[In the following essay, Walker explores the ways in which the three stories included in Women with Men incorporate as a theme the condition of loneliness and its perpetuation.]

Richard Ford's Women with Men (1997) is a collection of three long stories: “The Womanizer,” first published in Granta in 1990; “Jealous,” first published in the New Yorker in 1992; and “Occidentals.” It is Ford's first collection of work since the publication of Rock Springs in 1987. Like those earlier stories, these works target their subjects unflinchingly, bringing into sharp focus the moments when the lived life seems most diffuse. Appropriately, the characters profiled in these stories seem poised between past and future at some pivotal time when their decisions assume great significance. These choices, however, often fail to render their lives into greater relief or make their existences and circumstances seem any clearer to them. In at least two of these works, Ford leaves the characters entrenched in some confusion even as he allows his reader to see their predicaments with clarity.

Ford assumes a distant third-person narrative voice in the two stories that act as bookends for the collection, “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals.” In these stories, Ford utilizes a measure of “free indirect discourse,” that is, the adoption of a third-person voice that nonetheless is identified more closely with one character whose thoughts translate fully to the page; thus the other characters are depicted through that character's consciousness of them. It is a kind of third-person limited stance, as opposed to the third person omniscient in which the narrator may access each character's actions, words, or thoughts to an equal degree. In both “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals,” Ford's narrative angle permits a full glimpse into the heads of the protagonists, both men, yet fails to offer any kind of overt judgment of their personalities. Although both stories recall to some degree the same kinds of crises and attendant questions that bedevil Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter and Independence Day, they lack the irony generated by Bascombe's first-person account, Ford's sly humor, and the gaps between what Bascombe says or thinks and what the audience knows about him. Bascombe's wry self-deprecation and his obtuseness mitigate his solipsism for the forgiving reader who may find in Bascombe something he or she recognizes in his or her own self. This kind of identification is much more difficult in “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals.” Ford turns a hard eye on his subjects here, mining the details of everyday life and the less salient aspects of human sensibilities. Unlike the Rock Springs stories, where Ford has been said to practice “dirty realism,” “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals” focus on educated men whose intellects, like Frank Bascombe's, fail to redeem them from themselves. Their exterior lives, far from being barren or hard, exhibit instead the sheen of the privileged, and both men have been successful even when success has not adopted the expected guise. Despite such good fortune, both characters perceive themselves as misunderstood, but their efforts at connection with others leave them more isolated than ever.

“Jealous,” the middle story, focuses on a subject that by now should be familiar to Ford's readers: the boy on the cusp of adulthood whose parents, either one or both, have left him in some literal or figurative way. In many ways, this story fits the paradigm that I've already discussed at length in the sections on Rock Springs and Wildlife, so I won't cover the same ground here. “Jealous” may revise some of Ford's earlier explorations of this subject in that its narrator Larry does at least cultivate a relationship with his father based upon their reciprocal abilities to put their feelings into words. In the context of Women with Men, the story acts as an antidote to the isolation rendered so completely in the other texts.

Ford links the three stories through a common subject that comprises one aspect of the human predicament: the condition of loneliness and the unwitting perpetuation of that loneliness through what might be termed excessive self-concern. As the collection's title suggests, this predicament befalls people without respect to gender; as Ford moves his male characters in and out of contact with the women they encounter, he cites the human tendency to become so consumed by the self that others slip away gradually, first from the consciousness, and then, when it is too late, from one's life entirely. These stories make clear that self-awareness does not necessarily precipitate an accurate interpretation of circumstance or “other.” The characters in Women with Men attempt to cross a divide that keeps them separate, displaced, or otherwise isolated, but the language that they use in this attempt may only widen the breach. It is only when words are uttered without guise or guile that they shed, at least a little, their provisional natures and become measures by which one person may reach another.

MAKE-BELIEVE LOVE IN “THE WOMANIZER”

The protagonist of “The Womanizer” is 44-year-old Martin Austin, a salesman from the Chicago suburbs who markets a special kind of paper to foreign publishers of textbooks. His job requires periodic travel, and this story finds him in Paris, where he has met and become infatuated with an editor of one of these publishing houses, Joséphine Belliard. Married but with no children, Martin gives in to the flirtation, a harmless enough exchange at its inception. But as time passes, and upon his return to Chicago, he grants their rather uneventful dinner together and subsequent awkward kiss a kind of significance that the incidents clearly do not merit. Martin concocts his own version of this encounter that acts upon him like a tonic, rendering his heretofore satisfactory existence untenable and provoking him to acts that even he knows are out of character. In the bargain, he risks his job, threatens his marriage, and embarks upon a liaison with Joséphine that ends disastrously, with the kidnapping and molestation of her four-year-old son, Léo, under Martin's watch.

The narrator provides a clear view into Martin's thought patterns as the story unfolds. However, no authorial intrusion occurs. As a result, the story's tone offers no judgment of Martin's decisions, but it also offers no mechanism, via humor or irony, by which to excuse Martin's self-absorption and his actions, which finally and simply speak for themselves. For example, on several occasions Martin yokes two thoughts together but then cannot even see the incongruities between them. The night before he is to fly back to Chicago, he muses in his hotel room about what has happened: “he'd felt happy—happy to be only hours away from leaving Paris, happy to be coming home and to have not just a wife to come home to but this wife—Barbara, whom he both loved and revered. And happy, also, to have effected his ‘contact’ with Joséphine Belliard (that was the word he was using: at first it had been ‘rapprochement,’ but that had given way)” (26). In this passage, he goes on to express relief that there have been no untoward consequences of his little dalliance, at first consigning his “contact” with Joséphine to the realm of the inconsequential. What is interesting about the way Martin's mind works is that he finds no gap between what he says about Joséphine and his admission that he not only loves but also reveres his wife. Surely reverence would entail honor, which would then, if not prevent entirely, certainly curtail some of Martin's rationalizing of his feelings for Joséphine. The scene becomes even more complicated in its context, which is that Martin admits that he “had felt” happy, in the past tense, before he called Barbara to check in before coming home. The call changes his mood. Over the phone he can hear the familiar sounds of her moving around in the kitchen, and her voice assumes a friendly and enthusiastic tone, bearing no resentment for his absence. He all but needles her into anger by telling her, out of the blue, that he has had dinner with another woman that very evening, a “good” time, in response to her simple inquiry into what his day had held. Of course he does not need to impart this information to her, and in fact seems to do so deliberately, as if he wants to provoke her. He does tell Barbara that the woman is an editor, which certainly leaves room for the encounter to be a business dinner, but he also goes on to mention the “good time.” Not surprisingly, after his admission, Barbara's voice changes suddenly, and the conversation steadily deteriorates. But Barbara has stayed in control the entire time, perpetuating a kind of “let's not argue about this on the eve of your return” attitude, allowing for Martin's fatigue. In that spirit, she recovers herself, banishes the edge from her voice and offers almost too blithe a response: “‘Well, we're waiting for you,’ Barbara said brightly. ‘Who's we?’ Austin said. ‘Me. And the house. And the plants and the windows. The cars. Your life. We're all waiting with big smiles on our faces’” (29). Their conversation becomes emotionally false in the wake of Martin's divulgence, and Martin is angry, though it has been he who has introduced the seed of suspicion. The reader will later learn that Martin has had other affairs on the road, all of which he terms meaningless. But since he imagines that Barbara does not know about them, he does not perceive them as blemishes upon his marriage's sanctity or upon his “reverence” of her.

Martin's deliberation over which word to use to describe his time with Joséphine, “contact,” or “rapprochement,” is typical. He spends a good deal of time thinking about the appropriate vocabulary through which to describe his existence. He also ponders the relative appropriateness of language when he is with Joséphine, wanting to measure his words carefully in order to achieve the desired response. The timing of words assumes importance, also, so that in a given situation, Martin is more apt to be thinking about creating a certain impression than he is about what is actually occurring. In other words, he misses the moment through his analysis of his part in it. When he feels that he has said the wrong thing, he struggles to say the right thing next, as he does here with Joséphine: “He wanted to say one more good word that would help balance how she felt at that moment—not that he had the slightest idea how she felt” (14). The latter failure, not having any idea about how the other person might feel, dooms Martin again and again. He may have words in his mind to say, but he has no way to measure their effects on someone else if he cannot plumb the emotional depths of the person to whom he is talking.

The words that Martin wants to say often materialize for the reader, albeit filtered by a more articulate narrator, even though in the story they remain unspoken. What Martin wants to say to Joséphine before he leaves is that he believes that under other circumstances they could have been lovers, even good for each other. He perceives this thought as hopeful, some consolation for the brevity of their time together, and sentiments that are meant to encourage some intimacy uncomplicated by sex, untainted by obligation. All through their last dinner together, he wants to say such things, but he can never pinpoint the right moment, leaving him with the words unsaid but still thronging in his mind. The narrator reveals, “The words seem to have missed their moment. They needed another context, a more substantial setting. To say them in the dark, in a crummy Opel with the motor running, at the moment of parting, would give them a sentimental weightiness they didn't mean to have, since they were, for all their built-in sorrow, an expression of optimism” (22). Joséphine may be similarly calculating, and indeed her dialogue suggests a flair for the dramatic (“I am not so strong enough” (25), she says to Martin, to be his lover), but the narrator never reveals her motive for engaging Martin or, more accurately, of permitting his affections although she seems not to return them as fully.

In fact, Joséphine's responses to Martin are at best equivocal. She remains silent in the face of his musings; she whispers “non” over and over during their first kiss even though her lips part slightly and apparently willingly; she perpetuates a physical coldness whenever Martin touches her, if not physically recoiling, then certainly withholding any kind of warm touch in return. In short, she never fully reciprocates Martin's advances, either emotionally or physically. Her response here is typical. Martin has put his arms around her and “put his mouth against her cool cheek and held her to him tightly. … Joséphine let herself be pulled, be gathered in. She let her head fall against his shoulder. … It was thrilling, even though Joséphine did not put her arms around him, did not reciprocate his touch in any way, only let him hold her as if pleasing him was easy but did not matter to her a great deal” (21). Interestingly, it is Joséphine's ambivalence that compels Martin, which allows him to cast himself completely into whatever role suits him, protector, confidant, full-blooded American male. He gives in to his roles with a kind of abandon that must be lacking in his “real” life, but he loses his real life as a consequence.

Joséphine's situation is less easily analyzed because of the narrator's distance from her psyche. She is about to sign her divorce papers; her husband Bernard is a novelist who has written a tell-all book about her infidelities. Her past indiscretions only intrigue Martin, and he is surprised upon seeing Bernard's picture that Bernard is not in fact better looking. Bernard seems less than savory himself; Martin encounters him, recognizing him from the photograph in Joséphine's flat, and observes him without Bernard knowing who Martin is. Bernard seems nonchalant about their son Léo, and Léo exhibits signs of insecurity in the face of his changing life. Joséphine points out these signs to Martin, but she herself seems caught up in her own needs. The fact that she leaves Léo with Martin while she goes to finalize her divorce might even be problematic; she knows little of Martin, possibly not enough to trust him with her child, and she leaves few directions for him, circumstances that all but pave the way for Martin's fateful lapse while baby-sitting that results in the harm that comes to the boy. If only through Martin's perception of her and the narrator's factual recording of her behavior, Joséphine comes across as a woman who possibly thinks only of herself and who lets herself be caught up in the moment perhaps to forget the realities of her life. Martin himself gives into a kind of fantasizing, creating a world around Joséphine having largely to do with her being French, and therefore less capable of being known, he imagines, than a “regular” woman would be. He imparts mystery to her, in other words, and he responds to that mystery he has imagined, ignoring the realities of her daily life and responsibilities in favor of his fantasy. He becomes infatuated, then, not with Joséphine herself, but with his idea of her.

Martin's love and idealization of Joséphine persist upon his return after his first trip to Paris, interfering with his work and with his relationship with Barbara. His feelings make clear that he is experiencing an infatuation, and one that, with the passage of time, would probably dissipate in its intensity. Instead, however, Martin encourages it to flourish, remaining abstracted from the more pressing forces upon his attention: his wife and his job. Barbara finally lets Martin have it with a string of evidence testifying to his taking her for granted. She also points out the distance that has grown between them, largely because of what she terms Martin's being “unreachable” (42). She accuses him of thinking himself “fixed,” as a “given” (42) whose actions in a foreign country will not affect him later, or affect those whom he loves, but they do. Of course Martin has been distracted since his trip, and even though he acts totally surprised by Barbara's rather vehement indictment, the reader knows she is right. It is Barbara who labels Martin with the words that become the story's title: she calls him a womanizer (44), among other things, and then she gets up and leaves him at the restaurant where they have gone to have dinner. Stunned by her accusations, Martin assesses Barbara's reactions to himself as an “over-response” (45). He goes on to muse about the opposite sex: “Though women were sometimes a kind of problem. He enjoyed their company, enjoyed hearing their voices, knowing about their semi-intimate lives and daily dramas. But his attempts at knowing them often created a peculiar feeling, as if on the one hand he'd come into the possession of secrets he didn't want to keep, while on the other, some other vital portion of his life—his life with Barbara, for instance—was left not fully appreciated, gone somewhat to waste” (45-46). Martin's context makes clear that in the first part of the passage he refers to women other than Barbara. He practically admits here that his affairs fall short of some more meaningful relationship he shares with Barbara, but he seems unable to stop himself. The extramarital dalliances leave him strangely unsatisfied and render his marriage underappreciated, not partaken of to its fullest possible extent. Yet Martin continues to have affairs, acknowledging something kindred to Frank Bascombe's distrust of what he called “full disclosure,” possessed of secrets Martin would rather not keep and dispossessed of his marriage at the same time.

As the story continues, Martin's actions reveal that he does not really know himself at all. For example, he characterizes himself as a “stayer” (48), a man who had sense enough to do the right thing, what he figures is his “one innate strength of character” (48). But what he does almost immediately after this internal monologue is to leave Barbara, take the next flight to Paris, and reinvest in his relationship with Joséphine, which has never been what he has imagined it to be in the first place. Ironically, while he wanders Paris, resting up from his jet lag before he calls Joséphine, thoughts about Barbara come unbidden to his mind, that she might like this gift or that one, and that “She occupied, he recognized, the place of final consequence—the destination for practically everything he cared about or noticed or imagined” (58). Thus the narrator identifies what Martin risks losing in his pursuit of Joséphine. Martin calls her nonetheless, catching her as she is about to go out the door to finalize her divorce and in need of someone to watch Léo for the short time of her absence. It is on this occasion that Martin baby-sits Léo and during which he loses the boy in the park where he has taken him without his mother's permission. Even here the gap between what Martin knows and how he acts continues to widen: he was “a man, an American speaking little French, alone with a four-year-old French child he didn't know, in a country, in a city, in a park, where he was an absolute stranger. No one would think this was a good idea” (77). Although Martin usually perceives his decisions as having little potential to harm those tangentially affected by them, in this case his actions wreak irreversible damage to an innocent child. Appropriately, the reason that Martin loses sight of Léo is that he is lost in his own thoughts. By the time he comes to, and turns around, Léo has disappeared from the place he has been. Martin finds him pale and naked in some shrubbery, clearly having been molested during the moments of Martin's wandering thoughts. Of course Joséphine rejects Martin completely and utterly after this incident, and Martin is left with nothing at the story's end, not even a good excuse for his own behavior.

However, the experience leaves Martin capable of posing questions about the nature of contact with other human beings that perhaps would not have occurred to him before.

How could you regulate life, do little harm and still be attached to others? And in that context, he wondered if being fixed could be a misunderstanding, and, as Barbara had said when he'd seen her the last time and she had been so angry at him, if he had changed slightly, somehow altered the important linkages that guaranteed his happiness and become detached, unreachable. Could you become that? Was it something you controlled, or a matter of your character, or a change to which you were only a victim? He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure about that at all. It was a subject he knew he would have to sleep on many, many nights.

(“Womanizer,” 91-92)

Here Martin attributes a soundness to Barbara's reasoning that he was incapable of recognizing before, allowing for the possibility of his becoming detached, separated from crucial links that offered a mooring for his happiness. The answer to his first question, of course, is that the way to do little harm and still be attached to others is to be accountable for one's mistakes and take responsibility for one's actions. The narrator leaves this didactic answer deliberately absent from Martin's thoughts, at once suggesting Martin's inability to formulate it and also keeping the story true to its tone. Martin seems to have gained the insight necessary to articulate these questions, but he is unable to determine the cause of his possible detachment, leaving the three options of personal responsibility, character-determined action, or fate open as the causes. By leaving him in this moment of indecision, the narrator neither condemns nor redeems Martin, who remains sentenced nonetheless to the appropriate fate of continual pondering, night after night.

SELF-RELIANCE IN “JEALOUS”

“Jealous” provides the answer that Martin Austin cannot summon at the end of “The Womanizer,” and that is that meaningful connection with other people is predicated upon individual accountability. Larry, the story's protagonist and narrator, glimpses firsthand the ways that adults fail each other. His father has had several affairs, and his mother has left their Montana home for Seattle, Washington, after years of trouble in her marriage. Shortly after her departure, Larry's father moves them from Great Falls to the smaller and more northern city of Dutton, where he has taken a new job working on farm machinery. In his spare time, he trains bird dogs, though he's never cared for hunting himself. The story occasions a time in 1975, when Larry is 17, and he drives with his mother's sister Doris up to Shelby, Montana, where the two will take the train to Seattle to visit his mother. Like other of Ford's stories in this vein, Larry as narrator adopts a retrospectively poignant voice, telling past events with a present immediacy. Thus the outcomes of Larry's trip seems uncertain: will he then choose to stay in Seattle with his mother, return to Montana to be with his father, or in an even more unlikely option, will his mother return home with him? But the story's opening line, “In the last days that I lived with my father in his house below the Teton River, he read to me,”¹ reveals the answer, which is then never again overtly mentioned. In this way, the questions that preside over the narrative stay current even though Larry tells his story in retrospect. Surrounded by adults whose behavior is in some combination immature, despairing, violent, indecisive, or otherwise misunderstood, Larry faces that same future unless he discovers some way to exert control over his life. Finally, it is a measure of tenderness that characterizes his relationship with his father, combined with Larry's own sense of responsibility, that promises redemption from other failures at intimacy.

Even the story's elegiac opening line establishes some communion between father and son. Larry explains that Donny reads to him from a variety of sources for any number of possible reasons: to be aware of the world, to cultivate a stance of waiting for news, to acknowledge some order in life even when life seems disorderly, to admit that there is more worth knowing, to encourage Larry to pay attention, or even to admit, tacitly, that Donny was at a loss over what to tell his son. Larry characterizes his father as a man who does not stand by passively, as a man who acts when circumstances call for action and who cares about what he does. Nonetheless, Larry admits, “And I know that even on the day that these events took place he was aware that a moment to act may have come. None of it is anything I blame him for” (96). These thoughts close the story's first section and remain tucked away there for the reader to remember or forget. Larry's admission implies the significance of what's to come, and as the experienced, retrospective narrator, he can hint at the meaning embedded in the following scenes. Thus the story's opening sets up an investigation into the relationship between Larry and his father, even though the story's plot, which is relatively action-filled, dances around that subject.

The story exhibits some traits that liken it to the work collected in Ford's earlier collection Rock Springs and that some readers label “dirty realism.” The term implies the realistic telling of the story, that which makes it a close semblance of “real life.” Every event will be believable and in keeping with cause and effect; each character will be drawn carefully and act in a psychologically consistent way. In other words, what happens in the story could just as easily happen in life. The adjective “dirty” simply adds another qualifier that suggests subjects that might be found on the seamier side of existence or even simply in areas of the country where nothing is easy, hard work the norm, disappointment common, and violence more apt to occur. In Ford's short fiction, the American West is a common setting, particularly the more remote areas of Montana. Characters in these kinds of stories may often be at rope's end, so to speak, out of all good options and convinced that the bad option is the only choice left. However, these choices always have consequences in Ford's stories. His authorial voice never intrudes in a judgmental way, but most of the time the story's context exerts its own kind of moral imperative, making individual action the final arbiter of a character's fate. “Jealous” fits loosely into this paradigm, and its first-person narrative told from a retrospective point of view further likens it to Ford's earlier novel Wildlife and several of the stories that I previously discussed in the chapter on Rock Springs. Like these other narrators, Larry witnesses events that change his perception of the adult world.

The plot of “Jealous” is simple enough. Larry leaves Dutton, where he and his father have lived alone, and drives with his Aunt Doris, his mother's sister, up to Shelby, where the two will catch a train to Seattle. The reader learns as the story unfolds that not only has Larry's father been involved with a local woman, Joyce Jensen, with whom he has a reasonable affair about which Larry has been well-informed, but that also Larry and Doris were involved for a time after Larry's mother's departure. Their liaison is over in the story's time frame. The reader also learns that Donny, who in the past was fond of a drink, has now given up alcohol for good. The same is not true of Doris, who begins taking swigs from a schnapps bottle relatively early in the car trip to Shelby. The sheer and literal cold that characterizes Montana during the time of year of their travel, the day before Thanksgiving, practically becomes another character in the story. Its force is continually present, so that the characters engage in actions simply to combat the bone-chilling sensation. Doris's drinking serves this function in part, but it also suggests her despair. She talks to Larry as if he were an adult, which at once makes him feel manly and disconcerts him. Once they reach Shelby, the pair split up, Larry to buy a small gift for his mother with money his father has given him, and Doris to “warm herself” in a bar called Oil City. It is there that Larry finds her after purchasing a watch for his mother. Larry makes this decision thoughtfully and carefully, imagining what his father would think of his choice and feeling proud that he has found a nice gift but not had to spend all of his money to do it: thrift of which his father would approve. When he joins Doris, he sees that she has engaged in a flirtation with the man on the stool next to hers. Barney has recently gotten out of Fort Harrison, a hospital for “crazy Indians and veterans” (119), as Larry's father has described it. To Larry, Barney looks vaguely Indian and like a hard drinker; his face is puffy and he appears unhealthy. He and Doris have a rather drunken and strange conversation, into which Doris tries to pull Larry, who remains on the periphery, rather confused about what his role should be and taking so long to answer Doris's questions that she grows impatient with him. Barney leaves to go to the bathroom, down a hall at the bar's rear. As he disappears, a sheriff, accompanied by several deputies, comes into the bar. They are clearly looking for someone, and as one of the men suggests looking in the bathroom, Doris says, “Barney's in the bathroom” (124). What follows is a standoff that ends in a shoot-out and Barney's death. During the gunfire, the bar's patrons are ordered to lie on the wet floor, and afterward, the sheriff's men question everyone in the bar. By the time they are free to leave, both Doris and Larry are freezing, so they go to Doris's car to warm up again before catching the train. When they go to the depot to get on the train, Larry stops and calls his father. The story ends with Larry and Doris en route to Seattle. Thus Larry never reaches his literal destination over the story's course, but the beginning reveals the choice that he will make.

However, the story does prepare the reader for Larry's decision. It is not so much a desire to leave his father as it is a desire to escape from a particular place that drives Larry from the wilds of Montana to warmer Seattle. When Doris tells him that he smells like hay in the car and says, “You're a real hick” (109), Larry is angry, though he doesn't show it. At this point he slips into a retrospective voice, stepping out of the story's present as it is told and into some nebulous future moment that allows him to characterize his thoughts in this way:

What I wanted to do, I thought then, was stay in Seattle with my mother and start in at a new school after Christmas even if it meant beginning the year over. I wanted to get out of Montana. … I was missing something, I thought, an important opportunity. And later, when I would try to explain to someone how it was, that I had not been a farm boy but just had led life like that for a while, nobody'd believe me. And after that it would always be impossible to explain how things really were.

(“Jealous,” 109)

Larry acknowledges his desperate longing to get out of Montana here, but he also alludes to the difficulty of explaining his past, particularly in the ways that concern “how things really were,” a perspective made possible, no doubt, by this more mature voice intruding upon the recollection. His relationship with his father—and possibly even with both parents—seems to elude language's grasp, or, at least, defy his attempts to explain the complexities inherent in a long-distance bond with his father and maybe even the reasons for leaving him. Larry has referred earlier to the events that occurred which would bear telling, by which he presumably means the trip to Seattle, the violence he witnesses, and the realization he has. In this context, he has also implicated his father in some choice, or failure to make a choice: “on the day these events took place he [Larry's father] was aware that a moment to act may have come. None of it is anything I blame him for” (96). This “moment to act” seems to refer to another option for repairing the damage to the family, and that would be for Larry's father Donny to decide to accompany Larry to Seattle. Doris invites him to do so, and Donny will later tell Larry on the phone that his mother has asked if Donny wished that he were coming with Larry. Donny explains to Larry, “I told her she'd need to ask me earlier if she wanted that to happen. I said I had other plans” (140). In other words, Larry is not the only one making decisions that affect lives. His mother has made the choice to leave in the first place; then she has failed to ask his father soon enough, and his father is unwilling to change his plans to accommodate his mother. This verbal dance of withholding suggests an emptiness already gaping in the parents' relationship. Too much goes unsaid or is said too late. But Larry does not attempt to psychoanalyze his parents or even understand what it is that has come between them. Even though he wonders what the future holds for his parents, he accepts their decisions, and his recollection of this time makes it clear that his primary concern in these moments was simply to better his own life. Indeed both his father and his mother have placed importance on certain goals that seem to exclude the other, desires and dreams that in many ways are simply selfish ones—but that are also self-preserving. His mother, for instance, is going to school in Seattle to learn how to fill out income tax forms; her schooling ends at Christmas, which leaves her future open. Likewise, Larry wants to preserve as many possibilities for himself as he can, a path that ironically leads him from an open landscape to a more densely populated one. Throughout his trip, in fact, he keeps thinking about what might go wrong—Doris might get too drunk to stay awake and they might have to stop; his father might make him come home after he hears what Larry has seen in the bar—all events that might conceivably prevent his getting to where he wants to go. But like many of Ford's stories written about these turning points in a young boy's life filtered later through a grown man's perspective, a tone of sorrow and perhaps regret shadows the narrator's rather terse assessments of decisions he has made, implying that every choice entails a risk of loss.

In Doris Larry may see an adult who wishes, perhaps, that she had followed a different path. In fact, Doris seems for a time to have coveted her sister's life, which she then tries to step into by becoming Donny's lover in her sister's absence. She tells Larry, “I used to think your father'd married the wrong sister, since we all met at the same time, you know? I thought he was too good for Jan. But I don't think so now. She and I have gotten a lot closer than we used to be since she's been out in Seattle” (112). Doris alludes to a time when she has not thought the best of her sister, referring also to her own jealousy over her sister Jan's winning the attention of Donny. Doris herself has married an Indian, a man from whom she is now separated. She also tells Larry that she wishes for a divorce, some closure that might permit her to “begin to pick up the pieces” (108). She tells Larry that she has known real depression, though she's not sure that he realizes fully what that means. In other words, Doris exhibits many signs of loneliness, including her attempt to communicate with Barney at the bar and her relentless drinking. Obviously dissatisfied with her existence, she is prone to comment again and again about what a nice boy Larry is, as if she herself wishes for a person like him in her life. Larry, of course, does not know exactly how to handle Doris, but he does the best he can. When they are huddled in the car after the Barney incident, trying to get warm, Doris clings to Larry, saying

“You need to warm me up,” she whispered. “Are you brave enough to do that? Or are you a coward on that subject?” She put her hands around my neck and below my collar, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, though I put them around her and began to pull her close to me and felt her weight come against my weight and her legs press on my cold legs. I felt her ribs and her back—hard, the way they'd felt when we'd been on the floor in the bar. I felt her breathing under her coat, could smell on her breath what she'd just been drinking. I closed my eyes, and she said to me almost as if she was sorry about something, “Oh, my. You've just got everything, don't you? You've just got everything.”

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

And she said, “No, no. Oh, no, no.” That was all she said. And then she didn't talk to me anymore.

(“Jealous,” 138)

Doris seems to realize that in the cold and her drunkenness she is making sexual overtures to her sister's son, so she pulls away from Larry. In her belief that Larry's “got everything,” she suggests both his attractiveness and her own desperation. Doris's behavior resonates with the story's title, “Jealous,” and indeed to some extent jealousy, or at least the vaguest desire to have something that someone else might have that one does not yet possess, drives the adults in this story toward their own resolutions. Getting there—to the new job, the new school—may be one step toward taking care of the self, but it is no guarantee against loneliness.

Significantly, it is Larry's father who provides him with the safest haven. When Larry calls him from the depot, Donny is careful to let his son know that he will always provide a home for him. At the same time, he gives Larry room to make his own decision about whether to stay or to go. Larry asks Donny if he thinks that Larry should stay with his mother. Donny replies, “Well, only if you want to. … I wouldn't blame you. Seattle's a nice place. But I'm happy to have you come back here. We should talk about that when you've been there” (141-42). Donny's reasoned response satisfies Larry, and the last thing that Donny says is “‘I love you, Larry. I forgot to tell you that before you left. That's important.’ ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘That's good news,’ he said. ‘Thank you’” (142). This passage marks one of the few places in Ford's fiction where two characters are able to say “I love you” directly and without self-consciousness. This plain talk between Larry and Donny is perhaps the very fact that enables Larry to make his choice. He does not sever his link to his father, and his father makes it clear that his love is not contingent upon Larry's making one decision or another. This moment lends the story its poignancy, especially as it is cast in memory by the narrator, who seems to realize, or at least suggest, that the factors driving him toward Seattle had little to do with his father and more to do with imagining some future for himself that may or may not have materialized.

Appropriately, then, at story's end, Larry is still in transit, in the train car, and he feels some degree of uncertainty that crescendos into a moment of near panic:

I sat very still and felt as though I was entirely out of the world, cast off without a starting or a stopping point, just shooting through space like a boy in a rocket. Though after a while I must have begun to hold my breath, because my heart began to beat harder, and I had that feeling, the scary feeling you have that you're suffocating and your life is running out—fast, fast, second by second—and you have to do something to save yourself, but you can't. Only then you remember it's you who's causing it, and you who has to stop it.

(“Jealous,” 144-45)

Larry realizes here that it is he who has to take responsibility for his life, a choice he can make more freely perhaps because of the love that houses him. Although he is not literally shooting from a rocket with the speed pressing the breath from his chest, the metaphor that Larry uses allows him to conceptualize the state of near suffocation as one that he can control, simply by releasing his own breath. This epiphany offers Larry such comfort in that moment that he closes his eyes and sleeps. This image closes the story, providing a radically different scene from that of Martin Austin doomed to sleep on the subject of his detachment many, many nights. In “Jealous,” the narrator leaves his younger self at this moment when the future has yet to be ordained and during which he achieves a sense of calm and control. Even the notes of sorrow in the narrative's tone do not detract from Larry's equilibrium here, the stasis achieved momentarily and ironically in the brief span of time between one part of his life and another.

WHAT GETS LOST IN TRANSLATION IN “OCCIDENTALS”

The title of the final story of Women with Men [“Occidentals”] refers to the state of being from the West or belonging to Europe and America. The term suggests a degree of foreignness to its object, as if it were what others, non-occidentals, would call those who were unlike them. Like the first story, this one is set primarily in Paris, and a language barrier exists between the main characters—both Americans—and the native Parisians as well as between the American characters themselves. The title's irony is that these gaps occur among those who all are of the Occident; the term in no way makes its objects kindred. Furthermore, the story raises literal and figurative questions of conversion, or translation, through its plot and complementary subtext. Its protagonist, Charley Matthews, is a professor-turned-writer, whose novel, The Predicament, did not fare well upon its publication in America, but which for some reason or another has appealed to a French editor who arranges for Charley to have the manuscript translated and republished in France. Charley's trip to Paris with his girlfriend Helen Carmichael is in part to celebrate this occurrence and also to meet with Charley's French editor. At the last minute, the editor cancels their appointment, leaving Charley disappointed to be in Paris during the cold Christmas season. In some consolation, the editor suggests that Charley at least meet with his translator, and it is with the promise of that meeting, and the fact of Paris being open to his and Helen's exploration, that Charley attempts to convert his disappointment back into the joy he has previously felt. Charley's effort to convert his experience and, by extension, himself, fits together with the story's additional emphases on the perils of translation, the process of turning one thing into another for a different audience.

Even Charley's novel The Predicament deals to some extent with the ways that language fails, namely that words become meaningless through overuse, exhausted of their capacity to signify. Charley bases his novel on his own failed marriage, again converting the details of his life into a kind of roman à clef. Charley's was a “marriage in which meaningful language had been exhausted by routine, in which life's formalities, grievances and even shouts of pain had become so similar-sounding as to mean little but still seem beyond remedy, and in which the narrator (himself, of course) and his wife were depicted as people who'd logged faults, neglect and misprisions aplenty over twelve years but who still retained sufficient affection to allow them to recognize what they could and couldn't do” (159). The predicament, then, is how to sustain a relationship in the face of this kind of emptied-out language and shared existence, an endeavor at which Charley believes he has failed. He has even hoped that the book's publication would be interpreted as some new profession of faith toward Penny, his estranged wife. But Penny did not read the book; she even declined receipt of the proofs that Charley had sent to her. Having left Charley and taken their daughter Lelia to the Bay area, Penny becomes essentially unreachable, refusing all of Charley's efforts at communication. Her behavior inspires him to rewrite a portion of the novel, so that the character based on his wife is finally punished by the plot: the fictional character who is based on Penny thus dies in a traffic accident. But even this figurative death cannot rid Charley of his regrets. Although he takes Helen Carmichael with him to Paris in an effort to redeem some kind of joy from the act of writing the novel and its failure to reach its real audience, he recognizes once he is there that his act is not working. “Bringing her was his hopeless attempt to take an experience with him, and afterwards bring it home again, converted to something better. Only if he'd brought Penny with him could that've worked” (169). Helen even recognizes Charley's desire, as she puts it, to “translate yourself” (166). Charley's attempts to correct his life via his novel and then to convert his experience through sharing it with Helen fail.

Charley has set part of his novel's action in Paris simply on a whim. The decision, however, has entailed long hours of research to ensure that the Paris rendered on the page was at least on the surface an accurate rendition of the place itself. Since Charley has never been to Paris when he writes his novel, “he'd researched everything out of library books, tourist guides and subway maps, and made important events take place near famous sites like the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille, and the Luxembourg Gardens” (154). He experiences a thrill of recognition for certain places during the trip to meet with the editor, when he sees, for example, the street sign of the street where Penny's fictional counterpart has met with her demise. This kind of awareness, “but just for that brief moment,” makes Paris seem suddenly “knowable” (155), though Charley acknowledges the transience of the sensation. In a way, the fact that he has spent so much time imaging Paris makes him almost disappointed in the city's reality. Most of the time, he simply feels lost.

His sense of unbelonging is furthered by the suspicion that he is missing out on the nuances of conversation because of the fact that he doesn't speak French. Even before his trip when he speaks to the New York office's publisher's representative who informs him of the French editor's interest, Charley has trouble understanding several different things. First, he remains unsure of the woman's name, referring to her as “Miss Pitkin or Miss Pittman” (162). Second, he tells her that he's quite unsure about why “anybody'd want to read my book in France” (162), to which she responds “You never can tell with the French” (162). She makes another rather ambiguous statement that Charley is not really sure how to interpret: “‘They get things that we don't. Maybe it'll turn out better in French.’ She laughed a small laugh” (162). Finding her laugh and her response disconcerting, Charley becomes even more puzzled when she utters a French phrase, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (163); he admits to her that he doesn't know what that means. It turns out, somewhat oddly, that neither does she. She attributes it to Prince Charles, translating, “It probably means ‘Live it up.’” (163). In actuality the motto of the British Order of the Garter, the phrase means, “Shamed be he who thinks evil of it,” about as far from “Live it up” as it could get. In this way their conversation is littered with misunderstandings, illustrating how easy it is even for two people who speak the same language to create linguistic barriers between them. And, of course, their exchange demonstrates how far from the original a translation can stray.

On the other hand, Charley is so accustomed to feeling misunderstood and to misunderstanding others that he finds it some relief to be in another country where the language barrier is a literal one. As the narrator reports, “Time spent in another country would probably always be spent misunderstanding a great deal, which might in the end turn out to be a blessing and the only way you could ever feel normal” (180). Charley knows that he misses something as he conducts conversations with the natives, even those who speak English but who pepper their English with French phrases that they assume that he knows. As a result, he often feels a step behind in their banter, knowing that even if he can get the more mundane aspects of the talk he often misses the joke at the end that, for all he knows, may very well be at his expense. This sensation, no doubt, informs a dream that he has in which he is still married to Penny, who seems to be the person he is talking to although he cannot see her face. The two sit at a café, and to his amazement, “he was speaking French! French words (all unfathomable) were flooding out of his mouth just the way they flooded out of every Frenchman's mouth, a mile a minute. No one—whoever he was talking to—offered anything in reply. So that it was only he, Charley Matthews, rattling on and on and on in perfect French he could miraculously speak, yet, as his own observer, in no way understand” (191). When Charley awakens, he is physically and mentally exhausted. Defying Charley's attempt at analysis, the dream nonetheless suggests something quite literal about his character, and that is that he remains so caught up in his own thinking, mesmerized by his interior voice just like Martin Austin in the collection's first story, that he becomes rather oblivious to those around him. Perhaps he cannot understand other people because he does not really give them a chance to talk and explain themselves. Furthermore, these incessant thoughts—like the torrent of French words in his dream—finally offer no measure for real self-comprehension.

In this story, like in “The Womanizer,” the narrator speaks in the third person but is closely allied with Charley's perspective. In fact, the narrator seems to comply with Charley's assessment of which details need to be offered and when. Although the narrator spends a great deal of time describing Charley's regrets, his missing his daughter, and his wife's running off with an undergraduate student at the college in eastern Ohio where Charley formerly taught, it is some time before the reader learns that Charley himself had an affair with a woman named Margie. The story is practically over, in fact, before the narrative reveals this detail. Again the narrator offers neither condemnation of Charley's actions nor rationale for this decision on his part. Charley's infidelity, however, may lessen the reader's sympathy for him in the wake of Penny's departure. It turns out that Margie eventually left Ohio and her husband for Paris. As Charley is out walking while Helen rests in their room, he suddenly seizes upon the idea to call Margie, which he does, only to find out that her husband and children have moved to Paris to try to start over. Margie has accomplished what Charley has failed to do, and that is in some way to reinspire forgiveness and reconciliation so that all parts of his life could once again converge.

This contact only increases Charley's loneliness and his sense of displacement, as does the scene at his hotel upon his return. He finds the staff solicitous and cautious, Helen having overdosed deliberately on medication. Helen's suicide punctuates her long struggle with cancer, of which Charley has been aware. However, he interprets her pain incorrectly, unable to know the extent of it simply by virtue of his being another person; he perceives her disease and her attitude toward the trip through a kind of scrim that allows him a muted vision of her life's reality. He interprets her own being, in fact, in the context of his own, admitting that her predicament makes his own less complicated. Her life puts his in perspective, keeps him, at long last, from being “at the center of things” (215), which is not where he wants to be. In fact, Helen makes several references to the trip's significance, usually in the context of wanting to see some monument and using a tone that suggests, to the perceptive listener, that she is mentally going through a list of last things. Her rather fatalistic statements could be interpreted in the light of her survival thus far, that she has not expected to be able to see the things she's seen because she imagined that she'd be dead long before this. Nonetheless, the fact of her suicide renders her past statements in a different light. Without her life's ending, however, the rest of the story proves difficult to interpret correctly.

Charley's peregrinations through the streets of Paris have revealed something to him that he is able to recall after Helen's death. Even as he studies the street maps on his long walk, he finds himself repeatedly somewhere that he has not planned to be. Although neither he nor the narrator goes so far as to belabor this point, his wanderings nonetheless suggest that such displacement may actually create opportunities that he could not possibly have foreseen or planned. Furthermore, he realizes that the lines between events are not clear-cut markers or “lines of demarcation” (227), that he will not wake up one day and “be over” Penny. He allows that “succeeding as an exile was possibly a slower, more lingering process” (227) and that it is not at all necessary to fit into some place completely. In short, Charley resolves to take control of his life, at least to the extent that he can. The narrator reports what Charley is thinking: “You recognized changes in yourself, he believed, not by how others felt about you, but by how you felt about yourself” (223). This realization frees Charley to act in his own best interest and renews his hope in his meeting with his translator. Instead of trying to convert events to suit his life, he resolves to “convert himself to whatever went on in Paris” (223). This attitude allows him to interpret the translation of his novel as “the first move toward converting himself into someone available to take on more of life” (223). He reaches all of these conclusions before Helen's death, but he is able to summon them even in the wake of her loss. He has not planned to keep seeing Helen, because he knows in many ways that he is unable to be who she needs him to be. He has imagined the fictional death of Penny in order to try to cross the line toward getting over her, but he has faced instead the literal death of Helen. Not insignificantly, the event does not brake his progress toward what he deems a possible conversion. At least at this point he realizes that it is himself and not his circumstances that he needs to change.

The story's end leaves Charley pondering the ways in which he might put this experience into words, maybe in a letter to his parents, who are furniture makers but who have supported his less conventional desires. In Ford's fiction, the attempt to make sense of occurrence, especially through the telling of a story, usually bespeaks some positive turn for the character. In this sense, Charley's movement toward telling a story other than The Predicament seems significant, suggestive that he has emerged from a fiction into a new reality and that he might interpret this reality more ably. The narrative ironically implies, in fact, that The Predicament will not really translate that well into French, either, unless the French translator feels free to make subtle changes to the text. What she suggests in one sense disenfranchises Charley, especially in light of the repeated failures in the story for one person to interpret another correctly. Perhaps the changes that the translator deems necessary arise only from her own failure to “read” the book correctly. “Occidentals” certainly leaves this matter open to the question. What the French translator finds, as she tells Charley, is that certain problems with the narration undercut the book's success, that really the book requires a more humorous tone (though Charley has in no way planned for it to be funny). She even starts to provide Charley with a French maxim to help her explain what she means, though she catches herself, asking him if he speaks French. When he says that he doesn't, she says “It doesn't matter” (253), and then she pauses to recover her line of thought. There is a gap, in other words, between the way she reads the book and the way that Charley has conceived of it, an inevitable breach that occurs, of course, because one person does not think exactly like another. To the French translator's mind, another problem resides with the narrator (who is, as Charley has acknowledged, basically himself). She says, “you cannot rely on the speaker. The I who is jilted. All the way throughout, one is never certain if he can be taken seriously at all. It is not entirely understandable in that way. … But in French I can make perfectly clear that we are not to trust the speaker, though we try. That it's a satire, meant to be amusing. The French would expect this. It is how they see Americans” (253-54). When pressed to explain, she says to Charley that the French see Americans as silly, perpetually misunderstanding, but for that same reason, somewhat interesting. Having basically told Charley that his voice is not reliable, the translator arrives at her own solution for the narrative's perceived inconsistency, and that is to make it clearer that the speaker is not to be trusted even as the reader tries to trust him. The end result may be that Charley's book appeals to the French enough to sell well in translation, but it may also be that Charley's book may no longer be his story. Metaphorically speaking, if Charley's book requires revision, so may Charley himself need to change.

Certainly the ramifications of this passage reach beyond the pages of “Occidentals,” which is written in the third-person perhaps to avoid the very conundrum that first-person narration creates and to which Charley's translator refers. Ford achieves a rather metafictional moment in having an editor and a writer discuss some narrative problem in the middle of a narrative written, obviously, by a writer. Taken in the context of “Occidentals,” this moment may suggest something about Charley's character, and that is that all along he has been too close to his own story to be reliable. The narrator of “Occidentals” has told Charley's story from the third-person perspective but nonetheless from Charley's often limited point of view. Charley misinterprets others, misreads maps, or otherwise misses signs. Despite his epiphany that he can fashion himself in any way that he might like regardless of what others think, he would be an isolated person indeed if he never learned to communicate successfully with anyone else. In this sense, his desire to write his parents may be read as a hopeful ending to his story; presumably in that missive he would try to describe particular moments to a specific audience, and in that endeavor it would matter deeply to him whether he succeeded in his telling.

“NOW AND THEN. WOMEN AND MEN.”

In the third story included in Women with Men, the character Helen says that she does not believe in eras, or specific and contained periods of time divided cleanly one from the other. Instead she says, “I believe it's all continuous. Now and then. Women and men” (“Occidentals,” 206). Certainly Frank Bascombe of The Sportswriter and Independence Day has opined about continuity and community; he is another of Ford's characters who gets into trouble when he seeks to step briskly and unencumbered from the past to the present. In Ford's fictional universe, the most “successful” characters manage to preserve their own individuality without detaching themselves completely from what is significant. And what is significant is love, that most abstract of words that depends not on place or time or circumstance but on human beings for its cultivation. Because Ford writes many works from a male perspective and in fact has created plenty of male characters who perpetuate what might best be called a kind of obtuseness in the face of their relationships with women, Ford has often been called a “man's writer.” Certainly his grittier fiction does not do much to contradict that notion. As this volume has already suggested, Ford does not care much for what critics call him, which is not to say that he doesn't care what his readers think. Ford loses patience with the critical propensity to label and thereby exclude a reader; he finds this likely when critics push writers into regional categories or categories determined essentially by gender. In response to an interviewer who asked Ford if he thought Independence Day was more of a man's book than a woman's book, Ford replied, “Hardly. The women in the novel seem to know so much more than the men.” Sophie Majeski goes on to ask Ford, “So there is something essential about us that is beyond gender?” And he explains,

Yes, I look to the end line. Do they die any differently? I watched my mother die, watched my father die, and I thought to myself, that's where life ends, and it's very much the same. There are some things that are beyond gender. I've discovered it in a long relationship with one person, which isn't to say that it's magic or that you have to have a long relationship with one person—maybe it's just taken me 32 years to get it in my brain. But there are qualities in human life that perhaps only literature can define, which are more fundamental than those other distinguishing qualities among us, like gender, age and sex. There is something else.²

For Ford, this something else is a need to connect with another person, “to narrow that space Emerson calls the infinite remoteness that separates people. And maybe that's as close to describing the thing as I can get. The need to be able to touch somebody. And not even physically. … And even closeness is just a metaphor for something else. Language would always be dealing in its metaphorical representations. It is something for which there is no language” (Majeski). Ironically, the quality that literature can define that transcends gender, age, and any number of other qualifiers to human life is the very quality that resists language. For Ford, this discrepancy does not mean that one should stop trying to convey the human need for connectedness but rather that one should recognize that metaphorical representation only hints at the power of the real thing. Certainly there exist gaps between the literal and the imagined, between the original and the translation, but as Frank Bascombe would say, “words are required” nonetheless.

Notes

1. Richard Ford, “Jealous,” Women with Men (New York: Knopf, 1997), 95; hereafter cited in text.

2. “Richard Ford,” interview by Sophie Majeski in Salon. January 14, 1998 < www.salon.com/weekly/interview960708.html>; hereafter cited in text as Majeski.