If you can still see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible.
Most of the stories in this collection have as the driving force of the narrative a relationship. And it is usually a relationship that is flawed or fractured in some significant way. The marriage in this story is an example a fracture as it tells the story of former husband and wife who unexpectedly run into each other the first time in a long while following a particularly acrimonious divorce. The locus of the acrimony in this particular rupture of a once-happy marriage is not adultery, but money. The reality is that the acrimonious state of tension is really due to money per se, but the possessions of wealth at stake: his collection of a 1930’s movie star memorabilia which she sold and her collection of classic Barbie dolls which he sold. The story’s opening line foreshadows its closing line.
I’m not going to let you—make me—dishonest anymore!”
The titular carving implement is the stimulation behind this outburst of the wife/mother in this story. She is directing the exclamatory assertion toward her husband who has just—seemingly quite innocuously—suggested that she steal the “small, new, foreign” kitchen utensil from the vacation accommodations in which they currently occupy. Equally innocuous is his reply to her stating that they will not be stealing the knife as with hand held out, he asks her to give it to him. Only after her outburst does he have time to explain he was simply going to use it to try to dislodge a piece bread stuck in the toaster.
The outburst is central to the story for several reasons, not least of which is the implication that Mrs. Shapiro perceives that Mr. Shapiro has done at least one significant thing in the past that has led her to carry around shame and guilt over being dishonest. The big shock here is that the expected explanation is never forthcoming. The story treks along to its conclusion with the reader must as bewildered about the underlying origin of this outburst as they are when it is made.
“What is the worst thing you have ever done in your whole, entire life?”
Monsour is described as a “fashionable Franco-Egyptian theater guru” who has attained a degree of minor celebrity among those in the know for “his famous little games.” The question posed above is just such a demonstration of just such a game. So adept has he become over the course of posing this question to thousands of students over the past twenty years that he has perfected the dramatics of the query with a practiced pause for effect between “thing” and “done” to ensure the rules of the game were fully comprehended. For the narrator and his friend Levine who are attending the little dinner party hosted at the home of a professor, the question could not come at a worse time: Levine is in the process of plagiarizing his way through his college dissertation while the narrator is sleeping the professor’s wife.
