Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition (Initial Situation)
Love and Luggage
There's a smidgen of exposition at the beginning before we get into the real substance of the story. Of course, the story is just two people talking, so it feels kind of exposition-y the whole way through.
But if you look, you can see the dividing line between the exposition and the rising action: at the beginning the husband takes an extra-long-time to pack the luggage onto the train compartment—indicating he's avoiding something or is nervous about something—and then he and the wife settle in, making some exclamations about how they're married and what a big deal that is. Really, that's the exposition. We learn two major facts: the husband is nervous or avoiding something and we're looking at a pair of newlyweds.
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication)
Anxieties… Sexy Anxieties
When the wife starts worrying about how their marriage is going to work out—or, more specifically, how the first night is going to work out, if you catch our drift (our drift = sexy sexy sex)—then the action begins to rise.
She starts to worry about all the people all over the world, doing it all the time—getting married, she says she means, even though she obviously means something else—in China and other far-flung locales. The husband tells her to stop thinking about these things, implying that it's all going to be okay. But that can't prevent an escalating series of bickering matches: they argue about whether the husband likes the wife's family, whether he likes the wife's hat, and so on.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point)
Crush List
The story reaches the crest of its crisis when the husband and wife accuse each other of having crushes on other people, and suggests they each should've married someone else (not all that seriously, though, it would seem). The wife accuses the husband of having a crush on her friend Louise—who would probably share his bad taste in hats—and the husband accuses her of liking this dude named Joe Brooks.
It finally ends when the husband says that he didn't maliciously intend to talk about his wife's smokin' hot friend, Louise, in an insensitive way—it was just meant to be a funny peek into his stream-of-consciousness as he was standing at the altar. This proves to be basically acceptable to the wife, but it doesn't mean that their ridiculous squabbles are over (the hat argument's going to come back).
Yet things do tend to chill once they've gotten this quarrel out of their respective systems. Of course, the whole argument probably has more to do with unresolved tensions over their unconsummated marriage, than with any real fears about potential adultery or anything like that.
Falling Action
Enjoy the Silence
After the big blow-up, they still keep bickering but the action is definitely falling. They talk about what they're going to do once they get to New York—tip-toeing around what they really plan on doing. The wife talks about writing thank you notes to people from the wedding, but then changes her mind. Immediately thereafter, the narrator's voice breaks in for the total of one sentence: "There was a silence with things going on in it." (97)
Once the silence ends, they're still bickering and it becomes clear they have yet to consummate the marriage. They might've made out or exchanged a romantic moment of some sort—since, once it's over, they're pledging not to fight anymore. However, they immediately break this promise when the wife briefly re-ignites the argument about her hat.
Resolution (Denouement)
Fight Club for Life
The story doesn't have a "resolution", really—nothing is actually resolved, and we're pretty much back where we started, considering that the last line repeats dialogue from the beginning ("Here we are… aren't we?" [113]). The husband shuts down the argument about the hat, saying that they're almost in New York (and, hence, are about to do the deed), throwing in a few exclamations about how they're married—they're married!
This offers no guarantees that they're not going to have another forty petty-yet-intense verbal fights before they get off the train. In fact, the wife's repetition of the lines from the beginning shows that she is still as anxious as she was before—we're not over with this series of comic, absurd squabbles. It might very well continue for the rest of the couple's lives…