Russell Banks - Outer Banks

— Oh, you know, the balance of payments, as it were. It’s almost cosmic. I love analogies, as you well know, he reminded her gently.

— I don’t need to be reminded, she informed him.

— Yes, I remember your telling me that, too. And just about everything else we say to each other as well.

— It’s not exactly an opportunity for adventure, is it, being one of a pair of parallel lines? We stayed together too long, Egress; she reminded him again.

— Yes, I know, I know. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Remembering it, I mean.

— What’s the solution?

— Infinity, he laughed.

— No, be serious, Egress.

— I am, I am. We’re a pair of parallel lines, you said it yourself, and if that’s become a problem, as it most evidently has, then the only solution is “infinity,” which is where they meet, finally.

— Or diverge.

— Right, or diverge. Of course. But we’re not Greeks, nor were we meant to be, so we ought to be careful not to get our ethics mixed up with our mathematics. We’re neither of us skilled enough a mathematician to accomplish it with anything like grace or good feeling.

— Don’t worry about me, she said. — You’re the one who loves analogy, remember?

— Yes, yes, of course. But you’re the one who brought the parallel lines into this, which I’ve merely accepted as an indication of how you perceive our lives, past, present, and, presumably, future.

— I can’t stand this quarreling. It’s all so familiar to me, she exclaimed. — So déjà-vu. Good-bye, she said to him, and hurried from the bank.

He finished his transaction with the teller and left also, feeling no stranger to his anger with himself, even taking perverse pleasure from the familiarity.

10.

(IN THE COCKTAIL LOUNGE)

— H’lo again.

— Again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

— Been here awhile, eh?

— The better part of a season, I’d say. I thought I’d found a place you’d not found and wouldn’t. But here you are. I see I should’ve kept moving, should’ve kept taking those chances instead of this one…

— I’m sorry.

— Don’t be! No, it’s not your fault! None of it. Not a bit.

— I’ve changed.

— I know it. I can tell that. I know you’ve changed. Trouble is, I’ve changed too. And you know where that puts us? I’ll tell you where it puts us! It puts us right back where we started. What we’ve got to do is change, all right, but only one of us at a time!

— Right. Well, don’t let me interrupt you. ’Bye.

— Yeah. G’bye. Too bad for the bartender, though.

— Why?

— Wal, y’see, he just lost two customers. A “regular” and a “potential.”

— Oh, I know. Well, don’t worry, someone else will take our places, I’m sure.

— Yeah, sure, the world is full of people running away from each other.

— Right. ’Bye.

— G’bye.

11.

(AT THE HOSPITAL)

— Are you a patient?

— Here for tests.

— Really? Anything wrong?

— No, I’m sure it’s nothing at all. A little innocuous bleeding. A lump or two, shortness of breath. But still, one has to treat these things as if they were serious…

— I know.

— What about you?

— The same. Tests, X-rays.

— Nothing serious, I hope?

— Not really. A cough, occasional pain, a cut on my wrist that won’t heal properly… Probably coincidence.

— Of course. Like our checking in here at the same time, eh?

— Yes, sure. Just like that.

12.

(AT THE OPERA)

— No?

— No.

— Right.

— Right?

IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me to write a novel with A. As the prototype for its hero, Hamilton Stark, until fairly recently, a year ago this spring, when I drove the forty miles from my home in Northwood across New Hampshire to his home outside the town of B. Upon written invitation (via post card, as was his habit), I was on my way to visit him for the afternoon and possibly the evening. The post card read:

4/12/74. If you don’t show up here Sat. with a fifth of CC and a case of Molson I’ll stop up your plumbing with my toe. Number 5 has gone back to Mother and I’ve gone back to my old habits. Bring me a box of 30.06 rifle shells too. We’ll do some shooting. A.

Typically, he had typed his message, and the four-color photograph printed on the reverse side was of a building he had helped construct, in this case a Tampax factory in the southwestern part of the state. A. was a pipefitter with a wide range of practical engineering skills, and on that job he had been the foreman for all the plumbing, heating and air-conditioning systems.

After leaving my home around noon, I stopped in Concord, the state capital, and as instructed, purchased a fifth of Canadian Club whiskey and a case of Molson ale, which also happens to be Canadian. A. loved practically everything Canadian and thought Canada a truly “civilized” country, especially its far northern regions, where no one lives. “Up there,” he once told me, “there’s so many rocks and so few people, the people act like rocks. There aren’t even any goddamn trees up there, once you get far enough north! Now that’s class ,” he pronounced.

I had nodded my head in agreement, as was my habit, but I wasn’t actually sure — wasn’t sure that I agreed with him, of course, but also was not sure that he had meant what he had said, that he hadn’t been criticizing the Canadian landscape and people rather than praising them. I didn’t bother to pursue the subject; I knew my confusion at his ambiguous tone would only have been compounded by the further, inclusive, ambiguously hostile pronouncements that he would have heaped upon my head. He was like that. Once he perceived a crack in his listener’s confidence in the meaning and intent of his remarks, he gleefully hurled himself like a boulder against the crack until he had split the egg of assured understanding wide open and had it lying in pieces like Humpty Dumpty at the bottom of the wall. And like a fallen Humpty Dumpty, the listener always felt foolish and guilty, as if the fall and the consequent shattering were all his own fault, a just punishment for his exceeding pride.

In many ways, A. was a peculiar man.

I was saying, though, that I had left Concord, and a half-hour later, as I was driving past the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stovepipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or half-covered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene, the fields compulsively cleared by long-dead generations of Yankee farmers gone now in this generation to scrubby choke-cherry and gnarled stunted birch, saw the gap-toothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road, glimpsed in windows the blank, gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards, the scrawny yellow mongrels nastily barking from the doorsteps at my passing car — as I drove through this melancholy scene and thus neared the home of A., it occurred to me for the first time that I might write a novel with A. as the prototype for its hero.