“I’ve made a study,” I say. “I’ve always been interested in the Westfield exhibition. It’s one of the prim artifacts of mid-century urban life in America, you know, and it’s becoming clearly established as a scholarly and cultural treasure, more and more noted every year. I think that it’s uniquely valuable. I’m very happy we decided to come here.” This last not being the truth of course, because it has only been my persuasion, her submission.
“Well, yes, it is kind of interesting,” she says, “particularly this business of how they met and the screwing and so on, but honestly! have you ever seen anything like that guide or the people we’re with? They just have no understanding of what’s going on. It’s terrible to think that the world out there is full of people like this.”
“Yes, yes, but at least they’re trying, at least they want to be a part of it, they have the decency to come and to try to learn something, it’s the people who don’t come and the people who don’t learn who are the ones to worry about.”
“That boy is uncontrollable.”
“Well, yes.” I say, “so he is, but then the Westfields were too, at least half the time or maybe more than that they had no understanding of what they were doing. And nobody could have made them understand. But they thought that they were important and significant and that what they were engaged in had real consequences. You never know. It just goes to show that you never know. The price you pay—”
But I have obviously said too much, my voice breaking boyishly on the word “price” and Joanne looks at me with an unusual keenness which is only augmented by the fact that she is meanwhile removing all of her clothes as quickly as possible, first sweater, then brassiere, then skirt and so on, and the confrontation of flesh is appalling; the sheer magnitude of women, even the slightest of them, has never ceased to bemuse me, and at the sight of her familiar but devastating nipples spreading open in their discoloration and taking on the rather hideous hue of the surrounding wallpaper I find myself seized by a kind of madness. “What is this to you?” she is saying. “Why are you so affected by it? Do you know anything about these people? Did they mean anything to you?”
“No,” I say, “I never knew them at all; no one really knew the Westfields, they existed to themselves so utterly that to open a door on one of their private moments would, for a neighbor, have been an exercise in horror at the matter-of-fact banality of all this pain; the Westfields were never known, it’s just that I find it an interesting referent or should I say objective-correlative for certain things in my own circumstances oh your body, your body, your body, your goddamned breasts.” Once again I am mumbling. The sight of her nude has never failed to afflict my sanity and she has capitalized on this from the beginning, taking pleasure in the way in which my sexual need can patently devour me and make me only into a weak self-parody, but in basic concession to her I will admit that she is a nice girl and has never used this cruelly as so many others have. She pleasures and glories herself in it as simply as a child might take pleasure in a puppy’s intransigence. But the effects, of course, are always the same.
“Oh, God,” I say, taking off my own clothes in a rush of fabric which must have the uneven sound, to any distant auditor, of an ill-assembled flight of birds passing at some remove. “Oh God, I really don’t know if I can take it,” and I fall on top of her, the flat planes of our bodies intersecting at some frantic angle of need, and then, on my parents’ bed in the restored museum that was my home, I begin to make love to this girl that I really cannot get along with. It is very complex and very necessary and ultimately as simple as the albino’s need although far easier to rationalize, far more interesting in the recounting.
“What if they come in?” Joanne whispers to me, spreading herself open underneath. “They’ll see us, they’ll see us,” and her voice is somewhere midway between an avowal and a warning, impossible to understand what her real purposes are. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “They will just take it to be part of an exhibit,” and I work myself deeply into her, feeling her cunt close over me with more willingness than her arms will ever demonstrate, and I begin to fuck her with slow earnestness.
It is strange to be screwing her on my parents’ bed, but neither disconcerting nor unpleasant and I feel myself, in the bargain, whipped on by spectres and memory; I see the honest, laboring bulk of my father working through my mother’s body with its slow understanding, I see my own butterfly of a hand urging the last drops from the sphincter as I turn scuttling through the pages of magazines, I see my sister’s slow glaze of astonishment as I open the door to find her copulating with a girl friend some time many years ago, and it is as if all of these voices, along with Joanne’s, are helping me, speeding me toward my destiny as I work myself in a frenzy of real concentration toward a predetermined outcome, as predictable as the guide’s lecture but a damned bit more profitable, and as I do, all of it comes sweeping over me—old pain, old grief, old knowledge—and I seem to hear my father’s voice whispering obscenely to me, “Go to it you son of a bitch, you’re a hell of a lot better fixed than I am,” and as I think about that, as I wonder whether “better fixed” refers to choice of partner or only to the relative ease at with which I am able to come in almost any circumstances, I pour into her in a swoop, feeling my semen rill and surge back at me and it is as if I am fucking not only her cunt but my own emissions and very sensuous it is indeed. “Oh, God, that’s good,” Joanne murmurs to me, offering me a breast to bite and suck, and this too is an old problem; we have always found our answers in sex too easily to tackle the more difficult extrinsic ones. It is strange how these kinds of reflections always overtake me in the midst of what other men might call “unalloyed pleasure,” but then the message of the museum is vast and personal and one cannot quite flee one’s history, although it is worth a lifetime of trying. After a while I come off of her very gracefully, surrender the breast, and suggest that we rejoin the walking tour, otherwise our presence might be missed, questions raised, and an exploring company sent. Perhaps the other personnel, from the courtesy shop, will be coming up.
“Oh, no,” Joanne murmurs. “Must we? Can’t we just lie here for a while? You remember he told us they would be doing the kitchen first and then probably the bathroom, they have the whole first floor to do, we can stay here for a while.” I point out that this tour group is so small and our own persons so evident that surely a party would have been sent long before the troupe got to the bedroom. “Oh, all right,” she says with a kind of pretty petulance and stands up, begins to shuffle her clothes and gets dressed again. While she does so, I prowl around the objects of the bedroom, noting that everything is in the place I remember it to be, and then on an impulse I open the top drawer of the bureau and find that my father’s prophylactics have been restored to their original place, in a small abscess to the right of the main drawer, in an area also containing his tie clasp and cufflinks. The package is open and a quick count indicates that two of the prophylactics have been used, and I am overcome by my feelings of approbation for the staff of the restoration which has obviously done everything in its power to bring to these rooms and objects the particular sense and posture which was their characteristic in life.
In the center of this first drawer, on top of a pile of socks, is a sheet of paper, folded over. I take it out and open it and glancing quickly at the bottom see that it is a letter from my mother which my father, having apparently read, has put away in his effects for further pondering. The letter is written in her familiar, crosswise hand in that pinkish pencil which was her only apparent writing implement and I read it quickly, not being unaware at the same time of Joanne’s exquisite efforts to tuck her breasts into a brassiere which is deliberately two sizes too small for them, a predilection which lends her every motion in a tight sweater or dress an excursion into the deepest recesses of the observer’s heart. But today, of course, her dress has been nondescript, which is just as well in terms of the scholarly curiosity which has taken me here.
“Dear—” [the letter says, my mother having apparently left a name off out of indecision as to how to put it; in our presence she called our father by either his first name or last, occasionally adding “sweetheart” when guests were present but never finding that consistency of address which might have saved so much difficulty.]
“I thought that I would try to write you this rather than speak it because we never seem to talk any more and I find the words hard to get out of me but it is important to say it and that is that there is something missing. There is something terribly wrong I do not know what it is. It is not so much that I feel something to be missing as that I feel something where nothing should be. I can’t put it any better than that. Maybe we could talk about it. The kids are distracting of course but that’s not all of it. The reason I made you leg of lamb the other night is that you said you liked leg of lamb how did I know you wouldn’t? We have got to talk things over because nothing is as it should be but then everything can’t be wrong either. Something has got to be done about the relationships.”
Then, apparently indecisive as to whether she should sign her name or merely leave off a signature as understood, there was a small curlicue which might have been an attempt at initialing. I consider the letter for a little while—it is not, after all, that unusual a construction; I have seen many notes like this in my time and have written a few as well—and finally put it back in its original place, regretful that my father who had taken such care in its placement will obviously now never have the opportunity to consider it at what he often called his “leisure.” Indeed, it speaks well for the conscientiousness of the committee that they would take care to place this unanswered and unanswerable letter among the effects, and this conscientiousness speaks well of its seriousness of purpose, the eventual worth of the whole project, for no one knows better than I that the Westfields’ lives consisted only of such compendiums of the Unanswered and Unanswerable and there is, hence, some slight indication given by the committee’s action that this in itself may not have rendered those lives meaningless. It is a whole new way of considering things—that the meaningless may have a scope, a structure, a beauty and a purpose no less than the meaningful—and I know that I will want to ponder it at my own leisure as soon as I have a chance.
“Well,” Joanne says, taking my elbow, her body contained and straight beneath the brightness of her restored dress, “I’m ready to go. Aren’t you?” And indeed I am still naked and embarrassed in the bargain as I nod weakly at her and begin to assemble my own clothing. My act of dressing is neither as precise nor as purposeful—nor as aesthetically pleasing—of course as hers and therefore I do not loiter on it. While I am scurrying through these motions I see that she is looking through the open drawer with a bemusement of her own and has indeed just finished reading the letter, which she refolds and replaces.
“Mr. Westfield used prophylactics,” she says. “What is this letter all about? Who wrote it?”
“He used prophylactics because he feared any other kind of contraception and his wife objected to that interruption of coition which he had read about in a book once and was always eager to try. But never did I think the letter is from his wife.”
“You really know all about this, don’t you? It’s uncanny how much you know, Michael.”
“It means something,” I say, taking the letter from her hand and retucking it in its accustomed place. “Everything means something, even this. Perhaps the accumulation of objects, of mannerisms, of attitudes is as precious a task as accumulation of knowledge or money. Only the Westfields can know.”
“What did his wife want?”
“How do I know?”
“You seem to know everything else about them.”
“No, I don’t,” I say and it is a tribute to my aplomb and my certainty of self in these remembered surroundings that I do not take her line for a hint of suspicion about the actual relation. “I know only what I can infer from this, which is only what any other intelligent person can infer. Perhaps she wanted to be understood, that’s all.”
“What is this with understanding? Why does everyone want to be understood?”
I take her chin and tilt it upward slightly, attempt a gesture of tenderness by kissing her nose but the delivery misses slightly and I find myself implanting the a kiss instead on the cool, resilient surface of her fluttering eyelid. “Not anymore,” I say. “Not today. People aren’t so high on understanding these days, only accommodation and mutual use. But in the time of the Westfields—which was thirty years ago, you know—understanding was to them what sexuality is for us, it was the only way in which they could communicate. They always accused one another, these people, of not ‘understanding’ one another or not ‘caring’ enough, which is quite a different thing, you understand, and their most intense moments with each other were moments of self-revelation, which is kind of criminal when you come to think of it because it’s all so confused. But ‘understanding’ was for Mrs. Westfield what a ‘relationship’ would have been for us three or four years ago or what a ‘good thing’ would be today, and we must have respect for that. Just because the language was different doesn’t mean that they didn’t feel the same. Just because our past seems a little archaic,” I say with a feeling of rising expectancy which for me always indicates the beginning of what I later take to be an “insight,” “doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have as much passion and terror as our present; we cannot make a plaything or an artifact of our history, it is just as terrible and just as real as the other part. Because the words they used seem strange to us doesn’t mean that they didn’t feel. They felt. They suffered. Their intensity of feeling was as ordered and meaningful to them as ours to us. And they found structure in their possessions. I think we’d better go downstairs.”
“Oh, Michael,” she says, taking my arm and leaning against me in an ambiguity of gesture, “Michael, you’re so intense. You take everything so seriously! Can’t this just be a simple day of going out for us? Does everything have to be of such terrible consequence?”
“But I grew up where everything was serious,” I say. “Everything was a crisis, everything was portentous. There was not a gesture, not a twitch, not a single convulsion of the corpus that was not analyzed and analyzed again. It lends a kind of high gloom to the proceedings.”
“Someday you’ll have to tell me about that.”
“Yes, someday,” I say and lead her from the room. Only when we have again set ourselves upon the stairs does it occur to me that we have left the bureau drawer unopened and the bed rumpled, but I right myself successfully against the idiot impulse to go back and straighten everything. In the long run, I remind myself, it makes no difference at all what we do or might have done—it is only the question of alternative which is interesting—and besides that, the guide will take the disarray for some incompetence of personnel and for that reason relish it to the degree that he feels it protects and renders more secure his own position. The living room is empty, indicating that the party has either reassembled and gone on or is still dispersed on its ways, but a murmur of voices from the rear indicates that we have indeed fallen behind the tour and I lead her straightaway into the kitchen where the tourists are standing once again in their solemn clump, confronting the guide who is standing behind the stove, showing them utensils and apparently talking about the cooking artifacts of that time. To my dismay, he stops talking when he sees us and then favors me with a long sweeping glance which completely forsakes Joanne in its assumed totality of knowledge. I can feel her shudder slightly against me and run a comforting hand over her back. The tourists also turn to regard us with distasteful expressions and the albino sticks out his tongue at us. I note that it is colored with a reddish substance indicating that he has apparently gotten his refreshments.
“Well, then,” the guide says, “being so thoughtfully rejoined by certain errant members of our little troupe, I can now continue. I would think that there would be some consideration shown, you know; this tour is on a tight schedule and I can’t be expected to work to the convenience of single tourists; also, you are supposed to be under surveillance at all times.”
“I’m sorry,” Joanne says. “We were just looking around the grounds.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the guide says. “That’s neither here nor there. To refresh you—I was speaking of the cooking habits of the Westfields and the way in which they dined. It is particularly illuminating material, although it may lack that sensationalism which certain of you seem to be seeking in this tour.”
“Did they eat together all the time?” the thin father of the albino says. It is the first sustained line I have heard from him and is rather disquieting since his voice is quite resonant for a man otherwise so insignificant and seems to cause the crockery, in its place on the shelves, to shudder and bump in position.
“Oh, indeed they did,” the guide says. “They always ate together except on Thursday nights when Mr. Westfield attended meetings of his local salesman’s club and regaled himself not so much with liquor and companionship as a blessed feeling of isolation, undercut by the ironic realization that he could not conceive of himself as anything other than a displaced creature of his family. But otherwise they all ate at that large table you see in the adjoining room; Mr. Westfield would sit at the head, Mrs. Westfield at his side across from the daughter Katherine, and Michael opposite, facing his father at the foot. Of course ‘head’ and ‘foot’ are all relative terms, to the Westfields they were sitting this way but this was only in relation to the living room; someone coming from the bathroom or the spare bedroom in the rear would have found Mr. Westfield at the foot and Michael at the head. But these seating arrangements had some significance to the people of this time; it was considered a position of authority for the host or prime member of the family to sit at the ‘head’ of the table and, of course, the least significant—although not least loved—member would sit at the foot. There are some interesting documents available for private users indicating that the Westfields did indeed feel this way and that Mr. Westfield was most insistent upon what he considered his most important prerogative.”
“Well, that shows again,” the Ph.D. says, “that there was absolutely no question of homosexuality then with Mr. Westfield, not if he found important a simple stereotype which has long been thought of as a male prerogative.”
“Indeed”, said the guide, “but I think that your own orientation may be a bit off. There has never been, so far as I know, and I have been with this restoration for five and a half years, the slightest question raised anent Mr. Westfield’s masculinity or pseudo-masculinity. It is thus irrelevant and redundant to introduce evidence in favor of his heterosexuality, although I am sure that this is a very praiseworthy thing and I am sure the curators would be delighted to know that you have been interested sufficiently in the project to want to write your dissertation on it.”
“But that’s not so!” the scholar says, his voice breaking slightly, almost toward an albino-register. “The trouble is that there’s lots of talk, lots of scuttlebutt going around about the Westfields; every specialist is ready to smirk about Mr. Westfield and to say that there was something wrong with him. Something not quite right about him. Just because he married very late and liked ice-skating instead of church on Sundays and had a tendency toward temper tantrums and also seemed sufficiently uncomfortable in the presence of men as to never have one close masculine friend. We’ve got to get rid of that kind of thing at the source! I won’t have it! It’s a question of scholarship of normal rigorousness. If he were a homosexual, then I’d be all in favor of coming right out and saying it, but because he wasn’t one might say that it’s almost the holy obligation of the scholar to nip this kind of thing in the bud.”
“This is very dull,” Joanne whispers to me. “Why are they getting involved in this? It doesn’t have anything to do with sightseeing.”
“Well, I’m sure this is appreciated,” the guide says. “Perhaps you’ll be able to write something for our next edition of the brochure; I would think they’d be interested in having something like that. Of course it isn’t my field. I was saying that the Westfields ate together every evening except Thursdays in the aforementioned positions and that their mealtimes were characterized by an air of unusual tension which the participants thought of as ‘family life’ but which we can now see in retrospect was something rather apart from that. Specifically, there was fear and mutual loathing between the siblings, and Mrs. Westfield’s attempts to convert their sublimate giggles and threats into ‘good normal conversation’ were often provocative to the point of breaking up the meal entirely; one or the other of the younger Westfields would have to flee to his or her room to avoid ‘making a scene,’ and regurgitation, particularly on the part of the boy Michael, was frequent. Of course in later life the siblings got along much better and it is made clear from available documents that they eventually reached a true understanding, but the particular abrasiveness and hellishness of their relationship at this time cannot be dismissed and might well have served to permanently impair whatever relationship they later had. This is beyond the ken of the project of course, but you will note the table set as if for a typical dinner: the moderately priced china, the simple tumblers, the large serving plates into which the food was scooped from the stove to be brought and laid simply on the table, the silverware slightly baroque in its convolutions, the serving implements laid out ... It can be said that the Westfields lived a precise, orderly, regularized life. They never sat down to eat other than between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. and were always finished by 7:30. Mr. Westfield did the dishes while Michael did the drying. Occasionally Katherine would help at the latter task but often she would not. Mrs. Westfield went into the living room and watched television. ‘Television,’ which I have not yet had a chance to talk about in detail, was one of the more popular activities in the Westfields’ part of the world during the period discussed. Mr. Westfield did the dishes without protest nor did Mrs. Westfield protest her not doing them.”
