What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Submitted by Robert Waxler (profile)

Title and Author: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Genre: Short story
Theme: Love, friendship, conversation (talk)
Class type: Men or women

Two married couples - the narrator Nick, his wife Laura, the cardiologist Mel, and Mel's wife Terri - are sitting around the kitchen table, drinking gin, and talking about love. The heart doctor, Mel, does most of the talking (he thinks he's entitled to), although it becomes increasingly clear through the gin-soaked discussion that he doesn't quite know what he's talking about.

A seminarian before attending medical school, Mel claims that "real love" is "nothing less than spiritual love," an absolute love that seems to reflect his own desire to find permanence and stability in a world saturated with flux and change.

At the beginning of the conversation, Mel insists that Terri is wrong when she asserts that Ed, the man she used to live with, who was a violent abuser, actually loved her. Both Laura and Terri believe that people love in their own individual way. We cannot judge another's situation. "Sure sometimes he may have acted crazy," Terri says about Ed. "But he loved me. There was love there, Mel. Don't say there wasn't."

Is it possible for someone to love another person and still physically abuse that person? I ask the students.

Responses include:

--Yes, I think Ed did love Terri. Maybe he didn't know how to express it though.
--Terri just wants Mel to acknowledge that someone else could love her.
--Mel says he loved his first wife, but now he wants to kill her.
--There are all kinds of love - spiritual, chivalric, sentimental, carnal, physical - the story shows that.

As the four characters in the story continue to drink their gin, Mel emerges as a man struggling with fear, wrestling with contradictions. We might ask Mel:

--How can you say you loved your first wife, Mel, and now you don't, then at the same time insist that love is always absolute?
--How can you say you love your son, but not call him and talk with him?
--Why do you really like those medieval knights, Mel? Because they believed in love or because they wore that protective armor?

As he keeps drinking his gin, Mel tells a story about an elderly couple deeply in love who are rushed to the hospital after a near-fatal car accident. They are put in a hospital room together, but in hard casts, so they cannot turn to see each other. The couple's relationship seems to meet Mel's expectations of "spiritual love," but he dismisses their behavior as foolish and absurd.

"I mean, it was killing the old fart just because he couldn't look at the fucking woman," Mel says as he concludes his example with an undertone of his own growing frustration and violence.

What does Mel seem to be wrestling with? I ask our CLTL group around the table. What does he fear?

--He's all ego. Thinks he's better than everyone else.
--He's protecting himself. That's why he says he likes the medieval knights with their armor. He believes they can't get hurt.
--Yes, he's afraid that he'll lose Terri like he lost his first wife.
--He doesn't want to make himself vulnerable. But even the knights in their armor got trampled sometimes, as Nick reminds him.

As the light of the late afternoon fades into evening, and the gin is gone, Nick finishes the narrative: "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."

What do you make of the ending? I ask. Is there any hope in this darkness?

--They must be very drunk.
--It must be night, and they can't even get up to switch on the lights. They're stoned.
--But Nick hears the heart beat. They are together.
--It's the conversation they've had that binds them together.

Yes, I agree: it's the talk, the talk about love that wins the day, the flow of conversation that stirs the human heart, that creates friendship and a sense of community despite the darkness.