A Misunderstanding

Good day. We ended up last time in our exploration of Frederick Busch’s short story Are We Pleasing You Tonight? with a question as we hung with white knuckles on a narrative precipice: Are you embarrassed by who and what you’ve chosen to have around you or are you embarrassed by yourself?

The table of three or four dinner guests present the protagonist, Peter, with a mirror that shows him how he is not pleased with his current life, a life where he stays busy and tries not to think of his losses. The story, however, does not show what new actions he takes as a result of this realization, it ends at the point of confrontation.

The precipice was built by having two situations combined. Peter is drawn to a table of three customers who celebrate the birthday of a deceased fourth member of their party. One of the party strongly resembles a photo Peter saw in the morning paper of the daughter of his ex-wife, who resembled the great love of his life. The climax of the story occurs when Peter hovers at the table and overhears the widow saying: “And, every time, in spite of my best efforts, I remember the dishonesty and disloyalty. How can I forgive them? And I try. You compartmentalize your life, and soon you get locked in one of the compartments. And I was locked in another. And guess who kept the key? …Still.”

“Kay. Apparently, the widow of the absent birthday honoree has gone from idealizing him to denigration. She maintains a veneer of remembering him as a wonderful and loving spouse but after a few drinks, speaks of him as being dishonest and disloyal. She speaks too of being aware of her coping mechanism, compartmentalization. In other words, she gets through her life post marriage by keeping all the good memories separate from the bad ones.

Peter’s response is that, in the midst of being concerned about a waiter’s condition (on drugs), he asks all of the party—including the dead man—if they are pleased. “Are we pleasing you tonight?” he asks, echoing the story’s title.

“The old lady’s lips were pursed. It was as if she fought a pain. She looked at her son and then at the photographs. She shook her head.”

Peter notes the son regarding the photo of his dead father and looks at Linda, the son’s wife. “Though the rest of them couldn’t see who sat in Linda’s place, I knew, and I didn’t want to know, and I stood in silence…”

Unfortunately, at this point, the drugged waiter brings a special slice of birthday cake to the table and enlists other staff members in singing Happy Birthday, not realizing that the birthday honoree is dead and only present in a photograph and memory. It’s awkward and darkly funny.

“I’m so sorry,” Peter tells the widow. “For she had been betrayed again. ‘It was a misunderstanding.’”

“The son cleared his throat. He held the photographs. He looked at them with a sorrow I found familiar.

The daughter-in-law’s expression was only a little puzzled…She said to me, ‘Misunderstanding?’

“Yes,’ the old woman said. ‘It always is.’”

Structurally, this story occurs in one running scene with one digression in time that shows Peter’s memory of the morning’s New York Times reading. In that sense, except for the digression, the story could be a play, although there is considerable internal thought—a hallmark of fiction writing.

The narration is very close to Peter and no one else.

This is a tale of memory (painful memory) breaking into the present because of random reminders that crop up, in this case two photographs. Despite his efforts at denial, Peter is confronted by two painful episodes in his life, his failed love affair with Tamara, and his failed marriage. A photograph in the paper confronts this denial but he apparently shuts it up again until, later in the day, he is again forced to face it when a woman who strongly resembles both lost loves appears at the restaurant. In the second instance, the widow is confronted with two photographs of her dead husband, and this breaks through her usual denial. She remembers that he was disloyal and difficult.

A misunderstanding in both cases, leads to the re-emergence of tragedy, which cannot be denied. No one is pleased. Peter has received a jarring reminder that he’s lost the woman he loved, the woman he tried to replace her with lost to divorce and death. And the dinner party? The widow and the son have been reminded that the husband/father was not such a great guy, despite their attempts to pretend otherwise. All of them are embarrassed first by the people and things they’ve surrounded themselves with, and second by themselves. Different compartments, if you will. Interlocking compartments.

So, as in Ralph the Duck, Busch writes about matters of life and death but after the fact. They are both stories about how humans deal with tragedy.

Next time, a third story by Busch, Domicile.

Till then.

#AreWePleasingYouTonight? #FrederickBusch #AlanBray