Continental Drift

“The only time we were even, when we were really equals, was when we both skated for Bishop Grenier those three years before he graduated. He was a forward, and I was a defenseman, and we were the best combination in the state for three years running. The Dubois brothers. Remember? The Granite Skates, they called us in the Boston papers. That was the year I was a junior and we won the New England Championship down in the old Boston Arena. If it was today instead of 1966, we’d both have gone to college on scholarship. UNH, probably. But hockey wasn’t such a big college sport in those days. Anyhow, we were a team then, me and Eddie. And we were real close then. You know? Real close.”

“You want to move to Florida, don’t you?”

He sighs heavily and says nothing for several seconds. “I didn’t before.”

“But you do now.”

“Naw, I just don’t want to buy Ruthie’s skates,” he says. “If we move to Florida, I won’t hafta buy her any skates for Christmas.”

“Be serious. You do want to move to Florida, don’t you?”

“Well … yes, I do.”

“Right away? Right after Christmas?”

“No. No, there’s something I want to do first.” He slides his leg down her thighs to her knees, then back again.

“There is? What?”

“You know what I want to do first. And I’m not moving to Florida till I do it.”

“Now?”

“Is it okay? You wanta check the calendar?”

“It’s okay.”

Bob turns, places one hand between her legs and kisses his wife on the mouth, gently, gently, then more intensely, and when she starts to move beneath his hand, he kisses her fiercely, until he can feel himself huge and stiff, and then he finds himself fucking her with marvelous, thrilling force, while she turns and writhes under him, pushes her pelvis back at him more and more rapidly, in their old, familiar, utterly natural rhythm, the rhythm it took them years to discover, a rhythm they’ll never lose, they know, because it belongs to them alone, Bob and Elaine, his body and hers, in the one clear linkage either body can make to the other. They push smoothly on, one against the other, until first she sighs, and then seconds later he feels himself spread warmly out from the center of his body, and they stop.

For a few moments, they lie face to face in silence together, she on her back with her nightgown around her waist and her legs snaked around his waist, he with his weight resting on his elbows, and she says in a tiny voice, “Don’t ever do it with anyone else.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t think I could bear the idea. I could bear the reality, but not the idea. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I know. Me too. I couldn’t bear the idea. I don’t think I could even bear the reality,” he adds. “If I knew about it, I mean.”

“Good,” she says. “Me neither.” Then she brings her legs down, easing him from her.

Battérie Maçonnique

It’s as if the creatures residing on this planet in these years, the human creatures, millions of them traveling singly and in families, in clans and tribes, traveling sometimes as entire nations, were a subsystem inside the larger system of currents and tides, of winds and weather, of drifting continents and shifting, uplifting, grinding, cracking land masses. It’s as if the poor forked creatures who walk, sail and ride on donkeys and camels, in trucks, buses and trains from one spot on this earth to another were all responding to unseen, natural forces, as if it were gravity and not war, famine or flood that made them move in trickles from hillside villages to gather along the broad, muddy riverbanks lower down and wait for passage on rafts down the river to the sea and over the sea on leaky boats to where they collect in eddies, regather their lost families and few possessions, set down homes, raise children and become fruitful once again. We map and measure jet streams, weather patterns, prevailing winds, tides and deep ocean currents; we track precisely scarps, fractures, trenches and ridges where the plates atop the earth’s mass drive against one another; we name and chart the Southeast and Northeast Trades and the Atlantic Westerlies, the tropical monsoons and the doldrums, the mistrals, the Santa Ana and the Canada High; we know the Humboldt, California and Kuroshio currents — so that, having traced and enumerated them, we can look on our planet and can see that all the way to its very core the sphere inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls in a lovely, disciplined dance in time. It ages and dies and is born again, constantly, through motion, creating and recreating its very self, like a uroborous, the snake that devours its tail.