Living The Life

For my Intro to Professional Writing class this semester, I'll be frequenting this blog once a week! So get used to seeing me around more often.

 The next Tobias Wolff story is called "Next Door." It's only five pages, and he does a phenomenal job of enticing you in during such a short amount of time.

The story opens with a couple, who've been awakened in the middle of the night because their neighbors are fighting. The neighboring couple is screaming at each other, and all the lights in the house are on. The baby cries, and the dog barks, and the man strikes his wife. We never learn any names. 

The couple witnessing all of this is used to it. It happens often. 

The wife asks what’s on TV, and the husband reminisces about how he brought the TV into their bedroom in the first place because his wife used to be sick.

“It sits between our beds on a little table I built,” he explains.

With the imagery of separate beds and a past illness, this appears to be a couple of seniors.

The husband refers to sexuality with geographical terms. When his wife comes to visit him in his bed, “old Florida begins to stiffen up on me,” he thinks. “I put my arms around my wife. I move my up onto the Rockies, then on down across the plains, heading south.”

“Hey,” the wife says. “No geography. Not tonight.” Clearly, she knows what his narrative sounds like in his head.

They watch a movie called “El Dorado” about explorers looking for the city of gold. 

The husband returns to thinking about the couple next door. 
“I think about the life they have, and how it goes on and on, until it seems like the life they were meant to live. Everybody always says how great it is that human beings are so adaptable, but I don’t know.”

I think that thought about a life seeming like the life we were meant to have is the thesis of the story.

It’s an odd little moment of the lives of two couples, but the way it’s told is so enchanting. So much is left out that your imagination wonders. Wonders if you’re living a life or the life.