R. Carver

There was that time that I wrote the review of your book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for the Times, and I did not know anything I wrote. You were wild and magnificent and more worldly, and more worldly read than me. I thought you dwelled on the bad things, and the bad people feeling the bad things too much. I made it a habit to adopt the new style and I thought you had nothing to do with it.
I met you that weekend in Portland, a long weekend, Labor Day, and you seemed the nicest. I could not seem to get the smear of your writing out of my brain. A bad smear I thought at the time. Like you had tainted my thoughts. The way in which love could be. Like you had precluded the possibility of anything possible. I was young, foolish and full of hope.
In Portland, over that beer, I found you nothing like what you wrote. Filled with passion and a history of love, I failed to understand the way in which you could write what I felt at the time was so much heartlessness. Nothing is ever as it seems. Mt. Hood stood as a monument outside of the bar, and over the roofline, of the cold, frigid horizon of aging.
I made a mistake. See, it was never your intention to be that way. There was a commitment to truth of one sort or another. The way in which a fictioner will write it and a journalist could never get. This is all second-nature to the English majors in the crowd. I picked up your book again tonight some 18 years later, and it all falls into place. It’s not that easy, simple or forthcoming. Trying to make sense of tea leaves at the bottom of your cup, or to believe that she is out there waiting for you seems fruitless now. I do not know how I got the Times gig at all. Daddy was in the service with an assistant edtor during a week when the editor had escaped to Mali when it was beautiful and a respite. I needed cash.
Tonight Robert arrived and later found himself vomiting on the bathroom floor for an hour and a half until he passed out. I made a bed for him and lured him to it where he lies asleep now. I was just in bed myself, lonely, reading your review of Richard Ford’s The Ultimate Good Luck when I realized that a peace was required. All that I said of you was wrong. Incredibly so. In fact, all that I have said of myself to this point has been so as well. I am still figuring out piece by piece, and I still cannot figure out why your last word is there in those pages, as if that was all that ever really mattered. I can read it a hundred times over now, just one paragraph, with only a smidge that begets a smear, starts to sink into this heart, and I breathe.