Roxanne Recording

ROXANNE WAS MAKING A sound map of the house. What other people might have fixed, a dripping tap or squeaking hinge, she listened to. What other people blanked out—the refrigerator or furnace going on, a plane passing overhead—she heard. She was interested in the difference in tone between eggshells and chicken bones in the garbage disposal. She compared the refilling times of the two toilets. She recorded the boys’ feet up and down the stairs, in and out of the house, and she asked them to spend one rainy afternoon doing nothing but sitting down over and over again on different pieces of living-room furniture.

“Victor farted—on purpose,” Tony said, outraged.

“It’s okay; it’s okay,” Roxanne assured him. “Everything is okay.”

One morning she was out on the front lawn, setting up the sprinkler, and heard Tony upstairs practicing his violin. She got bowing exercises through the slow rhythm of water, falling back and forth like a metronome. The next morning she recorded only the sprinkler, then only Tony’s bowing. She wanted her machines to be one-voiced instruments as much as possible, not the garbage cans of sound like radios, everything jammed together at one source.

Roxanne rarely listened to recorded music. Alma’s stereo gave some space for the music to happen in but still not enough. It was like putting a whole orchestra into an elevator. She would not listen to symphonies at all unless she could go to the concert and see the numbers of instruments. Listening to a record gave you no idea how many violins were trying to vanish into the same note, an odd exercise to do over and over again for centuries, the obliteration of distinctive sound for volume. But, given a choice, she’d any day rather stand on a street corner and listen to a band march by each instrument giving her a solo a couple of steps long inside the traveling collective of sound.

Musical instruments were not of major interest to her, and she doubted that they would have been even if she’d had a childhood like Tony’s, practicing an hour before breakfast every morning. She would have been out with Victor listening to the neighborhood dogs bark, throwing stones into the fishpond, talking back to the crows. And like Victor, she’d rather shout than sing. The only kind of singing she could listen to was the sort people did alone, where they might imitate for a while the unnatural pretentiousness of the professional singer but soon turn it into the sound joke it was. Most singing was like the resonance of a cleft palate or the voice of someone born profoundly deaf. Learning to sing was like learning to limp. Roxanne had refused in school to carry a tune, except in her head, where she couldn’t help it. If she’d been allowed to whistle, she might have cooperated, but only on her own, not with a bunch of others.

One of Roxanne’s chief difficulties in learning to understand and be understood was that she had so little sense of what was commonly irritating and commonly pleasurable to listen to. Mastering table manners, polite conversation, other people’s orgasms, she could quickly get the balance of the natural, technical, and conventional, but it was years before she could believe that there was a common response to sound from which she was excluded. Fingernails across blackboards, cracking of finger joints, tapping of pencils—at first she made specific lists, only gradually began to generalize to any extended tapping or drumming, any machine except for those specifically designed for making a sound and having no other purpose. She finally was able to conclude that people were irritated or embarrassed or bored or frightened by any sound that was not specifically made to please, while for her that very motive in sound made it less interesting, less true. She was drawn to what she sometimes called weed sound because it was what other people would root out if they could. She named some of her pieces after weeds: dandelion, crabgrass, broom.

“The names of a lot of the sounds I love are ugly. I’m glad I’m not trying to write,” she said to Alma.

“Like what?”

“Oh, like the sound of your body shifting in the tub. A sort of grunting sound.”

“Have you recorded that?”

“Yes.”

Roxanne was working very hard and had been for the month since she’d moved in with Alma. It was intensely interesting for her, and it also kept her from thinking over-much about Alma and herself until it would be useful to do so. Roxanne had never lived with anyone since she’d had a choice because everywhere not her own had been some sort of prison. But she’d always had a dream of living that was shared, erotic and companionable, which would simply go on and on, maybe with one other person, maybe with several.

Alma was not like anyone Roxanne had known before. When Roxanne first met her, she had been astounded by her physical beauty, the generous clarity of her face, her magnificent size, the prize specimen of a breeder god who had made sure she was fed to a fullness of breast and thigh, teeth perfectly white, skin without flaw. Roxanne’s hunger was cannibal, to be satisfied whatever the price. She had known women who used husbands and children against her greed as a lover and had expected it of Alma, but Alma almost at once gave what Roxanne was intent on stealing. She had never known anyone as generous with her body and as selfish with everything else—with things, with space, with imagination, with heart. It was not conscious. For Roxanne it was oddly admirable because so uncalculating. Allen, who worked hard to maintain cynical superiority and was fond of making common cause with Alma, was guiltily generous in ways Roxanne understood. Alma’s guilt was never connected with her selfishness. She wanted to be punished—even brutally punished—for the generosity of her body. That was what Roxanne couldn’t stand, Alma’s wanting pain as if it were something she had earned, something Roxanne owed her as an emotional debt. It was heartbreaking. It was ridiculous. Roxanne didn’t understand it. She wouldn’t do it.

Now Alma seemed almost to have forgotten all that. Their lovemaking, necessarily quieter, except when the boys were off for the night with their grandparents, was positively domesticated in other ways. Though Alma was shy of the lovely size of her breasts, particularly her nipples, she was learning to use a bra like a purse, something for storing valuables when she went out, and she never resisted the pleasure Roxanne took in them, whether they were working together in the kitchen or making the bed. Roxanne indulged Alma by covering her own more often in public, though it was almost like being blind or deaf to shield what she felt through her tits. Alma did not know there was anything to receive except sexual pleasure.

She was not insensitive or unintelligent. Her selfishness made her a better mother than she would have been without it, functioning for the boys in the ways she felt them an extension of herself, in material and creature comforts, healthily against them as she made it clear this was her house, her life out of which they were expected to grow.

She did regret Roxanne had no room of her own, but it did not occur to Alma to offer to have one built in the basement, where Roxanne had stored most of her belongings since there was no obvious room for anything but clothes in their bedroom. It was not their bedroom; it was Alma’s, as it was Alma’s house, Alma’s children, Alma’s life, into which Roxanne would fit if she could.

It wasn’t that Alma couldn’t imagine so much as that she didn’t. Or did only when she was writing, when she often seemed to imagine so much that it ceased to be documentation at all.

It was comfortable, even rather grand, not only for Alma but for Roxanne. There were no calculated thoughtfulnesses that had to be noted and returned. There were very few distracting responsibilities to be assumed since it would never occur to Alma to say, in an aggrieved tone, “These are your children as much as mine,” or, “This is your house as much as mine.” She was surprised and pleased by Roxanne’s ordinary attentions to the children, her willingness to vacuum. She was relieved that Roxanne routinely contributed to the housekeeping money. In emotional ways, Roxanne felt freer of Alma than when they had not lived together. But she had no idea either how long she would be welcome or how long she’d be able to stay. She didn’t brood about it or puzzle anxiously. She noticed and worked.

Roxanne still posed for Carlotta once a week. The portrait, much referred to, had only just begun. Before, Carlotta had been sketching. She had begun working with Roxanne dressed, but after a month she said impatiently that this was work for a fashion designer or commercial artist selling shirts. Roxanne traded her clothes for closed windows. It was still very cold. She drank cups of tea and had a hot shower before she left.

Sometimes Carlotta showed her the day’s sketches. In no matter what pose, the body had a still attentiveness Roxanne recognized as her own, but the skeletal length of bones was exaggerated. Carlotta was taller than Roxanne. Roxanne was wearing Carlotta’s skeleton under her own inquiring flesh.

“I don’t want to do that,” Carlotta said. “But I’m afraid to make your bones less important than mine.”

“They are less important,” Roxanne said, putting her length of arm next to Carlotta’s, their hands side by side. Compared to the articulate instrument that was Carlotta’s hand, Roxanne’s looked like a small, timid animal.

“Your flesh is human. I’m not sure mine is,” Carlotta said, musing rather than judgmental.

Roxanne touched Carlotta’s arm with her fingers. It was hard and cool. She wanted to see Carlotta naked, curious to know the shape of her breasts, the line of hip and thigh. Roxanne assumed Carlotta had not made love with Alma because Alma had not initiated it. Alma had not out of nearly willful ignorance but also because this minimal flesh was worn like armor and kept chilled. Carlotta turned away and reopened the windows. Dutifully Roxanne put on her peacoat and left.

She went on touching Carlotta casually when she felt like it. The temperature of Carlotta’s resistance was constant, though her interest increased. Some of the poses she asked for were frankly erotic.

“For Alma’s birthday,” Carlotta said wryly.

The weekly present Carlotta was sending Alma was Roxanne’s intense sexual energy, and Roxanne suspected that was all Alma would get.

When she herself was exasperated with Alma and refusing to see her, Roxanne asked, “Why are you so angry with Alma?”

“She’s convenient to be angry with. She’s near enough to know that I am, and she cares … not enough, of course.”

“And Mike isn’t?”

“Isn’t he ever going to come back?”

“I don’t know. He’s asked for the boys for the summer. If Alma agrees to that, he may come to get them.”

“And her, too?”

“I don’t think so,” Roxanne said.

“He would if he could, even now.”

“Do you really want him?”

Carlotta stopped her more and more agitated sketching and looked at Roxanne as if she had just arrived in the room to interrupt Carlotta’s work. Roxanne was disconcerted by the shift, nearly embarrassed.

“I’ve always been jealous of her. Why shouldn’t I have at least what she doesn’t want? But he’s nothing but crumbs from her table; that’s all that’s left of him.”

Carlotta was crying, sounds more frustrated than grieving. Roxanne would have gone to her then if she hadn’t felt she would be only more crumbs until Carlotta raged, “Why don’t any of you ever want me?”

Naked, their bodies were remarkably similar except in skin tone and hair color, but Carlotta was not interested in posing for Roxanne. Her appetite was impatient, melodramatic, sex a contending struggle, full of squeals and hisses, until for Roxanne it was rather grandly funny. She felt like the driver of one of those bumper cars at the Pacific National Exhibition, crashing into Carlotta over and over again until she was trapped, stalled, and whimpering at the gentleness Roxanne forced on her.

“I won’t come. I won’t come,” she chanted, and Roxanne listened to the changing rhythms of it, letting it guide the pressure and rhythm of her tongue until she felt Carlotta coming and held her, gripped like a bowling ball that couldn’t roll away.

There were three or four occasions like the first one before Carlotta made love to Roxanne in return, with a roller-coaster wildness and uncertainty, rushing over and over again toward climaxes that dropped away in violent changes of direction, until Roxanne was nearly sick with hilarity, and Carlotta moaned and swayed like a trestle about to collapse.

“This is terrible, hard work,” Carlotta said, “and I’m no good at it.”

Roxanne laughed and hugged her. “We’re not in jail. You don’t have to.”

“Anyway, it gets in the way of work. We don’t have time for it.”

Carlotta was more cheerful, even humored, than she had been before as if some point had been proved and could now be let go. The drawings began to look more like Roxanne in bone as well as stance. Before Roxanne moved in with Alma, she had put her clothes back on for the portrait Carlotta could now paint.

Roxanne told Alma nothing about Carlotta. She did not trust Alma’s use of such information, which might, in her hands, turn into some new form of self-punishment.

The only person she did talk to was Pierre, who had an elaborate understanding of the personal, being interested in nearly nothing else. She and Pierre shared attitudes which were foreign to the others.

“Allen says the gods are not supposed to be moral, just larger than life. That’s why I’m always attracted to big men. It doesn’t matter about people’s flaws, which, after all, are in proportion to their size.”

Pierre didn’t forgive Allen his absences, his cruelties, his pride. Pierre accepted them, often loudly complaining but neither expecting nor desiring reform. Allen wouldn’t be Allen without them any more than Alma would be Alma without her monumental selfishness and misplaced guilt.

“There’s no point in telling either of them the truth,” Pierre explained. “I would screw you if I absolutely had to.”

“Of course,” Roxanne agreed, as little able to imagine it as he was.

“It’s not necessary. He likes to imagine that he seduces me away from heterosexuality every time he comes home. If it made me more attractive to him, I’d not only pretend to keep a harem, I’d have one.”

It was a fiction modestly costly for Roxanne since Alma got no pleasure from pretending to rescue Roxanne from Pierre and would have been reassured to know it wasn’t necessary, but Roxanne had to be loyal to Pierre, who was like a younger sibling, sister and brother in one.

“What Allen doesn’t understand is that we need taboos just like anyone else. Simply because I didn’t grow up with a sister I couldn’t screw doesn’t mean I can now or want to, any more than he wants the women he squires around. Does Alma ever pretend she’s having an affair with him?”

“No,” Roxanne said. “She does think he’s attractive.”

“I should think so!”

Pierre loved any excuse to talk about how attractive Allen was, from the way his hair grew at the back of his neck to the arch of his beautiful foot.

His worship of Allen’s body was very like what Roxanne felt for Alma’s, a perpetually renewing wonder that was joyful and holy. She and Pierre had been born again in the same faith. They celebrated and suffered as true believers.

“They don’t love us the way we love them, of course. Allen is too much of a man; Alma is too much of a woman.”

Roxanne at that kind of invitation took her turn to praise that too much of a woman, Alma. Pierre was more sympathetic to Roxanne’s passion unrequited than he was to her present sexual pleasure. Alma could be interesting to him only as the embodiment of an idea of love, not as a female body, about which he had deep aesthetic reservations.

“I’d rather not lie,” Roxanne said, “and I’d like to be happy.”

Pierre lifted his eyebrows.

“I don’t lie to you,” Roxanne continued.

“You’re not in love with me.”

“That’s not the reason. She’s so safe she doesn’t know what’s dangerous.”

“I know.”

“I worship that.”

“I know.”

“She doesn’t go out, you see. When she asks me about my day, I have to lie or skip parts. She doesn’t know that every day is a trail of dead cats, arrests, whatever. … You know that. That’s why you don’t go out. I don’t surprise you.”

“No, but, if Allen was tight with money and made me go out to work, I’d think he didn’t really care.”

“I don’t mind working.”

“Well, at least you can stop worrying about dying alone, which is more comfort than Allen gives me.”

“She doesn’t ever think about dying.”

“Neither does he,” Pierre said, “except for committing suicide, and he thinks that is a matter of choice.”

“If I ever told her we’re all dying of cancer, she’d think I was crazy.”

“Do you think I can say that to Allen? He couldn’t live with it. He just couldn’t. He thinks I’m paranoid because I won’t let him have his shaving cream in aerosol cans.”

“I don’t say why about things like that. I just say I don’t like it, whatever it is, and she throws it out. I think she thinks I’m whimsical.”

“It’s a trick to be a bodyguard for someone who doesn’t know it.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But don’t get uptight about it,” Pierre insisted.

“I’d like to be happy.”

“You are, compared to me.”

Roxanne was certainly neither bored nor lonely. Her lack of equipment or place to work daunted her only briefly. Since she could collect but couldn’t arrange the sounds of the house, she had simply to think about it. In thinking, she discovered the house too small for the mapping she wanted to do. So was the neighborhood. Roxanne wanted to make a sound map of the city. The moment that idea occurred to her, she realized that it was a project she was already in the middle of. If only she could hear what she already had recorded on those thousands of feet of tape stored in Alma’s basement, she would know exactly what to do. Instead she had to remember, make notes, describe.

“I need that wall,” she said to Alma as they lay in bed early one morning.

“What for?”

“A map of Vancouver.”

“What will you do about the closet door?”

“Include it.”

“You’re going to draw right on the wall?”

Roxanne got out of bed, found a pencil, and then, kneeling on her own pillow, she drew over the headboard a small compass. Then she handed the pencil to Alma.

“You’re daring me.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t do that to a house you own. You do it to someplace else.”

“It’s your house,” Roxanne said. “You can do what you want.”

“But you want to draw on the wall.”

“Yes.”

Alma didn’t agree then. She brought it up again at breakfast after the boys had left for school and was still undecided when Roxanne left for work. If Roxanne hadn’t had good training in foster homes, where it was made just as clear that she had no property rights, she might have been more exasperated with Alma than she was. If Roxanne had asked to tattoo obscene poems down the insides of Alma’s thighs, she would have stretched out naked and waited. To touch her bedroom wall was another matter.

“How do you feel about the garage door?” Roxanne asked that night at dinner.

The boys were puzzled. Alma explained to them, “Roxanne wants to make a big map of Vancouver, and I don’t think it ought to be in my bedroom.”

“Do it in my room,” Victor suggested. “I like maps.”

“She’d never get in over the junk.”

“Well, what about the garage door?” Tony asked.

“It seems awfully public,” Alma said.

“You let Daddy work in the shed,” Victor said.

“Daddy had a studio,” Tony said.

“I just need a wall,” Roxanne said.

“Well, why not right here?” Alma suggested, making a nervous gesture at the dining-room wall.

That evening Roxanne established the basic grid of streets across the wall she faced domestically twice a day. It would have been better if she could have wakened to it every morning, but, if she got up as soon as she woke, she could work awhile before breakfast. At first she intended only to make notes, a word or two to remind her of the sound she had recorded or wanted to record, but because the wall was first an issue and then a curiosity, Roxanne began to see the map as a thing in itself as well as a score for work to be done. She cut pictures out of magazines, everything from air-conditioning units to national flags. Directions were color-coded, green to indicate what did happen on that particular corner, red to indicate what might happen, gold to suggest what should happen.

“Are you trying to make it look the way it’s going to sound?” Tony asked.

“Not exactly,” Roxanne said. “I’m just trying to see what it sounds like.”

“Oh.” He was sitting at the dining-room table, cutting out a picture of the B.C. Hydro building. “Is it going to happen where you show it on the map or somewhere all at once like at the Playhouse?”

“I don’t know,” Roxanne said.

“It’s actually good-looking,” Alma said as she set the table for dinner.

They were expecting Allen and Pierre, and for the first time Roxanne was uneasy about the map. Alma’s parents had seen it; so had Ann Rabinowitz, and they had all responded with the same bland incomprehension to which Roxanne did not have to reply. Pierre would be playful, as he always was about her projects, and she could handle that, but Allen would see the entirely unrealistic scope of it and know that she was serious. He was quite willing to treat her like a precocious child, though they were the same age, but Roxanne doubted that he’d accept the idea that she was ready to do something with her work. She wasn’t sure herself, partly because she had no idea how it could be practically realized. Still, at this point she did not want to be discouraged. She felt the way Alma did about her stories, that she wasn’t sure they were good enough to stand rejection. Roxanne asked Alma to seat Allen with his back to that wall.

Allen and Pierre hadn’t been there five minutes before Tony said, “Can I show them your wall, Roxanne?”

She hadn’t realized until then that Tony was seriously involved. As he explained the images, the color coding, he was much clearer than she could have been, able to give some sense of the map as map, as score, as a number of possibilities, and his audience was far more attentive to him than they would have been to her.

Allen stepped back and looked at Roxanne. “Are you really going to do this?”

She shrugged, aware of how impossible the whole thing really was. If you could get jailed for two years for playing someone else’s equipment after store hours, what would you get for playing a whole city?

“I guess it’s private property.”

“What is?” Allen asked.

“The city … the streets and all.”

“No, it’s not,” Tony said, indignant. “It belongs to everyone.”

“Do you know any of the people in the music business?” Allen asked.

“No,” Roxanne said. “I’m not really interested in music. I’m interested in sound.”

“That doesn’t matter. What you need is money—obviously, lots of it.”

“Not really all that much—if I had the machines—a place to work.”

“Alma, why hasn’t Roxanne a place to work?”

“She has. She wanted a wall; here’s the wall.”

Allen and Pierre both laughed, and Roxanne couldn’t resist a smile. What was so obvious to everyone else—Alma’s reluctance to give an inch—she didn’t recognize at all.

Before the evening was over, they had explored the basement, paced out a workshop area, and Allen had extracted a promise from Alma that she would pay for the materials if the work was volunteered.

“You don’t know how to do things like that, do you?” Alma asked him.

“No, of course not. I play at being butch, but I don’t work at it.”

“Joseph will do it,” Pierre said.

“Oh, I couldn’t have Joseph …” Alma began.

“He needs something to do while he can’t teach.”

“There must be plenty of things for him to do …”

Alma didn’t want Joseph in the house. Allen was going to insist. As he and Alma grew closer, he bullied her more frequently and successfully. She gave in to give in, not because she agreed with Allen, and that pleased him. Roxanne would almost always rather give up her own way than be accompanied reluctantly. But Alma did need bullying since she did not really know about needs other than her own. She had to be told that you let a crazy friend help you, whether you wanted to or not, simply because he happened to be on the other end of the teeter-totter.

“I don’t really know how to handle him,” Alma confessed. “He’s never really liked me, and he doesn’t approve of us. Honestly, sometimes Allen goes too far.”

“I’m very pleased about the workroom,” Roxanne said.

“Of course, you are. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it months ago.”

“It will give Joseph a chance to like you.”

“I doubt that. You know, I don’t really think I understand men at all, except for men like Allen. They always seem to be disapproving of something and expecting an apology. Who’s Joseph to disapprove of me?”

He came, arriving while everyone was still at breakfast. The matter with Joseph, Roxanne and Pierre had long ago decided, was that he knew and pretended he didn’t. He knew everyone was dying of cancer, and he knew there was a point to being careful and loving. He couldn’t stand to know. Now mostly he didn’t have to pretend because he did forget, really forget, but forgetting wasn’t the same as not knowing, like Allen and Alma. Only real ignorance could make you strong. Joseph lacked that.

“I want to tell you something I just remembered, Roxanne,” he said, smiling at her. “I just remembered that walk we took across the bridge while you listened to the traffic. Do you still listen to the traffic?”

“Yes.”

He laughed his single note of distress.

“I remember because the baby does, too. She stands on the parking strip and claps after a car goes by.”

“Funny!” Victor judged.

“Before babies learn to talk,” Tony said, “they can hear everything.”

“Where did you learn that?” Alma asked.

“I don’t know—Mary Poppins? Didn’t the babies understand the birds?”

“They do say,” Alma told him, “that babies make every sound and then only remember and repeat sounds they hear back. That’s why, for instance, Pierre forgets his th’s. He didn’t hear them as a baby when he was learning French.”

Roxanne had a curious, faint memory of lying in an enclosed space, seeing nothing but the underedge of a window sill and a ceiling, listening not to a human voice but to a myriad of sounds coming in from outside. The world outside must have been her teacher, and she was still struggling to speak her own mother tongue.

“Nothing is really forgotten,” Joseph said. “I’ve been reassured.”

It was not reassuring. Fortunately or not, the bizarre events of any day in the drugstore where she worked distracted Roxanne from worry about anyone not in her presence. Chewing gum, cigarettes, prescriptions for antibiotics, sex magazines, deodorants, eyebrow pencils, vibrators—life is habit-forming, even for the old woman over there by the greeting cards, grunting out pungent turds while she looks for a birthday card for her grandson. Roxanne must clean up after her quickly before someone decides to lock the old lady up. No one gets indignant about dogs, which not only shit but nose each other’s private parts just to say hello, but let the manager catch a couple of kids feeling each other up over the magazine rack, and he calls the RCMP.

Roxanne had to work as hard to figure out other people’s morality as she did their taste in sound. The first principle was not to assume that what shocked and outraged people was something they didn’t do themselves. The manager, for instance, finger-fucked the cashier every time there was a slow couple of minutes. Roxanne didn’t object to it. It seemed no more offensive than rubbing a cat’s ears or scratching the base of its tail, but you could be arrested for doing it in public, and she’d been jailed for doing it in private before she was twenty-one. Yet it was what everyone wanted, in jail or out of it, a little wild comfort of one sort or another. In a humane society you wouldn’t punish people able to find their own; you’d help those who couldn’t … children, crazy people, old people. But Roxanne knew better. She was very careful to be of no real help to anyone while she was at work.

She had nearly forgotten the dangers at home when she walked in not only to Joseph having a cup of coffee at the dining-room table but to Mike, Victor balancing on the back of his father’s chair, Tony standing protectively by Roxanne’s wall.

“Where’s Alma?”

“In her room,” Tony said.

Roxanne acknowledged no one as she went through the room. She found Alma staring out the window at the city.

“When did he arrive?”

“About an hour ago,” Alma said, “just after the boys got home.”

“It’s only the first of June.”

“He said he wanted time to look around the old town before he took the boys south.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, Roxanne, it’s terrible, just terrible. When he sat down at the table with Joseph, it was as if the last two years hadn’t happened. …”

“You don’t want to go back to him, do you?”

“Of course, I don’t, but don’t you see, if you were a man, he wouldn’t dare come in like this, expecting me to make him coffee, settling to talk with Joseph as if he were in his own house. And you wouldn’t just stand there asking stupid questions … just like a woman!”

“I am a woman,” Roxanne said wearily.

“Oh, darling, what are we going to do?”

“What do we have to do?”

“Will you stop asking questions, for God’s sake, and tell me what to do?”

“I’m trying to say we don’t have to do anything except be civil to him when he’s here to see the boys. If he hangs around too much, tell him you have work to do.”

“He looks so … well.”

“Good.”

“Did you see his car?”

“I came the back way,” Roxanne said, looking out the window to which Alma nodded.

There was a sage green Lincoln Continental parked in front of the house. To Roxanne it was nothing but a cancerous lump in his ego, but it was obvious that Alma was admiring it.

“You ought to go back downstairs,” Roxanne said, trying to sound both matter-of-fact and decisive. “I need to change out of my uniform.”

“Shall I ask him to dinner?”

I don’t know—Play it by ear—Do you want to?—No—Yes—It doesn’t matter. Nothing that occurred to Roxanne to say was useful. She shrugged.

“Oh, shit!” Alma said, and slammed the door as she went out.

Roxanne got out of the institution green she wore all day and put on her most transparent shirt, her lowest-slung pair of trousers, and her pearl. She knew, if Mike had come to buy Alma back, she might be tempted not by the money itself but by the respectability of it. Roxanne could compete with respectability only by offending it; she needed to be as visible as possible.

Joseph was leaving as Roxanne arrived back downstairs. “I’ll come by to give you a hand tomorrow,” Mike was saying. “We could get it done in a day together.”

When Joseph had left, Mike said, “He’s not in very good shape, is he? It’s nice of him to give you girls a hand. I did as much for him when he was away but still … Well, poor guy. So, how about I take you all out to dinner?”

“Funny!” Victor said.

“You don’t change much, Funny!”

“You have,” Tony said quietly.

“Have I?” Mike asked, smiling.

He was even better-looking, his dark desert tan making his teeth all the whiter, his eyes bright with a warmer fire. He was dressed casually but expensively, his shirt the sort Pierre bought imitations of from Hong Kong, his shoes handmade.

“You never took us out to dinner before.”

“Well, I lived with you, son. That was different.”

Alma sat in front with Mike, Roxanne with the boys in the back seat of the Lincoln. Mike didn’t stop Vic from trying every button within reach, even played a teasing game with him by locking his door and closing his window from the master controls. Tony sat very still and straight.

“You know, I thought I’d hate working for a living—well, seriously. I love it.”

“It certainly agrees with you,” Alma said.

“Does, doesn’t it?” He grinned at her.

Roxanne had been afraid but not jealous of Mike when he was still Alma’s husband. At that time she knew he could kill either of them, and that was the only way he could have interfered with their relationship. But it was now not only domesticated but complicated by unsatisfied needs and subtle messages. Mike might enjoy meting out the sexual punishment Roxanne had refused, and Alma could still be roused by guilt to want it.

She was no less magnificent than he. Roxanne had got used to Alma’s loss of weight and knew being slender became her. Her face, which could be a bland mask when Roxanne first knew her, most often when Mike was around, rarely took on that defense now. She had learned to say and show more often what she felt. Now it was perfectly easy for Mike to read there that he pleased her. Roxanne’s cunt ached, so did the palms of her hands. She leaned on them.

“Seafood all right?” Mike asked. “Damn few fish on the desert.”

He indulged the glutton in Victor as they competed to see who could eat the most steamed clams. He encouraged Tony’s curiosity about an oyster dish he hadn’t tried. He was as attentive over Alma’s dinner as if she’d been a nursing mother. Roxanne, who knew shellfish were the sewers of the sea, ordered a dish which had both clams and oysters, a suicidal gesture only Pierre could have appreciated, and it was only a gesture because she could not eat.

“Well, I don’t know why I was so thrown this afternoon,” Alma said as she began to undress. “I was even wearing a bra because Joseph was around. I think Mike Trasco has turned into a human being.”

Roxanne took a fistful of Alma’s radiant hair and pulled, hard.

“Hey.”

“I’ll fist-fuck if I have to,” Roxanne said.

“Oh, love, love, don’t be silly. These are yours; this is yours. He’s always appealed to my vanity but you’re my addiction. You know that. I tried to swear off, remember? I couldn’t.”

“I’m your friend.”

“Of course you are, and my lover and my beloved, and I know you don’t like seafood, but oysters for me are like first-course sex with you, and I’ve been hungry for you all evening …”

Her lies were like Roxanne’s own, motivated by love, and Roxanne understood them. If she was not, in fact, the cause of Alma’s ready wetness, she was its welcome recipient. Alma was not at this moment thinking of Mike sucking her cunt, rimming her anus, preparing her for multiples of coming. Her mouth and hands were busy with the same plans for Roxanne, delicate, shocking, sure.

“Sweet woman.”

“Sweet woman.”

Out of bed, the ache returned, not just when Mike was around. Roxanne ached all day simply with the possibility of his presence. It was a great relief to her that her workroom was finished in a couple of days, but anytime the boys were home Mike had excuse enough to be there. Alma did nothing to discourage him.

“It’s such a relief simply to like the man,” she explained. “It makes me feel less crazy to have married him.”

Crazy to have divorced him? Roxanne had stopped asking questions. The sexual reassurance she insisted on, Alma gave her without grudge, but lying naked in Roxanne’s arms, Alma could still talk about Mike, his new confident kindness.

“He doesn’t even object to Tony’s violin.”

“He calls him owl eyes,” Roxanne countered, knowing that here, too, it was her jealousy that spoke; though Tony was far more cautious with his father than Victor, neither boy had eyes for anyone else.

“As a joke. Tony’s really looking forward to the summer. It sounds horribly hot to me. Mike says the best time to go is winter. We all might go down for Christmas.”

Roxanne assumed that she was not part of that all. She said nothing.

She was not surprised to come home to an empty house and a note on the dining-room table. Mike had taken them out for dinner and to the movies. Alma knew Roxanne would love an evening to herself to move into her workroom. She did go down to the basement, but the place smelled of Mike, and the empty house above her weighed too many aching tons.

She phoned Pierre.

“I’ll set another place at the table and give you rats’ tails on toast. Allen will come get you.”

Allen greeted her with “You must be a mind reader. I’m just home from Ottawa, where I got a lot of good advice. We’re going to get you a Canada Council grant.”

“What for?”

“To go on with your project, your sound map, whatever you call it.”

“I call it ‘Mother Tongue,’” Roxanne said.

“Sexist for my taste.”

Roxanne managed a half smile.

“I’m warning you,” Allen said. “We’re going to cheer you up. Before the evening is over, you’ll forget Mike Trasco exists. But while you still remember, let me tell you this: she’ll never go back to him.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“She doesn’t need the money; she doesn’t want the man. And, though she doesn’t think it’s quite nice, she happens to be in love with you.”

“The workroom is finished. He helped Joseph.”

“Good.”

There was a strained energy in Allen’s voice. Roxanne really wished he hadn’t been at home. With Pierre she could have wept and raged and despaired, and his comfort would have been to be as helpless as she was. Allen couldn’t stand things gone wrong. He had to fix whatever it was, and the more tired and pressed he was, the more responsibility he seemed to feel. For his sake, she would have to pretend to forget Mike for the evening. Though that would have been a relief, dropping her guard in that way seemed too dangerous. As long as she kept him locked in the vise of her attention, he couldn’t take Alma from her.

Once Pierre’s delicious dinner, which looked planned for three weeks in advance, had been enjoyed in the sort of leisure only men seemed able to command for a meal, Allen spread the Canada Council forms on the table.

“Tony talked very well the other night, but now you’ve got to talk. I was going to get Alma to write this up, but we’ll have to ourselves.”

“I don’t know anyone to ask for letters,” Roxanne objected, daunted by the whole idea of a grant.

“I’ve solved that. It’s multimedia enough so that I can write one of them, and Carlotta can write one, and I’ve got some names of people involved in experimental music here in town. The only problem is presenting it clearly. I’ll take a picture of the wall, but you’ve got to go on from there.”

“How can I cost it? I haven’t the first notion …”

“Roxanne,” Allen said, taking her shoulders, “stop that! You know the machines you need; you know what they cost. This is a mini-budget to get enough done so that you can give people some idea …”

“They’ll look up and see I have a record …”

“And that will be all the more reason for giving you the money. Artists are supposed to be outlaws. It’s just clerks in stores who’re not.”

“But what I’m doing is crazy,” Roxanne protested.

“Artists are supposed to be crazy.”

“You’re a genius, Roxanne,” Pierre said. “All Allen wants you to do is admit it.”

Confessing on a paper to be sent to an agent of the federal government what she would like to do to Vancouver was like submitting a master plan for robbing every bank in town. If she had to tell the truth, she had in mind a cast of thousands, involving everyone from schoolchildren to professionals. She wanted marching bands of tape recorders; she wanted fifty oboes on fifty different street corners, playing fifty different national anthems in their natural tone of complaint. And that was just the beginning. She wanted this performance to go on for days, for weeks, forever, a display of sound as permanent as sculpture which would transform the city.

“Surely it’s against the law?” she asked.

“You simply don’t say it’s a revolution,” Allen said, scribbling notes as she talked.

“But it’s disturbing the peace.”

“Never mind. Never mind.”

They were drinking vodka, and Pierre didn’t let the glasses sit empty. Roxanne drank as quickly as Allen without his habit or stamina, and she was also excited. Not only Mike but Alma receded from her mind. Roxanne was cheerfully drunk by the time Allen delivered her home, and it was well after midnight. She did notice, with relief, that Mike’s car was nowhere around.

“Where on earth have you been?” Alma demanded.

“With Allen and Pierre.”

“I bet!”

“Where else would I be?”

“In bed with Carlotta.”

“What?”

“You cheap little cheat! Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“It happened months ago before I moved in here. It hasn’t anything to do with anything.”

“How was she?”

Roxanne took a deep breath, knowing it was only the vodka that tempted her to say how hugely funny and really quite bad sex had been with Carlotta, how finally daunted Carlotta had been at the hard work of Roxanne’s body. Alma didn’t want to know.

“I spent the evening filling out an application for a Canada Council grant. It’s Allen’s idea. I think it’s probably crazy.”

“I said, ‘How was she?’”

“That’s the sort of thing you need to find out for yourself.”

“But it’s much quicker to benefit from your experience … and Mike’s. He said she wasn’t bad at all, but she didn’t like you much.”

“This is a silly conversation. Come to bed.”

“Don’t get near me.”

Alma’s eyes, in which Roxanne could swim naked, now tried to freeze her out, pale and hard-surfaced as ice.

“What’s really the matter?”

“And did Pierre have his bit of a bugger tonight?”

At such an accusation from Allen, Pierre would have waggled his behind. Roxanne knew she should do something sexual, preferably cruel, at least assertive. She couldn’t. She felt a pitying sympathy for them both as if she were a third party watching this scene.

“Do you ache all day the way I do?” Roxanne asked. “I didn’t know before that jealousy hurts … physically.”

“What have you got to be jealous about?” Alma asked sarcastically.

“Nothing probably,” Roxanne admitted. “But I keep hurting.”

“What would you have me do … not see him? It’s hard enough on the boys as it is without my making it worse. At least they can see there’s no animosity between Mike and me.”

“So different from you and me.”

“Why did you do that to me?”

“I didn’t do anything to you. I wasn’t even seeing you.”

“That’s a lie. She didn’t finish the portrait until well after you moved in.”

“All right, it’s a lie, or a sort of a lie. I’d rather not lie.”

“I can’t stand it.”

“Neither of us can,” Roxanne said.

She should have been able to reach out to Alma. Instead, Roxanne went woodenly out of the room and upstairs to bed. The vodka was a merciful sedative. She had been deeply asleep when she was roused by Alma’s rough lovemaking, crude name-calling, and tears which came so seldom, always in the dark. If only they could be happy.

It was the night before Tony and Victor were to leave for Arizona. Victor was manic with nervous excitement, Tony quiet with apprehension. Alma was being overly ordinary with them.

“I’m going to miss you guys,” Roxanne finally felt obliged to say.

“I bet!” Victor said.

“I’m not kidding. Two months is a long time.”

“When your workroom is all set up, can I help with the tape recorders and stuff?” Tony asked.

“Sure.”

“Are you going to make a movie?” Victor asked.

“I hadn’t planned to.”

“To go with the soundtrack, you know? I’d be in it,” Vic offered, and demonstrated some of the monstrous faces and horrifying deaths he was willing to perform.

“Vic, Roxanne is serious,” Tony said.

“Roxanne is funny!”

“Enough, Victor!” Alma ordered. “You carry on like that, and your father will kill you.”

“He didn’t hit me once … not all the time he’s been here. You’re the mean one. Anyway, I can hit him back.”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Alma said.

“You’re a girl-fucker!” Victor shouted in high good spirits, and then laughed into the tense silence he had created.

Alma hit him hard in the face. He had a startled, puzzled look as his tongue tasted blood from his nose.

“Don’t,” Roxanne said, moving between Alma and her younger son.

Later Roxanne wondered whether they would have sorted it out better if she hadn’t interfered. As it was, Alma left the room, and Roxanne cleaned up Victor’s face. She wanted to talk with him. She wanted to say, “The right word is lesbian, but most people still think that’s as bad as girl-fucker. All either of them means is that your mother and I love each other, and that’s a good thing.” Then she could have told him how to apologize in a way that he could understand. But Victor was not Roxanne’s child, and Roxanne’s feelings were very different from Alma’s. Roxanne was often frightened; she was never ashamed. She didn’t say anything, and he sent himself to his room as soon as the nosebleed was under control.

“He didn’t mean anything. It’s just a dumb thing he heard.”

“I know he didn’t,” Roxanne said.

“Is Mother going to want us back?”

“Tony, the problem is she doesn’t want you to go. Neither do I, except it will be fun for you to see Arizona and do things with your dad.”

“Why did she hit Vic like that?”

“She was scared.”

“Of Vic?”

“Of what the world teaches him.”

“I don’t learn it.”

“I know you don’t, and I’m glad.”

Alma had no conversation of the sort with either son. The farewell in the morning was stiff with unforgiven misunderstandings, Alma playing the abused and deserted woman, the boys marchers into a forced exile. Only Mike was absolutely cheerful.

As the Lincoln finally pulled away, Alma turned to Roxanne and said, “Don’t go to work today. Tell them you’re sick or something. I can’t stay here alone.”

Roxanne agreed readily enough.

“We’ll take a picnic and go to the beach,” Alma said.

It was a beautiful day. A lot of other people had had the same idea, mostly mothers of preschool children and the unemployed. Alma stripped down to a black bikini, oiled herself, and said, “I bought this for you. Do you like it?” Alma said that of anything new she put on. Roxanne didn’t own a bathing suit.

“Yes,” Roxanne said.

“No, you’d rather be at Wreck Beach.”

“No.”

“Have you ever been?”

It was going to be one of those sexual conversations which might set a lovely erotic tone to the whole day but could as easily tip into angry accusations.

“Would you like to go?” Roxanne asked.

“I feel safer among the young mothers,” Alma decided. “But we ought to do something a little wild to celebrate our freedom, don’t you think?”

Roxanne knew Alma was feeling no more like celebrating than Roxanne did.

“Most of the nudes at Wreck Beach are men.”

“So you have been,” Alma said.

“Once as Pierre’s bodyguard.”

“Do people … do anything?”

“Mostly look at each other. There are always a few people tangled up in blankets or sleeping bags.”

“Would you like to do that?”

“Not at Wreck Beach.”

“I want to do something special with you like fuck on the beach or go to a gay bar.”

“Why those things?” Roxanne asked.

“I want you to know I don’t care.”

“Don’t care?”

“Next time I’ll break his jaw if I have to.”

“Oh. Alma, he’s just a little boy.”

“Growing up to be a man as foulmouthed as his father.”

Roxanne savored that moment of Alma’s hostility toward Mike, but she had to rescue Victor from it.

“I wanted to talk with him,” Roxanne said. “We really should talk to them both. We should do it together.”

“Tell them we’re girl-fuckers?” Alma asked lightly.

“Tell them we love each other.”

“It’s none of their damned business,” Alma said.

They watched a toddler, running with diapers at half-mast away from a laughing mother toward the water.

“You lose them anyway,” Alma said, “That’s the whole point.”

“Are you afraid Mike won’t send them back?” Roxanne asked.

“Yes … and no. You aren’t being very good at my mood today, darling. I want to forget I am a mother. I want to be an irresistibly wicked woman in an amusing and relatively safe way.”

The bars were too rough for Alma to enjoy being irresistible. The coffeehouses catered to fifteen-year-olds, so Alma couldn’t help be reminded that she was a mother. The only possibility was finding a poetry reading or concert that would attract a lot of women and perhaps develop into a party afterward. Roxanne knew enough women from the women’s meetings she had gone to to get a party started, but not on a weeknight in summer.

“You’ll have to give me some time. There’s no place to go except on weekends.”

“I want to be a lesbian,” Alma said, rolling over on her stomach. “Oil my back.”

Roxanne obeyed and let a buggering finger play for a good five minutes in full view of young mothers who simply would not notice anything outlandish or indecent going on on their part of the beach. It frightened her badly but it also made her drunk with lusting gratitude that this absolutely magnificent woman wanted her not only in secret but out in the bright light of day to which Alma, out of wonderful ignorance, was immune. She did not know she could be not only exposed but arrested.

Where they couldn’t be comfortable was at home. It was contaminated with the boys’ absence.

“I don’t care where we go, just out,” Alma said.

No matter where they went, whether to the movies or swimming, they had to deal with men wanting to pick them up.

“This has never happened to me before in my life,” Alma said.

“Kids are great bodyguards,” Roxanne said.

“Or husbands.”

Roxanne found in the paper an announcement of a talk at UBC in the Student Union Building. “Women’s Liberation—Where Now?” She tried not to take the title personally. If she couldn’t protect Alma from men on the make, Roxanne could provide more seductive alternatives.

“You mean that’s where lesbians go on a Friday night?”

“The more interesting ones.”

“Will everyone be a lesbian?”

“No.”

“How will I tell?”

“Some of them wear buttons.”

“What will I wear?”

Roxanne was nearly always caught off guard by Alma’s sudden appearance in any room. She had a style, a presence that attracted attention—her height, her fairness, her simply expensive clothes, the serene planes of her face. Tonight she was in beige raw silk, matching trousers and tailored shirt, thongs on her long, elegant feet. Her ring was a brown sapphire. Roxanne anticipated the stir Alma would cause with pride and apprehension.

There were perhaps seventy women in a room casually arranged for a talk, some straight chairs fanned across the center of the room unoccupied. Everyone sitting down had chosen the couches along two walls of the room. There was no obvious speaker’s chair or table. Amiable nods turned into welcoming smiles when it was clear Roxanne was with the woman they had never seen before. Roxanne had to introduce Alma to half a dozen women before they could sit down.

“Who are they all?” Alma asked.

“Judy’s a painter; Ann works for CBC; Shelagh’s with the human rights office; Dadie’s a grad student in sociology.”

“How do you know them?”

Roxanne by now was not surprised by Alma’s surprise. The fact that Roxanne had been to jail so colored Alma’s vision of her past that Roxanne had given up trying to set the record straight. It was a source of mild disappointment to Alma that Roxanne didn’t run with a ring of lesbian prostitutes in her spare time.

“The Women’s Caucus downtown,” Roxanne said.

“There is a woman wearing a button. You weren’t kidding!”

A woman sitting on the other side of Alma asked, “Who is this very famous feminist speaker from Toronto nobody’s ever heard of?”

“She’s my sister’s sociology prof at York,” someone else replied.

“She’s my sister’s ex-lover.”

“It should have said so in the Sun,” the first speaker concluded.

Roxanne smiled. She had forgotten how wryly friendly and kindly rude these women could be. She hadn’t made friends with them exactly, but, when she was lonely, she could drift into their headquarters and always find something to do, mailings to get out, posters to make, babies to tend. Maybe there were still dances to go to where, even alone, you could make a good evening, if you were willing to ask for it. Would Alma like to go to a dance?

The speaker arrived. Roxanne was more and more often surprised to find the authorities much younger than she was. This professor might have been twenty-five. She was very good-looking. She was kissing everyone who was interested.

“She’s gay?” Alma whispered.

It was not a particularly interesting talk, mostly about women’s co-ops, credit unions, banks. Roxanne wished she could interest herself in money, but she was no better at concentrating on it than she was on keeping her mind blank. She listened to the room, the small sounds of restless liveliness women make when they are bored and excited. Alma, beside her, did not move; she was actually listening.

“But that’s exactly what’s the matter with me,” Alma said excitedly the moment the lecture came to an end. “She understands me completely. It’s what Allen has been trying to tell me for years: money is freedom. She’s right. She’s absolutely right. We have to get our hands on money; that’s all there is to it. Oh, I want to meet her. Do you think we could just go up and introduce ourselves? I just have to say to her …”

“Of course,” Roxanne said.

Dadie, the graduate student, caught Roxanne’s arm and held her back from following Alma up to the speaker. “There’s a party at my place after this if you and your friend …”

“We’d like that. Thanks.”

“I’ve lost track of you since you left the record store,” Ann of CBC said.

“I’ve got a job out in Point Grey now.”

“She new in town?”

“No,” Roxanne said. “She grew up here.”

“She doesn’t look … local.”

Before the evening was over, Roxanne felt like a sort of press secretary for Alma. People seemed shy to approach her directly and so asked their questions of Roxanne instead. Alma was unaware of anyone but the professor, at whose feet she sat, too busy admiring to care whether she was being admired or not.

“Oh, I wish she taught at UBC,” Alma said as they finally drove home. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who understood me like that. I feel as if my life had been changed. Didn’t she impress you at all?”

“She’s very good-looking,” Roxanne said, wanting to give her full marks where she could. “I really don’t understand economics, politics …”

“Do you want to clerk in a drugstore all your life?”

“Might deliver mail for a change,” Roxanne admitted. “One way of paying the rent is much the same as another—oh, not if you’re educated, I guess.”

“But it doesn’t pay anything. You can’t do what you want to do without money. And if Allen hadn’t thought of it, you never would have applied for a Canada Council.”

“I don’t really want that grant.”

“Oh, if only you’d listened tonight, you’re doing just what she said we do, backing away from money because it’s power, and we’re all terrified of power. Money’s turned Mike into a human being; he doesn’t have to pretend to have power he doesn’t have. With money, Roxanne, you’d be somebody.”

Roxanne remembered a saying she’d learned from a black friend in jail: “I know I’m somebody because God didn’t make no junk.” It was not a time to tell Alma about it.

“That doesn’t matter to me either.”

“What does matter to you?” Alma demanded.

“You, the boys, friends, my tape recorder …”

“Yes, but beyond that … there is something.”

Alma wanted to look for it in other lectures, readings, parties. She began to send out manuscripts of her stories and drop hints about her writing until someone suggested that she give a reading. Smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear, she said modestly, “Oh, I haven’t published anything.” At the end of that evening Alma was explaining to Roxanne that their trouble was defining themselves in male images of success, like being published or performed, when the real value lay in the work itself and sharing it with its real audience.

Alma had time during the day to get on with her writing. Roxanne rarely looked at her wall, out too late at night to get up early in the morning, loath to let Alma venture out too often on her own.

“You’re bored with a lot of this, aren’t you?” Alma asked suddenly.

Roxanne tried to protest.

“No, but you’ve heard it all before, the theories about why we’re not better than we are. It isn’t that you don’t understand.”

“I’ve never been very good at the theory,” Roxanne said. “I guess what I’ve always liked about women’s liberation is the women.”

Alma let out a shout of laughter. Then she looked seriously at Roxanne and said, “You’re so honest and so smart and so good, why are you living with me?”

A thing begins for any number of reasons, from the way a nipple tugs at a blouse to on whose lap you happen to be sitting on the way home; a thing goes on for only one reason: love. Roxanne was as sure Alma loved her as she was that she loved Alma. Roxanne would stay through times of jealousy, times of being unable to work, times of long and stupid misunderstandings as long as she loved and was loved, which was the hope of happiness.

“Did you ever go to a consciousness-raising session?” Alma asked.

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“What I didn’t like,” Roxanne said, “was people talking about their childhoods: toilet training, sibling rivalry, mother fixations, father fixations. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t have a family to make me unhappy or a course to teach me everyone is unhappy.”

“I had a lovely childhood,” Alma said. “You’re so silent about yours, I imagine unspeakable things.”

“It was very ordinary, except I was raised by a series of people. If I think back, I tend to feel sorry for them. It can’t be easy to try to raise kids you don’t love. What puzzled me—you always hear people complain that women talk about nothing but their babies—these women never did. They didn’t want to talk about anybody but themselves.”

“Well, that’s liberating.”

Roxanne sentimentalized motherhood. She realized that she missed Tony and Victor far more than Alma did. Roxanne encouraged herself to go on feeling their absence as a test of how genuinely she loved them and wanted them in her life. But of course, women shouldn’t be more interested in their children than they were in themselves. And those meetings, for some of them, were the only time in the week they could let themselves come first.

“Only naturally very self-centered and selfish women make really good mothers,” Alma explained. “Kids improve them, but they survive. I, for instance, couldn’t have given you up for the boys. If I’d been able to, Tony and Victor would owe me my life. Owing me theirs is enough of a burden.”

“What I mainly didn’t like about the group was that you weren’t in it.”

“I keep thinking how brave you must have been to go to all these things alone. I wouldn’t dare.”

Roxanne didn’t say that she went alone precisely to be alone, to have an excuse not to be with the woman she was supposed to be with. When Roxanne finally had the courage to end that relationship, she promised herself that she’d never again get involved with anyone who wasn’t bigger, smarter, and saner than she was. She did not tell Alma such things, not so much out of fear of her jealousy as out of embarrassment, Roxanne seemed to herself nearly retarded in learning both how to love and whom to love. Alma would have a good deal less respect for Roxanne’s experience if she knew how superficial and negative a lot of it had been.

Alma had three rejection slips in one day.

“You’re probably sending them to the wrong magazines,” Roxanne suggested.

“A good story is a good story,” Alma said glumly.

“But magazines appeal to different sorts of people. I can see that every day.”

“Only a hack would think about the audience!”

In the next ten days she had four more.

“Don’t most writers have drawers full of them?” Roxanne asked.

“If they send off the stuff they wrote at fourteen. At thirty-three, I’m either a professional or a failure.”

Alma had such confidence in her own negative judgments Roxanne couldn’t see how to quarrel with them. She certainly was no judge herself. For her what Alma wrote was lies, of the sort Roxanne wished she didn’t tell. Alma’s characters had only those sorts of bad feelings anyone would be expected to have, and they seemed as good at lying to themselves as they were to each other. But all the stories Roxanne read did that. There was no more point in finding fault with it than with complaining that all violins were playing the same note. Probably what Roxanne mistrusted in Alma’s work editors would see as strength, and what Roxanne loved, the quirky speed of it, hurrying when you expected leisure, taking emotional corners on two wheels, counted as a fault.

When the tenth rejection slip arrived, Alma said, “Okay, that’s that.”

“What’s what?”

“I quit,” Alma said. “The one thing too long a marriage taught me is not to stick at what I’m bad at.”

“But don’t you like to write?”

“Not if it turns out to be just scribbling,” Alma said. “I’ve decided you’d better be the genius. I’m going to get a job.”

“At last!” Allen said.

Luckily Allen’s gallery owner friend, Dale Easter, was still looking for someone or again looking for someone, and he agreed at once to try Alma out.

“But it’s amazing—I get either a salary or a commission, whichever is greater, and the paintings he’s selling are worth thousands and thousands of dollars. I could make real money.”

The names Alma reeled off meant nothing to Roxanne, and the calculations of possible income meant not much more. There was one problem.

“I can always ask Mother and Dad to take them when I have to go out of town, but, when it’s just an evening …”

“I’ll be home,” Roxanne assured her.

“And if one of them is sick?”

“I can be sick, too,” Roxanne assured her.

“What I’m thinking is maybe you shouldn’t work,” Alma said. “Maybe you should stay home.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“We mustn’t get into roles,” Alma said. “Do you think money could turn me into a bull dyke?”

“So quit your job the minute the boys get back,” Pierre advised.

“No,” Roxanne said. “Alma doesn’t want to support me.”

“Why not?”

“It offends her femininity.”

“What about yours?” Pierre demanded.

“Well, I don’t really want to be a wife,” Roxanne said. “Oh, it’s all right for you—it’s kinky.”

“Why has the holy light gone out of inferiority? The only other person I know who understands it is Joseph, but what can he do with it, being heterosexual, except feel guilty?”

“Is he going back to teaching next month?”

“He says so. He says he’s got a new tranquilizer that would have kept Hitler and Jesus at their rightful trades. He says it’s peace without its price. I don’t think he’ll last a month. It’s crucifixion year for him … for all of you.”

“We aren’t going to die together,” Roxanne said.

“No,” Pierre said. “Carlotta thinks she has time still to commit a well-thought-out suicide. She’s favoring a menopausal gesture at the moment, but sometimes she realizes her life is a suicidal gesture.”

“Is she doing your portrait?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why,” Roxanne said.

“Because I’m here,” Pierre said with an artful smile.

“I wonder if she’ll do Alma.”

“She’d kill her first,” Pierre said.

“Still?”

“She blames Alma for Mike, says she ruined him as an artist. Now he can’t think of anything but money. What’s more interesting, I want to know, except sex? Mike could never bore me.”

“Alma likes Mike a lot better now,” Roxanne said.

“Carlotta’s perverse. She’s only really interested in impossible, unhappy people. She told me sex with a woman is so normal it’s boring. I expect she was referring to you?”

“I expect,” Roxanne admitted, and sighed.

“I’m very loyal. I’ve thought you’d be marvelous in bed—not with me, of course. Alma’s color is always so good.”

“I am,” Roxanne said, “but it doesn’t stay interesting unless you’re in love or at least obsessed. Carlotta was just curious—and jealous.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I’m always curious, and I like Carlotta, and I’m sorry she’s so jealous of Alma that she can’t love her. It’s more convenient for me, but I’m sorry.”

“I want to trade shirts,” Pierre said suddenly.

“All right.”

“You’re a little too severe in that, and I’m a bit too limp in this.”

They traded shirts and kissed each other on each cheek, a salutation and farewell they used only when they were alone together.

“I’ll be glad when the boys get home and you have more time to yourself. Alma’s been very possessive of you this summer.”

“I’ve got used to missing them,” Alma said. “I wonder if giving up children is like giving up smoking. Gradually you find other things you persuade yourself you like even better.”

Roxanne expected Alma to propose a last week of evenings at meetings, readings, dances, but, though she didn’t have regular hours at the gallery, Alma was spending days there to become familiar with both the inventory and the procedures. She was ordinarily tired at night, as Roxanne had been all summer. Roxanne cooked dishes Pierre had taught her, too disguised and delicate for the boys, and they drank wine and sat long at the table.

“You don’t ask for enough,” Alma said one night. “This is what you’ve wanted to do all summer.”

“When you do. I like to do what you want to do.”

“I don’t pay attention to whether you’re tired or needing to work or to be alone. I do pay attention to you but not to what you need.”

“I like it.”

“But you must take up your own space. I can’t give it to you. I can’t even think about it.”

“I have what I need,” Roxanne said, and it was not exactly a lie since there was the room in the basement which maybe now she really could move into.

“I bought something for you today.”

“Show me?”

“There in the box on the chair.”

Roxanne expected to find something Alma thought particularly showed off her height, her coloring, her breasts, something Roxanne would admire her in. The shirt and pants she took out of the box were not Alma’s size.

“Try them on,” Alma said.

“For me?”

“That’s what I said.”

They were sheer, in greens as near to yellow as maple tassels in the spring, as dark as hemlock.

“You are a flower, an extraordinary flower,” Alma said. “That’s my first paycheck. How would you like to be a kept woman?”

Oh, Alma, I will go through all the fantasies with you, make all the mistakes, be your flower, your fool, your sister. I am afraid. I am often afraid for you, of you, but, yes, I’ll try anything that might possibly make us happy. There is a point.

“Answer me!” Alma commanded.

They made love with an intensity that they hadn’t risked all summer, as if they had been too fearful of their freedom to use it, seized it now only because they would very soon have to give it up. Roxanne worked the better on her wall for remembering the night they had begun making love in the dining room, continued in the living room, on the stairs, on the upstairs hall carpet. In their room at night, she felt not confined so much as gathered up there, an armload of flowers in the vase of their love.

In the first month the boys were home, Alma chose to work more often at night than Roxanne imagined was absolutely necessary. Alma’s sons got on her nerves.

“Victor, this is not Arizona. This is Vancouver. You wear shoes to the dinner table without having to be asked.”

“Tony, if you say ‘Dad says’ one more time, I’ll think you had a lobotomy while you were there and haven’t a thought left of your own.”

“What’s a lobotomy?” Victor asked.

“It’s an operation that turns a person into a parrot,” Alma answered, glaring at her older son.

He glared back. Alma’s sarcasm was never as effective with Tony as it was with Victor, who was bright enough to get the message, mostly good-humored enough to put up with it. Tony was more like Alma, able to dish it out without being able to take it.

Roxanne had expected the boys to make comparisons between their father and herself, but for them she wasn’t in it. The rivalry was between the two parents, leaving Roxanne usefully on the sidelines, far less resentful of their new loyalty to their father than she’d expected to be, surprised at the depth of resentment it could stir in Alma.

Because they knew the brand names of mobile homes and swimming pools, Alma complained that Mike had turned them into a couple of rotten little Americans. She didn’t like the clothes he’d bought them and was not reassured by Victor’s protest: “But that’s what everybody wears.”

“It was hot,” Tony said defensively, but unlike Victor, he didn’t wear his Arizona shirts again.

“Do you still want to help me with my workroom?” Roxanne asked him to help him out of one of his sulks.

“Oh, yeah, sure. I guess so.”

Once they were working together, Roxanne teaching Tony her system of filing tapes, he dropped his guard and began to talk and ask questions.

“Dad says sooner or later you’ve got to figure out art is a hobby. When you do that, you can take real work seriously. Is that how you feel? Is this a hobby?”

“I guess so,” Roxanne said.

“You don’t want to be famous or make a lot of money or anything like that?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not serious,” Tony concluded, but his voice tipped uncertainly.

“I’m serious about sound—but not that other.”

“I’m not serious about anything, not about my violin or drawing or anything.”

“I keep forgetting how old you are.”

“Twelve.”

“Ah, look, here’s what I wanted to find,” Roxanne said, holding up a tape. “It’s my terminal tape. I’ve got the airport, the bus depot, the docks, the train stations. I never did get a graveyard, someone digging, the coffin going into the grave.”

“Can you get permission to record something like that?”

“You have to wait for a friend to die.”

“Ghoulish!” Tony said with approval. “Is it on the map?”

“No, but I want to put it there.”

The map was going through an awkward stage, thick enough with pictures and instructions to look as if it were about to molt.

“I think making it worse will make it better,” Roxanne decided.

Victor was only intermittently interested in the map, more because he didn’t want to be excluded than because he was drawn to it. It was far more important for him to reestablish himself in the neighborhood, greatly helped by a new ten-speed, given to him not by his grandfather, but by his father. Roxanne was as lenient with him as she could be about times for coming home. He began to take advantage of her willingness to stretch ten minutes to an hour, and finally, she had to tell him, if he couldn’t show up on time, he couldn’t go out after supper.

“You’re not my mother!”

“No, your mother would take the strap to you.”

Victor stayed in, playing the TV in the living room at top volume while Roxanne and Tony worked in the basement. The next morning Roxanne found “FUCK” printed in a small, childish hand in a dozen places on the map, mostly in park and beach areas where there was still room to write. She wished she’d thought of it herself and told Victor so.

Gradually, as they settled into a routine again, Alma was more willing to come home to them, but she was asking something new of the boys; they had to be interesting if they wanted her attention. Otherwise, she either talked with Roxanne or was abstracted. It was more difficult for Victor, who was at a riddle stage and found it hard to remember if he’d asked more than once. But as with so many things Alma did essentially to suit herself, this improved not only the conversation at dinner but the boys’ dispositions. And Roxanne liked better winning Alma’s attention than being burdened with it as she sometimes had been during the summer.

“Dale Easter is a very interesting man,” Alma said. “I’d like to ask him for dinner. We could have Allen and Pierre, but I’d rather we tried just ourselves and sent Vic and Tony to my parents.”

Allen had said Dale was very elusive about his personal life and his background. No one seemed to know where he or his money came from, where he lived, with whom.

“Oh, he can be met in the steam bath, but he’s not there every night.”

At work Alma couldn’t get past the impression Dale tried to give everyone—that he didn’t really have a personal life, that he didn’t really live anywhere. He traveled and worked.

“You listen so well,” she said to Roxanne, “he might talk.”

In type not unlike Allen, though more expensive, ambitious, and mistrustful, Dale Easter gave a first impression of nearly ineffectual diffidence. It gave him time to listen and to look before the snob or bully in the person Dale was meeting discovered that he responded neither to condescension nor threats. It made him good with buyers and artists alike, each of whom was gradually persuaded that, however Dale Easter operated in general, in this particular transaction he was an ally.

He came to dinner not as boss but as friend, and the first thing he did was admire the paintings in the living room, most of which were early Carlottas. There was one architectural drawing of Mike’s and an acrylic seascape by John Korner.

“I wish I could handle some of these locals,” Dale said with a wistfulness Roxanne didn’t believe. “Korner is an incredible draftsman. He knows how to draw … but he lives in Vancouver. I told you Allen once asked me if I’d at least look at pictures of local sculpture—look, sure, but what could I do with it?”

More by tone than by any particular comment Dale was able to suggest it was the philistine world of international buyers rather than the local artists who were at fault, yet there was nothing he could do except, just by being in Vancouver himself, put it quietly on the map. Someday people would come to Vancouver not just to buy European and American art.

“Even now, people are buying Group of Seven, and Emily Carr just had to die to be famous. Look at the price of her paintings! Eventually eventually …”

Roxanne then caught only scraps of conversation as she finished getting the dinner. She was glad it was late enough in the year for them to be eating by candlelight. Properly on Alma’s right, Dale could sit with his back to Roxanne’s wall. But even in candlelight, he noticed it.

“What’s this? What’s this? Is there an overhead light? Do you mind?”

He stood in front of it for several minutes while the soup got cold.

“Where on earth did this come from?”

“It’s something I’m doing,” Roxanne said. “It’s not really to look at; it’s to read, like a score.”

“It’s a sound map,” Dale said. “The only other one I’ve seen—not nearly as elaborate or interesting as this was in Bonn, Germany, last year at the Beethoven festival. What’s this for? When is it going to happen? Where?”

“Oh, it’s only something for Vancouver, someday.”

“Has Allen seen this wall?”

“Oh, yes,” Roxanne said.

“Well, why didn’t he tell me about it?”

“It was in Vancouver,” Roxanne said.

“Touché.”

“Allen’s helped Roxanne apply for a Canada Council to put on some part of this anyway.”

“If it happens,” Dale said, “I want to help, all right? Anyway, put King Gallery on your map and make it sound however you like.”

The Canada Council turned Roxanne’s project down on the grounds that she hadn’t yet done anything to prove herself capable, no public concert or production of any kind. Roxanne was suddenly indignant, for she had put on magnificent sound happenings, experiences, whatever anyone wanted to call them, a couple of times a week for years in the basement of the record shop. That they had not been public was not her fault. Her one audience had called the police and could hardly be asked to testify to her years of work.

“So put them on again and make them public,” Allen said, “and then apply again next year.”

“Maybe Dale would let you use the big gallery,” Alma suggested.

“I thought he didn’t want the public in and out,” Roxanne said.

“He seemed interested enough so that we could ask.”

“It’s impossible,” Roxanne said. “I’d need a minimum of ten tape recorders and twenty speakers.”

“Surely you can rent that sort of thing,” Allen said.

“With what?”

“With Alma’s money, and she’ll pay for the advertising, too. Charge admission and make something over expenses for next time.”

“Who’d come?” Roxanne asked.

“How much money are we talking about?” Alma asked.

“Women aren’t supposed to fear failure,” Pierre said. “They’re supposed to fear success.”

“Well?” Alma said, facing Roxanne.

“All right,” Roxanne answered without any clear emotional sense of what she was agreeing to.

It would have been easier if Allen hadn’t been sent east on a job that would keep him away for well over a month. Once Dale Easter had agreed to let them have the space, he did not go on to offer the kind of advice and support Allen could only occasionally phone in from Ottawa or Halifax or Montreal.

Roxanne had no trouble renting the equipment she needed, but she simply had no idea how to go about getting an audience. When Allen shouted long distance, “Send out invitations,” she didn’t know who should receive them. Alma didn’t think stealing the King Gallery’s mailing list would be useful, since only about a dozen of the addresses were inside British Columbia. Her mother’s address book, though appropriately local, would not turn up anyone either interested or willing.

Joseph offered to get his students to print not only invitations but posters, and he seemed to know which stores would accept and display advertising.

“Get one up in the store where you used to work,” he suggested.

“Are you kidding?” Roxanne asked.

“No,” Joseph said, and to prove his point, he delivered a poster there himself and stayed until he saw it displayed.

Joseph also made himself available to help set up the machines. With his help and Tony’s, Roxanne could save some time for a kind of rehearsal in the afternoon before the event began. She was not trying to do anything very elaborate or tricky. Once the machines were started, there was nothing else for her to do. But she did want to use the space of the gallery well, speakers placed, volumes adjusted properly. There were no chairs. People would mill around or sit on the floor—if anyone came.

Allen sent a telegram to the gallery, which arrived just before eight o’clock. The only people there were Carlotta, Pierre, Alma and the boys, Joseph and his family. Even Dale Easter hadn’t been able to make it. Just as it looked very much like a family affair, half a dozen strangers turned up, young, polite, interested in the speakers and the machines. Then a man in his seventies with a long wool scarf and a loud voice introduced himself to everyone in the room as if they all should know who he was and be very pleased to see him. Finally the music critic from the Vancouver Sun appeared.

“This Allen Dent’s friend’s concert?”

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

“Well … whatever. No place to sit?”

“The floor.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you’re out of pocket.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You look seedy,” Roxanne said.

“I’ve found my first lump.”

“Where?”

“In my throat,” Pierre said.

“You’re joking?”

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

“Allen’s been away too long.”

“Do you think he lies to me?”

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

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

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

“He leaves me all the time.”

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

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

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

“No,” Roxanne said.

“Is Allen in Toronto?”

“I’m not sure. Why?”

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

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

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

Roxanne handed her the paper.

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

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

“Homosexual,” Alma said.

“Is that against the law?”

“No,” Alma said, “not for adults.”

“Was he taking pictures?” Tony asked.

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

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

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

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

“Allen!”

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

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

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

“He’s never out,” Alma said.

“I’ll go over,” Roxanne said.

“Won’t you eat something first?”

“No.”

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

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

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

“Pierre? Pierre?”

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

“Have you called the police?” he asked.

“Of course not!”

“They have to be notified.”

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

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

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

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

He went to the phone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Make love to me,” Alma said.

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

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

“What are you talking about?” Alma demanded.

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

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

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

“Is killing yourself against the law?”

“Not exactly,” Roxanne said.

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“We’re never going to see him again.”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t see how I can.”

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