“Lovers”
Book 1, chapter 4; Book 2, chapter 4
Characters
1.4 narrator (unnamed); woman he has had a long relationship with (unnamed); her husband (known as “the lover”); Clara (whom “the lover”/ husband has an affair with); her brother (unnamed, shot outside a diner); Clara’s Uncle Ray (who beats up “the lover”); a young black man in the music business (unnamed)
2.4 Irene Greenleaf (whose had liason with the narrator), the narrator, a friend (unnamed), Bill (the former husband of Irene), Charlotte (the new wife of Bill), the three children of Bill and Charlotte (unnamed), the borther of Irene (unnamed)
General Subject/ Plot
1.4: A woman, while having remained with her husband, retains a bitter memory of his infidelity decades later, a bitter hatred for the other woman.
2.4: A woman, unable to get over the infidelity of her husband, prays years letter for his death and the death of her family and is startled it doesn’t come to pass.
Motifs
1.4 Diner, infidelity, broken marriage, “black man in the music business” (Napoleon of first “Success”), “Clara/ Claire” figures pregnancy doesn’t come to term (like in second “Born Again”) “she had permitted her hatred to ruin, utterly, what was left of her life” (first “Born Again”), Bay Ridge
2.4 “35 years ago” (just like 1.4), alcohol (whiskey sour, margarita), cigarettes/ ash tray, “for christ’s sake”, brother killed outside a place, unhappiness,
Notes
Both stories involve a man who’s known a woman for a long time who continues to dwell on and be made miserable by memories of her past marriage (which is also the case in the first “Born Again”).
A couple differences/ coincidences: in (1.4) the brother of the other woman is randomly shot outside a diner (the first “In The Diner”) while in (2.4) he’s the deadbeat gambler brother of the betrayed wife and killed in a stupid altercation over boxers. In (1.4) the other woman’s pregnancy doesn’t come to term, in (2.4) she has three kids. In (1.4) the husband and wife remain married but estranged and the narrator is thinking of asking the betrayed wife to live with him, in (2.4) the husband and wife have divorced and the narrator rebuffs the efforts of the betrayed wife to have a romantic or sexual attachment […] Perhaps the crucial difference is that in [1.4] the unfaithful husband’s lover dies whereas in [2.4] the couple continues to live and have three children as well … Also, the [2.4] is more revealing of names.
The first “Lovers” is like the second “Born Again” in featuring a beautiful woman name Clara/ Claire who his very beautiful and has a brother and dies young. However, in the second “Born Again” her brother is Ray while in the first “Lovers” her uncle is named Ray. The brother’s name in the first “Lovers” isn’t given but we are told in that story that his death in front of a diner (reminiscent of that told in the first “In the Diner”) is the occasion for her embarking in an affair with a married man. In the first “Born Again” the married man who had gotten Claire/ Clara pregnant accused the brother (who is a “dim bulb”, maybe like Joey in the second “In the Bedroom”) of being the father.
The first “Born Again” features a woman reflecting on events of 20, 25 years ago; the first “Lovers,” which directly follows the first “Born Again”, has a woman obsessed with events of forty years ago. And in the first “Another Story” which directly follows the first “Lovers” the elapsed time span involved is “41 years ago.” In the second “Lovers” the time lapse mentioned is “35 years ago.” In the second “Lovers” the brother figure is a relative of the betrayed wife — not of the husband’s lover– but he also is said to die, having been beaten to death outside “Papa Joe’s.”
The first “Lovers” alludes also to the first “Success”, and I see no reason why the first and second “Lovers”, and the first “Born Again” and first “Success” and “In the Diner” could not be all referring to the same story. At least, no contradictory information is leaping out at me. (Though the second “Born Again” seems to lead us to a different vein of stories.)
Finally —“sexual fling, an expression, I grant you, even more stupid than ‘brief romance'” another one of these style conscious asides, such as occurs in the first “Success” (“as the cant of the day momentarily had it”) and “Another Story” (“As the smartly descriptive phrase has it”). Although I don’t intend to keep track of these they do seem at least as “symbolic” if that’s the word, “resonate”, as the other repetitions of the work. Perhaps they indicate that the narrator of the stories in which they occur (as opposed to the ones in which they do not) is a writer?
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