Summary
Stan plays poker with his Elvis colleagues and learns that many of them started as actors. And not all of them are gay—many are just acting gay, because clients don’t want them to be sexually threatening to female patients. Stan learns that the National Association of Broadcasters is in town for a convention, so they’ll have increased demand. They ask if Stan wants to be an escort, saying he won’t have to have sex: they’ll send in an Elvis Possibilibot and he can stick around to make sure it doesn’t violently malfunction. Meanwhile, Charmaine spends the weekend with Aurora living at her house. Charmaine learns that Aurora received a face transplant; it was her incentive for joining the project. Her real face was "scraped off" in a roller derby accident. Her face came from a Procedure victim. Aurora explains that lately they haven’t been euthanizing people; now they use undesirables for the imprinting surgery. Jocelyn has promised to set Aurora up with a partner “once she’s identified the right match.”
In Vegas, before his first escort assignment, Stan steadies his nerves with a stroll on the strip. He learns that four bald men in sunglasses came by looking for him with an old photograph. Stan goes on his date with Lucinda Quant, figuring it is best to stay in crowds. Lucinda Quant is sexually suggestive with Stan, who claims to be gay. She laughs and says he isn’t, but they can talk about that later. He keeps an eye out for the four bald men as she leads him through the convention crowds. Charmaine, meanwhile, learns that Ed wants to take her on a business trip to Vegas. Jocelyn and Aurora show Charmaine a video of Ed pitching his Possibilibots team on what he thinks should be their real venture: abducting women and programming them to be devoted to their clients. Charmaine realizes he wants to bring her to the Vegas clinic where they’ve been perfecting the treatment. Charmaine panics about her attachment to Stan being erased. Jocelyn reassures her, saying she’s coming along as a bodyguard.
Lucinda Quant takes Stan to see a Green Man Group show, a ripoff of the popular Vegas act Blue Man Group. Stan sits up straight when they do a tulip-themed performance to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” He assumes it’s a coincidence, as he isn’t sure who he’d give the belt to. After the show, while Lucinda Quant is in the bathroom, Veronica appears and ushers Stan to one of the Green Man Group’s dressing rooms. She tells him to wait for the contact. He waits for a knock and Lucinda Quant enters. She orders him to undo his belt, saying the story is going to be her comeback. Using a tiny screwdriver-like implement, she pops the belt buckle open and finds the mini black flash drive. She leaves with the drive.
Conor, Budge, Rikki, and Jerold come in with friendly greetings. All in green, they’re the four bald men who were looking for Stan. He learns that Budge got out of Possibilibots the same way Stan did. The men shave Stan’s head and disguise him as one of the Green Men. Stan learns he is the “lynchpin” in the next job they have to do. At a Ruby Slippers location, they will go in as the group and Stan will be instrumental in a “snatch” of a person. Meanwhile, Charmaine is on the plane to Vegas. While Ed sits up front in business class, Charmaine sits with Jocelyn in the back. Jocelyn says that Ed’s plan is for Jocelyn to drug her drink to knock her out. Paramedics will be there when the plane lands, and she’ll be taken to Ruby Slippers Vegas for the “brain intervention.” As the plane lands, Jocelyn points out that the ambulance is waiting. She pats Charmaine’s arm and asks if she is sleepy. Charmaine finds herself uncontrollably passing out, despite Jocelyn’s promise to keep her safe.
Conor doesn’t let Stan return to the Elvisorium; he spends the night with the men at their hotel. The next day, they cover themselves in green paint and clothing and drive to Ruby Slippers. They play loud music and dance around in the Atrium until they hear an ambulance approaching. Rikki and Jerome go out first; after they bow, Conor and Stan follow. Stan finds that the men have knocked out the Ruby Slippers bodyguards and three other men. Inside the ambulance, Ed has been knocked out and is being carried by Jocelyn and her “asshole husband.” Charmaine is unconscious on a stretcher. Jocelyn and Conor say it’s time to get her and Ed into the clinic fast.
That night, Lucinda Quant breaks the story of what’s really happening at Positron. Stan watches from the recovery room where Charmaine lies unconscious. He has removed his green paint. Aurora comes in and explains that Max (Phil) woke up and swore undying love to her, and that Jocelyn set it up because she’s divorcing him. The procedure will cure Phil of his sex addiction. Aurora is delighted. When Charmaine wakes up, she hugs Stan and then rips off his clothes. She can’t wait to have sex, and he is pleased that she finally desires him passionately.
Afterward, Stan goes out of the room and learns from Rikki, Jerome, and Conor that the procedure has been performed on Ed too. He is about to wake up and imprint on Lucinda Quant. Jocelyn explains that she’s going to take him to Dubai, where he’ll be safe from prosecution. Lucinda Quant wants “a stellar finale to her life, in case the cancer comes back.” She wants him to lick chocolate mousse off her whole body. Jocelyn explains to Stan that she can’t have Ed testifying to Congress because she would be implicated if he turned on her. It’s cleaner this way. As Ed wakes up, Lucinda Quant goes in and the others listen as Ed declares his love and passion for her.
A wedding-Elvis performs a marriage ceremony for Aurora and Max; simultaneously, Charmaine and Stan renew their vows. Charmaine is happy that the dark part of herself seems to be gone. The pain has been erased too. She even watches Max/Phil get married to another woman without jealousy. She wishes them the best. Sandi and Veronica are at the wedding dressed as Marilyns. They toast to the old days ironically. Jocelyn arrives late with Conor and his friends. Stan is delighted to see them. Jocelyn says she has a wedding gift for Charmaine, but will give it to her in a year from now. After Conor and Jocelyn leave, Stan and Charmaine speculate on whether they’re a couple. Stan says Conor always preferred hard-nosed women.
Stan gets a new job as an Empathy Module adjustor at the Vegas Possibilibots facility. His job is to perfect the Elvis grin on the bots. He and Charmaine have a three-month-old daughter named Winnie/Winifred, after Grandmother Win. Charmaine reads the news and worries about reports of baby abductions for their blood. Stan says it won’t happen in their neighborhood. She feels possessive of Stan too. Stan doesn’t buy the story that Charmaine knew the needle wasn’t going to kill him. But he can’t use that or her affair against her, because the score is balanced by his theoretical affair with Jasmine. Their sex has never been better, in part because of the verbal turn-ons Stan learned while recreating Charmaine’s sex with Max. She does whatever he commands.
In the last chapter, Charmaine is basking in the sun like a seal and thinking about how well Sandi and Veronica are doing these days. She’ll see them soon at the Positron Survivors’ Reunion. Stan is trimming their cactus hedge. Jocelyn arrives in a sleek hybrid car, visiting from Washington, where she and Conor have been doing something top secret. Jocelyn tells Charmaine that she’s ready to deliver their wedding gift: a piece of information that Charmaine can choose to hear. Jocelyn warns that to hear it, she’ll “be more free but less secure.” Jocelyn then reveals that Charmaine never had a brain adjustment operation. Charmaine can’t believe it, because it feels like everything is so different. Jocelyn says the brain is “infinitely suggestible.” Charmaine is upset to learn this. Jocelyn asks if it isn’t better to love him because she’s decided to, and not because she’s been forced. Charmaine worries over the possibility of a Max-like person in her future disrupting her pleasant, devoted life; she knows how destructive that would be.
Analysis
The themes of exploitation and manipulation return with the revelation of Aurora’s backstory. Having “scraped off” her face during a freak roller-derby accident, Aurora was in a vulnerable position. Jocelyn and the Positron project exploited her predicament by offering her an otherwise-prohibitively-expensive face transplant surgery in exchange for signing away her life to the project. Aurora also tells Charmaine about how Jocelyn continues to keep Aurora loyal with the promise of a man who can be made to fall in love with her. In this way, Jocelyn manipulates Aurora by keeping her on the hook.
Atwood continues building on the themes of the loss of human rights, greed, and exploitation with the revelation that Ed intends to surgically alter Charmaine’s brain without her consent. Having failed to woo her on his own, the morally bankrupt Ed—who sees humans as objects not worthy of rights—resorts to the idea of giving Charmaine the brain adjustment surgery that his Vegas clinic has been perfecting and that went wrong with Veronica. But in an instance of dramatic irony, Ed doesn’t know Jocelyn is working against him, and she has let Charmaine know what he plans.
Meanwhile, Stan goes about doing what he is told to do in Vegas, still being used as a pawn. In an instance of situational irony, Stan’s escort date with Lucinda Quant turns out to be a setup for him to hand over the flash drive full of incriminating material. While it has seemed to Stan that he’s continually being abandoned by his handlers, it turns out that even the Green Man show was staged to carry out Conor’s and Jocelyn’s plans.
The final stage of Jocelyn’s plot to undermine Ed’s authority comes with her, Ed’s, Aurora’s, and Charmaine’s arrival in Las Vegas. In a startling scene, Jocelyn explains to Charmaine that she is supposed to drug Charmaine just as the plane lands; then Ed can have her transported to a clinic to have her brain altered. Despite promising Charmaine’s safety, Charmaine finds herself uncontrollably drifting out of consciousness. However, in an instance of dramatic irony, Charmaine doesn’t know that Stan is working with Conor and his bodyguards to intervene in Ed’s plan. Once they are all at the clinic, Jocelyn continues to manipulate the situation to her advantage, regardless of people’s human rights. Attempting to tie up all the loose ends, she makes Ed hopelessly attached to Lucinda Quant and set up Phil with Aurora. She also rewards Stan and Charmaine by making Charmaine hopelessly devoted to Stan—or so it seems.
In the last chapter of The Heart Goes Last, Atwood returns to the themes of manipulation and the tension between infidelity and devotion. One year following the novel’s climactic scene in which Charmaine wakes from her brain adjustment operation to find herself more passionate than ever about Stan, Jocelyn visits the couple to deliver unsettling news: Contrary to what Charmaine was told, she never underwent the brain surgery.
With this revelation, Charmaine’s devotion to Stan comes into question, and she wonders whether another Max figure might come along to provoke her to cheat. While Jocelyn suggests that it is better to choose to be with someone, it is clear that Charmaine—a highly suggestible and manipulable person—would prefer to live in a reality where free will isn’t an option. With this haunting idea, Atwood ends the novel by reminding the reader that Charmaine, despite everything she has been through, is liable to fall victim to another totalitarian scheme.
