Raymond Carver and a Brief Snooker Vignette

Title of Work: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Author: Raymond Carver
Dates Read: January 17-18, 2023
Format: Print, paperback

Posted: Goodreads, January 18th, 2023
Rating: 4/5
Review:

I was at the Eastlake Zoo Tavern when I started reading it. That’s the big one on the corner of Eastlake Ave. and Lynn St. They’ve got a lotta space in there. Pool tables, a few old arcade gaming cabinets, skee ball, darts. It’s one of those places with all kinds of shit on the walls and I’m sure you can imagine the dark, stained wood paneling covered in equal parts by local band posters layered at least three deep and antique signage sourced over many years from flea markets and garages. I swear there’s a 20ft tall dragon in the back corner, dusty and red, with horns nearly touching the lofted ceiling. The bartender won’t take credit and if you forget there’s a big headshot pasted up on the mirror behind the bar of the Man in Black himself glowering out from under dark brows at the digital natives, yuppies and tech bros who don’t carry Cash. You can’t miss it.

They had come to play a few frames of snooker at the big table in the back which sat squarely beneath the indifferent gaze of the dusty red dragon—oh, and its eyes glowed—and I was along just to get out of the house, just to watch. Outside of dedicated halls you really won’t find many bars with a snooker table in the US. To tell you the truth, you won’t find many snooker players either and this massive table usually sits unused under a long hanging lamp and an old, black naugahyde cover patched with masking tape. Then, the green baize, the felt, was littered with the clattering balls and occasionally I interjected, when appropriate, to ask about some scoring nuance or let out a sympathetic groan as another gleaming ball narrowly, devilishly avoided dropping into its pocket. These rivals shared a single cue and occasionally, when the vast expanse of the felt required, a comically extended cue and bridge rest were removed from their hooks on the side of the table and employed for those reaching shots. The extended cue curved, the wood sagging under its own weight and I thought there must be some low-brow, phallic joke in there somewhere. Cue… balls… pocket… snooker? I hardly know her! Nothing substantial came to me at the time.

As the long frames of these two enthusiastic novices wore on I found myself less interested in the game and more absorbed by this book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. Truly, I spent the rest of the evening lounging behind the snooker table, pages fanned out above me, on a stained and splintered church pew likely dragged in decades ago. It had been born again, baptized in beer for another brand of worship but creaking week after week under the asses of sinners all the same. This sinner wasn’t drinking but read stories about a common, unrefined kind of love soaked in booze, smelling of smoke, and fraying under the strain of lower-middle class life. He thought he might like a drink. And a smoke. At least one of each.

Carver is a poet. No really, I think he was always a poet first and this is what drives the brevity, the many-times-distilled concentration of his short stories. His prose is bare but conjures memories in the deep sepias of old film photography. This bareness breeds an atmosphere of pervading familiarity as each sentence unfolds in eight directions, not on the page but in the reader’s mind which races to fill in that which is unwritten with faces, feelings, scenes from one’s own past. As I read I remembered the gleam of the wet grass and the quiet chitter of small, crawling things when the moon was out that night and I was the only person awake to see it. I remembered the resigned look he gave his wife when I lifted the baseball cards from the table at the garage sale. Will you take $15 for these? I remembered how we shook when my dad yelled and I remembered the shame when I raised my own voice after promising myself I never would. I remembered how we made love after the tears had dried; we couldn’t help ourselves even though all transgressions weren’t forgiven. After, things felt ok for a while. I remembered the mounting clumsiness as men’s stories tumbled out in soft slurs over a card game, memories shared from behind glassy eyes and over ever thicker tongues. We laughed in that cabin and shared in each other’s pain too.