Outer Banks (25 page)

Luckily, when Rochelle came up to him and introduced herself, saying that she recognized him from snapshots her mother had shown her, he smiled graciously—one of the few times, perhaps the only time, I've seen Hamilton Stark smile graciously—
and he took her hand in his and thanked her for inviting him. Rochelle was already six feet tall, a young woman with electrifying beauty, and as she stood there in the parking lot outside the auditorium in her royal blue gown and mortarboard, her hand in her father's hand, her green eyes staring directly, searchingly, into his brown eyes, which were squinting from the bright sunlight, I felt tears running over and down my cheeks.

Though she and I barely spoke, except for the moment when Hamilton introduced us to one another, it seemed to me then, and was later confirmed by her own testimony, that we both felt a deep bond between us. Years later, six, to be exact, I was able to ask her about that first meeting at Ausable Chasm, to ask her how she had perceived me then. We were lying in bed together, drifting languidly from passionate peaks through hazy valleys all the way to the gray light of dawn, the time of night and first intimacy when lovers ask one another how they were seen before, when they were not lovers. It's an ancient form of talk, one of the few reliable ways of finding out how one actually is in the world.

I lit a cigarette for her and, naked except for my socks and garters, walked across the room to the dresser—we were at my home, in my own bedroom, this the conclusion to an evening that had begun as a literary discussion on the subject of the modern novel—and fixed her a drink, cognac and soda. “Tell me,” I said to her, returning to the bed with her drink, “on that day we first met, your college graduation day, the day you told me about your father's wanting to go to college and how he had failed to satisfy that desire and how that was all tied up with your desire to attend Ausable Chasm—on that first day, how did you see
me?
How did I seem to you? Can you remember?” I asked, handing her the glass. “You don't mind telling me this, do you?” I asked, suddenly worried that I might have embarrassed her with my question. I still did not know how to anticipate her reactions to anything I might say or do, nor do I even today. She is more intelligent than I, but her thought sequences
are linked in patterns and systems that are not as logical as mine, and consequently she is unpredictable to me. Excitingly so, however! I find myself enlarged, enriched, and challenged by her unpredictability. She accomplishes it, expresses it, in our relationship in such a way that it never makes me feel arrogant or humiliated (the two most conventional responses in a male to a female's unpredictability).

“No,” she said in her low, early morning voice, “I don't mind.” She was tired, I knew, as was I, but we were both nonetheless stimulated by the occasion. It produced in her a kind of languid animation that, whenever it appeared, made me want to make love to her again. But I resisted the impulse and attended her words.

“I saw you immediately as an ally,” she told me. “I looked into your face and watched how you watched my father. I knew then that you were probably the only other person on earth who was obsessed with him in a way that corresponded to my own obsession with him.” Then she stopped a second. “But you don't want to hear about my
use
for you, do you? I mean, after all, as an ally you were useful to me. You were going to become a way for me both to justify and satisfy my obsession with my father. I did have other perceptions of you, perceptions that had nothing to do with any possible
use
I might make of you. Wouldn't you rather hear those?” she gently asked me.

Indeed. I had an erection to cope with now. The milky light of dawn was entering the room like a thief, stealing the nighttime and our disembodied, anonymous voices, thrusting us back into our particular, constraining bodies, those vessels, those jugs, those ridiculous, pajama-shaped symbols of our true identities. (I believe this, I have always believed it. I have never regarded myself as anything more than my disembodied voice and have never thought of myself as more clearly seen, known, than when I am heard. This, of course, lies behind my need to pursue and understand Hamilton Stark—at least it's what presents me with a rationale for my
pursuit—for he is the only human being I have known who did not seem to exist solely through his disembodied voice.)

That day at Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, though, I almost gave up on Hamilton. I came closest then to believing that the entire view I held of him was nothing more than an objectification of my own psychological and philosophical needs. For the first time, and, I hope, the last, I seriously entertained the notion that I had, in essence, made up Hamilton Stark, had invented him, had taken an ordinary man with an unusual personality disorder and had structured his numerous symptoms into an image that satisfied a set of secret, shameful needs in me.

My true weaknesses always seem to derive from my sympathies. Hamilton has told me this, and it's true. You will recall my sympathy for his second wife, the one he called “the actress,” and how my sympathy for her made me question his very authenticity. Well, the same thing happened, only in a more extreme fashion, that day when I first met Rochelle, discovered that she was giving the valedictory speech, saw her reaching out for her father's love and part of his life, and saw him yank both back. I was horrified. This was going too far, I thought. Surely, cruelty has its metaphysical use and meaning, but there must be a point where it is simply and purely cruelty and has no use or meaning except for the perpetrator.

“I'm glad you came,” she said to him in a voice that, to me, seemed remarkably calm.

He squinted into the sun and, expressionless, said that he had come to hear Ezra Taft Benson speak, a privilege that heretofore he had been denied.

Rochelle asked him if he understood Latin.

He shook his head no and asked, surprised, if Benson were going to speak in Latin.

“No, not that I know of,” she said, smiling easily. “But
I
am. Would you like a translation of my speech?” she asked him coyly. “I've copied it out for you.”

Again he shook his head no.

The half-hour that followed was extremely strained. The three of us strolled around the parking lot, Hamilton in the middle, Rochelle on one side, and me on the other. We looked at the automobiles, commented on the makes and the number plates, and asked one another questions that could not be answered. At least not by any of us.

I
REALIZE THAT
I'm not explaining many things that the reader doubtless would like explained. Please believe me, I'm not leaving these questions unanswered merely because I have a perverse love of mystery. Quite the opposite; in fact, I despise mystery. Mystery is the last resort of the hysteric. It's a frantic, final attempt to organize chaos, or rather, to give the
appearance
of having organized
chaos. None of that for me. It's too easy and too cheap a way out for a man who feels, as I do, morally compelled to abide with chaos all the way to the end, until either he has succeeded in answering all the questions at hand, unraveling all the tangles, explaining all the puzzles, solving all the riddles, or else he has succumbed to the snarl of chaos altogether. For such a man, for me, the middle, where “mystery” lies, is definitely excluded. I am an
emotional
man, yes, but I am
not
a romantic man. And though I may never ascend quite to those airy levels of pure reason where, for example, my friend C. strolls about so comfortably, at least I am clear about the nature of my goal and can measure with accuracy the distance I remain from it. This particular clarity and the measuring that results therefrom comprise, for me, the only possibilities for a moral life. All else is either fantasy or determinism.

For this reason, that day at Ausable Chasm I persisted in trying to find out why Rochelle was graduating from college here in the North. Ordinarily, if Hamilton indicated that he didn't wish to discuss a subject, I deferred to him and changed the subject, never bringing it up again unless and until he indicated readiness. But my fascination with Rochelle, then, at the actual sight of her, drove me to push in ways I would have otherwise found rude, if not downright boorish, in myself as well as in anyone else.

“What's the story?” I asked him. “What's the explanation? How come?”

All of which he answered with a shrug, a downturned mouth with pouting lower lip, like a carp's, a helpless flop of open hands at his sides. And after a while it occurred to me that he didn't know the answer either, that it was likely, when he had learned that his daughter was graduating from Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, that he had been as surprised and puzzled as I.

I therefore ceased asking the man about it and promised myself to ask Rochelle instead. Unfortunately, whenever I was with her, I became so addled by her physical and spiritual pres
ence that I forgot my promise altogether, and now, six years after making that promise, I still have not kept it, and thus I do not know why Rochelle graduated from an obscure college in upstate New York rather than one in central Florida. This distresses me. For now it is too late to keep that promise. Rochelle is gone from me except in memory and imagination. I will never know the answer to my question, and the reader will never know either.

 

T
O RETURN
: I handed Rochelle her drink and joined her in the bed. (This happens to be the imaginary point from which I can most easily recall the events of the day I spent in Ausable Chasm.) We were talking about the day we first met each other and how we had perceived each other then. She said that she had thought of me as a small man, short and slight, but later, after having seen me numerous times alone, realized that it was because I had been in the company of her father that first time and thus, when compared to his great height and overall bulk, had appeared much smaller than, in fact, I actually was. She was pleased, she told me, when she discovered that I was the same height as she and that, while my musculature was not exactly overdeveloped, 1 was nevertheless wiry and in quite good shape for a man my age.