Lies and Other Truths
The most significant metaphor in “The Visitor” deals with the stated reason for why a strange Syrian man prefers the loneliness of his mansion in the North African desert. It is a metaphorical image repeated twice in the text:
“I am drawn to it the same way as a sailor is drawn to the seat.”
“You loved, you said, as a sailor loves the sea.”
This metaphor for what keeps a man isolated from others turns out to be something less than entirely true and it is the revelation of a far less metaphorical reason upon which the story comes to its gruesome conclusion.
Samantha
“The Great Switcheroo” is a story about wife-swapping with the twist being that the wives are to remain unaware of this little trick being played upon them by their husbands. Things do not turn out quite as well as the narrator hopes, however. Disappointment arrives partly because his sizing up of the other man’s wife turns out to be far more accurate than that of his own wife.
“She’s a nympho-bird all right, I told myself. But a very rare example of the species, because she is entirely and utterly monogamous. She is a married monogamous nympho-bird who stays forever in her own nest.”
Bad News, “The Last Act”
Never can it be really be said there is a good time for the police to show up unannounced on your porch. Making this situation considerably more unpleasant is when those police who show up on your porch take on the aspect of familiar metaphorical comparison:
“She kept looking at them, but they didn’t speak or move. They stood so still and so rigid that they were like two wax figures somebody had put on her doorstep as a joke.”
Good News, “The Last Act”
From the opening scene in which she receives news of her husband’s death, the protagonist of “The Last Act” moves from near-catatonia to reviving a relationship with an old flame. Things look to be taking a definite turn from the state of things which start on that porch. At least for a while:
“Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plut had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy.”
The Climax
The climax of this collection of short stories comes about with the climax of the final story, title “Bitch.” It is perhaps the only appropriate choice to make for bringing this collection of stories not just about sexuality, but consumed by sexual metaphor, to an end:
“Oh, ecstasy and ravishment! Oh, Jericho and Tyre and Sidon. The walls came tumbling down an the firmament disintegrated, and out of the smoke and fire of the explosion, the sitting-room in the Waldorf Towers came swimming slowly back into my consciousness like a rainy day.”
