"A Platonic Relationship" & "Eric Clapton's Lover" by Ann Beattie

I found Ann Beattie (not that she was lost) through Dan Kois, who went on a mass-market paperback binge this summer for Slate Magazine.  My copy arrived from the street drug known as "Amazon Prime" two days later, smelling like an old person's shoes.  Note the stains of unknown origin on the cover.

The pages are that perfect burnt gold color of old paperbacks and I have to hold it ever so gently so that it doesn't disintegrate in my hands.

I chose my first story by its title, "Eric Clapton's Lover."  I went through an intense period of obsession with an Eric Clapton Greatest Hits Album in my late teens.

Writer's Note: How great is Spotify?  I am now listening to the exact album I used to play on repeat while driving around my one-horse town with my best friend. "After Midnight" was our favorite song.

The second story, "A Platonic Relationship," was Beattie's first to be published in The New Yorker.  She was 26 at the time.

I have swallowed the jealous bile in the back of my throat.  On to the stories...

Opening lines: 
(ECL) Franklin Fisher and his wife, Beth, were born on the same day of March, two years apart.
(APR) When Ellen was told that she would be hired as a music teacher at the high school, she decided that it did not mean that she would have to look like the other people on the faculty.

Gonna cause talk and suspicion, we gonna give an exhibition....

Inciting incidents:
(ECL): Franklin Junior leaves home with his new bride, a tractor-trailer driver.
(APR): Ellen gets a new roommate named Sam.

Surface problems:
(ECL): Franklin is fired from his magazine job and has to work at a movie theater that has rats in the soda machine.  Beth can't get out of bed.  Franklin starts to drink and seeks out women in parking lots.  Beth gets out of bed and becomes a feminist, but still dates a man who tries to name her cat for her.
(APR): Ellen spends inordinate amounts of time cleaning Sam's room for him, replacing one albatross (her ex-husband) for another.  She drinks too much beer.  Sam hightails it out of town on a hot, new motorcycle, leaving Ellen behind to reconcile with her ex-husband.

I desperately want Taylor Swift and John Mayer to cover Clapton's "Promises."  

Story-worthy problems:
(ECL & APR): Beattie's stories is understated.  They are not the fireworks; they are the uncomfortable barbeque where your divorced parents each bring their new partner and you sit watching your mother devour the crudite and your father stare at his much younger girlfriend's ass.  They aren't the murder in the dark of night; They are the days created the motive.

I love this line from ECL: "Being born on the same day seemed a very good thing to go on," he said.  And this: "I realized there was nothing I wanted to say to you and there was nothing I wanted to hear," she said.  Isn't that just the perfect two-line summary for a divorce that goes out as a whimper instead of a bang?

I found Ellen much less sympathetic than Beth.  At least Beth shows a little verve by getting transferred out of the lingerie department at her new job for talking too much to the customers.  Ellen just circles back to where she began.  Having gathered the courage to leave her husband and pursue her own dreams, she lets Sam use her like a gas station and ride off into his own sunset.  I want to visit her in another ten years and if she's still with her husband, or cleaning for another tenant, I'm staging an intervention.

Click HERE to read ECL on the VQR website.  Gotta buy the book or snag an old New Yorker for APR.  And go listen to "Lay Down Sally" while you're at it.