“Late Love” by Joyce Carol Oates, appears in the April 22 & April 29, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Here we present excerpts from Jennifer and Colin’s discussion about the story, edited for length and clarity.
▶ Initial thoughts on the story
Colin: I thought it was a great story. I mean, you expect, JCO, we in the know call her JCO. I took her course actually on Master Class, that’s why I’m entitled to call her JCO. So you’re right, she is a great writer. Obviously, she’s published an enormous number of stories. In fact, she’s actually been criticized by other writers for publishing too much, which, of course, she thinks is ridiculous. It’s almost like they’re saying, “slow down”. Some claim that it takes away from her prestige, because it’s almost like they’re claiming it’s kind of mass produced because she’s just so prolific. But that’s of course, ridiculous, right? They’re just jealous.
Colin: But anyway, she’s published an enormous amount of stories and books. Just enormous. And she’s very, very prolific. This a great story [and] I enjoyed it a lot. It is a little bit different from the last two. I guess it’s one of these “What’s wrong” stories. It’s a bit of a mystery of what’s going on. We have a couple of characters, one widowed and one divorced and there’s a lot going on. It seems to be delving into the surreal as the story goes on. What was interesting to me about the story was [the] third person narrator. So there’s an unreliability problem here. But you can’t have an unreliable third person narrator. That’s a technical reason: [with] third person narrators we are supposed to believe what they say. The unreliability would come in when you’re actually having dialogue. So a character can be unreliable through dialogue, [but] the third person narrator can’t be unreliable, so that is just a given.
Colin: If it’s a dialog, or if it’s a direct stream of consciousness in the character’s head, we can question the reliability. But that’s not up to the narrator. So whatever happens, we have to assume happened, right? And so my take on the story is it’s one of these stories that is a masterpiece of plotting to create this effect. It’s unclear what’s going on. Who’s having a nightmare? Is the husband having a nightmare? Is the wife having nightmares, [or] are they both having nightmares?
Colin: This reminded me of “What Lies Beneath”. Remember that [film] with Harrison Ford? [This] definitely reminded me of that. And that’s kind of what’s going on. But it didn’t proceed like that, right? As far as we know, there was no actual murder or anything like that. It was psychological, and by the end, we suspect the husband because he seems crazy. He’s having these dreams. He seems very capricious. His whole attitude changes.
Colin: But at the end of the story, the leeches [are] the giveaway that this not real. These leeches can’t exist, right? It turns out to be just in the mind of the wife. We find out, as it goes on, that maybe she’s the one who’s actually having the crazy nightmares and the delusions. That was just my first impression. Overall, I love this story. It’s really enjoyable.
Colin: There [are] some very nice contrasting descriptions of the husband in the day and the husband at night with some very unsavory word choices. I thought that was brilliant. I really enjoyed the story. I need to read it again, though, to confirm or disconfirm my initial theory about the plotting and exactly what is going on.
Jennifer: Yes, Joyce Carol Oates has this broad depth of all these stories that she’s created. I was sucked in immediately to the story for the content, for the very distinct way in which she leaves us questioning what is real, what is not real. And, as you said, [with] the leeches, [its] like, Wait a minute, something’s going wrong with these dreams.
Jennifer: My initial [question] was What is the nature of the relationship between this husband and this wife? I found it so curious that when she asked him [directly] or makes any allusions to his past, [he shuts down]. He [claims] that he doesn’t talk about the past. When the new wife looked up the first wife, she didn’t exist. It’s like this whole erasure, and I was [curious to find out] what is going on there.
Jennifer: The [characters] are not named other than K. and T., which I thought was interesting. [Although] we talk about his job, his house, his kids, his friends, we know very little about the new wife. I just thought that was a very interesting choice that led me to think about What is this relationship dynamic? What’s really going on? And, as you said, there’s all this suspense. And for me, it’s like, Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? Is there a good guy? Is there a bad guy?
Jennifer: And as we’ve talked about in previous stories, there’s this level of vulnerability and authenticity. Who gets to be heard and who gets silenced? Who do we trust, and who do we not trust? So, for me those were all top of mind, this vibrancy. From my standpoint, it would be great if we could pick apart some of those specific areas, because they really riled me up in this story.
Jennifer: And I’ll just end with this something that you said really rang true for me: some of the scenes were kind of gruesome. My initial thought was Oh, it’s a love story! And they found each other late in life, how sweet. This is going to be so nice. And then it was like, Wow! You are hitting us with these gruesome images, with these sights, these sounds, these smells. She just encompasses the full experience. The only thing Joyce Carol Oates didn’t make me do was taste something [in this story]. I sawt it, I felt it, I smelt it, I was in it, but I did not taste anything, thankfully, because this took a gruesome turn, and I don’t want to go there.
Colin: Well, exactly. These descriptions are highly grotesque, right? They are almost Kafkaesque. My sense is I think the husband is a killer. I’m believing it, right? He seems [as if] he’s hiding something. He’s having these dreams. Now again, I believe the narrator. We have to look back at exactly who is speaking, but if the narrator is describing the husband sweating and doing this clicking stuff, then he is.
Several nights later, the wife was again awakened by a low guttural muttering close beside her in the dark. And an eerie click-clicking of shivering teeth, like castanets.
… And now the husband had begun grinding his teeth as well as muttering.
Cautiously, the wife shook the husband’s shoulder again, hard enough to wake him mid-whimper.
Sudden silence in the husband—even his labored breathing ceased, and, in an instant, he was fully awake, holding himself rigid as if in the presence of an enemy.
Colin: We have to go back and look very closely, because JCO is a master of technique. Everything is very deliberately done here, every word choice, everything. And she did manifest this brilliantly. So we have to look closely to see exactly what is happening. Going back to how the story progresses, don’t you feel the pendulum shifting? At first, we suspect the husband for sure, because he’s having these nightmares, he’s sweating, and she’s describing him in this kind of monstrous way.
Colin: And these adjectives are the female protagonist’s words, not the narrator, right? This that free and direct discourse again, this third person. We are getting really unsavory descriptions of him. He’s almost like a beast as he sleeps. In the day, he’s extremely refined, he’s articulate, and all this. This dichotomy of descriptions between his waking description as very sophisticated, a little bit reticent, friendly and everything else, and this nightly kind of grotesque, almost like a Jekyll and Hyde hide transformation, as we’re seeing it through [the wife’s] eyes.
The wife felt a twinge of vertigo, almost of nausea, watching the husband’s mouth as he spoke to her in his affable-husband manner, and recalling the ferocious scowl of the man exposed by lamplight, exuding heat, sweat, smelling of armpits, crotch hair, fetid feral odors, though the husband in daylight was fresh-showered, fresh-shaved, his coppery-silver hair abundant except at the very crown of his head, his eyes of washed-blue glass utterly frank, guileless. It would have taken an effort of memory to summon the bloodshot eyes glittering with rage at her in the lamplight, and to what purpose such effort?
Jennifer: Yeah, I love that you said that, Colin, because for me it was this idealization of her husband. She’s [tells us] he’s tall, he’s handsome, he has a great job, he’s so respected in the community. But now there’s this sweaty mess of dirty looks and angry words when he acts out during these nightmares.
She groped to switch on the bedside lamp, which was a blunder: fiercely the husband scowled over his shoulder at the wife, shading his squinting eyes against the light as if it were not a low-wattage bedroom light, the soft glow of marital intimacy, but a blinding beacon causing him pain.
Jennifer: I just thought that was such an interesting thing, because she was still holding on to hope. [The idea] that somehow she misunderstood, right?
The wife had to wonder if the marriage had been a mistake.
A mis-take: taking something or someone for what he is not. Mis-apprehending.
Jennifer: This happens early in the story, and for me, it was one of those moments where she’s still idealizing her new husband, but a crack in the surface has appeared.
The man the wife knew, or would have claimed to know, never behaved childishly, vindictively, foolishly. He was a handsome man who carried himself with dignity, confidence. He was easygoing, gracious, soft-spoken. He dressed casually but tastefully. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that gave him a youthful, scholarly look appropriate to his position in life. If he felt disapproval, he was likely to express his opinion quietly. That man did not make faces. He did not betray anger, rage.
Now, in this precarious calm, the wife began to question what had happened. Thinking the husband might not have seen her, exactly. He’d been surprised by being roughly awakened; his brain had not been fully functioning.
This was altogether plausible. This was consoling, though problematic: If my husband is not seeing me, then who is he seeing?
▶ Is there a predator in this pastoral idyll?
Except: had the husband possibly forgotten her? For theirs was a new marriage, not a year old. A lamb with spindly legs, uncertain on its feet. Vulnerable to predators.
Each day came a flurry of kisses, light and whimsical as butterflies. Silly jokes passed between them. Each was grateful for the other. Especially, the wife was grateful for the husband. But how long could this idyll last?
Jennifer: I just thought that was such a beautiful, delicate scene but also brutal. She is talking about lambs, and she is talking about the stability of her relationship and that it’s susceptible to predators. Who is the predator? Is the predator in the story her mental decline or her inability to sense the world as it is? Is it this hostility and this anger she senses coming from her husband, which may or may not be real and it may or may not be justified. Somebody wakes up at 3 am. Somebody is not pleasant. Nobody is happy and joyous when they suddenly are awakened at 3 am. That’s just not a thing.
This was the explanation! The husband with rage-engorged eyes had seen another woman in the bed. The (former) wife, surely. He’d murdered her in his sleep in a rage. Because she’d seen him naked, in the sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts. Peered into his craven soul.
For how else could a husband impulsively murder a wife in their bed? He wouldn’t be likely to stab or shoot her—that would defile the bedclothes, allow blood to soak into the mattress and box springs.
Colin: Oh, exactly! Going back for a second, her imagination is obviously running wild. Some of this stuff is extreme. We have this vision or dream where the supposedly murdered ex-wife is advising the new wife on how to kill the husband. Now this is sinister, and this coming, of course, from the wife’s imagination. This is not a séance. We assume this is not a supernatural story. There’s nothing to indicate any supernatural element. This this isn’t Young Goodman Brown where it’s ambiguous.
Colin: This [story] is pretty unambiguous [on this point]. There is nothing occult happening in this story, as far as I’m concerned. This whole episode plays out in her head, which is very interesting, very sinister. She’s saying, you crush these barbiturates or whatnot and you sprinkle [them into his food]. This is very meticulous, to be honest with you. This is something we should revisit. I mean, where did she get this? Is this coming from her mind? I think we’ll agree there’s no occult in this story, right? So is she researching this in her own time? I mean, why would she know about crushing barbiturates?
Do not make my mistake. Do not trust in love.
Go to his medicine cabinet, where there are pills dating back years. Choose the strongest barbiturates. Grind these into a fine white powder.
*Stir this fine white powder into his food. A highly spiced dish is recommended.
Wait then until he is deeply asleep. Have patience. Do not hurry before daring to position the goose-feather pillow over his face and press down hard.
And once you have pressed down hard do not relent. No mercy! Or he will revive, and he will murder you.
Render helpless the enemy, for self-defense is the primary law of nature.
Jennifer: [Maybe] she killed her first husband, Colin.
Colin: Oh, boy!
Jennifer: What if she was the person who put the pillow over the face? And what if she’s the person who looked through the medicine cabinet. You just took me there, Colin. If feels like JCO is jerking us around.
Colin: Oh, wait a second.
Jennifer: Oh, by the way, we don’t know either way, but now I have like this murderous rage towards this new guy. [It’s] just a question.
Colin: Oh, no! I think you hit the nail on the head. Think of what this is now.
Jennifer: Oh, I don’t want to go there.
Colin: No, I think you’re right. I think she [could have] murdered her [former] husband. I think you’re right.
Jennifer: She loved her previous husband. He was awesome.
Colin: So let’s reread this story with a view to is she a suspect in her [first husband’s] death? But think about it.
Jennifer: You asked me, where did you get the knowledge about crushing?
Colin: I wasn’t [implying that]. I was just openly speculating. But I think you’re right. I actually think you’re right. I think there’s more going on in this story than we initially assumed, as we read it. You know it is a multi-layered story, but this throws in a whole other angle. I think it’s feasible that she murdered [her first husband]. You’re right, because think about it. Let’s go back for a second. This wife is not an academic. She doesn’t study biomedicine or anything like that, right? She’s flipped through some of the [new] husband’s medical books. Do the husband’s books contain methods on how to murder people with barbiturates? Seriously.
Jennifer: Not likely. Probably not.
Colin: So the question is, We don’t know much about her, but she doesn’t strike us as somebody who would know a lot about forensics and medicine and things like this. Yet what she knows is very, very specific, right? And it is very meticulous, very specific and frankly, is probably feasible. Right? So the question is now that and say she’s getting demented. You’re right. The pillow. How many times did that pillow get mentioned specifically.
Jennifer: Motive and opportunity, right? So it’s like she gives her the means to kill him: go to the medicine cabinet. She gives her the opportunity: put it in his food, make it into something spicy, because then he won’t notice. She claims that the ex-wife is telling her to do that, and I’m like I don’t think so. It’s not the ghost of the ex-wife telling you that.
Colin: Exactly. It’s a figment of our imagination. I think you’re right. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, you’re right. You have solved the mystery.
Jennifer: I don’t want to solve a mystery.
Colin: [A mystery] we didn’t even know existed.
Jennifer: I refuse to take us there. I refuse.
Colin: Oh, no, we should. Why not, right?
Jennifer: I will just say this is something you and I discovered together while conversing. That is how this came about.
Colin: Well, let’s note that. Not for a second when reading this story di I consider [the] possibly she could have [murdered her first husband]. We got to reread this and pay close attention to this. [Is this] the dementia coming out, or is this an entirely different way to read the story?
Jennifer: I blame her husband. I’m still hating on the new husband.
Colin: Well, maybe it’s not mutually exclusive, though. He could be a loser and she could have murdered the first husband. These are not mutually exclusive, I think.
Jennifer: Can we go back? Here’s the thing that gave me like a little teeny, tiny tinge of what maybe happened to the original wife of the husband who was divorced. The original wife passed away after the divorce. When I read this passage I was like, are you kidding me?
In the early days of the marriage, the wife had substituted a smaller pillow on her side of the bed, but the husband had noticed at once, had objected in his lightly ironic, elliptical way, noting that when a flat pillow was placed beside the goose-feather pillow the handmade afghan that covered the bed looked lumpy, asymmetrical—“like a woman who has had a single mastectomy, the symmetry of a beautiful body destroyed.”
Mastectomy! The wife had laughed, wincing. The analogy was so unexpected. But the husband was smiling, the wife saw. He’d meant only to be witty.
Colin: Oh, yeah, that was crazy.
Jennifer: His first wife died after they ended their relationship with divorce. Did she die of breast cancer? Is that why people don’t want to talk about it? Is just something we just don’t want to go there because it is so horrific, so let’s just don’t talk about it.
Colin: If she did, that makes this guy really coldhearted to make that joke. That’s almost sinister, if that in fact happened, and he made that joke. It’s a bad enough joke.
Jennifer: Of all the jokes you could make about asymmetrical things ruining beauty, do you have to reference cutting off a breast because she’s dying of breast cancer, and it’s destroyed her beautiful body. That’s cruel and a fundamental meanness. There’s something unfunny about that, right? There’s something fundamentally unfunny about that.
Colin: Well, yeah, there’s nothing funny about it. It’s exactly that. I mean, that’s a repugnant kind of joke.
Jennifer: Unless it’s black humor. Maybe I’m wrong [about being cruel]. Maybe it’s like dark humor that is funny to someone.
Colin: Let’s be honest. He’s not painted in the most positive light, right? I’m more interested in this murder hypothesis, though, because it’s not a mutually exclusive thing. He can be ass and she still could have murdered the first husband. I don’t see these are in conflict at all.
But she understood that the husband felt threatened by the subject, and quickly dropped it.
Like an athlete who learns a game only in the scrimmage of the playing field, the wife would learn to decode the husband’s most inscrutable moods. The wife would learn to anticipate the husband’s bad dreams before he succumbed to them. The wife would learn how to protect her own life.
Colin: This opened up an entirely new dimension. I really think you’re right. I think she murdered the first husband. But we need to prove it. We probably can’t prove it, but there seems to be [some] evidence. I mean her knowledge of a poisoning for one, and knowledge of killing people with pillows for two. This could be just somebody who watches a lot of true crime.
Jennifer: I am a CSI girl. I know all these ways of murdering people from watching the show.
Colin: Right.
Jennifer: But that doesn’t mean I could ever do it.
Colin: I mean, it’s not out of the question that she’s just interested in CSI and true crime. This is completely feasible, too, right, but at the same time …
Jennifer: It’s very odd if she can’t remember other stuff, and she knows this.
Colin: Yeah. Well, and but moreover I think we need to look for any close review of her sentiment toward the deceased husband right? And anything that was revealed about the circumstances. If there’s nothing else [more] than this, this just a possibility, but it’s a nice theory. It certainly fits with some of the evidence. Did she murder the [first] husband?
An aphorism of Pascal’s came to her: We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something down before us to prevent us from seeing it.
▶ Why did they get married?
Jennifer: So there were definitely some boundaries for her of what is shared space and what is intimate space, and what would be a rules violation in your relationship of overstepping. I just thought that was really interesting, especially in the context of what we have been told about the husband’s philosophy about life.
In the early weeks of their relationship the husband had made it clear to the wife that the past, to him, was not a happy place, nor was it a “fecund” or “productive” place—which was why he’d so thrown himself into his work and achieved for himself a “modicum of success” but was also why he preferred to live in the present tense.
“Which is why I love you, darling. You are the future, to me. A new marriage is a new start requiring a new calendar.”
Jennifer: His past was complicated. He spent a lot of time at work. He has a new calendar. This new marriage is a new calendar. We’re starting on day one. I’m not going to talk about my past. You don’t talk about your past. We’re living in the present. And for me, that also cements, in a kind of an interesting way, with the idea that if she is an Alzheimer’s patient or she’s starting to step into her dementia that they only have there and now, because the past is just wildly unreliable. So maybe, you could soften me to her husband, saying I’m not going to think about the past because we didn’t share it together. It could be confused, it could be muddled. We can’t reclaim it. So let’s just look forward. And so I could see some charity and some kindness in that interpretation.
Colin: Yeah, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have an overwhelmingly positive view of the husband, either to be honest with you. From what I think can glean from the story, I see this more as a partnership of convenience or marriage of convenience, right? There are certain comforts, and I think it goes back to loneliness. In her case, she felt suicidal. He saved her, but I don’t know., if he saved her so much as anybody would have saved her, because what she needed was just to not be alone.
Jennifer: [She needed] a husband.
Colin: Right. Exactly so I don’t even know that she felt he was her soulmate, either. I think at this age, having been married this long, both of them. I’m just speculating, but it would be a weird thing having been married for 30 some years to then marry somebody else, right. Wouldn’t it be weird? I can understand why in his case wouldn’t want to go back to the past. Because, frankly, can you ever replace what was lost in such a long relationship. I don’t know. I’m speculating, but again I didn’t feel like either of them were really in love, they were in it for emotional support, or so as not to feel lonely, or to keep up appearances, or whatever.
Jennifer: So I appreciate that you said that because there is a difference between their two circumstances. The new wife was a widow, so we assume, and this is big assumption [that] she was happy with her husband in that relationship until he passed away. Now we know the new husband divorced his wife 10 years ago. There was something that broke in that relationship, we don’t know what, but it was not divided by death. They made a decision to end that relationship. So I think that also for me sets up just an interesting psychological experiment of how does your experience of widowhood compare to being a divorced person, knowing that your spouse is still out in the world experiencing something new without you. I thought that was very interesting. The fact that they talk about this gentleman’s children by saying there are several of them, not a number, but several. And then they mentioned one daughter, who’s 40 that the new wife wanted to reach out to, but was afraid she would be rebuked, and she was afraid that the husband would be upset that she tried to establish a relationship with his children, and that that just felt so odd.
Only once had the wife met the husband’s adult children, who were (technically) her stepchildren—and how disorienting to have adult stepchildren whom she scarcely knew. Even the husband’s forty-year-old daughter, with whom the wife felt a tentative rapport, she was hesitant to ask about the (former) wife, who was the daughter’s mother, dreading the (step)daughter’s shocked, cold eyes. Have you no shame? Who are you? Go away, we will never love you.
The wife could not risk it. Could not risk having the daughter tell the husband, and how annoyed the husband would be, or worse.
Colin: Yeah, that’s weird.
Jennifer: And the wife mentions that she’s has adult stepchildren that she’s only spoken to once. The fact that, in the story, we don’t know what several means: is that 4, is that 3? Are they boys? Are they girls? Where do they live? What are they up to? They did say that they were all spread out, and I just thought that was an interesting detail to tease us with, but not flesh out. And again, that just pointed me right back to the husband as sort of the center of his own universe and these other orbiting satellites, I don’t really care about, because they’re still just orbiting me, the sun. And it’s like their details aren’t necessary, because I don’t care. I don’t know.
Colin: You know I got a Mr. Ramsey vibe out of this guy when you mentioned that. [Mr. Ramsey] from To the Lighthouse.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s so interesting.
Colin: You’re right, he does seem suspect, given everything we know about him. You’re right. He seems to be all business about [this new] marriage. He doesn’t talk about his past.
All of this the wife had learned from others. For the husband’s manly vanity was such that he would never stoop to boasting of his accomplishments; nor would the wife have been comfortable if he had.
Of his previous marriage the husband rarely spoke. Nor did he encourage the wife to speak in any detail about her life before she’d met him.
Colin: In fact, it sounded like he got fired from the university, or had some dispute or something, and he was no longer working there. Is that right? I don’t recall.
Jennifer: Well, it’s interesting, Colin, that you’d say that. Here’s a quote I’ll just drop in here:
As the wife listened, it seemed evident that the (sleeping) husband was engaged in some sort of dispute, in which he was, or believed himself to be, the aggrieved party; he was being teased, tormented, tortured. He was being made to grovel. Was the husband reliving a dispute with someone at the university? He’d retired as chair of the history department after twelve years, a remarkably long tenure for a university administrator; he was still active in university and professional affairs, and published frequently in his field of medical history.
Jennifer: So I think we heard the new wife’s speculation that he was having some troubles at work, and that’s why he was crying out in his sleep. I don’t think we have any other evidence supported [in the text]. She is speculating that he must have been having some troubles at work, because what else could cause him this anguish?
Colin: His character is not overly flattering, as you say, when we look at him he does seem to be a certain type. He does seem to have a bit of a Mr. Ramsey vibe in that he’s concerned with his work and his academic accomplishments, and maybe he’s not very close to his family, his kids or previous people in his life. It does seem that way. I get the sense that his new wife’s not an academic either, or what her previous or current occupation is. We do get the sense that she’s not another professor. You know he was some sort of academic. So there is some sort of disparity there. But there’s another question. Though he has been divorced for 10 years, has he dated anyone? Has he been in relationship since? We don’t really know. I don’t think so. That’s it is a good point, she’s bereaved and in her widowhood, whereas he wasn’t widowed, but is 10 years out [of his] previous relationship. So it does raise some questions is what was the motive [for the new marriage]? They don’t seem very close. Or as it’s pointed out, it’s like an affect. He seems affectionate, but it seems more like he’s just polished, right? It seems like it’s a savoir faire, as opposed to any kind of genuine affection. But again, it’s hard to say, because we’re not in his head. We have to take secondary evidence, right?
Jennifer: Yeah, and I appreciate that you brought us back to Mr. Ramsey from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. [Specifically] about him being academically inclined and kind of [giving off the vibe of ] the house is not my business, I can’t engage with you, the new wife. I’d like to refer to her as the new wife, K. mentions that he gives her these little butterfly kisses, and like he wakes up in the morning, and he’s happy to see her, and like they have this sort of blissful playful [dynamic]. She says they’re grateful for each other
Jennifer: There is this sense that there are questions that are too personal to ask of either spouse. Neither of them will risk that intimacy, that vulnerability. I’m thinking specifically about this scene when her husband wakes up from a nightmare, and she asks something to the effect of well, would you want to talk about it? And he’s like with you? No. And she’s like, but I’m your wife. Who else would you talk to about this like I’m supposed to be close to you, and then she feels, all of sudden, frightened by the reality of perhaps losing her memory or perhaps realizing her husband is so uninterested in sharing emotional intimacy with her.
Each day came a flurry of kisses, light and whimsical as butterflies. Silly jokes passed between them. Each was grateful for the other. Especially, the wife was grateful for the husband. But how long could this idyll last?
She was so grateful to him for having tossed her a lifeline, a rope she had grasped to pull herself out of the seething muck of despair.
How can you be so ridiculous, ungrateful? This man saved your life. This is a man who loves you, whom you love. This man who hauled you out of oblivion.
Jennifer: There are several specific things she mentions about her interactions with her husband that ring of “don’t ask / don’t tell”. He signals that he is not interested.
Of his previous marriage the husband rarely spoke. Nor did he encourage the wife to speak in any detail about her life before she’d met him.
She, the (new) wife, was hesitant to ask the husband personal questions. Out of shyness, fear that the husband would rebuke her, be annoyed.
The husband was watching her with an ironic gaze as a parent might watch a child blundering into something easily avoided if only the child would look where it was going.
“Yes, darling? You were wondering—what?”
“If something was on your mind, if . . . you might want to talk about it.”
“ ‘Talk about it’ with you?”
“Why wouldn’t you talk about it with me? I am your wife.” The wife was frightened all of a sudden.
(Was she this man’s wife? How had that happened?)
Jennifer: This was a gutting moment for me because she’s making this bid for connection, and he just slapped it down. He was not [receptive]. No, I’m not going to talk to you about this. How sad. This layered sadness of the desire to want to be connected. They’re in their golden years, and this could be their last relationship. Let’s go out on a high note. But no. They don’t know each other. It does not feel like the husband wants to know much more than the surface of this new wife. You get my coffee. You met my friends, and he never asked about her life, according to the wife. He just didn’t kind of care, from her perspective.
“Do you think your friends liked me?” the wife had dared to ask in the car as the husband drove them home, though she knew that the question would embarrass or annoy the husband, who did not like his wife to express neediness, or wistfulness, or disingenuous naïveté; and the husband had laughed, not unkindly, curtly saying, “Of course! Of course they did.”
But not expanding on the subject. Not encouraging the wife to ask further foolish questions. Not asking the wife if she had liked his friends, or had enjoyed the evening, or hoped to repeat it.
▶ Relationship dynamics
Colin: Let’s talk about their relationship because you mentioned that. Who are these people? What is the nature of this relationship? And this does come up.
Jennifer: It comes up again and again. But before we go there, I’d like to go back to your comment about Freud, because in the text itself, the husband gives the wife a lecture about dreams are not real.
“Keep in mind, darling: dreams are wisps, vapor. Fleeting. Silly. Aristotle thought that dreams were just remnants of the day shaken into a new configuration of no great significance. Pascal thought that life itself was ‘a dream a little less inconstant.’ Freud thought dreams were ‘wish fulfillment’—which tells us nothing at all, if you examine the statement. But all agree that dreams are insubstantial, therefore negligible. You make yourself ridiculous trying to decipher them.”
The wife wanted to protest; it wasn’t her dreams she was speaking of but his.
Jennifer: I thought it was just so interesting that again, she says her husband is a historian, he teaches at the University. I think he’s very much a listen here, little lady, let me tell you some stuff you don’t know kind of guy. And she’s like Okay, I’ll just listen to you. I don’t know anything.
Jennifer: I don’t dispute the facts that he presented that these famous historical figures have stated these theories. I do not doubt that at all those statements are true. But what really irked me about this, what really struck the wrong chord with me from him and why I just don’t like this guy that he was invalidating the fact that she had feelings. He tells her it is all imaginary, so it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters [to me] that she woke up in a terror. It matters she was crying out in her sleep. That happened. That’s not imaginary. That experience happened.
Colin: Yeah. well, yeah, right? Exactly. It’s gross invalidation. And also I questioned whether that’s what Freud said. I mean Freud’s entire enterprise was based on dream analysis, was it not? I mean, how can it be irrelevant?
Jennifer: So, Colin, I love that you said that. And I actually want to look that up later and say, like, were these quotes real quotes? Or was it a Jennifer kind of quote of like, I wish you would have said this, so this how I’m going to quote you. So I think that’s really interesting, because I also thought, wait, isn’t Freud all about your dreams? And maybe [dreams] are imaginary, but it still means something. And you know why it means something? Because we’re experiencing emotions. And again, we’ve had several stories in a row with these themes: Can you be your authentic self? Does your partner see and validate that you actually have a valid perspective, right? And there is so much invalidation of the wife in all of her forms. And for me it was this act of disappearing like he’s gently erasing the edges of his new wife in the same way that his previous wife, who did die after the divorce [and incidentally, you were correct when you said they were both widowed, since both of their partners are both no longer living.].
Jennifer: What’s going on with that disappearing? Why will no one speak the previous wife’s name? Why will no one speak about her at the grocery store or even the cleaning lady? People who have known the previous wife for 25 years. No one says anything. That’s weird.
Colin: It is weird, and let’s take second here. We have to go back to the text and look very closely. Is this her remembering or is this the narrator telling us so? Is this the narrator, this third person is telling us directly, so that we believe. But is this a recollection of the character? In which case, we have to doubt somewhat, because some of her accounts certainly are not reliable. Again, technically speaking, it’s a general rule of thumb that a third person narrator is reliable. But we have to ask, whose thought is this? Is this a recollection, or is this the narrator stating this?
Soon she discovered that the first (deceased) wife had no history.
No information online. No obituary. When she typed in the former wife’s name, a blunt message appeared on the computer screen in blue font:
This site has been discontinued due to a violation of the terms of service or program policies. Displaying this content is prohibited.
The wife wanted to protest. The name she’d typed out was not a site but a human being, a woman!
Yet to whom could the wife protest? No matter how many search engines she tried, each time she typed the former wife’s name the same message came up: Discontinued.
But how was it possible that the husband’s former wife had no history?
Colin: Because we know for a fact that the narrator can’t be stating this woman disappeared off the Internet, because that’s not believable. We’ll lose suspension of disbelief [because] it’s not possible. It simply can’t be done, right? So we have to suspect this isn’t actually the narrator telling us [this]. This is the character’s recollection or the character’s perception. And again, this Freudian thing doesn’t make sense, either.
Jennifer: And I’d like to acknowledge the subtle reference to Isabella’s monologue from Act 2, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, where Isabella implores:
“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me? O, perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the selfsame tongue,
Either of condemnation or approof …”
▶ Appearance vs reality
Jennifer: I just want to follow up on one other thing that you said about appearances. In the second paragraph
That they were “not young,” though described by observers as “amazingly youthful,” must have been a strong component of their attraction to each other.
Jennifer: As I was unfolding the husband’s character, I had a strong reaction: I do not like this guy. Everybody thinks he’s amazing. And when he closes his eyes at night all of the amazingness wears off, and the real animal person, with some unresolved issues kind of percolates up. And that was, for me, worth exploring. I’m deeply curious about the dynamics in this relationship, because I feel that there’s something super off balance here.
Colin: Yeah, exactly. First of all, it reminds me of George Saunders’ Swimming in a Pond In the Rain. He talks about binaries in Turgenev’s The Singers. We see some binaries here for sure: the waking life, the night life, the former ex, the current spouse for both of them. And again, it reminds me of Jekyll and Hyde. This kind of Freudian thing. We have the conscious and the subconscious at night. This dark id is coming out for both of them really, right? So we suspect the husband. It did not unfold as we thought.
Colin: I always reference George Saunders because his book is great. And he talks about, as a writer, not taking the easy solution. And the easy solution here is obvious that the husband is a murderer, and he’s going to murder [the new wife], right? This is the expectation. But George Saunders would say, this too easy. He talks specifically about this facile solution. We can’t take the obvious solution.
Colin: But Joyce Carol Oates is great because we keep thinking this is where this going and we can’t not think this where it’s going. Joyce Carol Oates is too good of a writer for that, right? She surprises us in a convincing way in the outcome of this story. (E. M. Forrester talks about characters). It is psychological. We presume he’s not an actual murderer and didn’t really murder his previous wife. There’s no evidence that he did that. This is a figment of her imagination, right? And the text supports that when she goes on the Internet, for example, and everything she searches, it’s gone.
Jennifer: And it’s blacked out.
Colin: Even a nation state couldn’t pull that off. That is clearly something wrong with the character, because a nation state even couldn’t pull something like that off right? So basically, it’s impossible for her identity to have been erased by the husband. So clearly, that’s not that didn’t happen. This progresses from a more kind of quotidian thriller into one that’s purely psychological, and something else is at play.
▶ Emotional rescue
Colin: I just want to say one really quick thing about the relationship. There’s this idea in her mind that he saved her because she was very depressed, or something, right? So she owes him. But in a way she saved him, too, because they were both presumably quite lonely. By her own acknowledgement, he saved her and she felt a sort of duty to recompense him for that.
Jennifer: I just want to read the quote that backs up that idea, in the beginning of the story.
The widow believed herself more devastated by life than the new husband, whose reputation as a historian and a public intellectual reinforced the collective impression that he was a man whom life had treated well. Only she, once she was his wife, understood how self-doubting the husband was, how impatient with people who agreed with him, flattered him, and looked up to him.
Jennifer: And there’s a further point where she states, upon waking him up, he states that he did not want to be rescued. He did not want to be rescued by her.
Jennifer: I feel JCO sets us up for that, because, if you’ll remember, at the very end when things flip from where we think it’s the husband having nightmares to now where we are thinking the husband’s reporting his wife’s behavior to us. It’s like, no, really the wife is having nightmares. She’s grating her teeth. She’s sweaty. She’s calling out. She’s the one who’s doing all the behaviors that he was accused of earlier in the story, which I also thought was an interesting mirroring of those experiences.
Near-blinding as the husband calls her name. Shakes her shoulders. Speaking urgently to her, “Wake up, darling! Wake up!” And she is free; she is awake. Not in the bathroom but in bed. In the fourposter bed where (evidently) she has been sleeping. Rescued by the husband from a terrible nightmare.
Jennifer: He needed to rescue her. And she herself said, because when she was newly widowed, and again we keep going back to suicide again. That’s a theme that keeps coming up in our conversations. She said she had attempted. You know she had thoughts about suicide. And this gentleman was her new lease on life and her role as a new wife and a new bride was to please her husband. She said so many things about that, I assumed she was just fulfilling the role of wife for her husband, day after day.
Later, on the back terrace, where the husband liked to have breakfast in good weather, the wife brought the Times to him as soon as it was delivered; the husband glanced up, smiling at her, clearly remembering nothing of the night.
“Thank you, darling!” He playfully seized the wife’s hand, kissing the moist palm.
Darling._ The wife knew herself vindicated, beloved.
Before that, on the back terrace, as usual the wife brought the Times to him as soon as it was delivered. “Thank you, darling!” the husband said, smiling.
As if nothing grotesque had happened in the night to turn them against each other.
As if the husband had not wanted to murder the wife, the wife terrified for her life.
For if the husband could so easily forget, the wife was resolved to forget also.
Jennifer: She was a function. She gave him the paper every day, and then they get on with their day, every single day. Is she a person to him at all? What is her role [in his life]?
▶ Conspiracy of silence or dementia?
Jennifer: Colin, you asked a specific question of whose recollection of the housekeeper not saying anything about the wife, and the recollection that the new wife had about her encounter in the grocery store. So thank you for calling that back to my attention that we are sort of taking [the wife’s] word for it, and her memory of how that felt.
When the new wife made inquiries about the former wife, she was met with faces as blank as Kleenex.
Alvira, who came each Friday to clean the house, as she’d done for the past twenty-five years, laughed nervously when the wife asked about the former wife (“Did you see her, after the divorce? Do you know what kind of illness she had, what caused her death? How long after the divorce was it when she died?”), backing away, dragging the vacuum cleaner with her. “¡Lo siento, no entiendo! ”
(Which was certainly not true, for the wife had overheard Alvira speaking English with the husband. Only with the wife did she speak a kind of half English, half Spanish, such as a child who did not want to engage in conversation might.)
In the grocery store, by chance, she encountered her husband’s friend Alexandra, who seemed at first friendly enough but became stiff-faced and evasive when, in the most indirect of ways, the wife alluded to the husband’s former wife. “Sorry, I’m in a rush. Another time, maybe!”—hurriedly pushing away her grocery cart as the wife gazed after her, stunned by the woman’s rudeness.
Jennifer: Isn’t it interesting that [the housekeeper] suddenly can’t speak English when the new wife asks about the former wife. And how she is left feeling stunned in the middle of the grocery store aisle by the husband’s friend’s rudeness. That felt real, right? Those scenes evoked true emotions.
Colin: I’m certain they’re true emotions, but what I think is going on here is that she has dementia. We’re not getting a proper recollection of what’s happening. So, for example, the housekeeper may never have spoken English, right? We have to look closely at the text. But it is quite possible that she is suffering from some delusions or hallucinations. They’re bad dreams. But she’s thinking that the Internet has erased the history of the ex-wife and so forth. I wondered as this [story] progresses, whether she’s suffering from dementia. Given her age and whatnot, it’s certainly possible and given sort of the strangeness it seems to me that she’s misrelecting. She’s maybe confusing things. It is possible that someone in the grocery store just didn’t want to keep talking to her about whatever she was talking about. So it’s not exactly clear that she was rude because of the ex-wife, or because of something else. Again, we have to look closely at exactly who is relaying this information. [Is it] through the viewpoint of the character, or is it coming objectively from the narrator? So my theory is that she has some sort of dementia and that would certainly explain some of the strange facets of this story.
▶ Who can we trust?
Colin: We don’t really know [because] we’re not in the husband’s head. We’re in the wife’s head. We’re never in the husband’s head, are we? So we don’t really have access to his thoughts, right? This a limited third person omniscient with the wife as the viewpoint character. We don’t have access to his thoughts. Everything we know about him comes directly from the narrator, or through her accounts of the husband.
Jennifer: Thank you, Colin, for reminding me that we don’t have any internal dialogue from the husband, so he could be having a completely different experience than we’re experiencing [through the wife’s perspective].
Colin: Yeah, exactly. And again, we can’t really trust the wife. Anything that comes filtered through her because obviously there’s some delusions. It’s not just the dreams, right? It’s the Internet thing and other things which suggest that her mental state is just not functioning properly.
Jennifer: She is experiencing cognitive decline. Colin, I’m glad you said that, because she couldn’t remember her first husband and what their house looked like.
Colin: There you have it. It sounds like early onset dementia, or some sort of phase of dementia. There’s been multiple references to her memory not functioning properly. So I think we can safely assume at this point that she does suffer from dementia, or some or some sort of cognitive decline. And that’s probably central to the effect in the story, right? Her being confused and sensing that there’s something going on that simply is not going on. And again, I think that part is cleared up by the end. I don’t think there’s any ambiguity regarding that. That ambiguity is resolved by the end of the story, I believe. Because we can only assume that whatever the issue is going to get subsequently worse. But again, we don’t know. The story ends on not an overly confident note, right?
Colin: The thing about this story, [is] it had a tremendous amount of ambiguity. This, of course, is a story that must be reread, because reading it a second time, we now have a different sense of the character, right? So we could now be attuned to Did she imagine it? This absolutely 100 percent warrants a second reading, and it will be a different story the second time. And that’s what makes this a great story. It’s a story that absolutely requires a second reading, because now you know things about her character [that] have been revealed that we didn’t know before until the end of the story or two thirds of the way through the story.
Jennifer: Sorry, Colin. He does speak out to her because they both, just throughout the story. First, she was the one who turned on the bright light, and he’s like it’s 3 A. M. You woke me up. What are you doing? I have a big day tomorrow.
Colin: What I was saying is the narrator does not have access to his thoughts. This a camera, we’re seeing him speak and we’re seeing his behavior. But the third person narrator, does not have access to his inner thoughts, the narrator has access to her thoughts. So this places a particular bias in the story where we are seeing the story from her perspective. We don’t know what’s going on in the husband’s head. We know what he says, and what he does, but we don’t know what he thinks. The speculations of what he is thinking come primarily from her. So this is a key to what is going on. Again, is he a bad guy? Is he really this bad? Actually, it’s hard to say whether this is objective information that we’re receiving, if it’s filtered through the wife.
Jennifer: And I love that you said that, Colin, because she turned the light on and startled him. At the end of the story, he turns on a light, potentially, right?
Colin: It says it, says one of them, so it’s ambiguous. We don’t know.
Jennifer: Right. We don’t know who did the light turning on.
▶ Animal nature
Jennifer: I wanted to go back to the animalistic nature that JCO really did a great job setting the scene for, in the opening paragraph
They were newly married, each for the second time after living alone for years, like two grazing creatures from separate pastures suddenly finding themselves—who knows why—herded into the same meadow and grazing the same turf.
That they were “not young,” though described by observers as “amazingly youthful,” must have been a strong component of their attraction to each other.
Jennifer: Repeatedly, throughout the story, [JCO] brings us back to this animalistic nature.
The face of the man roused from sleep was rawly aggrieved, accusing. It was not a handsome face but coarse, fleshy. Its flushed skin was creased with fine wrinkles, and the eyes, lacking the wire-rimmed glasses, were as puffy and red as the eyes of a thwarted bull.
In such a panicked beast there is danger, the wife knew, and she shuddered.
He appeared to feel cornered, threatened. A low growl in his throat became a whimper, a plea. His legs twitched as though he were trying to run but could not because his ankles were bound.
Jennifer: It was just very interesting that JCO set us up for that peaceful, pastoral scene. We see them grazing in a meadow. And, boy, that guy’s going to turn on you and he might have killed his wife! So I thought she just did a really great job of setting us up for an adventure that was maybe not going to unfold the way we thought.
▶ The new wife
Jennifer: I really believed that I was taking the wife’s side of things. JCO did a great job of sucking me into that female perspective, and of her not understanding at all what the husband was doing. But the way he was presented, made him in some ways for me, a little one dimensional in the I have a new wife. She’s a role that she plays. I don’t want her to talk about her past. I don’t want her to ask about my past. I don’t want to share intimacy with her. I don’t want to be vulnerable. It was just very interesting for me reflecting on what types of relationships did they have with their previous spouses. And how did that influence this new situation? I was particularly struck when the new wife said:
How unlike, too, the wife’s first husband, who in thirty-six years of marriage had never once talked in his sleep, at least not like this. Never moaned or thrashed in a nightmare.
Jennifer: And so there’s that. She’s still recalling her past. There definitely could be under a dementia element to that of just like, Wait! Who is this strange man that I am sleeping next to? It’s like, Oh, right, that’s my husband. I have a husband. He’s new. I just thought that was also very heartfelt, but also sort of haunting. It’s like, Will I, as a person, get to a point where I don’t remember the people who are important to me.
▶ Is there a murderer here?
▶ The morality of listening in / eavesdropping
Jennifer: Can I take this to one more place? I think we’ll probably circle back. But this is just front and center for me:
Again! The low, fearful, aggrieved muttering. What was the husband saying? The wife listened, now fully awake.
Now miserably awake. Despairingly awake.
Trying to decipher the garbled words. Rough syllables of sound. Like grit flying in the air. The wife was filled with dread. Did she really want to know what the husband was saying in his sleep?
Wondering, too, if it was even ethical to eavesdrop like this. Especially on a husband in such a vulnerable state. As if his soul were naked.
Jennifer: I just thought that was such a beautifully rendered passage. She asks us to contemplate if it Is it morally okay to glimpse into the private thoughts and nighttime terrors of someone else.
Colin: Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s a good question. This gave me John Cheever The Enormous Radio vibes. You know that classic Cheever story_? It_ is a great story [that] I believe was first published in The New Yorker. It’s got a bit of a sinister looking radio. The husband’s wife is feeling ennui or something, so he buys her this giant radio. It’s one of those transistor tube, vacuum tube radios.
Jennifer: Yeah, those old-fashioned ones.
Colin: Yes, like a whole cabinet [radio]. They bring it in [and it is] super expensive, right? And it’s got this kind of ominous green glow to it. It’s not working. It’s all like static-y. But then one day, they send a repair person [to fix it]. And then she hears this radio show. But it turns out it’s not a radio show. She can hear the conversations of all the various neighbors in this New York condo building they live in. And then she’s eavesdropping in.
Colin: And it’s really interesting. It’s a great story. But I got this kind of Enormous Radio vibe, because there is that question, is it ethical to listen to this radio? And it was kind of supernatural or something. It wasn’t just coming through the wire. It wasn’t really explained, but it was implied. It had some supernatural power, this radio, and but she could hear the domestic inner lives of these people who are keeping up appearances. And actually, I think this is a nice segue into this story because you talked about this public versus the private view of someone. Maybe you were being a bit harsh on the husband when you said he’s all public like this, but privately he’s not. But this this everybody, isn’t it? How many people do you know, except for people like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus have the same public and private selves?
Jennifer: Yeah. And I think that’s almost impossible to maintain, right?
Colin: It is a rhetorical question. Yeah.
Jennifer: The veil slips, you know the veil slips. And I thought it was interesting because she did say, is it morally correct for me to eavesdrop on my husband. And then later in the story, she says if he was talking on the phone I would know not to listen, right?
In their daylight life, the wife would not have eavesdropped on the husband if she’d overheard him on the phone, for instance. Especially if he were speaking with such fervor.
▶ The end of the story
Jennifer: I just want to go to the end for one quick moment, because it was so cinematic and beautiful.
One of them reaches for the bedside lamp and turns it on. Each seeing the other’s face haloed suddenly in the darkness.
Jennifer: This image stayed with me. Someone, we don’t know who, turned on the light, and suddenly, they are both in a halo of light. They both see each other in that last moment, and we see them, too. For me it felt like the Heart of Darkness, [this] feeling like everything’s dark in the background, and then it is just my face glowing with your face. I just thought that was just so beautifully rendered and left me with a ton of questions.
Colin: Oh, yeah.
Jennifer: It was so unresolved, and I’m just so angry at her husband. I didn’t quite resolve that by the end of the story. That lingered.
Colin: No, exactly. And that’s right.
“Darling, wake up! You’re having a bad dream.”
Fingers grip the wife’s shoulders hard, give her a rough shake. Her eyelids flutter open.
In the dark that is not total darkness, she is astonished to see a figure leaning over her, in bed beside her. Telling her, as one might tell a frightened child, that she has had a bad dream but she is awake now, she is safe.
Where is she? In a bed? But whose?
Naked inside a nightgown. A thin cotton nightgown, soaked in perspiration, that has hiked up her thighs.
Frantically her hands grope her body—nose, cheeks, jaw, breasts, belly. Only smooth skin.
In this bed in this room she doesn’t recognize. Then she recalls: she is married (again).
Colin: The ending certainly suggests she does have some cognition problems, right? Memory problems. And then one of them reaches for the bedside lap and turns it on one of them. Which one? That’s interesting, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s got a resonant ending, doesn’t it? It’s not a feel good ending. Again, she doesn’t recognize the room. She temporarily forgot that she was married again.