“I’m sorry,” I say. “I care very much, I care very terribly for you but we simply can’t get involved that way now. We have the tour to go on and things to see and things to do and certain responsibilities to fulfill; later will be time enough for all of this and besides you know I love you.” But it has been the wrong thing to say because she tosses her cigarette to the ground with an anguished expression and caves against me, her hands reaching to meet around my back.
“Oh, Michael,” she says, “oh, Michael, why did we go on this stupid tour anyway? We could have been back at the hotel making love to each other and everything would be beautiful, but instead we have to come out and see this and I don’t even want to. I don’t even care about it. It was all your idea, I’d rather be at the hotel. Couldn’t we give it up and go back?”
“We already paid.”
“We can turn the tickets in or go another time. Oh, Michael, I hate to see us fight like this; we’re all we’ve got.”
“Yes,” I say and stroke her hair, shining dimly against my palm. “Yes, I know, but we’re way out of town now and the bus is the only way back. I wouldn’t know how to get back by public transportation and we really can’t afford taxis.” I know the route to midtown very well, of course; it is engraven upon every cell from years of solitary buses to the center, but to concede this would be, of course, to lose the argument and I do not want to lose it. I am strangely fascinated by the prospect of seeing my old home once again and the fact that neither the girl nor anyone on the tour knows my relationship to it is additionally titillating; it is as if I am walking around with some kind of strange power, a total precognition which renders me superior to them and although there is a kind of excitement in this there is pain also because they do not know the cost of these rooms. But I cannot reflect on this at the present time, all that I say to her is, “Let’s go inside again. You know I love you, you know how I feel about you. I could spend all of my life in bed with you and not even find the beginning. But we came out for this tour and we bought the tickets and we ought to see it. I understand it’s very interesting.”
“That’s your trouble,” she says. “That’s the trouble with all of you, you say that you could spend the rest of your life in bed with me. How about not in bed with me, just talking and being together, would that mean anything? Isn’t there anything but sex for you?” And I understand finally that I have reached very deep water, but at the same moment she gives me the reverse of the exiting tug and thus indicates that she will go back to the house now. I decide to say nothing—anything I say will only complicate matters impossibly—and allow her to lead me back, our feet lifting small scuffs of moisture and sand into the air, a feeling of heaviness and oppression in the climate. When I was much younger I believed that the weather was somehow personal, that it was contrived only to afflict me and in truth I have never lost this assumption. Being back at my own home has only reconstituted the obsession. I warn myself to stay as calm as possible, there is every indication that this may be an emotional day and little good will accrue from expending feeling easily or for triviality.
We go back into the house. The tourists have moved, from the vestry and into the living room and are standing behind the large gate shutting off its contents from visitors. The guide is in their center and is saying nothing, apparently they have been waiting for us, the laggards, to rejoin them and there is a good deal of pique on some faces as we try to huddle into them inconspicuously. A heavy, red-faced woman shielded by sunglasses and a handkerchief held against her cheek is particularly enraged, she mutters something to me as I brush against her and then bends to whisper into the ear of an albino boy standing at her side, apparently her son. “No consideration,” I hear her say. “They have absolutely no consideration, but then these people never do.”
I would, if it were feasible, reply to her at that point, tell her that in the most essential sense if I were not there there would be no tour, but I decide not to; at the same time the girl’s hands fold into mine again, almost trustingly, and I am overcome by such sentiment at this sudden admission of her dependence that I am momentarily incapable of speech. And then, too, the guide has begun his speech.
“This is the living room,” he says. “It is an excellent example of its type, both accessible and comfortable for the occupants, and the furniture, restored to its original polish, is extremely practical both in terms of cost and convenience. The family used to spend their evenings here, watching television, reading, and occasionally playing board games such as Monopoly, Parcheesi and chess. This was a common way of passing the time during this period although they had other activities as well.”
I look intensely at the living room. It is somehow comforting to see everything as it was so long ago; I have not been here for quite a long time, of course—it is hard for me in my blanket of buried recollection to know exactly, but it is probably twenty years—but everything seems the same. There is a large, reddish couch which is backed up against the far wall, to its sides are pictures and adjacent to this on the other wall is the small bulk of the television set and a straight chair. In the center is the dining table and there are a couple of other simple chairs scattered in informal positions. The flowers on the dining table are artificial, of course, but look very well for all of that, being a cluster of pink and blue which has the aspect of human flesh.
“Although the room is a common example of its type,” the guide says, “it is extremely well preserved and possesses to the highest degree that combination of functionalism and anonymity which was the keystone of this culture. Observe the living room closely, if you will. It appears spare, clean, reasonable, as if it were tenanted by sensible people who spent a good deal of their time examining their lives and trying to make some sense of them, as if it were lived in by people who devoted a good portion of their conversation to considerations of their mortality, their penalties, the ultimate meaning of what they would have to eventually understand or die. Yet the fact is that this room entertained almost no such thoughts and that its occupants were often not only unaware of these considerations but felt that the room—being ‘pleasant’ and ‘bright’ and ‘airy’—was a good source of ‘relaxation’ geared to take them away from exactly those questions which I have raised. They thought, in short, of this living room as a kind of respite from the torment and considerations of their ordinary lives, and who among us is qualified to understand that irony or to comment upon it? There are no easy answers, as any consideration of this Westfield restoration will show us, and I think that you will find this increasingly broadening as we proceed.”
The guide grins when he finishes this sentence and I am aware for the first time that I do not like him very much. He is a small man, beautifully proportioned so that there is no hope of ever referring to him as a dwarf, but his features are even uglier upon inspection and there is a kind of whimsical light in his eyes which indicates that he has certain thoughts on his job and on the restoration site that his canned speeches will not permit him to concede. Our eyes meet for an instant as he passes them flickeringly over us and I feel a fear that he might have recognized me, but then they turn away, passing others, and I realize that this is only my own discontent and insecurity I am feeling and that the guide, actually, has no idea who any of us are but is merely trying to do his job in as reasonable and controlled a fashion as possible and is probably interested in nothing so much as his mid-day break or a time after that when he can go back to his own furnished rooms and, by swaddling himself in liquor, immerse himself in his own sense of restoration. As I think this I decide that I have no reason to dislike him, yet the response remains, nestling uncomfortably in my gut. I understand that I will have to work all of this out sometime during the day and this intimation fills me with gloom, not so much because I am afraid of knowledge as because I am very tired and interested only in sensations at the present time, having no capacity whatsoever for abstraction. It occurs to me from some abscess of memory that this is an old problem.
“The tenants in this ‘living’ room were thus not so much ‘living’ as merely ‘existing,’” the guide says, running a small hand over the gate, “and indeed some of the eminent philosophers and writers of their time took this one step further to say that actually this was not the case either but that they were in all likelihood ‘dying.’ This is something worth thinking about and we will touch on the subject again, but as more information comes to bear we will be in a better position to appreciate this.” He shrugs and makes a tilting gesture with his palms toward the ceiling. “Shall we go now?” he says.
“I have a question,” one of the tourists says. He is a fat man carrying an umbrella looped over his right wrist, splendid mustaches flaring, an air of piggish certainty caving in over his eyes and down toward the duller planes of his cheeks. Surrounded as he is by others it is hard to gauge his weight, but surely he is massive, he talks in short puffs and with that kind of portentousness which men almost always assume when they realize that they are potential heart cases and thus uniquely vulnerable at any given time, yet are not willing to do anything to deal with the more pressing medical certainties underneath. “In fact, I have a couple of questions.”
“Well, yes,” the guide says, “that’s my job. I want to emphasize that I am happy to entertain your questions at any point of the tour; this is an important museum and the job of the restoration is to make its contents and meaning as apparent to as many people as possible. The cause is not only educational but cautionary, and how can we do both if we do not know what is on your minds?” I feel that this is very nice of the guide although I suspect that he is only following protocol in saying this, and that if there were complaints to his superiors about a failure to answer questions, his job or at least his actual tenure might be in some jeopardy. I too have worked in civil service at some time in my past, I recall, and know of the tense ambiguities of the position, the constant conflict between guilt and revulsion which so undermines the civil servant and renders him open to cheap satire and burlesque.
“Now then,” the fat man says officiously, “who lived here? You keep on telling us about the ‘Westfields’ but who, actually, were they?”
“That is a good question,” the guide says. “I was going to delay this information until we came into the rear hallway, which was the place in which all family portraits were hung, and I would at that time have given an ample explanation of the biographies and relationships of the members of the family, but there is no harm in telling you this now and it will, perhaps, give you a better appreciation of the points of interest in the kitchen, which we would reach first, as well as the essential mystery of the dining room. The Westfields were a family of four, composed of Jonathan Westfield, a salesman of minor accomplishments, his wife Josephine who was a part-time schoolteacher in the city civil service of her time, and their two children, Michael and Katherine. Michael was the older by three years and both of them came relatively late in life to the Westfields who were, respectively, forty-five and thirty-eight when their son was born. Both of them married relatively late as well and for a while lived in a small furnished apartment in the more central city, but after the birth of their son, they decided that they needed ‘more space’ and accordingly rented the home which has become this museum. The relationships between the Westfields are surely interesting and surrounded by many comedic aspects, but there is so much of them which we cannot know because it is buried so far back in time and because relationships, in any event, are very tricky things to understand. We do, however, have certain facts verified by biographical data and correspondence and they can be rapidly summarized as incontrovertible. Incidentally, these materials are on view in the attic, which will be the next-to-last stop of our tour and surely one of the high points, although the footing up there is extremely dangerous and only volunteers should come on up.”
“Tell me those facts,” the fat man says. His eyes are more and more possessed of a certain pleading intensity and at the same time the fingers of the girl dig into my palm sharply and I inhale in a rapid squeak, which is particularly embarrassing as those eyes turn toward me. I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say. The fat man turns away in disgust.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I say, bending down to whisper this into her ear. “It upsets me and we’re in company now.” She shakes her head rapidly, indicating that she will not listen, and it occurs to me that there are intricacies to our relationship which are extraordinarily dangerous and which I should familiarize myself with before proceeding any further. But this is not the time, of course, and besides I am very interested in everything that is going on outside: I am interested in the guide, interested in the living room, interested in the fat man’s questions and exceedingly anxious to hear the answers. It is as if the guide, by laying out the facts of the relationship, will illuminate certain problems I have had for a long time and by that illumination make them disappear. Although I have never undertaken psychoanalysis I have done an inordinate amount of reading in the field and the key to most modern theory, as far as I can surmise, appears to be that to totally realize and apprehend one’s problems is to vanquish them, and there is nothing that I am more interested in doing at the present time since my life, obviously, has become a very difficult, complex one. What I want to do is to kiss the girl and show her in that kiss both affection and dismissal, but I know that I do not have the poise or facility to bring it off. Perhaps if I had already possessed these facts things might have been different.
“The relationships,” the guide says. “Yes, of course I will try to summarize them. We are talking of a family of four, which means that in geometrical constancy there are ten or twelve possible relationships between the members of this family or some part of them: the relationship between Mrs. Westfield and her daughter, for instance, the relationship between daughter and son, father and son, father and daughter, father, daughter and son considered as a trinity, son, mother and father and so on and so forth. This is one of the most interesting facets of the Westfield project: the way in which an almost total picture of life in the period can be built up from the simple analysis of these relationships. But at the moment let me say that Mr. Westfield married entirely too late in life to bring to his wife or children that particularity of understanding or relaxation of perspective which is the key to carrying off relationships successfully. In the place of these missing elements he substituted compassion, but that is often not enough, not when you are dealing with highly volatile human beings and a great deal of history. Through most of his life Mr. Westfield routinely expected that he would never get married, and when he did, it was with a kind of bemused surprise. Some expert scholars have advanced the interesting theory that Westfield spent all of his marital life in a continual reflex of shock and that his failure to ever deeply accept the nature of his condition may have contributed to so many of those difficulties which have been later documented. Of course Westfield did not himself feel this way, nor would he understand what we are saying. He felt that he was a ‘good husband’ and a ‘good father’ and so indeed he was in all of those terms of reference which we would care, as strangers, to bring to him. He committed no adultery, made a fair living, took his family on trips, and for a man whose identity had been based upon solitude for forty years or more, he did a noteworthy job of shifting his entire self-image to that of a ‘family man,’ so much so that he could not, after a while, think of himself as being distinguishable and discrete, as apart from Mrs. Westfield and the children. Of course he had no friends other than through his professional duties, which makes of this rather a moot point. All of his free time was spent with his family or trying to get back to them.”
“I don’t understand this,” the albino child says suddenly in a high, whining, rather dreadful voice. “I don’t understand any of this and I don’t like it; it has nothing to do with me, why did we come here? I’m bored, it’s all too terrible, let’s go somewhere and get an ice cream cone or something else.” I would judge his age to be eight or nine although his rhetoric is obviously that of a child far advanced beyond his chronology. On the other hand, there is a certain irritative note to his voice not characteristic of children beyond babyhood.
At his outburst the guide pauses, of course, and turns toward him with a faintly embarrassed look, once again making that gesture of the tilt of palms. Some sun comes through the skylight, flickers off him, and in that moment of attitude he looks almost saintly, subsuming all knowledge, all rationalization into that posture. But like all things, this passes, and his voice is thin and querulous when he says, “Who said that?”
The woman with the child becomes still and grim and it is apparent that she would try to let the moment pass and deal with it later. But it is not to be, for the girl with me suddenly takes her hand from mine and pointing a finger says, “Her child said that. He was the one creating a disturbance.”
The mother gives the girl a look of hatred which passes and flickers on to me and I feel such a surge of rage and pain that at this moment I could commit sheer murder for shame. But the girl adds defiantly, “She’s got no right to take a child here unless she can keep him under control; we’re all very interested in what’s going on here and how can we be expected to appreciate it if this is going on?” And I feel a retaliatory surge of affection for her so enormous that I slide my hand down her arm and squeeze her wrist gently, trying to show her that I agree with what she is saying after all. She shakes her head and subsides against me, breathing rapidly, and I realize that this has been more of a strain on her than I would be able to understand.
“Well,” the woman says. “Well, we’d leave right this minute if there were a bus going back, you’d better believe me, but we just have to stay now.”
“I do think the child may be too young for this tour, madam,” the guide says. “As a general rule we do not accept people under fourteen, we feel that they do not have the maturity or perspective to appreciate the exhibits in their truest light. It was only as a favor to you as a matter of fact that we permitted the child to come along, but if you find yourself unable to deal with this—”
“Don’t like it!” the albino mutters, driven to some high petulance by the discussion. “It’s boring! Let’s go somewhere, Mama, and get out of here.”
“Well, listen now,” a slender, very well-kept young man to my rear says, “I don’t think there’s any reason for this at all. The child is only a child after all, he can’t be expected to understand all of this as quickly as we can take it in. You ought to show a little patience. We’ll go for some ice cream very soon,” he says to the child and I understand then, with an intuition so enormous as to be beyond doubt, that he is the father of the child and husband of the woman but has hitherto stayed at a little remove from them because in normal circumstances he finds his life in their presence so intolerable that he finds every structured situation a divine order to be apart from them. It is impossible for me not to be sympathetic to this painful situation—so similar in ways to that of the Westfields and yet not a cold artifact, real and therefore intrusive—and yet my train of concentration toward the tour has been severely broken and I wonder if I will be able to get myself back into this again. It is a very tenuous thing after all, this concentration, and my mood of before has already begun to change slightly, to slide imperceptibly toward that sour and self-indulgent despair which I have known at so many other moments and which makes appreciation so difficult. I remember now the girl saying to me last evening as we huddled together in the spaces of the motel room, only our limbs touching, “Michael, you’re really hell sometimes. You’ve got to stop this sulking around because it’s like you’re doing it because you’ve got an audience and you wouldn’t have the nerve to do it if you were alone, and I simply can’t pay the price for your dramatics anymore. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right, Michael?” And at this remembrance I bend and put my lips against the surfaces of her ear, strangely hard, like pinpoints coming against me, and her odor swirls up to me as well, an odor compounded from sweat, semen, flowing, need, desire, disaster and such a multiplicity of other things that—ah!—I rebound from her like a spirit and put my arm against her waist, drawing her in. She says nothing but, by rubbing her head against my chest indicates that everything is once again momentarily well between us, and I feel myself dazzled at the complex of emotions I feel for this girl, the sheer liability of all of it. I have never been this way with myself and possibly what she said to me at some time in the past was true, that I make far more demands on others than myself because there is something inside that I am afraid of facing. It is a thing that I know I will probably have to face seriously in the near future. My career is at something of a crossroad.
Meanwhile, the flurry of dialogue around us has ceased and the albino child has curled himself into a small, quietly muttering bundle, against his mother’s right armpit. She stands otherwise to the side and slightly apart from him, the contact something which she is trying to make negligible, and the lines of her face are deep and straight with the pride that she is trying to assume. It is obviously a very difficult series of relationships from which the albino has emerged and which nurture him yet, and I find myself closing my eyelids—an old habit—against further consideration. The guide, meanwhile, with unusual aplomb, has settled himself into the couch, crossed his legs and leaned back.
“Well,” he says, “well, yes, let’s proceed then by all means. I’m sorry I can’t permit all of you to sit on the furniture while we talk but the mansion, despite the skill of its restoration, is in very fragile shape; excess use would certainly destroy everything here. Also, this room would not contain even half of you; I let myself through the gate because I can only lecture by facing all of you in the room but the room itself is restricted to personnel. I am truly sorry but then this is a difficult tour, you might be aware of some of the problems we’ve had in the past. What was the question again?”
“You were explaining the relationships,” the heavy man says, lifting the handle of his umbrella slightly off the wrist with his other hand. “You had just finished describing Mr. Westfield.”
“Oh, yes,” the guide says. “Oh, yes, that’s right. Actually I was not explaining the relationships—hell, that would, as I’ve already pointed out, be almost impossible in line with the geometrical multiplication—but giving you a brief detail of the actual personalities so that you might be able, in your own heads, to imagine the relationships which would proceed from these individuals. I was, in short, giving you a still-life. Incidentally, as we pass the courtesy shop on the way out—it is in the basement and you’re free to go into it at the end of the tour—you will be advised of the many fine souvenirs you can purchase there; there is a brief biography of the Westfields whose two hundred pages contains far more material than I can give you in this brief span, and there is also an excellent album of family photographs, still-lifes and backgrounds, which give an excellent picture of the way they lived. In addition, there are records which may be purchased as well as objects of other interest. So you can rest assured that although my information may be sketchy it can be easily supplemented at your leisure.” A certain plaintive note has come into the guide’s voice as he says this and I wonder whether this is communicable resentment or merely that variety of petulance which overtakes limited men when they perform jobs whose consequences they do not understand and whose actions seem pointless. I decide that at some point of natural breaking in the tour I will speak to the guide separately, try to understand him as I am trying to understand myself, and perhaps then all of these things, as well as his aspect, will fall into place for me.
“In any event,” the guide says, “we have discussed Mr. Westfield; let us consider Mrs. Westfield briefly now. She also married rather late, as I pointed out to you, but in her case the marriage may not have been as disastrous, as completely murderous, to the original personality as it was in the case of her husband. Like many women of her period, she never doubted from long before puberty the fact of her eventual marriage and motherhood, and indeed interpreted all of the events of her life as merely some kind of preparation and foreshadowing for this. Imagine her dismay, then, when at the age of thirty-one she found herself still unmarried and with no visible prospects; it was a condition which would have upset the serenity of a woman ten times more serene than Mrs. Westfield. Nevertheless, she persisted; although she had moved into a supervisory position in her teaching duties and although many of her best friends were also over thirty, not married and assuming that hardness and whimsicality of approach which forecasted great things from them in their jobs—although all of this was true, Mrs. Westfield, with that kind of blind faith which may be as close to the truly sacred as any of us may ever know, Mrs. Westfield continued to seek men through ‘mutual friends,’ through ‘adult resorts,’ through ‘cocktail parties’ and the other unique anachronista of the period, her features never raddled in public by any apperception of singlehood and doom, and then at one of the ‘cocktail parties’ she met Mr. Westfield himself, who had been induced to come there by a prospective customer and who could not resist the possibility of doing liquor and business together. Mr. Westfield was a used-car salesman. She was immediately attracted to him, observing him at great distance through a haze of bootleg liquor which had been subsumed into a very popular drink of the day which then and now is called the ‘martini.’ All of this occurred slightly before the repeal of ‘prohibition,’ a concept which, of course, will be a mystery to most of you here but which was one of the controlling aspects of the age in which Mr. and Mrs. Westfield grew to maturity, lending a fine air of illegality to even the simplest and most inevitable of human activities, an attitude which had many interesting implications in the conduct of these people several years or decades later.
“After some time, Mrs. Westfield found her pull to this good-looking stranger almost irresistible although, at the same time, there was a good deal of guilt attached to her feelings of attraction because it was then a popular theory that a righteous woman could undertake no feelings of sexual attraction, let alone passionate response, and yet Mrs. Westfield, as some of the documents in the attic will indicate, was a woman of almost unbearable sexuality, which led to a certain rapidity in her sexual dealings which of course had unfortunate consequences. At this time, however, she was a virgin which added, as you can imagine, not only to her guilt, but to that uneasy feeling of excitement which she interpreted as a distant warmth working through her thighs and toes and even parching the nipples of her invisible breasts, which were well concealed under several layers of the dress of that period.”
Once again, the girl’s hand slides into mine and this time she gives me several urgent presses of the palm, along with a certain tickling motion of the forefinger which, under other circumstances, I would find almost unbearably exciting, very much like the damned Mrs. Westfield trapped in the swirling of the cocktail party, trying to fasten some kind of sense of direction to herself so that she can garner an introduction. The girl, of course—it is remarkable how my prescience unfolds as this morning goes on; I feel as if all actions, all meaning are subsumed in my intuition and that I can assess the most hidden and therefore basic motives of individuals simply by considering them—is trying to tell me that she is thinking of us and is also trying to draw ironic contrast between the morals of Mrs. Westfield’s day and our liberated own, of the morals of a day in which women had to suppress all sexual consciousness as against the present time when it is understood by all people of some college background that women are as sexually needful and deserving as men and therefore can cut through all layers of potential hypocrisy toward a clear sense of understanding. She is trying to remind me that our own first meeting embraced none of these difficulties and that indeed we went to bed after knowing one another two hours as casually as Mr. Westfield, on the eve of his thirtieth anniversary, must have ground his limbs forth toward determined conclusion, but I find it difficult to respond to the girl’s pressure with my own enthusiasm, and for several reasons. A feeling of woe scuttles around in my center, familiar and accessible as the ravages of any orgasm, and I recollect that on this aforementioned evening when we went to bed after barely knowing one another, her arms were tight and still against my back as I entered her and her eyes held only a dim surprise as I wedged and sought her with my prick. Her grief, in its stillness and intensity, was as close to that of Mrs. Westfield’s as either of us may ever know, and it was difficult to deal with, difficult to take even in memory although she seems to have no such recollection at this moment. It is strange, of course, how my memory comes back to me when convenient; it is increasingly obvious to me that I know almost everything that I will ever need to know about this girl and the circumstances which brought us here, and yet I will myself not to think of it, being far more interested still in what is going on outside and knowing that any final key, any unlocking of understanding, must proceed from the events of this day and not in the reverse fashion. It occurs to me for the first time that I have a fair idea of what I am doing here and what strange fate has led the two of us into these rooms. Meanwhile, of course, the guide is still speaking and I attend to him, drawing the girl’s fingers over my thigh as I do so to show her that she is yet important to me. Her name I now remember is Joanne and I have known her for seven months and twenty-two days and I know, as well, exactly what her furnished apartment—in which I have spent so many nights—looks like, but of the circumstances of our relationship or the long span of time behind us I still know nothing and do not seek to. In fact, I would rather not know any of this although I am sure that I will. Her fingers claw at my pants absently, she rolls some of the fabric between her fingers, fashioning it into a phallic form, and does things with her fingernails, but I take neither caution nor pride from it.
“‘Lovely night isn’t it?’ Mr. Westfield said to her and she replied anxiously, ‘Yes, it is, yes, it is,’ hoping that he would not lose all interest in her and turn toward other occupations as, Mrs. Westfield remembered, so many men had in the past,” the guide is saying. Apparently during my preoccupation the matter of the introduction has been passed over and now I will never know exactly how Mr. and Mrs. Westfield met one another. This fills me with dismay because it is not one of the least things which I had hoped to learn from the tour, and the brochures and publicity guides about it which we had picked up from the desk of our motel had indeed made special mention of this as being a highlight of the tour; the Westfield home guide included a complete account of how these people had met and what had drawn them to one another. “Excuse me,” I say, breaking into the guide’s flat, meandering monologue. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear you. How did you say they met? Who introduced them?”
I realize that I am being stared at in an unkind fashion by all of my companions; not only the albino and his family, the fat man and a tiny woman who appears to be his wife, and the two teenagers in Edwardian dress are looking at me with loathing, but Joanne herself has turned, momentarily taking her palm from mine, to look at me with a hard questioning stare in which there is very little approbation. Nevertheless, I cannot allow my conspicuousness to divert me from what I deserve to know; this is an old problem which I will not allow to defeat me. “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I didn’t hear you but it’s my right to know, they promised it in the brochure and it’s an important part of the program. How did you say they met? What attracted Mr. Westfield to her?”
The guide licks his lips and swings his little legs uneasily on the edge of the couch. “I’ve already been into that,” he says. “I can’t start repeating everything, you know, if I do that we’ll never get anywhere. This is the basic tour, if you want a private showing you have to come out on Fridays and pay extra and take your own guide.”
“Please,” I say.
The guide settles back and looks at his fingernails, opens his mouth as if to say something and then closes it. This is so grotesque and out of kilter with his easy, careful motions hitherto that the albino laughs, a swift, high bark which is instantly stifled by his mother, and then as instantly begins to sob. “I’m sorry,” the guide says when the albino’s moans have faded into his mother’s skirt. “I’d like to tell you if I could. But this is a programmed speech, you know, we can’t be expected to remember everything and I don’t have the right cues. I lost them when I passed it. In order to tell you what you want to know, I’d have to go back to the beginning of the tour and start there. That wouldn’t be fair to anyone else.”
