When Janet Emory and Tom Morrison drove through Port Angeles, Janet looked at every house, wondering which one Raymond Carver had lived in. They had been driving for two days, up from San Francisco, and Port Angeles, lying between the snow-capped Olympics and the blue sea, was the most prosperous town they had seen in hours. Houses climbed the hillside and clustered around the harbor where bright-colored fishing boats were moored and big cranes slanted against the sky. "I bet it's up there," said Janet, pointing to some houses sheltered by tall blue-black firs. "No, it's out that way," said Tom, nodding toward the far end of town. Tom was an attorney and could make everything he said sound like a fact. Even when Janet knew he didn't really know what he was talking about, she found it hard to not to believe him. "What makes you say that?" she asked.
"It has the best view," he said.
"I don't think Carver was the 'best view' type."
"Why not - if he could afford it?"
Janet shrugged. Tom had never even read Raymond Carver. She had just graded forty-six freshman compositions on "Cathedral" and almost felt like she had been living with Carver, not Tom, for the past week. After so much time poring over his words, it was amazing to think that only a couple of months ago the man himself might have walked down this street.
When they had planned this trip Janet imagined herself meeting him--she had different scenarios--but they were too late. At her last class she'd read the poem "Gravy" about how grateful he was for his life even though he was dying young. She was the only one who cried. Tom pulled into a gas station on the main street, and, while he filled the tank, Janet walked up and down trying to memorize every detail of the place. She didn't believe in taking photographs: they just made you lazy about really looking. Being there. She would have liked to go down to the harbor, maybe sit in a coffee shop and read the local newspaper, but Tom said they didn't have time. Within minutes they were back in the car and Port Angeles had disappeared. Janet sat with her back against the door, looking at the road behind them.
"What's the matter?" Tom asked.
"Oh, I don't know," she said, picking at a loose yarn on her sweater. Even though she had known she wouldn't see Raymond Carver, she had expected something. But what.
Janet and Tom were on their way to spend a week in the San Juan Islands, not doing anything special, just resting and enjoying the view. Lately they had not been getting along very well, so being together, in a cabin on an island, would be a strenuous activity. It took several more hours and two ferries to get from Port Angeles to their destination, but they finally arrived, driving the last mile down a road so overgrown it was like a green tunnel. When they came out, there was their house on a small spread of lawn that ran right down to the beach. The house was perfect, just as Janet had imagined it, small and neat, with every window framing woods, sea, sky, islands. She rushed out onto the deck and leaned against the rail.
"Smell the air," she said, when Tom came out to join her.
The cool breeze was moist and scented by fir and salt, not the city smells: pavement and exhaust. For a moment they stood together, then Tom went back inside. He started up the coffeemaker, while Janet began unpacking. After the long trip, it felt good to restore a sense of domestic order. The smell of coffee filled the house as she lay their sweaters in the closet and hung their rain jackets on hooks by the door.
"I'm ready for some rain!" she said, slipping her feet into rubber clogs and doing a little dance. Janetand Tom had moved to California from Boston only a few months before, and Janet was already tired of sunshine. She found the brightness oppressive and the fog--which she associated with rain--disappointing. The northwest, she had announced to Tom as they crossed the Columbia River, was more to her taste. The simplicity of the landscape was soothing: round humped islands, tall straight trees, billowing clouds, water. There were no pink, green, or lavender homes, no neon signs, no palms, no garish flowers. Even the grass was less gaudy. This is more like it, she had said, although she wasn't sure what it referred to.
"We need to go shopping," said Tom, his head in the refrigerator.
He was throwing away things left by previous tenants that he didn't approve of: relish, yellow mustard, margarine. Janet hated to see food thrown away, but she only said: "Start a list." She was stripping her clothes off to lie in the sun. It had been a long time since she had been anywhere she could sunbathed nude and she felt self-conscious, stepping out into the light naked. The cool air touched her breasts and belly. She lifted her arms and let the breeze blow all around her, then lay down carefully on the cold plastic stripping of a lounge chair.
"What are you doing?" asked Tom.
"Having a clean air bath. Why don't you join me? It's great."
"No thanks." He sat down with his coffee and spread out the newspaper.
"If you don't put on sunscreen, you'll get cancer," he said.
"OK," said Janet, stretching. The sun felt warm and soothing, not lethal, and the breeze stroked her skin. Tom frowned at her and lifted the newspaper between them. Janet closed her eyes, remembering the night two years ago when she had run into Tom with some friends from high school at a pub on Charles Street. She'd been surprised by how glad he was to see her. He'd been a good-looking popular senior when she was just a freshman and she'd hardly known him, but when he slipped his arm around her, it had felt just right--like they'd always belonged together. Janet still believed in that moment of recognition, but since they'd arrived in California, it seemed harder and harder to find things to say. They had made love exactly twice, and then it had been very matter-of-fact, nothing like the way it used to be. The way she remembered it when she was alone. Maybe, thought Janet, who had just turned 30, this is part of getting older.
Still she looked down at her pale legs and turned them from side to side trying to arrange them in a way that looked appealing. Tom set down the newspaper, but he didn't look at her. He gazed at something in the water. After a moment he went inside and came back with binoculars. He lifted them to his eyes and stood silent and motionless for what seemed like forever.
"What is it? What are you looking at?" asked Janet.
"Otters," he said.
"No kidding!"
Janet got up and Tom handed her the glasses, but as she scanned the blurry water, he put his hand on her back and his touch was so cool and impersonal, she pulled away. "I didn't see them," she said, putting down the glasses.
"That's because you didn't look where I showed you," he said.
He sat down again, leaving her feeling naked and foolish. Janet went inside to dress. When Tom came in she was still standing at the bureau, a tee shirt in each hand, trying to decide, brown or blue.
"Let's go shopping," he said. "I'm hungry."
The road to town wound by rolling meadows where sheep grazed, past silvered beaches, and through dark stretches of forest. Each time they rounded a bend and came to a new scene of islands and water, mountains and sky, Janet said: "Isn't this amazing?" and, for a change, Tom didn't say I told you so, but smiled and said yes. In town they shopped at the one grocery store and explored the narrow streets where useful shops vied for space with gift galleries and cafes serving espresso.
"I'd like to live here forever," said Janet, looking at a display of handspun yarn in a shop window.
"That's what you said about San Francisco before we moved there," said Tom.
"Did I?" asked Janet. "Did I really?"
But Tom had already disappeared into the bookstore. The bookstore was in an old house right on the water, and Janet wandered the aisles, imagining that she was the owner, leading a simple life in the cool damp quiet. All through college, she had worked as a bookstore clerk. Then it had seemed like a pleasant way to acquire books cheaply and pay the rent until she was ready to start teaching. Now after several years of trying to herd indifferent and rebellious students toward literature, waiting on customers who wanted to read sounded wonderful. A new edition of Raymond Carver's collected stories was displayed prominently on a table by the door. Janet picked it up, enjoying the soft colors and silky feel of the dust jacket, the rough cut edges of the paper, the clean spare design of the pages--so like the stories themselves. On the back was the familiar brooding face she was sure she would have recognized anywhere.
She examined the table of contents and was still debating over whether to splurge and buy the hardcover when Tom came up, took a copy, and carried it to the counter.
"What are you doing?" asked Janet.
"Buying a book," he said.
"But why are you buying that book?"
"Obviously so I can read it."
Janet watched him make his purchase, amazed at the surge of resentment she felt. She had no doubt that by nightfall she would hear Tom's expert opinion on Carver's work, as well as his living habits.
"Come on, Janet, let's go home and eat," he said, opening the door.
Janet turned away from him, her heart pounding angrily, and went to the back of the store. There she stood between the shelves of books, pretending to look for something while her eyes filled with tears. It was stupid, she knew, but she couldn't help it. After a few minutes she was able to compose herself. Then she bought her own copy of the book and carried it out to the car where Tom sat drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. On the way home, the two books in their thin paper bags lay on the seat between them. Janet was acutely aware of their separateness as she looked out blindly at the passing scene.
"So why did you buy that book?" asked Tom. "Now we have two copies."
"I was already planning to buy it. You should have waited and read mine," said Janet, trying not to sound sulky.
"But you weren't buying it. You were just looking at it," he argued. "How long do you think I should wait for you to make up your mind?"
Janet didn't know what to say. The question, she was sure, was not really about the book. And anyway, Tom was an attorney. He never asked a question he didn't already have the answer to.
Once the groceries were stowed away and they had eaten, the afternoon stretched before them like the empty sea. Janet hunted through a shelf of battered paperbacks and took several out to her chair on the deck. Tom sat down beside her with the Carver book and began reading, methodically starting with the first story. Janet still felt bruised, but she told herself that silence was preferable to shouting. Lately they had seemed to slip into endless rounds of shouting that made her wonder what she had done to her life. Her friends and family had all been shocked when she told them that Tom had accepted a position with a firm in San Francisco and that she was going to move with him. "But your whole lives are here," her older sister exclaimed.
"We'll make a new one," Janet had said, feeling like a pioneer, and she had actually enjoyed the process of moving. But once they were in their new apartment, she found herself in a state like permanent jet lag. At night she couldn't sleep and during the day she spent half her energy fighting the desire to lie down. Everything seemed unfamiliar--not just the weather, the flowers, and the architecture--but the labels on food, the meaning of words, the expressions on people's faces. She tried to explain to Tom how lost she felt, but he was busy with his job and wouldn't admit to sharing any of the same feelings. "Nothing's changed," he insisted. All she needed to do was make up her mind to be happy and they'd be fine. Janet had tried, but loneliness was like a stitch in her side that never went away.
"Would you like me to read to you?" Tom asked. Janet was two murders into an Agatha Christie, but he sounded conciliatory, even friendly, so she nodded and closed her book. He began slowly but, as the story of a wife who struggles to reach her husband unfolded, his cheeks flushed and he picked up speed. There were no sounds except his voice and the soft slap of waves hitting the beach. Janet, who recognized the story and knew it ended with the wife praying for help, grew tense anticipating the intimate words coming from his lips; and she was reminded of the day a few weeks ago when she had come home from teaching to find Tom waiting for her, his face pale and his angry eyes like stones.
"I've been reading this!" he said, shaking the notebook she used as a journal in her face. "Sometimes I think I should never have come here," he read, mimicking her. "I'm so unhappy I don't know what to do. I wonder if I only moved with Tom because I was afraid to be alone. . ." Janet had been too shocked either to defend herself or to accuse him of violating her privacy. She had simply grabbed the notebook, thrown it into the kitchen sink, and dropped matches on it until it burst into flames. "Do you think that changes anything?" said Tom, watching her. "Do you really think now we'll both stop knowing how you feel?"
By the time Tom got to the story's last line--'God, will you help us, God?'--Janet felt like she was choking. She stood up quickly, the aluminum frame of her chair squawking loudly, paperbacks falling to the deck.
"What's the matter?" Tom asked.
"That story's just so sad," she said, moving to the railing. "Sometimes the sadness takes me by surprise."
Tom pushed his own chair away from the table carefully. "I liked it," he said. "I thought it was pretty good." Then he yawned and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood out around his head in curly clumps.
"I'm going to lie down now," he said and went inside. This was not, she knew, an invitation to join him.
Janet watched him through the window as he sat down on the bed, bent to take off his shoes, and then lay down flat on his back. Each motion was economical, discreet, like a frame in a motion picture. She could see herself too, reflected in the window, looking tense and solitary against a backdrop of islands, ocean, and big western sky.
Now that she was alone, Janet thought she ought to be able to relax, but the silence was so deep, she felt like she'd gone deaf. Even the water seemed to have stopped moving. Long shadows had begun to creep across the lawn and the layers of islands were darkening from green to black. She shivered at the thought of the long evening ahead, and the stitch of loneliness tightened under her ribs as if someone were pulling on a thread getting ready to knot it off. Tonight, she told herself as she gathered up the damp paperbacks, it would be cold enough for a fire in the fireplace, and that would give them something to do, something to talk about. And there was still dinner to cook and eat and clean up. So the day would pass and then there would be six more and then the drive back. And then what.
She stood in the doorway, looking at Tom and wondered if he too were secretly somewhere else. As she lay down beside him, the bed sagged and creaked. She settled herself, careful to preserve the space between them. Then she reached for her new book and folded it in her arms against her chest. The weight of it was comforting, and, as she held it, she felt all the sad stories, the clamoring voices, prayers, and dreams flow into her, along with Carver himself writing - and living - his way out of his own sad story until he could say: "I'm a lucky man." She closed her eyes and saw the tall cranes, the snow-capped mountains. She was leaning idly against the car, watching the morning shoppers go by, when she caught sight of him. He was coming down the street, his clothes rumpled from hours of writing, his expression calm and distracted, and any minute now, any minute, she would step away from the car to join him.