The Perfect Couple

Celeste’s stutter is an important symbol in the novel with many hidden meanings. The stutter, which Celeste develops at the age of 28 in the run-up to her wedding with Benji, serves in part as a metaphor for Celeste’s inner chaos. On the surface, the stutter can be attributed to wedding nerves, but it also symbolizes the battle between love and settling, individualism and martyrdom, and Celeste’s childlike and grown-up selves. Although Celeste is an accomplished woman, the narrative hints that she may be emotionally too dependent on her parents. Celeste’s desire to please her parents is immature and forces her to persist with an unhappy relationship. Her healthy, individualistic grown-up self rebels against this regression, and the tussle spills forth as a stutter.

The stutter intensifies when Celeste must face the planning for the wedding, marking her discomfort not only for the ceremony but also the world in which she is trying to fit. Celeste becomes a “marionette operated by Greer and Roger Pelton” (304) during the wedding planning, uncomfortable at the thought of getting procedures like an eyelash extension. Celeste’s stutter disappears when she is at work, with her friends, or with Shooter, signifying that she is comfortable in these milieus. Once Celeste decides to choose love and integrity over settling and misguided martyrdom and tells Benji she will not be marrying him, her stutter disappears entirely. Its disappearance shows that Celeste has embraced her healthy, grown-up, and ethical self.

Made of silver lace, with “pink, yellow, and blue sapphires” (17), the ring that Tag gifts Merritt plays an important role in the narrative. Tag purchases the trendy ring from Nantucket jeweler Jessica Hicks. Tag’s secret purchase becomes known to Greer when Hicks, a mutual acquaintance, tells Greer that Tag may have bought jewelry for their daughter-in-law. Greer immediately suspects the ring is meant for Featherleigh Dale, the family friend with whom she thinks Tag is having an affair. In this sense, the ring functions as a red herring, a diversion. Greer is so convinced that Featherleigh is the woman Tag is pursuing that she doesn’t even recognize the ring when she sees it on Merritt’s thumb.

To Merritt, the ring first symbolizes the possibility of a better life and love; later, it comes to represent betrayal. Traditionally, the closed circle of a ring symbolizes a bond; Merritt, aware of this symbolism, feels that Tag’s gift is meaningful. She tells Celeste that the fact that Tag gave her a ring and not “a book, a scarf, a bracelet” (308) indicates his serious intentions. Celeste thinks the gift is meant just as a fond token and, as such, that Tag’s choice of gift is unintentionally cruel. The fact that Tag does not think about the implications of his gift means that he does not see Merritt as a person; to him, she is only an object of desire. In the final scene of the book, Merritt throws the ring in the sea, marking her heartbreak and disillusionment with Tag. The circle of her trust is finally broken. Yet, the appeal of the bond the ring represents is so strong that Merritt ends up diving underwater to retrieve it. The ring’s lure thus leads to danger and death, calling to Merritt from the ocean floor. “Like love, she thinks, it is just beyond her reach” (340). Merritt keeps reaching for the illusion of the perfect love the ring represents, faints in the water, and drowns.