Russell Banks - Continental Drift

“Shit, Sarah, let’s not talk like this, not right now. Okay? He’s my brother. I’ve lost my brother. Let me … let me just be …”

“I’ve lost a husband,” she cuts in. “And Jessie’s lost a father. I’ve got a right.”

“Yeah, I know. I know. But let’s not argue about what kind of man he was, or how we ought to be feeling. Plenty of time for that later. It doesn’t matter right now what kind of man Eddie was. He’s a dead man is what matters. You know?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“I’ll … I’ll get the name of the funeral home they took him to. I’m sorry about that, it was just that I was kind of upset right at that moment and all and wasn’t paying the right kind of attention. I’ll take care of things here, till you get here, I mean.”

“No,” she says. “Just stay in the house, and don’t do anything, you hear? Don’t let anyone in, either. Things are more complicated than you know. Eddie got everything screwed up, so it’s not gonna be easy to untangle things. The bastard.”

“Sarah, he tried. Eddie tried. For Christ’s sake, I know a little bit.”

“Bob,” she says sweetly, “you only know a little. I know a lot.”

Bob tries to argue with her, not to prove her wrong, just to soften her feelings somewhat, but he can’t get over the wall of authority she’s put up between them: she knows the truth, has always known the truth, and he knows almost nothing.

He does know, however, that his wife Elaine, unlike his brother’s wife Sarah, will not treat him and Eddie in such a hard, self-centered way, and he’s right, for when he calls her and tells her about Eddie’s death, she is indeed properly dismayed and feels deep pity for both Bob and Eddie, which pleases him and fills his heart with renewed affection for her. But not for long. When he tells her what he planned to tell her, that he will take an evening job himself, as soon as he gets back down from Oleander Park, which may be a few days, since he has to run things up here, she responds coldly and says only that she can make more money as a waitress in one night than he can pumping gas part time for a week. And when he unfolds to her his plan to borrow enough money from Ave to buy the remaining three-quarters of the Belinda Blue from Ave, she laughs outright. “For God’s sake, Bob, now you sound just like Eddie,” she says, as if she were talking to a child and the consequences of his acts could in no serious way affect her life, only his.

When Bob Dubois is confused, he often responds by becoming angry, and now both his sister-in-law and his wife have confused him, so he slams down the phone and stalks out of Eddie’s kitchen, a large, shadowy room cluttered with dirty dishes, glasses, pots and pans, piles of dirty laundry, unread mail and newspapers, the room smelling of old garbage and burned cooking, and heads for Eddie’s liquor cabinet below the wet bar in the living room. The shades are drawn here, and the room is dim and sedately gray. Bob pours himself a double shot of Canadian Club and tosses it back in two gulps.

Refilling the glass, he eases himself down into the large, L-shaped, wine-colored sofa, picks up the phone from the table next to it and dials his old friend Avery Boone.

It’s Honduras who answers. Bob does not want to talk to any more women. He speaks to her as if she were a receptionist. “Ave, please.” She recognizes his voice and laughs, that same, high-pitched, mocking laugh she threw at him from the boat last night. “Let me speak to Ave, please,” he repeats.

“I got some stuff of yours here, Bob. Pair of pants, tee shirt, shoes and socks. Even a pair of underpants. All nice and clean, freshly washed and dried and pressed. Got your wallet here too. You were right, honey, you are broke.”

Bob says, “Just put my stuff on the boat.” The wallet he needs only because his driver’s license is inside it; the money in his pocket now is what’s left of a twenty-dollar bill he took from Elaine’s purse before leaving this morning. He’s suddenly afraid he won’t have enough money to get home on. Maybe he can borrow some money from Sarah when she gets in from Connecticut this afternoon. Oh, Christ, he thinks, I don’t have enough money to buy a damned newspaper when I want to. I have to live like a goddamned kid, begging and borrowing money I can’t pay back from the grownups, who all happen to be women now.

“Where’s Ave?” he asks.

“You know, honey. Still out on the boat with Tyrone.”

“Tell him when he gets in that I have to talk with him, so he should call me right away.”

“Now, don’t you go carrying any tales back to him. You were just as bad as me, you know.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I won’t say anything. But last night was it, girl. Never again. You understand?”

She laughs and says, “Of course,” as if she does not believe him, though it’s not clear to Bob if that’s because she thinks she’s irresistible or he is. He decides it’s because she thinks she’s irresistible, which means he’ll have to be on his guard from now on. Bob understands men; it’s women who confuse him and make him angry, which he is, once again, and so once again he slams down the receiver and knocks back the Canadian Club.

The room is gray and damp and smells to Bob of the death of men and of their debts. Everywhere he looks he sees something that reminds him of male helplessness and ineptitude — the framed pictures of Jessica on horseback, on water skis, in her Holy Communion dress, pictures of a girl gone north to Connecticut with her mother because her father, the fool who snapped the pictures, was too loud, too selfishly obsessed with becoming rich, too insensitive to anyone’s pain but his own. And the room itself, with its department store decorations, huge, ornately framed pictures of New England villages and covered bridges in autumn hung above the long, low sofas and marble-topped tables, the pale green wall-to-wall carpeting, the neo-colonial wet bar with thirty different kinds of liqueurs underneath, everything in the room expensive, ready-made, impersonal — Bob sees it clearly now, all for show.

All for nothing, Bob thinks. His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because they were empty. But he never believed that it would all come to this, to nothing. Actually, he had envied his brother’s show, had thought that the appearance of confidence, knowledge, wealth and power would somehow over the years demand or create the reality, and Eddie would in fact be confident, knowledgeable, powerful and wealthy. Bob thought that was how you became those things. You created an outer man you could admire, and then after a time, over years, the inner man gave in to the pressure of the outer and fell into line, and from then on, the two marched in step together, like brothers. And when one died, the other died with him.

But here is Bob, living on alone, and if he feels more like a child than a man, it’s the women who make him feel that way, he thinks, his wife, his sister-in-law, his friend’s girlfriend. What he believes he needs to induce these women to make him feel like the grown man he’s become is money, and he has none, or sex, and after last night with Honduras, he hasn’t much of that, either. Since the birth of Robbie last fall, a shadow has fallen between Bob and Elaine, so that they rarely make love now, and when they do, it’s perfunctory and routine, a polite form of exchange. Elaine grew fat during the pregnancy and stayed thick in the hips and belly afterwards and started to speak of her body as if it were not hers but belonged instead to a pathetic, neglected, insecure friend. Anything that pointed to its existence distressed her, and sex most emphatically pointed to the existence of her body. And for Bob, the birth of his son has resulted, oddly, in his feeling outnumbered and alienated from his entire family — the three children and mother became one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet passing accidentally through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. That is not the kind of man who strolls through his house feeling sexy.