Enduring Love: Chapter 20 Summary & Analysis

“For the second time that afternoon,” Joe finds himself sitting in a police station, waiting to be interviewed, a coincidence he attributes to the statistical phenomenon “random clustering.” He reflects on the fact that the incident in the restaurant is already providing “headlines in the evening paper,” and he and the other witnesses to the shooting gather around a copy that a waiter has procured. From the newspaper, Joe learns that Colin Tapp is “an undersecretary at the Department of Trade and Industry” and that Parry, who has not yet been identified, is being credited with saving Tapp’s life.

Clarissa is the first in Joe’s party to speak to the police. As she returns, she warns Joe to “just tell them what [he] saw” rather than “go[ing] on about [his] usual stuff,” his concerns about Parry. Because Joe knows that Clarissa didn’t recognize Parry in the restaurant, he determines not to argue with her.

When Joe is finally shown into another interview room, the police officer with him this time is Detective Constable Wallace, whom Joe describes as a “polite young man.” Joe begins talking even before Wallace has taken his seat, confessing that the bullet was “meant for [him]” and that Jed Parry is responsible for the shooting. Looking at Joe without “any great surprise,” Detective Constable Wallace asks him to “go from the beginning.” He listens and takes notes as Joe delivers his story.

As was the case during Joe’s previous police encounter, Detective Constable Wallace occasionally steers the conversation “toward irrelevancies,” asking Joe to clarify seemingly unimportant details. The two men quibble over when Joe first recognized Jed Parry, and Wallace eventually asks Joe to remain at the police station for a while so that he can be questioned again. Because Joe believes that the events themselves will “do the work” of verifying his concerns about Parry, he determines not to “press the police too hard.” Despite this confidence, however, he feels his “isolation and vulnerability” as he sits at the station by himself. Nursing this sensation, Joe recalls the sense of loneliness that a friend, “wrongly diagnosed with a terminal illness,” once described to him. Joe feels similarly now, believing himself to be totally alone in his fight against Parry.

Detective Constable Wallace returns bearing Duty Inspector Linley’s notes. The two men have spoken to one another on the telephone, and Wallace asks Joe to repeat his story from the beginning. Joe refuses, and Wallace begins to ask him a series of questions instead. Rather than answering, Joe continues to insist that the police investigate Jed Parry, who, Joe maintains, is “not going to stop at one attempt” on Joe’s life. Irrelevantly, Detective Constable Wallace insists on talking about the Keats-Wordsworth story that Clarissa told in the restaurant. After a while, however, he comes to his point: the scholarly debate over the story’s accuracy leads him to the matter of inaccuracies in the eyewitness testimonies of Joe, Clarissa, and Jocelyn Kale. As he finishes, Wallace shares with Joe that “there was an attempt on [Colin Tapp’s] life eighteen months ago” that was most likely related to his official work.

Annoyed at this “meaningless coincidence,” Joe argues further with Detective Constable Wallace about the particular details of the restaurant meal. He feels “a familiar disappointment” that “no one [can] agree on anything” and wonders if the “prism of desire and belief” inevitably warps all recollections of the past. He thinks again of the evolutionary necessity of “convinc[ing] [our]selves” from time to time of “half-truths,” and he thinks, too, what “startling inventions” metaphysics and science are to rescue humans from such illogic.

As their interview draws to a close, Joe and Detective Constable Wallace argue further over the flavor of the ice cream served at the restaurant, the respective weight and height of the two gunmen, and whether either wore a ring. Though Wallace assures Joe that “Parry isn’t behind this,” he suggests that Joe might nevertheless need “help” and offers him forty milligrams of Prozac. Joe hurries away, experiencing once again the “shrinking, isolated feeling” that tells him that he is on his own.

Joe arrives home in darkness, the day having passed at the police station, and finds that Jed Parry is nowhere to be seen. Clarissa has left a note saying that she has gone to bed, and Joe pours himself a drink and goes into his study. Looking through his address books, Joe finds the names of acquaintances who have fallen out of his life and reflects on how financially successful they have all been. Though he does not yet tell the reader what he’s looking for, he makes it clear that he doesn’t expect to find it among his reasonable, responsible friends. Finally, however, Joe finds in the “W” section the name of Johnny B. Well, a harmless drug dealer whom Joe once knew and who is “as extensively connected as a neuron.” From him, Joe can presumably get what he is looking for.

Joe reflects on his long-ago acquaintance with Johnny B. Well and on the economic forces that gradually altered the man’s drug-selling career. Johnny has been “obliged to extend the range of his contacts” over the years, and Joe now believes that someone in Johnny’s circle will be able to help him. Staring at Johnny’s name in his address book, Joe wonders why he didn’t think of him “instantly.” “The answer,” Joe reflects, “was that I had not seen him in eleven years.” Additionally, Joe has long since given up illicit drugs for the “infinite, ingenious” and “tasty” pleasure of alcohol.

Sitting with his telephone in his lap, Joe realizes that he is at a “turning point” and that “one action, one event, would entail another, until the train was beyond [his] control.” Nevertheless, he picks up the phone and calls Johnny B. Well. What he needs, he tells his former friend, is a gun.