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Mary gets run-down. Crying is bad for your face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can’t stop. People at work notice. Her friends tell her John is a rat, a pig, a dog, he isn’t good enough for her, but she can’t believe it. Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.
These lines, from story variation B, document how desperate Mary’s urge to secure John’s love is. So overwhelming is her need that she experiences his neglect as physical sensations of exhaustion and tears. She denies her physical reactions and the ample evidence that leads her friends to correctly label John. Instead, she persuades herself that the “nicer” John can be coaxed into existence by her devoted, servile love.
Because Mary cannot see the reality of their relationship, she subjugates her identity to meet what she perceives as John’s needs and desires. Readers may infer that the submissive role she accepts and her dependence on John to feel loved arise from cultural expectations she has imbibed about how women earn men’s love by sacrificing themselves to men’s needs. Perhaps she wants to create John in the image of the lover that exists in some “happily ever after” scenario in her mind, even if she has to “squeeze” him to do so. Whatever her reasons, Mary misreads the situation. The “nicer” John exists, but not for her. Readers know this because, after John meets Madge, story variation A kicks in. Readers don’t know whether John reads the suicide note that Mary leaves to prompt his remorseful love and that represents her desperate need for love.
John, who is an older man, falls in love with Mary, and Mary, who is only twenty-two, feels sorry for him because he’s worried about his hair falling out. She sleeps with him even though she’s not in love with him. She met him at work. She’s in love with someone called James, who is twenty-two also and not yet ready to settle down.
John on the contrary settled down long ago: this is what is bothering him.
In story variation C, two people experience the urge to be loved. Mary loves James, but she is not the desperate Mary of variation B. Her desire for James seems typical—an attraction, a hopeful possibility, based partly on Mary’s desire for the freedom James has to come and go.
John, however, urgently needs Mary’s love because it helps him persuade himself that he is not getting old. John seems to see, in Mary’s youth, his former self, before marriage, a house, two kids, a steady job. His conflict is a midlife crisis, common to the point of being cliché, but he experiences it not as an expected stage of life but as an existential emergency. For Mary, John is a stopgap, someone to have a “fairly good time” with in bed but also tedious and needy. But for John, Mary’s love, if he can secure it, will help him escape the facts that are “bothering” him as he loses his hair, a symbol of his former youthful virility and of the possibilities of young adulthood. Perhaps John is in love more with what Mary stands for, the open doors and beckoning roads of one’s earlier twenties, more than with Mary herself. Without being at least adjacent to these youthful possibilities, John can’t bear his life.
