Continental Drift

And now, after making love to Doris, he feels the hard, metallic bubble once again, still located low in his belly, but expanding toward his chest and groin now and rapidly growing heavier. He suddenly feels frightened, but he doesn’t know where to aim his fear — and that only makes him more frightened. What if he has cancer? He’s panicking. Jesus H. Christ, what’s wrong? He’s pulling his clothes back on, slowly, carefully, as if nothing’s wrong or unusual, but he’s thinking in a wind: My God, I’m going to blow up, my life’s all wrong, everything’s all wrong, I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this, what the fuck’s going on?

Bob Dubois does not know what is going on, because, on this snowy night in December in a dark, shabby apartment over a bar on Depot Street, as he draws his clothes back on, he does not know that his life’s story is beginning. A man rarely, if ever, knows at the time that his life’s story, its one story, is beginning, especially a man like Bob Dubois. Until this night, except for the four years he served in the air force, Bob has lived all his life in Catamount and since high school has worked for the same company, Abenaki Oil Company on North Main Street, at the same trade, repairing oil burners. He is thirty years old, “happily married,” with two children, daughters, aged six and four. Both his parents are dead, and his older brother, Eddie, owns a liquor store in Oleander Park, Florida. His wife Elaine loves and admires him, his daughters Ruthie and Emma practically worship him, his boss, Fred Turner, says he needs him, and his friends think he has a good sense of humor. He is a frugal man. He owns a run-down seventy-five-year-old duplex in a working-class neighborhood on the north end of Butterick Street, lives with his family in the front half and rents out the back to four young people he calls hippies. He owns a boat, a thirteen-foot Boston whaler he built from a kit, with a sixteen-horsepower Mercury outboard motor; the boat he keeps shrouded in clear plastic in his side yard from November until the ice in the lakes breaks up; the motor’s in the basement. He owns a battered green 1974 Chevrolet station wagon with a tricky transmission. He owes the Catamount Savings and Loan Company — for the house, boat and car — a little over $22,000. He pays cash for everything else. He votes Democratic, as his father did, goes occasionally to mass with his wife and children and believes in God the way he believes in politicians — he knows He exists but doesn’t depend on Him for anything. He loves his wife and children. He has a girlfriend. He hates his life.

2

Because there’s nothing dramatically or even apparently wrong with his life (many men would envy it), and because Bob Dubois was raised as most poor children are raised (to keep a wary eye on those less fortunate than he, rather than to gaze hungrily in the opposite direction), he is not inclined to complain about his life. In fact, what he hates about his life is precisely what he usually points to with pride: he has a steady job, he owns his own house, he has a happy, healthy family, and so on.

The trouble with his life, if he were to say it honestly, which at this moment in his life he cannot, is that it’s over. He’s alive, but his life has died. He’s thirty years old, and if for the next thirty-five years he works as hard as he has so far, he will be able to stay exactly where he is now, materially, personally. He’ll be able to hold on to what he’s got. Yet everything he sees in store windows or on TV, everything he reads in magazines and newspapers, and everyone he knows — his boss, Fred Turner, his friends at the shop, his wife and children, even his brother Eddie — tells him that he has a future, that his life is not over, for there’s still a hell of a lot more of everything out there and it’s just waiting for the taking, and a guy like Bob Dubois, steady, smart, skilled, good-looking and with a sharp sense of humor too — all a guy like that has to do is reach up and grab it. It’s the old life-as-ladder metaphor, and everyone in America seems to believe in it. Bob has survived in a world where mere survival is insufficient, so if he complains about its insufficiency, he’s told to look below him, see how far he’s come already, see how far he’s standing above those still at the bottom of the ladder, and if he says, All right, then, fine, I’ll just hold on to what I’ve got, he’ll be told, Don’t be stupid, Bob, look above you — a new car, a summer house down on the Maine coast where you can fish to your heart’s content, early retirement, Bob, college-educated children, and someday you’ll own your own business too, and your wife can look like Lauren Bacall in mink, and you can pick up your girlfriend in Aix-en-Provence in your Lancia, improve your memory, Bob, eliminate baldness, amaze your friends and family.