Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  “Maggie,” he asks in the car, pronouncing her name for the first time, “who decorated all those torture chambers?”

  Maggie laughs. “The Jaycees. That’s their Halloween haunted house. The rest of the year it’s a playhouse for the artists who have studio spaces in the building.”

  Wakefield isn’t paying attention to the answer: he’s thinking, Will I have sex with Maggie? It’s an important question because the answer might determine the shape of things to come. On the one hand, he’s attracted and thinks the feeling is mutual. On the other hand, he feels none of the enthusiasm that Ivan Zamyatin would bring to such an encounter. For Zamyatin the opportunity would be accompanied by childlike curiosity and genuine warmth. Without those ingredients, Wakefield feels some disingenuousness. He can imagine very well Maggie’s generous body and the comfort he might find in it, the weight of her breasts on his chest and the pulse of her. It’s a thought he’s sure she must share because she turns on the car radio, as if to banish it, and a song on the oldies station illustrates his dilemma. It’s the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

  “I didn’t find the wedding all that funny,” Wakefield finally says.

  Maggie looks disappointed. “I thought it was quite sweet. Neal and Bob are both friends of mine.”

  “Wasn’t it just a mock ceremony?”

  “No, they’re a real couple. We worked on this for months, we discussed the arrow through the hat for days. Neal thought it might look like he was wounded in the head in some way, like he was crazy to get married, but Bob said that it was Cupid’s arrow. Bob’s mom is a hippie, she said that it was an Indian arrow and it symbolized the fact that all white people carry this guilt-arrow in them. I just thought it looked cool.”

  Wakefield feels bad that he’s let her know that he’s read the entire evening as an art event in no way connected to real life. How could he have not understood, after their symbolic little war over the meaning of family, that the community’s belief in the power of Art was quite real? Have to show some respect for such quaint beliefs. Especially if you want to get laid. Dufus.

  “I thought it was just, like, let’s get dressed up and have a party,” he says lamely. “You know, an entertainment,” he says, digging his hole a little deeper. “Like a happening, maybe …”

  Maggie does know about happenings, and is very disappointed in Wakefield. She studied art in college! The man has just witnessed the most fabulous wedding ever concluded in the town of Typical, and he can’t see past the art to the heart. Her friends had thought long and hard about how to affirm the most basic of life unions in terms that would expose the town’s hypocrisy while confirming essential human values. Wakefield is being paid to deliver his insights on money and poetry (with a detour in art), but he’s failed to see that art and life can be connected, that it all meant something, especially in a place like Typical.

  “I’ve had too much red wine,” she says, suppressing her anger, “but I’m surprised that someone so knowledgeable about art can’t see the serious meaning under the costumes.”

  “Sentiment is not ‘serious meaning,’ Maggie. Just because they’re a real couple …” Wakefield’s argument trails off. He gave up looking for meaning in art a long time ago. The relationship of art to reality is complex and delicate, depending on whether one spells it with a capital A, or whether one uses it as a noun or an adjective, and myriad other factors that he’s given a good deal of thought to but aren’t easy to explain now.

  The subject of tomorrow’s lecture seems suddenly uncertain, even cruel. They won’t understand what he’s talking about, and he can’t rethink his entire view of art and life to fit the profound soul-needs of a company town. Sleeping with Maggie seems out of the question. He has offended her.

  “Your friends’ wedding was terrific, I’m sure,” he stammers. “I’m just so jaded about weddings.”

  Maggie softens. Familiar territory. “Me, too,” she admits. Aha, he’s human, after all. Still, she drops him off at the Bavarian castle and says good night with the engine running.

  “One more thing,” Wakefield says as he exits the car. “Do you believe in the Devil?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Maggie says firmly.

  Wakefield dropped out of college when he was twenty to travel in Europe. The theme of this Grand Tour was ghosts, and he hoped to locate some in their ancient haunts.

  In Paris he attended lectures on architecture at the Sorbonne. The lectures were like baroque palaces, elaborate and endless. But with a certain kind of literary Paris firmly in his head, he wandered at night through the streets, communing with the souls of old buildings. The reality (even at night) didn’t quite fit his mental map; instead of morphing into the image established by centuries of art and literature, the nocturnal streets and the (rare) citizens of Paris who braved them appeared dull, gray, and postmodernly underwhelmed by the past. It also rained continually and Wakefield could barely afford coffee. After a month, during which he caught both a nasty cold and gonorrhea, he declared Paris exhausted, her secret places inhabited only by tourists and bourgeois spirits. Wakefield sipped his last overpriced espresso at a counter in Gare du Nord, remembering Baudelaire’s curse on boredom: “Habitually we cultivate remorse, as beggars entertain and nurse their lice.”

  Office workers rushed past, hurrying home to their discontented spouses. He overheard an American woman complaining to a friend about her French husband. “I wouldn’t even mind him fucking around,” she said, “if he were more considerate. But he expects me to iron his shirts, cook his food, and take care of his children. If I complain, he runs to his mother, and she scolds me for upsetting her ‘darling baby.’ Imagine!”

  “Oh, I know,” the friend nodded, looking at her watch, “they’re all mama’s boys!”

  Wakefield’s study of architecture was not focused on the technical; the mathematics involved in engineering were beyond him, and he was a sloppy draftsman. His true interest lay in architectural aberrations like Ludwig of Bavaria’s overwrought castle and Gaudi’s bizarre “organic” cathedral in Barcelona. He was attracted to the hybrid, the eclectic, and to structures so deformed by use and time that they were no longer recognizable. He traveled through Europe in search of ghosts and their ghastly habitats.

  “Modern architecture,” he told a girl named Judith with whom he spent one night in a youth hostel in Padua, “particularly Bauhaus, repels me. It is so transparently, defiantly revealing. I like postmodern ideas, but the buildings themselves are too light for my taste, too ‘jocular,’ too disrespectful of the history they try to subsume.”

  “Shut up, you pompous ass!” someone with a British accent shouted from the darkness of the dormitory.

  Judith laughed, and Wakefield left Padua the next day.

  Before he had left college to travel, he got a failing grade on an essay he’d entitled “Buildings Should Earn Their Postmodernism!” in which he argued that playfully incorporating old styles in new buildings resulted in an “unearned postmodernism” that would eventually drive everyone living in these structures insane. He used as an example the Place of Italy, in New Orleans, an urban park and fountain.

  The park itself was a forest of classical columns, some of traditional stone, others of aluminum or glass or cement. “Does anybody like it?” his essay asked rhetorically, Wakefield not having then (or ever) mastered proper academic tone. “The structure will fall apart in less than five years and weeds will start growing through the columns. Even the bums shun it, and bums are true specialists, because their lives are uncomfortable, open to the elements. In effect, bums are the great critics of urban spaces. The Place of Italy,” he concluded, “flunks the test. Bums refuse to socialize or sleep here. QED.” Wakefield’s analysis of the homeless and urban sculpture raised the eyebrows of his professor (while possibly bringing a smile to his lips), and he shared the essay with two colleagues. They all came to the conclusion that this essay was not about architecture, and they told this to Wakefiel
d.

  “Well, what is it, then?” asked the outraged young scholar.

  “It is sociology, psychology perhaps, colored by artistic considerations,” the professors pronounced. Being kindly men, they tried to convince Wakefield to change his major. They had a long conversation with him, after which Wakefield, half-convinced, ventured that he might consider specializing in “psychotecture,” which is the effect of structures on their inhabitants, a notion he invented just for the occasion. His professors said there was no such thing; the department produced architects, not psychos. So Wakefield said defiantly that he didn’t want to build anything, that he was interested only in what had escaped the architects’ intentions, those glitches and mistakes that dwell like small demons in even the most ambitious designs. The professors told him that his sensibility might be better served in a French university, where theory is often valued more than actual construction. Thus began Wakefield’s European wanderings.

  In Barcelona he found the ghosts more interesting than the ones he had encountered in Paris, but he made a much more important discovery: Love. He met Marianna, a Romanian émigré. She had managed to leave Romania by marrying a Spaniard, but as soon as they arrived in Spain she abandoned him. Now she was a waitress in Barcelona. Wakefield took her to a movie, to a restaurant, and to Gaudi’s unfinished cathedral, and then he proposed.

  Marianna was interested in Wakefield because he was American. She declared herself bored by Europe and spent most of the time, even when she was waiting tables, encased in a pair of headphones that filled her consciousness with American pop songs. She became animated when Wakefield talked about the U.S., but lapsed into weary inattention when he speculated about architecture, art, and Europe. Wakefield felt safe with Marianna. He could conduct his intellectual life without any fear of her disapproval. She simply didn’t care.

  Paradoxically, in Europe, thanks to his fiancée, Wakefield realized how American he was. He had expected Old World ghosts to revive him, but only Marianna’s restlessness excited him. She was as restless as America. Europe was like an old woman endlessly sweeping her sidewalks and ironing her linens. One afternoon in Cádiz, drinking Jim Beam on the rocks—Marianna wouldn’t have anything else—he was seized by nostalgia for his own, unapologetically unnostalgic country. They took the first available flight.

  When we get home, he told himself, as Marianna chewed gum and tossed her hair around to the tune in her head, I will be the cartographer of hidden American spaces, the surveyor of our own genii loci. I will show Marianna the real America, not the one she knows from songs and movies.

  He returned to school, where he was reluctantly readmitted, but his thesis on “American Buildings: Hiding in the Light” met with a cool reception. He retained from his European journey a fondness for the sharp contrasts of light and shadow near the sea, and the habit of an afternoon siesta, but he experienced none of the elation he had expected to bring to his studies. No one cared about his “unmapped architecture.” Eventually he quit school again, and to support himself and his new wife, who spent all her time shopping, he started writing for travel magazines, which paid well.

  Wakefield is still in bed when Maggie arrives to take him to The Company’s informal luncheon. When she calls from the front desk, he tells her to come right up. Elegantly accoutered in a fashionable business suit, she bursts cheerfully into his room. He is still in T-shirt and boxers.

  While he shaves and brushes his teeth, she watches the news on TV and outlines his mission through the half-closed bathroom door. “These guys are supergeeks. All they know is software, that’s why we thought it would be a good idea if you talked to them about art, maybe philanthropy. Look at that. Poor Monica. The government is spending six million dollars to force her to describe a blow job!”

  “It’s not as easy as all that,” quips Wakefield. He’s feeling something generated by the stimulating expression “blow job.” It’s dirty, it’s shameless, nice work, Maggie.

  “They wanted an inspirational speaker. We had a hard time finding someone who didn’t juggle balls or do card tricks.”

  Balls, tricks. Maggie is bad this morning. Wakefield nicks his chin. He watches the trickle of blood in the bathroom mirror, then blots it with toilet paper. Philanthropy, huh? His talk is about money and poetry (with a detour in art), not money for poetry (or art).

  “So you’re the guy,” she continues. “How did you get into art?”

  “Couldn’t juggle. I’m not sure I’m into art. I may be more into money.”

  “By the way, I’ve gotten over your superficial appraisal of last night’s wedding performance. I figured you’re one of those art critics.”

  Wakefield’s razor stops midstroke. “I’m sorry, too. I travel so much I don’t know where I am sometimes. It was callous of me to say anything before I learned more about this place.”

  In the other room, Maggie smiles. “Well, don’t beat yourself up too much. A gay wedding is a fairly unusual thing here. We didn’t even have an Italian restaurant in Typical five years ago. That was considered exotic. We had to drive eight miles to the college town to go to Luigi’s for spaghetti and meatballs. There was nothing but the tire plant and farms around here. Stingy German farmers … they didn’t waste money going out. I know. My folks took me to a restaurant twice: on my thirteenth birthday and when I got accepted to college. Everything changed when The Company came. Now we have Thai, Mexican, Italian, Greek, Indian. There’s even a Russian restaurant.”

  Wakefield finishes his toilet and comes back into the room. He puts on his trousers and a clean shirt and watches Maggie watch him. When he misses a button, she rebuttons him. She stands so close he feels the whole warm animal wash over him. Her perfume is familiar and he fancies he knows what her skin feels like. Then she ties his tie. He’s embarrassed.

  “That’s okay. Lots of men can’t really tie a tie.”

  “What happened to the tire plant? And the farmers?”

  She sits back on the bed and crosses her legs. Shapely, notes Wakefield. Well-shaped hips in a nicely tailored skirt. A vooman, as Zamyatin might say.

  “The factory closed in the seventies. Then my parents sold the farm and moved to a retirement community in Florida. My brother left for college, and my sisters and I went to New York City. I came back here to oversee the sale of the farm and ended up getting hired for public relations at The Company. Now I run Lectures and Events. That’s about everything. You saw my kid last night, my darling, the apple of her mommy’s eye.… And you? Married?”

  “Was.” Wakefield doesn’t want to get into it. He doesn’t like the direction of the conversation; it will only lead to a bunch of platitudes, and he prefers going to bed with someone before this kind of questioning. It’s purer that way.

  “Florida. Are they happy there?”

  “Who? My parents? No, not really. My father was a real farmer, man of few words, churchgoer, all that. Florida’s his worst nightmare. He says it’s full of Jews.”

  Wakefield lifts an eyebrow.

  Maggie shifts uncomfortably.

  “Well, he’s just one of those people. When the farm was going under, he joined some kind of church that thinks the end of the world is around the corner and that we all have to fight ZOG—the Zionist Occupation Government. My mother finally put an end to that. Now they’re just Baptists. The paranoid right wing has gotten a lot quieter since The Company came. It’s practically like Seattle here now.” Maggie hesitates, shifts gears. “What do you know about money? Are you some kind of investment counselor, too?”

  “Oh, no,” Wakefield answers sincerely. “The only thing I know about money is that there seems to be a lot of it around these days. Do you own any stock?”

  “Sure, I own Company stock, and I buy every new IPO. I buy and sell quickly, but I mostly buy. I invested my small share of the farm money in stuff that would kill my father if he knew about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Genetic research. Well, come to think of it, h
e’d probably like that: better crops, fatter cows. An optic fiber manufacturer, an alternative energy consortium, a company researching youth drugs. Cutting-edge stuff.” Maggie’s very proud of her foresight. “It’s all about the future, right?”

  “We will all be rich, rich,” Wakefield half-sings. “Doesn’t it make you nervous?”

  “Why should it? We’re far from reaching the top of this market.”

  “But art is the ultimate investment, trust me.”

  “I prefer tech stocks,” she teases. “And it’s time to go.”

  Maggie takes a backward look at the bed. It’s only slightly ruffled. Wakefield sleeps all curled up on one side, keeping the covers smooth. He likes to be invisible.

  The Company’s private club is called Finland, and it is not what Wakefield expects. From the outside, it still looks like the tire factory it once was, surrounded by snowy fields. It becomes evident, however, that only the shell of the factory has been preserved.

  The entry hall is dominated by a Bengal tiger with bared teeth that looks so alive Wakefield draws back. Maggie laughs. Wakefield likes her laughter; it is musical and abrupt, knowing, not childish.

  The lunch with the Company muckety-mucks is being held in the elephant room, so known because an African bull elephant with his trunk in the air dominates a long, low table surrounded by silver-embroidered Indian pillows.

  “Is it real?” Wakefield inquires, slightly awed.