionaires. Carlotta paid a hundred dollars a month for hers. She would not, however, trust the police to deal with her unwelcome guests.

“What if people are doing this to people all over Canada?” Alma demanded.

“I’ve thought about that. I imagined a student going into the office of a particular university president and saying, ‘Man, you turn me on.’”

“Don’t you see at all how dangerous it is?”

“No,” Carlotta said. “I think you enjoy the paranoia, and so does Allen. Pierre killed himself because he was a shallow, vain little creature who didn’t know what else to do with his loneliness. We don’t even know that he was ever told about Allen’s arrest. It could as well have been a coincidence.”

“I just don’t want to be associated with any of it. It’s all a sordid mess, and it has nothing to do with me.”

Carlotta got a fine highlight on a cheekbone.

As Allen had lost weight before her eyes, Alma, of course, gained, life swelling in her belly and breasts. Every mood flattered her, whether she was being vain and silly or affectionate and witty. Carlotta had only to catch a few of the hundreds of right moments to have what she wanted: woman being woman.

“I am rather fine,” Alma said, a hand on Carlotta’s shoulder, admiring the painting.

She was the only one of Carlotta’s models who simply enjoyed her own image. Mike had been nervous at first and finally bored. Joseph laughed at his in his chronic distress. Roxanne took only polite notice of hers. Pierre had peered and poked very much as he must have at his image in the mirror. Allen depended on his to keep himself believing in his own anger. Ann grew more and more embarrassed by hers as it neared completion.

“You’re flattering me,” she’d say.

“How? Doesn’t it look like you? Aren’t those your gray hairs?”

“Yes, but I look—oh, I don’t know: healthier than I am.”

“Aren’t you healthy?” Carlotta asked.

“Well, ordinarily, I guess. Joseph loves it. He keeps saying, ‘It’s so like you,’ in a pleased, surprised way; so in some way it must not be like me at all.”

“I get an idea, usually a very simple idea to keep the mood under control. This is unagitated woman in the ordinary light of day. But you’re alert, you see. I have your attention. That’s what Joseph likes about it. That’s what everyone will like about it.”

“But I’m not a very good listener,” Ann confessed. “Half the time I’m planning tomorrow’s dinner at the same time.”

“Well, that’s in your hands. I haven’t left it out.”

“I do like what you do, Carlotta. I really think I do understand it.”

“That’s because I am a minor Kitsilano artist who has made certain mistakes on Commercial and in West Point Grey. We share a territory.”

“In school we were taught that art should instruct and delight.”

Carlotta laughed. In the old days Mike would have taken up such a challenge and lectured Ann to neither enlightenment nor pleasure about art as the redeemer from usefulness. What Carlotta believed she never admitted to anyone: art heals, even its own motives if it has to. “Art as the-Scab-on-the-Wound School,” she could say wryly to herself, but she would not be misunderstood to mean art is therapy.

“Art doesn’t need an excuse, does it?” Carlotta said, to answer something. “It’s only artists that do, and there isn’t any excuse for us really.”

There was something else in the portrait of Ann Carlotta didn’t talk about. Though there was a window, though the light came in cheerfully enough, there was a subtle claustrophobia in the space the figure occupied. When Carlotta was sure it was nothing but the truth, she declared the portrait finished.

Alma would be her last. In this Carlotta was confronting and transforming into myth what she envied most, celebrating all she was not. She would finish it before Alma was again blasted seedpod, sore and milky, confronting unwed motherhood in an intolerant neighborhood without even the blessing of her ridiculously indulgent parents. If Carlotta went on with figurative painting, she would invent the images she had so far only been able to take from life. What a relief it would be to work in solitude again, her muse at last outgrown.

“If it’s a girl, I’m going to name it Carlotta,” Alma said.

“You know I don’t like children,” Carlotta said.

“You could be her godmother. It’s taking an interest in a child that makes them interesting.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“A courtesy godmother then.”

“Why involve me? It has nothing to do with me.”

“I need somebody with me,” Alma said.

“Your mother …”

“I’m not going to ask her.”

“But what about the boys?”

“They’re old enough to stay alone.”

Carlotta’s dreams no longer tampered with her own fragility and pain. They were instead confrontations with the life in Alma’s womb, often so horrifying and repulsive Carlotta woke physically sick. They stayed so vivid that she was for a time afraid she couldn’t finish the portrait before the baby was born. Then to finish it became an obsession to hold Alma inviolate against the hideous jokes played even against the gods. What if it was a mongoloid? Was Alma also afraid, knowing she was old enough to be in danger? Though she was resolutely cheerful, surely some nights her own dreams must be filled with the possibility of retribution.

There was a letter from Roxanne with a return address in San Diego. She was working at the Music Center there, being taught how to talk about what she was doing, being given phrases like “sound decay,” “natural drift,” “sonic meditation.” Soon not only her work but her conversation would be incomprehensible to someone like Ann and an increasing irritation to Carlotta, except, of course, that Roxanne wasn’t around to be irritating. Carlotta missed her more than she would have expected to and suspected that Alma missed Roxanne less once the physical addiction was over.

Did Canadians always have to go south of the border or across the ocean to learn how to talk?

“All right, international art is megalomania and packaging,” Dale Easter said, “but we can’t go back to village cultures.”

“What about McLuhan’s global village theory?” Alma asked.

“‘Global’ is the operative word there,” Dale said.

“Or small is beautiful?” Alma tried again.

Carlotta wished she hadn’t said she’d stay for dinner. Alma, without having broached the subject to Carlotta, was obviously trying to manipulate Dale into offering Carlotta a show. Though she was fretting about where she was finally going to show these portraits and some of the sketches, she would not have accepted an offer from Dale. He was not interested in things Canadian, and she did not want his patronage. Tony sat stiff with boredom, Victor trotting one leg through the main course and now dessert. She was sorry for them that she was not Roxanne, who always seemed so natural around children, as if they were as easy to talk with as anyone else.

“Art is elitist, Alma. Surely you’ve got enough experience now to know that. There’s no such thing as a bestseller in drugstore terms. The ‘small’ world of painting has to be international, the world of collectors and curators.”

“Carlotta sells quite well right here,” Alma said.

“How much a year, Carlotta?” Dale asked, turning to her. “Five … six thousand?”

“Now that there’s Art Bank,” Carlotta said, “and if you count the dentist bills I pay for with paintings.”

“You see? We often make that in one sale.”

“Even the artists we sell had to begin somewhere,” Alma protested.

“Alma,” Carlotta finally said, “don’t push him. If I weren’t here, he’d explain to you that the portrait work I’m doing went out with the invention of the camera except for subjects like the queen.”

“I wouldn’t,” Dale protested. “I admire you for doing what interests you. I really do. It just isn’t mainstream, that’s all.”

“Women-Can’t-Piss-on-Fire School,” Carlotta said.

Tony suddenly laughed and then blushed.

“I’m not being vulgar,” Carlotta hastened to explain to him. “It’s Freud, and he was perfectly serious. So, of course, is Dale.”

“Art is sexist,” Dale said. “I can’t really help that. There is Emily Carr. More to the point, there’s Bridget Riley, alive, relatively young, with every coveted award, prices as high as any man’s.”

What a lot of conversational weight names had to carry, particularly for someone like Dale, who didn’t like to argue to impress. He could spend a whole evening correcting your view of him with his famous names until he was convinced you agreed. He didn’t have ideas so much as explanations.

Carlotta thought no less of Dale Easter than she did of a group of women who ran a storefront gallery on Fourth Avenue where only women’s work was exhibited, carefully screened against male content and shown only to other women. At least Dale’s bigotry wasn’t foolish. He made a great deal of money. Still, she didn’t agree with him even at the end of the evening, and he knew it.

“If you’d flatter him just a little,” Alma said. “He’s impressed with how much you make. He says he bets there aren’t many in town who can make that much selling just in Vancouver.”

“He wouldn’t give me a show,” Carlotta said. “He doesn’t meet fire regulations.”

“There wouldn’t be any trouble about that.”

“When your father sees this portrait, he may close the show on his own initiative.”

“More likely he’ll buy it.”

“I wish I didn’t have to sell it, or any of them. But I can’t afford not to now that they’re all done.”

Finally Carlotta found a gallery out in Surrey operating on a government grant to bring culture to the boondocks. It advertised its shows and concerts on huge billboards on either side of the freeway. Technically it could exhibit but couldn’t sell; however, it was glad to refer anyone interested in buying directly to the artist.

“What’s the gimmick?” Alma asked.

“Taxpayers’ money,” Carlotta said.

“They don’t take any commission at all?”

“And I don’t even have to pay for the invitations. They don’t serve wine, maybe Kool-aid and Oreos.”

“When?”

“The first two weeks of October.”

“Oh, good. The baby will be here by then. Nobody should have a September baby. It’s like living with a wood stove all summer.”

“What do you know about wood stoves?” Carlotta asked.

“I visit the poor.”

Carlotta’s mother heated her cabin with one, not because she was poor but because she liked hard work and deprivation. She cooked on a hot plate in summer, which was much hotter in Kamloops than on the coast, but not for comfort: to save wood. It was that heat, as well as her mother, which had driven Carlotta to the coast. Even now, in August, the sea breeze cooled both Carlotta’s and Alma’s rooms.

“I’m nearly finished,” Carlotta said. “I’m really finished.”

Alma looked with her. “I wish I could tear it up at night so that you’d have to begin again in the morning. I’m going to be horribly lonely now.”

“You’ll have the baby soon.”

“It’s not the same. Do you miss sex?”

“Not much,” Carlotta said.

“I sometimes wish there were whorehouses for women.”

“Well, it’s easy enough to come by if you want it—as close as the nearest bar.”

“Not if you want a woman.”

“There are those kind, too, I’m told.”

“Roxanne wouldn’t take me. She said no one in them was over fifteen. We did meet other lesbians, but, you know, they’re just people after all, and you can’t just go up to a person and say, ‘I want to make love’ or screw or whatever.”

“Why not?”

“Would you?”

“Go up to someone? Sure, if I felt like it.”

“Make love with me.”

“Alma, you’re eight months and twenty days’ pregnant.”

“I don’t mean now. I mean … ever.”

“No,” Carlotta said gently.

“I didn’t think so,” Alma said. “Well, anyway, I don’t have to go on wondering.”

“You said being lesbian isn’t the way you want to live.”

“I know,” Alma said. “But the option was going back to Mike—never another man. I just couldn’t.”

That night Carlotta dropped in at the bar of the Vancouver Hotel, where she’d once worked as a waitress. Her second drink was bought for her. She was home two hours later, her point proved, fifty dollars in her wallet. She sometimes thought it was the only kind of sex she really did understand, and she didn’t miss it. She did need the money. How many more years could she reasonably count on her body’s paying the rent? The five pounds she’d gained made her look younger, but thirty-five was watershed year. The twenty to twenty-five years between whoring and the old-age pension might teach her new motives for fasting.

Carlotta felt a senior citizen indeed, as well as the wrong sex, as she sat in the maternity waiting room of the Vancouver General Hospital at four o’clock in the morning.

“I should have just called a taxi myself, I know,” Alma had said apologetically, “but I have to know there’s someone else there. I have to know I’m not by myself.”

“Are you scared?”

“Lonely,” Alma said.

To remark on a condition natural to Carlotta as if it were something that needed accommodating, if not correcting, was another of the great differences between them. Since Carlotta couldn’t be with Alma now, she wondered what earthly good she really was sitting there among half a dozen boys young enough to look blameless. When you didn’t have children to measure your own aging, you had to be startled like this into knowing you must be taken for an expectant grandmother because you were old enough to be one.

“I’d rather be her,” the tall, thin, nervous youngster sitting next to her said.

“Who?”

“Her. Having it. Instead of being guilt-tripped about it the rest of my life.”

“If that’s all you give her to complain about, she’s lucky,” a dark square of a boy said from across the room.

“Man, I don’t have a job. She did, until just a couple of weeks ago—no maternity leave, nothing.”

“Get them all pregnant and back in the kitchen, maybe there will be work for us.”

Carlotta got up and walked out into the hall. She’d never been any good at other people’s nervous systems. To deal with such vulnerable stupidity was beyond her.

“Carlotta?”

She turned to confront a nurse.

“Mrs. Trasco says that you should go home. It was a false start, but we’re keeping her here.”

“Tell her I’ll be at home with the boys.”

Carlotta had not meant to offer that, though she knew it was the other place Alma wanted her to be. Was she, in fact, trying to be Alma’s mother? Perhaps Carlotta had got to the age where, whether she was good at whatever or not, she did it. How alarming! Not even to get exemption for ineptitude.

It was dawn. The first buses were running empty in her direction. It would be a couple of hours before a transfusion of people would revive Broadway, as pale and still as something dead now in the tender light of a day that would be hot.

“We don’t stand the heat,” Carlotta said out loud in the back of the bus, an old crone, the wicked fairy godmother dismissed from the birth.

Tony was up, sitting at the dining-room table with his hands folded over the note his mother had left him, facing Roxanne’s map as he always did, the only one in the family informed rather than framed by that wall.

“Is she all right?”

“So far,” Carlotta said, hearing how little comfort that would be to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t have to tell you how bad I am with children since you’ve had so much firsthand experience.”

“I’m not really much of a child,” he said.

“It’s your own fault,” Carlotta said, dreading the possibility that he’d complain about either parent.

“Do you ever hear from Roxanne?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s in San Diego at the Music Center there. I think maybe she’ll come back for my show.”

“I hope my dad’s not.”

“Why? I’ve asked him.”

“That baby’s my dad’s, isn’t it?”

“Tony if you want a heart-to-heart about that, you ought to have it with your mother, not with me.”

“She won’t talk to me.”

“I thought it was the other way round. Are you going back to bed, or should we have some breakfast?”

He was oddly companionable in the kitchen, letting her take charge while he anticipated each thing she needed.

“How did you know I’d have tea?” she asked him as he put boiling water in the pot to heat it.

“Mother doesn’t know how you stand to drink it first thing in the morning.”

He had such a grave face until he smiled. His teeth, which were like his father’s, were too bright for his fairness.

“Well, you listen to her anyway,” Carlotta said.

“When I used to ask Roxanne questions, she answered me.”

“Maybe that was a mistake she made,” Carlotta said, using a clamp to turn the bacon.

“It’s not a mistake to understand.”

“Well, so the baby is your father’s. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a bit of useless information.”

“Then she really did want us to go back to him. She really did want Roxanne to leave, and it’s only because he married that other person …”

“Bunny.”

“Bunny, that we didn’t go back.”

“I don’t think even your mother knows that. You can’t outguess someone who is also only guessing.”

“But he always wanted more children. I can remember they used to fight about it. So how is he going to feel?”

“You want a fried egg?”

“Sure.”

How did she know how Mike would feel? For all she knew, this Bunny might have presented him with triplets by now. There had been no communication between them since that phone call all those months ago.

“Roxanne wouldn’t mind a baby, I don’t think,” Tony said. “She just thought Mother would go back to him.”

“If you care about Roxanne, don’t wish her back here. She’s not one of us.”

“She’s real,” Tony asserted.

“Maybe that’s what I’m saying.”

“Then I’m not either.” He lowered his voice in anger, as if he were afraid of it.

“So, when the time comes, you’ll go.”

Victor was standing in the doorway in his pajamas with an erection he apparently hadn’t noticed.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo, stupid,” Tony said. “Go get dressed.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“At the hospital having the baby.”

“Oh.” He turned and went back upstairs.

Carlotta felt as assaulted by Victor’s mindless penis as she did by Tony’s questions. She wished she had never come. Now she felt trapped, having given this number to the hospital.

“What time are you off to school?”

“School doesn’t start until next week.”

Carlotta couldn’t be stuck here all day. The only other option seemed to be to go back to the hospital. Tony at least wasn’t stupid.

“Is Allen coming?”

“Home?”

“To your show.”

“I imagine so,” Carlotta said.

“Then I guess I won’t be allowed to go. Do you know why Mother won’t speak to Allen? Because she thinks I’m a queer.”

What did Tony want from her? Was she supposed to deny it?

“You’ll probably have to stay home to babysit, whether he’s there or not.”

When she had fed Victor breakfast, Carlotta decided that sleep might be the most practical solution. The boys could answer the phone and call her.

Carlotta lay down on the bed which had held both Mike’s urgent fucking and Roxanne’s tenderness: the tongue, the probing finger preparing her for Mike’s assault. If she and Mike and Alma had ever … but Carlotta could not imagine Alma as a lover; she was irretrievably a rival who even now took over her own bed and cooled whatever appetite Carlotta had tried to conjure for her own comfort.

Tony woke her at noon with the information that Alma had gone back into labor.

“Is that all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she assured him without knowing what else to say.

What did she know about birth anyway? Probably with the sort of sex education they had in the schools these days, Tony and Victor knew more about it than she did.

“I think I ought to call my grandmother,” Tony decided.

“She doesn’t want her,” Carlotta said. “She was emphatic about that.”

“Well, Victor and I are still speaking to them, and Gram said, when the time came, we should go over there …”

“You’d certainly be fed better. And why not? They’re not going to stay mad at a new grandchild. But tell them she doesn’t want them … yet anyway.”

He was a nice kid, really, and he did have a lot on his plate. What was Alma thinking of, burdening him with a version of her own guilt? Well, she burdened everyone, one way or another. Why else was Carlotta going back to the hospital, fear a pain in her chest, unable to believe in anything but the awful?

The baby was born ten minutes after Carlotta arrived at the hospital, a “perfect” child, that peculiar adjective used to describe a creature with all its fingers and toes, unambiguous genitals, and a head the proper size, though with how many of its marbles no one yet knew. A girl. Carlotta.

“It must be so nice to have a baby named for you,” the nurse said. “I do like your painting very much. There’s one in my dentist’s office.”

“My last crown,” Carlotta explained wryly. “You’re sure she’s all right? She doesn’t have a third tit or cleft palate or anything?” Confessions of only the most ordinary of her nightmares.

“Perfect. She’s perfect.”

“And her mother?”

“She said she didn’t want to do it too easily or we’d think she was a peasant,” the nurse said. “She’s one of these women made to have babies.”

When Carlotta saw her, however, Alma’s face was stained with fatigue. It was as if the baby had, in a morning, stolen ten years of Alma’s life. But she was euphoric.

“I knew it was a girl. I so wanted a girl.”

“The boys have gone to your parents.”

“Well, I can’t help that,” Alma said.

“I can’t be your mother. You’ll have to make friends with her again … or your sisters.”

“It was Tony’s idea, wasn’t it? He could take care of himself. He’s perfectly capable.”

“You should make friends with him again, too.”

“Oh, Lot, I know I should.”

In spite of herself, Carlotta was interested in the baby. It was so small a package to contain all that would become a woman, and it was so concentrated on the process of breaking itself in, unmannerly urgent at the breast, like a straining weightlifter accomplishing the movement of its bowels, and it slept as patients do under anesthetic after major surgery. Yes, it was terribly dependent, as everyone always remarked, but Carlotta was more impressed by the imperiousness of its commands which could jar even Victor out of his own hedonism to answer an infant need.

As Carlotta studied and sketched the baby she became acquainted with the source of her own bodily preoccupations, the intensity with which she had concentrated on her own parts and processes. She had not been a doted-on only or much younger child. She had had to compete from birth as one of a litter for the attention of a parent who anyway saw in an infant’s lying in its own excrement the equivalent of some self-imposed adult penance. To survive in the most friendly of climates was an amazement. What the baby was teaching her was a new respect for herself.

Tony was particularly good with the baby, untroubled by changing the dirtiest diaper, which sent Victor retching from the room.

“It shows she works, that’s all,” Tony tried to explain to his brother.

It was Tony who found the baby a name for herself. “Tot” he called her, and then so did everyone else, though Carlotta avoided any name as much as she could. She felt both identified and usurped.

Finally the real grandparents arrived with a carload of pink and white peace offerings. Tony let them in. The baby didn’t really need a father. None of them had. The grandfather had always been the stallion in the field. That fuss was over.

“Once you give in to it, some semblance of normal life is reassuring,” Carlotta confessed to Joseph, who was helping her frame some of the sketches.

“I think it’s relatively easy to explain,” Joseph said. “That is, the source of terror is the source of comfort. Running from one means being deprived of the other.”

“I couldn’t go as far as you have, however.”

“In either direction,” he agreed. “But I didn’t know it was normal to be afraid of what makes you happy.”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and laughed.

“But you’re on the other side of that now.”

“‘In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise’—I’m reading poetry myself now.”

Praise. Carlotta walked about the gallery, looking at the portraits and sketches of her friends, work that had intermittently occupied her for the last five years. She knew—if anyone bothered to be critical—she would be called slick, flattering, and an anachronism. Perhaps one of the reasons she liked Vancouver was that she was rarely called anything at all, being outside the world of academic connections, without a school. She had been able to follow her own needs in developing her skills. She had suffered only the doubts she herself cast about her work. She could see she had achieved what she was after: envy transformed into praise for these people given her and as defining to her as the sky or the sea or the line of mountains. She was considering the transparency of Roxanne’s shirt as it compared to the transparency of Joseph’s body when she was startled by her own name called in a familiar voice.

She turned to discover Allen walking across the gallery toward her. They embraced. Then she stood back from him and studied his face.

“Well?” he asked.

“You’re barely recognizable,” she said.

Oh, any stranger would have known him as the avenger in his portrait, the gun at his heart. He would have to wear a putty nose or grow a beard to avoid that until he aged enough to leave only a few traces of that intensity of feeling. The emptiness, which had been as fluid as tears, had hardened in his eyes. He had come to terms with permanent damage.

“What a place!” he exclaimed. “How did you ever find it? Aren’t you terrified you’ll be cut up and sold for baked goods at the next church supper? Do you really know where you are?”

“Under the protection of the federal government.”

“I doubt it. Remember, I was born here, home of the enemies of Canada Council or any other federal funding body in support of the obscene arts.”

“What’s obscene?” Carlotta asked.

“This marvel of Alma, for instance.”

He stood and looked for a long moment. Carlotta studied with him, trying to find anything in the least objectionable about that majestic pregnancy.

“In this community the schools use the censored text of Romeo and Juliet which cuts out the nurse’s references to pregnancy. Our English teacher used to point out all the bawdiest puns the prudes didn’t get,” Allen explained, still looking at the painting. “You admire her just the way I do.”

He turned to look at the portrait of Roxanne and said simply, “Tits.”

“Oh, Allen, come on!” Carlotta protested.

“Art, like the brassiere, must be uplifting.”

“People like that aren’t going to come to a show like this.”

“Don’t count on it. There’s a lot of civic pride.”

He stood before the portrait of Pierre, his body stiffly attentive, a mourning that had become formalized.

“He was both weaker and more eager,” Allen finally said quietly. Then he turned to Carlotta and said, “I want you to take my portrait out of the show.”

“I wouldn’t consider it!”

“For your sake,” Allen said urgently. “I still get hate mail from around here. The people I went to school with are aldermen and ministers and schoolteachers and parents now. You can get away with mother-fuckers like Roxanne and loonies like Joseph, even the monster mother, Alma, but you can’t get away with me, not here.”

“You’re a fine one to talk about what can’t be got away with!”

“For my sake then,” Allen said.

“What you really want is community outrage,” Carlotta said to him, “and you know by now you won’t get it, so you want to protect yourself from disappointment.”

“We needn’t quibble about my motives,” Allen said amiably.

“We’re not going to quibble about anything.”

“I owe you a drink,” he said. “I want to take you out for dinner. I need to know the lay of the land before tomorrow night.”

“And I need to know what it’s like to be an artiste in Toronto.”

“No. I dine out on my pain only when someone else is paying the bill. How I’ve missed you, Carlotta. In fact, I’ve missed everyone, even Alma. How is our bitch goddess?”

“She’s just had her baby—well, nearly four weeks ago, a girl.”

“And Tony is more beautiful than ever, and I’m still barred from the house.”

“I assume so,” Carlotta said.

“There’s such security in knowing old friends don’t change.”

Over dinner, when she asked him hopeful questions about where he lived, who his friends were, Allen parried in a flippancy perfectly familiar, but there was no longer that central vulnerability, Pierre.

“Were there ever any real consequences of that show?” Carlotta finally asked.

“Real? No. Those people don’t take artists seriously. They pay more attention to their gossip columnists than to us.”

“In Vancouver, yes, but I thought maybe in Toronto …”

“I’m the fellow with the clever gimmick: androgyny in the prime of life. You know, even junior executives are supposed to be in touch with their own feelings these days, to climb over heads without leaving any marks, to fire tactfully. The only people who take me seriously enough to dislike me—aside, of course, from the friends of my childhood—are the radical lesbians, who, like Roxanne, think I shat in my own nest.”

“They’re not admirers of nuance.”

“I don’t suppose political people can afford to be, but it’s why they are so very tedious. Ordinary people, on the other hand … won’t you reconsider and take me out?”

“No.”

Carlotta had a presentiment that Allen would someday contradict his disappointed cynicism with a rash political act; then she realized the presentiment was instead a recollection. That made her feel old, grandmother to their past selves as well as to the baby.

She was fixing a last pot of tea for them back in her room when the phone rang.

“Lot?”

“Yes, Alma.”

“They’re both here.”

“Who?”

“Mike and Roxanne.”

“They came together?”

“Of course not, but they’re here. Roxanne arrived only about half an hour after he did.”

“And you want me to take one or the other of them off your hands.”

“Is there any way you could?”

“Allen’s here with me at the minute.”

“Oh.”

“I imagine he could pick up Roxanne. Is Mike alone?”

“Yes, his wife’s seven months pregnant and didn’t want to travel.”

“Do you want us to come get her?”

“Could you make it look … accidental?”

“Are you going to let Allen into the house?”

“Well, of course. After all, Mike’s here. I have to go now. Could you come soon?”

There was real glee in Allen’s energy as they set out for West Point Grey.

“Roxanne doesn’t deserve to be rescued, of course, but what a reunion!”

Tony opened the door to them and blushed. Allen didn’t give him a chance to refuse them entry stepping across the threshold, putting an affectionate arm across the boy’s shoulders, and turning him into the living room, where Mike sat in the chair that had once been his exclusively, holding the baby in his arms. Roxanne stood, as if about to depart. Alma was between them, blocking their view of each other. Victor leaned on the back of his father’s chair.

“This is turning into quite a party!” Alma said, successfully surprised. “Are you just back in town, Allen?”

“That’s right.”

Mike was getting up out of his chair, deftly wedging the baby against his chest with one arm, offering his free hand to Allen. Carlotta had forgotten the impact of Mike’s beauty or he had grown even more magnificent. His radiance did not draw her; on the contrary, it made the impossible distance between them all the clearer. The only time he could ever have been accessible to her was when he had lost the confidence which now seemed as bright and strong as his teeth. Only after he had released Allen was Allen free to greet Roxanne. He kissed her on both cheeks, bringing the memory of Pierre palpably into the room. Allen and Alma went through no overt ritual, perhaps because each knew this was an emergency rather than a reconciliation.

“I was just on my way …” Roxanne said.

“Don’t rush off now,” Allen said. “In a few minutes I’ll give you a ride. I just stopped in to say hi.”

“Have a drink,” Mike said. “I know there’s plenty. I just fixed one for myself.”

He was not aware of the feud between Allen and Alma; she would not have told him anything about it. He was aware that he might be taking up more space than anyone else wanted him to, for he suddenly handed the baby to Tony turned to Alma, and said, “Would you like me to help?”

“Please,” she said.

She had hardly left the room when the infant storm began in Tony’s arms.

“It’s time for her feeding,” he explained.

Alma returned at once, sending Tony to help his father. Then, without asking permission of anyone, she opened her blouse and offered a large dark nipple to her infant daughter. Mike and Tony came back with drinks for Allen and Carlotta.

“Drink time for everyone,” Mike said, moving to stand beside his ex-wife and the baby.

This tableau in its ordinary balance of family life was what Alma had often thought she wanted back, but at the center of it now, she was unaware of it. Her whole attention was on the child.

Carlotta looked over at Roxanne, who had all but physically vanished. Did she feel banished from that kingdom or freed of an obsession? Allen was not looking at Alma at all. His eyes rested on Tony.

“I’d rather watch the hockey game,” Victor announced, breaking the moment into acceptable pieces.

“We get to do that tomorrow night,” Tony explained. “I’m sorry I won’t be at the opening, Lot, but Tot’s too little. We’re going to stay home with her.”

“You’ll have to see it later. There are some sketches of you and Vic.”

“Really?” Allen asked. “For sale?”

“I think my grandfather’s spoken for them all,” Tony said.

He wasn’t in the least flirtatious with Allen, but the special gravity of his tone and expression was disturbingly attractive. Even Carlotta could see it, or she was admitting to her conversion: children are people.

“Where are you staying?” Carlotta asked Roxanne.

“I hadn’t thought …”

“Here,” Tony offered quickly. “You can have my room. I’ll bunk in with Vic.”

“Sure,” Vic agreed. “Because Mother sleeps with the baby.”

“Thanks anyway,” Roxanne said. “Maybe I’ll see you awhile after school tomorrow.”

“But Dad can’t stay,” Tony said in a soft, urgent voice. “He’s married to somebody else now.”

Roxanne made a gentle face at him, as if he’d said something unworthy of his own perception. He colored again, but he didn’t retreat from her.

“Come home with me,” Carlotta offered. “And let’s go now.”

“I do believe he’s in love with you, Roxanne,” Allen said as he drove them back to Kitsilano by way of the beach.

The bay was filled with the dark shapes of freighters, waiting for prairie grain on its way to China. Someone recently had tried to persuade Carlotta to go on one of the China tours because she would understand and be drawn to their poster art, as most of the others going would not. China for Carlotta was a large warehouse next to a railway line where people selected fur hats, blue shirts, and political buttons to distribute to their friends back home. So the freighters were there as props for foreign mythologies.

“It’s a different world,” Roxanne was saying, not having taken up Allen’s taunt about Tony. “Everyone there is doing things, and there’s money—not government money, private money, because people really are interested, really believe in the importance of what we’re doing. It’s crazy.”

Allen dropped them off. Carlotta didn’t like to think of him spending the night in a lonely hotel room, underlining all that he had lost here. She knew he wouldn’t go to the baths or the bars. But there was nothing else to offer him. She felt very meager with Roxanne, too, the bed narrow and lustless. It was a long way for friends to come for so little.

“I shouldn’t have asked you,” Carlotta said.

“I had to come,” Roxanne said urgently. “I have so much to tell …”

Some small part of it was a new lover, not so magnificent as Alma had been (and here she paused for a tribute to Alma’s breasts and thighs, which Carlotta had never risked painting for Alma’s sake), but human in ways Roxanne thought finally necessary. The greater length of telling, some several hours, was exactly what Carlotta had expected and dreaded. Roxanne had discovered the vocabulary for what she did. If there had been a trace of egotism in that new wonder, Carlotta could have told her to shut up and go to sleep. Instead, she drank cup after cup of tea, her nails making bloody half-moons in the palms of her hands to keep herself awake. Finally it was Roxanne who fell asleep in the middle of one of her own jargon-laden sentences. That aura of hair rested on the pillow; that comically generous mouth in too small a face was still. Was there something essentially simpleminded about someone greatly gifted? Carlotta had no doubt at all that Roxanne would go on to hear her work in the fictitious capitals of the world. “Yet she lacked—what was it? A kind of complexity or sophistication. There would always be something of the uncritical worshiper in Roxanne, no matter how many goddesses fell.

They all—Joseph, Ann, Allen, Roxanne, Alma, and Mike—arrived early for the opening, more in the mood of performers than guests. The children had been left at home. The length of the drive out of town, the lack of familiarity with the gallery, the fact that it was a school night made Joseph and Ann decide to leave Joy in the care of Rachel and Susan, as Tot was left with her brothers, in the novelty proud rather than resentful of the responsibility, or so Alma reported it.

“I can only stay an hour. It’s such a long way. Tony’s got a supplementary bottle in case of emergency, but I’m the emergency. I should have had twins!”

She was so proud of mother’s milk she might have invented it. Since the thought of it created mild nausea in most of the others, there was a physical space left around her, across which various needs for attention had to travel and did.

“This is more effective,” Allen was saying. “Paintings are, on the whole. But there were lots of subjects at my opening in Toronto, and they did give the impression of having been cut adrift from the walls to be free-floating images in the room. “You’re positively diminished, of course,” he said, smiling at Alma.

“And you might have escaped from a ward for the criminally insane,” she retorted.

“I’m the only certifiable nut among us,” Joseph said.

“It doesn’t show,” Mike assured him, “in your portrait or in you.”

As soon as other people began to arrive, Carlotta felt anxious as if she or her friends were in real danger, as if she had inadvertently exposed not only Allen but all of them, for they seemed terribly vulnerable there in their flesh, where each move, each gesture could betray. The portraits, in contrast, seemed safe from harm. If she had not been distracted by a number of her regular collectors, she would have obeyed an instinct to herd her friends into safety in the office, in the back alley, anywhere except here where their portraits were like “wanted” posters for the criminally free. It was odd to have her familiar personal paranoia extend as far as her imagination had, to include her friends.

“Nice to have you on my side,” Carlotta said to Alma’s large and handsome father. “I was afraid you might not like Alma’s portrait.”

“Marvelous!” he said. “Simply marvelous! One goes on too long thinking of one’s children as children.”

“I don’t want to sell you every sketch of Tony.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, but I must have them.”

His confidence was such that he spoke as if the decision were up to him rather than to Carlotta.

“But I’ve spoken for one of them, sir,” Allen said, suddenly at Carlotta’s elbow.

“You remember Allen Dent?” Carlotta asked.

“Indeed.” Alma’s father nodded but did not offer his hand.

“The fire regulations in this building seem ideal,” Allen said, his tone gallant.

Alma’s father agreed and excused himself.

“I always did like playing ‘bite the hand that feeds you,’” Carlotta said, light and cool as she always needed to appear to be, fooling other people as a way of fooling herself.

The crowd grew, became a kind of obstacle course to get through. Carlotta felt trapped in it and at the same time the cause of it, caught in her own net along with her friends. Allen had started taking pictures. The exploding flashes illuminated face after face that she didn’t know. She heard the word “tits”; she heard the word “radical.” She heard, “I want to buy the flower man.”

Mike was standing beside her. “I’d forgotten how young we were. I didn’t remember it like that at all.”

“What did you expect to see?”

“The error of my ways?”

“The error of mine!” Carlotta said, and laughed.

“Are you all right?”

“It’s such a crowd. There are so few people I know. Where do you suppose they all come from?”

“Off the big road, I guess, following the billboards. They didn’t spare the advertising,” Mike said. “I’d like to see you before I go back. Do you have any time tomorrow?”

Before she could answer, there was a sound or a feeling, as if the crowd were one great beast that had torn a muscle or a tendon. Carlotta looked toward a sigh, contraction, whatever it was. Then someone screamed.

“Is someone hurt?”

“Has someone fallen?”

There were shouts, several sharp grunts, and the mass began to bubble in the vicinity of Roxanne’s portrait.

“There’s the faggot who does it to kids, right there! Allen Dent. Get him!”

Then, only five or six feet away, Carlotta heard and identified the sound of a bucket of liquid being emptied against the wall. She looked and saw red paint like a bloody explosion, drooling down over what had been the portrait of Alma. As the man with the bucket turned around, Carlotta recognized him. He was the trick who had paid her last month’s rent.

“Why, you prick!” she shouted.

“That will teach you, you two-bit whore, not to bring your filth into this community!”

Mike’s arm had come down around Carlotta’s shoulders, and he placed his body between her and the man who spoke.

“Let me go,” she commanded in a quiet but clear voice.

She felt his arm fall away as she lunged forward. She could think of only one thing. She wanted his eyes.

“Lotta, don’t kill anybody,” she heard Mike shout at her.

As she felt scalp and skin under her nails, her thumbs hungering for the eye sockets to blind the bastard, suddenly her arms were clamped to her sides from behind. There were cameras flashing everywhere.

“Let me go!”

It wasn’t Mike. She was being held and dragged back out of the crowd by a uniformed policeman.

“They’re ruining my paintings!” she was shouting. “Those bastards have ruined my paintings. Get them, why don’t you?”

She saw Allen, blood pouring out of his nose, shoulder to shoulder with Mike, punching it out with half a dozen men.

“Who the hell are these apes?” Mike shouted.

“Old high school buddies,” Allen answered. “Meet our local aldermen.”

Out on the sidewalk there were more photographers, more policemen, several on their way in, one holding Roxanne, whose shirt had been torn off, whose shoulder was bleeding.

“What in hell is this?” Carlotta demanded. “Why are you arresting us?”

For answer, she was escorted to a waiting paddy wagon.

Joseph and Ann arrived on the sidewalk under police escort, Joseph stumbling as if he’d been pushed, Ann arguing.

“We didn’t throw the paint, Officer. We’re the artist’s friends.”

Several unknowns made flying exits before Mike emerged, the frustrated bouncer, a policeman on each arm, bellowing like a bull, behind him Allen, who was being dragged rather than helped. Everyone was in the paddy wagon before Alma appeared, bathed in red paint, explaining regally to anyone who would listen that her father was in there somewhere and would have them all dismissed from the force if they didn’t release her at once. She was a nursing mother. Then she saw all the others looking out of the door of the paddy wagon.

“All of you?”

“All of us,” Mike said, holding out a welcoming hand.

“What about the baby?”

“She’ll be all right.”

“My God, Roxanne! Are you hurt?”

“Some,” Roxanne answered. “So’s Allen.”

Alma rummaged in her handbag and found cotton to put under Allen’s upper lip, to clean up the cut on Roxanne’s shoulder.

“Are we really going to be taken to jail?” Ann asked.

“Looks that way,” Joseph said, and for once his note of laughter was signal rather than warning; Allen and Mike began to laugh with him.

“I’m so damned proud of them all,” Allen said, under his stuffing of cotton. “The people of Surrey care enough about art to start a riot! Things like that don’t happen in Toronto.”

“And the police care enough to join them,” Mike said. “Makes a man proud to be a Canadian.”

“But who’s behind it?” Ann demanded. “It was obviously all planned. Even the press was there. The police were using our portraits to identify us all.”

“I am,” Allen said. “They came to get me.”

“I went to bed with the prick who was throwing the paint,” Carlotta said.

“They’ve ruined the work. Don’t you care?” Roxanne was shouting. “Is it nothing but a big joke to you? They didn’t come because of Allen. They didn’t come because of Carlotta. Blame the weather. Blame the stars. They came. They always will.”

“No,” Ann said, “that’s unjust.”

“It will be all right,” Alma said soothingly. “Dad will be there.”

The silence that fell was deeply embarrassed. Inside it Carlotta felt responsible for both the terror and the silliness of their circumstance. She had painted them all into this ludicrous corner, images of envy transformed, offensive deities of the big frog in the polluted little pond, where she, where they all had to live. She saw again the face of the man she could have blinded, felt the intimacy of his scalp under her fingers. She had not blinded, she had not killed him, that payer of her rent, committing a rape she would not consent to, ever. Adrenaline drained out of her like a hemorrhage. She began to shake so violently that she might have to hurl herself to the floor to stop it. Arms held her. Ann’s? Alma’s?

There was Mike’s voice: “We’ll sue the shit out of them.”

Joseph’s very near: “All things fall and are built again.”

“Surely you can,” Ann was saying. “You can paint us all again.”

Quieting, Carlotta pulled back away from that multiple embrace and discordant song, seeing them all, Joseph, Ann, Mike, Alma, Allen, and Roxanne, escaped from their destroyed portraits, survivors who had already grown far beyond her fixed ideas of them. Because they were all here now together, their lives would change again in ways she couldn’t predict.

“I can’t imagine,” Carlotta said. “I can’t imagine.”