What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Raymond Carver

Product Information

Mel looked at Laura. He looked at her as if he could not place her, as if she was not the woman she was. There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

Paul E. Blom, PhD Student and Teaching Fellow | The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Department of English and Comparative Literature | Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 | Chapel Hill, NC 27599 | [email protected] Little men have their own little vices: drunkenness, unfaithfulness, spitefulness… And little men have their own little handicaps: stupidity, silliness, incompetence…The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else. So Much Water So Close to Home' is a story of men on a camping trip who come across a woman's dead body. The way they deal with it disturbs their women and everyone who knows them. But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.” A man sitting in a barber's chair getting a haircut listens as three men waiting their turn argue about a hunting story one of the men is telling. The manuscript version of the same title appears in Beginners (2004). The authors are not to be blamed entirely; they have less say on their works’ titles than we imagine. Perhaps editors have been pushing this title form, hoping to appropriate the rhythm and literary associations of Carver’s original title, to strike a vaguely meditative tone without asserting the book’s real character.

Dionysius, One: Terri lived with Ed before she lived with Mel. Terri tells how Ed loved her so much he tried to killer her, dragging her around the living room by her ankles, while repeating, “I love you, I love you, you bitch’. Thus, the four launch into a debate about Ed’s madness and passion being true love. Sidebar: Ed embodies the ancient Greeks myth of Dionysius, the frenzied, drunk intensity of unbridled passion gone wild. A collection of slice-of-life short stories that mostly go nowhere and end ambiguously, and for some damn reason I loved them. So he offers a story of his own as an illustration of what love really is. He is a heart surgeon, and he tells the others about an event that happened several months earlier. An elderly couple were in a car accident when a joyrider crashed his car into theirs, dying instantly. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I'd do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last, and always.² Dionysius, Three: Ed shot himself in the mouth but he didn’t die – he was taken to the hospital where at one point Mel actually saw him. “His head swelled up to twice the size of a normal head. I’d never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do again.” When Ed was in his hospital room dying with his much swollen head, Terri sat in the chair next to him, counter to Mel’s wishes, right up to Ed’s last breath. Sidebar: As these two women and two men drink their gin, Terri’s compassion for Ed is the sole example given in the story where love transcends physical attraction for any of them.But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.” What do any of us really know about love? It seems to me we're just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don't doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I'm talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person's being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did.” Terri says Ed took rat poison when she left him but that he survived. Mel says he’s dead now. Terri says he shot himself, but he “bungled it.” The major themes come down to the nature of love and communication and connection. The Nature of Love in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

He makes it look so easy. He almost makes it look too easy in this short story collection, as though there isn't much here aside from spare language and even sparer "plot". Perhaps the problem is that every way in which I’d like to describe the depth of these stories simply comes off as an unspeakably repetitive cliché that almost makes me shudder. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.”After finishing the second bottle of gin, the couples discuss going to dinner, but no one makes any moves to proceed with their plans.