Continental Drift (15 page)

Bob and Marguerite have become close friends. They gossip together. She tells stories about the three doctors she works for, calls them Winkum, Blinkum and Nod, a lecher, a crook and a lazy man. He counters with complaints about his brother, his job, his boring family life, and then one morning remembers Ruthie’s learning disability and shoves it into the conversation so as to elicit Marguerite’s professional opinion, which turns out to confirm the school nurse’s opinion, a fact that impresses Bob with Marguerite’s intelligence and education.

Now, for the first time, Marguerite seems genuinely curious about Bob’s wife and children. They’ve talked of many things before this, often matters of considerable intimacy, at least for Bob, such as when and how his parents died, which parent he resembles more, and
how he is both different from and very much like his brother Eddie. She even asked him once if he had played any sports in school, which Bob took as a clear indication of her interest in his body, and as a result, he went into elaborate detail about the kind of body you needed if you were going to excel as a defenseman in hockey. “Lots of endurance,” he told her. “You gotta have lots of endurance. And big bones, it’s good to have big bones and flat muscles. You can’t have one of those muscle-man bodies, you know the type, muscles like grapefruit glued to skinny bones. ’cause you really get banged around, playing hockey. You go into the corner, digging for the puck, some big guy’ll come at you full tilt and lay a body check on you that slams you into the boards, and it’s legal, all legal, so you gotta keep on playing. No time to lie there and clear your head and check for broken bones. I still skate,” he told her, lying. “Leastways I did till I left New Hampshire. Pickup games, you understand, nothing organized. I’m still in shape for it all right, but I don’t have the wind anymore. Cigarettes,” he said ruefully, lighting one up.

Marguerite asks him what his wife is like. She’s genuinely curious; his answer will help her understand what she herself is like. Her father is in the stockroom, cutting cartons and stacking them into neat bundles. He knows she’s here and it’s past quitting time, but he’s grown accustomed to her chats with his boss, which leave him standing in the background, pulling at his earlobe and waiting, like a bored child, for her to finish whatever obscure adult business she’s up to.

“Well, first off, Elaine’s a lovely lady,” Bob says. “Very much the mother,” he adds, leaning forward with both hands on the top of the cash register, as if it were a lecturn.

“And you, are you very much the father?”

Bob looks intently into her eyes, drops his gaze for a second and says in a low voice, “No. No, not really. And I got no excuses, either. It’s just … it’s just that I’m all the time too worried about myself. She’s not like that. Elaine. She doesn’t worry about herself all the time, like I do, so she’s free to think about other people, the kids,
mainly, and me. It’s not selfishness, I don’t think. It’s different. I’m not really selfish. I’m just all the time worried about myself….”

“Why don’t you stop worrying about yourself so much, then?”

“It’s not like that. You can’t just decide and do it, or else you end up worrying about that too, and you’re right back where you started from. It just has to happen. You just have to be born a better person that I happen to be, that’s all.”

“Oh, come on, you’re not a bad person. You’re really not.”

“Not
bad
, maybe. But not
good
, either. See, you, you’re good. You think about your father and worry about him more than you worry about yourself. Like Elaine does. Me, I worry so much about whether I’m any good or not, or what I ought to do or shouldn’t ought to do, or whether I’m smart enough or work hard enough, all those things, that there’s never much room in my head for anyone else’s problems. Even somebody like my brother Eddie, for instance, who, even though he’s selfish, really selfish, and I’m not like that … still, he’s a good man, because in the end he doesn’t worry about himself too much. I don’t know, it’s a kind of vanity, you know? What I’ve got. I mean, Eddie’s free to be good. I’m not, almost. He’s more the father than I am, and more the husband too. More the brother, even. He sees somebody’s got a problem, and he tries to solve it, even though he’s selfish, which only means that he won’t solve it if the solution is going to hurt him somehow, and most solutions won’t do that, you know. Especially if you’ve got some money, like Eddie does. But me, I don’t even notice it that somebody’s got a problem, not even when it’s staring me in the face. I don’t know what makes me this way, but it’s the way I am, and I can’t stop being the way I am just by wanting to. Any more than Eddie can, or Elaine, or even you, can stop being the way you are just because you want to. If you want to.”

“I suppose,” Marguerite says, stretching wearily. “It’s hot out there. Nice in here.”

“You got air in that car, though.”

“Yeah. But it’s getting from here to there that bothers me.” She laughs. “That’s the trouble with air-conditioning. Nobody missed it
till after they got it. Anyhow, when that thing in my car starts up, all it blows out at first is more hot air. It’s worse’n a heater.”

Bob watches the woman carefully, as if she were prey. “Are you … are you going straight home from here?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I got to fix supper for Daddy.”

“Then? Then what?”

“Then … nothing, I guess. No big date. No nothing.” She smiles with slight embarrassment, as if coming up empty-handed.

“Don’t you have any boyfriends?”

“Nope.” With a sudden movement, she stabs at her hair with stiffened fingers. “No boyfriends. You never heard me mention none, did you?”

“Well, I wondered. You know, since you’re so good-looking and all, and single. But I never asked before, because I figured you’d just say yes.”

She smiles. Her teeth are large and gapped. To Bob, they’re sexy, forthright, passionate teeth. “And you didn’t want to hear me say so?”

“Right.” He smiles back.

“What about you, mister?”

“Well. I’m married, you know,” he says, suddenly serious.

“Yeah. But that don’t stop people.”

“I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Uh-huh. You tell me the truth.”

“I have … I
did
have a girlfriend. In New Hampshire. A nice woman, though. I used to see her once in a while. No big thing, though. We weren’t in love or anything. You know. Just friends.”

“Uh-huh. Just friends. What about your wife? Did she know about this friend of yours?”

“Jesus, no! No. It was just a once-in-a-while thing, me and Doris. That was her name, Doris.”

“Uh-huh. Doris. Well,” she says, “I’ve got to get Daddy and go home.”

“Is your house air-conditioned?”

“I got me one unit in the living room, and it cools the rest of the house down pretty good, except when I’m cooking or there’s a whole lot of people in the house. But it’s fine for me and Daddy.” She looks toward the back of the store, as if in search of her father, who sits in the stockroom on a crate, waiting for her call.

“Ah, listen, Marguerite, I’d like to go out for a drink with you sometime. Would that be okay with you?” He exhales slowly.

Screwing up her face, as if trying to remember his name, she studies his eyes for a few seconds. “You sure? I mean, there’s places we could go. Over in Winter Haven or up in Lakeland. You’re married, you know. In case you’ve forgotten.” She pauses. “And we’d stick out.”

Bob takes shallow breaths quickly and his voice comes out higher than he’d like. “Of course I’m sure. Just go out for a few drinks, you know, some night after I close the store.”

“You know what you’re doing,” she informs him.

“Oh, yeah. No problem. I could pick you up at your house, if you wanted, or we could meet someplace.”

She is silent for a second, then smiles and pats his hand. “Tell you what. I’ll pick you up here at the store some night. My car’s got air, remember? That ol’ thing of yours, that’s a Yankee car.” She smiles warmly and calls her father.

Folding his arms across his chest, Bob steps back from the register, as if he’s just completed a big sale. He leans against the shelf behind him and watches the woman and her father head for the door. Just as she reaches to open it, Bob calls to her, “How about tonight? I close at nine.”

Without looking back, she says, “I don’t know,” opens the door and steps into the heat.

At seven, she calls him, and sounding slightly frightened, speaking more rapidly than usual, she says that she’ll meet him at nine, then hurriedly, as if late for another appointment, gets off the phone.

Bob immediately calls Elaine at home and tells her he’s made a new friend, a Budweiser salesman from Lakeland, who’s asked him
out for a drink after work, so he’ll be home a little later than usual tonight.

This relieves Elaine. A new friend is what Bob needs. Someone to brag to, someone he can talk fishing and sports with, someone he can complain freely to, especially about Eddie, because she knows he won’t complain about Eddie to her, no matter how much Eddie, that bastard Eddie, bothers him.

Three times in the next three weeks Bob and Marguerite drive out in her car for drinks at the Barnacle in Winter Haven. That first night, when they returned to the store, Bob leaned over from the passenger’s side and kissed her on the cheek, nicely, then got out and waved good night. The second time she drove him back from the Barnacle, they sat in her car for a few minutes talking about the stupidity of one of the doctors she worked for at the clinic, and Bob reached over and kissed Marguerite full on the mouth in midsentence, passionately ground his mouth against hers, and she let him slip his tongue between her big teeth and on into her mouth. The third time, they sat in the car making out like teenagers for nearly an hour, before Bob finally pulled himself free, zipped his pants and stumbled from her car to his. They didn’t go to the Barnacle after that; they drove straight to the Hundred Lakes Motel out on Highway 17 north of Winter Haven.

Compared to most men his age, Bob has made love to few women, so if he no longer thinks of himself as inexperienced, it’s mainly because of the frequency with which he has made love over the years. He lost his virginity when he was seventeen in the back seat of Avery Boone’s Packard when he and Ave crashed a beer party at a New England College coed dormitory, and by pretending to be sophomores from Dartmouth, talked a pair of beer-drunk freshman girls from Fairfield, Connecticut, into leaving the party and driving to Lake Sunapee with them.

“Older wimmen!” they hollered afterwards, all the way home to
Catamount. It had been Avery’s idea, so he did most of the hollering, but Bob gleefully shivered with excitement for hours.

The next summer, Bob joined the air force to avoid being drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam to be killed, and the fear of venereal disease, embarrassment for his ignorance and a country boy’s shyness kept him celibate for most of the next four years, until, home on leave, he took Elaine Gagnon to the drive-in theater in Concord and promised to marry her. She had just graduated from high school, and when her mother died that same month, thought originally of going to hairdressing school down in Manchester, to get away from everything, she said. But she fell in love with Bob Dubois, who had been a senior at Bishop Grenier and a hockey star when she had been a withdrawn, insecure, plain-looking freshman whose father had disappeared years before and whose mother worked on the line down at the cannery. Elaine counted herself lucky to be able to stay in Catamount and wait for Bob to be discharged from the air force so she could marry him and take care of his house, have his babies, wash his clothes, cook his food, laugh at his jokes, share his anger, and comfort and reassure him, and in return obtain for herself the family she never had and always felt she both needed and deserved. She got a job in bookkeeping at the cannery, and they did it the first time in the bedroom she had shared with her mother in the tiny apartment over Maxfield’s Hardware Store on Green Street, and both Bob and Elaine thought it was the most exciting thing they had ever done. So they did it again, and then they did it as often as they could, which, for the next two years, until Bob had saved enough money for a down payment on the house on Butterick Street and they could get married, was only once or twice a week, usually on Saturday nights at her place. He was living with his parents then. After they got married, they did it four and five nights a week.

Despite this clearly focused attention, over the next four years Bob fucked five women other than his wife, all of them customers of Abenaki Oil Company, one time each. He had a hard time distinguishing between making love on the run to these women, covering
their shoulders and arms with oil burner soot, and masturbating. He felt a similar kind and quantity of guilt for both. Even while doing it, he felt stupid and young, adolescent again, the way he used to feel when he was in the air force. He’d wake up in his barracks bed and remember that the night before he’d spent several sleepless hours contemplating deliciously obscene fantasies while masturbating slowly into a handkerchief or sock. He’d look in his shaving mirror, and he’d see the weakness in his eyes, and he’d loathe himself for about a half hour.

In his late twenties, he stopped masturbating, which was no easier for him than quitting smoking would have been, and stopped responding warmly to the flirtatious words and looks of lonely women with broken oil burners, and he concentrated all his sexual attentions on Elaine, which for a while pleased him, made him feel strong, disciplined, clean. Then one night he learned from Elaine that she had slept with his best friend, Avery Boone. The announcement came a week after Avery had sailed south on the inland waterway in his converted Grand Banks trawler, the boat Bob had helped salvage and redesign and that he’d use freely for several years fishing out of Portsmouth, alone on some days and with Ave and anyone else who wanted to come along when the bluefish were running.

With Ave gone, Elaine had felt free to confess what had been bearing down on her conscience like a stone, what she had confessed to three different priests and what all three had urged her to confess to her husband, which is that one day when Bob was out on the boat, the
Belinda Blue
, gone alone for mackerel, Avery had come over to the house, and they had got drunk together and had ended up in bed together. Avery had been horrified afterwards, as had she, and made her promise never to tell Bob, it would destroy their friendship, which was more important to Ave than anything else, except, of course, Bob’s relationship with Elaine.