If ever a spoiler alert was needed, it is now. Because I am going to tell you about this absolutely supreme dialogue story and the unbeatable premise and twist. So avert your eyes now if you don’t want to know. The whole story is about a phone call. On one end, when the phone rings our guy leans across a woman in bed to pick it up. On the other end, it’s his good friend looking for his wife, whom he was expecting home from an event she went to earlier. It’s the same woman who is in the bed. The friends talk and talk and the other guy reminisces about how it was when he courted his wife and recites a short poem he gave her, written in her voice, containing the immortal line, “Pretty mouth and green my eyes”. Anyway, he’s a bit emotional but by the end so he wraps the call up and says something like “You know what, she just walked in.” [From memory.] I don’t think even Chekhov could beat that ending.
First published in The New Yorker, 1951. Collected in Nine Stories, Little, Brown & Co, 1953
A Personal Anthology 