Summary
The short story “Meeting Elise” on a middle-aged alcoholic named Henry Luff who lives in New York City. The story opens with Henry going to the doctor because of abdominal issues. After subsequent testing, Henry is diagnosed with potential colon cancer.
Readers then begin to learn of Henry’s other problems. Henry speaks of a time when he had a wife and a baby girl named Elise. Henry made his living as a successful painter, painting pictures of nude models. However, Henry’s life collapsed when he fell in love with one of his nude models, a 17-year-old girl named Olivia. When his wife heard of their affair, she fled to Russia and brought their child with her, refusing to allow Henry to see Elise as she grew up. Henry stayed with Olivia until she got a drug addiction, became ill, and passed away; Henry is still traumatized by this and experiences vivid flashbacks of Olivia.
At the present time of the story, Elise is eighteen years old and a talented cello player. Elise is engaged to her recording manager, something about which Henry is angry. Henry still financially supports Elise even though he hasn’t seen her since she was a baby.
Now that Elise has turned eighteen, she’s legally allowed to meet Henry, but she’s hesitant to do so. Henry talks to his longtime painting agent, Jacob Apelman, about his fears about meeting his daughter. Elise agrees to meet Henry for lunch before the concert. Henry drinks two bottles of wine while waiting for Elise and her fiance, but after 90 minutes, she cancels on him. Henry pleads to have a drink with her or breakfast the next day, but Elise's fiance takes the phone from her. Henry curses at him and then bursts out that he has cancer.
Henry goes to the hall where Elise is performing that night. He walks in while they are rehearsing and Elise sees him, but he is quickly escorted out of the building. Elise sends a note asking Henry to leave, saying she will pay him back for the expensive cello he bought her when she was younger. Henry attends part of Elise's performance, but he leaves before it is over. The chapter ends with Henry experiencing a flashback of Olivia.
Analysis
"Meeting Elise" continues the trope established in the first two short stories of The Boat of difficult relationships between parents and children. However, this short story is a reversal in that it is told from the parent's point of view rather than the child's point of view, as we saw in "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" and "Cartagena." This calls attention to the ways in which Henry is childlike himself, even in comparison to his daughter; he seeks his daughter's attention and acceptance in a way children might seek out their parents, and he is overwhelmed by his emotions and self-destructive behaviors compared to Elise, who is presented as stable and successful.
Henry and Elise's relationship is further complicated by the parallels between Elise and Olivia, Henry's young lover who died. In "Meeting Elise," Henry's daughter has just turned 18, which is why she now has the ability to contact her estranged father. Henry tells his doctor that it will be the first time he has seen Elise "in seventeen years" (p.71). Then, when Henry thinks back to the first time he met Olivia, the narration states, "She was seventeen years old" (p.75). It seems that Elise being the same age as the lover whom Henry has clearly still not gotten over is bringing up complex and confusing feelings and memories.
"Meeting Elise" is quite graphic in its descriptions of Henry's body. Even in the first paragraph, Le writes descriptions like, "Water...coalesces on my creased balls...what remains in my fist is a shriveled sac of skin" and "my ass is burning...[I] smear some of that sweet stuff onto my rosebud." These descriptions seem to have been crafted with the aim of disgusting or disturbing the reader, creating a sense of being overwhelmed by sensory information. This allows the reader to empathize with Henry's state of being overwhelmed by both physical and emotional pain.
Le infuses many of his short stories with irony by presenting a main character that is unable to do their job, especially one that they once had a talent or passion for. This is apparent in "Meeting Elise" through the fact that Henry, a skilled and successful painter, has been unable to produce art for a year and is even losing his vision. Le explicitly highlights this situational irony, writing, "A few months ago, my eyes joined in on my body's general strike. Some condition that made them more sensitive to light. An ironic incapacity" (p.78). This irony also appears in "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" and "Cartagena": Nam is facing writer's block while attending a program for accomplished writers and Juan Pablo is a hitman who is unable to kill one of his targets.
Henry is depicted as something of a narcissist, which is shown by his inability to respect his daughter's boundaries and his blaming his life troubles on everyone but himself. When reflecting on how his marriage ended and how he lost contact with his daughter, Henry thinks, "It was Jacob Apelman’s doing that I met Olivia eighteen years ago, when I was unhappily married to a terminally passive-aggressive wife, father to a chronically ailing baby daughter, and caretaker of a career that made my domestic life seem idyllic" (p.74). This makes it seem as if cheating on his wife was inevitable after being introduced to a seventeen-year-old model, rather than a choice (not to mention a crime) that he had control over. Henry later plays up his wife's role in their separation again, thinking, "My ex-wife—the witch—after she kidnapped Elise, exiled her to Russia—all that time I was cut off from my own daughter until it was too late...The poisoning complete" (p.79) The way that Henry remembers the end of his marriage and early years of his daughter's life absolves him of any blame, heaping it onto his wife and agent. Perhaps this is why he is unable to truly understand Olivia's hesitant and distrustful feelings toward him.
