“No, I am not,” the guide says. “I most certainly am not, and if you will only allow me to proceed I think that you will find that there has been a kind of fine, controlling superstructure to all of this and that in the last analysis nothing has been out of place, nothing has been random. Remember, we are now at the culminating exhibits: the two bedrooms, here are where all the pieces fall into place.” His speech strikes me as being a shade frenetic, perhaps a shade forced on the last syllables, but then again it is impossible for me to envy the position into which he has been cast, and for the life of me, I would have no other way of handling the situation in his place. And would know far less than he. “Let me continue,” the guide says.
“Yes,” I say. “Let him continue. He’s doing very well; he’s done fine all day today. I think that we should hear him out; it isn’t much longer now.”
The guide nods curtly to me—torn obviously between gratitude for support and a kind of dull resentment at the interposition between himself and his duties, does this mean that he will lose a certain amount of promotion credit?—but the scholar and the other give me a look of loathing so intense that I find myself babbling, much as I did once to my father when caught in the act of subterranean necking with my sister when we were very pubertal, “Well, well, I have a right to do it, don’t I? I mean I have a right to say it? I mean, it’s something worth doing, isn’t it?” I feel a rocking moment of confusion wrench me as I realize that I am not quite sure whether I am talking of the necking or the guide and decide to let it pass, let it pass, hope that this moment, as all the others, will be subsumed in the future moments, but not at all as confident as I was. I reach for Joanne’s hand and to my relief I find it, squeeze it violently, feel no answering pressure but try again. I am waiting for her to whisper to me that everything is all right, that I have not disgraced myself and that my history, like my possibility, is as replaceable as any incident of human connection; but she says nothing at all and when I look down upon her (I am, I should have mentioned a good time ago, four and a half inches taller than she) her face is turned, the hard surface of one slightly flushed cheek jumping out its message to me in the smooth, cold, disordered twitching of a nerve. I clutch her hand toward my waist, afraid that somehow she will depart. “Anyway,” I say. “Anyway, that’s my position.”
“All right,” the guide says. “All right, if the three of you have calmed down sufficiently and can permit me to continue, I’d like to see what I can say now of value. You will note the large dresser to the rear of the beds and somewhat to the right; it contained Mr. Westfield’s underwear, his socks, his various memorabilia and even for a while—until a cheap ‘automatic valet’ was purchased—his pants and unpressed suit jackets. In the bottom drawer, however, underneath a pile of his white and blue shirts, we see an object of the most particular interest which, to be sure, I would like to show you.” The guide rummages through that aforesaid bottom drawer, having some not unexpected difficulty in pulling it out (I know exactly what he is going through) and after a while emerges with a small book bound in a blue jacket whose title is Marriage Lore. He shows it to us for a moment, then holds it over the gate so that we can gather around and look at it more closely. There is no need for me to do so, of course—I know the contents of this book somewhat better than I would even the sense of this narrative if recorded and reread at some date in the far future—but in order to stave off any suspicion I examine it as intensely as any of the others, rubbing my hand over the grainy surface of the jacket. It feels like human skin, like the buttocks of an aged female, an illusion which had overtaken me at the time of original contact some twenty years ago. I used the book often to masturbate to, and from the look which Joanne suddenly gives me—the first look of any kind I have had from her since the guide and tourists entered—I suspect that she knows so as well.
“This,” says the guide, and there is a hint of pride in his voice and manner, almost a flourish as he retracts the book and sets it upon the dresser, “this was the sex manual of Mr. and Mrs. Westfield, purchased for the two of them by Mr. Westfield on the eve of his marriage and given to his bride for a companionate reading on their wedding night. You may think it strange that this couple, who had already copulated prior to their marriage, would either purchase or pay close attention to a work of this kind, but you must understand not only the personalities involved—Mr. Westfield felt that copulation was a pastime as earnest and meaningful and necessarily planned for as a laundry chore, for instance—but the period. In this quaint time, not so far removed from us as we would hope, sexuality was considered not to be a natural part of the question of human experience but rather an unnatural extension, something either delightful or terrible—depending upon who you were, what you wanted to be—and too often banal but in no case as easily related to the other areas of the physiological and psychological function as we, in these liberated times, do now believe. We have long since transcended any strain about sexuality—isn’t that so, ladies and gentlemen? Why, I wouldn’t hear a word of retort!—but the Westfields had not, and thus they felt they had to schematize the act and consider it in a way in which you or I might explore the roots of a dead plant or the viscera of an equally deceased chicken, and it is for these purposes that the book was procured. Of course it was put away on the third night of their honeymoon and never looked at by either of them again, they having felt that they had absorbed all that was necessary from it and were now qualified to put its admonitions into practice.
“Michael, however, the archives reveal, was aware of the location of this book, which the Westfields had negligently failed to either dispose of or better hide, and used it often in his early masturbatory activities, only going on to better things when he was able to secure an adult library card and consequent privileges from his local branch and found himself catapulted—and catapulted is the word—into a universe of far larger sensation. But most of Michael’s early sexual awakening revolved around the pages of this very book, ladies and gentlemen, and it is, thus, a most remarkable document; if our sexual life is merely an enactment of those fantasies and desires implanted into us at the basic turning moment of puberty—if this is the fact, and it is the belief of the senior trustees and the research foundation that this is indeed a valid assumption—if this is so, then this very book is probably being enacted by the now mature Michael Westfield upon some unsuspecting—or perhaps all too suspecting—lady at this very moment. Consider that, the profundity of this recycling, the nightmare of history we are considering! If, of course, Michael Westfield is indeed alive and functioning still. There are many conflicting reports about him, as well as the sister Katherine, and there has yet emerged no definite body of opinion on their present whereabouts, if any. Perhaps if our contributions continue to increase as, happily, they have over the past decade, we will eventually be able to extend our research activities not only into a consideration of the extant documents but into an exploration of the present whereabouts and activities of the surviving members of the family as well as their relatives. This is a consummation which is devoutly, at least in scholarly terms, to be wished, although there is a considerable body of thought which holds that the location of Michael and Katherine Westfield would, in theoretical, research terms do little good and only serve to confuse the issue horribly. Also, as you know, they are prohibited by the terms of the grant from coming back to the restoration at any time.”
The guide replaces the book almost reverently in the bottom drawer and closes it. “This is considered one of the high points of the entire exhibit,” he says. “I myself find it very provocative, almost personally moving. Only an artifact, that book, but consider the effects, the consequences! The very implications! Incredible,” the guide says and shakes his head ruminatively. “Incredible, incredible.”
“The Michael Westfield question is an extremely interesting one,” the scholar says meditatively. “I did a minor term paper as an undergraduate on him for extra credit. Of course the Michael Westfield area is so slight and so unimportant that no courses were offered in my undergraduate curriculum, but at the time that I did the paper I thought I might want to do my dissertation on him, finally deciding against it because the area of sexuality in the lives of the Westfield parents was so much more fruitful. Nevertheless, I don’t think we need worry about him. Not at all,” the scholar says somewhat mysteriously and shakes his head. His friend pats him on the shoulder twice and once again whispers something to him.
“Why not?” Joanne asks. “Why not?”
“Yes,” the guide says. “I’d be most interested in hearing about any area of scholarship outside my purview. We aren’t simply doing a job here, you know; we’re entirely dedicated to our work. I applied for this position. What about Michael Westfield?”
“Oh never mind,” the scholar says. “It isn’t important. He isn’t important.”
“Why not?” Joanne asks again. I feel that somehow she is doing this for me and turn to look for her confidential smile, but she is staring straight at the scholar, her face set and determined. “If you say something, say it. Why not anyway?”
“Because it all comes to nothing anyway,” the scholar says impatiently. “It absolutely comes to nothing and there’s no sense involving further discussion of the purposeless. In the last analysis you have to look for origins, not consequences. The consequences merely enact the origins. Forget it.”
“That isn’t very promising,” the guide says.
“I will say no more.”
“That’s the first time you’ve shut up all day,” says the heavy man. “The very first time. To what quality of Michael Westfield do we owe this?”
Tension seems to come up again but the guide wearily, raising a hand, manages to simultaneously defer to it and pass it by. “All right,” he says. “It’s a long day, a taxing day and the peculiar communicability of the artifacts is indeed remarkable; it does the strangest things to people. Let us try to continue; there isn’t very far to go at all. Let me summarize the objects of interest in this bedroom; then once again I would like to hear sensible brief questions and then we will go to the rooms of the siblings and be done with this. The courtesy shop offers a particularly nutritious and inexpensive hot dinner, incidentally, and for those of you who care to dine substantially and early, I think you will find it a bargain. The waitress is garbed in the period fashions of the day, looking very much as Mrs. Westfield might as far as we can gauge from photographs, and the food is so authentic that it might have come from the Westfield kitchen. You have a choice of home-cooked meat loaf with mashed potatoes and peas or a tuna fish salad for a party of four, made of two seven-ounce cans of tuna fish with mayonnaise to taste and a quarter of a head of lettuce, butter and spinach side dish optional. Private parties can be accommodated on reservation, incidentally; should you ever happen to be in this vicinity on a weekend accommodations can be arranged. Let us consider the window shades and venetian blinds here; you will note that the venetian blinds are extremely snug against the invasion of light—Mrs. Westfield paid more than a little bit extra for these—and for this reason it was necessary to burn exceedingly bright lights during the days. The venetian blinds were never open, then, except during periods of extremely great humidity or when guests were in the house. The windows themselves are of a very fine glass, both protective and filtering of light; they had a tendency to stick under even the most pleasant weather conditions, leading to the tendency of the family to keep them closed almost all the time. This may have had something to do with the internal climate of the home which, as I have already noted I am sure, was almost unbearably warm during the spring, summer and fall. The bedroom, along with all of the other rooms on the second floor, was not coterminous to the bathroom, leading to a certain logistical problem for all of the Westfields, who, in the morning hours, would find themselves extremely uncomfortable and the traversion down the stairs to be exceedingly difficult. It is not impossible that a lot of the anal humor and urgency in the household was predicated upon the simple inaccessibility of the bathroom. I do not believe at this time that I have anything else to say about the bedroom so will once again invite questions and then we can go on, see the other two bedrooms briefly and finish off. Are there any questions?”
“Did they like to screw?” Joanne asks, rather abruptly.
“Oh,” the guide says, “I thought that this was answered. I have gone into the most careful documenting of the sexual lives of these people and I don’t understand why the question would come up now.”
“But you’re wrong, you see,” Joanne says with a kind of menacing quiet which is also one of her moods—less familiar than most but still falling into the range of observed behavior—and which, if I could, I would warn the guide about with a wink and a sigh; she is nothing to be trifled with when she falls into this tone of query, but is indeed working herself into a certain series of postures which can be quite painful to those with whom she becomes involved. The fact is that like many girls of more or less casual sexual motive and behavior, Joanne has rapid inversions, convulsions of guilt and streaks of dread which afflict her, most often after she has fucked too audaciously and for her sake without too much purpose, and I feel a surge of pity and understanding for her, although there is very little in either of these emotions that I understand will do us any good. “Anyway I want to know,” she finishes. I have apparently missed some interpolatory line of dialogue dealing with Joanne’s belief in the importance of sex as the basis of human behavior, but I really feel as if I have missed nothing at all. We have been there before, you see.
“Well,” the guide says, “I can only try to answer you along the lines already so clearly implied, which was that they neither liked nor disliked the act but, particularly in the case of Mr. Westfield, felt that its performance was integral to that picturalization of a ‘normal life’ which they felt they were leading and which, conversely, they desperately wanted to lead; and in line with that it was important for them not only to perform the sex act with a certain degree of regularity but to agree that they had shared ‘mutual pleasure’ from it, and so they insisted they did. As to whether or not they truly enjoyed it in the intense emotional physical sense, this is something which we can obviously not be sure of but which can only be surmised from the data. We think—”
“Mr. Westfield enjoyed it,” the scholar says. “He enjoyed it a great deal. Studies—”
“I hate it!” the albino says in a high whining voice, and his mother once again cuffs him, a concealed blow on the side of the head almost hidden under her coat, but solid enough in its impact to make all of us stand a little taller and take some notice. The woman flushes and tries to work her head down into her collar and finally says over the thin cries of the albino, “Well, he was only making a nuisance. I was trying to keep him quiet.” A certain fierceness overcomes her features and she says loudly, “It’s not an easy thing to control, you know. It’s terribly difficult. There’s more to this than you can possibly imagine. The conflict, the possibilities—”
It is all too much for me. I feel for the first time that day in urgent need of the bathroom and this time, without even motioning to the guide, without giving any kind of indication to Joanne, I detach myself from the crowd and go outside, hit the steps at full tilt heading downward. It is possible that I hear the guide’s voice raised in mild protest as I speed away, but this means nothing to me and I am in the interstices of the bathroom before I have even had time to give due consideration to the fact that when I took my hand away from Joanne’s there was no pressure, no inquiry, not even a turning of the head, but only that blank disinterest which she has seemed to have since the very moment of my completion. Since I know that we will be parting I know that this should not distress me, but it nags, niggles, works into some corner of the being and disturbs me to such an extent that I am unable to properly start my stream when urinating, an old difficulty. Under emotional stress, it seems to be the urinary sphincter which first fails to function; only after that piece of business has presented itself does the mind seem to function.
Nevertheless I do begin to void thickly, jets of urine streaming from my organ, and a delusion overcomes me during this moment, the delusion that in any instant my mother will knock at the door and then come in unbidden to observe me, try to “straighten” certain things out on the shelves, try to “keep the place in order.” This was an old family habit and may, indeed, have been one of the most workable and yet protective ways in which we could express our aggression; certainly my poor father was unable to take “a good crap” for a sustained period of time, and similarly my most irrepressible urinary urges would overcome me when my mother was in the shower. Of course the thick, mottled, uneven glass of the stall shower made it absolutely impermeable to disclosure and I can therefore offer in evidence the statement that I have never seen my mother nude, but the thought, in fact the principle, might have been there. It is all too complex for me and I flush the toilet vigorously. To my surprise, the restoration committee has done its job well and the toilet still functions, and I luxuriate for the instant in the sinuous hiss and piling of water, watching it recede from me violently and wondering as I did years ago where the water went when it was flushed. For a long time I believed that it went into the cellar—the place where the courtesy shop is now of course—and lay there thickly waiting for reconstitution in the form of further flushes later or in some of my mother’s cooking, but now I do not believe that, of course. I know that the water goes out to the sea, adding its filaments, fragments and turgid piling of our history to the implacable water and that it is never seen again; tossed and aimless, thrown as far from us as the jets of liquid we exude during sexual intercourse. I do not believe any more in reconstitution, which may be one of the basic insights into that protective cynicism which has now nourished me for so many years.
I hear footsteps in the hallway as I am pondering all of this and decide not to emerge but instead to listen; this too being an old family habit, dating from the time in my early teens when I played “detective” by hiding behind doors to listen to my parents’ conversations while allegedly doing my homework; this might have given me a feeling of power except that the conversations were so banal, the point of all of this so invisible that it reacted strongly against any megalomaniac feelings which might have developed. There is no exciting clandestine insight to be gained from the muttered requests of one parent to the other to exchange sections of the newspaper or consider tomorrow’s dinner.
This, however, is a little different, the surest indication of my building theory that in the long range certain things do change, if only slightly and to no apparent purpose. As the flush fades I hear someone say, “I don’t know about this. There’s no real precedent.”
“Of course not,” another voice says. Apparently they are both men in their late forties, although I would hesitate to base further characterological assessments simply upon the sound of voices. “But how could there be? It’s something entirely new.”
“But not unexpected.”
“Do you think we’re right?”
“Well,” the other voice says, and I hear them receding now; apparently they are going into the basement, “I don’t think that it matters whether we’re right or wrong. We’re doing the necessary, which is the important thing.”
“Yes. And then too, the whole thing is a cycle.”
“Yes. The thing is a cycle.”
“Cyclical.”
“Exactly,” the other says and I hear a door slam. Strangely, rather than wanting to draw inferences from the conversation (which I suppose had to do with some of the dry bureaucratic details of the museum and little else) I find myself only reminded through the use of the word “cycle” that this was, indeed, one of my father’s favorite words, which was used almost more frequently in explanation or discourse than anything else with the exception of simple connectives like “the” or “cut it out” or “I can’t stand it anymore.” To buy a new car was to “go through the cycle” and the death of a relative was “a cycle” and the birth of another relative was “part of that cycle” and so on and so forth until I began to deduce my father’s entire inference of the universe as being a simple curvature, somewhere along the Einsteinian plane, of course, but much starker, much simpler, much more geometrical in its precision. If everything indeed was a cycle (or was he indeed only punning on the word “circle” or worse yet, mispronouncing it?) then it was quite likely—or, at least, not entirely unlikely—that he and everything else would come back again. This was a thought to send me speeding out of the bathroom, all unheeding of possible interception, and I took the stairs two at a time in leaping bounds (I always did this anyway when we lived there although I was warned by my mother that I could “bring the house down”) and rejoin the tour. In the interim they have once again moved and are, indeed, in Katherine’s room when I come to their rear. Joanne is almost invisible now, pressed against the gate, hidden by the family of the albino and the shoulders of the heavy man who, by some trick of posturing and angle, seems to have his arm around her, his lips against her neck, his absorption total. “So much for Katherine,” the guide is saying. “As I have said she is the least important member of this family, possessing many qualities and traits of her own, but unfortunately these qualities and traits tending to be merely extensions or variations of those of her parents. Also she was too young during the historical period to grasp some of the more important implications. She was bright enough and she felt enough but she lacked a metaphysic, a common problem among people of her age at this time, of course. It must be noted however that she possessed a kind of genuine sensitivity and her capacity to be pained by the events of the household went far beyond her ability to understand it; for this reason she may be a more interesting character than is commonly supposed, and indeed it has been the purpose of the restoration to inaugurate a detailed study of the lesser-known aspects of her life just as soon as sufficient funds can be secured. In all likelihood those funds will be available by government grant by the end of next year, and after a team of scholars go to work, I think we will find some very interesting material emerging in the years to come. The point is that the more we learn of Katherine, the more we can learn of Mr. and Mrs. Westfield, and this is no mean function. If the only way in which to comprehend parents is through the neuroses of their children, then this could be fruitful ground. On the other hand, nothing is entirely sure. Katherine slept with stuffed animals in her bed—you will note some of them—until well past her twenty-second birthday, converting a childish habit into a piece of contrived feminine whimsy, and who can blame her? She lived in the house as frequently as the brother Michael, although not as frequently as her parents. As to the exact quality of her inner thought, her inner relation, we could only surmise this, and but dimly. It is sufficient to say that at the present time we consider her a ficelle. In no pejorative sense at all, of course.”
He motions toward the bed, which does indeed contain three of Katherine’s familiar sleeping companions: a large yellow dog engraved with the crest and initials of my college which my father had bought for her on a weekend visit to the school: a large, rather misshapen pig which I recall as being named “Walter” and which Katherine claimed to have intricate dialogues with through her fifteenth year, not at all out of insanity but, as the guide had suggested, simply from a kind of apprenticeship in flirtation; and a large green dog with no name whatsoever which, although four feet high standing, stretched out to a more comfortable posture in the bed and might have performed for her a valuable surrogate function. I have no way of knowing. Did Katherine’s desire in those long nights equal mine and were her occupations similar? According to all the texts I have read and the little I know of women, masturbation seems unlikely. I do not believe in a feminine sex drive at all comparable to or understandable by men. On the other hand, granted that she might have had—as I did—to do something as a means of discovering her identity in the darkness and somnolence of those twisted nights … what else could she have done? And does it matter? Will we ever know?
“And that is about that,” the guide says. “I see no need in not being frank; there is very little to see here, and we are dealing with a marginal personality. Questions, of course. We are looking at a shelf of her schoolbooks, incidentally, and these happen to be an unusual acquisition; of all the objects in this house only these were actually excavated from the ruins whole and in no need of restoration before they could be shown. This may have something to do with the high quality of the bindings. Katherine insisted upon buying only the best and newest editions of her texts.”
“No questions,” the scholar says abruptly.
“Well,” the guide says after a flat, slightly embarrassed pause, “well, that’s all well and to the good, but there are other people here as well.”
“She doesn’t matter,” the scholar says definitely, shaking his head. “Why waste our time? Any importance given to Katherine has been exaggerated.”
