Forget the Bagels

A WRITER'S WIT
Aunt Dot pointed out how missionary work was often done by foreigners in Africa, Asia and so on, and used in the past to be the thing in all countries. We ourselves, she pointed out, had been converted by Roman and Irish missionaries, Rome by Jews and Greeks, Greeks by Jews, North Americans by French and British emigrants, South Americans by Spanish and Portuguese, and now America was sending missions to convert Britain. It was done all the time; in Syria the Crusaders had had a go at it, and today there were several missions at work in Turkey, and no one seemed to mind. The Towers of Trebizond ©1956
Rose Macaulay
Born August 1, 1881

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Blaise Cepis

August 1, 2016, Joshua Ferris, “The Abandonment”: A popular television actor believes his wife has left him when she doesn’t immediately return to their New York apartment from buying Sunday morning bagels and a newspaper. ¶ Nick spends hours searching for her, even tosses his cell phone in the trash in frustration and then can’t recall the correct ashcan when he returns to retrieve it. In the next scene, however, he takes a car to Brooklyn and visits with a married female artist he’s met four days earlier at an important opening in midtown. In this tête-à-tête they compare their lives—Ferris makes a point of having them compare the scents of their lives—and they end up making out. When they finally determine that Nick must leave before her husband and family return, he passes by the rowdy bunch on his way to the elevator. Back in Manhattan, Nick’s wife has to open the door for him because his key no longer seems to work. The reader now becomes privy to information that Nick has done this before: left her momentarily because of his abandonment issues. So the reader is left with sort of an O. Henry / F. Scott Fitzgerald magazine-story irony that hinges on one factor. If this wife of his, Naomi, had taken her cell phone with her—even to pick up bagels, this woman who only too well knows what her husband’s abandonment issues are—then there would be no story, no magazine irony. In today’s world no person under forty abandons her phone, even for a short errand, especially in Manhattan. What if Nick should want to change his bagel order or want something else? What if I’m molested? This point seems to demand a greater than normal suspension of disbelief. Ferris is the author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which came out in 2015.
Photo-Illustration by Blaise Cepis.

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