Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

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.