Call If You Need Me (2 page)

Jay seemed exactly the person I’d been hoping might appear. He respected my work, loved Ray’s writing, and understood the process of revision and publication. Moreover, as both a fiction writer and a magazine editor, Jay knew good stories when he saw them. In March 1999 he flew to Seattle and came three hours, by car and ferry, to Port Angeles. The next day, from nine in the morning until eleven at night, we carefully examined the contents of each drawer in Ray’s desk. We read the pages in the folders, labeled and photocopied them, and finally made our choices. It was a quiet, intimate process, full of purpose. As we read, it became clear there were three fine stories. The dread I’d felt of coming to the last of Ray’s work was subsumed by the prospect of doing right by these unpublished stories. It seemed especially fitting that
Esquire
, where Ray’s stories found their first broad readership in the early 1970s, should participate in this discovery.

Jay took on the job of deciphering Ray’s cramped handwriting to make accurate transcriptions. One manuscript was entirely handwritten, while others were in typescript with hand corrections. Far from finding this work tedious, Jay drew energy from the task. Having spent eleven years deciphering Ray’s handwriting, I checked Jay’s transcriptions word for word against the originals to fill in a few spots he couldn’t make out. We were mindful that Ray would sometimes take a story through thirty rewrites. These stories had been put aside well short of that. (In Ray’s final months, he turned from fiction to poetry for what
became his last book,
A New Path to the Waterfall
.) Still, very little editing was needed on these stories. Characters and place names were standardized, so Dotty didn’t become Dolores a page later, or Eureka did not become Arcata. Endings, where Ray always worked hardest, were, in some instances, left as one leaves a meal when the phone rings. We simply let those last moments reverberate, allowing the story to come to rest.

Ray had written several accounts of men trying to start over again, most notably “Where I’m Calling From.” In “Kindling,” the first of the new stories to be published in
Esquire
, a man desperately splitting a cord of wood tries to clarify his will toward going forward after alcoholism and the breakup of a marriage. The narrator is also a writer, and his tentative attempts to write again hark back movingly to that time in 1979 when Ray and I began our lives together in El Paso and he made his own fresh start at writing after a ten-year bout with alcoholism.

Of the five new stories, “Dreams” became my favorite and Jay’s. Here a woman loses her children to a fire after the collapse of her marriage. The story seemed to bridge our lives in both Syracuse (where Ray and I had, like the couple in the story, slept in the basement to avoid the August heat) and the Northwest (where a fire had broken out on our street, although no lives had been lost). I recognized the echo of Ray’s story “A Small, Good Thing,” in which a child also dies. In both cases I admired Ray’s audacity in taking on subject matter that easily could have gone sentimental. In “Dreams,” the details curl forth like smoke from a roof, the action unfolding in chiaroscuro: the scene looms, glowers, then flares. These characters’ lives are so plundered by circumstance that they become our own.

The two stories Bill and Maureen discovered date from the early 1980s, and both deal with the collapse of a marriage. One of them, “Call If You Need Me,” anticipates a central image in the story “Blackbird Pie” and the poem “Late Night with Fog and Horses.” In all three tellings, horses mysteriously appear through fog at a fateful parting. The other story, “What Would
You Like to See?”, seems a cousin to “Chef’s House”; in each a husband and wife, while attempting to bring their lives together again, remain so injured at the core that they must go their separate ways. The closing image of spoilage recalls Ray’s story “Preservation” in its suggestion that relationships, like food on the thaw, are perishable, and beyond a certain point, you can’t get them back.

When all but one of the stories had seen serial publication, Gary Fisketjon, Ray’s friend and editor, went over them again with me. At one point we discovered ourselves taking out the commas we’d put in. We laughed and quoted Ray to each other—that if you find yourself taking out what you just put in, it’s a sure sign the story is finished.

I recently reread the four essays from
Fires
included here. I felt about “My Father’s Life” as I did when Ray first showed it to me in an early draft. It has to be one of the most moving expressions on record of a son’s love for his father. In an emotionally implosive scene, Ray goes to his father, who’s in the mental ward of the hospital where Ray’s child has just been born, and tells him, “You’re a grandfather.” His father responds, “I feel like a grandfather.” That sentence falls as softly as distant thunder, yet it has the effect of a hammer blow.

In “On Writing” we get Ray’s literary credo. Eschewing what he calls “cheap tricks,” he delights in the labor of rewriting. He’s brave enough
not
to know where he’s going as he writes his initial draft. He sees to it that the story has tension, or what he calls a “relentless motion.” He knows what to leave out or to let rest “just under the surface.” Above all, there is his injunction to use “clear and specific language,” for which he set the mark for writers of his generation.

Ray’s homage to John Gardner, his mentor and teacher, made me recall our driving through a snowstorm to visit John at his home in upstate New York. We’d talked into early morning, savoring the company of this man who had cared about Ray and his writing at a time when Ray desperately needed it—even
loaning him the keys to his office so he had a place to write. Later, when John died in a motorcycle accident, Ray and I remembered John hadn’t wanted to go to bed that last night we’d spent together.

It’s natural to want to know where a writer we admire began, and Ray’s first published story, “Furious Seasons,” marks that beginning, with Faulkner and Joyce as mentors. Also there is the rough gem of a story, “The Hair,” which seems antecedent to the later “Careful.” In “The Hair” we witness the first moments of that honed “dis-ease” for which Ray became famous. “The Aficionados,” also written at this time, is one of only two parodies he published. Here, under the pseudonym John Vale, he took his jabs at one of his clearly recognizable influences. Nonetheless, Hemingway remained an important literary model who would later give way to Chekhov.

The reviews, introductions, and remaining essays collected here remind us of Ray’s enthusiasms: his love of a pure “good read,” vagaries of character, turns and twists of plot. Always there is the mandate of having something important at stake. As we read what Ray says about teaching writing or the reasons behind his choices for an anthology, we draw instruction from his respect for “vivid depiction of place” or “demonic intensity” and his awareness of “what counts”: “Love, death, dreams, ambition, growing up, coming to terms with your own and other people’s limitations.” Ray understood writing as a process of revelation, and his essay “On Rewriting” emphasizes the importance of revision as a means to open up the story and discover, in the deepest sense, why it was being written in the first place.

I have great respect and affection for the writings collected in this book, not only for their biographical and literary value, but for their passion and clarity. As at the initial publication of
No Heroics, Please
, I feel greatly indebted to William L. Stull, who did the work of collecting Ray’s fugitive pieces from newspapers and periodicals. I will always be grateful to Jay Woodruff for his personal kindness and cooperation during all phases of presenting
the three stories we discovered; our work enhanced an already great friendship.

Here in the Northwest we often set out rain barrels in order to catch some of nature’s bounty. The rain barrel insures an ample supply of soft water for washing our hair, for watering our plants. This book is like rain collected in a barrel, water gathered straight from the sky. We can dip into it at any point and find something to refresh and sustain us—to bring us close again to the life and works of Raymond Carver.

T
ESS
G
ALLAGHER

Ridge House

Port Angeles, Washington

January 2000

The impetus for issuing an expanded volume of Raymond Carver’s uncollected work (and the source of this book’s title) was the discovery in 1999 of five previously unpublished short stories. Three of these—“Kindling,” “Vandals,” and “Dreams”—were found in files at Carver’s home in Port Angeles, Washington. The remaining two—“What Would You Like to See?” and “Call If You Need Me”—were found among Carver’s papers in the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University Library. All five stories are printed here for the first time in book form.

Like its predecessor
No Heroics, Please
(1991),
Call If You Need Me
includes all the nonfiction left uncollected at the time of Raymond Carver’s death: his statements on his work (“Occasions”), his comments on others’ writings (“Introductions”), his book reviews, his two last-written essays (“Friendship” and “Meditation on a Line from Saint Teresa”). In addition, the present book contains four prose pieces—“My Father’s Life,” “On Writing,” “Fires,” and “John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher”—previously collected in the miscellany
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
(1983, 1989). Sections devoted to fiction include five of Carver’s early stories and the sole fragment of his uncompleted novel,
The Augustine Notebooks
.

The texts in
Call If You Need Me
are presented uncut and largely unedited. Obvious misspellings, word omissions, and errors of fact have been silently corrected. Direct quotations, whether from Carver’s work or writings by others, have been checked against their sources. In general, works in each section are arranged chronologically, in the order of their first publication.
Information about copy-texts, sources, and publication history is provided in the notes.

For expert advice and assistance in locating and editing the texts that comprise this book, I thank my wife, research partner, and codiscoverer of two of the new stories, Maureen P. Carroll.

W
ILLIAM
L. S
TULL

University of Hartford

Connecticut

March 2000

It was the middle of August and Myers was between lives. The only thing different about this time from the other times was that this time he was sober. He’d just spent twenty-eight days at a drying-out facility. But during this period his wife took it into her head to go down the road with another drunk, a friend of theirs. The man had recently come into some money and had been talking about buying into a bar and restaurant in the eastern part of the state.

Myers called his wife, but she hung up on him. She wouldn’t even talk to him, let alone have him anywhere near the house. She had a lawyer and a restraining order. So he took a few things, boarded a bus, and went to live near the ocean in a room in a house owned by a man named Sol who had run an ad in the paper.

Sol was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt when he opened the door. It was about ten o’clock at night and Myers had just gotten out of a cab. Under the porch light Myers could see that Sol’s right arm was shorter than his other arm, and the hand and fingers were withered. He didn’t offer either his good left hand or his withered hand for Myers to shake, and this was fine with Myers. Myers felt plenty rattled as it was.

You just called, right? Sol said. You’re here to see the room. Come on in.

Myers gripped his suitcase and stepped inside.

This is my wife. This is Bonnie, Sol said.

Bonnie was watching TV but moved her eyes to see who it was coming inside. She pushed the button on a device she held in her hand and the volume went off. She pushed it again and the
picture disappeared. Then she got up off the sofa onto her feet. She was a fat girl. She was fat all over and she huffed when she breathed.

I’m sorry it’s so late, Myers said. Nice to meet you.

It’s all right, Bonnie said. Did my husband tell you on the phone what we’re asking?

Myers nodded. He was still holding the suitcase.

Well, this is the living room, Sol said, as you can see for yourself. He shook his head and brought the fingers of his good hand up to his chin. I may as well tell you that we’re new at this. We never rented a room to anybody before. But it’s just back there not being used, and we thought what the hell. A person can always use a little extra.

I don’t blame you a bit, Myers said.

Where are you from? Bonnie said. You’re not from anywhere around town.

My wife wants to be a writer, Sol said. Who, what, where, why, and how much?

I just got here, Myers said. He moved the suitcase to his other hand. I got off the bus about an hour ago, read your ad in the paper, and called up.

What sort of work do you do? Bonnie wanted to know.

I’ve done everything, Myers said. He set the suitcase down and opened and closed his fingers. Then he picked up the suitcase again.