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The narrator of “Happy Endings” begins by engaging readers in the story’s first three lines, using direct address to set up the six story variations. The narrator establishes a plot premise—two people meet—and advises readers who prefer happy stories to read variation A.
A. John and Mary meet, fall in love, and marry. They have successful careers, buy a house that appreciates in value, and pay “live-in help” to raise two happy, successful children. The happy couple enjoy sex, have friends, travel, retire, and take up hobbies that they enjoy till their deaths.
B. Mary and John are young people in an unhealthy relationship. Mary loves John desperately, but John merely uses Mary, who provides him with dinner and sex twice a week. Mary tries everything that her culture has taught her a man wants in order to persuade John to love her, making her house and her face look good and pretending to enjoy sex. Her efforts fail; John leaves after sex and hardly speaks to her. Mary becomes depressed. Friends try to get her to see the reality of John’s abuse, but she believes that a good man who will love her dwells somewhere inside John. She thinks that this man will emerge if she keeps up her efforts.
After some time, John suddenly complains about Mary’s cooking, which hurts her. She learns from friends that he has been having dinner at a restaurant with Madge. John has never treated Mary to a dinner out, and she despairs. She washes down aspirin and sleep medication with sherry and leaves John a note, imagining that he will find it and her in time to save her. Then, he’ll love and marry her. But instead, Mary dies, and Madge and John marry and have the life described in story variation A.
C. Mary is a young working woman in love with a young man, James, who is not ready for a committed relationship. John is a middle-aged man who needs Mary’s love and sexual attraction to stave off his fears of mortality. Mary pities John, and the sex is okay, but she craves James’ freedom to ignore adult responsibilities and she longs to take off on his motorcycle to chase fun, music, and drugs.
John, although in love with Mary, is married to Madge. They are successful in the same ways as the couple in variation A. He can’t leave Madge, but he needs Mary, who finds his long-winded explanations of this dilemma tedious. One day, when James and Mary get high together, John uses his key to Mary’s apartment and catches them in bed. Crushed, he buys a gun, returns, and kills the lovers and himself. Madge grieves but then marries Fred, and they marry and have the life described in story variation A.
D. Fred and Madge have a good marriage and a nice house by the coast, but a tidal wave wipes out many houses in their area, driving housing values down. They survive the wave, though many others die, and they gratefully continue as the couple in variation A does.
E. Fred, however, has a heart problem, and Madge cares for him till he dies and then takes up charity work till she, too, dies, as in variation A. Or, the narrator suggests, it could be that Madge dies of cancer, leaving Fred feeling guilty and confused until he takes up bird-watching.
F. The narrator suggests a less conventional plot for readers who find the previous story variations “bourgeois”: Mary can be a spy, and John can be a partisan. It won’t work well, especially for a story set in Canada, but this plot might offer some “lustful” moments and an opportunity to capture and critique current social conditions.
The narrator insists in the closing paragraphs in the coda of “Happy Endings” that, regardless of variation, all stories end the same: the characters die. Writers may try to dodge this reality for benign or deceitful reasons, but to refuse this ending is an act of self-delusion.
The narrator adds that while stories all end the same and while story beginnings are more fun to invent, it’s the “stretch in between” that matters most, and is hardest to create, in a story. This is because plots are really just “one thing after another” unless writers make the connections readers need by dealing with character motivations, the “How and Why” of human behavior.
