The set-up for “The Paradise Lounge” is simple but effective. Beatrice and her lover have stopped for the night in the titular lounge, a shabby hotel bar in the middle of nowhere, to consummate the last night of their affair. They are observed by a regular, the elderly Mrs. Doheny, who can tell they are not married, that they are conducting a tryst. Mrs. Doheny—dressed up, make-up duly applied—is there to meet, as she ritually does, the Marsdens, long-time married friends. We go back and forth between Bea’s and Mrs. Doheny’s perspectives, Bea feeling dirty and depressed in this shabby little town and shabby little hotel, Mrs. Doheny feeling wistfully, vaguely envious of Bea’s generational freedom. By the end, we learn that Mrs. Doheny has been in love for decades with Mr. Marsden. Bea, in her turn, senses Mrs. Doheny’s situation and envies it, the dignity and restraint of a previous era and its inhabitants, a dignity and restraint that would have prevented the filthy, humiliating mess she finds herself in. Mrs. Doheny walks home crying and we are told that “It was difficult sometimes not to weep when she thought about the easy times that had come about in her lifetime, mocking the agony of her stifled love.” It’s a kind of sexual Gift of the Magi: both women have the thing the other wants, neither wants the thing they have.
One feels Trevor’s thumb on the scale with this one, in terms of the ease with which both women identify the other’s situation. It’s not impossible to credit that, in a state of heightened emotional sensitivity, they might realize what each other are up to. Nonetheless, I felt briefly reminded, as one sometimes is with Trevor, of the presence of the author-god in the background, arranging everything, writing to some extent less about the characters themselves and more about the situation writ large: the joys and miseries of generational permissiveness. It isn’t really a demerit to the story though. As usual, Trevor’s calm mastery wins the day—at times, his stories are not so much standard realist stories as arrangements. And as such, the point so to speak is more in the holistic mood of the arrangement, the narrative gestalt.
Part of the gestalt here, as it so often is, is the backdrop of Ireland. At times it’s the painfully beautiful and instantly nostalgic Irish countryside; at times it’s Dublin; and at times, as here, it’s one of the small dumpy places 40 years on from their post-WWII heyday. Taking a walk before dinner, Beatrice’s unnamed beau says, “Not exactly camera fodder. A bloody disgrace, some of these towns are.” Mrs. Doheny, for her part, remembers when the town was more beautiful, but also remembers it as an era of almost theatrical moral abstention, Ireland self-consciously distinguishing itself from racy and adulterous England and America: Decent Catholic Ireland.
Ireland is, in many ways, the perfect setting for Trevor’s stories, but of course, Trevor would not have been the same writer if he’d been from another country. The simultaneous sense of a glorious past and the endless ongoing decay of the present moment; this coupled with the Catholic sense of the past as original sin, the site of the original error that has doomed the present. This is, after all, the emotional biography of most of Trevor’s characters, who in their fallen state sentimentalize a past that has hobbled them for life. Trevor, like a remarkable number of other first-rate short story writers, seems energized by an unresolved and unresolvable love-hate affair with his homeland. Flannery O’Connor and Georgia, Cheever and Westchester, Alice Munro and rural Ontario—there is something particularly congenial in the short story form to this kind of geographic emotion. Perhaps it’s the compression of the form, how much you have to do in so little space? Or perhaps it’s more effect than cause, the writer endlessly reckoning with the joy and harm caused by that initial dramatic condition: birth.
At any rate, the setting is a fundamental piece of the simple yet gratifying little puzzle offered by “The Paradise Lounge.” Sitting at the bar drunk after taking in the town’s dismal sights—sights that very much include the hotel and bar itself—Beatrice observes that “the town and the hotel—especially the meal they’d just consumed—combined to reflect the mood that the end of the affair had already generated.”
