Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Both Doreen and Buck were good-looking, and people thought of them as sexy because they looked the way sexy people are supposed to look, clean and healthy and symmetrical. Doreen was tall and broad-shouldered with full breasts and a firm, round bottom. She had silky-smooth, dark brown hair that hung loosely over her shoulders, and in the summer she tanned easily and evenly to a shade that made people think she might have a little Mediterranean blood in her. Her face was large, with a full, broad mouth that was good-humored, and because of the crispness of her full lips, sensual, and her brown eyes, shaded by a prominent but serious-looking brow, were set wide on her face. Her nose wasn’t quite right — a little short and narrow for such a large face, but it certainly was not unattractive. Buck’s most unattractive feature in those days was the wide gap between his front teeth. The gap was wide enough for him to spit through, which he did habitually, wide enough even for him to clamp a cigarette with, which, as a joke, he sometimes did, so that he could go on talking while his cigarette remained attached to his upper jaw by the gapped front teeth. Then he would pluck the cigarette away, and you would see that the gap was actually kind of sexy, kind of inviting, like an open door or gate, and if you were a man, you’d think, “Hmmm, I bet old Buck gets a lot of women,” and if you were a woman, you’d think, “Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to run my tongue into that gap between his teeth.” He was also tall, a little over six feet, and in those days in good shape from his work on the drilling rig, and with his ash-brown hair cut in the military style and his clear blue eyes and straight, narrow nose, he was clean-looking, too.

Their wedding night and honeymoon — a week in a motel near Franconia Notch in the White Mountains — weren’t much fun for Doreen. They weren’t much fun for Buck, either. He was awkward and too quick and then impotent for a while and then impatiently passionate and grabby, his head so full of blood from shame and lust that he couldn’t think, so finally, because she could think, Doreen just gave herself over to him and, without feeling, let him have his ways with her. There were several ways, because of all the false starts and false stops and his difficulties with the condom, and it was with barely hidden relief for both of them when, finally, lodged up inside her, Buck grunted and his pelvis whimpered of its own accord, and he was freed to withdraw from her. Her hymen he had broken easily, without even realizing it, earlier, and though she had felt a stab of pain, it was a hot, quick and almost pleasurable pain, so she had said nothing to him. Then next morning when he got out of bed to pee, he saw the specks of blood on the sheet beneath where he had slept, and he quickly covered them with the top sheet and went straight into the shower, while she lay curled on her side sleeping peacefully.

Throughout the honeymoon week, Doreen watched and understood Buck, and she loved him. She hated to see him suffer so, and in a way she wished he would just forget all about making love to her and just let her look at him, as if he were a movie actor or maybe a stranger she had met here in the White Mountains while on vacation alone, a tall, athletic-looking man with bright blue eyes and a sexy gap between his front teeth. She could watch him at breakfast in the International Pancake House across the road from the motel. Or she could watch him in the chair in front of her as they both rode the aerial tramway to the top of Wildcat Mountain. Or, at the viewing platform at Echo Lake below the Old Man of the Mountain, he could be peering through the telescope next to hers. His quarter’s worth of viewing and hers would run out at the same time, and both their telescopes would droop at the same instant. He would turn to her and their eyes would meet above their telescopes, and he would say, “I’ve been watching you all week. I think you’re beautiful, and I want to make love to you.” The music would rise, she would let go of her telescope and take a single, delicate step forward, he would reach out his hand and take hers, and… Well, you know the rest.

Doreen knew the rest, too, but she wasn’t all that interested in the rest. And everything she was going through in bed with Buck only served to formalize her lack of interest. When they returned to Catamount and moved into the trailerpark at Skitter Lake, it only got worse. Buck tried to make love to her about once a week at first, and then once every two weeks, and then only once a month, always with the same frustrating results for her, the same depressing results for him. It wasn’t that either one of them was technically incompetent in the act. What was wrong was inside their heads. Her fantasies and his fears had no way of meshing together or of helping one another go away or even of becoming known to one another. The one thing that kept their attempts at lovemaking even remotely tender was her understanding of his fears, for when he grew angry at himself for his awkwardness or the unpredictability of his body, its sudden flights from itself, he would turn on her, suddenly snarling through the darkness that lay between them, “Goddamn it, Doreen, if you didn’t just lay there like a log I might be able to get myself more excited about the idea of making love to you,” and if, as a result of that scolding, she started licking him over his chest, fondling his inner thighs, grasping his muscular buttocks in her hands, digging into his white, tight flesh with her sharp fingernails, he’d slump and say in a low voice, “I don’t know, Doreen, it frightens me when you’re like this. All I can think of is your doing it with another man.” Doreen understood these remarks and during the days while Buck was at work in Northwood drilling artesian wells with her father and grandfather, she plotted strategies that she hoped would allay Buck’s fears at last and thereby would make him into the kind of man who could lift her up and out of her real life into the world where she knew she truly belonged, the world in which she was the recipient of a handsome stranger’s utter devotion.

Within six months, however, the only time Buck would make love to her was when he was drunk, but not every time he was drunk, for by that time he was getting drunk often. All Doreen’s strategies had failed by then — filmy negligees, soft music, flattery, faked orgasms, even marijuana. But nothing she did allowed Buck to come to her directly, good-humoredly, with simple hunger and tenderness and admiration neatly intertwined. If anything, her strategies only made it worse, because Buck always noticed them immediately and grew either desperate to respond to them or else grew angry and accused her of accusing him of being unable to function sexually without atmosphere and stimulants. That was when she committed adultery for the first time — after Buck had grabbed the two marijuana cigarettes from her hand and had flushed them down the toilet and stomped out of the trailer, leaving her alone in bed. She had got out of bed and had walked to the trailer next door in her nightgown, barefoot, to the kid she had bought the marijuana cigarettes from, Bruce Severance, thinking that what she wanted was to buy another cigarette, this one to smoke alone, defiantly in front of the TV, so that when Buck came back smelling of booze and still angry at her, she wouldn’t much care. But she and Bruce had got to talking, he loved to talk, especially about marijuana, and she had not realized that marijuana was such an interesting subject, that there was so much to know about it, and for about five minutes, standing against the wall of his trailer, the kid had made love to her. He had simply come up against her when she had started to leave, had pulled her nightgown to her hips, and then, with one quick hand, had unzipped his fly, releasing his erect penis, which he had inserted. It was over before she had realized it had begun.