Outer Banks (24 page)

C. was refilling his glass. “Old A. doesn't seem to've been able to hold his liquor, eh?” He smiled tolerantly. “Not really a
man's man.”

“So it would seem,” I said. “But listen, this is interesting here.”

I reached down and snapped off the recorder. In the sudden silence that followed, I placed another log on the fire and refilled both my and C.'s glasses.

“I don't… I don't quite understand,” C. said slowly.

“No?”

“No. There's something …
peculiar
about her tale.” He held his glass by the stem and twirled it slowly. “There's a gap between the story she's telling, all that business about a man she was married to long ago, a man she met over a dozen years ago, for God's sake, a gap between that story, as data, and the way she's telling it. She's in no way still in love with the man, that's obvious. Not like A.'s first wife. This woman is brighter, more conscious of herself, than the other. Tell me,” he said, peering over the rim of his glass, “is this, this
gap
, what you were so eager for me to hear and speculate on?”

“Well, yes, but there's more.” I was alarmed that he'd picked up the distance between the content of her story and its formal elements. It meant that for him to be able to respond intelligently to the tape he would have to know the secrets about Annie Laurie that I had hoped to keep out of this book. Her obesity, already revealed, at least to the reader, was but one of several pieces of information concerning her that I was loath to expose—for several reasons. First, it would make it easier for some readers to identify Annie Laurie's model, D., if they happened to see her on the streets of Manchester or in one of the local department stores, say, or coming out onto the stoop of her building to get her welfare check from the mailman. And if one of my readers happened to be her mailman—oh, almost too
cruel to imagine!

When I began this project I was under the impression that I would be able to keep certain secrets, an impression that increasingly looks false. I wanted my story to seem true-to-life, as it were, which meant to me that a great deal of it had to be redundant. Also, I was aware from the start that Hamilton Stark in many ways could be seen as a grotesque, an exaggeration of a merely neurotic human being, and to ground him sufficiently in everyday life (as well as to justify my view of him as something quite superior to a merely neurotic human being formed and contained by his social circumstances), I felt it necessary to surround him with plain fare, pea soup and porridge people. Not exotics. Not three-hundred-pound ex-tap dancers whose sadly diminished lives are spent reminiscing over a few tattered clippings and an unpleasant night spent years ago in a lakeside motel. I had to go this far, however, to reveal this much: there was no way I could keep it out of Rochelle's novel, after all, and certainly there was no way I could legitimize my altering the transcripts of her tapes. And as for revealing Annie's great weight, I could not withhold that fact without misrepresenting Annie's narrative altogether. What if the reader were to infer, as he naturally would, that Annie was still beautiful, still slender and long-legged, that her memories and childhood ambitions were not mocked outright by her present physical condition? That reader would have heard something quite different from what I and C. and the rest of us have heard. But … was it sufficient that I reveal only her enormous belly, arms like the legs of a hippo, throat like a tire tube, cheeks and forehead smooth and round as basketballs, hands swollen like sausages? Was that alone sufficient? Well, I hoped my friend C. would tell me. If C. heard nothing odd, nothing that was not mildly moving and interesting, then I would probably not even bother to tell him as much as that the woman he had been listening to was an almost impossibly fat woman. If C. found himself slightly bewildered by the tapes, however, if he
detected, as he did, a “gap” between form and content that was not quite comprehensible, then I had decided I would reveal the fact of her obesity. If still he was not relieved and was not permitted comprehension of her testimony, if he was neither moved nor interested by it, however mildly, then … well, then I would probably have to reveal more.

“Would it clear things up for you,” I said to C., “if you knew that the woman is unusually obese? A frighteningly fat woman?”

C. thought for a moment. “You mean like the fat lady at the circus? Freakish?”

“Yes.”

“Well, no. No, not unless
this
makes no sense to you … or to me, of course,” he said, indicating with his diction and furrowed brow, pursed lips, index fingertips pressed to chin, that he was about to launch a speculation, a ship of theoretical thought. “We are, all of us, so unsure of what is real and not real, that whenever we encounter a person, especially one of the opposite sex, for some reason, who behaves as if the question of what is real and not real were a simple one to answer, and further, when that person then proceeds to proffer an answer that completely denies the simple evidence of our senses, we are, all of us, likely to forsake our sense and cleave to the other. Essentially, that's the role our parents play for us when we are infants and small children. They define what is real and what is not real, and quite often,
usually,
in fact—because as children we don't understand even the basic physical laws of the universe yet, not even the laws of perspective or of Newtonian physics—quite often what our parents tell us is real denies completely what our senses have indicated is in fact the case. We say, for example, ‘The moon is bigger than the sun.' It's obvious to us. But our parents contradict us: ‘The sun is thousands of times bigger than the moon.' Often they even laugh at us, and they always explain away the contradiction with some piece of nonsense, like, ‘It only appears
to be smaller because it is so much farther from us than the moon is.' So even though we're presented with a contradiction that is then justified only in terms of nonsense, we nevertheless accept it wholly. At that time, the power of the contradiction seems to depend on two things: the physical size of our parents compared to our own tiny displacement and their self-assurance. ‘Ho, ho,' they say, ‘the sun is thousands of times bigger than the moon!' We as children have neither size nor self-assurance.

“Now, my friend, here's the point. Evidently certain women, and possibly a number of men as well, when encountering a man of A.'s enormous physical size and self-assurance—which to my mind borders on the psychotic—find themselves reduced back to the level of children when it comes to their ability to separate what's real from what is not real. Your man was apparently able to induce in Annie Laurie the emotional equivalent of a child's relation to its parent, in particular as regards the parent's having been thrust into the position of arbiter of reality, a kind of metaphysical supreme court of no appeal. That's evidently what made our Annie Laurie, I mean D., think she was crazy. Unfortunately for her, she was made dependent upon him, and her dependence increased in geometrically multiplying degrees every time such an encounter as at the motel occurred. I'm curious. Did his denial of her reality in so absolute a fashion take place only after one of his episodes of drunkenness and rage?”

“The fact of her obesity doesn't really alter your comprehension of her words?” I queried hopefully.

“No. Of course not. Don't be silly. But tell me, did A. deny D.'s perceptions of the world only after one of his episodes of drunkenness and rage?”

Somewhat relieved, I answered him. “Apparently what he could not remember simply did not happen, as far as he himself was concerned. According to the tapes, portions you haven't heard, he could not remember
anything
he said or did while drinking, and he could never remember what he had said when
he was enraged, which was often, and he could not recall what he experienced during sex. I'm summarizing, of course, but there's no point in your listening to seven hours of tape. Most of what's there is self-centered trivia and small talk between two women who don't know each other very well. The important facts about Hamilton Stark, A., though, are, one, he believed passionately that if he had no memory of a particular act, speech, or emotion, he did not commit it, speak it, or experience it. It wasn't his. It was someone else's. And two, he never remembered what he did when he was drunk, said when he was angry, or experienced when he was copulating. A third fact of consequence might be that he was often drunk, frequently enraged, and regularly had sexual relations with women.”

“You speak of him in the past tense,” C. said with a smile, “as if he were dead.”

“It's a narrative convenience. Ignore it.”

“Fine. But it is odd,” C. opined, and again my heart fluttered with dread, “that the man would seem so deliberate about his offenses. Do
you
think it was deliberate on his part? Is that why you want to immortalize this cad? Do you think his awful personality was the expression of a consciously held idea, a philosophical idea, about the world and how to be in it? That is, after all, what's fascinating about religious leaders, isn't it?” (That's one of the things I love about C.—he refuses to deal with personalities; he goes straight and deeply into the abstract, historical heart of the matter. It's why I referred to him earlier as a thinker.)

“Oh, I don't know, I'm no longer sure,” I said sadly. “I feel like Saint Peter making one of his denials.” For the first time in my celebratory examination of my hero, I was aware of the strong possibility that he was not only a churl, but a nonconscious churl. A true churl. I was suddenly afraid that my man's life was out of his control, when my original perception of him, the very reason I had decided to celebrate him in the first place, for heaven's sake, was that he, of all people, had gained control
of his life without suppressing his life. For an instant I thought of telling C. about the cataclysmic end to Hamilton's marriage to Annie, and also the final secret. But then, like Peter after the cock crowed and the prophecy had been fulfilled, I felt a sudden surge of belief—possibly welling from my knowledge of how C. would interpret the information and the secret, possibly for an even less defensive reason—but regardless, like Peter, I was once again rocklike in my steadfastness, and I was no longer ready to give up on my man, my Roarer, my Crank, my Colossal and Cosmic Grouch and Bully Boy, my Man Who Hated Everything so as to Love Anything, my Man Obsessed with a Demon so as to Avoid Being Possessed by One—my one last possibility for a self-transcendent ego in a secular age!

 

O
UR CONVERSATION DAWDLED
on into the late evening, but we, neither of us, could add anything substantial to what has already been described here, especially since I had by then decided to withhold a quantity of specifically cruel qualities demonstrated by my man, and by eleven o'clock, C. and I decided to have a nightcap and end the evening's conversations with a…

T
HIS IS THE
story of how Hamilton Stark almost went to college. Unavoidably, it will be the story of numerous other events as well—other people, other missions, other conflicts resolved and unresolved—but mainly, it will be the story of how Hamilton Stark almost went to college.

Not many people know it, know that he even wanted to go to college in the first place or that he actually came close to doing so in the second. Naturally, you'd never have heard it from the man himself—he carried a number of odd, perhaps even (now that we know what we know) defensive prejudices against people who had gone to college.

“You take your college-educated man,” he frequently proposed, “and I'll show you a capitalist dupe. Not that I mind your capitalists. Shit, no. I
admire
capitalists,” he said. “It's your
dupes
I can't stand. I'll stomp a capitalist dupe before I'll stomp a communist true believer, and you know what I think of your communist true believers,” he reminded me.

Needlessly, it turned out, for I did indeed know what he thought of people he chose to designate “communist true believ
ers.” I knew that he despised them. Possibly despised them to the point of violently attacking them, for, though I personally have never actually
seen
him physically assault a so-called communist, nevertheless I have heard stories that, frankly, I'd rather not relate here. Let it suffice to say that Hamilton Stark, in the barrooms of central New Hampshire, was a well-known, militantly forceful anticommunist. Every morning he read the Manchester
Union-Leader
, a newspaper widely regarded as the nation's most rabidly right wing, a newspaper with red-ink headlines such as
MUSKIE WEEPS WHEN SHOWN HIS OWN WORDS AND HALDEMAN AND EHRLICHMAN QUIT UNDER LEFT-WING PRESSURE
. That sort of garbage, which Hamilton, oh, my Hamilton, seemed to choose to believe.

There was a brief period when he and I were still willing to argue politics. I am a moderate Christian Socialist and at the time of this writing have cast my presidential ballot for the following individuals: Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Rogers Morton (write-in), and Morris Udall (write-in). Hamilton, though he has voted in every presidential election since 1948, has voted for only one man—Ezra Taft Benson. At least that is what he tells me. And I have no reason to doubt that if Hamilton votes in 1976, he will vote yet again for Mr. Benson, even though by then Benson may well be dead and out of the running altogether. And who knows, Hamilton may write in Benson's name anyway. He used to quote Benson to me until, my ears burning, I begged him to stop. “You want to hear what a
wise
man said? ‘It's just too bad, it's really sad, but there has to be a loser.' Now that's
my
idea of presidential wisdom!” Hamilton would exclaim. “I
love
that … ‘it's really sad,' heh heh heh. You talk about your Kennedy wit. What about the
Benson
wit?”

I suppose in a certain perverse light Benson's remarks could have been seen as witty, but to me they seemed cruel and shallow. The difficulty in arguing politics with Hamilton was that I could never tell for sure whether or not he was being seri
ous. It was never clear that, by taking such an extreme position and then defending it with quotes from someone like Ezra Taft Benson, he wasn't mocking me. Here are some other sentences Hamilton quoted and claimed were uttered by the man: “There's no way a man can live a useful life without stepping on a few people's toes.” “It's in the nature of freedom not to know what a man will do with it.” And, “The best defense is the one you never have to use.” Actually, this last sentence I heard myself as it came from the crinkled lips of the ancient parchment-skinned Ezra Taft Benson. He gave the graduation speech at Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, Ausable Chasm, New York, in 1969. I was in the audience because Hamilton Stark was in the audience; he was there, first, because his hero Ezra Taft Benson was giving the graduation speech, and second, because his daughter Rochelle was giving the valedictory speech. Frankly, I think Benson's speech meant more to Hamilton than his daughter's did—Hamilton either fell asleep or pretended to fall asleep during the latter—but for me, that day was momentous. It was the day I first met Rochelle, Hamilton's daughter. Benson could have collapsed from a heart attack during his speech and I wouldn't have noticed or cared. And the only reason that today I can recall the merest scrap of his speech—“The best defense is the one you never have to use”—is because Hamilton quoted it to me a dozen or more times during the drive back to Barnstead.

I had never met Rochelle, though of course I knew of her existence, had listened to Hamilton talk about her for years, and had seen pictures of her, first her grade school photographs, then junior high school, and most recently, four years ago, her high school yearbook photograph. So, in a manner of speaking, I knew what to expect. I had seen her image change, gradually, year by year: from that of a bright-faced, wide-eyed, mischievous three-year-old (taken at nursery school), in which she wore a kelly green daysuit that contrasted beautifully with her then
flame red hair; to the image of a gap-toothed seven-year-old grinning proudly into the camera, her now deeper red hair in braids tied around her head, her green eyes flashing with innocent affection; to the image of a sober-faced, sexually serious adolescent, an intense face already full of intellectual grace and sensual force, with a touch of the bewilderment that such rare presences in such inordinate quantities must have caused her; and on to the most recent image, the tall, almost statuesque, even though delicate and slender, young woman, her deep red hair now tumbling roughly, densely, over her shoulders, her eyes warm, intelligent, disciplined, her mouth in a slight smile as if about to speak, full and promising, her neck long, proud, elegant. And of course, because these photographs were all inscribed to her absent, never seen nor even directly remembered daddy, I was able to trace the development of her character over the years by studying the changes in her handwriting and the language she used to inscribe her photographs. From her nursery school photograph (precociously, I thought):

And then, sadly asserting her relation to him, a six-year-old who could no longer even recall the presence of the man, who knew him only as a name and burning need:

Here she is at ten, obviously after having read a bit of Shakespeare (one wonders what her mother made of the little girl's reading habits: a fifth-grade child poring over Lear?):

And here, in her own, mature, self-aware hand, at the age of seventeen, describing the true nature of her relationship with the man while at the same time offering him its positive denial, which was, of course, the nature of her daily experience of the man:

It was never clear to me why Rochelle was graduating from college in Ausable Chasm, a small tourist town, once a mill town, located in upstate New York a few miles from Lake Champlain. I could not imagine anyone sending his child to such a college for academic reasons (unless the child were unable to matriculate anywhere else), and so far as I knew, Rochelle's mother still resided in Lakeland, Florida, as had Rochelle, at least through her senior year of high school. It didn't make sense to me that she should attend a small, nondescript college fifteen hundred miles from home, especially when there were so many right around home to choose from. I asked Hamilton about it during the drive west and north from his home in Barnstead. He had called me the week before to ask if I would accompany him to his daughter's graduation, mentioning, as if it would help me decide to come, that the featured speaker would be Ezra Taft Benson. He did not mention, of course, that his own daughter would give the valedictory speech, or that it would be in Latin (of her own choosing—the first time in the history of Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science that the graduation speech had been given in Latin!). He told me about that, offhandedly, in Burlington, Vermont.

“Why,” I asked him as he drove his car onto the ferry at Burlington and we began the crossing of Lake Champlain, “why does your daughter happen to be graduating from a small, obscure college in upstate New York, when all along I thought she was living in central Florida with her mother and presumably would have gone to either a well-known, prestigious college in the New England states or else one near her home? Did they move north while she was in high school?” I prodded. I suspected there was a story here to be told me by someone.

It was a beautiful, sunshiny, mid-June day stuffed with bright yellows and jade greens. The mountains, the broad valleys, the almost giddy blue of the lake—it made me want to be either a farmer in this valley or a tourist. I could not decide which role would give me more of the place. It's an ancient dilemma: We can
never choose between the experience itself and our memory of it.

Hamilton's answer didn't make much sense to me. Not then, anyhow, except to let me know that he didn't wish to discuss it. He simply told me that the girl was obviously trying to get closer to her father now that she was no longer wholly dependent on her mother, but that Ausable Chasm was as close as she dared come to where he happened to be. So I let the subject drop and tried to enjoy the day, the smooth lake, the immense sky above it.

At the campus, a complex of half a dozen small, square, brick buildings that from the outside resembled a munitions plant, we met Hamilton's daughter, Rochelle, he for the first time since she was an infant, me for the first time ever. As we got out of his car—he was driving an air-conditioned, dark brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville at that time, quite luxurious—I asked him if Rochelle knew he was coming. He grunted that in response to her invitation he had sent her a post card so indicating.

“Is this the first time you will have seen her since she was an infant?” I asked him.

Again he grunted his answer, which was yes. I could tell from his grunts that he was somewhat tense and possibly even a bit frightened of the occasion. One could hardly blame him. I'm sure that, although he never mentioned it, her acceptance of him was fully as important to him as his acceptance of her was to Rochelle. What if she saw him and, flooded with memories of her mother's angry descriptions of the man, said to him, “No, I have changed my mind, I don't want you here, I don't want you to come to my graduation!” Would he try to comfort her, try to convince her that he truly wanted to be there, reassuring her with his kind, soft and urgent words? Or would he simply spin on his heels and walk away, back to his car, and go home?