“I suppose,” Marguerite says, stretching wearily. “It’s hot out there. Nice in here.”
“You got air in that car, though.”
“Yeah. But it’s getting from here to there that bothers me.” She laughs. “That’s the trouble with air-conditioning. Nobody missed it till after they got it. Anyhow, when that thing in my car starts up, all it blows out at first is more hot air. It’s worse’n a heater.”
Bob watches the woman carefully, as if she were prey. “Are you … are you going straight home from here?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I got to fix supper for Daddy.”
“Then? Then what?”
“Then … nothing, I guess. No big date. No nothing.” She smiles with slight embarrassment, as if coming up empty-handed.
“Don’t you have any boyfriends?”
“Nope.” With a sudden movement, she stabs at her hair with stiffened fingers. “No boyfriends. You never heard me mention none, did you?”
“Well, I wondered. You know, since you’re so good-looking and all, and single. But I never asked before, because I figured you’d just say yes.”
She smiles. Her teeth are large and gapped. To Bob, they’re sexy, forthright, passionate teeth. “And you didn’t want to hear me say so?”
“Right.” He smiles back.
“What about you, mister?”
“Well. I’m married, you know,” he says, suddenly serious.
“Yeah. But that don’t stop people.”
“I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Uh-huh. You tell me the truth.”
“I have … I did have a girlfriend. In New Hampshire. A nice woman, though. I used to see her once in a while. No big thing, though. We weren’t in love or anything. You know. Just friends.”
“Uh-huh. Just friends. What about your wife? Did she know about this friend of yours?”
“Jesus, no! No. It was just a once-in-a-while thing, me and Doris. That was her name, Doris.”
“Uh-huh. Doris. Well,” she says, “I’ve got to get Daddy and go home.”
“Is your house air-conditioned?”
“I got me one unit in the living room, and it cools the rest of the house down pretty good, except when I’m cooking or there’s a whole lot of people in the house. But it’s fine for me and Daddy.” She looks toward the back of the store, as if in search of her father, who sits in the stockroom on a crate, waiting for her call.
“Ah, listen, Marguerite, I’d like to go out for a drink with you sometime. Would that be okay with you?” He exhales slowly.
Screwing up her face, as if trying to remember his name, she studies his eyes for a few seconds. “You sure? I mean, there’s places we could go. Over in Winter Haven or up in Lakeland. You’re married, you know. In case you’ve forgotten.” She pauses. “And we’d stick out.”
Bob takes shallow breaths quickly and his voice comes out higher than he’d like. “Of course I’m sure. Just go out for a few drinks, you know, some night after I close the store.”
“You know what you’re doing,” she informs him.
“Oh, yeah. No problem. I could pick you up at your house, if you wanted, or we could meet someplace.”
She is silent for a second, then smiles and pats his hand. “Tell you what. I’ll pick you up here at the store some night. My car’s got air, remember? That ol’ thing of yours, that’s a Yankee car.” She smiles warmly and calls her father.
Folding his arms across his chest, Bob steps back from the register, as if he’s just completed a big sale. He leans against the shelf behind him and watches the woman and her father head for the door. Just as she reaches to open it, Bob calls to her, “How about tonight? I close at nine.”
Without looking back, she says, “I don’t know,” opens the door and steps into the heat.
At seven, she calls him, and sounding slightly frightened, speaking more rapidly than usual, she says that she’ll meet him at nine, then hurriedly, as if late for another appointment, gets off the phone.
Bob immediately calls Elaine at home and tells her he’s made a new friend, a Budweiser salesman from Lakeland, who’s asked him out for a drink after work, so he’ll be home a little later than usual tonight.
This relieves Elaine. A new friend is what Bob needs. Someone to brag to, someone he can talk fishing and sports with, someone he can complain freely to, especially about Eddie, because she knows he won’t complain about Eddie to her, no matter how much Eddie, that bastard Eddie, bothers him.
Three times in the next three weeks Bob and Marguerite drive out in her car for drinks at the Barnacle in Winter Haven. That first night, when they returned to the store, Bob leaned over from the passenger’s side and kissed her on the cheek, nicely, then got out and waved good night. The second time she drove him back from the Barnacle, they sat in her car for a few minutes talking about the stupidity of one of the doctors she worked for at the clinic, and Bob reached over and kissed Marguerite full on the mouth in midsentence, passionately ground his mouth against hers, and she let him slip his tongue between her big teeth and on into her mouth. The third time, they sat in the car making out like teenagers for nearly an hour, before Bob finally pulled himself free, zipped his pants and stumbled from her car to his. They didn’t go to the Barnacle after that; they drove straight to the Hundred Lakes Motel out on Highway 17 north of Winter Haven.
Compared to most men his age, Bob has made love to few women, so if he no longer thinks of himself as inexperienced, it’s mainly because of the frequency with which he has made love over the years. He lost his virginity when he was seventeen in the back seat of Avery Boone’s Packard when he and Ave crashed a beer party at a New England College coed dormitory, and by pretending to be sophomores from Dartmouth, talked a pair of beer-drunk freshman girls from Fairfield, Connecticut, into leaving the party and driving to Lake Sunapee with them.
“Older wimmen!” they hollered afterwards, all the way home to Catamount. It had been Avery’s idea, so he did most of the hollering, but Bob gleefully shivered with excitement for hours.
The next summer, Bob joined the air force to avoid being drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam to be killed, and the fear of venereal disease, embarrassment for his ignorance and a country boy’s shyness kept him celibate for most of the next four years, until, home on leave, he took Elaine Gagnon to the drive-in theater in Concord and promised to marry her. She had just graduated from high school, and when her mother died that same month, thought originally of going to hairdressing school down in Manchester, to get away from everything, she said. But she fell in love with Bob Dubois, who had been a senior at Bishop Grenier and a hockey star when she had been a withdrawn, insecure, plain-looking freshman whose father had disappeared years before and whose mother worked on the line down at the cannery. Elaine counted herself lucky to be able to stay in Catamount and wait for Bob to be discharged from the air force so she could marry him and take care of his house, have his babies, wash his clothes, cook his food, laugh at his jokes, share his anger, and comfort and reassure him, and in return obtain for herself the family she never had and always felt she both needed and deserved. She got a job in bookkeeping at the cannery, and they did it the first time in the bedroom she had shared with her mother in the tiny apartment over Maxfield’s Hardware Store on Green Street, and both Bob and Elaine thought it was the most exciting thing they had ever done. So they did it again, and then they did it as often as they could, which, for the next two years, until Bob had saved enough money for a down payment on the house on Butterick Street and they could get married, was only once or twice a week, usually on Saturday nights at her place. He was living with his parents then. After they got married, they did it four and five nights a week.