“I suppose,” Marguerite says, stretching wearily. “It’s hot out there. Nice in here.”
“You got air in that car, though.”
“Yeah. But it’s getting from here to there that bothers me.” She laughs. “That’s the trouble with air-conditioning. Nobody missed it till after they got it. Anyhow, when that thing in my car starts up, all it blows out at first is more hot air. It’s worse’n a heater.”
Bob watches the woman carefully, as if she were prey. “Are you … are you going straight home from here?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I got to fix supper for Daddy.”
“Then? Then what?”
“Then … nothing, I guess. No big date. No nothing.” She smiles with slight embarrassment, as if coming up empty-handed.
“Don’t you have any boyfriends?”
“Nope.” With a sudden movement, she stabs at her hair with stiffened fingers. “No boyfriends. You never heard me mention none, did you?”
“Well, I wondered. You know, since you’re so good-looking and all, and single. But I never asked before, because I figured you’d just say yes.”
She smiles. Her teeth are large and gapped. To Bob, they’re sexy, forthright, passionate teeth. “And you didn’t want to hear me say so?”
“Right.” He smiles back.
“What about you, mister?”
“Well. I’m married, you know,” he says, suddenly serious.
“Yeah. But that don’t stop people.”
“I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Uh-huh. You tell me the truth.”
“I have … I did have a girlfriend. In New Hampshire. A nice woman, though. I used to see her once in a while. No big thing, though. We weren’t in love or anything. You know. Just friends.”
“Uh-huh. Just friends. What about your wife? Did she know about this friend of yours?”
“Jesus, no! No. It was just a once-in-a-while thing, me and Doris. That was her name, Doris.”
“Uh-huh. Doris. Well,” she says, “I’ve got to get Daddy and go home.”
“Is your house air-conditioned?”
“I got me one unit in the living room, and it cools the rest of the house down pretty good, except when I’m cooking or there’s a whole lot of people in the house. But it’s fine for me and Daddy.” She looks toward the back of the store, as if in search of her father, who sits in the stockroom on a crate, waiting for her call.
“Ah, listen, Marguerite, I’d like to go out for a drink with you sometime. Would that be okay with you?” He exhales slowly.
Screwing up her face, as if trying to remember his name, she studies his eyes for a few seconds. “You sure? I mean, there’s places we could go. Over in Winter Haven or up in Lakeland. You’re married, you know. In case you’ve forgotten.” She pauses. “And we’d stick out.”
Bob takes shallow breaths quickly and his voice comes out higher than he’d like. “Of course I’m sure. Just go out for a few drinks, you know, some night after I close the store.”
“You know what you’re doing,” she informs him.
“Oh, yeah. No problem. I could pick you up at your house, if you wanted, or we could meet someplace.”
She is silent for a second, then smiles and pats his hand. “Tell you what. I’ll pick you up here at the store some night. My car’s got air, remember? That ol’ thing of yours, that’s a Yankee car.” She smiles warmly and calls her father.
Folding his arms across his chest, Bob steps back from the register, as if he’s just completed a big sale. He leans against the shelf behind him and watches the woman and her father head for the door. Just as she reaches to open it, Bob calls to her, “How about tonight? I close at nine.”
Without looking back, she says, “I don’t know,” opens the door and steps into the heat.
At seven, she calls him, and sounding slightly frightened, speaking more rapidly than usual, she says that she’ll meet him at nine, then hurriedly, as if late for another appointment, gets off the phone.
Bob immediately calls Elaine at home and tells her he’s made a new friend, a Budweiser salesman from Lakeland, who’s asked him out for a drink after work, so he’ll be home a little later than usual tonight.
This relieves Elaine. A new friend is what Bob needs. Someone to brag to, someone he can talk fishing and sports with, someone he can complain freely to, especially about Eddie, because she knows he won’t complain about Eddie to her, no matter how much Eddie, that bastard Eddie, bothers him.
Three times in the next three weeks Bob and Marguerite drive out in her car for drinks at the Barnacle in Winter Haven. That first night, when they returned to the store, Bob leaned over from the passenger’s side and kissed her on the cheek, nicely, then got out and waved good night. The second time she drove him back from the Barnacle, they sat in her car for a few minutes talking about the stupidity of one of the doctors she worked for at the clinic, and Bob reached over and kissed Marguerite full on the mouth in midsentence, passionately ground his mouth against hers, and she let him slip his tongue between her big teeth and on into her mouth. The third time, they sat in the car making out like teenagers for nearly an hour, before Bob finally pulled himself free, zipped his pants and stumbled from her car to his. They didn’t go to the Barnacle after that; they drove straight to the Hundred Lakes Motel out on Highway 17 north of Winter Haven.
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 a
nd 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.
“Go easy,” she whispers. “I’m not ready.” She holds him by the shoulders, spreads her legs and grinds her pelvis and groin against his, while he goes on kissing her along the neck, down and across her shoulders, until her moans and the heavy thrust and rub of her groin start to get to him, and he makes his first attempt to enter her.
“Easy, easy,” she warns. He’s gentle, but persistent, a man knocking lightly at a locked door, determined to wake his lover and not her maid. Wetting his fingers with spit, he reaches down and strokes her lightly with his fingertips. She arches her spine first toward him, then away, and lifting her pelvis, she opens like a flower to him. Again, he drops down and moves to enter, but again he finds himself ejected.
“Wait, wait. Kiss me. Please kiss me.”
He kisses her, starting at her face and ears, tangling his fingers in her dense hair, then down along her neck to her breasts, where he feathers her large, erect nipples lightly with his tongue, while she twists beneath him and coos with evident pleasure. Moving his mouth off her breasts to her belly, he draws his hands to her breasts and strokes her nipples with precise care, drifting with tongue, teeth and lips downward, over her hips, along the inside of her thighs, and when she spreads her thighs, he moves his mouth quickly against her cunt, prods and probes it with his tongue, until he knows its shapes, and begins licking hungrily, noisily, with gentle precision, his heavy arms laid across her belly, his fingertips fluttering over her breasts. She has brought her naked feet together, sole against sole, and when he starts to run his prick slowly against her feet, she moves them away, as if frightened. A third time, lifting his weight onto his elbows, he attempts to enter her. A third time, he fails.
“I want to make love to you, Marguerite.”
“You are. You are. Do what you were doing. Do that.”
He lowers his mouth to her breasts and moves quickly down her body. Soon she is quivering beneath him, and after a few moments, she lifts her pelvis against him, shudders and says, “Ah-h-h!” In seconds, she has drawn him up and forward, has turned him onto his back and has buried her face in his groin, licking and sucking on his penis. Almost before he knows it is happening, it has already happened, and she leaves him for the bathroom, where he hears from behind the closed door the sound of water running.
By the time she returns, he has got under the covers of the bed. She joins him there, and wrapping her long arms around his body, she snuggles against him and says, “That was wonderful. Real nice.”
“Yeah,” he says. “No, it really was.”
“I’m sorry. I guess … I guess I’m sort of nervous and all. You know?”
“Oh, yeah, well, I didn’t even notice. I mean, that’s okay. It was really great. No kidding. You’ve got a beautiful body,” he says softly, though he hasn’t actually seen it yet, except for a glimpse as she flicked on the bathroom light and quickly closed the door behind her, a flash of brown buttock and back.
“Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.”
6
A half hour later they leave the motel and drive back to Oleander Park, chatting about the Boston Red Sox, promising each other that next spring they’ll have to go to some of the exhibition games together, since, to their mutual surprise and pleasure, they both happen to be Bos
ton fans, or so they insist.
They kiss goodbye passionately, and she says, “I love you.” Bob steps from her car and, once outside, says, “Me too.”
But when she has gone, and he has got into his own car and has started the motor, he drops into deep confusion. What happened? What did he expect to happen? What did he want? What did he get? What did he give? As he asks the questions, one by one, he realizes that he can’t answer any of them, not a one, and consequently he does not know how he should feel now. Happy? Sated? Disappointed? Ashamed? Angry? Proud?
The only thing he does know, he tells himself, is that he loves her. Yes, he, Bob Dubois of Catamount, New Hampshire, has fallen in love with Marguerite Dill of Auburndale, Florida, by way of Macon, Georgia, where she was a Southern black woman married to a Southern black man. This means, of course, that he no longer is in love with his wife Elaine. Or so he insists.
When he moves the gearshift lever, it jams, refuses to slide into reverse. He jiggles it, wrenches it, sneaks up on it and flips it, but nothing works. He checks his watch. Ten forty-five. The only way he can get the car into gear now is to have someone sit inside the car and jiggle the shift lever while he jumps up and down on the front bumper. The highway is deserted and dark, and across the street at the housing project, everyone’s inside watching TV.
He shuts off the motor and gets out of the car, slamming the door shut. “Shit,” he says aloud, thinking of the five-mile walk ahead of him. “Shit, shit, shit.” It means walking in darkness along the gravelly shoulder of Highway 17, past Lake Louise and the moss-shrouded cypress trees and tall pines, then south on 520 past the marshes to Lake Grassey and home, unless he can talk someone into coming out here to the store at this hour to help him free the transmission. He’d call a garage, but that would cost him twenty-five bucks at least, and he spent his last few dollars on the motel room, insisting on it, despite Marguerite’s polite suggestion that they split the cost.
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