Russell Banks: Continental Drift

“Well … yeah. I guess so. But I meant about being here, like this.” He looks stupid again, and he knows it. Holding his beer in one hand, he tries knocking a cigarette free of the pack with the other and dumps a half-dozen cigarettes onto the floor. “Look,” he says, kneeling to retrieve the cigarettes, “I love my wife. I really do.”

“Sure you do, Bob. Sure you do.”

He sits down in the rocker, sets the can of beer on the maple step table next to it and lights a cigarette. “Well … I do.” He turns the can slowly with his thumb and forefinger, leaving wet, spiraling rings on the tabletop. “You and me, Doris, that’s different. That’s friendship. Know what I mean?”

The woman is silent for a few seconds. “Yeah. I know what you mean.” And she does know, because at this moment their thoughts, though they cannot be uttered, are essentially the same. Both Bob and Doris are struck, amazed, even, that such a simple event as a man and a woman in a room together can turn out to be so complicated that neither is able to say why he or she is there. They have been in this room together enough times to know that it’s not because they are friends, for their friendship is not the sort that demands privacy in order to thrive. And it’s not because they are in love with each other, for Doris still loves her second husband, Lloyd Cleeve, who broke her nose and three ribs one night and on another gave her a concussion and on five or six more bruised her face, until finally she left him and he moved down to Lowell, Massachusetts, and started in on another woman. And Bob still loves his wife Elaine, who nags a little but is kind to him in all the important ways and most of the unimportant ways as well, who does understand him. And though Doris is more able than Bob to separate sexual pleasure from the pleasure of being loved by someone, neither of them has come to this room to satisfy his or her sexual needs. Elaine Dubois, after seven years of marriage, is still attractive to her husband, and she thoroughly enjoys making love with him and does so frequently and with great, uninhibited enthusiasm, which enthusiasm happens to operate on Bob as a powerful sexual stimulant, arousing him to levels of endurance and spontaneity he’s never reached with other women. And Doris, who, as mentioned, is more able than Bob to separate sexual pleasure from the pleasure of being loved, perhaps because she is thirty-five years old and has been living alone since she was twenty-eight, frequently visits and is visited by a tireless nineteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice with a scraggly blond beard and shoulder-length hair, a hard-muscled, dope-smoking kid named Rufus, called Roof, who rents the studio directly beneath hers. He usually shows up at her door, barefoot, in tee shirt and jeans, late at night when she can’t sleep and has been pacing the floor. They smoke a joint together, and then he goes to work on her, until, hours later, exhausted, she falls asleep against his hairless chest, and when she wakes in the morning, he is gone.

Bob stands in the darkness by the bed that a few minutes ago was an orange sofa and pulls off his clothing. Then, quickly, as if the room were cold, he yanks back the covers and slips into bed, stretching his naked body out and folding his arms behind his head.

In a few seconds, Doris emerges from the bathroom wearing only her panties, which, when she reaches the side of the bed, she daintily removes. Then she slides into the bed next to Bob and puts her arms around him and kisses him softly, gently, on the mouth, the neck, the shoulders. Her mouth and her little moans, to his relief, arouse him (not that he’s not easily and regularly aroused; it’s just that once in a great while for no reason he can name he is not able to convince his inert penis to rise up and please, and the experience, painful, humiliating and bewildering, has had an effect on his self-confidence all out of proportion to its frequency). To Bob, Doris’s body is more attractive naked than clothed. She is round and smooth and soft to the touch, her nipples are pink and hard, and her thatch of light brown pubic hair is dense and surprisingly silky as he runs his hand over the swell of her belly and out along the inside of her thighs.

Soon she has her legs wrapped around his waist, her head turning from side to side on the pillow, her hands digging into his shoulder muscles, as he slides in and out of her, swiftly and smoothly, and then her breathing becomes loud and rapid, and she cries out and yanks her head forward to his face and kisses him frantically on the mouth, grinding and mashing her lips against his, while he goes on moving steadily in and out, as if nothing has happened, as if he were a machine. He knows, of course, what has happened — it’s how it happens with Elaine — and sometimes, if he keeps on pounding steadily away, as if he can do this all night long, it will happen again, and that will make him a better lover to her. So he keeps on going. And yes, it happens again, and he’s pleased with himself and begins to move against her more swiftly now, to take his pleasure almost as if it were payment for hers. He goes on, and it goes on. But nothing happens. On and on, with Doris trying to help out by moving around him, swinging her legs up his body, locking her legs against his back and shifting her buttocks higher. But still it goes on, and nothing happens. He feels no buildup of heat, none of the usual tightening in the groin and belly, and eventually he finds himself worrying about the time and thinking of his wife’s face and his daughter Ruthie’s ice skates, white, size four, and Sears, which will close at nine, until his penis, still stubbornly erect, feels as if it belongs to someone else, and he feels like a man out walking a stranger’s large, energetic, badly behaved dog. He wants to stop, but she’ll know — he’s not sure what she’ll know, but he doesn’t want her to know it — so he goes on, only to discover, at last, that he’s lost all his force and that his penis, still large and thick, is doughy. He has no choice now. He pulls his hips away from her, and she unlocks her legs and draws them down to the bed.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing. Nothing. That … that was wonderful.” He rolls over onto his back and studies the luminous hands of his watch.

“Is everything all right?” She’s not really interested or even curious; she’s just being polite and isn’t quite sure how to go about it.

“Yeah, fine. Of course,” he quickly answers. Then, more slowly, “It’s just that … I dunno. I was getting kind of worried, about the time and all, you know?” He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply and lets the smoke trickle from his lips. He’s not really worried about the time, and he doesn’t exactly feel guilty toward Elaine. After all, he’s had up to a dozen occasions before this to test his capacity to feel guilt for having committed adultery, and it hasn’t worked. All he’s felt is fear of getting caught at it, like a child cheating at Monopoly. He knows he’s supposed to feel guilty, but he simply does not feel guilty for sleeping now and then with other women than Elaine, so long as he knows that he is not in love with the other women and that, therefore, he has in no way jeopardized Elaine’s position as his wife. That would make him feel guilty — to imagine another woman than Elaine, to imagine Doris, say, as his wife.

No, something else is oppressing him tonight. He’s felt it physically, like a hard-skinned bubble in his gut, since he left work. He looked at his paycheck, and he felt it. He got into his car, studied for a few seconds the torn, faded upholstery, the clutter of tools, toys, food wrappers, kids’ mittens and empty beer cans, and he felt it. And then at Irwin’s, standing at the bar chatting with Pearl and nodding and listening to men he knows from work and others he knows solely from having drunk with them, workingmen and out-of-work men and a few old drunks who once had been workingmen, he felt that heavy bubble there, too. And he felt it when he first spotted Doris in the corner sitting alone, where he knew she’d be, because she was there almost every Friday night at this time, waiting, if not for him, then for the next-best man in the place. (Doris is not a whore, she’s not even promiscuous; she’s one of those women who are waiting and who once in a while get bored waiting, so she pretends for an evening that the man she is talking to is the man she happens to be waiting for.) And a few minutes later, when he found himself crossing the barroom toward her, again he felt the bubble, but now it felt painful to him, so that he wondered for a second if he was sick, and he tried to remember what he had eaten for lunch. But it went away as soon as he started talking with Doris, kidding her and being kidded for a while, then asking her if she had any beer in her refrigerator, to which she answered yes, did he want to come up?