“Well, thank you,” he says and shakes my hand. This is the first time I have been truly close to him and he is much older than I had taken him to be; apparently he is sixty years or more, his face blotted by wrinkles of retrospection and inner contemplation of the most disastrous sort, and a thin smell of liquor seems to be emanating from him as well. I am beginning to understand his willingness to cause constant breaks. The woman is plain, middle-aged, her figure not bad as far as I can tell from the covering of her uniform, which has THE WESTFIELDS! stencilled over it in plain blue pencil.
“It was very interesting,” I say, “and it’s difficult to make this kind of thing interesting, I know that.”
“Well,” the guide says, coughs and shrugs, “you know how it is. Originally I was supposed to be on the research staff but this vacancy opened up and I really had no choice. No choice at all if I wanted to move to a new rank. Actually I’m not entirely at my ease in public. But I try; I do the best that I can.”
“I thought you made it very understandable.”
“Really,” the guide says and giggles rather disconcertingly. “Understandable? I’m not so sure that that’s a compliment, you see, because I personally don’t understand any of this at all. I mean, the notes of the lectures are pretty definite and I do the best I can, but I’m not sure that I really know what went on here or even that I care. On the other hand, it does give quite a portrait of the way in which these people might have lived.”
“Indeed it does.”
“The lives they led! Amazing,” the guide says and rubs the woman’s shoulder enthusiastically. “Too much to think about it.”
“Yes, indeed,” the woman says in a flat Midwestern monotone. “It was strange, mighty strange. Still, what are you going to do? There must be a reason why this has become national property.”
“You have any particular interest in the Westfields?” the guide asks. Seen at his ease, in this informal posture, he is obviously trying to reciprocate with a personal approach of his own, but I am perceptive enough to know that he could not care less whether or not I was interested in the Westfields and, indeed, has been off duty since the moment we entered the shop and only wants a little solace now, a little respite. It is not an easy job.
“Not really,” I say. “We were in the vicinity, my girl friend and I, and I thought we’d just drop in, that’s all.” Saying “girl friend” I nod toward Joanne, who has been looking toward us, but as I smile, her eyes drop suddenly and she seems to become absorbed in some geometry of the floor. “My girl friend,” I say.
“Very pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“Very nice.”
“Yes. Thank you.” There seems to be little more to say and feeling vaguely embarrassed, in the grip of some sort of grave unease, I wander away from the guide without any further comment, not quite sure of what exactly has happened to me. I find my eye caught by a series of masks which are dangling from fluorescence at a great height; apparently they are representational death-masks of my parents, colored in purple and a faint yellow and done with high style, but I find after staring at them for an instant that they depress me more than otherwise. As a matter of fact, I feel a kind of tangle of depression somewhere deep in the gut and intimate a sensation of falling into it; I am not quite sure why this is the case but know that for reasons I cannot locate I suddenly do not find the courtesy shop quite as rewarding and evocative as I had hoped. Instead I go over to Joanne, who is prowling through the book section, going through leatherette-bound editions of some of the works on my shelf, and, putting my arm around her, say, “You want to go now?”
She looks up at me with the bright, winsome distrust of a stranger. “What’s that?”
“I said, do you want to go now? Have you seen enough of this?”
“Well, really, Michael,” she says, disengaging herself slightly from me, “whose idea was it to come here in the first place? You must have been looking forward to being in this shop all day! Why do you want to leave?”
“I’m tired. I’ve had enough.”
“Well, not yet. I want to stay. There are things here to look at. Why don’t you kind of go off by yourself, Michael, and we can meet a little later.”
It is true that I have known for some three hours that Joanne and I have no future and yet, even in those terms, it is impossible to stave off a feeling of terror which suddenly overtakes me. Perhaps it is truly that I cannot bear to be the disdained one and when this behavior is turned upon me I become hopeless, perhaps it is only that I care far more for Joanne than I would admit and than a few vigorous fucks here and there would indicate. Most complex and terrible, and yet, trying as always for that fine denial of feeling which has been the key to any of my moderate successes, I say, “Don’t be silly, Joanne. Don’t be unreasonable. We’re going to go home together and—”
“Not necessarily,” she says and shrugs. “Look at these paperweights. They’re supposed to be the kind Mr. Westfield used in his offices. Aren’t they interesting? They’re quite strange.”
“What do you mean we won’t go home together?”
“I said I didn’t know. Leave me alone, Michael.” She turns toward me and confronts me fully, her face rising to a kind of tension which almost makes it transparent; I can sense the bones and blood moving within. “Haven’t you had enough of this?” she says. “Isn’t there a time to get off the cycle and live your own life? Leave me alone, Michael. Later, later.”
“Cycle?”
“Yes, cycle, it’s all a cycle but it’s got to stop, Michael, and it’s going to stop because I won’t take it anymore. I screwed that dirty old bastard. He wanted me to and I let him and he loved it. We did it right in the cellar, they have beds there. I did it and I don’t care. And then I told him everything. I told him who you were and what you were doing and why you were here and he was very interested. That’s why I wanted to talk to him, Michael; that’s why I went away from you. Because I had to tell him.”
“You told him?” I say. I am dimly aware that our conversation has become so spirited that it has stopped the noises around us and that we have, in fact, an audience, but I cannot stop myself, not at this particular point; I am just like my father, worrying something far past its uses and into demolition. “You told him? For Christ’s sake, why?”
“Why? Why? Why? Because it’s got to stop, Michael; there’s got to be an end to this nonsense, you’ve got to grow up sometime and come to terms with it, you can’t go on living your whole life as if this was still going on, it isn’t going on anymore and it never will again. And I won’t be used, I won’t be part of it, you just took me here because you wanted to do it all yourself and I tell you I won’t stand it. Won’t stand it!” she says and slaps me viciously across the face.
I recoil, blind for the instant, staring, gasping, and I see now that they are all looking at me: albino, parents, heavy man, the scholar, his friend, even the guide has taken an elbow off the counter, even his rustic companion has turned to me with eyes full of fright; a wideness to my vision seems to embrace even more than this and I hear the sound of my own voice, unreasonable, shouting, tinny in my ears. “Why did you do that?” I say and she slaps me again, even harder, and I feel the outlines of the room literally beginning to wave before me; it is all too much. Ah, God, it is all too, too much. “Bitch,” I murmur, but there is no heat in it.
“Don’t call me bitch!” she says and she is really screaming now, screaming and sobbing too, the two modes streaked together and adding a kind of resilience to her voice by a strange compounding which causes it to level as she goes on. “Don’t call me bitch or I’ll call you bastard; no, Michael, I tell you it’s got to stop, it’s got to stop now because there has to be an end to it. An end to all games, all gestures, all terror, all dreams—you’ve got to face the fact of what is and I won’t have it any more. He went at my breasts and my neck and my cunt and it was good, Michael, it was good because I didn’t owe him anything, not a goddamned thing. People don’t owe you anything, Michael! Nothing at all,” and she falls against me and rubs her head against my chest desperately, unreasonably. I lift my hands and touch her hair, wondering, wondering, and as I do so the enormous facsimile portrait of my father becomes dislodged, by some trick of gravity, from the wall and falls with a clatter to the floor, almost decapitating one of the clerks, who dodges from it with a terrified expression on her face. And indeed I can understand the terror, for from this closer aspect the face of my father is filled with hatred, the features bulging with a kind of knowledge which he is trying awfully to disseminate. And yet it is not quite like my father but some transmogrification of him which renders him, in the portrait, solid and terrible, all the things that he wanted to be and never was.
“That’s Michael Westfield,” the scholar is whispering. “My God, that’s Michael Westfield,” and as he says so they all begin to run toward me. Here they come now: the albino, his parents, the scholar, the heavy man, his friend, even the guide moving at great speed, their eyes wide and staring, and they are saying, “Michael Westfield, Michael Westfield! Michael Westfield?” and their hands are reaching to touch me as if I had some power, some corporeality which could be transferred. I feel myself sinking before them, still clutching Joanne, feeling the almost boneless glide of her body as it folds toward me, and I realize then and only for the first time that she is terribly frightened, frightened of things which I have never grasped or understood until this very moment and now I do see them and it is all too much, all too much for me. At the moment when they seem about ready to overtake me, literally climb me and rip my clothing away, the curator emerges from a side door like an actor from a special exit and points in my direction. He is carrying the heavy man’s umbrella, apparently being the one originally responsible for its loss. His glasses glitter with spectral knowledge.
“All right now,” he says. “All right, all of you, that’s enough, that’s quite enough, we’ve done what we had to do but now it’s time to let the regular processes take over and let the law be satisfied; we will turn him over to the authorities and proffer the proper charges, now stop this, stop this,” and for a moment they have indeed stopped but then some weakening tremor in his voice, some small tremor in his arm may tell them something which even he does not know and they come upon me, their rage now obvious along with their need and of the two it is only the need which I cannot understand because I know rage, have lived with rage all of my life, know nothing better nor ever will. But this knowledge is not enough; I cannot defend myself before them. There are too many of them. I clutch myself, the superfluity of Joanne already gone, feeling the rivers of waste moving under the surfaces of veins and at that moment they lunge all the way over and past me and I understand in the last instant before ascension that I have not been the object of their concern at all but only an interposition and that there is something beyond. I turn my head and see in the slowly opening door the figure of the Other and it is toward him that they plunge with their cries while meanwhile, suddenly exalted, I vault from the floor, past matting and superstructure and into the very matrix of the building and all is gone and I wake up then on the morning of my thirtieth birthday, coldness in my legs, coldness in the stomach, a taste of fire in the mouth and looking toward the sun coming through the window I find myself saying, “I can’t stand this anymore; I don’t think I can stand it,” and my wife brings in coffee which I sip slowly, scrappling for a deadly cigarette, thinking about all the consequences and implications contained in this implacable but terrible structure which the ancients called chronology and which I will only know, as long as I live, as Time.
July 30, 1969
New York, New York
Afterword:
Behold Goliath
The autobiography inherent in fiction is the Devil’s Pact; it is the first station on the nascent writer’s subway to hell and for most it is the last stop, clever or luckless figures like Tom Wolfe push themselves or are pushed right there. Most hang on for one or three or fifty stops beyond, the fluorescence becoming ever dimmer, the detritus in the stations ever more forbidding to those tempted by delinquency but there is no doubt of it all being a one-way excursion and even in the most seemingly detached and precise work, even in the most seemingly transmuted, one can see the form and outline, the consistency which marks the pursuit. I went the usual route (the first fiction I remember attempting at age 7 was of a little boy unsuccessfully dodging a snowbank on the way to the second grade) tracking from received to imagined to long-feared to long-sought experience, adapting or adopting other personas, sometimes historical, sometimes at such apparent distance (a senile, incontinent ex-President of the USA in centers The Last Transaction) that I thought I had found an alternate subway—but no, none of it. In the mad odyssey of The Lone Wolf, in the first-person bleatings of Quir, the abducted alien of In The Enclosure, in the induced Jesus of The Cross of Fire I would always find the familiar form, the known landscape, the recollected convulsion of experience reproduced. Sometimes masked, sometimes parodied, sometimes set on Ganymede or in a Civil War platoon, the Beast in the Jungle would come forth. Who was I kidding? In the end, at the end, as I wrote of Robert Heinlein who tracked from “By His Bootstraps” to Double Star to sailing beyond the sunset, I would “Always confront my own screaming face.” Heinlein made a decent living and a difficult career, I took the leavings which both are apt to leave behind.
That noted, that fully conceded, In My Parents’ Bedroom falls both within and without the argument; it is a novel frankly addressed as autobiographical, a 30th birthday present to myself on the occasion of (I thought) getting at last out of the gate of youth and onto the mile and a quarter race which I imagined life to be. Horses are trained for sprints or routes or sometimes both, sometimes nothing at all, but I envisioned myself at 30 (the writerly equivalent of maybe five equine years) to have been already proven at low-grade allowances, now ready for some cheap stakes at Ak-Sar-Ben or the Fair Grounds. First though I had to pass the standard tests for stimulants, subtle defects in chemistry, hidden problems in a foreleg which might lead to breakdown and this novel was in effect the veterinarian’s protocol. Could I manage an autobiographical work sufficient to prove that I would now be capable of transcendence. Or would I fall into what Delmore Schwartz called “The Wound of Consciousness” and be forever entrapped, a James Farrell replicating an imaginary daring youth or a Seymour Glass, a former wise child, now a guru and saint, long dead at 28 by his own hand? I did not exactly address the novel in that spirit but retrospection can impute authority.
I had already delivered eight or nine of the ten novels I published with the Olympia Press and it was quite evident in July 1969 to both Maurice Girodias and myself that we had no future; my adventure as his Leading Writer had ended as did all of his adventures with Leading Writers and whether I could even place this novel there was in doubt when, uncharacteristically, I started without a contract and then just went ahead and finished it in a few days. Some fiction is easier to write than to support logical argument why it should not be written and I finished this with even more than the usual speed, delivered it and waited for the rejection. I must have sustained myself through the work in the dim conviction that it was literary enough to be sold as a “literary novel.” Girodias surprised me (he was full of surprises until he was not) by contracting for the work, paid me in agonizing spurts of $250 a week and then, looking upon what he had made, dithered and panicked. I don’t think he would have allowed publication if he had been paying attention but like too many babies, this novel was born because no one was really paying attention.
Constructed in equal measures of fabulation and drear recollection, the novel has its moments and if nothing else persists as what Bill Pronzini deemed in an entirely different context “evidence,” it is testimony constructed and real by equal parts, the narrator’s first name is my father’s, the apartment as described is pretty much as I remember the Flatbush abode on East 35th Street. It has more importance, perhaps, as another station on the train; my final novel for Olympia Confessions of Westchester County (reissued also by Stark House) is entirely apart from this but In My Parents’ Bedroom had to be dislodged, the pebble in the shoe, so that I could continue the journey. It was originally going to be under the pseudonym “Arnold Gregory” and advance publicity deemed it such but then I gave voice to Laurence Janifer’s favorite expression (and his philosophy of life), thought what the hell and let it lurch into the world. My parents never read it. My sister did (in their lifetime) and urged me not to inadvertently leave a copy behind on a return to the homestead. I did not and as is a generality with shakily transmuted work, that was a good thing. Everything was a good thing for a while until inexorably it wasn’t. The human odyssey: autobiographical or otherwise.
August 2020: New Jersey
