The first half of “Cocktails at Doney’s” features a very similar set-up to the superior “In Isfahan”: a middle-aged expat British man encounters a beautiful woman who falls in love with him. In both stories, the woman is a superficial, oversharing chatterbox who is drawn to the deeply reserved man, a reserve hiding a similar problem—in “In Isfahan,” our protagonist is a serial cuckold; in “Cocktails at Doney’s,” he is serially impotent. Both stories are told from the man’s perspective, although we learn more about Normanton in “In Isfahan”—our hero in “Cocktails at Doney’s” remains nameless for the duration, and we hardly know any details about him or his life, simply that he writes mediocre travel guides and is assailed by painful memories of his romantic failures; his presence is as vaporous as the presence of the angry and heartbroken women who swirl around his memory. Both stories take place overseas, “Cocktails at Doney’s” in Florence, Italy, “In Isfahan,” in… well, have a guess.
“Cocktails at Doney’s” takes a different and interesting second-half turn, however, as the woman, Mrs. Faraday, fails to meet him for a last round of drinks at Doney’s bar. Having become (as in “In Isfahan”) against his will somewhat enamored of the lady, he goes looking for her, but finds she has left her hotel without paying. His inquiries lead to a carabinieri investigation that brings Mr. Faraday from America, but that ultimately turns up nothing, although our protagonist is convinced she has been murdered—newspaper stories of abductions and killings are cleverly peppered throughout the narrative, foreshadowing and supporting this possibility. He returns to Doney’s, safe from the possibility of encountering her—safe, that is, from sexual possibility—and “[mourns] her as a lover might.”
By my count, this is the fifth installment so far of the Brit Abroad genre, a genre that includes the aforementioned “In Isfahan,” as well as “Death in Jerusalem,” “On the Zattere,” “The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs. Vansittart,” and “Running Away” (I believe the Collected contains a couple more Italy stories, and the Selected continues this genre, most notably with the masterpiece “Cheating at Canasta”). Trevor’s hit-miss ratio with these stories is notably high, a phenomenon true as well of John Cheever and Bernard Malamud, whose Italy stories are among their best. It seems somewhat axiomatic and perhaps predictable that writers as place-centric as Trevor (or Cheever and Malamud) would find their imaginations enlivened by going abroad.
For Trevor, in particular, the continent works well as a backdrop, offsetting his characters’ peculiarly Irish-Catholic sexual perversity and neurosis to a sharper effect than usual. Many if not most of Trevor’s characters suffer from some sort of sexual dysfunction: either they have never had sex and don’t want to and never will, or they have never had sex and would like to but never will, or they had sex once and it scarred them for life, or they had sex with someone and married them and are miserable, or some combination thereof. The heroically impotent protagonist of “Cocktails at Doney’s” would seem somehow at home amidst the drizzling Irish countryside or the drizzling London cityscape. He is haunted, like so many of Trevor’s protagonists, and the British Isles are great landscape for hauntings—spiritual, sexual, and otherwise.
Italy and the Mediterranean, not so much. The typically Trevorian character’s flaws are highlighted by the balmy weather and all those naked statues. Mrs. Faraday is regarded by our hero in this story as a vulgar, talkative, loose woman, but in many ways, Mrs. Faraday is the normal one: she is married and dissatisfied, and she seeks sexual adventure and romance in one of the most romantic countries and cities in the world. The protagonist of “Cocktails at Doney’s” is a Prufrockian scuttling thing, and we see that all the more clearly for viewing him against the pastel colors of Cinqueterra as opposed to the gothic environs of Ireland.
One other thing that struck me about this story was the sad—though probably not sad—fact that it is no longer possible to write fiction about impotence, a great and storied subject that finds its apotheosis in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (it only now occurs to me at age 47 that that title is probably a dirty joke). Impotence as a physical ailment is imminently treatable simply by talking to a “doctor” on the internet and ordering blue pills. Impotence as a mental ailment is both treatable on a therapeutic level, and simultaneously not even considered an ailment by many sufferers, given the modern vogue for not having sex. And anyway, as Patricia Lockwood put it in her great takedown of John Updike, we are more than 20 years done with “My Dick” fiction—mainly a blessing, and yet, an ironically potent fictional subject and theme for centuries.
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