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Mary falls in love with John but John doesn’t fall in love with Mary. He merely uses her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind. He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you’ll notice that he doesn’t even consider her worth the price of a dinner out, and after he’s eaten dinner he fucks her and after that he falls asleep . . . . when he wakes up he doesn’t even notice, he puts on his socks and his shorts and his pants and his shirt and his tie and his shoes, the reverse order from the one in which he took them off.
In story variation B, from which these lines come, John is a very unsympathetic character. He knows Mary is in love with him, recognizes that her love makes her vulnerable to self-abnegation, and establishes a pattern of use and abuse that lasts for some time. The narrator’s diction makes the point subtly, by assigning a monetary value to the sex as if Mary were a prostitute and a cheap one at that, and overtly, by describing that sex as perfunctory and John as a taker: food, sex, sleep, in that order (and, later lines reveal, every three days). While he sleeps, Mary keeps working to gain his approval, making the house and her face pretty, but her actions mean nothing to him. He simply follows his routine of dressing and leaving Mary to wait for the next futile encounter. The John described in these lines has some things in common with the John of story variation C. Both need Mary to meet sexual needs, both are self-centered in their relationships with Mary, and both Johns cause, whether directly or indirectly, Mary’s death.
He’s hardly in any position to be jealous, considering Madge, but nevertheless he’s overcome with despair. Finally he’s middle-aged, in two years he’ll be as bald as an egg and he can’t stand it. He purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target practice—this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later—and shoots the two of them and himself.
In story variation C, from which these lines come, John at first seems, if not a sympathetic character, then perhaps at least a relatable one. Fears of aging and settling for less are common and human. However, John deals with his fears by cheating on his wife while telling himself and Mary that he’s still committed to his marriage. Mary may be willing to go along for the sex, in this variation, but John still uses her and Madge to try to meet his needs. When he catches Mary and James in bed, the narrator points out his hypocrisy: the cheating husband jealous of the younger woman with whom he doesn’t share a commitment. In variation B, sex with Mary satisfies John’s ego in a “tepid” way. But in variation C, John’s ego is so fragile, and so much more important than anything else, that he destroys his marriage, murders two young people, and kills himself rather than face age, the boredom of being “settled,” and baldness. The narrator wryly comments that John’s reaction is “the thin part” of the story and will need to be developed, but it’s possible that the comment is ironic. This particular obstacle to a “happy ending” is so common as to be trite, but at least, as the narrator later complains of many stories, it is not sentimental.
