We stand in the garden where we stood before and Joanne takes my hands, clasps them, raises them against her and lets me partake for an instant of the surfaces of her breasts, then brings them down to her waist. “I’m scared, Michael,” she says. “That’s all I wanted to say. I’m terribly, terribly frightened and I had to get out of there; I had to try and tell you that.”
“Why? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” I feel obliged to ask these questions although, actually, I am not very interested in the prospective answers. What I am truly interested in is the viewing of the bathroom but this is something which is obviously not to be.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just some kind of general anxiety, this thing that I have which comes over me now and then, and it’s come over very strong now. Oh, why did we take this tour Michael! It’s so depressing! These people lived so horribly. How could people live like this and not kill themselves?”
“They liked it. They thought that they were indeed living, and to the extent that their philosophy contained a question of alternative might only have conceded that their existence was a simulacrum of the real thing, but nevertheless to be respected for that alone. ‘Some people live their way but this is our way,’ Mrs. Westfield would say.”
“But it’s so terrible! You said so yourself. Didn’t you say so yourself when they were talking in there about dinner time?”
“Yes, of course I did. It was just an outburst. Besides that, the dinners were very soothing. The Westfields all said that they looked forward to them.”
“I don’t know. It just depresses me terribly. And you’re depressing me terribly too, Michael. You’re so interested in everything there and it’s really so dull! You wouldn’t be Michael Westfield, now would you?” she asks.
I know that this last question has been framed only out of a kind of forced coquettishness, but nevertheless it is almost impossible for me to control the start-and-recoil with which I respond, a slow shuddering and contraction of the stomach which spills out to be consequential elsewhere. Fortunately, her eyes have drifted out to the street as she says this and she does not swing back to observe me until I put a slightly quivering hand on her shoulder and say, “Of course not. Don’t be silly. The Westfields’ whereabouts are unknown, you know that.”
“Still, you have the same first name and you seem to know so much about everything that’s going on here and you were the one who wanted to come on out—”
“The Ph.D. seems to know a lot more than I do,” I say. “And be even more passionately interested. Maybe he’s Michael Westfield.”
“Oh, God, do you really think so? Yes, of course you could be right. Why that’s too terrible to think about! That poor man, sneaking back to his old family home after all these years, seeing all his secrets made exhibits, seeing everything that he lived for converted to something to be gaped at by a load of silly tourists. Oh, it would be horrible for him! Why would he come back?”
“Maybe he couldn’t bear to stay away. Maybe he had to see it one last time. Who knows?”
“What would they do to him if they found out that he was Michael Westfield?”
“Well, the terms of the restoration, I understand, are that no Westfield or relative may ever enter the premises. I suppose that they would expel him. They might even make a report. There isn’t that much they can do actually. This isn’t a government institution, you know. They wouldn’t send him to jail.”
“Oh,” she says shrugging. “Oh, well, then. Then it doesn’t make any difference at all what happens to him. It was just a thought. Listen, Michael, that isn’t the real thing I wanted to come out here for. I wanted to come out for something else. I wanted to ask you—”
But I will never know, at least not for the duration of this tour, what she wanted to ask me because while we have been so intensely talking a dapper, well-dressed man wearing period garb has come out of the front door and has quietly come behind us, introducing himself with a series of throat-clearing noises. That is to say that I must make the inference that he has come from the door and up behind us, because the first reckoning I have of his presence is that series of chokes and slow rumbles with which he makes himself known. He is a tall man, immaculately dressed in the clothing of the Westfields’ time and carrying under his arm a thin notebook with a glossy cover on which there seems to be some kind of decal. “Excuse me,” he says.
“Yes?” Joanne says quietly, but I can feel the jumpingof her skin as I lay a restraining arm flatly on her shoulder. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m one of the members of the committee,” the man says. “One of the curators, we’re always on duty. I presume that you’re with the tour?”
“That’s right,” I say. “We just came out here to get some air.”
“We wanted to talk,” Joanne says. Never is she so protective of me, so confidential, so affectionate as when we are in the presence of strangers. I feel her fingers trickle up my inner arm and caress my armpit, feel an idiot surge of desire which I fear is immediately visible to the curator.
“Well,” the curator says with an air of precision which in no way serves to conceal what I sense to be a certain sadness, “well, then, you see, guests aren’t permitted on the grounds other than in the presence of a tour guide. Guests are not permitted to leave the tour other than on the dismissal of the guide and when they take their breaks under his supervision and so on. It’s nothing we like to do,” he says apologetically, “but we have to guard against trespass and despoiling of the property and people getting lost or taking objects or something like that. I’m sure you understand. I thought I saw the two of you outside before, but you had gone in by the time I came out. I’m sorry.”
“We have to go back in there then?” Joanne says. “We simply can’t stay and talk in the garden? What’s wrong with that; we’re not harming anyone.”
The curator shifts his case and then, thinking better of it, takes it from under his arm and runs his hands over it absently. “Rules,” he says. “Regulations. Civil service mandate. Of course, I’m not unaware of the irony of this: the Westfields themselves lived a very contained and ordered life and only did what were considered the ‘proper’ things to do while otherwise engaging in the most unspeakable fantasies. But the fantasies did them no good, of course. So in a sense we are only perpetuating this kind of misdirection with our very rigid rules and regulations. Nevertheless we have no choice. We didn’t decide on this policy, our funding sources did. So if you will—”
“Well,” Joanne says and unlinks her arm from mine, “well, if we must, we must. Would you do me a favor, though?” and at the same time she gives me an assuring nod. I know instantly that I am in for difficulty, for Joanne always precedes her most outrageous requests and behaviors with a girlish attempt to indicate that she means nothing by them.
“Within reason, certainly.”
“Might I talk to you alone for a moment?”
“What? What’s that? I don’t understand.”
Joanne squeezes my hand abruptly and releases it. “I just want to see you alone for a minute. My boy friend understands. I have a few questions I want to ask you. They aren’t very important but I’ve always been curious. And Michael can rejoin the tour.”
“Um,” the curator says. “Um.” A certain disorder seems to have come into his beautifully-arranged clothing and a bit of sweat sheens his forehead. “Well, I guess so. I mean, I don’t know why not. Do you object, sir?”
Joanne gives me a sidewise glance with blackness deep toward the center and I say, “No. I have no objection at all. That’s perfectly all right, she had told me she wanted to speak to one of the curators when we were on the way over.” Since I will never marry her I need not be concerned with her behavior anymore and yet, strangely, as I say this I feel not rage so much as a kind of remorse. I do not understand this and know that I will want to investigate it later.
“Well then,” the curator says, “shall we talk in my offices? Unless—”
“Your offices will be fine,” Joanne says and turns briskly away from me, already heading back toward the home. “I’ll see you in a few moments, Michael. Okay?”
“Now, let me remind you that you must rejoin the tour,” the curator says over his shoulder. “I trust you to do this on your own recognizance but it’s very important that you do so; we have limited guard facilities here and must trust in the honor of people. However—”
“Oh, I will, I will,” I say and proceed to follow them slowly at a safe distance. Now, with yards between us, Joanne’s face has softened, taken on the various colors of the foliage she passes, and seems to be illumined with a kind of vivacity as she leans toward the curator to say something and then impulsively takes his arm. They pass through the door and I am quite alone. I hear the door slam, Joanne probably having done this since the curator would not under any circumstances have encouraged me to stay out.
I am alone, then, completely alone for the first time in several weeks. The fact is that Joanne and I have not been out of one another’s presence—barring simple trips to the bathroom and even then often in company—for at least two and a half months, and even my sleep has lost that fine, high isolation which I had thought was the most irrevocable part of it; now I seem to sleep not upon a cliff but in a low clearing surrounded by bears and other night-creatures, all of whom regard me with caution not unmixed with love. In sleep, awake, in the transition between the two I have felt overwhelmed, in the center of a constancy I can barely understand let alone come to terms with, and the truly numbing part of this is that it is a constancy created by only one person, and that a girl whom I did not even know a year ago. Once again I feel myself prowling through the amnesia, sifting through the rising scraps and convolutions of recollection, and I know that if I do much thinking on this situation, even for a question of moments, it will all come back to me and then I will be in enormous difficulty. For one thing, my decision to leave Joanne may not look so firm, so sane, so definite if I get into the question of antecedent. It is enough to know that I have known her with an intensity I have reserved for no other person and that that intensity seems to be finding its fruition this morning. Strangely, I am neither curious nor concerned about her decision to speak with the curator. I feel that this has absolutely nothing to do with me and that, in the long run, things will work out exactly as they are intended to, with or without regard to individual choice. I owe a certain amount of this fatalism to my parents, of course, but there are other forces mixed in: failure, loss, pain, a couple of small successes, all of them leading to a resignation that so vast and so metaphysical in all its implications that even the Westfields would not have comprehended it.
I remember though, I remember coming against her in the softness and shallowness of a random bed some time ago—was that bed mine or hers?—and revealing for myself one by one the gift of her breasts, so unassuming under clothing, so consumptive a reality without and bending myself over those breasts sucked and prowled myself toward an unseen consummation, and opening up all the way, all the way she let me work through her thighs and then into the cunt with a force which seemed ready to explode me through the other end and then I was whining and bucking in her arms charging with energy and with a kind of enthusiasm nervous and intermittent as a twitch and then came, came, came all the way into her while her mouth burrowed against my ear and she whispered curse words which someone had probably once told her he found exciting. The whole thing could not have lasted more a than forty seconds, although she told me afterward that it was fine, fine for her too; she hadn’t come but then she wasn’t expecting to and as far as she was concerned, the female orgasm was only a myth anyway; invented by men as a rationalization for their sense of guilt. But we fucked and fucked again and the same thing happened, although once I made her whimper, and toward the middle of our relationship she took to the assumption of animaline sound in the bed: dogs, chickens, cows, a whole menagerie of responses done for my titillation more than hers, and meanwhile all the time we were fucking, fucking: we were fucking here and there and almost everywhere until she decided—it was her idea—that since we were screwing almost indiscriminately anyway we might as well make it the real thing and take a long trip together, spreading, in a sense, my lust and her reception throughout the United States, and so we have done so for many months now. Or perhaps it is only weeks. There is some question of antecedent vaguely poking at me: surely I had a job, surely she had a job, but other than knowing that they had something to do with paperwork and depended, both of these jobs, utterly upon the invisibility of the people whom our jobs affected because to confront them would have made our tasks unbearable—other than this I do not know precisely what we have been doing nor at the moment do I want to know. I am sure that it will all come back to me. Everything in due course will become clear, the tour itself is proving that, for although I have been away from this house for fifteen years or more, for all the effect that it has upon me and for all apparent distance created, I could never have left it. “You can’t run away from yourself,” is the way my mother put it, and in certain senses, perhaps, she knew what she was talking about. On the other hand, if I had gone away to the Southwest in that, my seventeenth year, when she said that, things might have been different. If I had gone away alone (except for parental support) and sought the fortune which a distant relative had promised me in the oilfields and dark sands of the Southwest. Who knows? Who knows? Surely I would have come back here anyway. There is no place so far removed from it that home is not accessible. Perhaps this is a tragedy, I do not know.
I do not know; I do not know but I am beset suddenly with the urge to go back inside the house, and so I take the three familiar steps of the stoop in a leaping bound and pass through the door and am inside. The door is not locked, of course. There was no chance that it would be. The Westfields secured the door day and night against strangers. It should have but did not embrace the concept of their own son. I am in the living room once again but this time it is empty and although I am very anxious to rejoin the tour in the bathroom, find it irresistible to look around, which I do, and find my father’s note behind the grand piano where doubtless he had left it thirty years ago for the committee to find, restore and replace, all chasms of time rendered obsolete by the permanence of this humble object.
THREE
I cannot restrain my desire to pick up the note and look at it. I should not feel this way: my father’s notes are as familiar to me as the outlines of my own skin, and in my youth I have read at least a hundred of them; notes addressed to me, to the family at large, a few to himself, all of them written in a rhetoric which seemed to possess as little discrimination for object as it did tolerance for subject. I remember that once, when I was eight or nine years old, I fell into cryptograms through a puzzle book which had been given us by another of those vaguely distant relatives whose gradual attrition through the years seemed to be the only metaphor for impermanence which my parents would accept. The point of the cryptogram was to have friends write mysterious messages which only you, knowing the code, could decipher, and it struck me as well as the author as an enticing project; but since I had no friends, let alone the kind who would care enough to set up a secret language with me, I found the book more of an exercise in frustration than otherwise after I had exhausted my first curiosity. I begged my father, at last, to write me a note in code and leave it on my bed one morning before he left for work and, grumbling, he consented. He left the house in those days at dawn, long before any of us had arisen, and returned somewhat after dusk; but the interesting thing is that he was not a father by proxy and that all of us were quite aware of his presence during the missing hours, a presence carefully nurtured by my mother, who could make no sensible decisions of any kind—life-decisions as to whether we might borrow a quarter or go out alone somewhere—until my father was home. On this morning I awoke from a rather restless sleep convinced that my father had not done what I had asked him, but when I reached under the bed it was there, printed in his precise handwriting on a sheet of his blue office stationary and, in the bargain, Scotch-taped closed for security. I cannot make sufficiently dramatic the anticipation with which I tore open this note: for all that it might have been it could be the key to existence itself, some private message from my father which would render into perspective all of my suffering and explain not only its cure—which was minor business—but its cause. It was causes which I always sought, then and now.
Dear Michael: [the note said, being written in the simplest of all the suggested codes in the puzzle book, a simple substitution of the letter before the desired letter in the alphabet so that “dear” became “cdzq” and so on, but with what tantalizing joy did I break the code to find out what my father had said to me!]
