(urth) Short Story 92: Checking Out

[Marc Aramini]

Checking Out

“Checking Out” first appeared in 1986 in *Afterlives* and is collected
in *Storeys
from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY: A nameless protagonist is awoken by the slam of a door. He is
lying on a blue satin coverlet fully dressed in his best suit but without
shoes. He believes himself to be in a small, shiny, and cheap hotel room
and sees his suitcase nearby. He opens his bag and realizes his blue-eyed
wife Jane didn't pack it, thinking it must have been his cleaning woman,
Martha, before he remembers “Martha was dead.” He sees a picture of Jane's
clear blue eyes, and thinks that she would say that she would miss him,
“Though he knew the only time she really relaxed was when he was gone –
when he was gone, and she could pretend they were rich for life, and there
would never, never be a need to make anything more, no need for late nights
at the office, for flights to New York with [his secretary] Jan.”

He remembers a flight and decides he is in the Algonquin in New York, and
wants to go out and get a magazine but can't find his shoes: “Well, to hell
with them.” He finds Jan's picture while looking for his slippers, and
thinks Martha must have put it there. He tosses it “toward the
wastebasket.” He thinks she must love him “in a way Jane never had”, at
least since the birth of their child.

He finds a picture of his adolescent sweetheart Joan under Jan's picture,
and hears the air conditioner like an “unending sigh”. He recalls a
childhood desk and is astonished to think that Joan was probably a virgin
then. He tries to throw “both” pictures at the wastebasket again, and steps
on the balcony to see a huge atrium, with flooding below and the sky above,
but no way to leave the room. “Tiny figures moved slowly across the lobby,
wading in water nearly waist deep …. The room was dark and gloomy behind
him, like a cave in which something slept.” He returns to the room to see
Jan's picture once again on his clean clothes, and reaches for the phone to
confess to Jane.

The story cuts to Jane and Mrs. Clem discussing how nice he looked in all
that pretty blue at his funeral – Jane bought an air tight dome to keep
water from getting to her dead husband. She answers the phone but hears
nothing, not even breathing, as the main character, despite his resolve to
return to his wife Jane, becomes confused again and calls out all three
names before the cleaning woman comes in to turn down the bed so that it is
ready for him to lie in once more.

COMMENTARY: The first thing that jumps out is the style of the story,
rather unusual for Wolfe at this point in his career: simple declarative
sentences that repeat the same pattern over and over. The simple repetition
will be the narrator's fate. He tosses Jan's picture toward the wastebasket
three times, and many thoughts recur incessantly. “No doubt” starts at
least seven sentences in a fairly short story – but our main character has
been plagued by doubts and uncertainty all his life, especially when it
comes to women. The fragments that stick out are “Flights … Space. … an
atrium - … a flood - ...” Even the names of the women involved (Jan, Jane,
and Joan) have a sameness to them that makes them seem like a repetitive
part of a cycle, and no doubt this symbolizes his difficulty in separating
his feelings for them while he was alive. He tries to get rid of unwanted
pictures now with little success. The picture of Jan keeps cropping up, in
the frame and on his clothes, whenever his attention waivers – no matter
how he resolves to throw it away, he fails.

The overwhelming blue of the sky and the water in the atrium and his own
coverlet of course reflect the blue of his coffin – but he is trapped in
that small room, sealed off from the blue water and infinite sky he can
only glimpse from the closed balcony. More than this, however, the blue
also represent Jane and her blue eyes. At the end of the story, she has
erected an air tight barrier around him so that the water can't reach him,
the blue theme her choice, and he has been sealed off from her love. His
ending decision, to return to Jane, comes too late – unable to truly make
up his mind in life, in death the decision has no power, and he is trapped
in the limbo, with only the repetitive sameness of trying to throw away the
things he never could in life.

The sighing might seem like the slow exhalation of a final breath, but it
probably implies regret now that things can no longer be fixed and he has
finally made his choice. Even with his resolution, which seems firm, when
Jan does not hear him, he immediately begins to call out the wrong name
once more. This final scene is the hardest to pin down as “after-life” or
not. It is doubtful there is any intersection between his existence in the
hotel limbo and Jan's continuing life without him, but whether or not his
spirit can actually succeed in making the call, it is clear he can no
longer communicate with her. The only female presence he will have here is
probably “dead” Martha the cleaning woman, who refuses to do windows. His
failure to see clearly in life and appreciate the things he had has doomed
him to this.

With the meaning of the female names discussed below, Mrs. Clem's minor
mercies involve saying how nice he looked in death and in suggesting to Jan
that she hang up the phone, but all that is left for the main character is
the bitterness of separation and the return of his dead cleaning woman.

There is some speculation as to whether this afterlife is more like a hell
or a purgatory, but from the sighing and the main character's exclamation,
“To hell with them”, it seems to be more like the first circle of Dante's
Hell, Limbo, the start of the huge vertical prison, rather than any
Catholic idea of Purgatory, for even when he makes his decision to return
to Jane or throw away Jan and Joan, immediately they are back to haunt him.
There is no indication that he can ever throw them away, failing to do so
in life – when Jane does not hear his voice, the cycle of confusion starts
over.

LITERARY ALLUSIONS-

Because of the name, “Checking Out”, and the sighing that is heard
throughout the story, the thought that this was something like Wolfe’s
version of Bierce's “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” presented itself, but
the blue satin coverlet and the dead man's shoeless state matches a bit too
much with the coffin (most are buried without shoes, after all) that his
wife has spent so much money on to believe that he was actually still in
the process of “checking out”. It seems far more likely that the literary
allusion at work is to Dante's *Inferno*, where the souls in Limbo
constantly sigh, lamenting their separation from God. Even though Dante's
vision of purgatory is also vertical, like the huge atrium that our
narrator sees, the sighing found throughout Limbo and even the idea of
Virgil in Limbo as a fountain and the “sea of all good sense” makes it seem
as if our main character is more closely situated to the Inferno than
Purgatory. Our nameless main character has no way to ascend or leave the
hotel room, even though he insists on checking out of it.

NAMES

Obviously, all three female names are so similar in their root that they
mean the same thing.

Jan – God is gracious, it can also mean gift from God

Jane – God is gracious, gift from God
Joan- God is gracious, gift from God
One gets the impression that part of the narrator's failing in life was in
lacking appreciation for God's gifts until it was too late.

Bruce – implies thick brush (if there is a deliberate Dante reference at
work in this story, ironic that the start of his poem involves getting lost
in the woods -

IN the midway of this our mortal life,

I found me in a gloomy wood, astray

Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell,

It were no easy task, how savage wild

That forest, how robust and rough its growth,

Which to remember only, my dismay

Renews, in bitterness not far from death.


 Martha – the sister of Lazarus and Mary, her name means bitter, (just as
the names of the wife of the narrator in “Redbeard” and the daughter in
“The Adopted Father” do).

Mrs. Clem – the name Clem implies merciful. Her mercy extends to advising
Jane to hang up and in admitting that the dead man looked nice in all that
“pretty blue”.

THE EFFECT OF THE NARRATIVE VOICE:

The immediacy of first person might create a more personal look at our
narrator’s dying or dead experiences, but the third person allows distance
and a passive powerlessness that suits the isolated, trapped man – he is
about to lose the “I” of ego, isolated in the watery hotel room of his
spirit. His attempt to assure his wife that he is returning and that he is
making his choice comes far too late.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:
What is the significance of the flood, and why would Jane erect an air
tight barrier around his coffin to avoid the entrance of water?
Symbolically I think this represents the separation from her, but is the
water imagery truly as benign as Jane's blue eyes when there are figures in
the lobby wading in water up to their waists?

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

I feel as if Wolfe has done several stories where the narrator is about to
die, namely “The Recording” and “Melting”, and several that involve
consciousness after death - “The Dead Man”, *Peace, *and some of the
stories from *Strange Travelers*. However, even though there are some small
gestures that this one is located on the cusp of dying, the overall effect
is that of an after-life story where our narrator deals with the regrets
and mistakes of his life, and in that regard it is closest to *Peace*. It
is also like a more figurative “Packerhaus Method”, though this one is more
overtly dualist, with the intersection between the afterlife and the purely
physical world fleeting, ineffectual, and perhaps illusory.
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