I couldn't sleep last night and thus found myself, during the three-o'clock hour, scanning the bookshelf for something to distract me. I pulled down Raymond Carver's collection Where I'm Calling From and found, in the table of contents, "The Student's Wife," ten pages long, about another insomniac, maybe not what the doctor ordered but it seemed apt. I hadn't noticed before the soaring language that Carver, later in his career, perhaps abetted by Gordon Lish, excised from his prose. Here are the first two sentences:
He had been reading to her from Rilke, a poet he admired, when she fell asleep with her head on his pillow. He liked reading aloud, and he read well--a confident sonorous voice, now pitched low and somber, now rising, now thrilling.
Tomorrow, however, will be Friday, the wife of the Rilke admirer's "day for all the four-to-seven-year olds in the Woodlawn Apartments," and she can't sleep. After her husband unsonorously asks her to leave him alone, she gets out of bed, moves through the apartment, looks in on the kids, smokes a cigarette, thumbs distractedly through magazines. Finally, as the story ends, the sun is rising:
Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read has she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this.
She waited and then moved over to the door and turned the lock and stepped out onto the porch. She closed the robe at her throat. The air was wet and cold. By stages things were becoming very visible. She let her eyes see everything until they fastened on the red winking light atop the radio tower atop the opposite hill.
She went through the dim apartment, back into the bedroom. He was knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow. He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arms flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched. As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.
That's the end, except for her kneeling at the bed and asking God to "help us." You feel she'd have as good a chance with the winking red light atop the radio tower. This kind of situation recurs in Carver's fiction. It's always the woman who, using Hemingway's expression, feels the nothing. See, for example, "I Could See the Smallest Things" (which, alas, I cannot find online).
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