“No, it wouldn’t.”
“Maybe you can infer it from what I’ll be saying later. And the tour goes on four days a week in the summer, every day except Friday, which is private. You could come back tomorrow and I’ll know it then. You just have to pay a little closer attention.”
“All right,” I say, now merely shamed because for the first time I have become visible among the tourists, have established myself no less than the albino or the fat man or Joanne as something to be reckoned with. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you anymore.”
“I don’t mind being bothered. That’s part of the job of the restoration staff, after all, to highlight the points of interest and be always ready to illumine them. But we can’t know everything.”
“Let him go on, Michael,” the girl whispers to me. “After all, what does it matter how they met each other? They’re both very dull people, they sound like the kind of people who would meet in the most boring, insignificant way possible and none of it matters. Besides, I’ll make it up to you later. I’ll make you think about other things.” And once again there is that quick, deadly pressure of the hand on which is super-imposed a wink which she gives me with her left eyelid, the right tilted off-angle to it to produce the kind of pleasing unevenness associated with a grand master painting. “I love you, you see,” she says irrelevantly.
“Well then,” the guide says, “after some time, having exchanged those simulated ‘biographies’ with which people of this unique period always felt they came to ‘know’ one another, Mr. and Mrs. Westfield began to feel more comfortable, by which it is meant only that Mrs. Westfield came to understand that she was safe in his presence and he that her occurrence did not of itself destroy his present and future prospects at this gathering. Indeed, under the influence of the liquor they had had and a certain restlessness which Mr. Westfield had been feeling for some time and which seemed to coalesce around the prospect of this woman who stood, hands folded before her, at his side, a certain quantity of another emotion began to intrude, one which made them suddenly restless as they considered whether or not they would leave this ‘cocktail party’ together and what would happen to them if they did.”
“This Mrs. Westfield,” one of the Edwardian-dressed teenagers said, “was she pretty?”
“That’s an intelligent question and I’m glad you asked it. Furthermore, it comes within context, unlike certain other questions which have recently been raised.” At this slam at me the guide permits himself a small knifing smile which apparently produces such tumult within that he bounces slightly on the couch and uncrosses his legs. “The answer to that question is that Mrs. Westfield was not really pretty but that she fell within a certain margin of sexual acceptability and a man greatly desirous of sex could, despite the unusual modesty of her garb even for the period, have found her attractive. Mr. Westfield’s sex drive had, of course, been sublimated in other areas for so long that it is an object of consideration as to whether or not he responded to her in that fashion. He probably did since all the available documents indicate that he was of normal heterosexuality in his pre-marital period and merely of a certain low intensity. It is indicated that he visited prostitutes once or twice monthly when ‘the urge,’ as he called it, became irresistible.”
“That’s very satisfactory,” the teenager said, “and I thank you very much for it. I think that that should settle the question once and for all of Mr. Westfield’s homosexuality. He was not homosexual in the least and I have never felt that he was. I am glad to know that you have backed up that point. For if he was homosexual then his entire life could be seen only as a kind of terrible, evasive farce springing away from the centrality of his passion; indeed all of this—home, artifacts, children, incident!—would have been merely an enactment of his unwillingness to face the truth and that, of course, is completely impossible. It would render the restoration useless. So thank you again. All of this is earnest, there is no evasion in the sexual lives of the Westfields.”
At the conclusion of this long speech the guide eyes the teenager strangely and indeed a subtle giggle seems to permeate the general atmosphere, loosening, for the first time, a certain air of tension among us which has been evident from the beginning of the tour as if we have used that tour only as a means of divertissement from more central and interesting hatreds. The teenager shakes his head and nods alternately, scuffs his feet and looks down at his shoes. “Sorry,” he says, “I tend to get a little passionate about the subject. I’m working on a doctoral dissertation on the Electra complex in the Westfield family, you understand, and I tend to get a little passionate about all of this. I don’t mean to be intrusive, of course. But it’s all so terribly interesting and the main reason I wanted to take the tour was to get some first-hand information. I’m sorry.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” the guide says. “It’s good to have someone participating who is at a level of expertise. Do you find the tour interesting?”
“Oh, very much so. I don’t think anyone has questioned the value of the restoration, the unique value of the Westfields, but there’s just been so little constructive, disciplined work done on this material that all of it remains still to be undertaken. This is my friend, George,” the teenager says, pointing an elbow at his companion. “He’s a scholar too, although not in sociology; he’s an eclectician. George is just keeping me company this morning.” He pats his companion in an unmistakable way, inducing a high giggle, and then turns back toward the guide.
“I’m sorry to have interrupted,” he says. “I just wanted to get that one little question settled and then we can go on. Please excuse me.”
“Well,” the guide says, “well, that’s all right. That is something I was glad to answer. At any rate, after a time the Westfields left this ‘cocktail party,’ not precisely sure how they had so easily accustomed themselves to this as an inevitability, yet at the same time perhaps enjoying one another’s presence, and then Mr. Westfield said, ‘Why don’t we take a drive somewhere?’ and she agreed. By the way, are you here on a grant?”
“Oh, no,” the teenager says. “I paid my own way in. And George’s as well; it wouldn’t have been right to have taken him to a place that bored him unless I at least had the manners to pay his way.”
“Well, you could have got in at half price as a student. Remind me when we get to the exit and I’ll make arrangements for a refund.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Tell me more about the lady,” the albino says, and is instantly muffled by his mother. “I want to hear more about the lady.”
“Well, then,” the guide says, and a slow hint of pleasant light seems to illuminate his features with the knowledge that he is being attended to from an unexpected source. “I was about to. The lady, Mrs. Westfield that is, accepted this offer of a ride from Mr. Westfield because she was impelled by both necessity and curiosity. Also, at this time so early on in their relationship, she had already decided that she would marry him. This is not an exceptional admission because Mrs. Westfield, having passed the age of thirty, had reached a point where every single man of equivalent age to whom she was introduced became a source of matrimonial intuition and it had already led her into a number of embarrassing situations from which she had emerged untainted by gloom because unpossessed, in these things, of memory. She quickly got into his car—it was a fine, late-model Buick of a kind rarely seen nowadays outside of the museums—and he drove her to a secluded spot in the distant woods. There, after a time I am happy to say, Mr. Westfield performed upon Mrs. Westfield the act of love, the speed of his maneuvers being in no small way impelled by the rapidity with which the wind moved through the trees, the distant shore lights played on the grass, the energetic crickets pumped out their nightsong. He copulated with her, in short, some three hours after his introduction, a record which neither Mr. Westfield nor his intended spouse had ever expected to attain nor, for that matter, one which they ever equalled again. I will not go into the more licentious facts of this copulation; downstairs in the courtesy shop are facsimiles of a series of letters written by Mrs. Westfield to her husband some months after the fact which go into a certain explicitness of detail, and similarly there are a collection of family home movies, duplicated for popular consumption at retail prices, which show both of the Westfields during their honeymoon in bathing attire; from this can be gained an excellent understanding of their physical attributes and capabilities. More than that I cannot say; a certain shyness is programmed into this lecture and in the bargain the restoration committee is not interested in the sexual lives or capabilities of the Westfields except as they reflect a certain reality of circumstance. And since—a final digression—it has long since been proven that the sexual lives of all the Westfields have no more to do with their inner reality than the frantic manipulations of a fly on wallpaper have to do with that fly’s inner sensibility, there is needless to say going to be little material of this sort discussed today. Of course I am open for questions here.”
“Questions,” Joanne says. She removes her hand from mine and fixes her wrists together, confronts the guide in an attitude of demureness which I would consider stunningly attractive under other circumstances but which I can now only interpret as malevolent. “Yes, I have some questions if I might.” She gives me a slow, even wink and my anticipatory prick, as if having grasped some meaning of its own, roils in response. “I thought that morals in those days were different from what they are now. Specifically, I didn’t think that couples fucked on the first date but only after a long time, and usually then with a certain amount of guilt.”
At the word “fuck” the guide winces slightly but recovers his aplomb long before the question is finished. The other tourists, however, titter somewhat and I feel a faint, high flush of embarrassment coming over me; it occurs to me now that Joanne has always been characterized, at least in our private dealings, by a certain frankness of rhetoric which is perhaps more forced than free, more contrived than whole, but which is nevertheless abrasive. “Fuck, fuck,” the albino says and his mother clouts him on the ear. He begins to sob and the moans in the sudden hush take on a copulatory tinge.
“Ah,” the guide says. “Well, that too is a question worth pondering. We have to consider the morals of that day versus those of our liberated own and it is indeed hard to draw a dichotomy because it is the fixed assumption of the restoration scholars that such a dichotomy, if it does exist at all, is much subtler than the popular press would want to conceive. The fact is that there has always been as much fucking per capita—I use your word, young lady, to indicate I take no offense—but that it has a slightly higher visibility nowadays than it used to since it has become somewhat of a commodity. So there was nothing remarkable about the Westfields’ behavior. There was never anything remarkable about the Westfields’ behavior. A horrid predictability infuses all of it. Does that answer your question?”
“Did they enjoy it?” Joanne asks. “Was it good for them? I mean,” she says, bobbling my elbow slightly and favoring me with the quick offered plane of a cheek grazing my suit jacket, “I mean was it as satisfactory for them, as good for them as it is for us? Those of us of this day, of course, I mean.” She laughs and pinches her fingers into my elbow and I realize then for the first time—how obtuse I have been! but then I have excuses—that she has contrived all of this to embarrass me.
“Of course they enjoyed it,” the Ph.D. candidate says, “they enjoyed it a great deal. You don’t think there was anything wrong with Mr. Westfield, do you? I think that we settled that right off.”
“Some Coke,” the albino says.
“But what about Mrs. Westfield? I was asking about both of them. Did she enjoy it?”
“I don’t think your question makes any sense,” the Ph.D. candidate says, flicking some imagined dust off a sleeve. “Of course she enjoyed it. In those unfortunate times women were objects and those responses which were expected were elicited. Rather we should concern ourselves—”
“Some Coke with ice,” the albino says, “and let’s go for a walk. It’s so boring! It doesn’t have anything to do with anyone! Please let me go home, we don’t have to stay here all the time, huh, do we?” Casually but with easy grace, his mother slaps him again and the child collapses against her, his eyes enormous. The guide, somewhat taken aback by this explosion of incident, shifts on the couch and then gets up swiftly, comes to the gate and leans on it.
“Well,” he says, “really now, there’s no reason for this kind of emotional display. The project is controversial of course, and the restoration, because it is so significant to all of our shared history, takes on a rather painful emotional tinge but this isn’t worthy of anyone here. Can’t you all act mannered?”
“Don’t tell us to act mannered,” the albino’s mother says, giving Joanne a ferocious look. I understand that the situation is coming close to a danger point and, intercepting Joanne’s hand which was aimed toward the child probably to give him another ferocious tap, say, “Maybe we could all take a rest for a little while. I mean, this kind of thing isn’t easy for any of us. Maybe the child could get some Coke and the rest of us could stretch our legs and then we could come back here to hear more of this. Isn’t that fair enough?”
The action has been somewhat provocative and indeed there is something to its definitiveness which, I fear, might reveal my secret, the fact that I have particular interest in this museum and knowledge of it. Surely tourists do not normally interpose themselves between their guides and events. But this particular guide is, apparently, at one of those moments of fatigue whose onset in the civil servant is so rapid and whose effects are so pernicious; it is the occurrence of an uncontrollable situation upon the civil servant with the attendant realization that since he has no vested interest in the outcome he can only pay a penalty either way. Perhaps I have caught him at some moment of private retribution. “Well,” he says, “that’s not a bad idea. It’s terribly warm in here in the summer—it always was, the Westfields stubbornly refused to install air-conditioning, they felt that it was an ‘unnecessary expenditure to spoil all of us,’ which we have tried to continue in the restoration as well for a sense of authenticity. I’m sure the courtesy shop is open and you can probably get something now. Why don’t we reassemble here in fifteen minutes?” There is a slight mumble from the thin man behind me who doubtless wants, at this moment, reunion with his family as little as I do with Joanne, but the guide, all precision at last, overrides this and says, “Yes, then, well that’s a fine idea and I’m going to have some coffee myself,” and leaping over the gate with a swinging bound, dodges through the corridor and into a stairwell. We hear the sound of pattering.
We stand there for a moment in that vague collage of embarrassment known to all travellers who can judge their presence only in terms of a structure suddenly removed, and then the albino says, “Coke Mommy, coffee Mommy,” and this slight impetus causes a virtual rush; first the mother and child leave at a slow trot, the father follows, the fat man with his umbrella still at bay gives us an embarrassed smile and walks toward the front door, doubtless seeking some air and rain for his equipment, and then the teenagers, giggling slightly, nod to one another and move into the next open door, toward what would be the kitchen exhibit as I recollect. Joanne and I are, thus, left alone in the room and for an instant I do not know what to say to her; she looks so lovely and yet so dismally threatening in the weak light, and then she seizes my elbow in a gallant grip and presses herself against me so that I can feel her breasts on an elbow and then she says to me quickly and in a whisper, “Michael, while the rest of them are wasting their time, why don’t we go right upstairs into the bedroom and fuck? I’ll be on the bottom and you’ll be on the top and we’ll take all of our clothes off except for the ones at the very top. Wouldn’t that be fun?” And the thing is, looking at her, that I am seized by such desire that it becomes a pain in my stomach, and moving solemnly with the gravity it moves toward the groin, a sinking need, a rising expectancy, and behind me I can hear the cries of the tourists as they seek their own means of passage. And in the heart of the living room, beneath the beating clock, I think that I hear a cackle.
TWO
Memory returns to me in thick, uneven, pounding waves of insight as I take Joanne’s arm and guide her toward the upstairs exhibit. The idea of fucking in the bedroom of my parents has seized me with such tenacity that I can barely keep my tread straight, although at the same time I know now that Joanne is evil and that she is out to destroy me. It has always been so and I remember as well why we have come to this museum. We came to avoid further arguments. It is strange how now that memory has returned I want so little part of it.
But, nevertheless, there it is: we have been travelling together, Joanne and I, and have come at last to this strange city which, by coincidence, houses the Westfield restoration among other monuments. We have been in several cities on this latest trip, we have been in Detroit and Minneapolis and Ames, Iowa and Pittsburgh and New York City as well, but in none of them have we found precisely what we were looking for, which, possibly, was some solution to our relationship, although that is hard to ascertain. From the insides of motel rooms all locations look the same; also there has been the embarrassment of staying in all these motels without a car, the embarrassment of checking in with luggage and formality and leaving “license plate #” blank on the applications because neither of us knows how to drive but Joanne “digs motels.” So we have gone from hither to yon, mostly by bus and taxi and in room after room we have enacted the same slow, deadly scene of convolution and departure and are no closer to a solution now than we were at the beginning, have come, in fact, to that point where we suspect the only sane means of continued accommodation is to turn jointly outward rather than separately inward. So I have suggested the Westfield museum to her as a means of passing the day, conceding in no way either my coincidental relationship to it (I have never, after all, told I her my last name) or my unusual, virtually obsessive desire after all these years to see it, and she has said yes because she is still at that point of relationship where she believes that to please me is to please herself. And so here we are.
Precisely who we are, from where we have come, how we got to know one another are questions which still evade me but I know that in time now, the answers will come. I know how Joanne and I have gotten here, what we mean to one another, what else matters? We ascend the creaking stairs of the house slowly, fearing a collision or plunge at any moment, and at last come into the main hallway of the second floor. My bedroom is at the rear of this hallway, of course; my sister’s is in the center and my parents’ is at the near end. It is toward this nearest one that Joanne now leads me. I follow, torn between lust and indecision, and when we come to the gate we pause for a moment, whether out of deference to our history or awe at the enclosure I have no way of knowing.
It is strange, strange to see the bedroom of my parents after so many years, but, of course, it is exactly as it always was; the twin beds lie close to one another, separated by the bulk of the reversible television set which lies between; at the corner my mother’s vanity bureau exudes a sickly reflected yellowish light from its mirror; at the other end is my father’s dresser where, I recall, he kept his prophylactics until my eleventh birthday when I located them in the top drawer and tried them on casually one by one to a disastrous (and long-since suppressed) outcome. The closet, half-ajar to reveal the cunningly restored clothing of the exhibition, also has a large mirror and it reflects that of my mother’s vanity bureau, although not to a sequence of merging rooms as one might suspect, but only to blankness. Joanne gracefully climbs over the gate, catching her skirt only once in the act of getting off, and then sprawls on the bed, motioning me to join her. I do with some finesse and then we are seated together, toe to toe and only that way but it is enough. The bedspreads feel oddly smooth to the touch; age has rendered them glossy rather than otherwise and I feel that if I looked closely enough I would see the smudges of my old semen stains from the time in my early teens when I came into their room on Saturday nights when they had gone to the movies and beat off violently at the ceiling, wondering as I did so whether my mother had the same aspect as my father poked into her and whether it could possibly be enough to make it worth it.
“Did they do it right here?” Joanne says hoarsely. She is titillated. “Did the Westfields really do it right here in this bed?”
“Yes, they did,” I say. “They did it all the time up until the lamentable death of Mr. Westfield, which occurred some time ago I understand, while he was enjoying a shoeshine on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 53rd Street on his way to the agency. He was fifty-six years old. All the way until that time, however—”
“You really know a lot about this, don’t you?” she says. Her mood has altered over the past hour. She is girlish, winning. Even her breasts seem sharper, higher against the fine arch of her chest. She has decided to appreciate me. Had we not been through this so many times before I would be touched past desire to submission ... but I have indeed seen all of it.
