“I hope not,” I say. “I hope not.”
“I have an idea,” she says, grasping my arm and leaning forward to me with real confidentiality. “While the rest of them are downstairs, let’s go back to your parents’ room and let’s fuck!”
I look at her intensely. “We did that,” I say. “We did that already about an hour and a half ago.”
“Oh, really?” she says. “Oh, of course,” but her eyes do not really register comprehension. “Of course we did. But what’s wrong with doing it again? There’s nothing to be done about it.”
And it is only then that I feel the frozen, uncomprehending gloom of the massive double-take seizing with the ferocity and singleness of purpose of a fist. I stagger slightly in the hallway and am only successful in righting myself by reaching my arms toward her and balancing myself on the softnesses of her shoulders. “Wait a minute,” I say. “You didn’t say ‘the Westfields’ room.’ You said ‘your parents’ room.’ That’s what you said.”
“Oh?” she says and her eyes register a faint dismay which might be profound and which might on the other hand only be a polite reflection of my own expression. “Oh, did I say that? That was really silly, Michael, because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings and I was happy to go along with you for your sake. But since it’s out, it’s out. Yes, surely, Michael, I know that these people were your parents. I know you’re Michael Westfield. You’ve been acting so strangely all morning and you were always talking about this restoration when we were driving and I could just tell in hundreds of ways. But it doesn’t matter to me. I feel the same way about you that I did. And I won’t tell anyone. That old curator was starting to ask me all kinds of questions about you and who you were and what your name was and so on and I didn’t tell him a thing. So you don’t think that I’d ever tell a soul.”
“Oh,” I say, “oh, God,” feeling the cave of the living room closing around me, the very clutter assuming that malevolent and personal proportion which disaster sites always seem to do. It is no coincidence that the closet drama is being played in the living room, which was, of course, in different guises, the crisis room and in which the few discussions of prior alleged seriousness were carried on at about the rate of one every two or three years. “Oh, God, I don’t think I can stand it anymore.” I stagger over the gate in an uneven ragged bound and sprawl on the couch. “It’s just too much for me, all of it, all of it.” I cannot explain why I am opening up so emotionally for Joanne but suspect—in fact I am certain or otherwise would not be able to do it—that it is all part of some highly contrived plan which my subconscious has already bought and is now essaying to sell to me.
“Oh, don’t be so emotional, Michael,” she says to me coolly, sitting next to me on the couch, working her thighs against mine and taking my hand to inspect it. “There’s really no need for these kinds of dramatics; this was your idea in the first place you know, and how did you expect me not to suspect the way you’ve been carrying on about this and the way you’ve been acting here? Besides, plenty of us go back to the homes where we grew up; it’s unfortunate that yours has turned out to be some kind of national shrine and that you’re forbidden, but it’s basically a healthy experience and it’s good for you. I won’t ever tell. But that dirty old bastard started to feel me under the table; he was squeezing my thighs and working against my knees and it was just too much. What kind of people are there working here anyway? I never knew of anything like this. Oh, come on, Michael, let’s go upstairs and screw. If you feel strange about your parents’ room we can do it in yours or your sister’s but I’d really like to. It would be so nice.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Can’t you understand that all of this is too much for me?” And indeed it is, I lean forward on the couch in a posture of distress, cupping my head on the open left palm but the difficult thing about all of this is that I know exactly how it looks and the effect I am trying to bring around by doing it. This is all very similar to my mother’s ‘fainting fits’ when she would pass out near the crockery or late on weekday evenings rather than face difficult choices, and also very much like my father’s predilection for throwing tantrums precisely before some important economic issue was about to be discussed. We re-enact our history, re-enact our history, there is really no end to all of it. None, none. I feel the pressure of Joanne’s fingers on my wrist and then she is guiding me, quite easily, to my feet; I am not resisting her at all of course. I feel her arm slip around my waist and her lips touch the panels of my cheek. “Come on,” she says, “everything will be all right. You know that yourself. Let’s go upstairs. Let’s go upstairs and fuck. Then when the rest of them come up we’ll join them and it will be like we know something that they don’t know. I love you, Michael. Have I told you that today? I love you. I love you. Everything should be all right between us.” Her breast, shielded, grazes into the sudden cup of my palm and I feel her warmth. I allow her to take me to the stairs, allow her to take me up the stairs and when it comes to the choice of rooms I allow her to take me where she will which, of course and inevitably, is once again the bedroom of the Westfields. Pater and mater. I do not think about this anymore, so urgent and rising is my need to fuck her.
FOUR
This time she draws the shades with a swift deftness which obviously is the extension of all kinds of planning, an ease and certainty about these things which has always evaded me, and then in the dark, toe to toe, foreheads touching, we unclothe like assassins and toss our clothing at a great distance from the bed, pile into the sheets together. It is almost as if we are now courting disaster, for should we hear the sound of the guide and his entourage coming up the stairs, even clattering at the door of the room, there would be absolutely no time to get out of bed and dress before we were intercepted. And so we would stand naked: stand naked before albino, his family, the two Edwardians, the fat man, the guide, only my swollen genitalia giving indication of the mortality contained in that nakedness, and there would be absolutely no way that the situation could be saved. In all likelihood we would be involved in the courts. Still, it does not occur to me to pick up the clothing and put it at a safe remove. I think the fact of the matter is that I want to get caught; that I want to bring down upon myself a disaster so large, so final, so damning in all of its implications and so irrevocable that it will be possible to subsume all difficulty in that disaster and thus abandon all responsibility. In one way or the other way it is possible that I have been looking for this all my life, have been looking for something to come along so enormous and damning that it will render the question of further struggles an irrelevance. It may be this more than anything else which causes my prick to speed toward Joanne with such enormous force, such great concentration; it may be the need to sink far below any sense of my purposes and never be seen again which gives voice to my groans, my mutterings, my shouts. I will have no way of knowing this, ever. There are no easy answers. There never will be.
My father too must have been looking for something of this sort, for no other reason could he have seen terror in an untied shoelace, all damnation and loss in an unshoetreed shoe; his instincts then were right (at least in terms of my own) but he was simply too limited a man to have the scope, the dramatic sense of history and the background that I do. For these reasons I am able to contrive large disasters which are of almost metaphorical sweep in their intensity and irrevocability, whereas he was only able to immerse himself in a constantly-reiterated banality. Of course it is all too late to care much about this or to change it in any way but I wish, unreasonably, that there were some way to travel my adult self back in time and confront my father with what I have since learned about really colorful ways in which to celebrate the death-urge. If I could get past his posturing, his remorse, his easy dismissals, I think that I might very well be able to do him a large favor and for it, perhaps, even win his favor. Of course I am not in the least interested in winning his favor, having lived my own life my way for quite a while now. And for no profit other than mine. My own. My life.
Witness Joanne. There is Joanne. For all this time, as this pure storm-and-welter of retrospection and indulgence tumbles through my mind, all this time I am atop her on my parents’ bed in an orgy of concentration, brow furrowed, prick burrowing, trying to fuck her. She is tight now, surprisingly so, some miracle of psychic connection with the curator must have locked up her cunt because it is damnably hard, almost impossible, for me to penetrate her and I am only able to do so with great difficulty, forcing myself past levels of unchanging skin and arid glands in order to do so. I wish that I had some of my parents’ Vaseline but that, of course, is quite impossible; it has not been in these quarters for ten years, I am sure, and if it was it would be unusable now by dint of age. Besides that, Vaseline in my home was used, to the best of my knowledge, only for thermometers and small, harmless burns. So I work my way into her slowly, frenzied in concentration, and at last it begins to work: suck of breast, flip of ass, rising nipple, deepening cunt and at last I am snugly all the way up to myself in her and our lips collide. “Fuck me,” she whispers. “Oh, this is so exciting. I want you to fuck the hell out of me. Really do it now. Do it as if you were mad at me. Do it as if I had fucked that dirty old creep downstairs. Maybe I did. You’ll never know.”
“Bitch,” I say, less out of conviction than necessity. “Bitch, bitch, bitch,” and begin to flop upon her painfully; my cock is swollen and very hard and there is very little friction generated by the collision of our genitals, but I close my eyes against all these concerns and try to think only of spilling, spilling into her. “Oh, bitch,” I moan, feeling an ancient cry deep in the cells, a long lusting, a deep feeding. “Oh, cunt, oh, cunt,” and she says, “You too, you too, you bastard, you can’t fuck me; you’re not good enough for me,” and, “Oh, you cunt,” I say. “You dirty wretched miserable bitch,” and feel my orgasm yank me out of myself, leaving me quite speechless as sperm pours and pours into her. I raise my hands to cup her breasts and suck at them industriously and she inhales to place them in my mouth even more deeply, and still dry, dry, she works out her last measures against me. By any objective scale, I suppose it is possible to say that we have had a satisfactory, if somewhat too complex fuck, but the look on Joanne’s face is unspeakable and leaves very little to the imagination, being composed of distress, dismay and a kind of smugness in equal parts, all of it quite horrifying, and set off against the flop and roll of her large, meaty breasts, it has a rather Gothic aspect. It is evident that she is unsatisfied and cannot decide whether she is more anguished by this than she is pleased by the fact that I have not moved her. Meanwhile I roll off to her side, looking up once again at the ceiling, and for the first time then I see it truly as my mother must have seen it, the greyness of its aspect, the complete implacability of its color, the slow, subtle changing shapes which optical illusion seemed to give it—yes, the ceiling was the total metaphor for everything which sex meant to my mother, and at this instant I can understand, if only for the first time, how difficult it must have been for her to sustain herself in an environment where sex was highly valued and often joked about (but, I remind myself, where many of her friends must have had as difficult a time as she). The thing was that my mother always referred to sex as a “great joy” and a “beautiful fulfillment” and once, in a moment of pique, confessed herself to me as being “wholly satisfied with everything, which is why I don’t want to see those magazines and books of yours around,” and how difficult indeed it must have been for the poor woman, for the fact is (I can see this now) that she was satisfied, that sex was a great joy and to the degree that she understood this phenomenon of pain and relief which is all that we may ever know of the heavens—to the degree that she did indeed understand this, she was pleased with it. This is a chilling line of speculation; it would be chilling for me to follow even if I was in the humming safety of a motel room with Joanne and some blankets huddled over me; here, in the truly dangerous circumstances surrounding this room and this fuck it is entirely out of proportion. I shudder and jump on the bed and for no reason which I can understand find myself clinging to her.
“Why?” she says to me, taking me in with a slow sigh and allowing me to fasten my lips to her large nipple. “Why does it sometimes work out like this? It’s like you’re going away, that you’re not going forward but retreating from me as fast as you can. I don’t understand it.”
“Why did you let him proposition you?”
“He propositioned me; I didn’t let him.”
“Then why did you go to talk to him? The poor bastard probably thought you were trying to pick him up.”
“I had a few questions,” she says unconvincingly and thrusts the breast deeper into my mouth so that I can suck more avidly. I am not quite sure exactly what profit I intend to take from this but remove my mouth and say, “There’s got to be an end to this, you know.”
“An end to what?”
“To us. To this thing.”
“Well,” she says, and her eyelids close over as she rolls against me, “we never expected anything different from the beginning, did we? We knew it would come to nothing eventually. No, don’t move away. Suck on me. They’re still ripe.”
I immerse myself in her again and it is indeed very easy and very restful, it is something that I could do for a very, very long time without the necessity for any kind of thought, and I feel, in fact, that I am working myself toward the verge of a very real connection, some kind of genuine necessity at last answered, hot then, in the distance, we hear a dim clatter and the rumbling sound of footsteps. I can, of course, instantly place them from all my subsumed knowledge of this house; they have reassembled in the dining room and are about to take the steps to the bedroom.
“My God,” I say and leap from her at full force, staggering back against the wall. “We’ve got about a minute to get dressed, even less. Hurry, for God’s sake! You want to get caught?” I struggle with my pants, feel with gratitude my leg moving slickly into both sets, the touch of the shirt against my chest.
She leans back, her arms behind her head, breasts pointed to the ceiling and says, “Oh, come on, Michael. Don’t be so nervous. It is your house,” and giggles then, rather unreasonably.
“Don’t you understand? They’ll find us here and then—”
“And then what?”
“And then enough!” I say. She is being completely unreasonable; in fact she is being a little insane. The trouble is that I know exactly what she is thinking and how she is being driven in that direction. And I feel the same thing working within me as well, for of all the tastes of catastrophe, what could possibly please the disaster-gourmet more than the prospect of being caught in flagrante delicto by strangers in his own home, in his own parents’ bed? The compulsion to lie down beside her and let what will evolve happen is almost irresistible, and to compensate for it I spring toward her, grab her wrist and pull her upright from the bed, twist it slightly then until she mumbles in pain and finally stands alongside me, sobbing. “Please,” I say. “We can’t have this, Joanne. Please don’t do this to me.”
“You bastard,” she says. “You don’t understand. You don’t even know what’s going on here.” But she begins to dress quickly enough, simultaneously with the sound of steps working on the stairs. Her assumption of full dress coincides almost exactly with the sound of the guide’s hand on the doorknob, but in an enormous, explosive leap full of energy I manage to get both of us over the gate to stand innocently against the wall just as he opens the door and all of them pile in. And—wonder of wonders!—he gives no sign of acknowledgement of our presence, possibly taking us for having been with him all along.
Then too, the guide seems very tired. There has once again been a change in my colleagues’ aspect and demeanor since the last time seen; now where there was anticipation there is only a kind of sullenness and the guide’s own dedicated civil servitude seems to have been replaced by an intricate kind of pallor which begins at his forehead, works down toward his neck and then doubtless into all of the invisible places. His eyes are very much like those of my father after a long day, slightly red at the rims, on the edge of tears or perhaps just past them, and his breath seems to snort unevenly, not quite catching his nostrils on the inhale. Only the albino seems slightly contented, he is working on the last leavings of an ice cream cone and sighing slightly as he puts the remainder into his mouth and—without chewing—swallows it. He seems to be at a kind of peace which is, of course, well beyond where I am at this moment.
If the guide notices the slight rumpling of the bedspread or the faint hint of semen he gives no clue. Indeed his visage at this moment seems hardly to be receiving much intelligence. He gives an indolent wave at the room as he climbs over the gate and then, with a weary groan, seems to assume the mantle of professionalism again. The scholar and his companion, I am pleased to note, look entirely restored in the physical sense although no less sullen than anyone else. Joanne, meanwhile, moves as far away from me as she can in the limited space and, folding her hands, looks downward and toward the wall. In other circumstances I would know exactly what this behavior forecasted in the way of remonstrations, arrangements, guilt and exercise later but now I do not care anymore. That is the thing that I sense within myself, and with almost a kind of joy I carefully explore this feeling, picking it up, looking at it from under the edges like a pancake. I truly do not care. I feel as if I will be able to leave the Westfield museum in due course and never think of it again. It is almost enough—but only almost—to redeem the day.
“Well, then,” the guide says, “we are, of course, in the master bedroom, the bedroom where Mr. and Mrs. Westfield slept, copulated, read and watched television, although only the first of these activities was one which can be said to have been truly engaged in simultaneously by the Westfields. The television was kept between the beds and could only face one of them at a given time; the Westfields decided who, on a given night, would watch television and, since they never agreed on shows, who would read a book. The television was given preference. When they copulated, of course, twice a week, they would be in Mrs. Westfield’s bed—this was the way in which things were done—but otherwise they would be quite apart and it is no mere error or failure of sentiment that has led the curators to designate these beds as shrines. They are the center of the mystery. They are as close, perhaps, as we can get in this entire tour to an apprehension of holy ground. For that reason we have taken you here first, the other two bedrooms to come are only a deliberately contrived anticlimax, supplemental to these.
“You will note,” the guide says, sitting down on my mother’s bed and rubbing his hand over the slightly disheveled linens, “you will note the presence of one semen stain right in the center here. This stain, which is a reconstitution of Mr. Westfield’s own bodily juices, is a simulation of the actual stains which appeared, and if you will look through your brochures later you will note that it was given to us through special federal donation some seven years ago, thus completing the collection. I would ask you to consider it carefully, for there is no dearth of implication here.
“There is no dearth of implication because it indicates that Mr. Westfield felt enough for his wife to render upon her that blending of his organic juices which he referred to as his ‘gift’ to her, and this illustration of capability, to say nothing of the implied enactment of Mrs. Westfield’s response, should be sufficient, once and for all, to close the book upon those minor scholars who have insisted that there was something ‘abnormal’ in the basic marital relationship between the Westfields. There was not, of course. I am not talking about levels of implication or abstraction, obviously, when I say this.”
“And not a moment too soon!” the scholar says in a high voice. Apparently his vomiting, or whatever he has done in the vicinity of the courtesy shop, has utterly reconstituted his spirits because he is facing the guide with more color and enthusiasm than I have yet seen him demonstrate today. Indeed, there seems to be a rather dangerous fluttering of the limbs as he continues speaking which causes his companion to put a concerned, restraining arm upon him and renders a certain supernatural glow to all of this. “Not a moment too soon indeed! Mr. Westfield lived a perfectly normal sexual life; it might have been distinguished by its high moderation, of course, but moderation can be a virtue as well as a penalty and in all basic matters this splendid gentleman functioned at a level of high morality. I despise those interests who say that his extrinsic behavior suggests some sexual abnormality! I despise the question of the ice-skating scholars! I wish to point out—”
“Enough,” the heavy man says. His face is tense and strained in the odd light of the bedroom and he seems to be working himself into some kind of strange rage of his own. “I’ve heard quite enough of all of this, thank you. I am not interested in disputations concerning Mr. Westfield’s heterosexuality, I am not interested in knowing whether or not he found Mrs. Westfield attractive; I do not care to know whether the semen stain we are witnessing is authentic or spurious. Irrelevant, irrelevant! I am bored! I am fed up with all of this! The basic question, which we have to resolve once and for all, is this: is it significant? Is it lasting? Does it mean anything? In terms of the long-range potentialities involved and the question of the accretion of scholarship on twentieth-century America, will it fit in?” He slams his fist toward the floor, apparently forgetting again that he has misplaced his umbrella. “These are the questions and I demand some answers right now!”
“Nonsense!” the scholar shouts, turning with a fury to equal that already spent. “Absolute nonsense! I have listened to this long enough this morning and I won’t hear any more of this rot. No, get your hand off me; I feel perfectly all right and I’m capable of handling this myself. How can you ... how can you possibly make any final evaluation of these people until you have settled once and for all the question of heterosexuality? I tell you, it would be apostasaic and stupid to even make such attempts without backing off to this basic reasoning. Now, from my point of view, until and unless we can clear up this scuttlebutt, these vicious rumors, these small stories propounded by evil men—”
“God damn you!” the heavy man screams. “Goddamned nits like you are the ones who’ve fucked up the whole issue in the first place! How can anything be clear if the basic premises are all wrong, if the assumptions are foul? No, I want some answers to these questions now.”
It occurs to me, of course, that somewhere during the course of the interval, my tour companions have gone completely insane. Certainly there is no other way in which to explain or understand the choler informing the heavy man’s face with a series of dull, ill-matched red and white streaks, no way to understand otherwise the scholar’s high-pitched bellow as he turns once again to confront the question. But the guide, to my surprise, appears to take this as a perfectly normal development; in fact—or is this merely an illusion?—he seems to favor me with a slow, diminishing wink, all knowledge, all precognition floating into his eye, and then he turns into the center of the argument and says, “Gentlemen. gentlemen. You both have points of great merit. And I am delighted to see at last that you are so involved in this tour. But if you will only hold your fire—or your questions, as you will—for a few moments I think that we can proceed to give you enough information to resolve the question and to show you that you both are right. There’s nothing wrong with gentlemen of good will disagreeing, and it is these disagreements which contribute so much to the richnesses of the Westfield project, its unique contribution to Western culture; its controversiality is, in short, that life-force which simultaneously infuses and solidifies it toward a state of permanence. But calm, calm, and let me continue.”
“You’d better answer my questions then,” the heavy man says sullenly. “I won’t put up with this anymore otherwise. You’re evading the whole issue.”
