In these perceptive, richly observed stories, characters arrive at major turning points in their lives through conflicts in relationships or other circumstances, often leading them to a greater understanding of themselves and those close to them. Taken together, the stories offer a layered examination of how people can find ways to live with emotionally complex and difficult situations and, perhaps, imagine new possibilities for themselves.
The title story of the collection, “Resonant Blue,” considers a turning point in the life of an architect named Tony, who lives with his girlfriend, Brigetta, in an oceanfront home that he’d extensively remodeled years before. It seems no coincidence that just as he was tearing down walls during the remodeling, his longtime marriage was also coming apart.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Tony’s relationship with Brigetta is also strained. She spends more and more time away from him, often visiting the boutique of a friend who’d hired Brigetta as an interior design consultant. Another frequent presence at the boutique is a muralist named Leonard, who as Tony noticed during the boutique’s opening, had “an unnerving way of looking at Brigetta.”
Then there’s a mysterious painting job that Brigetta has planned for a bedroom of Tony’s house, a bedroom that has been serving solely as a storage space for her never-unpacked boxes. (Ominously, she begins to move those boxes from the house, claiming she just wants to free up more space.) Eventually, Tony checks on the room and finds that the walls are “still the same bone white as the rest of the house.” He also finds paint cards of various colors taped to two adjoining walls. The paint chips and otherwise stark setting seem to stand for something unrealized, echoing the nature of Tony and Brigetta’s relationship, especially once Brigetta breaks up with him, much to his surprise.
The breakup forces Tony to confront emotional blindspots in himself, which are hinted at during an earlier conversation between him and his ex-wife, Margaret. At the time, Margaret is concerned about not having heard from their daughter, Maddie, who is traveling in Europe. When he offers to call Maddie, Margaret replies, “But will you listen? I mean, really listen.” Here and elsewhere, it’s suggested that Tony spends most of his time in his own world, closed off from full engagement with others.
This emotional distance becomes even more apparent when, at Tony’s request, Brigetta meets with him after their breakup. In their increasingly fraught conversation, Tony blames their breakup on an affair between Brigetta and the muralist, Leonard. But Brigetta tells Tony that he’s overlooking his own role in the failure of their relationship.
“I felt, I feel you aren’t exactly mentally present most of the time,” she says to him. Then she adds, “It was very lonely, living with you.”
The end of the story presents a solitary Tony, his beloved daughter having gone off to college. Yet he looks forward to meeting people at an upcoming holiday party, and to buying gifts for Maddie that he believes she’d enjoy. Although these plans are far from earth-shattering, they suggest a new desire to connect with others, and a future in which some measure of hope might reside.
For the protagonist in the story “Driftwood,” Jackie, a transformative moment arrives after a stranger appears on her property, in an isolated desert town. Although he’s a trespasser, it soon becomes clear that he’s not a threat; in fact, he turns out to be the opposite.
Jackie learns from the stranger, named Rye, that many years ago, a creek used to run through her property. He explains that as an artist who creates sculptures with found materials, he’d come to her land to search for “[a]nything left high and dry by that creek. Animal shells, bones, driftwood.” He shows Jackie sculptures of various animals he’d made from discovered wood, which he keeps in the bed of his pickup truck.
Although the two of them appear to feel an instant, mutual attraction, Jackie checks herself, thinking that Rye isn’t much older than her grown son. The attraction stands in sharp contrast to life as Jackie has come to know it. Over the years, she’s had to find ways to live with profound setbacks and losses, including the death of her first husband in an accident caused by a drunk driver, and more recently, a stroke that has turned her father into “an immobile shadow of himself.” And then there’s the diminishment of Jackie’s second husband, Ken, who is off at work when Rye appears. Once physically vibrant, Ken “had stopped doing anything but going to work and coming home,” and Jackie observes that during his times with her, he often “stared past her at the dinner table.”
After Jackie invites Rye into her home for lunch, she’s taken by how he really seems to see her, and by how he listens to her so closely, something she’s not used to. She observes: “This man seemed interested in her at a level that probed something deep within her, like a tongue looking for a lost tooth.” By the end of the story, the connection between Jackie and Rye has become even more profound, though both of them seem to understand that it also must be fleeting.
After Rye’s departure, Jackie’s husband, Ken, returns home. We expect his presence to cast a pall over any remaining glow from Jackie and Rye’s connection–and, at first, it seems to. But then an unexpected revelation (something I don’t want to give away) seems to spark something new–or the welcome return of something old–-between Jackie and Ken. Although much of the story explores what time and age can take from us, the deeply moving ending of this story suggests the gifts they can also bring.
Age and the passage of time are also important elements in the story “Par Avion,” in which the sixty-two-year-old protagonist, Anita, travels to a Greek island without telling her children, leaving both of them worried and wondering. The trip comes at a turning point in Anita’s life. Having recently moved into an independent-living community that she hasn’t really settled into, she seems to be at sea and in search of meaning, a search that takes her deep into her past.
As a twenty-year-old, Anita traveled to the same Greek island to meet a longtime pen pal of hers, a young man named Costas, in person. During her time on the island, the two of them fell in love, and though the relationship didn’t last, the memories of it haunt Anita, who ended up marrying another man, now her ex.
On this latest trip to Greece, Anita is holding those memories of Costas close, literally, because she has brought with her his letters from their days as pen-pal correspondents. She harbors the hope that he might still be on the island after all these years, even as she knows that this is a distant possibility, especially because he’d shared with her his plans to leave.
One striking aspect of this story is that Anita’s memories of who she was during her time with Costas seem just as important to her as her recollections of him. At one point, the author observes:
Whether or not Anita reconnects with Costas in the present, we get the sense that the journey to the island is fulfilling an important need in her: to rediscover that old drive to seek and devour. As this insightful, and ultimately hopeful, story makes clear, that drive has far from vanished.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories about complicated personal relationships
￭ Stories about characters at turning points in their lives
￭ Stories about finding ways to cope with emotionally complex and difficult situations