Hamilton Stark

Chapter 6. Chapter Beginning as “His Second Wife Speaks of a Man She Calls ‘Your Father’ (from a Tape Recording)”

HIS SECOND WIFE SPEAKS of a man she calls “Your Father” (from a tape recording):

“Yeah, my mother, she used to sit back in her chair and she’d clap her hands together, like this, and she’d say to me, ‘Annie, oh, Annie, you’re so pretty with that smile and those legs. With those legs, honey, you, you’re going to the top!’ She said, she said it often enough, boy, once a day at least, and she wasn’t the only one saying it, either. My God, Uncle Zack, my Aunt Harriet. I mean, even old Grover said it, old Grover the janitor in our building on East Eighty-sixth, even he said it, so by the time I was, say, oh, I dunno, twelve, thirteen, by that time I really believed it myself. I really, I believed it was gonna be true. I was going to the top. And you know what that meant to us, ‘getting to the top,’ it meant Show Business. SHOW BIZ. I guess because we were New Yorkers. You know. But also because we were all jokers, all of us, the whole family — comics, singers, mimics, like that. This was before television, of course, back in the forties and all, so to us Show Business didn’t mean TV, it meant the stage. The Musical Stage, honey, right up there in front of a live audience, people who really love ya, and you can feel ’em loving ya, nobody cares if you feel it, so you just take it in like the sun’s rays, and the more you get the better you get, no kidding, that’s how it works, Show Business. With the stage, I mean, not TV or movies. It’s different there, TV, the movies, because the audience there hates you if you look like you can feel ’em loving ya. They want to see you as if you’re all alone in the world or something, you know, as if they’re looking at you through one of those one-way mirrors that department stores have for detectives. Anyhow, to be good, really good, on the stage, you have to get special training, of course. No matter if you’re talented — talent’s as cheap as daisies and’ll do you about as much good as a dozen of ’em — unless you get the training, because you might, you maybe wouldn’t think so, but it’s not so easy to stand up there and let ’em love ya and let ’em know you can feel it, let ’em know you love it. Which of course is what keeps them doing it, loving ya. It really is not easy. I don’t care what you might think. It’s work. Hard work, honey. You wouldn’t believe — you’ve never been in show business, have you? I can tell. Never mind, I mean, I can tell from the way you walk and how you’re sitting, stuff like that, though of course you’ve got the looks, you could do it, I mean if you had the training and all, though you might be too old for it now. I was only a kid when I got started. I had the looks too, but like I said, talent’s cheap. Nothing. Nuth-ing. So I had to get started early, before I was ten, even, I got started. At first all I could do was sing, you know, like a little kid, but cute, I mean cute enough to get me on ‘Uncle Bob’s Rainbow House’ eight times in one year, and then when I started taking lessons it didn’t take long before I was good enough to sing with Major Bowes, and after that I did the ‘Rinso White’ commercial on radio. Did you ever hear that one? ‘Rinso White! Rinso White! Happy little washday song!” You’re too young for radio. Another radio show I was on was ‘Our Gal Sunday,’ where I had a singing part for thirty-six weeks running. And all this time I’m taking voice lessons, training to be heard, honey, not seen, not yet, anyhow. First things first, you know what I mean? But around the time I was eleven my mother says I ought to start getting ready to be seen, people are really starting to talk about how good-looking I am anyhow, so she starts me taking tap and modern ballet, and three afternoons a week the accordion. Things you can do out in front of people. Not like the piano or the cello or something like that, that hides you. My mama really had it figured, she really knew what she wanted for me and how she could get it for me. She wanted me to be seen, and naturally, to be loved for it, for being seen. Oh yeah, my mama just knew it, people were going to love me for letting them see me — and I was going to let them see everything I had, too. I was going to turn myself into a beautiful girl gracefully dancing up there on the stage, long white legs shining in the lights, feet in silver shoes tapping miraculously fast in complicated rhythms while the whole upper body and the accordion would swing back and forth in a slick kind of counterpoint! That girl was going to be me! That girl up there tap-dancing and playing the accordion, her fingers and arms moving as fast and as graceful as her feet and legs, with the music of the accordion and the crackle of the taps joined by the sweet sound of her own singing—that girl was going to be me! ‘Lady of Spain I Adore You.’ Sure. I was going to become an entire musical production, with the movement, the rhythm and the melody all together in a single body placed in the exact center of an enormous stage! I mean it, she meant it. That was my mama’s dream, God rest her soul, and naturally, before I was very old, it was my dream too. I guess when, I guess you’re more likely to do that, make your parent’s dream into your own. You know, when your parent dies young. Maybe, I don’t know, to work off the guilt or something. You know. Hell, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Why, I mean. Anyhow, it sure became my dream awful fast, and especially after mama died, which was the summer I turned sixteen and was starting to take voice with Estelle Liebling — you probably know who that is, Beverly Sills studied with her, though I didn’t know her then, even though we were about the same age. I guess we had our lessons on different days or something. I could hit a high G above high C then, would you believe, and that’s as good as Beverly Sills, though like I said, talent’s cheap, you have to have a lot more than talent to be a Beverly Sills. Anyhow, when my mama died I was sixteen. Cancer. My father died when I was two. Car crash. I went to live in the next block, over on Eighty-seventh, with Uncle Zack and Aunt Harriet and just threw myself into my lessons, tap-dancing and singing and playing the accordion, all of them, practicing eight and ten hours a day, probably driving everybody in the building nuts, but no one ever complained, because just like my mother, they were all sure I was going to the top. They all knew that someday I would make it big. Big. And then they could remember when. You know how people are. They like to be able to remember you when. And if you yourself are a true believer, I mean really believe, even to the point where it’s never actually occurred to you that you might not make it big, never even once occurred to you, pretty soon everyone who knows you starts thinking the same way. It never even occurs to them either that you won’t become a star. So long as you’re not a complete idiot, of course, so long as you’ve got some kind of recognizable talent. That’s the one thing you really need talent for, to convince people you’re not crazy because you happen to believe you’re going to become a star. It’s what makes them believe. In you. People, strangers practically, would start telling me on the elevator, ‘Annie, I just know you’re going to make it big! I can already see your name up in lights on Broadway!’ they’d say to me. Stuff like that. Only, the trouble was, pretty soon I was, I not only had to live up to my poor dead mother’s expectations for me, but the expectations of everyone who lived in the building too, and all my teachers, even my friends. So if the thought ever did occur to me that I might not make it, get to the top and become a world-famous tap dancer and accordionist — or the even more horrible thought that I might not really want to become it — well, you better believe those were thoughts I put out of my head in a hurry. I can remember lying in my bed in my room on Eighty-seventh, my legs and ankles stiff and aching from ten hours of practice, and suddenly I’d be thinking, I might not make it. I might not be good enough. I might not be lucky enough. Stuff like that. And pretty soon I’d start to think that those were thoughts that were being put into my head by my poor dead mother’s restless spirit, just to sort of test me. To discipline me. No kidding, that’s how I got around any doubts I felt in those days. I just figured it was Mama, doomed to wander through purgatory or someplace until I made it to the top. Mama somewhere out there helping to guarantee my becoming a star by toughening me up with bad thoughts. So I’d give the right response, I’d say, I’d tell myself, ‘Not a chance I won’t make it, not this kid, not me, not Annie Laurie!’ And then I’d roll over and fall asleep, probably with a smile on my face…”

If I may, I’d like to state now that the above is a partial transcript of a tape recording made by Rochelle Stark during a series of lengthy interviews with her father’s second wife, Annie Laurie Stark, who now resides alone in a shabby tenement in Manchester, New Hampshire, middle-aged, depressed (I’m sure) and angry in ways she herself can never know, or she would probably try to kill someone — her ex-husband, a randomly selected stranger, or even herself.

I will try to explain. I have not offered the transcript in its entirety here because the whole tape is too long, too painfully depressing and, finally, because of the several secrets she must keep from herself, a little confusing to the listener. Also, unless you happen to know the woman personally, boring.

For one thing, if you do not actually hear the tapes, if you must read them, you cannot hear her tough, New York accent, its glitter, and thus cannot hear it cut against the enervated, listless quality of her language, the words she uses. It makes an interesting conflict, creating an effect of stoic bravery, that accent and those words. And then, of course, there are the secrets, what she cannot mention, cannot bring herself to talk about to anyone, not even to patient, kind Rochelle, who, sitting across from her in the dusty, cluttered living room, knows what those secrets are. For while, naturally, you who read this account cannot see Annie, Rochelle, in interviewing the woman, could see her, and among the several things she could observe was that Annie Laurie is obese, is almost grotesquely fat. And because she will not speak of it under any circumstances (and no interviewer would be so callous as to force her), Annie’s obesity remains a secret. Well, not anymore.

But there is a second secret which I cannot bring myself to reveal. Not yet, at least. At least not with this character. Perhaps never. (This is a novel, for God’s sake, not a court case.)

Anyhow, the tapes of her interview with Annie Laurie Stark are among the documentary materials that Rochelle chose to use in the making of her novel. How they happened to come into my possession is not worth going into here, but it is enough to say that she made them available to me, with full knowledge of the use I would make of them. I have tried to give credit to Rochelle and her materials wherever in my novel I have consciously drawn from them or from her novel itself. And because her novel will never be published (for reasons that I will go into later), I do not feel any particular misgivings over certain of my appropriations — even though I am sure there are people, literal-minded readers with a facility for legalistic short division, who would construe my truly creative operations as plagiaristic or, at best, as derivative. To such readers, I offer neither apology nor explanation. To the rest, the above ought to be sufficient as both apology and explanation.

But the tapes. When I first sat down in my chair and listened to them, a process that consumed an entire evening, long into the winter’s night, I was astounded. Appalled. Aghast. Amazed. (I can see now that I’ll be unable to keep Annie Laurie’s second secret to myself. It’s fast becoming part of the novel. Oh, Annie, Annie, I’m sorry.).

Immediately, I called my friend and neighbor C., the thinker, a man whose sense and sensitivity I trust explicitly because both sense and sensitivity happen to be driven by a deep curiosity about the nature of the universe rather than by any purely personal considerations. “I have something here that I want you to listen to,” I explained to him, after first apologizing for calling so late.

“Now?” he petulantly asked me, understandably, for it was three A.M.

I assured him that it could wait until the following morning, that I had just got carried away by a rush of perceptions that had led me to a state of extreme agitation and, as a result, moral confusion. An orderly progression of perceptions makes the moral life easier to accomplish. When a flood of perceptions washes over one, however, one’s moral certainty gets swept violently away. This is possibly why it’s so rare and difficult for the aware man to be much of a moral example to others. One is always safer if one can save that role, the role of moral example, for the dull and the stolid, the insensitive, the practically insensible.

But to return, I explained to C. that I needed an objective response to some tape-recorded interviews I had recently obtained, materials that I wished to use, in a much modified form, of course, in my novel about Hamilton Stark, which C. well knew to be in fact about A. I told C. that the reason for my excitement and my need for him as an objective listener derived from my bewilderment, which in turn was a consequence of my inability to trust any longer certain conclusions I had drawn prior to my having heard these tapes, conclusions which, of course, had to do with Hamilton Stark’s character.

“I thought I knew this man!” I exclaimed to C. “I thought I had a clear idea of the quality of his attractiveness, its limits and uses. I thought I knew how he had been perceived by the people who loved him as well as by those who hated him, and thus I thought I knew how to perceive him myself and to make him available, visible, known, to people who knew nothing of him except by what they got through me. But now … now I’m just not sure anymore. I’ve heard some things in these tapes that simply don’t belong there. Or rather, they don’t belong in the same moral universe as the one I have cast my novel into. I’m finding myself tempted to break into that universe, like some kind of sneaky rapist climbing through a bedroom window, with secrets, information, data, stuff, I had wanted to keep out. I need someone to confirm or deny what I think I’m hearing on these tapes before I can go on. Am I making myself clear?” I asked him.

“Not at all,” C. answered.

“Please bear with me. I know it’s late. But this may be the most important chapter in the book. It’ll be either the final chapter or the sixth of eleven,” I explained.

“Well, what are you hearing?” He yawned noisily onto the mouthpiece, letting me know that he wished to go back to bed.

“I’d rather not tell you until after you’ve told me what you hear.” I didn’t want to prejudice him any more than necessary. I told him only that the tapes were an interview made with D., who was A.’s second wife, the one he now and then refers to as “the hussy” and sometimes as “the actress.” He once told me, concerning D., that the trouble with a woman who has been an actress is not that she will lie but that you will never be able to believe her.

“Ah, that one,” C. said.

I decided to tell him nothing more until he had heard the tapes himself. I promised him that I’d have two bottles of a fine California wine, a pinot noir from a small vineyard outside Sonoma that we are both especially fond of, and he gladly promised that he would come over to my house and listen to the tapes tomorrow evening after dinner.

He arrived at about nine, still sucking his teeth, as was his habit following an enjoyable meal. It was a blustery cold night, clear and starry, the kind of night that sometimes occurs in mid-February when a spring wind stirs the midwinter cold. I helped him out of his overcoat and escorted him into the library, where I had a large, cheering fire crackling well along and the wine and glasses set out next to the armchair.

He descended into the hug of the chair, taking possession of it as if with great physical need, lit one of his thin cigars, capped a light belch with his gopherlike front teeth, and indicated that I should pour the wine. Our visits are characteristically embellished by a certain ritual, a ceremony. This was a typical one. The purpose of our little ritualistic parading around, our wheezing, sighing, genuflecting, our litanies, and so on, which either would go undetected by a stranger or, if detected, would be thought curious yet boring, is that we both are trying to create as much as possible of the atmosphere that we assume prevails at meetings in, say, London or Brussels, or Belgrade even, between two wholly civilized intellectuals. The underlying assumption, of course, whether held consciously or not, is that by creating such a particularized atmosphere (no matter that we must imagine the model for it), we will therefore find it easier to behave as wholly civilized intellectuals ought to behave — not a simple feat for two middle-aged, middle-class, American men living in a village one hundred miles from even a minor seaport or a major university. But this kind of imitation has always been characteristic of American intellectuals, I suppose. We are, in our own odd way, neoclassicists, regardless of our low opinion of other neo-classical people or ages and in spite of the fact that we have never enjoyed a specifically classical period in our cultural development. Perhaps it’s too late to have one. We have lost our innocence. We must imitate, and we also must imagine what we imitate. Thus we always seem to be at least twice removed from true sincerity, true, innocent authenticity. It’s hard to tell if that’s a problem or a solution to one.

I poured the wine, standing next to C.’s chair while I poured, as if I were the wine steward and my library our club library.

C. tasted the wine, just a sip, almond-sized, and made a slightly dissatisfied face. “Cheese. A small slice of Gouda to neutralize the taste buds.”

I strode to the kitchen and returned with a wedge of Gouda on a small wooden plate, which I placed on the table next to C.’s chair. Then I filled both our glasses.

C. sliced a sliver off the wedge, popped it into his mouth, quickly chewed and swallowed. He cleared his mouth, as if to make a speech, and tasted the wine again.

Still standing, I waited through the sniff, the flip of tongue, the hold, and the drop.

“Excellent,” he pronounced.

As if relieved, I crossed the room to the fireplace, where, my glass held casually in one hand, my free arm draped like a sweater across the mantel, I assumed a posture that in the dim half-light of the carpeted, book-lined room would make a disinterested viewer think of Oliver Goldsmith. I watched C., legs crossed at the ankles, one hand flopping across the thick arm of the chair, the other posing his wineglass beneath his nostrils as if he were holding a long-stemmed rose, his cigar building a white tubular ash in the ashtray beside him, assume a posture in his chair that would make that same disinterested viewer think of my friend as Ford Madox Ford. Sometimes it was Paul Valéry, but usually, especially in winter, for some reason, it was Ford Madox Ford.

“You said something about listening to some tapes?” C. wheezed at me. Ordinarily he affected the wheeze when he was unsure of the direction of the conversation. It seemed to settle him down, make him the center of the room regardless of where the conversation might wander.

The recorder was inside a cupboard next to the fireplace. Leaning down and switching the first reel on, I quickly told C. that what he was about to hear was an unedited interview made by Rochelle Stark (whose real name C. of course was familiar with) with Hamilton Stark’s (A.’s) second wife, to whom I am referring here as Annie Laurie. “You’ve never met this woman, and I don’t believe we’ve ever discussed her before, have we?” I suddenly realized that I was speaking with the voice of an attorney addressing a jury. I couldn’t tell, however, if I was the prosecuting attorney or the attorney for the defense. I wasn’t even sure who the defendant was.

“No, although you have alluded to the fact of her continued existence. Somewhere in New Hampshire, I believe.”

“Yes. Manchester.”

“Ah. The Queen City.”

And here the tape began:

“What, what’s that thing you got there, a tape recorder? Is it on, is it turned on, honey? You aren’t going to record this, are you? Listen, honey, if you’re going to put this on tape I’ll have to be a lot more careful of what I say, especially with you being his kid and all. I mean, you know what they say about how blood and water don’t mix, don’t you? I’m not interested in a feud, starting some kinda family feud, not anymore, not now. On the other hand, I mean, what the hell, maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, I mean to him. Or anyone else either. There’s a lot of water gone under the dam, you know. What can it matter now, after all these years? I mean, so what if he happens to hear what I’ve got to say about him now, there’s plenty others who could say lots worse by now, I’ll bet. Besides, he can’t hurt me any, not anymore, not anymore. And it’s not like I was interested in making a good impression on him, if you know what I mean. Pretty hard to do now, ha, ha, ha. It’s been what, ten years now I’ve been sitting around thinking about what happened between your father and me, and you know what? Most of what I thought was true back then, ten years ago, when I divorced him, I really don’t think is true anymore, not that I’d do it all over again if I had the chance, believe me. I wouldn’t marry that man again in a million years, and I wouldn’t divorce him either. What’s done is done, and marrying and divorcing a man like your father is something you only want to do once. Jesus, isn’t it amazing how you never know what’s happening to you when it’s actually going on? You have to wait until it’s all over and done with before you can find out, and then it’s too late, you’ve forgotten too many things, you can’t remember what people said, or what they even looked like, or even the order, you can’t remember the order of things anymore, if you ever knew the order of things in the first place, for God’s sake. Makes you feel kind of helpless. I guess you can never know what really happens to you, not even afterward. Right? It’s kind of crazy. Think of all the trouble you’d save, though. I mean, if you knew what was happening at the same time as it was actually happening. Hah, it’s probably a good thing you don’t. You’d probably just kill yourself and save yourself the trouble of your whole life. Here I am, look at me, running on about nothing, old motormouth, that’s what your father used to call me. Old Motormouth. I’m sorry, honey, I know I talk too much, I’m really a great talker, or at least I used to be a great talker. I don’t get too many chances anymore, so I don’t know now, I mean, maybe I’m just a lady running off at the mouth…”

“How old was she when this was recorded?” C. asked in a flat voice.

“Thirty-one.”

“Not old.”

“No.”

“… twenty when I first met him, about your age, a few years younger, even. Jesus, we were a beautiful couple, I was really thin then, no kidding, I had to be, I was dancing with the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show every week, national TV, and they did a weight check every Thursday night, like they do with boxers, because after all, our bodies were our meal tickets, honey, our livelihoods, and if we put on a pound more than we were allowed, there was a dozen girls standing right behind each one of us ready and able to take our places on a moment’s notice. It was a grind, lots of pressure. Once you stepped out of that line-up, honey, you stayed out. We worked harder than anyone who hasn’t done it can know, new routines that the choreographers more or less made up on the spot and as we went along, practicing seven and eight hours a day right up to the dress rehearsal, which really wasn’t your actual dress rehearsal at all as much as it was just the first time we could do the entire number all together from start to finish, and usually there were half a dozen last-minute changes that we’d have to fit in before Saturday’s show, and then we’d have Sunday off, and then on Monday the whole thing would start over again. The life of a chorus girl isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, honey. We really were a lot like your professional athletes, like boxers or something. Except that we had the summers off, but not many of us could afford to loaf, or wanted to anyhow, so most of us took summer stock and chorus line jobs in musicals or night-clubs, which is how I met your father. I was in the chorus line, with a singing part, too, at the Lakeside Theater up in Laconia. You know the place probably, it’s pretty famous, over there by the lake, at that place they call the Weirs. Anyhow, your father went to see the show one night, alone, and he picked me out of the chorus line, so he says, and sent me a dozen yellow roses and a note backstage after the show. Believe it or not, it was the first time that had ever happened to me. A stage-door Johnny! Imagine! Me, little Annie Laurie, singled out of the chorus line by a man in the audience! Remember, honey, I was only twenty years old at the time, and sure, I was a big-city girl and he was supposed to be a country rube, but I’d been raised like a flower in a hothouse and he’d been brought up like a piece of moss on a rock, a chunk of lichen or something, so when he tried the old dozen-roses-and-a-note routine, I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker. Also, I was pretty lonely, spending the summer like that in the sticks, away from home for the first time, really, because back in New York I was still living with my Uncle Zack and Aunt Harriet, who had raised me after my mama died. So here I am, backstage in this dingy little barn theater beside the lake, taking off my make-up, and one of the stagehands comes knocking on the dressing room door with a dozen yellow roses and a note for “The Tall Blond Singer in the Chorus Line.” That’s how he’d addressed the card, and since I was the only one in the line with a singing part, one short number, which I had because it was a six-girl line and I was the only one who wasn’t completely tone-deaf, I knew the note was for me. I can still remember pretty well what it said. It was in that style of his, the way he wrote all his notes or letters or anything. Even the way he talked, most of the time. Flowers a token of esteem from member of audience. Would you have drink with sender. H. Stark. The note was typed, you know, with a typewriter, but it’s strange, I didn’t even notice that, or if I did, I certainly, I didn’t think anything about it, you know, like, What’s a member of the audience doing with a typewriter in his lap? I should have, of course. Thought about it, I mean. I guess he must’ve typed the note out at home before he came to the theater and brought it with him, and that’s strange, don’t you think? I mean, it was opening night. He couldn’t have known who he was going to send the flowers and note to until after he’d already got to the theater. The note on the flowers was in handwriting, somebody’s, probably the stagehand’s. I should’ve thought about stuff like that, at the time, I mean. I sure have since then, but a lotta good it’s done me. If I’d thought about it then I would’ve been able to know quite a lot about your father before I even set my eyes on him, but I guess I was too flattered and lonely to notice even. All I cared about was whether or not he was going to be young and handsome, so I asked the stagehand, and he told me sure the guy was young, you know how stagehands talk, and yeah, the guy was handsome. “Okay-looking,” was probably how he said it. “But the guy’s pretty big,” he told me. I remember that clear as a bell. I remember picturing to myself this tall, handsome stranger, as big as John Wayne and handsome as Robert Taylor, so when, when I walked out the stage door and saw your father, I had to pinch myself on the arm to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. He was very gallant, like they say, I mean at first he was. Real old-fashioned, kind of making these little bows when he’d open a door for me, attentive to every detail of the evening, like making sure that when he brought me a corsage, which he did every time we went out, at least at first, but making sure too that he had on a lapel flower that was the same as was in the corsage. Jesus, what a Romeo he was, that guy! But not one of your Latin lover types. Different. All the time serious as a preacher or something, talking like some kind of weird professor in that flat metallic voice of his about things that usually were pretty interesting, if you listened close, like about the history of Lake Winnepesaukee, which is the lake the theater was located on, or maybe discussing the fine points of the show, pretty well informed on theater, he was too, almost like one of those critics for the Times. I was really, I was surprised, up here in the woods like that, and all of a sudden here comes one of the local yokels, and it turns out he has this interest in theater and travel and history, all kinds of stuff, stuff I thought only New Yorkers were interested in. Jesus, honey, what a sucker I was. Twenty years old, getting sweet-talked by some big hunk of country meat. And by the time I let him sweet-talk me into bed with him, I was pretty much in love with him. He wasn’t my “first,” but he was the first man I fell in love with, really deep, you know? That was also the first time I saw him drunk, too, but it was too late for me to get out by then, the bastard. He had me hooked, so when he started getting mean and wild and drunk all the time, instead of running away from him, which is of course what I should’ve done toot sweet, I tried to comfort him. You know, to soothe his fevered brow, like they say. Wrong thing to do, honey. Dead wrong. You know, to soothe his fevered brow. All my hand on his brow did was jack up the temperature about ten degrees. Jesus. I’ll never forget his face, the way I saw it then, that first night in the motel with him, like the face of some kind of beast, all the time roaring and shouting stuff that didn’t make any sense at all to me, stuff that didn’t have anything to do with me, although he’d stare right into my face when he shouted, so naturally I thought at first he was shouting at me, that’s what anyone would’ve thought. It was the most frightening, scary thing I’d ever seen, I thought he was…”

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…