“Not at all,” C. answered.
“Please bear with me. I know it’s late. But this may be the most important chapter in the book. It’ll be either the final chapter or the sixth of eleven,” I explained.
“Well, what are you hearing?” He yawned noisily onto the mouthpiece, letting me know that he wished to go back to bed.
“I’d rather not tell you until after you’ve told me what you hear.” I didn’t want to prejudice him any more than necessary. I told him only that the tapes were an interview made with D., who was A.’s second wife, the one he now and then refers to as “the hussy” and sometimes as “the actress.” He once told me, concerning D., that the trouble with a woman who has been an actress is not that she will lie but that you will never be able to believe her.
“Ah, that one,” C. said.
I decided to tell him nothing more until he had heard the tapes himself. I promised him that I’d have two bottles of a fine California wine, a pinot noir from a small vineyard outside Sonoma that we are both especially fond of, and he gladly promised that he would come over to my house and listen to the tapes tomorrow evening after dinner.
HE ARRIVED AT about nine, still sucking his teeth, as was his habit following an enjoyable meal. It was a blustery cold night, clear and starry, the kind of night that sometimes occurs in mid-February when a spring wind stirs the midwinter cold. I helped him out of his overcoat and escorted him into the library, where I had a large, cheering fire crackling well along and the wine and glasses set out next to the armchair.
He descended into the hug of the chair, taking possession of it as if with great physical need, lit one of his thin cigars, capped a light belch with his gopherlike front teeth, and indicated that I should pour the wine. Our visits are characteristically embellished by a certain ritual, a ceremony. This was a typical one. The purpose of our little ritualistic parading around, our wheezing, sighing, genuflecting, our litanies, and so on, which either would go undetected by a stranger or, if detected, would be thought curious yet boring, is that we both are trying to create as much as possible of the atmosphere that we assume prevails at meetings in, say, London or Brussels, or Belgrade even, between two wholly civilized intellectuals. The underlying assumption, of course, whether held consciously or not, is that by creating such a particularized atmosphere (no matter that we must imagine the model for it), we will therefore find it easier to behave as wholly civilized intellectuals ought to behave — not a simple feat for two middle-aged, middle-class, American men living in a village one hundred miles from even a minor seaport or a major university. But this kind of imitation has always been characteristic of American intellectuals, I suppose. We are, in our own odd way, neoclassicists, regardless of our low opinion of other neoclassical people or ages and in spite of the fact that we have never enjoyed a specifically classical period in our cultural development. Perhaps it’s too late to have one. We have lost our innocence. We must imitate, and we also must imagine what we imitate. Thus we always seem to be at least twice removed from true sincerity, true, innocent authenticity. It’s hard to tell if that’s a problem or a solution to one.
I poured the wine, standing next to C.’s chair while I poured, as if I were the wine steward and my library our club library.
C. tasted the wine, just a sip, almond-sized, and made a slightly dissatisfied face. “Cheese. A small slice of Gouda to neutralize the taste buds.”
I strode to the kitchen and returned with a wedge of Gouda on a small wooden plate, which I placed on the table next to C.’s chair. Then I filled both our glasses.
C. sliced a sliver off the wedge, popped it into his mouth, quickly chewed and swallowed. He cleared his mouth, as if to make a speech, and tasted the wine again.
Still standing, I waited through the sniff, the flip of tongue, the hold, and the drop.
“Excellent,” he pronounced.
As if relieved, I crossed the room to the fireplace, where, my glass held casually in one hand, my free arm draped like a sweater across the mantel, I assumed a posture that in the dim half-light of the carpeted, book-lined room would make a disinterested viewer think of Oliver Goldsmith. I watched C., legs crossed at the ankles, one hand flopping across the thick arm of the chair, the other posing his wineglass beneath his nostrils as if he were holding a long-stemmed rose, his cigar building a white tubular ash in the ashtray beside him, assume a posture in his chair that would make that same disinterested viewer think of my friend as Ford Madox Ford. Sometimes it was Paul Valéry, but usually, especially in winter, for some reason, it was Ford Madox Ford.
“You said something about listening to some tapes?” C. wheezed at me. Ordinarily he affected the wheeze when he was unsure of the direction of the conversation. It seemed to settle him down, make him the center of the room regardless of where the conversation might wander.
The recorder was inside a cupboard next to the fireplace. Leaning down and switching the first reel on, I quickly told C. that what he was about to hear was an unedited interview made by Rochelle Stark (whose real name C. of course was familiar with) with Hamilton Stark’s (A.’s) second wife, to whom I am referring here as Annie Laurie. “You’ve never met this woman, and I don’t believe we’ve ever discussed her before, have we?” I suddenly realized that I was speaking with the voice of an attorney addressing a jury. I couldn’t tell, however, if I was the prosecuting attorney or the attorney for the defense. I wasn’t even sure who the defendant was.
“No, although you have alluded to the fact of her continued existence. Somewhere in New Hampshire, I believe.”
“Yes. Manchester.”
“Ah. The Queen City.”
And here the tape began:
“What, what’s that thing you got there, a tape recorder? Is it on, is it turned on, honey? You aren’t going to record this, are you? Listen, honey, if you’re going to put this on tape I’ll have to be a lot more careful of what I say, especially with you being his kid and all. I mean, you know what they say about how blood and water don’t mix, don’t you? I’m not interested in a feud, starting some kinda family feud, not anymore, not now. On the other hand, I mean, what the hell, maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, I mean to him. Or anyone else either. There’s a lot of water gone under the dam, you know. What can it matter now, after all these years? I mean, so what if he happens to hear what I’ve got to say about him now, there’s plenty others who could say lots worse by now, I’ll bet. Besides, he can’t hurt me any, not anymore, not anymore. And it’s not like I was interested in making a good impression on him, if you know what I mean. Pretty hard to do now, ha, ha, ha. It’s been what, ten years now I’ve been sitting around thinking about what happened between your father and me, and you know what? Most of what I thought was true back then, ten years ago, when I divorced him, I really don’t think is true anymore, not that I’d do it all over again if I had the chance, believe me. I wouldn’t marry that man again in a million years, and I wouldn’t divorce him either. What’s done is done, and marrying and divorcing a man like your father is something you only want to do once. Jesus, isn’t it amazing how you never know what’s happening to you when it’s actually going on? You have to wait until it’s all over and done with before you can find out, and then it’s too late, you’ve forgotten too many things, you can’t remember what people said, or what they even looked like, or even the order, you can’t remember the order of things anymore, if you ever knew the order of things in the first place, for God’s sake. Makes you feel kind of helpless. I guess you can never know what really happens to you, not even afterward. Right? It’s kind of crazy. Think of all the trouble you’d save, though. I mean, if you knew what was happening at the same time as it was actually happening. Hah, it’s probably a good thing you don’t. You’d probably just kill yourself and save yourself the trouble of your whole life. Here I am, look at me, running on about nothing, old motormouth, that’s what your father used to call me. Old Motormouth. I’m sorry, honey, I know I talk too much, I’m really a great talker, or at least I used to be a great talker. I don’t get too many chances anymore, so I don’t know now, I mean, maybe I’m just a lady running off at the mouth…”