Raymond Carver’s “The Calm”
“I was getting a haircut. I was in the chair and three men were sitting along the wall across from me. Two of the men waiting I’d never seen before. But one of them I recognized, though I couldn’t exactly place him. I kept looking at him as the barber worked on my hair. The man was moving a toothpick around in his mouth, a heavyset man, short wavy hair. And then I saw him in a cap and uniform, little eyes watchful in the lobby of a bank.”
Thus begins Raymond Carver’s short story, “The Calm,” from his acclaimed collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Maybe this paragraph doesn’t seem like much, but the language is pretty exemplary of Raymond Carver’s style: First-person, colloquial, and hyper-descriptive without using too many words. I haven’t read his poetry yet, but I’m excited to, because his prose does exactly what I think poetry should: Weave an image through language, with the language only making you aware of itself when it should.
What interested me about THIS story is that it starts in the barbershop, with our narrator describing the three men waiting for their haircuts. When the barber strikes up a conversation with one of the men about his hunting trip, the narrator simply gives a transcription of the dialogue, most of which consists of one of the men’s description of his son’s botched attempt to shoot and kill a deer.
You start to wonder why, if Carver just wanted to tell the story about the hunting trip (which is interesting on its own), he didn’t just set the story in the woods.
When two of the men get in an altercation on the heels of the story, the reader is sucked back into the world of the barbershop, and you realize that the story is about the interactions of the three strangers in the barbershop, and the touchiness of human relations. At least you think it’s about that, until Carver finishes this way:
“‘Well, do you want me to finish barbering this hair or not?’ the barber said to me as if I was the cause of everything.
The barber turned me in the chair to face the mirror. He put a hand to either side of my head. He positioned me a last time, and then he brought his head down next to mine.
We looked into the mirror together, his hands still framing my head.
I was looking at myself, and he was looking at me too. But if the barber saw something, he didn’t offer comment.
He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it slowly, as if thinking about something else. He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it tenderly, as a lover would.
That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber’s chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber’s fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.”
Maybe Carver’s greatest strength as a writer is his consistent acknowledgement that the meaning of things doesn’t lay in events themselves, but in the context of events within the order or disorder of people’s lives. This story is about little, except the clarity of remembrance at those crucial turning point moments in our lives. And even this theme is hard to hold in the frame of your mind, without it slipping and giving way, as everything in Carver’s world (and ours) always does.
