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.”
“… until finally he flopped onto the bed and passed out, and afterward, after I was sure he was out cold, I crawled into the bed next to him, but under the covers, he was lying on top of everything, and I tried to sleep, which I guess I eventually did, for a while, anyhow. I woke up, I woke up before he did, and in the early morning light looked at his face. Oh, Jesus, it was like a baby’s face. Peaceful, innocent, curious, good-natured. You know what I mean? Like a baby it was. The exact opposite of what it had been six or seven hours before. I’d never seen such an incredible switch. I wondered if maybe I’d imagined the whole thing, you know? But anyhow, even though I was wondering this, I still expected him to act all hangdog and guilty as hell when he woke up. Naturally. I mean, I was all set to forgive him. I’d even rehearsed a couple of speeches where I forgive him for getting drunk the first night we spend together and we talk awhile about his childhood and he promises never to drink like that again. That’s the sort of thing I figured would happen. No kidding. I never expected him to do like he did. To wake up and just act like nothing had happened. It was something weird, honey. One for the books. He acted like I was an old pal or something, just somebody who happened to be there in the morning after a night out with the boys shooting pool or bowling or something. He brushed his teeth and shaved and got his clothes back on—one of the last things he’d done before passing out was take off all his clothes and pound on his chest like Tarzan, no, more like a scowling gorilla, the real thing—and then, all the time humming and cleaning up the room, he waited for me while I dressed too. Finally I got up the nerve and I put it to him, I asked him straight out, “What about last night, Ham?” And you know what he did? Get this. He winked at me! Real slow and sexy. Just crunkled up his cheek, smiled a little, and winked! Then he pats me on the ass and pushes me gently toward the door, saying as we go out that he’s hungry as a bear. That was the first time your father made me feel I was crazy…”
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 fur-rowed 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!
Our 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…
Chapter 7
Ausable Chasm
THIS 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 believers.” 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 EHRLICH-MAN 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 serious. 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 th
e 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.
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