Outer Banks (30 page)

55. Exposés and public scandals seemed to make him sad, as if he were suddenly reminded of some great loss from his childhood.

56. “I hate a melee. If you want a fight, you ought to make it personal. Insult somebody. Insult his mother, his girl friend, his manhood, whatever it is he thinks needs protection.”

57. He never permitted any of his wives to make breakfast for him. Once Jenny, attempting to curry his favor, got up an hour earlier than he and prepared a breakfast of fried eggs, pancakes, sausages, fresh biscuits, coffee, and melon, and when he came downstairs and discovered this lovely meal, he was enraged and stormed out of the house. Later, when describing the event, he explained his rage by pointing out the control a woman can obtain over a man if he lets her imitate his mother. “Good intentions can't dull a sharp knife,” he aphorized. In fairness, he also pointed out the control a man can have over a woman if she lets him imitate her father. “It's how I kept all my women in line. While I kept them.”

58. He despised throw pillows, bric-a-brac, knickknacks, and souvenirs, scatter rugs, doilies, and imitation chandeliers, flower decals, pink appliances, the color off-white, and whitewall tires, decorated mailboxes, and lawn sculpture, and David Susskind, and game shows, and television weathermen. He believed that you are what you love, and therefore he despised people who loved any or all of these things. He also believed that you are not what you despise, and since you cannot very easily control what you love and thus cannot very easily control what you are, you therefore ought at least to make a concerted attempt to avoid being what would disgrace you. For him, then, the most interesting person was the one who hated more things than anyone else, and the least interesting was the one who loved more things than
anyone else. Errol Flynn, he thought, was an example of an interesting man. Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer were interesting. Gerald Ford, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles were not.

59. He loved compression when, as a quality, it was joined to symmetry—as in algebra or symbolic logic, a portable tape recorder, a double-bitted ax, or a Maltese cross. In fact, his favorite design was a Maltese cross, and he frequently left it doodled behind him, on restaurant tablecloths, condensation on windows, sand, snow, and dust.

60. He wore no jewelry and carried no watch. “On principle,” he claimed. As with so much else.

61. He did not wear glasses.

62. The men were unloading a truckload of twenty-foot lengths of six-inch galvanized pipe. He was the foreman on the job site, and because it was only eight-fifteen in the morning and the four men unloading the truck were moving very slowly, two men to each length of pipe, he grew annoyed and left the shanty, where he had been laying out the day's work on the blueprints, and told the crew they were unloading the pipe as if their intent were not to get the truck unloaded but were instead to avoid hurting themselves or tiring themselves out too early in the day, at which point he himself began unloading the pipe, yanking a length by himself from the pile, hefting it to his shoulder and carrying it to the stack twenty feet away, and there laying it gently, so as not to damage the threaded ends, down. The men looked at the sky and the ground. He came back to the truck and did it again. Then again. The men stood aside and watched him work, confused as to the point he was making. After he had unloaded ten lengths of pipe, he stopped before the men and calmly said to them, “You have to lift until everything turns black. Lift till you black out. You have to do it every day. The job will always be more than you can handle, anyhow, so the only point is to lift until everything turns black.” Then he walked back into the shanty and resumed
laying out the day's work. The men turned to each other for a second, grinned good-naturedly, and went to work unloading the pipe, as before, two men to each length, and moving slowly, with care, pacing themselves.

63. He suddenly remembered his father's walk, his stride, efficient and regular, like a dog's involving his body only from the hips down. He tried to imitate it and discovered that to do so he didn't have to alter his own stride in the slightest. The discovery gave him a moment's extreme pleasure, not because it meant that he resembled his father even more closely than he had thought (which would not have pleased him at all), but rather because he believed that his discovery of the similarity between his imitation and the remembered image had led him directly to a momentary awareness of the nature of
all
human beings. And who, indeed, would not experience such awareness, however momentary, with pleasure?

64. He visited his father's grave only once after the funeral, the following summer, when the grass had returned. He walked about the plot for a few moments, admired the view of the river from the hilltop cemetery, and got back into his car and drove home. From the top of Blue Job Mountain behind his house, he could see the cemetery, three miles distant. His ancestors for two hundred years were buried there, and once, when this was pointed out to him, he seemed surprised and confessed that it had never occurred to him, even though he made it a habit to climb to the top of Blue Job once every week.

65. To Trudy, his first wife: “I can't tell you I love you because I don't know what the word means. I mean the word ‘I,' not ‘love' or ‘you.'”

66. To Annie, his second wife: “I can't tell you I love you because I know what ‘you' and ‘love' mean and I don't know what ‘I' means.”

67. To Jenny, his third wife: “I can't tell you I love you because I know what ‘you' and ‘love' mean.”

68. To Maureen, his fourth wife: “I can't tell you I love you because I know what ‘you' means.”

69. To Dora, his fifth wife: “I can't tell you I love you.”

70. With regard to all five wives, he observed one evening that it would have been possible for him only to have told them he did
not
love them, because he would then be lying and thus he would know what he meant. He meant to lie. By this it seemed that he believed that the only statements a person could make, and also could attribute meaning to, were statements known by the speaker to be falsehoods.

71. Asked by a friend why he continued to marry, feeling as he did toward women in particular and things in general, his response was to shrug helplessly and say, “When you don't despise a thing, you let yourself be powerless to resist its advances, when and if it advances.”

72. He disliked most curtains and drapes, all venetian blinds, overhead lamps, tools that were not kept in immaculate condition, and collections of any kind. “I believe in sets of things, not collections.”

73. “ ‘Everything implies its opposite.' I read that. The writer didn't understand what he was writing. He thought it was about logic instead of the world.”

74. He refused to return the greetings of his immediate neighbors, the people who lived along the road to his house, and after a while they ceased greeting him or waving to him when he drove past their homes on his way to and from town and work.

75. He seemed to attract the adulation of adolescent boys, and as long as they remained in awe in silence, he did not discourage it. But as soon as anything more was asked of him, a declaration of loyalty or affection, say, a simple explanation, he in turn asked more of them, and this inevitably drove the boys away, usually hurt, often angry, and always confused as to who had failed whom.

76. On a number of occasions, with something like glee, he quoted a well-known Jamaican proverb: “Me no send, you no
come.” He claimed that it meant, “If I didn't send for you, then you're not here.”

77. He combed his hair the same way all his life—straight back without a part, cut fairly long, trimmed by a barber every three weeks. Even in his forties, he had no gray hair, and as a result it was difficult to guess his age. People took him for anywhere between twenty-five and fifty-five, depending on their opinion of how old they themselves looked.

78. He kept himself physically very clean, and every morning he shaved himself meticulously, using no cologne or aftershave lotion on his face other than coarse rubbing alcohol. He used a straight razor, which he honed daily on a two-inch-wide leather strop, and a mug and brush. The razor, strop, mug and brush had all belonged to his father, and every morning while he shaved he thought of his father every morning shaving who must have had some other way of calling forth his father, for the grandfather, the one who had died drunk in a snowbank, had been a bearded man. In that way, every morning while he shaved he was able to think of his grandfather, a man he had never met and who had never shaved. This process satisfied him doubly because it demonstrated for him the way he believed everything worked.

79. He participated in no sports, had not played a game of any kind since his adolescence. The only kind of fishing he did was what is called “bottom-fishing,” and though he owned numerous firearms, both rifles and handguns, he hunted only what he called “pests,” crows, woodchucks, rats that scavenged his rubbish and other used-up household articles dumped in the field in front of his house.

80. Where other people saw only white, he claimed to have recognized twenty-one different shades of the color of snow. What he said he saw were eight shades of gray, seven of yellow, and six of blue. His favorite snow color was “blue number four.” Black and white, as colors of anything, were unknown to him, he insisted.

81. Drunk, regardless of whether he was speaking to a stranger or to an acquaintance, he usually spoke in accents—Irish, Southern, Italian, and so on. Then after a few more shots of Canadian Club and bottles of ale, he would begin to speak in foreign languages, or what the people around him took for foreign languages. If a French-Canadian were present, he would speak a bit of French. Occasionally, if it came out that the person he was talking to was fluent in some other foreign language than French, in Spanish, say, or German, he would start dropping sentences, phrases, words, as well as entire paragraphs, that seemed to be in Spanish or German. No one ever challenged him on his proficiency, and surely no one dared to challenge his veracity. The people usually just smiled and nodded, the way they would if someone had merely introduced a pleasant non sequitur into the conversation, which by then would have been drunken, loud, and digressive anyway, full of fits and stops, starts and interruptions. What matter, then, if some of the fits and stops came in foreign languages that no one in the group, except the speaker, seemed to understand? In this way, he had spoken in recent years with dozens of French-Canadian lumbermen, millhands, and fellow construction workers, an Italian-American formalist painter from New York City with a summer house on Bow Lake, four Creole-speaking Jamaican transient farmworkers, a Portuguese fisherman visiting relatives in Fall River, a pair of Russian chemists at a convention in Breton Woods, a Venezuelan student at the University of New Hampshire, many Greek cooks, restaurant managers and waitresses, a Chinese Bible salesman, and six Japanese tourists. Additionally, in what he claimed were the original languages, he had made references to and quotations from numerous works of literature written in ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. As he rarely bothered to translate these into English, it was not known how accurately he was quoting the original, if at all. And of course, always at these times he was extremely drunk,
and the personality he was exhibiting was so vivid that, while it could not be ignored, neither could it be taken seriously—that is, as literally a personality.

82. He wore size 13 EEE shoes, over-the-ankle, moccasin-toed workshoes with a steel-reinforced toe and heel. At all times he owned three pairs of these shoes, one brand-new, one two years old, and one four years old, all of them purchased by mail from L. L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. These were the only shoes he owned, and every two years, when he bought a new pair, he threw away the oldest pair, just tossed them over the fence into the field in front.

83. He sent the apprentice pipefitter, his very first day on the job, to the toolshed for a glass-stapler. After a while the boy returned, saying he couldn't find it, and then, timidly, asked him what a glass-stapler looked like. He stared at the boy with apparent disgust and after a moment told him it looked just like it ought to look. “Keep in mind the function, and you'll figure out the form,” he said grumpily and walked off. The boy asked the other men, who smiled and sent him on several wild goose chases before the boy finally figured out what was happening, and then everyone had a good laugh together. “You can't find what doesn't exist,” he advised the boy. “But remember, you can't lose it, either.” The boy nodded somberly, as if understanding, and the men looked from one to the other and grinned knowingly. Later in the day, one of them said to the boy, “He's a little crazy, y'know. But don't let it worry you none, because he never lets it interfere with his job.”

84. He picked up the phone and dialed the first three digits of his sister Jody's telephone number. He had prepared one sentence; it was: “Hello, let me speak to my mother.” From there on he planned to improvise. He had, however, forbidden himself to explain or apologize for
anything.
All else was permissible, depending on what she or his mother said. Then he stopped dialing and put the phone down. “If I'm not going to explain or
apologize for anything, then I have no reason to be calling her. She should be calling me,” he later reasoned.

85. Inside his house, he walked around in his stocking feet. His shoes were always neatly set on a wicker mat next to the door.

86. He could find the cube and square roots of extremely high numbers in his head with nearly the rapidity of an electric calculator. He dismissed the feat as a trick of concentration that any fool could teach himself if he weren't so happy being a fool.

87. He owned no photographs of himself. Whenever one came to him, he threw it away, just tossed it into the trash can under the sink without even examining it to see whether it was a good likeness or not.