“Alone,” she interrupts.
“Yeah, alone. But that’s the way he is. He likes it that way. But he got out, that’s the point, and Eddie got out too. Eddie made a killing too. Ave Boone in his boat on the Keys, and Eddie wheeling and dealing in central Florida, while I sit up here in the snow and ice and darkness and fix people’s oil burners and wonder how the fuck I can afford a pair of ice skates for my kid for Christmas.”
“But we have the kids, the house …” she says.
He doesn’t hear her. “One time when we were kids, Ave came over to my house, and he had this advertisement he’d cut out of some fancy New York magazine he’d seen in the dentist’s office, and we were sitting around in my bedroom talking about what we were going to do after school or something, we were maybe seniors then. And he pulled this ad out of his wallet and unfolded it and handed it to me. It was a whiskey ad, and there was this handsome guy wearing his trousers rolled up to his knees and no shirt on, walking ashore on some tropical island. And he’s got this case of Haig & Haig on his shoulder and a dinghy on the shore behind him and a nice forty-foot catamaran sitting out in the bay. Eddie was out of school by then and was working at Thom McAn’s on Main Street selling shoes, but he was already figuring out what he was going to do in Florida a few years later, and I was already thinking about maybe joining the air force so I wouldn’t get drafted because I didn’t have anything like Eddie’s epilepsy to keep me out or Ave’s belief that he could con the draft board into a four-F, because neither of us particularly wanted to go to Vietnam and get fucking shot. Anyhow, Ave shows me this clipping like it’s a letter from Hugh Hefner asking him to spend a week with the Playmate of the Month or something, and he says to me, ‘There. That’s me,’ he says.” Bob is silent for a few seconds. Then he sighs. “You wanta know what I said? I’ll tell you. I said, ‘That’s me too.’ ”
Elaine takes his hand in hers again. “Honey, honey …”
Bob brushes his eyes with the back of his other hand. “I just don’t know what happened. Ol’ Ave, he’s probably right this minute walking ashore with a case of Canadian Club or Chivas Regal on his shoulder, and my brother Eddie is down there dancing cheek to cheek with his wife in a fancy nightclub while his accountant works late figuring out another tax dodge for him. And what am I doing? Sitting in Catamount in a fucking chair with the stuffing coming out so bad it has to be covered with slipcovers because I can’t afford to get it upholstered or buy another one.” He plucks at the arm of the chair as if clearing it of lint. “I sit up here feeling sorry for myself. Crying like a fucking baby. Just like my old man. Only he didn’t have brains enough to cry or get mad and break all his car windows. He sat in his chair with the stuffing coming out and listened to Frank Sinatra tell him he was destiny’s darling. Then he got old and then he died. And that’s all she wrote.”
“Come on, honey. It’s Christmas …” she says.
“It sure as shit is Christmas,” he snarls. Then, after a few seconds, in a low voice he says, “I don’t know, Elaine, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m having a nervous breakdown or something. I’ve never felt this way before. I don’t know, but I do know I can’t take it anymore. Maybe I’m freaking out. It’s this place, maybe, the cold and the dark … and no money. And it’s because I’ve had this look at myself, at my life, you know? I’ve looked at it, and all I can see is my father all over again. And his father. And on and on. All the way back to the fucking Dark Ages. Since the beginning of fucking time. I thought … I thought it was going to be different. You know? Not necessarily like the picture of Ave Boone coming ashore with a case of whiskey on his shoulder, I mean. But different. But now, tonight, I saw it all. I saw myself. Clear as crystal. I saw myself, and I realized that it’ll never be any different. Never. It’s like all these years I’ve just been waiting around to win the state lottery or something. Like that’s the only way my life, our life, can be different. The only way it can be the way I thought it would be is if I win the goddamned state lottery. You know what that means, Elaine?”
“No. But it’s not true anyhow. We have a good life. We do.”
Ignoring her, he says, “It means we’re dead. That’s what it means. Dead.”
“No, honey. No, it doesn’t. You’re just depressed, that’s all.”
“You’re right, I’m depressed. But for Christ’s sake, Elaine, there’s a reason! Don’t you think people get depressed for a reason sometimes? That’s what I’m trying to get you to understand, for Christ’s sake. Try. Please try to understand. Because you’re dead too. Not just me. You know you are too. Way down deep inside yourself, you know you’re dead. And the girls too. They’re as dead as we are, unless they get lucky. We’re all dead. Like my father and mother, and like your mother too. We only think we’re alive. We watch that fucking TV screen, and we think we’re like those people there, fucking Hart and Hart, and that makes us forget that we’re not like those people at all. We’re dead. They’re pretty pictures. We’re dead people.
“I listen to Fred Turner down at the shop tell me how pretty soon he’ll take me off night call so I don’t have to go out nights and Sundays anymore to fix people’s goddamned broken furnaces, and I think I’m alive. I start to thinking I’m like Fred and someday I’ll be a big guy with my own company, even though I didn’t have a father with a company to hand it to me like Fred did, and pretty soon I’ll be driving around in a white Caddie with my company’s initials on the number plates, DOC, Dubois Oil Company. But Fred went to fucking college, and I can barely balance my own checkbook, and besides, if he takes me off night call I won’t get any more overtime and we won’t be able to handle the mortgage payment next month, so I say, No, Fred, for Christ’s sake, don’t take me off night call, I need the fucking overtime. That’s being dead, Elaine. Dead.
“And I come home to this house and see how if I don’t paint it this spring the rot’s going to get it by next winter, only I can’t afford to paint the goddamned thing. And I can’t afford to put storm windows on it so we don’t have to burn so much oil, which I can’t afford either anyhow, and then I look out the window at that damned boat I still owe money on and which I wouldn’t have bought and built if my friend Ave Boone hadn’t taken off for the Keys with his boat, and I realize that I can’t afford to take off a week from work in the spring just so I can use the fucking thing anyhow.
“And every time I drive that car I still owe money on I realize I’ll be lucky to get another month off the damned thing before the fucking transmission goes, which I can’t afford to have fixed if it does go. And that’s being dead, Elaine. Day and night, week after week, year in and year out, it’s the same, until finally my body catches up with the rest of me, and it dies too.”