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Summary
Part 3: Chapters 30-33
Chapter 30: STEPHEN, October 2012
Without Lucy, Stephen is lonely in New York and seeks a new girlfriend. At Carl and Beth’s dinner party, he meets Alice and later gets her phone number from Carl. Stephen realizes that he has never gone on a date with someone he wasn’t already involved with and that it’s his first time not knowing if he will have sex afterward. When Alice arrives, Stephen recognizes a chance to be a different person, since Alice has no preconceived notions about him. While doing cocaine in the bathroom, he receives a text from Lucy. Despite being annoyed by the chore of keeping in touch with her, he responds. He walks Alice home and makes out with her outside her building, but she does not invite him inside. The next day, Stephen sends Alice flowers and a note using his nickname for her, “Alice in Wonderland.”
Chapter 31: LUCY, February 2013
Jackie pesters Lucy to come to an afternoon party. Jackie is distraught over her breakup with Stuart, and Lucy is heartbroken over her discovery during Thanksgiving of Stephen’s relationship with Alice. At the party, Lucy finds Billy, who invites her to join his outdoors club’s next trip to Death Valley. She finds her friends and continues the party at his place, but after he leaves, she is filled with dread. When she sees that his address is Wrigley’s old place, memories of Stephen compel her to go home instead. The following morning, Jackie angrily confronts Lucy for lying about the Writers on the Riviera program. Her anger and sadness at Lucy’s diminished confidence remind Lucy of Lydia’s talk with her that summer about how thin she has become.
Chapter 32: STEPHEN, February 2013
Stephen brings Alice to Long Island for his birthday party to meet his family. He is frustrated by his father’s questions about Diana and Lucy, asking him to please focus on Alice. He is contemptuous of Alice’s provincial traits and of Luke and Kathleen ordinariness. Stephen has been accepted at New York University and will start law school in the fall. Thinking of how his arrest kept him out of the Ivy League schools, he briefly flashes back to the accident, to red hair, blood, and the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” When his father asks if his mother has called for his birthday, Stephen claims it doesn’t matter. Back in the city, he and Alice have sex, and he says “I love you” afterward, wondering what it would feel like to mean it. [130]
Chapter 33: LUCY, June 2013
The morning of Lucy’s first appointment with her new psychiatrist, Dr. Wattenbarger, Lucy learns that CJ plans to attend the sixtieth birthday party for Gabe and Macy’s father. Watching her mother, Lucy decides that CJ is still keeping her affair a secret and is enraged by the thought of her mother seeing Gabe at the party. Rather than going to her internship at Bill DeBlasio’s campaign office first, she waits until her family leaves the house and steals the box of Marilyn’s jewelry from CJ’s closet. After driving into the city, she stops first at a pawnshop, where she sells the valuable items to Sal. She throws the items he will not buy into the East River before putting the cash from Sal anonymously into the collection plate at St. Thomas Church, a site of happy childhood Christmas memories. She drives straight to Dr. Wattenbarger’s office afterward. Disposing of Marilyn’s jewelry has somehow made her ready to talk to him.
Analysis
In Chapter 31, Lucy is described as diminished and empty after losing Stephen to Alice. When Jackie confronts her over lying about her reason for not going on the Writers on the Riviera trip, she refers to Lucy as a “shred” of herself, showing how she has lost her personality to her obsession with Stephen and to her depression. Lucy compared herself to a tin can, feeling hollow and empty. While Lucy engages in anorexic behavior throughout the book, in this chapter she is driven to the binging and purging that characterizes bulimia, eating heavily after leaving the party at Ella’s and then, disgusted with her body, forcing herself to vomit up what she has eaten. This image provides a metaphor for her psychological emptiness. She seeks to fill her empty self with food only to find that the food does not satisfy her need for fullness and return herself to emptiness again. Metaphors of emptiness throughout the chapter present a bleak view of Lucy lost to depression and despair.
Stephen’s birthday party puts his emotional distance in marked contrast to the people around him. He looks at Luke and Kathleen’s happiness with each other with contempt, hating the ordinariness of their lives, as represented by Luke’s khakis and whale belt and Kathleen’s contentment with her job. He dismisses his father’s concern that his mother has not yet called to wish him happy birthday. Luke finds his father’s continued love for Nora pathetic, and he insists throughout the book that he feels no connection to her, nor sadness at her lack of contact. Alice irritates him even as his family warms to her. He finds himself annoyed with her provincial habit of always calling New York “en-why-cee,” which shows she is not a native New Yorker, although she herself is not embarrassed to be from Pittsburgh. After the party and sex with Alice, he tells Alice he loves her, a significant moment in romantic relationships. However, he feels nothing, an example of his emotionally closed condition throughout the book.
Lucy’s destruction of Marilyn’s jewelry represents her finally attempting to lash out at CJ after years of simmering rage. Marilyn is CJ’s most important role model and also the family member who loved her and took her in as a lost teenager. The jewelry represents CJ’s connection to Marilyn after her death, as indicated earlier in the novel with the image of CJ sleeping surrounded by it, believing she can still smell Marilyn’s perfume. It is a deeply personal collection, built piece by piece on Marilyn’s travels, including trips she took with CJ. Lucy chooses it as the target of her rage knowing that its loss will bring CJ pain on parallel to the pain CJ’s affair with Gabe has caused Lucy. Lucy’s method of destroying the collection shows her desire to disperse it permanently and impersonally. Although she could have kept the money from pawning the more valuable items, she donates it anonymously, so that nothing of the jewels connects back to her or, more importantly, remains connected for CJ. Throwing the others into the East River ensures they are gone forever. Her rage is so great that she feels no regret at CJ’s hysterical weeping or Gloria’s unjust firing over the missing jewelry.
