"Gazebo" (1980)

A lot of good stuff in this great Raymond Carver story—for once a story from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that was left relatively undisturbed by editor Gordon Lish. I like the setting in a cheap motel with the disintegrating 30something couple who manage it. Yes, shabby motels, drunken daze, and relationships gone bad are certainly familiar, but the way Carver handles them they are vivid and fresh. Holly and Duane are have shut down the front office for the day to hash things out with a bottle in a suite ("we needed a suite"). Holly has found out Duane has "gone outside the marriage" with the motel housekeeper and it's really the end. The story is told first-person by the philandering husband, whose relentless dialogue cues are variations on "go," e.g., "'Don't move to Nevada,' I go. 'You're talking crazy,' I go. 'I'm not talking crazy,' she goes." It is the way people tell stories (or did) but after a while it becomes a distracting tic here. I'm not even sure people talk that way anymore. The story has a strange urgency, perhaps because it is so fragmented. The couple's drunken day is punctuated by motel patrons, presumably with reservations, trying to get their attention outside the room. The story takes place across most of one day, with the single scene of a long, drawn-out talk, set off by numerous line breaks and memories. The gazebo turns up late, an extraordinary image from a memory of better times, a wonderful contrast to the dreary motel argument. Although "Gazebo" features a relationship that is ending, it is really more a study of alcoholism, what it sounds like and looks like in the wild and all the ways it moves. Drinking is what unites this couple even as it has sent their lives all to hell. They take it by the quart. "Gazebo" is so good on alcoholism it triggers me a little, recalling my own drunken episodes or those of others. There is a great tension that comes from their simultaneous final failure at managing the motel, which echoes their personal demise. In many ways this story feels like Carver is headed confidently into his best period of writing.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)