Your story “Ordinary Wear and Tear” follows the long friendship of two men who grew up together in a small town in Montana, where they both continue to live as adults. How did the characters of Carl and Jed come to you? Did one character lead you to the other, or were they both on the page from the get-go?

I don’t know how anything comes to me. I’m sometimes drawn to ideas that fail to thrive as soon as I act upon them. Or an abandoned ember flares into life. I had taken time off around the publication of a book, but I was soon tired of not writing. I set out to work on New Year’s Day, determined to write something. After an uncomfortable spell—backache, feet going to sleep—a couple of faces arose, and I decided to follow them around. Memory and the unconscious came along. After a spell in that pleasant trance, I realized I’d made a mess. I’d have to get to work.

Carl grew up with financial security, went to boarding school, and became a lawyer. Jed was adopted by parents who had little interest in him, had to join R.O.T.C. to pay for college, and always felt he had a more precarious grip on success. How much does the differences in the two characters’ trajectories account for the differences in their personalities?

Carl’s upbringing contributed to his complacency, for sure. He is unlikely to experience the kind of discomfort that would motivate him to aspire to more, and may think that his decency is a sufficient achievement. In a society like ours, it may be. Jed, for all his charm, is just feral. Few people had a hand in his upbringing. Women are attracted to him, and that has been all the motivation he’s needed. He’s generally thoughtful, but that, too, is part of his apparatus. (“A gentleman is a patient wolf,” Lana Turner said.) His solitary state at the end of the story suggests the future toward which his nature trends.

Carl is decent but a little dull. Jed behaves badly, and arguably gets more pleasure out of life. The voice of the story inhabits Jed a little more than Carl, perhaps because his behavior would be harder to explain if we weren’t given insight into it. Do you feel more for Jed than for Carl?

I feel that I understand Jed, while Carl is the result of observation. We’re baffled by disruptive or immoral people whom we also like. We view them with a detachment that they don’t have, and are confounded that they can’t see where they’re headed; or we’re unpleasantly surprised when their worst traits lead them to success and happiness.

Ultimately, Carl upholds certain moral standards and Jed doesn’t. But Carl is referred to as a “soft touch” and “guileless.” Is his decency an active moral choice or is it a form of passivity that leaves him exposed?

It’s the culture of his origins, which his passivity keeps him from challenging. He’s a lawyer with little passion for justice. He’d just like to go on being a lawyer and eventually a judge. He’s not fascinated by his wife, but he loves boats.

Shirley, a woman who moves to the town and marries Carl, becomes a fault line in the men’s friendship. Is their rivalry really about her, or is it about something unresolved between the two of them?

She raises the temperature until the flaws in the friendship are exposed. Carl’s and Jed’s lives have been ones of amiable incompatibility, which endured in its untested state.

Why is the title of the story “Ordinary Wear and Tear”?

It’s a story about mating and its preliminaries, the longing for permanence among unstable humans. Desire is restrained or disorderly, and, in either case, it exacts some toll. That’s hardly unusual; in fact, it’s ordinary. ♦