This collection part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series includes seventeen vintage Raymond Carver, including Viewfinder - An abandoned husband chucks stone as he is photographed up on his roof by a door-to-door salesman/photographer who had hooks instead of hands; A Serous Talk - An ex-husband expresses his rage when his ex-wife takes a telephone call in the bedroom by cutting the telephone line in the kitchen; One More Thing – A husband, wife and daughter accuse one another of being nuts. To share a larger helping of what a reader will find in the pages of this book of early Raymond Carver short-shorts, here’s a bit of detail on the title story alone with my sidebar comments:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Symposium: Two couples, Mel and Terri, Laura and the narrator, Nick by name, sit around Mel’s kitchen table one evening drinking gin when the topic of conversation turns to love. Sidebar: Echoes of Plato’s Symposium and, of course, the meaning of symposium is a drinking party. However this is 20th century Carver county America, so the object of love remains always women for men and men for women – not even close to seeing the opposite sex as the first step on the ladder leading to a more generalized universal love of philosophic wisdom.
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.
Dionysius, Two: Mel relates how Ed would call him up on the phone to threaten his life and once actually tried to kill him. Mel had to buy a gun for protection (completely out of character, he admits – he’s a cardiologist, for God sake!) and he and Terri lived like fugitives. Terri, in turn, says how when she left him, Ed drank rat poison causing serious facial deformities. Sidebar: Raymond Carver noted how a little menace is good for the temperature, good for a short story. Very true, Ray! Since Mel and Terri were personally so threatened by Ed, the whole tone of the discussion on love takes a much more serious turn.
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.
True Love: Laura comments how she and Nick know what true love is, as they touch knees and Nick makes a big production of kissing Laura’s hand. Terri tells them they are still on their honeymoon, even after being together for nearly two years, but just wait. As an afterthought, Terri tells them how she is just kidding about that "just wait." Sidebar: Like hell Terri is kidding; she knows from experience that at some point the honeymoon ends, but Laura and Nick are in honeymoon mode now, which is the pinnacle of love for each one of these four, thus her jealousy.
Probing Question: Mel waxes philosophical when he acknowledges how he loved his first wife very much but now he hates her guts. Same thing with Terri in her love for Ed, same thing for both Laura and Nick since they both were married previously. What happened to that love? And if anything tragic happened to any of them, their partner would find someone else to love. Sidebar: Good question. Why is such a powerful, all consuming emotion for one person alive within us for a time then it either dies or turns to an equally negative emotion? Even when it comes to something that doesn’t change, like music, the type of music we love changes over time. Why is this?
DOA: Mel relates a story of love that really impressed him, a story where a drunk teenage driver at high speed slammed into the car of a seventy-year-old husband and wife. The kid was DOA but the husband and wife were at his hospital in traction, bandaged head to foot, in the same hospital room and the husband tells him though a mouth-hole in his bandaged head that what really depresses him isn’t the accident or being injured or the pain but the fact that he can’t turn his head and see his wife through his eye-holes.
The White Knight and His Kids: Mel says how he wants to be like those medieval knights in their armor where nothing can hurt them. Then, tipsy with gin, Mel wants to speak with his kids. Terri cautions him that his Marjorie (Mel’s ex) might answer the phone. Mel becomes extremely angry and upset, tells everyone how Marjorie is bankrupting him, how she doesn’t marry her goddam boyfriend since she wants to still continue to collection money from him. Knowing Marjorie is allergic to bees, Mel swears he will show up at Marjorie’s front door wearing the white suit of a beekeeper and let loose a hive of bees to kill her. Sidebar: Echoes of Ed and the spirit of Dionysius as Mel is possessed with the mad desire for destruction and killing.
Silence: All four fall silent, sensing how Dionysius isn’t all that far away – it is only a matter of what can set us off. The story ends with Nick’s reflection: “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
Raymond Carver, master of the short story
Comments
Post a Comment