Russell Banks - Continental Drift

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 But she fell in love with Bob Dubois, who had been a senior at Bishop Grenier and a hockey star when she had been a withdrawn, insecure, plain-looking freshman whose father had disappeared years before and whose mother worked on the line down at the cannery.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.

Bob had taken the news stoically, grimly, and when she was through confessing, he told her he understood her crime, but he couldn’t understand Ave’s. Several times over the next few years, Ave wrote from Moray Key, Florida, where he’d established himself as a charter fisherman, but Bob never answered, and then all they heard from Ave was an annual Christmas card, signed with his full name, first and last, as if to admonish his friend for his silence.

Bob had not forgotten Avery Boone, but he figured he had forgiven him. Elaine’s obvious faithfulness and her shame for her one aberration helped him forgive his old pal, but so did his own affair with Doris Cleeve, which started shortly after Elaine’s confession and continued haphazardly until the week before Bob and his family left Catamount for good. He never even said goodbye to Doris Cleeve, never even told her he was leaving.

And that’s it, the entire sexual experience of Bob Dubois. On the face of it, it’s not much, but in a way, Bob made up for his paucity of actual experience by thinking about sex constantly and, for the most part, clearly. His good fortune, and perhaps hers, is that he enjoyed sex with his wife and she enjoyed it with him, so that despite his constantly thinking about sex (remembering past encounters fondly, visualizing future couplings with unusual vividness) and his use of an unexpected, if somewhat naive, gift for narrative, his thoughts rarely turned in on themselves, where they could easily have bred feelings of deprivation, self-pity and resentment. But all that, of course, was before he met and fell in love with Marguerite Dill.

They enter, Marguerite first, Bob holding the door open for her, and commence kissing in the middle of the room. Bob thinks that maybe he’d like to have the lights on, but he can’t figure out how to say so without sounding a little weird, so he lets it go and continues kissing her and fondling her long body. She’s wearing designer jeans and a gray tee shirt that advertises Disney World with the head of Mickey Mouse, whose black ears spread like a diva’s breastplate across her large, round breasts.

She’s very passionate, he thinks, as she bites, sucks, licks his face and lightly moans. Stepping her back to the bed, where she kicks off her sandals, he lays her down and proceeds to draw her jeans off, first one leg, then the other, and then her panties, while she shrugs her way out of her tee shirt and unsnaps her bra.

Standing, Bob unbuckles unzips, unbuttons and unties his own clothing, until he, too, is naked, and hugely erect, he knows, for he can feel the weight of his cock swaying in front of him, out there in the breeze and spray like a bowsprit, and as he comes forward onto her, his mouth reaching in the darkness for her mouth, his hands reaching for her breasts, he has a quick vision of himself as a white boat, a skiff or maybe a flat-bottomed Boston whaler, sliding easily onto the hot golden sands of a tropical beach, with dark, lush jungle ahead of him, the burning sun and endless blue sky above, and behind him, the sea, surging, lifting and shoving him up and forward onto the New World.