Janus

Janus Summary | Detailed Summary

Set in the 1980s, "Janus" tells the story of a successful real estate agent named Andrea. Every real estate agent, the narrator says, has a trick for making houses seem special to buyers, and Andrea is no exception. Sometimes, she brings her dog to play in the kitchen of a house she's showing, so the place will feel more like a home. Always, she brings her ceramic bowl and places it somewhere in the house where a prospective buyer will see it.

Like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, the bowl has two faces. It is not attractive, yet is has presence. It seems at first to be glazed in a plain cream color, but when seen from different angles, the bowl shows bits of geometric color and bits of silver. Buyers are drawn to inspect the bowl more closely, but then fail to find words when they try to comment on it. Andrea's life has two faces, too. It seems at first to be perfect, but this story's closer look shows it to be more complex.

To Andrea, the bowl is perfect. She enjoys watching peoples' responses to it. Once, a woman had wanted to know where she could get a bowl like that. Andrea pretended to take a few days to ask. Then, she called the woman back and lied, saying that the owners couldn't remember where they got it.

Andrea does not let her husband drop his keys into the bowl. When he first saw the bowl sitting on their coffee table, he smiled briefly and called it pretty. He did not examine it closely. Now that he and Andrea are both out of graduate school, they buy themselves lots of pretty things to make up for all the years that money was tight. Yet the pleasure in things has quickly worn off, and Andrea's husband is no more interested in her bowl than she is in his trendy new Leica camera.

Andrea and her husband are both quiet, reflective people. They are slow to make decisions, but once they do, they don't change their course. Sometimes, Andrea wants to talk to him about the bowl, but she does not, and that makes her feel guilty. She has even stopped discussing her real estate strategies with him, because now all her strategies involve this bowl. Andrea sometimes wonders if it is possible to live with someone you don't really have a relationship with, but she tries not to think too much about that.

Although interest rates are very high in the 1980s, Andrea is having a big year in real estate. She even has more clients than is comfortable for her. She wishes she could repay the bowl for her good luck. She wonders if it's possible to have a relationship with an inanimate object like a bowl, but she tries not to think about that, either.

Andrea is sure the bowl will not last forever. She constantly wonders how it will end, but it never occurs to her that she could be the one to break it. When she carries it back and forth from house to house, she is not especially careful with it, yet she is sure damage is inevitable.

Right as the story ends, the reader learns that Andrea's lover had bought her the bowl at a crafts fair before their relationship ended. He left soon afterwards, when she would not end her marriage to be with him. He couldn't understand why she would rather be two-faced and carry on two relationships, rather than end one and begin the other. Now, she sits up at night alone, watching the bowl sit perfect and safe on the table. She is fascinated by a flash of blue that sits near the rim, "a vanishing point on the horizon."