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The Mississippi Review: Public Display of Affection
by Laura Levin

Mississippi Review

Laura Levin’s “Public Display of Affection” examines change. More specifically, Levin looks at the changes we don’t notice, the little subtleties that we miss in the motion of days upon days. Perhaps more than anything, this story reveals that intimacy isn’t a state of being; it’s an ongoing process. We like to get to know someone, then assume that our knowledge will remain accurate, that the individual will remain static, but that’s very seldom the case.

Throughout “Public Display of Affection,” we watch the narrator try to figure out her husband and their relationship. She very literally awakens one day to realize that her husband has changed. Early on she notes, “I don’t see him undressed much these days—our schedules are out of sync—but he looks slimmer than I remember. I no longer see signs of his mid-thirties around his mid-section. Since his promotion, he has begun working out with a personal trainer two afternoons a week.” Changing jobs isn’t subtle, but the effect it may or may not have on his body can be hard to notice. More than anything, the narrator realizes that she has lost a basic sense of intimacy with her husband: “This is the first time I’ve truly woken up with him in months, and I feel strangely embarrassed, like I’ve just slept with someone for the first time and now we have to figure out how much privacy the other person needs.”

As this leads the narrator to imagine an affair between her husband and a coworker, she begins asking questions. And this is what makes this story effective; it’s not the questions themselves or even their answers, but rather what they reveal. Her questions about her husband and his life reveal how much the narrator has lost. The narrator’s questions reveal how her relationship with her husband has broken down, how the assumption of intimacy has left them time to change, has left time for their relationship to decay.

Read the story and let us know what you thought.

About the Reviewer
Jeremy Trimble is a graduate student at Sacramento State University in California. He is a writer working on his first novel.

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