Can the other place be an effective structural element in a short story? Let’s look at two short stories that have a number of similarities but use the other place in very different ways. Both “The Flaw in the Design,”^[10] by Deborah Eisenberg and “Give”^[11] by James Salter are first-person stories narrated by a married character who is confessing an extramarital affair. “The Flaw in the Design” opens with the other place. In dreamlike, hallucinatory prose, a woman recounts how she made eye contact with a man she noticed in a subway station and with spontaneous and reckless abandon, spent the afternoon with him in a posh hotel room. The hotel room is her other place and what we know about it we know only through her sensations: “The wall brightens, dims, brightens faintly again — a calm pulse, which mine calms to match, of the pale sun’s beating heart.”^[12] Then, after a double space, when the woman returns to her well-appointed house, we are introduced to the primary place. Through just a few details (roll top desk, crystal tumbler, granite and steel in the kitchen,) we recognize the upper-level status of this family, and it becomes difficult to connect the afternoon pick-up with the mother and wife whom we watch engaging in dinnertime banter with her son and husband. The question at the forefront of our minds is Why? This causes us to be attentive and on the lookout for clues to her behavior.

Because the other place is the first thing we encounter in this story, it functions as the destabilizer. That allows us to see, right away, a more hidden side of her personality. When the narrative takes us to the primary place, we see that all three members of this family struggle with what the college-age son believes is a morally compromised past, and the pick-up starts to seem less arbitrary. By the story’s end, we understand how the woman’s role as accomplice to her husband’s fabrication of the past entraps her and we see that her afternoon impulse is the way she escapes his mistakes, the way she enjoys independence. The other place here, as in the novels discussed, gives the protagonist greater complexity. It creates a contradiction in her behavior and poses the question why that is so essential for keeping a reader engaged.

We lose ourselves there, happily, and in changed form continue on, knowing something more, or perhaps only something different about the basic questions, the whys and hows of our existence.

In “Give” by James Salter the other place is revealed later in the narrative and when we encounter it, it comes as a complete surprise. It, too, is a place of assignation, but it represents a side of the narrator’s life that the reader would never have guessed. And while the hotel room in “Flaw in the Design” is described in disjointed visual details that impart elegance and anonymity, “[f]eather pillows, deep carpet, the mirror a lake of pure light—no imprints, no traces: the room remembers no one but us,” the small city apartment the lovers in “Give” use for their regular and continuous meetings is specific and particular. “There was an apartment on twelfth street that we were able to use, the garden behind it, the dazzling chords of Petroushka — the record happened to be there and we used to play it — chords that would always, as long as I lived, bring me back to it,
his pliancy and slow smile.”^[13] This other place exists only in this one sentence, but the specificity makes it feel established and necessary, whereas, for the woman who narrates “Flaw,” the encounter of her afternoon is meant to be erased and forgotten. Not even the mirror will record their presence. For her, what is important is that she will never go there again. For the narrator of “Give,” the apartment on twelfth street is a place with an identity that occupies a central position in his life. It puts pressure on the primary place, the house the narrator occupies with his wife and son and questions arise. Those questions draw us into the asymetrical arrangement of the narrator’s desires so that we can feel his struggle as he faces the choice he must make.

That is the beauty of an other place. It is concrete and material, with an appeal to our senses that all material things have, and yet, because it is presented in a contracted, sketchy, and incomplete manner, it creates a narrative gap. That narrative gap raises the questions that make us curious and deliver us, expectant, into the central drama. We lose ourselves there, happily, and in changed form continue on, knowing something more, or perhaps only something different about the basic questions, the whys and hows of our existence.