He hasn’t been aware of that, of course, until now, when he unexpectedly finds himself staring at Marguerite, examining her boldly but nonetheless innocently, for at last his curiosity has overcome his fear and at this moment, but only for this moment, he has not yet made himself sufficiently familiar with her darkness to begin to long only for her, to touch and hold her, lick and kiss her, to lie down and fuck her and her alone and not just any tall, slender, attractive black-skinned woman, which is the way it has been until this moment, impersonal, abstract, pornographic and racist. Here I am on a white shag carpet fucking a beautiful black woman, me, Bob Dubois, for God’s sake, pale and hairy, muscles tensed, cock swollen, red, stiff, while the beautiful, smooth-skinned black woman shakes her round buttocks in my face and peers back at me and offers me some more of her marijuana cigarette.
George has started sweeping in the far corner of the store, out of sight beyond the head-high shelves of gallon jugs of cheap wine, and the woman turns back to Bob. “I think I’ll be picking him up and leaving him off for a while,” she says thoughtfully, biting her lower lip with large, widely spaced upper teeth. “He’s still not … like he was yet. I’m a little worried about his getting the right bus home and all, you know? And getting off at the right stop? You know?”
“Oh, sure, sure, I understand. I mean, it’s a hell of a shock to his whole system, probably.” Bob feels himself stumbling after the words he wants to say. He wants to be both suave and consoling, as reassuring as he is seductive, but he knows he sounds instead like a man who’s busy and hasn’t quite heard what’s been told to him.
“So … you’re a nurse,” he finally says. Her hair, cut in a short, loose Afro, is black and shiny and prematurely flecked with gray.
“Yes, I work for three doctors, out at the Westway Clinic.”
“Ah,” Bob says, as if gaining an insight.
“You know it? You live out there in Auburndale?”
“No, no. It’s just … that’s a nice job, a nurse in a clinic. Better than a hospital, right?”
“Better hours. But that’s about all,” she says. Then, “You got a nice smile, you know that?”
“Ah,” Bob says again. Suddenly he asks her, “Are you married? I mean, George never mentions a son-in-law. Only you. He talks about you a lot. So I wondered …” Her skin is clear, unblemished and roan-colored, dark brown with a slight reddish tinge brought forward, Bob notices, by lipstick and the makeup on her cheeks. She’s wearing perfume, lilac, and when he sniffs for more of it, he looks at her nose, broad, symmetrical, functional. A true nose, he thinks. Not a large, pointy, phony nose like his, not a dog’s nose. Elaine’s nose he hasn’t looked at for years, although he used to wonder at it, because it was so perfectly shaped, or so it seemed to him then — slightly curved, short and narrow, giving to her small face the look of a fierce bird, like a falcon or hawk — but now he can’t recall it. His memory is only of having paid attention to something that has disappeared, swallowed by her eyes, so that now, when he looks at his wife’s face or remembers it, all he sees is the center of her eyes, as if her face has somehow gradually become invisible without his ever having noticed until after it was gone, lost to him, he is sure, forever.
Marguerite answers his question as directly as he asked it, as if she is used to having white men she barely knows ask her if she is married. She was, she tells him, but not now, not for over five years. Her husband was in the air force and stationed here at Shure. “But,” she says, shrugging, “that didn’t work out so good. But I liked it here, and I had a better job than the one I used to have in Macon, so I stayed. And the next year my mama died and Daddy came down.”
“It doesn’t make sense, your being alone,” Bob says with great seriousness.
She laughs. “Yes, it does, Mister Dubois …”
“Bob.”
“Okay, Bob. Yes, it does make sense! A lot of sense.” Then, turning to leave, she smiles and says, “Besides, I’m not alone, you know.”
“You’re not? I thought …” He doesn’t know what he thought.
“I got my daddy!” she calls from the door. Then, to the old man, “Bye, honey! I’ll pick you up at five, okay? You remember, now, y’ hear?” And then she is gone, leaving Bob Dubois standing at the cash register, his heart thumping, head abuzz, hands, he suddenly notices, wet with sweat.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Bob looks forward to seeing Marguerite twice, in the morning when she brings her father to work and again in the late afternoon when she picks him up. She could more easily drop the old man off in the morning, and later, sitting in her car outside, signal with the horn for him to come out, but she doesn’t. She gets out of the car and comes into the store and talks with Bob. Bob believes she does this because she is falling in love with him. He believes this because he thinks he is falling in love with her, and just as his days have now taken on an unexpected yet longed-for significance, at least his Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays have, so, too, he believes, have her days, once tedious and bland as boiled potatoes, now come to seem intense, shapely, piquant.
At home, Bob merely waits for time to pass. He withdraws from his nightly conversations with Elaine, leaves off, or treats as a chore, reading stories to the girls before they go to bed, and usually ends up falling asleep on the couch before the eleven o’clock news comes on. Naturally, Elaine resents and then quickly fears the change in him, for she does not attribute it to anything other than to the change in her, that is, to her pregnancy, which, she thinks, has made her more sensitive than usual, more demanding and more easily hurt.
So she tries to avoid criticizing Bob for depriving her and the girls of his attention, and really, that is all he’s guilty of so far, so why should he be criticized? He’s working sixty and seventy hours a week at a demeaning, boring job that he was led to expect would be something quite different from what it’s turned out to be, he’s cut himself off from everything that’s familiar to him — landscape, manners, friends — and except for Eddie, around whom he’s never able to rest, he has no one he can simply enjoy himself with, no one to go out for pizza and beers with, no one to go fishing with, no one to go with him on a Sunday morning to Chain-O’-Lakes Park in Winter Haven, where the Red Sox hold their spring training rites and play their exhibition games, where, if he got out there before they went north in late April, he could get, he told her, Carl Yastrzemski’s, Jim Rice’s and Freddie Lynn’s autographs for their son, because someday, he said to her, those guys will be dead and buried and Bob junior won’t believe that his dad saw them in the flesh and actually had a conversation with them.
Elaine feels sorry for her husband. She suggests hiring a babysitter and going out together to the Okie Doke, a dance club she’s heard about from one of the wives she’s befriended at the park, a woman named Ellen Skeeter, but Bob says, “Naw, that’s just one of those cracker joints where the music’s too loud and everybody gets drunk and ends up stomping on your feet if you try to dance or picking a fight with you on the way to the men’s room.”
So she urges him to take a Sunday and pack a lunch and drive with her and the girls to New Smyrna Beach on the coast, but he sighs and says, “Just what I need after a hard week, a day spent in the car fighting the traffic, with the kids fussing in back, a bunch of sandy sandwiches in the sun, and a sunburn to boot. Besides, this time of year the beaches are jammed with all those noisy Canucks who couldn’t afford to come down in January and February. God save me from the Frenchmen. It’s the same kind as used to drive us nuts in July at Old Orchard Beach in Maine.”