Russell Banks - Outer Banks

“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…

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 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?”