Russell Banks - Continental Drift

For the first time since he came to Florida, he lets himself say to himself that he has made a terrible mistake. He should have endured the sad frustration of his life, should have been patient and waited, because it would have passed, probably once Christmas had passed, and in a few years he would have got ahead, he would have been promoted at the oil company, maybe even ended up with a desk job as a supervisor or an estimator for new work. He would still own his house on Butterick Street, his boat, the dining room set they sold for one hundred dollars in the yard sale. He’d still be able to fuck Doris Cleeve when he got a little depressed or bored, and he’d know exactly how she felt about him and how he felt about her. He wouldn’t worry if his prick was too small because he was a white man. He wouldn’t worry about how well or badly he made love, because Doris always got wet right away and sucked him right into her with obvious excitement and joy. Good old Doris Cleeve. And he wouldn’t have to think about the yellow-skinned black man lying in his own blood with a fist-sized hole in his face where his mouth and all his pretty teeth used to be, or the boy huddled in his shit against a cinder-block wall begging him not to kill him, or Eddie wondering why the hell he didn’t kill him. He wouldn’t be the man he has become, and then the man he has become would be free to go on and be someone else, some guy Bob Dubois would never miss knowing anyhow, some nervous, unsure liquor store clerk who tried and failed to make love to a pretty black woman and then almost got himself killed and had to shoot a robber because the man was black and he was not and as a result did not have the wit to talk his way out of it, when, if the robber had been white, Bob would have explained easily and nothing bad would have happened to the sad-eyed liquor store clerk working for his older, smarter brother while his wife gets more and more pregnant and life gets daily more complicated and difficult and all he can think about in the face of it is how can he redeem himself as a lover with the black woman he failed to make love to successfully. This man is not the sort of man Bob Dubois would want to know if Bob Dubois were the same man he was six months ago.

Looking around at the strangers in the waiting room, the nurses and attendants and the occasional intern passing through, Bob suddenly feels lost to himself, as if the man he once was has been destroyed and replaced by someone he can’t recognize. It makes no difference what he does now, Bob decides. He can walk out the door to the breezy night, to the smell of magnolia and honeysuckle, to the anonymous cars passing by on their sleepy turns toward home, empty buses hissing to a stop to pick up late-night stragglers after the bars have closed, card games shut down, tempers and passions cooled enough to take back to living rooms and bedrooms — he can walk out to that world and join it, and with no one the wiser, drift on out to Highway 17, hitch a ride north as far as Atlanta, where, along about Wednesday, the police will pick him up for vagrancy. He pictures himself slumped in the back of the police car, two thick-necked young cops in front on the other side of an iron mesh barrier smoking cigarettes and talking in low Southern voices about bets they’ve placed on the All Star game this weekend. Bob doesn’t know what sport the All Stars play, or where the game is being held. He barely knows what city he’s in, what season it is (late spring, early fall, tropical midwinter?), or how he got the cuts and slashes on his neck and the backs of his arms, so that when at the police station the desk sergeant asks him about the cuts, he makes up a story, tells him he got rolled by a couple of black kids in Macon who cut him with their razors for the fun of it, and he’s believed, booked and taken to a highway work camp near Woodbine to spend thirty days cutting and burning kudzu alongside Interstate 95. After that, when he’s released, he rides with a friend from the work camp, a pickpocket who steals a car five miles from the camp, to Nashville, where the friend says they can both get work as bartenders … or he talks a local peanut farmer into hiring him as a fork-lift operator at the warehouse … or he phones his wife in Oleander Park, Florida, and tries to explain what happened to him, so that she will borrow a car from a neighbor and will pick him up and drive him home to where he used to live, with her and their two daughters and unborn son.

He tries to explain to Elaine what has made him feel that it no longer makes any difference what he does. He tries and tries, first on the telephone from the hospital and then, beside her, in the car driving home. But he fails. First she understands too quickly and feels sorry for him; then she can’t understand at all and feels inadequate and guilty; and finally she pretends to understand and says she has felt the same way herself. It’s how it was that night in New Hampshire, little more than six months ago, when he came home weeping and they decided to move to Florida. In New Hampshire, he could weep like a child and cry, “I want … I want …” and she could respond by saying, “A new life! A fresh start! Florida!” and it didn’t matter that she didn’t understand him, or that she understood him too easily and therefore not at all. He could dream his way back to life, could make love to her and fall asleep with a smile on his face and wake the next morning believing that what he was about to do would make a difference in his life and in the lives of his wife and children. Their lives would soon be better than they had been, not because of chance or dumb luck or just rewards handed down from heaven, but because he, Bob Dubois, had decided to leave his old life behind and pack up and head south. Everything was going to be different, and better. That, most of all. Better.

Now, however, when he cries to his wife, “I want … I want …” there is nothing she can say to make him forget that she can’t understand him at all or else thinks she understands him all too well. Consequently, his mind turns to the woman Marguerite Dill, whose love for him, if he can acquire it, will make him different from the man he is, the man who cries, “I want … I want …” Men do that to women, use them to remake themselves, just as women do it to men. Men and women seek the love of the Other so that the old, cracked and shabby self can be left behind, like a sloughed-off snakeskin, and a new self brought forward, clean, shining, glistening wetly with promise and talents the old self never owned. When you seek to acquire the love of someone who resembles you, in gender, temperament, culture or physical type, you do so for love of those aspects of yourself, gender, temperament, culture, etc.; but when you seek the love of someone different from you, you do it to be rid of yourself. And so Bob, who more than anything desires to be rid of himself, falls to contemplating the love of a Southern black woman and the kind of Northern white man it will make of him.

Once again, he decides that he no longer loves his wife. He’s not sure what the implications of that decision are, but he hopes they don’t mean separation and divorce, breaking up the family. He’s not ready for that, and even so, she, more the Catholic than he, would not permit it, no matter what the cost. They no longer quarrel, he and Elaine; that scratchy period passed the day he decided Marguerite was only a passing fancy. Since then, his days and nights with his wife and children have been peaceful, if somewhat boring. Since then, he has not had to fuss with himself to rub out the guilt he felt in the company of his children, who wanted to know, did he still love Mommy? Now, however, he fears that the nasty and exhausting quarrelsomeness that plagued them for several months in the spring will return and will quickly escalate, until he’s forced to make an impossible choice between his love for his children and his love for a woman not their mother. Bob’s no psychologist, but he knows how things go.