Continental Drift

Elaine is silent for a second. Then in a quiet voice she says, “We have a good life, honey. We do.”

Bob looks at his feet. “My father, when I was a kid, used to play a record over and over, I don’t know where the hell he got it, he only bought the record player for Ma and me and Eddie to play, but he had this one record of his own, a forty-five by Frank Sinatra called ‘Destiny’s Darling,’ a really stupid song. But he loved it, and he used to have a few beers and play that record over and over, until he’d get this kind of dreamy look on his face, sitting there in his chair listening to this song and pretending he wasn’t who he was. And me and Eddie, we’d see him doing that and we’d laugh, you know? We’d laugh at him, because we knew we were different, we’d never do anything so stupid as our old man, work all day in a fucking mill and come home and have a couple of beers and play a goddamned record by Frank Sinatra about being destiny’s darling. I mean, Jesus! What an asshole, I’d think. I was only a kid, I was in high school then, me and Eddie, but being such hotshot hockey players and all, getting written up in the papers and all, we thought we were destiny’s darlings. Only now it’s fifteen years later, and here I am. Just like my old man. Only instead of coming home and sitting in my chair and playing ‘Destiny’s Darling,’ I’m watching fucking Hart to Hart or some damned thing on TV. And if my kids were a few years older, they’d be laughing at me, the way me and Eddie used to laugh at my old man. Look at the asshole, they’d say, Ruthie and Emma, bigshot cheerleaders in high school and all, look at the asshole, he thinks he’s Robert Wagner or somebody, they’d say, he doesn’t know he’s half drunk and covered with soot from other people’s furnaces and doesn’t have a pot to piss in and never will.”

“Oh, honey, we have a good life. We do.”

“Maybe you do. Or at least you think you do. Because you happen to be living the way you always wanted to live, the way when you were a kid you hoped you’d live. Because of your old man’s taking off on you and your ma like that, and your ma having to work herself practically to death at the cannery by the time she was forty-five. But me, I don’t know, I thought it was going to be different. Me and Ave Boone, we used to talk about building a boat and going to Australia or someplace in the South Pacific and making a killing. We used to say that, ‘We’ll make a killing.’ If I said those words now, it’d be like sand in my mouth, because I’d be lying and I’d know it. No fucking way I’ll ever make a killing. Ave, he did it. He got out. He built his boat, just like he always wanted to, and he got out. It took him till he was almost thirty, but he got out …”

“Alone,” she interrupts.

“Yeah, alone. But that’s the way he is. He likes it that way. But he got out, that’s the point, and Eddie got out too. Eddie made a killing too. Ave Boone in his boat on the Keys, and Eddie wheeling and dealing in central Florida, while I sit up here in the snow and ice and darkness and fix people’s oil burners and wonder how the fuck I can afford a pair of ice skates for my kid for Christmas.”

“But we have the kids, the house …” she says.

He doesn’t hear her. “One time when we were kids, Ave came over to my house, and he had this advertisement he’d cut out of some fancy New York magazine he’d seen in the dentist’s office, and we were sitting around in my bedroom talking about what we were going to do after school or something, we were maybe seniors then. And he pulled this ad out of his wallet and unfolded it and handed it to me. It was a whiskey ad, and there was this handsome guy wearing his trousers rolled up to his knees and no shirt on, walking ashore on some tropical island. And he’s got this case of Haig & Haig on his shoulder and a dinghy on the shore behind him and a nice forty-foot catamaran sitting out in the bay. Eddie was out of school by then and was working at Thom McAn’s on Main Street selling shoes, but he was already figuring out what he was going to do in Florida a few years later, and I was already thinking about maybe joining the air force so I wouldn’t get drafted because I didn’t have anything like Eddie’s epilepsy to keep me out or Ave’s belief that he could con the draft board into a four-F, because neither of us particularly wanted to go to Vietnam and get fucking shot. Anyhow, Ave shows me this clipping like it’s a letter from Hugh Hefner asking him to spend a week with the Playmate of the Month or something, and he says to me, ‘There. That’s me,’ he says.” Bob is silent for a few seconds. Then he sighs. “You wanta know what I said? I’ll tell you. I said, ‘That’s me too.’ ”

Elaine takes his hand in hers again. “Honey, honey …”