Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

my robe, open at the throat, and touches his cap. He stands with his legs apart, feet firmly planted on the top step. "Have a nice day," he says.
    A little later the telephone rings and Stuart says, "Honey, how are you? I'll be home early, I love you. Did you hear me? I love you, I'm sorry, I'll make it up to you. Goodbye, I have to run now."
    I put the flowers into a vase in the center of the dining room table and then I move my things into the extra bedroom.
    Last night, around midnight, Stuart breaks the lock on my door. He does it just to show me that he can, I suppose, for he doesn't do anything when the door springs open except stand there in his
    underwear looking surprised and foolish while the anger slips from his face. He shuts the door slowly, and a few minutes later I hear him in the kitchen prying open a tray of ice cubes.
    I'm in bed when he calls today to tell me that he's asked his mother to come stay with us for a few days. I wait a minute, thinking about this, and then hang up while he is still talking. But in a little while I dial his number at work. When he finally comes on the line I say, "It doesn't matter, Stuart. Really, I tell you it doesn't matter one way or the other."
    "I love you," he says.
    He says something else and I listen and nod slowly. I feel sleepy. Then I wake up and say, "For God's sake, Stuart, she was only a child."
    THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW
    Raymond Carver lives in a large, two-story, wood-shingled house on a quiet street in Syracuse, New York. The front lawn slopes down to the sidewalk. A new Mercedes sits in the driveway. An older VW, the household car, gets parked on the street.
    The entrance to the house is through a large, screened-in porch. Inside, the furnishings are almost without character. Everything matches—cream-colored couches, a glass coffee table. Tess Gallagher, the writer with whom Raymond Carver lives, collects feathers and sets them in vases throughout the house—the most noticeable decorative attempt. My suspicions were confirmed; Carver told me that all the furniture was purchased and delivered in one day.
    Gallagher has painted a detachable wood "No Visitors" sign, the lettering surrounded by yellow and orange eyelashes, which hangs on the screen door. Sometimes the phone is unplugged and the sign stays up for days at a time.
    Carver works in a large room on the top floor. The surface of the long oak desk is clear; his typewriter is set to the side, on an L-shaped wing. There are no knicknacks, charms or toys of any kind on Carver's desk. He is not a collector or a man prone to mementos and nostalgia. Occasionally, one manila folder lies on the oak desk, containing the story currently in the process of revision. His files are well in order. He can extract a story and all its previous versions at moment's notice. The walls of the study are painted white, like the rest of the house, and like the rest of the house they are mostly bare. Through a high rectangular window above Carver's desk, light filters into the room in slanted beams.
    Carver is a large man who wears simple clothes—flannel shirts, khakis or jeans. He seems to live and dress as the
    characters in his stories live and dress. For someone of his size, he has a remarkably low and indistinct voice, I found myself bending closer every few minutes to catch his words and asking the irritating "What, what?"
    Last year, when I visited Syracuse, the "No Visitors" sign was not up and several Syracuse students dropped by to visit during the course of the interview, including Carver's son, a senior. For lunch, Carver made us sandwiches with salmon he had caught off the coast of Washington. Both he and Gallagher c*re from Washington state and at the time of the interview, they were having a house built in Port Angeles, where they would live part of each year.
    This year, the house is completed, and without a phone. Since the time of the interview, Carver has received the Strauss Living Award, given by the Academy of Arts and Letters, and has resigned from his teaching post at Syracuse. For the first time in his life, Carver is a full-time writer.
    He once said that the reason he became a short-story writer rather than a novelist was that, in his early life, there was not enough time for the sustained effort of a long work. Now he is starting on a novel.
    "It feels different to the extent that I know it's going to be a long haul," Carver said recently in Port Angeles, where he had been in the woods