Sam

This story concerns a husband whose wife and children have recently left him, and his approach to the separation as a “cure” from an addictive substance, which I think is certainly one aspect of ending relationships: The withdrawal symptoms.

He soon finds a man spying on him in the wee small hours.

Like many other Carver stories, I suppose I enjoyed it well enough, the characters and situations, but it’s hard for me to put it all together and say what it means.

I thought this story was so sexually arousing, without being sexually explicit at all. The character Baxter is similar to many “womanizer” caricatures, always presented as completely sleazy (the fellow in The Family Guy comes to mind, but in this story I definitely found myself rooting for him and even kind of inspired by the idea that seducing someone isn’t so much a matter of who you are or what your status is, but rather finding the proper way of relating, of giving the other person what they feel is missing in their life, or of entering into that person’s fantasy of who they want to be.

I appreciate the sadness. I always want more than my life seems to allow. I think in some ways it’s drilled into us here in the USA that anything is possible, and it’s not always emphasized that achieving one goal might require sacrificing something else, something very valuable to us.