Fault Line

It’s a lovely Irwin Shaw Sunday morning in New York City. “Michael held Frances’ arm. . . . They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast.” Michael almost falls as they walk. His wife’s response lets us know why this story is titled “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “She’s not so pretty anyway,” Frances said. “Anyway, not pretty enough     to take a chance breaking your neck looking at her.”

Congenial husband and wife banter spills from the page as they walk on, no hint of tension. Until Frances breaks off mid-sentence:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published     “Say, are you listening to me?”     “Sure,” he said. He took his eyes off the hatless girl with the dark hair,     cut dancer-style, like a helmet, who was walking past him with the self-    conscious strength and grace dancers have. She was walking without a     coat and she looked very solid and her belly was flat, like a boy’s, under     her skirt, and her hips swung boldly because she was a dancer and also     because she knew Michael was looking at her. . . . Michael noticed all these     things before he looked back at his wife.

And clearly Frances has been noticing her husband noticing.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “You always look at other women,” Frances said. “At every damn woman     in the City of New York.”

As the conversation continues, the words border on bickering. Michael tries to defend himself:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “I look at women,” he said. “Correct. I don’t say it’s wrong or right, I     look at them. . . .”    “You look at them as through you want them . . . Every one of them.”

Minutes later, after rhapsodizing about all the attractive women in the city, Michael admits, “I can’t help but look at them. I can’t help but want them.” And shortly after: “Sometimes I feel I would like to be free.”

What has been said here reveals not necessarily the end of Michael and Frances—but a fault line that threatens their marriage. In the space of a few minutes, a woman surprises her husband by saying what she has noticed. A husband surprises his wife by verifying what she fears. Readers are surprised by seeing—perhaps for the umpteenth time—the disrupting power words can have in what begins as a congenial conversation between two people who take their relationship for granted.

I’ve written about this kind of story, this kind of moment before, when an ordinary conversation trips over a word, an admission, that can’t be taken back. I call these Hurstwood moments, after the character in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie who is on the verge of returning $10,000 in cash that is not his to the safe where it belongs . . . when the safe door clicks shut.

Frances might have dropped the subject, but she didn’t. Michael might have safely returned the currency of his marriage to a safe place, but he didn’t. Shaw might have penned a definitive verdict on this relationship, but a good story—like a previously okay marriage—doesn’t work that way.

Note:

“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” is available in Short Stories: Five Decades (University of Chicago Press, 2000). I found it online at Classic Short Stories.

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