How to be An Other Black Box

While discussing "How to be an Other Woman" in class, I noticed some striking parallels with another short story, "Black Box" by Jennifer Egan. (For those wishing to read it, you can find it here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/black-box-2.). On the surface, these appear to be very different stories aside from their shared use of the second person: one is about a woman in an affair, and the second is about a woman trying to seduce a man, possibly some kind of criminal or terrorist, in order to spy on him. The parallel lies in the way both stories' narrators develop. They both begin with a clear frame of mind, and as the situation grows murkier and more emotionally involved, they spiral into self-doubt about their identity and the relationship they've been pursuing.

Both of these stories opened by placing their narrators in a mission, which was how I first was reminded of "Black Box" while reading Moore's story. The narrator of "Black Box" is termed a Beauty, a volunteer undercover seductress employed to spy on enemies of the state; in other words, a secret agent. "Black Box" is framed as the narrator's field guide to Beauties like herself-- much as how "How to be an Other Woman" is framed as a guide to having an affair -- and the story begins with matter-of-fact advice on how a Beauty should seduce her target. Likewise, the opening of "How to be an Other Woman" immediately evoked the sort of secret mission vibe that "Black Box" had: "Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie," and later on, directly references the narrator as a metaphorical spy, "you are two spies glancing at watches..."

The language of the opening places the narrators on a mission, and the narrators have a focused frame of mind for that mission. The narrator of Egan's story is clearly focused on her mission of getting close to her target. Even though little fragments of her own background slip out in what is ostensibly a totally objective field guide, such as a reference to her husband ("If you love someone with dark skin, white skin looks drained of something vital,") the narrator consciously steers herself back to her task. She does this in spite of the physical violations she endures: "Resist the impulse to reconstruct what has just happened. Focus instead on gauging your Designated Mate’s reaction to the new intimacy between you." Similarly, the narrator of Moore's story, Charlene, fully settles into her role as mistress, not even acknowledging the possibility that she may merely be one of a string of women, as we later discover. To her, being a mistress has become a part of her identity. She sits in public restrooms and says to herself, "Hello, I'm Charlene. I'm a mistress."

And eventually, the cracks begin to show; these two protagonists discover repercussions of their pursuits they aren't totally ready to deal with. For the narrator of "Black Box," the emotional stresses both of being physically violated and thoughts about her relationship to her husband and father build up over the course of the story, eventually reaching a head in what I think is section 37, where she is forced to attack a woman holding a baby, commentating that "We are most reluctant to hurt those who remind us of ourselves." For Charlene, there's a nagging doubt that as a mistress, she's not good enough; we see this in Charlene's list-making, which she seems to do as a direct response to Patricia's list-making. Although it was less clear for the narrator of "Black Box," Charlene's turning point seems to be the scene where she realizes that's she's simply one of many woman: not just "An Other Woman," but "Another Woman." The narrator of Egan's story begins to doubt her mission and whether she truly had any control in her life ("Hindsight creates the illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment. It’s easier to believe in a foregone conclusion than to accept that our lives are governed by chance"); Charlene's inferiority grows into a sort jealous panic, and she begins seeing potential lovers for her man in every woman she meets.

All in all, these are both intriguingly innovative stories, I would recommend readers check out "Black Box" if they haven't done so already. It's worthwhile to note that "Black Box" was published as a series of tweets, so every sentence is shorter than 140 characters.