“Bozo”, by Souvankham Thammavongsa, appears in the April 8, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Here we present excerpts from Colin and Jennifer’s discussion about the story, edited for length and clarity. Also, check out our short essay, about how “Bozo” is immanently identifiable, in The Essays.
▶ Initial thoughts on the story
Jennifer: I’m very excited to be discussing this week’s story entitled “Bozo”. I’m really curious, Colin, to get some initial thoughts on your impressions of the story.
Colin: It was a highly internal story involving just two characters. It’s really in the female narrator’s head most of the time. It takes place most of the time at the bar, right? And she’s thinking about this bartender, and I thought it was a really nice story. I liked it. It’s relatable, [and] I think [that] is what I really liked about the story.
Colin: Now, I’m not a female, of course, but I can relate to this very well. I think this is one of these universal kind of themes. Right? That we can relate to this this longing or this just wondering about someone else, maybe romanticizing them. And this disappointment was palpable, that you could feel, although she handled it with grace. And I like that, because you could see some experience there. It’s not like reading a Joyce story in Dubliners, where this is the narrator’s first time facing rejection It seemed to be. It was subtle. She was a little bit hurt, I think, but she just took it in stride. And that’s what I liked about it. It was one of these relatable stories that comes from someone who is longing for a connection, and who is speaking from experience.
Jennifer: The setting was so specific but it was specifically generic, and it was instantly placeable. A bartender and a half empty restaurant bar in an unnamed, midsized midwestern town. At least that’s what came up for me, because that’s my background. And that space felt very tired and familiar. You could really put yourself in that physical place where she’s observing the bartender.
Jennifer: The author’s descriptions of people contain no unique physical descriptors. She says things like “beautiful” or “used to model“. That was my first clue the author is not going to do the work for me. She is opening the door to invite me to create my own world. She is giving me the scaffolding to hang my own details on there. And I just really, really love that. And I think that’s something we’ll come back to later.
Jennifer: The author just opened up this door for me to create my own fantasy world, similar to the way that the narrator was gazing at the bartender. She created this rich fantasy world, and I was just all too eager to drink up that loneliness and that low level of sadness. I felt like a strong, clear drink, with a little hope floating on the top like that mint leaf, and then it just sinks to the bottom by the end of the story.
▶ The profession of the narrator
Jennifer: The author did a great job of creating this intimacy with distance, and I think that was one of the things that was very important for me to think about in the story. And specifically, there was this parallel between the bartender, who was very comfortable being gazed at and the narrator. He wasn’t curious about the world. According to her, he just did his job. He’s not doing extra. He’s just doing his job. And she is also serving up what people are asking her to do, right?
Colin: Hold on! She’s not a writer.
Jennifer: Oh, sorry! I made an assumption that she was a writer.
Colin: No, no, no. Her occupation is not listed. She tells him, but doesn’t tell the reader what it is, and it doesn’t sound believable.
I told him that I was going to travel there, and mentioned what I did for work. I wasn’t used to saying what I did. I said, “I know that sounds fake, but that’s really what I do.” He laughed, and mentioned that he used to model. That sounded fake, too, but looking at his face and his body, considering how comfortable he was with being looked at, and the way he let me look at him without it ever having to mean anything, I could tell that he knew how to make his living from someone’s gaze.
Jennifer: Yeah, she says [that her job] doesn’t sound believable. But for me, the story I told myself about that, in my mind, is that the narrator is a social media influencer or she is a writer.
Colin: No, it’s not stated what she does.
Jennifer: She speaks to her tendency to make up stories about other people, that she likes to observe from a distance, and that she likes to be very clear with the boundaries around closeness. And so for me, that felt like a parallel of an author’s perspective: showing us how a person may observe someone else being observed. She says that bartending was his job, and he was really good at it, and he produced what people asked for, in the same way that a writer, perhaps could also be seen as a person creating their own internal world that is not necessarily based in reality, and serving that vision up to others. That was very much inside her comfort zone.
Jennifer: I appreciate that you called out that there’s no evidence to point that she’s a writer. That was an assumption that was made by me.
▶ The aquarium and the abyss
Jennifer: She goes to the aquarium, which we will talk about in depth, because I think there is a lot going on in that scene. The narrator tells us that at the aquarium there is a place called the abyss and that it is a real thing.
A few weeks before, I had been to the aquarium. There really is a place called the abyss, I learned. It’s three levels below where sunlight reaches. I don’t know how to swim. I would never go diving or snorkeling. You swim toward things and they dart away. You don’t get to see anything, really. I like how safe it feels at the aquarium. I can breathe on my own, and look. I don’t have to know how to swim or be afraid of drowning.
Jennifer: For me, the narrator mentioning the abyss immediately, signals something, like this unending pit of loneliness. Right? You can get on the edge of something and look in. But you’re still protected, because you’re not getting wet. You’re not getting involved in relationship. You’re just gazing right and pretending.
Colin: Exactly. I mean, that’s the sense I got to right. She she’s in a cloistered, safe environment where she can take a risk without taking a risk. That’s what the aquarium is, in a way, right cause, she mentioned. If she doesn’t want to go scuba diving, it’s dangerous. It’s murky or snorkeling. But in the aquarium you’re safe. But at the same time it’s not the real thing once again, right? Going back to that Henry James title. It’s not the real thing. It’s a simulacrum in a way, I mean they are real animals, sure. But they’re in a completely artificial environment where you can see them out of their context right? And again I got the sense she was playing it safe. In a way, the aquarium is a way, maybe, that speaks to her. But again she did take the risk of at least asking the bartender. But again, I did get the sense she says so herself she could do this without maybe fully committing to it. Maybe that’s a notion of commitment. If you want to go scuba diving and you want to go snorkeling, you have to take those risks. You have to be willing to commit to the risk to do it, whereas in the aquarium you don’t. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to get too close. She wants the aquarium version, and that’s what she got out of the guy, the aquarium version, right? She could see him from behind the glass, so to speak, safely.
Jennifer: Absolutely, that echoes what I was feeling. I want to pretend I’m having the full experience without taking the risk of something actually happening. No bodily harm will happen to her at the aquarium. No emotional harm will happen if she just idealizes this guy and keeps him in fantasy land because he’s always going to live there.
▶ Under the gaze of another
Jennifer: The story keeps bringing me back to the gaze. She says he used to be a model. He’s very comfortable being gazed at.
He laughed, and mentioned that he used to model. That sounded fake, too, but looking at his face and his body, considering how comfortable he was with being looked at, and the way he let me look at him without it ever having to mean anything, I could tell that he knew how to make his living from someone’s gaze.
Jennifer: When that waitress brushed up against him, I thought this situation is like the opposite of a strip club. He’s being objectified. He is just doing his job, and is like he is not even going to dignify the co-worker by looking at her, because he is just doing his job. [The attitude of ] “I’m not responsible for your actions, because I’m just doing my job.”
A waitress went by, and, though there was plenty of room behind him, she squeezed so close that her chest brushed up against him. And on the way back, when she passed him, she touched his arm. He didn’t react either time. Part of the job. No turning around to acknowledge her with a smile. No asking about her shift and how it was going. But she got to touch. She got to be back there, with him.
Jennifer: For me, when the narrator was at the aquarium and she’s gazing in, she says she likes to look at him do his job. She felt that jealousy. She wanted to drink all the drinks that he had made for other people. She wanted to consume that, and she was very sensual: I want to taste that experience. And he instinctively knows, what people want before they tell him. That’s interesting.
▶ The power of three
Jennifer: The theme of three gets repeated throughout the story and that starts while she is at the aquarium.
A few weeks before, I had been to the aquarium. There really is a place called the abyss, I learned. It’s three levels below where sunlight reaches. I don’t know how to swim. I would never go diving or snorkeling. You swim toward things and they dart away. You don’t get to see anything, really. I like how safe it feels at the aquarium. I can breathe on my own, and look. I don’t have to know how to swim or be afraid of drowning.
I thought of a school of fish I saw there that swam together as one giant ball, spinning and spinning. A lobster with three claws. The giant octopus and its three hearts. Jellyfish that glowed. I wanted to go there with him and watch him look at those things. See him in the dark. See if he could be beautiful there, too. It probably seemed like a strange thing to ask someone I’d just met. I leaned over, almost tried, lost my nerve.
Jennifer: For me, she’s dreaming of taking this guy to the aquarium. It’s him and her and this invisible third person called girlfriend that we don’t know about yet. There’s this other presence in this story. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the bartender and his girlfriend had been together for three years. There’s just something about this three, three, three. Of all the things she could have called attention to, she did that for a reason. I can’t pretend to know her reason, but it did inspire me to think: What’s going on here. What are you up to?
Colin: That’s a great observation. You’re right. The it does. It does come up repeatable through the description of the abyss.
It’s three levels below where sunlight reaches.
Colin: That’s conspicuous, right? Like, what do you mean by levels? I thought the phrasing of that makes it stand out immediately. And you’re right. Three levels, three claws, and three hearts of the octopus.
Jennifer: She said three things about three things in a row. She is really hitting us over the head with it, right?
Colin: It’s not a coincidence. There’s no way it’s a coincidence. I think that is a good observation. That’s spot on: it’s him, her and the girlfriend. That’s the three. That’s the triumvirate here, but in reality, they can’t have a three because there’s a third wheel.
Jennifer: She’s never going to have what he has with his girlfriend. The narrator will never be invited in.
Colin: So she’s the third wheel. It’s an odd number, right? She’s the odd person out.
Jennifer: The odd person out, in this three-year relationship.
Colin: It’s obviously deliberate, now that I think about it. This isn’t a coincidence that three comes up so many times. There’s enough to make it very obvious. And the way it was started with the abyss. As you said, that stands out. It’s conspicuously worded, isn’t it? It sounds strange, three levels.
▶ Conspicuous word choices
Colin: There’s a few times that the wording drew attention. The conspicuous wording stood out. The mouth thing drew attention to itself.
When he wasn’t making drinks, he served food to all of us sitting at the bar. Nothing special. Pale, soggy sticks of potato. Things fried in lard. Clumps of meat. That made me feel a terrible sadness for him.
Colin: This is very conspicuously worded, because it immediately stands out from the tone that proceeds and follows it. Clumps of meat, things fried is very disgusting and sordid sounding. She wants to rescue him from this.
Colin: This is story is brilliant because she changes the wording of the phrasing to indicate important symbolism or some very important notion. [The mouth thing drew attention to itself.]
Colin: Another thing I loved about [the story] was [it is very] stylistic. It was very simple but some of the word choices really called attention to it themselves, and I thought that was brilliant.
Jennifer: The word choice was so evocative and moody, especially when she talks about the food. You can kind of smell it in your head. That’s why I’m thinking it’s this midwestern chain restaurant, he is not in a ritzy resort. He’s just in this generic strip mall place with a low level of sordidness, mixed with sadness.
He just wanted to go to the beach once a year. I wanted to give that to him. Actually, I wanted to make it so that he’d never have to come back and serve anyone here again.
Jennifer: And right after that bar food scene, she talks about rescuing him. I think that is something really important for us to get under the skin of.
▶ Women’s work / societal expectations for women
I don’t know why, but I wanted to give him everything. Where had these feelings come from, and why were they here now? I had them, and I couldn’t tell him. I could want so much based on so little. It was smaller than that, even. It was nothing.
Colin: Yes, good point. This is something I noticed as well. I likened it to a maternal instinct and an instinct to protect, to nurture.
Jennifer: I took that in a different direction, Colin. I can see some of that, but I’m going back to the idea that women of a certain generation are often rescuing men, they are trying to elevate them. It’s like the reverse of the knight in shining armor [stereotype].
I thought of the woman. His girlfriend. Who she was. Whoever she was she was probably like me. She probably wanted him to stop bartending and wanted him to have his beach vacations.
It’s hard to leave a woman. Women are, for the most part, good people. Nice—and, if they’re not nice, people make them feel bad about it, so they have no choice but to learn how to be nice. Attentive and caring. Thoughtful. They take out the garbage, clean the toilets, have dinner on the table, buy you clothes. They’re ambitious for you. And they forgive anything, because they allow you your mistakes. You don’t even have to try very hard. Just look clean, and pretty.
Jennifer: So to me, this feels like banter about emotional labor. It comes right after a passage about what she thinks his girlfriend also wants for him. It just felt like this is a very female centered caretaking of this man. There’s something about that which echoed.
Colin: This kind of a trope, right? I’m going to change him. When you’re dating you should never go in it thinking you could change somebody right, because, you really can’t. But you always hear this idea that Oh, I’ll change him for the better or whatnot. I get the sense she wanted someone to care for, someone to nurture. Again, it goes back to the intimacy and the connection and the longing to be in a relationship where you’re needed. I think that’s what it is. She didn’t feel needed by anybody. Maybe. We don’t know what her personal life is like, but we can assume that she’s pretty lonely, right? She is lonely, she talks about it, but we don’t know anything about her. What she does, who she associates with.
▶ It’s hard to leave a woman
It’s hard to leave a woman. Women are, for the most part, good people.
Colin: That was a strange line. It was funny. It was weird. Because it’s such a weird generalization, right?
Jennifer: And what does the opposite say, if women are good people, what are men?
Colin: I don’t know. I mean people are people. You have good people. You have bad people, but I thought it was a funny and odd line. I just appreciated the line because I’ve never heard someone generalize like that, in such a funny way. We could think about that meaning more deeply, but just in terms of a line, I love the line:
Women are, for the most part, good people.
Colin: What does that say about her? Is that suggesting she is not good? We don’t know, but I got the sense that she was talking about herself when she said for the most part. In other words, there are exceptions, and I got the sense that she was a bit down on herself. Maybe she was one of the exceptions. I don’t know. I got that sense of a little bit of maybe mild depression in this character. Not like major depression, just a sense of forlornness, a little bit of melancholy.
Jennifer: The author is asking us to consider, to ponder, by using these very unique phrases that stick with you. They have an ambiguous meaning, right?
Women are, for the most part, good people.
Jennifer: If the narrator is telling me what one group of people are, what is she implying that the other kind of people are not, because she singled it out. I just thought that was an interesting observation you made: maybe she’s being self-reflective. Maybe this goes back to her authenticity and vulnerability and self-awareness we referenced earlier. That she can see that nobody’s as good as you think they are, including me.
It was possible to know him. But, really, I didn’t want to know him. I liked him at exactly this distance. They all disappoint, eventually, when you get to know them.
Colin: The more I think about it, I think she’s being down on herself here. I don’t think she’s comparing women to men. I think she’s saying as a whole women are, for the most part, good people, but I don’t think necessarily think she thinks she’s a good person. Maybe she feels a bit depressed, or she feels a little bit like she’s not a good person, which would explain why she generalizes again:
You don’t even have to try very hard. Just look clean, and pretty.
Colin: So she’s almost taking on an old stereotype about the role of a women, but she’s applying to herself. And I think that makes sense if she had hundreds of suitors online, but she’s not pursuing anyone, maybe it’s because she’s afraid that if she gets too close, they’ll reject her.
▶ The evolution of the narrator’s character
I don’t know why, but I wanted to give him everything. Where had these feelings come from, and why were they here now? I had them, and I couldn’t tell him. I could want so much based on so little. It was smaller than that, even. It was nothing.
Jennifer: Again, this felt like such a personal awareness of her longing. And one more passage that ties into that isolation and of not taking the risk of connection:
A few weeks before, I had been to the aquarium. There really is a place called the abyss, I learned. It’s three levels below where sunlight reaches. I don’t know how to swim. I would never go diving or snorkeling. You swim toward things and they dart away. You don’t get to see anything, really. I like how safe it feels at the aquarium. I can breathe on my own, and look. I don’t have to know how to swim or be afraid of drowning.
Jennifer: When she hears that the bartender and his girlfriend go to New York, she makes that big comment about their walking across the streets, and they trust without question that no one, no car is going to come from the wrong direction and harm them. They have this underlying foundation of trust. I took that as a representation of the strength of their relationship. They are in this trusting situation that no one is going to harm them. This third wheel is not going to go down the one-way street the wrong way and run them over. They trust that no one’s going to harm them. And I just love that juxtaposition with her inherent lack of trust. I think she’s just longing for that security and that mental framework of a world that makes sense, where things go as planned. You don’t have to be afraid, you go with the flow.
Colin: Yeah, that’s exactly it. She’s not willing to take the leap of faith. Maybe she self-selects herself out of these things by self-sabotaging herself in the very beginning, or she doesn’t want to get too close. She has a longing to get close, but she’s risk averse. She overthinks it, which would be a very classic modernist narrator, by the way, in terms of over intellectualizing things. She does take some action. She does take a risk. But at the same time, we get the sense that she’s not willing to take a leap of faith, and I think that’s the crux of it. He and his girlfriend were willing to love in that “love is blind” notion. They don’t even have to look, they trust. And she doesn’t trust. So maybe she really is putting up barriers, she’s putting up guardrails and she is preventing her from getting close [to others]. And I did get the sense that she’s a kind of the quintessential outsider in literature like Colin Wilson’s outsider theory. I think she’s an outsider, and she does put up barriers it seems.
Jennifer: And she also has this vulnerability. I just want to go back to the scene because we’re painting this picture from what she has shown us. Of what she reveals and what she hides. An intellectual peek-a-boo that feels like a push/pull situation between I want this, but I’m afraid of it, and I’m picking people who aren’t really available, and I kind of got that vibe, but I’m not sure because he didn’t really ask about me, but he was polite. She’s having this internal debate with herself about is this a person signaling I’m into you. He’s not signaling “I’m into you”. His actions are saying “I’m polite, it’s my job”. But in that conversation with the bartender, she wasn’t afraid to let it show.
I was nervous and scared, and I let it show on my face.
He paused for a moment, and said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” I nodded and let him see my disappointment.
Jennifer: I was very taken when she said I was nervous and scared and I let it show on my face. And he walks away from her to give her a moment to collect herself. She was raw and vulnerable. She wasn’t putting on a mask to be Oh, I’m a cool girl … it didn’t matter … I knew you had a girlfriend … It’s no big deal … She signaled to him she was genuinely disappointed. It wasn’t his fault, but she didn’t hide it from him. That felt like growth, with a little stretch out into the dangerous water. She stuck her toe in the water. She’s not ready to swim, but she at least stuck her toe in.
Colin: That’s a great observation. I think that’s it, I think she hasn’t shown vulnerability in her life. Maybe she had some past experience. Maybe she’s just kind of cagey by nature.
Colin: If we talk about the modern short story form being primarily about character over plot, I will go back to this classic notion that a character needs to have a want. Like Vonnegut says, give them anything, give them a glass of water, make them thirsty or make them want a glass of water. They need to want. So here we have a character here who has a want. Clearly, she wants a connection. It’s not the guy per se she wants, but she wants a meaningful connection. She wants to care for somebody, that’s clear. But she’s also afraid of being vulnerable. She’s afraid of taking a risk. She’s afraid of taking the leap of faith, and she’s probably self-sabotaging herself. And it makes sense. We know she gets a lot of attention. She’s getting a hundred messages a day, so we can assume that it’s not for lack of attention. But in this case, this is probably the first time, or maybe a rare time, that she actually took a risk, and then she was rejected. Like you say, I think the character growth is in her actually showing that she’s not hiding it. She did take a risk, which we assume was hard for her to take. She was nervous, she tried and it took three times to do it. And that makes her very human, very relatable. And again, I imagine she’s very desirable if she’s getting a hundred messages a day. She’s probably very attractive, right?
Jennifer: But there’s something else going on.
Colin: She is vulnerable, and we feel she’s down. She’s hard on herself, and she’s down on herself, and we feel that she’s afraid to take that risk, and that makes it extremely relatable. And now that I think about more about this, it’s like the Stoics – a lot of a lot of people say that you don’t know someone from what they look like. And now she doesn’t know the bartender, she’s assuming. You see someone walking down the street who looks very attractive, very happy [but] we don’t know what’s going on in their head. They could be melancholic. There are many counter examples. There are [similar] quotes from Epictetus and Seneca. They look happy. They look successful. They look everything, but in reality, you don’t know what it is like to be them. We don’t know what they’re going through. When we put the pieces together here, this is what we’re what we’re seeing. She took a risk, she was rejected and she still showed her vulnerability. To me, that is quintessentially important character development and character growth in this story.
Jennifer: I just want to read you a couple of quotes that solidify this. As Vonnegut says, give them a want, right? The narrator is not shy about stating what she wants:
He was a bartender. He could make a drink for you, if you wanted. All you had to do was lean over and ask.
I wanted something he could make. Something no one else had. I asked him if he could make this for me, and he nodded.
If I looked at him, he’d look over and smile. If I leaned forward a bit, he’d come to me. It was so easy to get him to pay attention.
Jennifer: She enjoys how easy it for her to draw him in, to get his attention. But in the context of the bartender, theoretically, we don’t know. He was doing his job.: I am a bartender. I am here to serve you drinks. I need to pay attention to you, the customer, because that’s my job. But the narrator took it somewhere else.
Was he a person who went with anyone who asked, or was he more discerning?
Jennifer: I also love that she kind of does this discernment about his character. When she talks about her hundreds of online suitors, she signals she had to be a discerning person. She didn’t want all these guys. How can she even know if they are real, how can she pick?
And what, then, if he came to my place? A few pumps and it would be over. I didn’t want a few pumps. I wanted to be something to him. Something that would last more than one night. I don’t know why I wanted that, but there it was, that want.
Jennifer: She goes there. She declares that she wants something and she wants to be something to him. She wants the drinks. She wants to be fed when she is hungry. She is not afraid to tell us what she wants. And she does not shy away from that. She’s like: You know, I get a hundred messages a day. I could get any guy anytime. I don’t want this.
Jennifer: When she talks about online dating, she states that if we were online I could give him the heart emoji, or I would know what to say, but in real life I don’t know how to do this. This is risky. I don’t know if you’re single. You know, if you’re on a dating site, you assume people are single. In the real world, you just don’t know, so it has its own hazards of unknowability. She did a great job of reminding us of this. It’s like, Wow, in real life. I don’t know how to act. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. And that felt really relatable, I think, especially to the millennial generations, and people who have had a more online presence through their dating experience than someone in my generation might.
Colin: That’s a very good point, but not only that [during the pandemic] people lost their social skills because they lost their ability to relate to people in an offline environment. So we have two things: she seems to have given her age approximately 40, if this story is set in the present day, I would say that this narrator would have experience both pre-Tinder and post-Tinder, plus the pandemic. So here’s someone who maybe very realistically lost the ability to form human connections in person. And that again, that’s a big problem. I’ve read number of articles on this. And I think to this day people are still suffering from this deficit from being isolated for so long, plus the ease of online dating.
▶ The relatability of the narrator
Colin: This is a complex 3-dimensional character. Going back to E.M. Forster, this is what we want in a character. She surprised us by taking the risk. She surprised us in a convincing way, and she surprises again when she with humility. She accepted her rejection and didn’t try and brush it off like it was nothing. She showed disappointment. She was vulnerable. This is a complex character in every sense.
Jennifer: For sure, and I love that. The author made me check my own assumptions. I don’t know what this woman’s job is, I don’t know what her relationship history is so I’m filling in all these gaps for myself, based on my judgments of her. And the author did such a great job of teeing us up for that. You write your own story. She didn’t fill in all the details, and I just thought that was really meaningful. I am as guilty as this woman was about projecting all these positive attributes on how it would be in a relationship with this bartender, right? I’m fantasizing about this world that doesn’t exist. I did the same thing as the narrator and the author invited us to.
Colin: To interject, I wouldn’t say this is like an Omelas phenomenon where you are kind of complicit in this scheme that they have. My sense on why she did this was not to make you guilty by rendering a negative or presumptuous judgment. I think she did this so that you can relate, because this story is eminently relatable. So by leaving out details, you become the narrator. We’re seeing so closely through this narrator’s eyes. There are certain details that are left out about her background about what her job is. It’s almost like she becomes you. And I think that’s the beauty of it, and I’m a guy, but I can relate perfectly to this character. And you assume she’s a writer. But she could have been anything really. She could have been a data scientist, right? We don’t know. I think that’s the strength of the story: it is not to make us complicit, it is to make it about us, in a way.
Colin: And that’s the relatability of it. This is why this story I feel is so relatable. And that’s a real testament to the technical skill the writer and how she left out things intentionally so that we could, in fact, identify so strongly with this narrator.
▶ Love during the pandemic
Jennifer: I just wanted to go back to what you said about the pandemic. She mentions the pandemic when she did the timeline in her head. They met right during the pandemic:
I thought, What happened three years ago? The world had shut down. The pandemic. People had paired up quickly. Survival can feel a lot like love. The way you are forced to need each other. Maybe that was what it was for him. A coming together that was a convenience. And after two years, being that close, even if you didn’t love someone, you would then, because the circumstances encouraged it.
Jennifer: She is in fact, fact checking right? She’s asserting that at the start of the pandemic, people got together in a hurry without much interviewing, right? Oh, my gosh! The world is ending! Everyone get together before it is too late. And once you are kind of locked into place, you are trapped. The idea that after two years, whether you love someone or not, you would love them because the circumstances created that love. That was just very powerful indication to me of what she thought about relationships in general and that relationship in particular.
Jennifer: To me that was just like such a heartbreaking revelation that nobody’s coming for your unhappiness. If you want to say stuck and unfulfilled, go ahead. At least he’s with someone. They just see her on the outside, saying “I don’t have my person” and even if he’s unhappy, at least he has that.
Colin: Actually, I think there’s even more to it than that. I think this is a kind of truism, because if you’re king of the hill, you are always fending off threats to your position. People always think there’s a certain anxiety that comes with happiness. How long will last? If you’re in a blissful situation, in the back of your mind it’s totally natural to wonder how long can this last? and it can create a kind of anxiety, that king of the hill syndrome or king of the hill situation. You’re always worried about whatever that threat is to your happiness. I think it’s a truism. It’s almost a more comfortable situation, because at least you’re not anxious about losing that bliss or that beatitude or that happiness that you have. You’re not worried about losing it.
Colin: This idea of settling that’s talked about here. I related to that when she said Oh, he wasn’t like the other guys who just you know the status quo you know, keeping up with the Jones, this lifestyle American dream lifestyle you get.
I liked that he was almost forty. It meant that I wouldn’t have to teach him anything or help him become anything. It meant that he wasn’t like other men, getting married and starting a family in their twenties, with a house by the time they’re thirty. What after that? An affair, to keep it going, or a divorce, for giggles.
Colin: It’s like the Bed, Bath and Beyond lifestyle, right?
Jennifer: But she saw it.
Colin: She saw it and she didn’t want that, or at least she maybe she’s jaded. Maybe she did want it. But there is a way to look at that kind of lifestyle and see it as very unpalatable and unappealing, right? She had both notions, maybe simultaneously. That’s the ambiguity again. Maybe both notions were in her head. She’s obviously doesn’t want to meet someone like that. She doesn’t want to be in that situation herself. But, on the other hand, maybe she is a little bit jealous about people who are. But it’s hard to be jealous of the people who get divorced.
Colin: Just circling back to the line about the unhappiness thing. I think that is a very relatable line. When you’re happy you get nervous.
Jennifer: You could lose it.
Colin: She’s projecting onto that guy. She’s making excuses. She’s tacitly saying that she’s better and more desirable than the girlfriend. The assumption that he’s only staying with her because he was settling. This is kind of a defense mechanism on her part.
Jennifer: When we were talking about what her background is, we don’t know for sure. But when she says:
It was possible to know him. But, really, I didn’t want to know him. I liked him at exactly this distance. They all disappoint, eventually, when you get to know them. I just wanted to look and make up stories.
Jennifer: She’s spelling out for us that she’s had some experiences where it’s better not to know. The idea that I would just rather look at you from afar. It’s also about safety. If you’re in an unhappy relationship, which she projects onto the bartender and his girlfriend, that’s safe. There’s no risk in staying put.
Jennifer: As you said, when you settle it’s not risky. It’s comfortable, and you know the confines of your cage. There’s nothing to fear. You’re not going to get wet. You’re not going to go scuba diving. Knowing the confines of your cage, there is nothing to worry about, so you can settle in. And I just thought that was very interesting about her psychological profile. If we were pulling that together and making our own assumptions, that feels true to the story she’s told us about herself. That feels true that she would let somebody stay in unhappiness, because at least you’re together and not alone.
Colin: We get the sense that she’s maybe a bit risk averse, she likes aquarium. She doesn’t want to get too close, because then she’s always disappointed. But at the same time, she’s talking about him settling. She’s not settling. She could settle for one of these 100 guys a day that she’s getting contacted by, right? Presumably she doesn’t want to settle. This is very complex.
Colin: These are almost contradictory kinds of thoughts, in a way. She’s thinking about him. And she’s almost seeing a benefit in settling. This seems to be a very common notion, settling. Back in the day, people got married for other reasons, and then they stayed together for life. But now there’s so many options.
Jennifer: She echoes this back into the story when she talks about the life cycle of relationships. She idealizes the bartender because he is not in his twenties, so he is not trying to prove himself. He didn’t just get married in his thirties, and he also didn’t just have a divorce in his forties. I think in her mind there’s this life cycle of growth for men in relationships. For those getting married too early, buying a house in the suburbs, perhaps that choice felt like settling. Or perhaps it was doing the right thing even though that ultimately didn’t result in happiness.
Jennifer: I think there’s that echoing question of do you settle because you have someone, even if you are unhappy, or do you float outside of the aquarium, looking in, all the time thinking God, I wish I had what they had. I just can’t get in.
Colin: I think that’s what makes this story so good is just how relatable it is.
▶ The last scene and the last line
When I returned to the restaurant, the following Friday, I knew that the woman at the bar was her. His girlfriend. The woman was—as I wanted her to be for him—beautiful. I watched her, and I listened. She kept calling him something. I tried to make out what it was.
“Bozo,” she said.
I’ve heard babes, sweetheart, darling, honey. But bozo I’d never heard before. I knew then that he really did love her. To be a bozo to someone meant that you let them call you anything, and you would be that for them. He wanted to be a bozo.
Then, alone, I got up and left the restaurant. I walked down a dark alley nearby. And there, with my back up against a brick wall, I closed my eyes. I said the thing she’d called him to no one in particular. I wanted what was in her mouth to be in mine, too.
Colin: Wow, what an ending! There is no ambiguity, we are not like sitting here asking “what does that mean?” It’s just so powerful.
Jennifer: The author created these very evocative moods as she takes us along on this emotional journey. The image of the narrator literally having her back against the wall, alone in an alley, calling out this guy’s name to nobody, is haunting. It just lingers.
Colin: I think the last line makes this story. As George Saunders says, “Is it a story yet?” Or what becomes a story, not on last page, but on precisely the last line, I think, and that’s the beauty of it. But again she wants what she wanted, what was in her mouth.
Colin: Obviously, we get a sensual sexual kind of connotation, the intimacy, a connotation right here with the word mouth, and it comes up repeatedly. So, she longs for him physically, but it seems more than that, despite what she’s claiming. She seems to be claiming that she’s not interested in really getting to know him.
Jennifer: I’d like to go back to the mouth thing because she owns that sensual side of it. But what also what comes out of our mouth? Our words. She mentioned he was a man of a few words. For me, it was this feeling of I’m telling my story, but the words aren’t coming out, and it’s all in my head. I want that intimate word they call each other, to come out of my mouth. I want to be part of that.
Colin: As George Saunders says, “Is it a story yet?“. It definitively becomes a story in that last paragraph, right? And it was great before that. But this is just the piece de triomphe. What it needed to be the perfect story. I think it’s a perfect story. It really is a perfect story in many ways.
Jennifer: Yeah, it’s like, what would we add? There’s nothing to add, and there’s nothing to take away.
Colin: She wants what they have. That’s it. She wants a bozo and she wants to be a bozo. And that just says it all right there, right? And that’s the ultimate: she has admitted to us or herself. She’s showing that vulnerability, and she longs for this.
Jennifer: Her heart was on her sleeve. In that moment, there was nothing held back.
Colin: She was not in the aquarium in that final admission, that final act of openness.
Jennifer: In the end, she was broken open.
▶ Bozo as a term of endearment
Jennifer: So one quick sidebar about the title, Bozo. For people of a certain age, if somebody uses “bozo”, it is typically a derogatory term. I could say “I went out to the bar last night and I met 15 bozos” to indicate that I was dealing with fools, jerks, undesirable dudes, etc. It’s not a term of endearment in my world. So for me, when the girlfriend called him that, I thought Well, maybe she did meet one of him as the bozos at the bar, and as she got to know him, she fell in love with him. We don’t know why she uses that term, bozo. But from an outsider’s point of view, it doesn’t seem like a term of endearment, it seems like a derogatory term.
Colin: Well, right, it’s ironic because it means exactly the opposite of what bozo typically means. So it’s ironically used term. Ironic in a good way here. We use irony in the opposite direction, right? But in this case, it’s a good thing. It speaks volumes more than if you had some generic hallmark greeting card monikers like sweetheart. But, bozo, how many Hallmark cards have that? That’s what makes it so endearing. This is what proves the love, right? Because, like the narrator said, this word would never be applied in this context, except in the case of a true connection. I think that’s says it all.
Jennifer: And as you said, it was endearing, and it was unique to them. It was their special code, their intimacy. They didn’t want to be like everyone else, right? And I think that was just so beautifully rendered.