Bob says, “Just put my stuff on the boat.” The wallet he needs only because his driver’s license is inside it; the money in his pocket now is what’s left of a twenty-dollar bill he took from Elaine’s purse before leaving this morning. He’s suddenly afraid he won’t have enough money to get home on. Maybe he can borrow some money from Sarah when she gets in from Connecticut this afternoon. Oh, Christ, he thinks, I don’t have enough money to buy a damned newspaper when I want to. I have to live like a goddamned kid, begging and borrowing money I can’t pay back from the grownups, who all happen to be women now.
“Where’s Ave?” he asks.
“You know, honey. Still out on the boat with Tyrone.”
“Tell him when he gets in that I have to talk with him, so he should call me right away.”
“Now, don’t you go carrying any tales back to him. You were just as bad as me, you know.”
“Yeah, don’t worry, I won’t say anything. But last night was it, girl. Never again. You understand?”
She laughs and says, “Of course,” as if she does not believe him, though it’s not clear to Bob if that’s because she thinks she’s irresistible or he is. He decides it’s because she thinks she’s irresistible, which means he’ll have to be on his guard from now on. Bob understands men; it’s women who confuse him and make him angry, which he is, once again, and so once again he slams down the receiver and knocks back the Canadian Club.
The room is gray and damp and smells to Bob of the death of men and of their debts. Everywhere he looks he sees something that reminds him of male helplessness and ineptitude — the framed pictures of Jessica on horseback, on water skis, in her Holy Communion dress, pictures of a girl gone north to Connecticut with her mother because her father, the fool who snapped the pictures, was too loud, too selfishly obsessed with becoming rich, too insensitive to anyone’s pain but his own. And the room itself, with its department store decorations, huge, ornately framed pictures of New England villages and covered bridges in autumn hung above the long, low sofas and marble-topped tables, the pale green wall-to-wall carpeting, the neo-colonial wet bar with thirty different kinds of liqueurs underneath, everything in the room expensive, ready-made, impersonal — Bob sees it clearly now, all for show.
All for nothing, Bob thinks. His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because they
But here is Bob, living on alone, and if he feels more like a child than a man, it’s the women who make him feel that way, he thinks, his wife, his sister-in-law, his friend’s girlfriend. What he believes he needs to induce these women to make him feel like the grown man he’s become is money, and he has none, or sex, and after last night with Honduras, he hasn’t much of that, either. Since the birth of Robbie last fall, a shadow has fallen between Bob and Elaine, so that they rarely make love now, and when they do, it’s perfunctory and routine, a polite form of exchange. Elaine grew fat during the pregnancy and stayed thick in the hips and belly afterwards and started to speak of her body as if it were not hers but belonged instead to a pathetic, neglected, insecure friend. Anything that pointed to its existence distressed her, and sex most emphatically pointed to the existence of her body. And for Bob, the birth of his son has resulted, oddly, in his feeling outnumbered and alienated from his entire family — the three children and mother became one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet passing accidentally through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. That is not the kind of man who strolls through his house feeling sexy.
