Russell Banks: Continental Drift

These northern New England milltown bars are like Irish pubs. In a community closed in by weather and geography, where the men work at jobs and the women work at home and raise children and there’s never enough money, the men and the women tend to feel angry toward one another much of the time, especially in the evenings when the work is done and the children are sleeping and nothing seems improved over yesterday. It’s an unhappy solution to the problem, that men and women should take pleasure in the absence of their mates, but here it’s a necessary one, for otherwise they would beat and maim and kill one another even more than they do.

Dubois is sitting at a small table in a shadowed corner of the bar, talking slowly in a low voice to a woman in her mid-thirties. Her name is Doris Cleeve. Twice divorced from brutal young men by the time she was twenty-eight, Doris has nursed her hurt ever since with alcohol and the company of men married to someone else. She is confused about where to go, what to do with her life now, and as a result, she plays her earlier life, her marriages and divorces, over and over again. As in certain country and western records on the jukebox by the door, Doris’s past never fails to move her.

Except for her slightly underslung jaw, which makes her seem pugnacious, she’s a pretty woman and not at all pugnacious. She wears her ash blond hair short, stylish for Catamount, and dresses in ski sweaters and slacks, as if she thinks she is petite, though in fact she is merely short. In the last few years she has put on weight, mainly because of her drinking, but she hasn’t admitted it to herself yet and probably won’t, until she discovers one morning after she turns forty that she is a fat woman, as fat as the rest of the women she works with down at the cannery. She has slender wrists, though, and small, delicate hands, which is why she still thinks of herself as petite, and having just lit her cigarette (actually, Bob lit it for her, with a flourish of his butane lighter), she jiggles and admires her bracelets while he goes on talking.

Bob Dubois in most ways is an ordinary-looking young man. You’d pass him in the Sears tool or sporting goods department without a thought, a tall, bulky workingman in good physical shape. Stiff, short, light brown hair that resists combing, square features, pale blue eyes, small ears and, because of his size and build, a surprisingly delicate mouth — Bob’s face is an easy face to ignore, so long as he is ignoring yours.

But if he’s not ignoring yours, if he’s slightly curious about you or attracted, sexually or otherwise, or threatened, his broad face changes and becomes extremely expressive. Bob’s face is like an intelligent dog’s, unable to hide or effectively disguise his emotions, and it’s forced him into being fairly honest. He’s learned to disguise his thoughts, of course, his strategies, plans and fantasies, but not his feelings. He doesn’t know this, however, because whenever he looks at himself in a mirror, he seems to have no feelings whatsoever. He wonders what he really looks like. Photographs can’t tell him — he looks into a camera lens the same way he looks into a mirror, as if he were an actor portraying a corpse. If he truly were an actor and could portray a living man, then perhaps he would know what he looks like.

When he’s not trying to act, when he’s himself, he has a curious, good-humored, friendly face, or else he shows you a closed, hard, angry face. One or the other, with not much in between. Because this shift from open to closed, from good-humored to angry, from kindly to cruel, is abrupt and is wholly unchecked along the way by degrees of coldness, anger, and so on, the extremes seem extreme indeed, opposites, even though, as Bob himself feels and understands it, the shift from his being a happy man to an unhappy man is one of only slight degree.

It’s the same regarding his intelligence — that is, how it appears, how it feels to him and how he understands it. One moment he looks positively brilliant and feels it and believes it; the next moment he looks downright stupid, and he feels and believes he is stupid. The shift: from one to the other, however, seems to him only a matter of degree — mere inches.

“My wife doesn’t understand me,” he says to Doris Cleeve.

“You probably don’t understand her, either.”

Bob smiles and lights a cigarette. “I don’t make enough money.” To her, as he says this, Bob looks good-humored, friendly and smart. Better than anyone else in this place, who is in a bad mood, unfriendly, stupid or all three. Also, he’s handsome, in a way.

“So? Tell me who does. Especially at Christmas. You wanna hear my problems?”

She has large, healthy teeth. A fleck of tobacco from her unfiltered cigarette clings to a front tooth, and for an instant Bob wants to lick it off. “I don’t get enough sex,” he says.

She laughs out loud and looks down at her drink, gin and tonic. As if satisfied, Bob peers across the smoky, crowded room and smiles at no one in particular. Someone has played the Johnny Paycheck song, “Take This Job and Shove It,” on the jukebox, and at the chorus a half-dozen customers join in, singing loudly, happily along, slapping backs and grinning at one another.

It’s dark outside. Gigantic red and green electric candy canes and wreaths dangle from lampposts while shoppers hurry anxiously along the sidewalks from store to store. The snow is falling heavily in fat flakes that turn almost at once to gray slush beneath the boots of the Christmas shoppers and under the tires of the cars.

Bob Dubois stands stiffly at the pay phone in the hallway that leads back from the bar to the rest rooms. A burly, unshaven man in a checkered wool shirt and overalls squeezes past, touches him on the shoulder and says Bob’s name, then hitches his pants and returns to the bar, as Bob goes on talking into the telephone.

“Yeah, I already been to the bank and cashed it. Listen, I’ll … I’ll get home in a couple hours or so; it’s the only chance I got to shop…. I know, I know — white. White figure skates, size four. I’ll try Sears first. I know it’s late, I just haven’t had a chance, you know that…. I dunno, a couple hours, maybe…. I’ll get something to eat down here. Okay? Okay….”

He hangs up and moves slowly down the hall to the men’s room, where there is a small spotted mirror over the sink, into which he will gaze for a few seconds, wondering what he looks like, wondering if his lies show, or his fears, or his confusion. Giving up, he will try to comb his stiff hair, posing once or twice as the man he saw last night on television in a Christmas perfume ad, tuxedoed, dark hair graying at the temples, parking his Lancia on a moonlit street in Aix-en-Provence, leaning down to kiss the long neck of a lovely, smiling blond woman in an evening gown, whispering a compliment into her pink, perfectly shaped ear.

On the floor above the bar there are three apartments, two studio apartments facing Depot Street and a larger unit at the rear facing an alley, and on the floor above that three more. In the tiny kitchen of one of the studios on the top floor, Doris Cleeve, having served Bob Dubois a Schlitz, is fixing herself another gin and tonic.

“How many times you been here now, Bob? A dozen? How come I always hafta tell you to make yourself comfortable before you make yourself comfortable? Tell me that.”

Bob draws the curtains over the pair of windows that face the street, and as they close, catches a glimpse of his car below, the roof and hood white with snow. “C’mon, Doris,” he says. “You know how I feel about this.”

“About me ?” she asks. “You mean how you feel about me ?” She sits down at the table facing him. He is standing in front of one of the windows and next to an upholstered platform rocker.