Response to Richard Bausch's "1-900"

I really enjoyed the all-dialogue aspect of this story.  The possibilities of using this in different contexts is now running through my mind.  What I enjoyed most is the role that is given to the reader.  Bausch hands us the opportunity to decipher why these two people would have such a conversation.  Why would John call a sex line so he could chat about his failing marriage?  And why would Marilyn/Sharon stay on the line for so long if she was truly irked by John’s desire to get to know her?  This kind of reaction to a short story is what proves its effectiveness.  

Had we been given a narrator, I would not have been able to last the whole 21 pages before I put the book down to do something else for a bit.  It would have done the work in trying to figure out the characters for me and the pace of the conversation, which also kept me reading, would have been much too slow.  Both of these characters wanted something.  John wanted to see his kids and Marilyn/Sharon wanted to hear her boyfriend tell her “I love you”.  These characters were dynamic and complicated and unexpected and fun to interpret.

I was confused about the title during the bulk of reading because I didn’t know what 1-900 numbers were.  Despite me not understanding it, I think the title is fit for this short story because it carries that sense of anonymity; the entire conversation I was skeptical of whether John and Marilyn/Sharon were actually telling the truth to each other and that brought so much more significance to the use of 1-900 as the title.  Even the specifics in the conversation were non-specific.  What an interesting way to make a statement about conversation being more intimate than sex.