William Trevor’s short story is about perception — about how we see the world. Owen, the piano tuner, is blind. We are told: “Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.”
Belle had been rejected and had never married. “Well, she got the ruins of him anyway,” a farmer of the neighborhood remarked, speaking without vindictiveness, stating a fact as he saw it.
Violet had taken Owen everywhere in an old Vauxhall. She described everything: the Esso station where they bought fuel, the gloomy religious art at a customer’s house. Owen saw himself as a man who knew the neighborhood.
When Belle began to take him around, Owen would describe the neighborhood for her.
Belle cut him off: What Esso station? It had become a Texaco. And what pictures on the customer’s wall? He must have taken them down.
Belle remade his world.
It’s a story about husbands and wives. But it always makes me think about how other people shape our perceptions of the world. The people we love, for course. We notice their influence. But there are those powerful social forces. We are hardly aware of the almost gravitational strength of the force of society as a whole. Our perceptions are shaped by countless people we don’t know or care much about.
• Source: William Trevor, Selected Stories; New York: Viking, 2010. For a related note, see “Marking the day: Trevor,” May 24, 2022.
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