Continental Drift

Bob Dubois stands stiffly at the pay phone in the hallway that leads back from the bar to the rest rooms. A burly, unshaven man in a checkered wool shirt and overalls squeezes past, touches him on the shoulder and says Bob’s name, then hitches his pants and returns to the bar, as Bob goes on talking into the telephone.

“Yeah, I already been to the bank and cashed it. Listen, I’ll … I’ll get home in a couple hours or so; it’s the only chance I got to shop…. I know, I know — white. White figure skates, size four. I’ll try Sears first. I know it’s late, I just haven’t had a chance, you know that…. I dunno, a couple hours, maybe…. I’ll get something to eat down here. Okay? Okay….”

He hangs up and moves slowly down the hall to the men’s room, where there is a small spotted mirror over the sink, into which he will gaze for a few seconds, wondering what he looks like, wondering if his lies show, or his fears, or his confusion. Giving up, he will try to comb his stiff hair, posing once or twice as the man he saw last night on television in a Christmas perfume ad, tuxedoed, dark hair graying at the temples, parking his Lancia on a moonlit street in Aix-en-Provence, leaning down to kiss the long neck of a lovely, smiling blond woman in an evening gown, whispering a compliment into her pink, perfectly shaped ear.

On the floor above the bar there are three apartments, two studio apartments facing Depot Street and a larger unit at the rear facing an alley, and on the floor above that three more. In the tiny kitchen of one of the studios on the top floor, Doris Cleeve, having served Bob Dubois a Schlitz, is fixing herself another gin and tonic.

“How many times you been here now, Bob? A dozen? How come I always hafta tell you to make yourself comfortable before you make yourself comfortable? Tell me that.”

Bob draws the curtains over the pair of windows that face the street, and as they close, catches a glimpse of his car below, the roof and hood white with snow. “C’mon, Doris,” he says. “You know how I feel about this.”

“About me?” she asks. “You mean how you feel about me?” She sits down at the table facing him. He is standing in front of one of the windows and next to an upholstered platform rocker.

“Well … yeah. I guess so. But I meant about being here, like this.” He looks stupid again, and he knows it. Holding his beer in one hand, he tries knocking a cigarette free of the pack with the other and dumps a half-dozen cigarettes onto the floor. “Look,” he says, kneeling to retrieve the cigarettes, “I love my wife. I really do.”

“Sure you do, Bob. Sure you do.”

He sits down in the rocker, sets the can of beer on the maple step table next to it and lights a cigarette. “Well … I do.” He turns the can slowly with his thumb and forefinger, leaving wet, spiraling rings on the tabletop. “You and me, Doris, that’s different. That’s friendship. Know what I mean?”