The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In Shawnee Mission, the select suburb of Kansas City, the home of a wealthy young citizen and his wife is shielded from the street by an avenue of trees. Inside the house is an impressive collection of fine furniture and Oriental rugs. For parties, the lights are kept rather dim, and the stereo is played rather low. In the corner of the large living room, in a porcelain dish, sits what appears to be a bar of honey-colored bath soap. It is Turkish hashish, and it cost two thousand dollars. Guests—perhaps ten couples—sit in a rough circle on the floor while, with some ceremony, the host chips small, thin, oily-looking flakes off the hashish bar, using a penknife, and carefully tamps them into a little pipe. He then lights the pipe, inhaling deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs for as long as he can. Then the pipe is passed to a guest, who also inhales deeply. The pipe continues slowly around the room.

  The conversation is muted, there is some knowing laughter. The quality of the hashish is commented upon; it is considered very good. The rhythm of a rock group continues softly in the background. It is Saturday night, the best time, with the week’s work and worries out of the way, and nothing but a lazy Sunday morning to look forward to. These are all such old and such good friends and neighbors, except for one couple, who are newcomers. They were warned, before being initiated into the group tonight, that this evening’s entertainment would be somewhat special, for somewhat sophisticated, even worldly, tastes. The newcomers, for whom this is decidedly a new experience, are a bit apprehensive, but they have agreed to go along with whatever the evening turns out to be. They have been told that, should they not care for the experience in the end, this will not be held against them. But it is also understood that no mention is to be made of this particular evening to anyone outside the little circle. For the most part, the newcomers are happy to be here, because assembled in the room are some of the leaders of Kansas City society’s younger set—couples who shop in New York, ski in Gstaad, have discovered the nude beaches in Sardinia and Acapulco, and are otherwise committed to dispelling the impression that Kansas City, Missouri, is a provincial, one-horse town. After all, didn’t Kansas City give the world its very first suburban shopping center, Country Club Plaza, as long ago as 1920? The little pipe circles the room a second time, is refilled, and begins a third circle. The music—more protracted now, a song that never ends—lingers on from the twin speakers. “Isn’t this nice?” someone asks.

  Gradually, hands touch, hesitantly at first and then with more determination and enthusiasm. Gradually, too, the lights are lowered on rheostats until they are completely extinguished, except for a single candle. The table on which it sits is a kind of altar. In the flickering light of the candle, hands grope toward bodies, and bodies touch, then lips. In the darkness, only beards provide a clue as to whether the person one is kissing is male or female, but that is the point. It isn’t supposed to matter. Shoes and neckties come off first, then stockings, jackets, blouses, dresses, bras, trousers, and underwear. At first there are whispers, a few giggles, and then, besides the music, there are only sighs and soft sucking sounds, which rise, very slowly, to moans and gasps and grunts and little cries. When it is all over, everyone lies still, cuddled and curled together, caressing cheeks and eyelashes and hair—lies there for what seems the longest time. The first word uttered is unprintable, and is followed by laughter, a signal that this part of the evening is over. It is time to sort out clothes and underthings from the untidy array of garments tossed over chairs and sofas, and to dress to go in to dinner, where the wine will be excellent.

  While this particular evening did transpire in Kansas City, it would be wrong to suppose either that Shawnee Mission suburbanites are a particularly depraved lot, or that this sort of thing does not go on, in certain groups, in Westport, River Oaks, and Sausalito. Of course, there are variations—not many, perhaps, but some. In Yorktown Heights, New York, a secluded enclave of large estates in northern Westchester, it is the custom for a certain hostess to depart, after dinner, for an upstairs bedroom, there to make herself available to any or all of her male guests. Her husband, meanwhile, has permission to repair to another bedroom with the lady guest of his choice. There are, of course, plenty of other bedrooms in the house available for other random couplings. In Beverly Hills, where things might be expected to be carried off with a certain amount of flair, guests at the home of a well-known taxpayer are met at the front door by a uniformed maid. Each guest is handed a loose-fitting robe, and is ushered into a dressing room to change. Then, in their robes, the guests proceed into the party, where, among such traditional substances as alcohol and cannabis, a white powder is offered for sniffing.

  “The important thing is to be discreet, not to get the whole town talking about it,” says one suburban woman who, for obvious reasons, does not wish to be identified. “One rotten apple in the bunch can spoil the fun for everybody. It’s not that we’re ashamed of what we do. We’re sophisticated, educated people who happen to take a liberal view of sex. We were practicing open marriage long before they wrote a book about it. What we enjoy doing doesn’t hurt anybody, even though it might not meet what the hypocrites call ‘community standards.’ What we do at our parties doesn’t involve the community. It just involves ourselves. But if someone blabbed, and the rest of the community found out about it, there would be hell to pay. Our kids could be affected, our parents, our other friends who simply have no idea—even our husbands’ businesses and professions. But as long as everything is kept within the group—there are four couples who get together fairly regularly, and a fifth who join us from time to time—there’s no problem. It’s like a little club, and it’s very, very private.”

  It was apparently “one rotten apple” in Buffalo, New York, who let it be known that certain unorthodox carnal goings on were taking place involving two socially prominent couples in suburban East Aurora. Buffalo is a small, socially inbred city, and rumors spread rapidly. As they did, both sets of parents of the couples involved learned of the gossip and scandalized fathers confronted unrepentant sons and daughters. Soon, everyone in the Buffalo Tennis & Squash Club had heard the stories. Though the suburban “scandal” never reached the newspapers, it did billow sufficiently to persuade one couple to move out of town. The second couple were divorced.

  Sex in the suburbs may have the advantage of increased privacy, but still a certain furtiveness is necessary, at least for some people. The men’s room at the Greenwich railroad station, for example, is said to be a popular rendezvous for homosexuals during commuting hours. And, at the other end of the line, the men’s room, public dressing rooms, and showers at New York’s Grand Central Station were the scene of so many hasty trysts in the hours between 5 and 7 P.M. that the station closed much of the area off. Conservative Rye, on the other hand, pretends to be unaware that a bar operates on its main business street which offers a female impersonator for entertainment on weekend evenings.

  Defenders of the suburbs point out, rightly, that according to the United States Census Bureau, the divorce rate per hundred is nearly twice as high in urban areas as it is in what the bureau calls the “urban fringe.” From this the conclusion could be drawn that the suburbs exert a stabilizing influence on American marriages. But what statistics cannot measure is how many suburban marriages are enduring simply as the result of economic pressure. For the city apartment dweller, divorce can seem relatively simple. There is little property to divide other than books and furniture. But the couple who owns a suburban home has a considerable investment in it, which neither partner wants to lose. It could be argued, then, that the Census Bureau’s figures suggest that the suburbs are holding together many marriages which, under other circumstances, would long ago have come apart.

  Herbert Gans, a sociologist at Columbia University, has pointed out that “People who have problems in the city bring them with them to the suburbs,” and this is no doubt true. Other researchers have found that suburban life itself has little effect on mental health. It has been noted, however, that
certain groups of people tend to find the suburbs stressful. These include adolescent children, who find the lack of city activities boring; women of working-class backgrounds who have been thrust upward in society and find it difficult to deal with the social demands of a new environment; cosmopolitan individuals who simply miss big-city life; and educated women who want to work in interesting jobs.

  In some cases, too, a move to the suburbs can put financial burdens on a family that it did not anticipate. In buying the new house, such matters as the extra cost of commuting, the need for a second car, the cost of keeping the grass cut and hiring baby-sitters had not been considered. This was the case of a Detroit couple who bought a new house several years ago in the “General Motors suburb” of Bloomfield Hills (as opposed to Grosse Pointe, which tends to attract Ford and Chrysler people.) Let us call them Mr. and Mrs. M. The M.’s had been married for eight years, and had two small children, when they made their big move. At the outset, the M.’s realized that they were paying more for the house than they had planned. But it was a lovely place, on two rolling acres, and was a temptation. Shortly after moving in, the M.’s discovered that the water supply was inadequate, and a new well had to be drilled. A new roof was also needed, and when that was completed, the assessment on their house was raised and their taxes went up. Additional furniture, rugs, and curtains were also indicated, but because of the unexpected expenses, these were temporarily ruled out. So was the second car Mrs. M. had planned to buy. Fortunately, the children’s school was within easy walking distance, but shopping was not. Without a car, Mrs. M. was required to order groceries from a store that had a delivery service—at extra cost. In the beginning the M.’s had considered theirs a happy marriage. But soon their hours together were spent in bitter arguments over money matters.

  Without an automobile, Mrs. M. began to feel isolated, abandoned, stranded in a half-furnished house. She believed that there was no way she could move out and join the community. She missed, all at once, the corner drugstore in the city where she and her neighbors had met for coffee and sandwiches. Because of his commuting, her husband was gone from the house for longer hours than before, and yet, without companionship during the day, she demanded more companionship from him in the evenings than he could supply. In the new position which had prompted him to buy his new house, Mr. M. was required to do a certain amount of traveling. While he was gone, in her loneliness, Mrs. M. convinced herself that he was being unfaithful. When he returned from his travels, she confronted him with suspicious questions. He confronted her with unpaid bills.

  Mrs. M. did meet one neighbor who genuinely wanted to be her friend, though one friend is not a community, by any means. Also, the neighbor was an alcoholic, who helped feed Mrs. M.’s traitorous suspicions about her husband with cheerful assurances that “all men play around.” The neighbor worked, but had Wednesdays off. “Every Wednesday she calls me and invites me over,” says Mrs. M. “I don’t really want to go because I know what she really wants is a drinking companion. But then, out of boredom, I go—she’s just down the street. I can feel myself becoming an alcoholic right along with her, simply because I have nothing else to do. Now I find myself, around noon, going to the refrigerator to get myself something—a beer or a glass of wine. I think I’ll just have one beer. But I usually have more. I drink now from noon until the kids come home from school, until there’s somebody else in the house. I know this is not good. Every morning, I think: Well, maybe today I won’t have anything to drink. And then my neighbor calls or comes over, and I have a beer with her, and before I know it I’ve had three or four. And then I think: Oh well, I won’t tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes and I start drinking again, and before I know it, it’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” About a year ago, Mrs. M. tried to break off her friendship with her neighbor. There was an angry quarrel, followed by a reconciliation, followed by a second quarrel and more long, lonely hours, for which Mrs. M. consoled herself with beers from the refrigerator. The M.’s quarreled about Mrs. M.’s drinking, the rising bills for beer and wine, the state of the half-empty house, the lawn, which had grown too tall and rank for the power mower, and about the fact that Mrs. M. was gaining weight. Mrs. M. made a feeble, unsuccessful attempt at suicide—“Mostly to try to get him to pay some attention to me.” Currently, the M.’s are seeing a psychologist and marriage counselor.

  “Of course I’ve thought of divorce,” says Mrs. M., “but where could I go, what could I do? We own the house together. He owns the car. My neighbor”—the two are once more friends—“says that the court would give me the house. But how could I make the mortgage payments?” The psychologist, meanwhile, who charges eighty dollars an hour, is adding to the couple’s already overburdened budget and money worries.

  Ulrich Franzen is a New York–based architect who has designed a number of expensive houses in Westchester County and on Long Island—houses which favor much use of glass and steel and stone, houses which have won prizes for their design and which have been photographed by all the leading house and architecture magazines. He takes a somewhat cynical view of the houses he builds and of the clients who hire him to build them. “I never pay any attention to what the client says he wants in a house,” says Franzen. “I don’t build the house for the client. I build it for the person who will buy it from the client. I design my houses for the next owners. I started doing this long ago, when I realized that my clients never lived in any of my houses very long. Most couples, when they hire an architect to build them an expensive modern house in the suburbs, think that building the new house will save their marriage. Of course, building a new house won’t save a marriage. When the house is finished, the marriage breaks up anyway, and the house is sold to someone else, who will really appreciate it. Building the new house may postpone the breakup of the marriage for a while, but it will never save it. Building a new house is easy. It’s so much easier to change your address than to change yourself.”

  20

  The Vanishing Living Room and Other Phenomena

  Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Goodstein of Scottsdale confess that they never use their living room—in fact, hardly ever go into it. It exists, large as life, down a short flight of steps, and it is prettily and expensively, if a little stiffly, decorated. Decoration, indeed, has become the room’s sole function. It has no other. It is a room to be viewed and admired, but not entered. This, of course, is not a new phenomenon in America, where, as early as Victorian times, the formal “parlor” existed mainly for show. Though it was dusted daily, and was often the largest room in the house, the parlor was not for family use, but remained as forbiddingly untouchable as the folded monogrammed linen guest towels in the bathroom.

  In today’s suburbs, however, in comfortable houses like the Goodsteins’ across the country, the role—or nonrole—of the living room is a little different. The Victorian parlor was at least put to occasional use—for weddings, funerals, or important entertaining. But today’s suburban living rooms offer only perpetually dead space. The living room today has little more than symbolic value, as an advertisement for a family’s success. In it are placed the best pieces of furniture, the most valuable paintings, the most expensive rugs—all of which give it a roped-off look. In the rest of the house, meanwhile, can be seen what suburbia is really all about, which is essentially women and children.

  It was women and children who invented the suburbs, who first saw them as a necessity, and it is they who continue to rule them. The cities, to which the men commute, are masculine; the suburbs feminine. For suburban women and children, contemporary architects of suburban houses have, to replace the living room, come up with that room called “the family room.” The family room was a post–World War II invention, and today virtually no suburban house of consequence is built without one. Furthermore, it has come to serve a purpose that is perhaps unique in the history of human habitation. The family room is located hard by the kitchen, where the meals are prepared, and it inevitably contains a stereo,
a radio, and a television. It is here—not in the dining room—that the family eats its meals, on trays in front of the set. Usually, the family room contains a bar too—one concession to male needs—and it is here that the cocktail hour is spent. The family room is for lounging and for napping, and for horsing around. It is also for entertaining, and it is here—not in the living room—that guests gather for parties when it is too chilly to be outside on the terrace by the pool. It is, in other words, an all-purpose living space where there are no real rules and where every domestic activity, including sleeping, can take place. The personality of the family room makes the living room, by contrast, all the more chilly and aloof, more ornamental and museum-like, a place one passes on one’s way somewhere else. The family room is, as its name implies, a nest—a place where the woman of the house goes to relax and be comfortable, with her children and husband, her brood, nestled around her. Now that kitchens have become streamlined and impersonal, the family room is the heart of the house.

  This nest is sometimes rather a messy one. If the living room is pristine and sterilized, the family room is cluttered and drink-stained. The rules of the family room permit that this be so. This makes a family room an easy room for a housewife to take care of, since it requires no care—nor does the living room, since how much care is required of a room that is never entered? Surveys have shown that women are, by nature, less tidy souls than men—or, rather, that most men think that women are untidy and disorganized. In a recent study, one hundred fifty recently divorced men were asked what they considered the primary reasons for the divorce. The responses followed a predictable pattern: “Our backgrounds were different”; “Our religions were different”; “Her mother was the domineering type”; “She was immature”; “We were incompatible”; “She and her psychiatrist ganged up against me.” But 80 percent of those interviewed included, as at least one important reason: “She was a lousy housekeeper,” or “The house was always a mess.” The family room, perhaps, solves that problem. Also, since the Women’s Movement has thrown terms such as “housewife” and “homemaker” into disrepute, the family room has conveniently provided a place where housekeeping and homemaking do not apply. The family room is for family, and family means kids, and kids mean kicked furniture and finger-spotted woodwork. As Jeanette Goodstein says proudly of her typically battered family room, “This is the room where we do our real living.”