Continental Drift

The woman is silent for a few seconds. “Yeah. I know what you mean.” And she does know, because at this moment their thoughts, though they cannot be uttered, are essentially the same. Both Bob and Doris are struck, amazed, even, that such a simple event as a man and a woman in a room together can turn out to be so complicated that neither is able to say why he or she is there. They have been in this room together enough times to know that it’s not because they are friends, for their friendship is not the sort that demands privacy in order to thrive. And it’s not because they are in love with each other, for Doris still loves her second husband, Lloyd Cleeve, who broke her nose and three ribs one night and on another gave her a concussion and on five or six more bruised her face, until finally she left him and he moved down to Lowell, Massachusetts, and started in on another woman. And Bob still loves his wife Elaine, who nags a little but is kind to him in all the important ways and most of the unimportant ways as well, who does understand him. And though Doris is more able than Bob to separate sexual pleasure from the pleasure of being loved by someone, neither of them has come to this room to satisfy his or her sexual needs. Elaine Dubois, after seven years of marriage, is still attractive to her husband, and she thoroughly enjoys making love with him and does so frequently and with great, uninhibited enthusiasm, which enthusiasm happens to operate on Bob as a powerful sexual stimulant, arousing him to levels of endurance and spontaneity he’s never reached with other women. And Doris, who, as mentioned, is more able than Bob to separate sexual pleasure from the pleasure of being loved, perhaps because she is thirty-five years old and has been living alone since she was twenty-eight, frequently visits and is visited by a tireless nineteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice with a scraggly blond beard and shoulder-length hair, a hard-muscled, dope-smoking kid named Rufus, called Roof, who rents the studio directly beneath hers. He usually shows up at her door, barefoot, in tee shirt and jeans, late at night when she can’t sleep and has been pacing the floor. They smoke a joint together, and then he goes to work on her, until, hours later, exhausted, she falls asleep against his hairless chest, and when she wakes in the morning, he is gone.

Bob stands in the darkness by the bed that a few minutes ago was an orange sofa and pulls off his clothing. Then, quickly, as if the room were cold, he yanks back the covers and slips into bed, stretching his naked body out and folding his arms behind his head.

In a few seconds, Doris emerges from the bathroom wearing only her panties, which, when she reaches the side of the bed, she daintily removes. Then she slides into the bed next to Bob and puts her arms around him and kisses him softly, gently, on the mouth, the neck, the shoulders. Her mouth and her little moans, to his relief, arouse him (not that he’s not easily and regularly aroused; it’s just that once in a great while for no reason he can name he is not able to convince his inert penis to rise up and please, and the experience, painful, humiliating and bewildering, has had an effect on his self-confidence all out of proportion to its frequency). To Bob, Doris’s body is more attractive naked than clothed. She is round and smooth and soft to the touch, her nipples are pink and hard, and her thatch of light brown pubic hair is dense and surprisingly silky as he runs his hand over the swell of her belly and out along the inside of her thighs.