62 pages • 2 hours read
Rachel CuskOutline
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Faye meets the neighbor again; he’d texted her earlier in the day, inviting her for a swim off his boat. As they drive to the marina, Faye tells him that she did not see this side of Athens during her previous trips. The neighbor is surprised to learn that Faye has been to Athens before. He, too, has been to London, where Faye lives, many times. In fact, he took up a job in London some years ago. This was at a time in his life when his finances were at rock bottom, his second divorce having wrecked him. His friends urged him to take up a 9-to-5 job, something that they would never have done.
The neighbor wonders if his friends had his best interests at heart or if they were like animals, encouraging the one who got away to run fast even if it means that the escapee will get lost. Faye tells the neighbor that his image of the zoo reminds her of an opera called The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a hunter keeps a fox he has caught with farmyard animals. The fox escapes but feels terrified when she approaches the forest.
The neighbor left his job when he received the news that the engine of his boat, parked in the marina, had been stolen. He saw the news as a sign and returned to Athens. For the first time in years, he had clarity about what he wanted from life. On the way to the marina, the neighbor stops at an elegant, modern café. He tells Faye about his third wife, a prudent, puritanical woman who was stringent about finances. Though it was this quality that drew him to the wife initially, he quickly grew to dislike her. The sex between them was terrible, as the third wife believed in sex only for procreation. They stopped being physically intimate once their son was born.
The divorce, however, was not acrimonious. The third wife was not greedy, and the neighbor has to admit that his son with her is the best adjusted of all his children. When Faye tells the neighbor about her experience with Cassandra, he tells her that he had a premonition this morning that Faye was having a bad time. That is why he invited her to the boat. The neighbor asks Faye to crosscheck if the text was sent at the same time that Cassandra was berating her, and Faye confirms the serendipity.
As they get on the boat, Faye and the neighbor talk more about their lives, with Faye confessing that she now believes in being passive and letting life take its course. Any action seems artificial to Faye, as if she is forcing her will on unknown currents, so she wills herself into blankness. The neighbor talks about his first wife again, how their marriage broke up over a single event. However, the event that he describes is the wife waking him up from a nap to confront him over his infidelity.
Faye is shocked at the confession; the neighbor explains that the infidelity was minor. He didn’t really want to pursue a person but the idea of excitement. Faye feels put off by the neighbor, a feeling that is aggravated when he turns to her suddenly and tells her that he is attracted to her. Faye laughs in surprise, but the neighbor embraces her awkwardly. Faye feels repelled by him. She pushes him away and goes for a swim. When she returns, she explains that she is not interested in a relationship with any man at this point in her life. She says that they should head back.
Chapter 8 Summary
Later that night, Faye meets Ryan and Elena, an old friend. Elena is so spectacularly beautiful that Ryan is visibly moved by her presence. When Faye tells Ryan that she and Elene plan to meet Melete, a friend who is a poet, Ryan says that he will have to opt out. Ryan is tired from the previous night, when he went out with a bunch of students. His apartment is also overrun by scarab beetles, which he is up smashing to death all night. Ryan says goodbye, and Faye and Elena head to a busy café where beggars ask patrons for alms.
As Faye and Elena wait for Melete, Faye tells Elena about the neighbor and his advances. Elena wonders at Faye’s naivete: It was glaringly obvious that the neighbor would proposition her. Faye says that she could imagine he was interested but never thought he’d cross the boundaries of age and propriety. Elena thinks that Faye should have told the neighbor up front that she was not interested in a romantic relationship. In Elena’s experience, being totally honest is the best way to gauge a man’s character. A man’s reaction at being told that someone is not interested in him reveals everything about him. Elena has seen men who were swooning switch to instant hatred when she told them that she only wanted to be their friend.
The women are joined by Melete, dressed in a dark suit. Elena chides Melete and Faye for wearing dark colors; she is dressed in resplendent gold clothes. Melete has been giving a series of poetry readings across the city. Her poetry often discusses same-sex attraction between women. As always, today’s reading was attended by one of Melete’s ex-students. The young man has been attending her readings for years, always sitting in the front rows and pulling faces at Melete. Melete has no idea why the man behaves this way and has never asked him the reason behind his actions. He is the last person she would ever see as a threat, and perhaps Melete’s perception of reality itself has created a new reality, “something outside itself that mock[s] and hate[s] her” (188). Perhaps the young man is simply troubled or strange. Since he is so faithful to Melete, she tries to love him.
Elena dislikes Melete’s approach of loving one’s enemies. She thinks that Melete ought to confront the man, who is probably just playing a twisted game with her. Men like to live a fantasy with women, so women must be honest with them and burst their illusion. In the middle of this conversation, the writer gets a text from the neighbor saying that he misses her.
Elena tells Faye and Melete about Konstantin, the man she is now seeing. When she met Kostantin, she felt, for the first time in years, that she’d met her equal in beauty and intellect. With Konstantin, Elena wanted a sense of mystery, so she repressed her own tendency to draw the truth out of him. She also perceived a boundary around Konstantin that she did not want to cross. Recently, at a party, something she heard Konstantin say shattered her. When a friend asked Konstantin if he wanted more children—he had two from his first marriage—Konstantin said no. Elena felt that what Konstantin really wanted to say was that he did not want children with her. Later, she told Konstantin what she’d overheard, and he apologized, calling it a thoughtless comment. However, his words have created a wedge between them.
Melete tells Elena about a dream she had, where she and a bunch of other women were menstruating at an opera house. The men looked at the women in disgust. Melete thinks that such disgust exists between men and women. Elena tries to get rid of the disgust with frankness but considers that the better thing to do would be to accept it. When Melete was a child, she experienced vomiting episodes every day when she got back home from school. The episodes started when her stepfather moved in with her and her mother. It could be inferred that the nausea was a reaction to the new male presence. It stopped when a psychotherapist suggested that Melete try playing the trumpet. Producing the great, rude noise from the trumpet distracted Melete from her disgust; the vomiting stopped.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Although the novel’s plot resists a conventional structure, its climax can be said to occur in this section, with the neighbor making sexual advances at Faye, thus invoking The Complexities of Relationship Dynamics. The build-up to the moment—Faye’s willful ignorance of the neighbor’s escalating behavior—foreshadows their eventual confrontation. Although Fye does not say it outright, her relationship with the neighbor has been deteriorating at every successive meeting, with the neighbor continuing to reveal unpleasant depths of his personality to her.
For instance, throughout the novel, the neighbor has suggested that his first wife broke up with him over a single, silly fight. He now confesses that the fight arose because his wife confronted him about his infidelity. The infidelity was not a figment of the wife’s imagination, but the neighbor tries to downplay it as “a piece of stupidity, an office flirtation that got out of hand” (173). This again establishes the neighbor as an unreliable narrator, who has been performing his story for the specific purpose of seducing Faye. The neighbor confesses the truth to Faye now as a means to win her over with his honesty; however, the move backfires, illustrating the emotional gap between the neighbor and Faye. Faye notes the performative aspect of the neighbor’s confession of attraction for Faye, with him raising his chin, looking meditatively at the horizon, and then turning to address Faye, like an “actor about to deliver a too-famous line” (176).
However, Faye, too, has been putting on a performance, and like the neighbor, even she has left out parts of her story. It is only during their third meeting that she notes that she has been to Athens several times before. The neighbor’s surprise at this revelation shows that Faye had cast herself as a newcomer and the neighbor as the man who would introduce her to Athens. Later, she tells the neighbor that her new approach in life is to let things take their course, rather than fight against the current. Faye is being literal, but the neighbor reads this as a sign that Faye wants him to take charge of the situation, being the “dynamic male” to her “passive female.”
The neighbor’s advance on Faye is told in graphic, disgusted vocabulary, with Faye noting that he approaches her “like a prehistoric creature issuing from its cave” (176). Faye experiences the neighbor as an aging but dangerous animal, his nose a “great beak” and his mouth scaly (176). Faye’s language here loses all pretense of objectivity since she is rattled to the core by the neighbor’s surprising actions. The moment acts as a rupture in her state of willful passivity. She suddenly misses her children and cannot wait to get back home. Snapped into being decisive, she tells the neighbor that she is not interested in dating anyone. The decisiveness suggests that Faye’s approach of being a sponge or a recorder of life cannot work in a real-world setting. For women, there is no luxury even of anonymity. Thus, Faye cannot simply go along with the flow like a man: The sexual danger of the neighbor reminds her of this fact.
Melete, the lesbian poet, refers to the gap in understanding or the difference between men and women as “the disgust” (196). By disgust, Melete means what she regards as the inherent fight between the sexes, which the neighbor calls “the strife.” Thus, these characters imply that the relationship between women and men always has an element of hostility to it, which people try to cover through the illusion of romantic love or, in the case of Elena, through frankness. The trumpet that Melete played as a child to overcome her nausea is a phallic symbol, with Melete’s conquering of the trumpet indicating her conquest of the male—in this case, her stepfather’s unwanted presence.
Throughout the novel, Faye uses her record of people—rather than her opinions—to show their characters. An example of this is her observations of Elena. Elena criticizes the dark color of Faye’s clothes. Later, she criticizes Melete for the same thing, noting that people should not wear dark clothes all the time. Elena herself is dressed in a dress the “same dark gold color as her waving hair” (181). When she and Faye get to the restaurant, she inspects several tables before deciding where they will sit. This emphasis on symmetry and the right setting reveals something about Elena’s character: She wants to control reality by arranging it the right way, which is why she reveals her motives to men immediately. However, the fact that she has not used the same tactic with Konstantin shows that reality always manages to get the better of illusion.
