In Oates’s own words, this story “explores the fundamentally unspeakable mysteries of human personalities in conjunction with one another.” These are mysteries we live out in our everyday interactions, no matter how well we think we might know someone else. Who is this person, really? What are they thinking? What do they think about me? We’ll never know for sure—others’ inner lives are stubbornly eclipsed—but we search for clues anyway, feckless detectives struggling to solve a perpetual stream of mysteries flowing from the ultimate mystery of life. When it comes to the collision of personalities, there’s a pleasure and beauty in not knowing, in the fact that there’s a secret part of the self that can never be shared. But, as Oates’s story makes clear, there’s also an element of horror.

The story’s subjects are K__ and T__, a “not young,” recently married couple settling into what is, for each of them, a second marriage. By the husband’s design, each knows very little about the other. He sees this marriage as a “new start” and rarely speaks about his former life, nor does he encourage his wife to speak about hers. The wife’s identity, especially, has been reduced to her relationship with her husband. Oates emphasizes this erasure with the letter from a truncated name—“K__”—and by subsequently referring to her only as “the wife” or, lesser still, “the (new) wife.” K__ isn’t quite the wife, and she’s constantly, painfully aware that there was another before her. The husband’s name receives a similar treatment, but they live in his national-landmark house and see his group of friends, and his professional identity remains intact between marriages, all affording him a greater substance while the wife’s is leeched dry.

The literal nightmares that start encroaching on the “daylight logic” of their lives alert the wife to the presence of the unknown element in her husband. Something is lurking out of sight, beneath the surface, and it doesn’t remotely resemble the husband she knows. Awake and in the light of day, the husband is a strapping, broad-shouldered, calm man. In the throes of his nightmares, he’s ugly, whimpering, and bestial, a “thwarted bull” and “stricken animal” who strikes terror in his wife and then rebukes her for waking him. The couple met when they happened to find themselves innocently “grazing the same turf.” Now, the husband is a beast that might “lash out, claw”—and even kill.

The idea that the husband might have murdered his first wife comes to K__ in a dream. But instead of fading at daybreak, the faulty “nighttime logic” seeps into her waking hours and is sprinkled throughout the story. The wife’s idea that the husband murdered his first wife in the very bed they sleep in now ignores the (supposed) fact that the couple had already divorced when she died. There’s also a subtle (and humorous) implication that K__ considers whether the house “had come to be a landmark in the community” because it was the site of the murder. But then there’s the case of the goose-feather pillow—a possible murder weapon—which reminds K__ of the husband’s off-putting single-mastectomy analogy and accompanying remark about “a beautiful body destroyed.” A link is formed between the pillow, the husband’s insistence on keeping it, and murder—a link between the wife’s night thoughts and the day.

Her internet search of the former wife supplants nighttime logic with a full waking nightmare. The message returned by the search engines reads: “This site has been discontinued due to a violation of the terms of service or program policies. Displaying this content is prohibited.” It’s at once comical, absurd, nightmarish, and horrific, as if the former wife had been “discontinued” for failing to uphold her end of the marital agreement, which has become the (new) wife’s fear. Instead of asserting herself and her identity, she feels that she has to slip into the role of the perfect wife, not merely to avoid conflict, but “to protect her own life.”

Before meeting the husband she had “considered taking her own life.” The husband rescued her from that fate, but now she fears he might take her life instead. It’s a horrible place to be, facing death in both directions, and with no other choice but to adhere to the “terms” and “policies,” which, to her understanding, requires a stifling state of selfless non-being. While the husband’s vision of “a new start requiring a new calendar” had once been touching, by the time the wife is searching for her missing boxes—anything substantive to tie her to her former self—the idea is suffocating.

After the wife’s last horrifying nightmare, Oates leaves us in bed with the couple and without any clear answers. Have they both been having nightmares? Is the husband a murderer? Has he been gaslighting the wife? Each still knows little about the other. Throughout the story, Oates repeatedly compares the wife and husband to children, whether it’s the “blundering” of the wife or the husband’s childlike stubbornness. Their love came late in life, but it’s still young; in the relationship, each is like a child still learning the other’s “almost intelligible” language, an effect of living so many years and developing so much of their personalities before encountering one another. Milan Kundera wrote about how, when people meet late in life, the “musical compositions” of their lives “are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.” In this early phase of their late love, it’s no surprise that the wife wonders, “But who have I married?”

That’s still the question in the closing scene, when “One of them reaches for the bedside lamp and turns it on. Each seeing the other’s face haloed suddenly in the darkness.” Despite the question’s presence between them, I read a hopefulness in those final lines. Both are wondering the same thing. Both are unsure of what has been happening and, in Oates’s words, of “who needs rescuing.” We don’t know who turned on the light. A balance has finally been achieved.

The image of the wife and husband seeing each other’s faces “haloed” in the darkness recalls a line from earlier in the story about “the soft glow of marital intimacy,” which the lamp failed to provide when the wife turned it on earlier but does appear to provide at the end. The lamp doesn’t (and never will) illuminate their inner lives, but there’s more to be seen if each is open to lighting it. And, with regard to the horror that darkens the unknowable, we either learn to live with it or we don’t live at all. Other people are a mystery, how they perceive us is a mystery, life is a mystery—without solving them, we live on, necessarily resigned to an incomplete set of clues.

Pascal’s aphorism reminds us that the only reason we can even function is because of what we place in front of us, the obligations and activities of everyday life that prevent us from seeing the end we’re all running toward. They take our minds off the mysteries, and the horrors they contain, so as not to disturb the functioning—and continuation—of our lives.

Read “Late Love,” by Joyce Carol Oates, in The New Yorker.