Pem and Moira's Unfinished Affair

A dinner-party seduction and a walk in the Met become raw material for stories about class, desire, and disillusion.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

Dinner-Party Recognition

Dinner-Party Recognition Context Pem finds himself seated beside a woman he calls Moira, a quiet, underdressed wife of a powerful CEO. She smiles at his jokes but seems elsewhere. When the table switches, she stares at him with solemn intensity. He has the sensation of a nonsexual arousal and a sudden melancholy. Significance The meeting reveals Pem's hunger for something beyond the social circus. Moira's apparent integrity, her refusal of ornament, makes him feel his own thrown-away life. The recognition is mutual and wordless. Consequences They make a plan to meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the Monets.

Lunch Among the Monets

Lunch Among the Monets Context They stand before the big blue-green paintings of water lilies. He proposes an affair; she says it is a matter of time, for she has two young children and a nanny and a schedule. They do not touch. When she gets into the cab, her glance is almost mournful, a declared trust that strikes Pem like a blow to the heart. Significance The Monet water lilies become the color of their afterward, a blue-green warmth he will carry in his skin. Moira's seriousness transforms his fantasy into a dependence he had not bargained for. He imagines, for a moment, that he might find salvation in an authentic life with her. Consequences The affair enters its intended phase, conducted in the rectory to the sound of the city outside.

The Afternoon in the Rectory

The Afternoon in the Rectory Context Two soft taps on the door: Moira arrives, drinks only tap water, and then goes into the bedroom. She is skittish, balky, and has to be held down to do what she has come to do. Afterward Pem lies as if in the blue-green warmth of Monet's pond. Significance The scene is more melancholy than erotic. Moira's yield is both a gift and a surrender, and Pem feels suddenly charged with undefined responsibilities. Their intimacy is built on a power imbalance that she intends to exploit as much as he does. Consequences Moira tells Pem her story: working-class Pennsylvania, Penn State dropout, temp job, CEO husband. The affair becomes inseparable from her crossing of class lines.

She Is a Story Crossing Class Lines

She Is a Story Crossing Class Lines Context Everett notes that Moira is turning into a story, a woman crossing class lines, and that Pem is behaving like a snob. He sketches the outlines of a movie in which the lover takes total control, wires the husband's house, and transforms Moira into an instrument of remote revenge. She accepts every indignity without anger. Significance The movie version transforms genuine feeling into a power game. It exposes the dark underside of Pem's attraction: his desire to control, to shape, to be the author of her fate. Moira's own desire is inseparable from her upward leap and her willing subjection. Consequences The affair becomes a cautionary tale about the need to turn living people into characters. The narrator abandons the movie because it is top-heavy and self-destructive.

The Affair Becomes Raw Material

The Affair Becomes Raw Material Context Moira disappears from the novel's foreground after the early chapters, surviving only as an outline for a film that is never made. The narrator admits that she has been absorbed into the story-making machinery. Her voice, her body, and her history are returned as words on a page. Significance The unfinished affair stands for the cost of narrative. People become characters, and characters become commodities. The novel's honesty lies in acknowledging how much of another person's life goes into its construction. Consequences Moira's fate is to be a story, not a person, in the book that carries Pem's quest. The emotional bond is broken by the very act of writing about it.

at a black-tie dinner early in the novel

after their first spoken agreement, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

when Moira first comes to Pem's rooms

when the narrator begins to rework the affair into a movie

late in the novel, as the author reflects on what he has used