If I may, I’d like to state now that the above is a partial transcript of a tape recording made by Rochelle Stark during a series of lengthy interviews with her father’s second wife, Annie Laurie Stark, who now resides alone in a shabby tenement in Manchester, New Hampshire, middle-aged, depressed (I’m sure) and angry in ways she herself can never know, or she would probably try to kill someone — her ex-husband, a randomly selected stranger, or even herself.
I will try to explain. I have not offered the transcript in its entirety here because the whole tape is too long, too painfully depressing and, finally, because of the several secrets she must keep from herself, a little confusing to the listener. Also, unless you happen to know the woman personally, boring.
For one thing, if you do not actually hear the tapes, if you must read them, you cannot hear her tough, New York accent, its glitter, and thus cannot hear it cut against the enervated, listless quality of her language, the words she uses. It makes an interesting conflict, creating an effect of stoic bravery, that accent and those words. And then, of course, there are the secrets, what she cannot mention, cannot bring herself to talk about to anyone, not even to patient, kind Rochelle, who, sitting across from her in the dusty, cluttered living room, knows what those secrets are. For while, naturally, you who read this account cannot see Annie, Rochelle, in interviewing the woman, could see her, and among the several things she could observe was that Annie Laurie is obese, is almost grotesquely fat. And because she will not speak of it under any circumstances (and no interviewer would be so callous as to force her), Annie’s obesity remains a secret. Well, not anymore.
But there is a second secret which I cannot bring myself to reveal. Not yet, at least. At least not with this character. Perhaps never. (This is a novel, for God’s sake, not a court case.)
Anyhow, the tapes of her interview with Annie Laurie Stark are among the documentary materials that Rochelle chose to use in the making of her novel. How they happened to come into my possession is not worth going into here, but it is enough to say that she made them available to me, with full knowledge of the use I would make of them. I have tried to give credit to Rochelle and her materials wherever in my novel I have consciously drawn from them or from her novel itself. And because her novel will never be published (for reasons that I will go into later), I do not feel any particular misgivings over certain of my appropriations — even though I am sure there are people, literal-minded readers with a facility for legalistic short division, who would construe my truly creative operations as plagiaristic or, at best, as derivative. To such readers, I offer neither apology nor explanation. To the rest, the above ought to be sufficient as both apology and explanation.
BUT THE TAPES. When I first sat down in my chair and listened to them, a process that consumed an entire evening, long into the winter’s night, I was astounded. Appalled. Aghast. Amazed. (I can see now that I’ll be unable to keep Annie Laurie’s second secret to myself. It’s fast becoming part of the novel. Oh, Annie, Annie, I’m sorry.)
Immediately, I called my friend and neighbor C., the thinker, a man whose sense and sensitivity I trust explicitly because both sense and sensitivity happen to be driven by a deep curiosity about the nature of the universe rather than by any purely personal considerations. “I have something here that I want you to listen to,” I explained to him, after first apologizing for calling so late.
“Now?” he petulantly asked me, understandably, for it was three A.M.
I assured him that it could wait until the following morning, that I had just got carried away by a rush of perceptions that had led me to a state of extreme agitation and, as a result, moral confusion. An orderly progression of perceptions makes the moral life easier to accomplish. When a flood of perceptions washes over one, however, one’s moral certainty gets swept violently away. This is possibly why it’s so rare and difficult for the aware man to be much of a moral example to others. One is always safer if one can save that role, the role of moral example, for the dull and the stolid, the insensitive, the practically insensible.
But to return, I explained to C. that I needed an objective response to some tape-recorded interviews I had recently obtained, materials that I wished to use, in a much modified form, of course, in my novel about Hamilton Stark, which C. well knew to be in fact about A. I told C. that the reason for my excitement and my need for him as an objective listener derived from my bewilderment, which in turn was a consequence of my inability to trust any longer certain conclusions I had drawn prior to my having heard these tapes, conclusions which, of course, had to do with Hamilton Stark’s character.
“I thought I knew this man!” I exclaimed to C. “I thought I had a clear idea of the quality of his attractiveness, its limits and uses. I thought I knew how he had been perceived by the people who loved him as well as by those who hated him, and thus I thought I knew how to perceive him myself and to make him available, visible, known, to people who knew nothing of him except by what they got through me. But now … now I’m just not sure anymore. I’ve heard some things in these tapes that simply don’t belong there. Or rather, they don’t belong in the same moral universe as the one I have cast my novel into. I’m finding myself tempted to break into that universe, like some kind of sneaky rapist climbing through a bedroom window, with secrets, information, data, stuff, I had wanted to keep out. I need someone to confirm or deny what I think I’m hearing on these tapes before I can go on. Am I making myself clear?” I asked him.