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 But she fell in love with Bob Dubois, who had been a senior at Bishop Grenier and a hockey star when she had been a withdrawn, insecure, plain-looking freshman whose father had disappeared years before and whose mother worked on the line down at the cannery.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.
Despite this clearly focused attention, over the next four years Bob fucked five women other than his wife, all of them customers of Abenaki Oil Company, one time each. He had a hard time distinguishing between making love on the run to these women, covering their shoulders and arms with oil burner soot, and masturbating. He felt a similar kind and quantity of guilt for both. Even while doing it, he felt stupid and young, adolescent again, the way he used to feel when he was in the air force. He’d wake up in his barracks bed and remember that the night before he’d spent several sleepless hours contemplating deliciously obscene fantasies while masturbating slowly into a handkerchief or sock. He’d look in his shaving mirror, and he’d see the weakness in his eyes, and he’d loathe himself for about a half hour.
