The fact that everyone has turned to look at our confrontation with an intensity of interest elicited by nothing that has been yet said this morning fills me with a flush of despair, but I persist. “We had to get away for a moment,” I say. “No disrespect was intended. I just wanted to know what the point of all this was.”
“Where did your girl friend go?”
“She went downstairs to talk to one of the curators. She had a few questions she wanted answered.”
“Oh,” the guide says. “Oh.” I know exactly how he feels. The surest way in which to demolish a civil servant is to make reference to a superior, and yet at the same time I feel shame for his sake because, as is usually the case in civil service, he probably knows far more about the subject at hand than his superiors; should, in fact, be the man whom Joanne wanted to talk to. But his ill luck, the knowledge of which is scorching his features, is hardly to be changed by the likes of myself. He shrugs and says, “I don’t think I understand your question. What do you mean?”
“I mean, the point of the Westfield restoration. Why have it? What does it mean?”
“By buying tickets to come you’ve answered the question, haven’t you? You obviously find it of significance or you wouldn’t be here.”
“That may be true,” I say. “But in general terms, what is the point of it? All this triviality, all this pain! Why try to subsume it in artifacts? Haven’t we got enough of this ourselves? Do we have to go outside and search for it? In general terms, of course.”
The guide tries to sneer but his training and his very evident enthusiasm for his job get the better of him and it does not quite come off. “That isn’t a bad question,” he says, “but, of course, I’ve tried to answer it by implication throughout the morning and will certainly continue to. The life of the Westfields was significant, important, a meaningful microcosm of the way in which people lived at this period in this place. By apprehending it, by trying to come to terms with it, we come into contact with our own history. Perhaps the Westfields are easier to understand because they are all gone and we can learn from their artifacts, which are far less confusing—and infinitely more precise—than actions, which are always discolored by conflicting motive. But by dissecting this life we can, in turn, dissect our own. I would think that this would be the purpose of any exhibition. I don’t mind saying that I think this a valuable one.”
“Yes,” I say, “yes, yes, but they were such essentially trivial people, people so essentially involved only in themselves, not only unaware of great issues but, as you point out yourself, deliberately in flight from them. Wouldn’t there be better people to try to understand?” In fact, I do not quite know why I am doing this; for all the good that the guide’s answers will be doing me, I might just as well be addressing myself. Nevertheless I persist. “They weren’t very important, you know.”
“Sure, they were,” the fat man says. “Certainly they were. How can you think that?”
“He’s right,” the guide says, for the first time engaging in what could be called a dialogue with us. “They were important, I don’t think that this kind of thing can be disputed. By the very fact of their staidness, their stolidity, that accumulation of traits, mannerisms and cheap, mass-manufactured articles which spaced out their lives, they established some kind of a norm in the society they inhabited, a storm-center in the midst of the stillness where, at least, they had some certainty. It is well known that people go for objects, mannerisms and familiarity precisely because they can be dealt with in a way that the unknown cannot, and that by reshuffling these traits in a certain way, a true and proper metaphor for reality can be induced.”
“But that’s precisely the point!” I say loudly. “You see the point is that these people were surreal, these lives can be regarded as a flight-and-substitution and to understand them is to get further from reality, ever further, not closing in on any sense of it at all. By manipulating these objects and mannerisms they were trying to fool themselves into thinking that it was the same as reality, but we know better. Don’t we? Don’t we?” I say rather wildly, flicking my gaze frantically from side to side on those dull parched faces which now, right down to the albino, seem to regard me with a kind of tolerant amusement. “Don’t we?”
The guide gives me a long, surveying stare in which all knowledge, all pity, all understanding seem to be encompassed, and says, “Son, if you don’t understand the meaning of all of this, if you really mean it when you say you don’t know why it’s important, then I can’t make you understand. There’s simply no way. You’ll have to be a little older, you’ll have to know yourself a little better and then it should all fall into place. But I can’t dispute this. I simply can’t dispute this. This restoration, you see, is built upon an assumption as fundamental, as basic and as irredeemable as any of the Westfields’, and that is that this is of importance and can be understood in its own terms. If you can’t see that I can’t make you. Everything here is vital and it is always with us, every part of it. Every artifact an admonition. Shall we take our break now and go downstairs to the courtesy shop? Or would you prefer to go straightway to the bedrooms? Myself, I could do with some rest; it’s been a very difficult morning for all of us.”
“The shop,” the scholar says. In the interim he and his companion have unobtrusively rejoined us at the rear. His face, although somewhat ashen, appears to have retained its normal outlines and it is his friend actually, who seems to be more the sufferer, a certain twittering anxiety causing him to jump and twitch as the scholar moves against him.
“Are you feeling better now?” the guide asks.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure so. It was all the talk of coprophilia that did it to me. We had a little fresh air outside and everything’s fine now. But let’s take a break; let’s do if we can.”
“Well, then,” the guide says. “Certainly.” By some trick of light he looks almost fatherly now although, of course, in a far subtler and thus less lasting fashion than did my own father. “We’ll all go downstairs then and reassemble at the foot of the stairs in fifteen minutes. I shall lead the way of course,” and he brushes by us with a certain gravity and grace of motion and leads us toward the stairs to the basement, a hint of beckoning in his upraised hand.
I am uncertain as to whether I wish to follow him or whether I want to stay and look around these rooms some more. On the one hand I am, of course, most interested in seeing the “courtesy shop” which should have many objects of interest mass-manufactured and thus rendered both nostalgic and significant; on the other hand I have not quite gotten the lure of the bathroom out of myself as perhaps I should have through the guide’s abbreviated lecture. It is illegal, of course, to remain here without supervision, but none of them look back at me as they go and it is apparent that all of them are more concerned with factors downstairs than anything of me and that I have the place, in the most essential sense, once again to myself. Or, as my father put it when I was going through a particularly difficult and unfortuitous business of being bullied in public school around my twelfth year, “You just go right up and pass those boys; you don’t even think about them. You don’t really think you’re so important, do you, that the whole world thinks about you and has you on its mind all the time? They don’t even know you exist.” Good advice, of course, but projected too deeply out of my father’s persistent nihilism to have application to my difficult situation, and the first time I tried it—attempting to bypass a pair of cajolling bullies in the schoolyard—I got myself physically invited to join them and a good deal of punishment for what they took to be my newfound (and, as it turned out, extremely tenuous) arrogance. Nevertheless, in this situation, within the walls of the house in which he lived for some twenty-three years, my father’s advice seems to have assumed the stolidity and permanence of an epitaph, and bowing to it I stay behind and walk eventually into the bathroom where, closing the door behind me, I sit down meditatively on the toilet and stay in a fixed posture for a long time.
It was on this toilet, of course, that I used to flagellate myself occasionally, but the majority of my adventures went on either on my own bed or, as I have said before, on that of my parents. Sitting on the hard, implacable weight of the closed toilet I feel myself once again overtaken by the pain, trembling and needful misery which always preceded my masturbatory exercises and, indeed, were it not for the fact that I have given up masturbation or a good part of it years ago and were it not for the fact that I have so recently and joyously possessed Joanne, I might beat off here once again, for nostalgia’s sake if nothing else. But there is, to be sure, almost no impulse to do so below the basic urge of perversity, and in any event my semen would be a very frail tribute to this overhanging memory which sits in the fluorescence, darts through the cove of the shower, seems to perch on a windowsill. The fact is that I am very much at loose ends with myself.
It has been a difficult day, after all, a demanding day and one as well not without surprises, and it does not seem quite over even yet. Sitting across from the shower, looking at it, I remember a day in my eighteenth year, shortly before I entered college, when I had sat in exactly the same position, looking at that dull, shrouded glass, clusters of green floating toward the center, and had muttered to myself (I was stark-naked at the time, incidentally), “I am going to college and four years from today, having finished college, will be sitting on this toilet in exactly the same position, looking at this damned shower, and the only difference will be in my head, the only difference between the Michael of four years from now and the Michael of today will be a series of attitudes fixed in his head and that is why he is going one thousand miles away to a strange place with strange people, because he wants to make different connections in the head. Is it worth it? Isn’t there an easier way to repair the network?” But of course there wasn’t, and four years later, almost to the day, I sat once again opposite the shower, soaked in a summer sweat and debating whether or not I wanted to shower before I went out to the racetrack and decided, finally, not to. If there were different connections in my head I was unable to spot them, at least at that time. Later perhaps. On the other hand I have no doubt at this time that things are different and that there is all the necessary difference between this blank confrontation now and those two in history, but I am not so certain about even this, that if I were to hear my mother’s pattering in the hallway and the sound of her fist urging me toward the completion of my business, I could know that everything would not go back to the way it had been and there it would be again. Everything as it was. Only the history unascertained. It is really too much for me to think about, even in this difficult mood, and I get up from the toilet quickly and go over to the medicine chest. Opening it I find that the guide has given an apt summary of its contents but has omitted, perhaps, its most important feature. Underneath a piece of towel paper, folded in quarters, is a note from my sister to herself, one of those notes which I have previously mentioned which, I am sure, the committee in its wisdom has gone over carefully and which it has selected to play its modest role, for veracity’s sake, in the chest. It is unfortunate, of course, that no one will ever see it, but I am anyway, which is certainly sufficient, and turning to make sure that the door is still closed I open it unhastily and read it.
We wrote very few notes in the Westfield family to one another, but almost copiously to ourselves, and this letter from my sister is longer than it would seem to have any right to be in terms of its location. What it actually seems to be is a misplaced entry for her diary, and as I think of that long-discarded document, now reconstituted as someone’s first edition of a paperback mystery or worse yet as the diary of another person, I feel a tinge of regret that this one, for whatever sake, was excluded; it is apparently a transitional chapter of no small significance and seen in context it might have made everything before or after it seem entirely clear. But then, having rarely seen my sister’s diary and having almost never had a chance to inspect it closely, I cannot be entirely sure of this ... or of anything else:
August 13: We went over to Dorothy’s house this evening. Dorothy lives just like we do only they put the dinner on the table when everyone wants it and not at any other time. Afterwards I went upstairs with Dorothy, with Joan M and with Helen and we talked about things. I learned a lot. Things are almost the same. Helen says that Burt K likes me but she doesn’t know why and I told her that George T likes her too but also didn’t tell her why. After that we played wrestling and it was very good and I almost lost. I wanted to stay but I knew they would only be coming out to look for me so I had to go home. After I came home I thought a lot about Burt but I don’t know why he likes me because I’ve never done anything to make him like me and I’ve never had him over here because I am afraid to. Maybe I will understand this later. Dorothy isn’t bad but she and the other girls on the block still feel there’s something strange about us because of our religion and maybe there is. I don’t know anything about my religion. I never studied it.
And resisting the impulse to put this one too among my effects, I replace the note back in the chest. The mention of religiosity sparks some long-hidden memories for me; I had never been aware until this moment of my sister’s acuity toward the general issue or her ability to capsulize the problem in a sentence or two and irrationally, decades past the fact, I wish that I had made some attempt, when we were much younger, to talk to her. We talk to one another now, occasionally anyway, and I know enough about her life to understand that she is fulfilling the terms of the grant to the letter by expressing no intention of ever returning to the restoration as long as she is alive, but as to the exact quality of her existence, the scope of her ambitions, the meaning of her functioning, I am not quite sure. I have always taken it for granted that Katherine functions on a level somewhat different, by which I mean lower, than mine, but it occurs to me for the first time that this is not necessarily true—this day is full of insights—and that what I have taken for lower insight is merely a higher resignation, carried forth to this day with a certain stylishness and grace which is foreign to me. In any event it is very difficult and complex and I am consumed by the desperate urge to get out of the bathroom, an urge more desperate toward exit than any of my father’s “hurry calls” to get in which caused such distress and dislocation for the one of us caught in there when the need did smite him. I leap toward the door, turn the knob and find it sliding in my hands, and for a crazed instant succumb to the feeling that I am trapped and will become an artifact myself, a piece of business to be included in the next edition of the tour guide (“Michael Westfield is on view in the bathroom in a characteristic posture of flight-and-immersion; of course you should not touch him under any circumstances as he fears touch”) but the door spins open at last and I spin into the hallway gasping, surprised at the density of the air. It is incredible to feel that we were able to live so many years in such a humid atmosphere, but so we did and became unconscious of it; perhaps the very climate was the key to the way in which the Westfields functioned, a thought which in its delightful banality once again violently alters my perspective. I am about to dart for the stairs and the entrance to the courtesy shop when, to my surprise, Joanne comes out of the living room and puts her arms around me. Her face is bright, flushed, happy, her eyes almost twinkling; if she had been in search of something when last seen, it could be clearly understood that she had found it. “Hello,” she says. “I was looking for you.” The dismaying fact is that I had not missed her presence at all and might not have for the next several hours.
“Hello, yourself,” I say. “They all went downstairs to the shop to take a break. They’ll be going upstairs to the bedrooms soon.” I am trying to present to her a normal demeanor but it is not easy and I wonder if it shows.
“That’s nice. Was it a good lecture?”
“I just caught the end of the bathroom business. It was fairly interesting. But it’s all starting to get a little bit dull.”
“Oh. Too bad. Do you want to know what I was doing?”
I do not. “Of course,” I say.
“You must have thought it very strange when I told that old man I wanted to talk to him alone. But you were very nice about it.”
“He wasn’t an old man.”
“He acted the part. Do you want to know something? He propositioned me! Right in his office.”
“Oh,” I say. It is difficult to maintain the bright look of interest which I know is necessary because our posture is uncomfortable in this position and in the bargain I had been thinking of going to the courtesy shop. “Oh, for God’s sake. Really. How about that?”
“We were just talking about one thing and the other thing and he leaned forward and put his hand on my knee and said, ‘You’re very beautiful. I’ve never seen a girl as beautiful as you in the way that you are. Couldn’t we go to bed together? There are plenty of beds all over the restoration and we won’t have any trouble at all finding privacy. Please say you will; it won’t mean a thing to you but it will mean so much to me.’ What do you think of that?”
“What were you talking about before he said this to you?”
“Oh,” she says, “oh, just things. Nothing very much. I just had a few questions I wanted to ask about this museum and I thought I’d give you an opportunity to wander around on your own by getting him off your neck. You could say thank you! You’ve been dying to walk around by yourself all morning and when I give you the opportunity what do you do? You go right back to the tour.”
“I looked around a little bit first.”
“And get myself propositioned in the bargain!”
“I don’t understand,” I say and this much is true; I have no idea why government civil servants in the employ of a museum project would proposition female visitors to this project, no matter how desperate they are or how attractive the female visitors. The fact is that Joanne is not that terribly pretty; her figure, particularly with clothes off, is impressive and there is an unusual resilience to her skin, an almost masculine tautness, which I have always found extremely exciting, but her face is ordinary and she has, at the age of twenty-five, still no conception of the uses of makeup or any of its subtleties. She is, in short, acceptable but there is little in her to drive a curator to madness. It is another of those strangenesses of the restoration which I know I will have to, much later, come to terms with in order to proceed to anything else.
“Did you go to bed with him?” I ask perversely.
She gives me a look with a good quotient of pain in it. “I certainly did not,” she says. “The man was insane. What do you think of me? Do you think that as insane as everybody else in this place seems to be?”
