What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Mel’s choice of profession is significant. As a cardiologist, he should understand the human heart more than most, but he describes himself as a “mechanic” who physically mends the heart. Human emotions remain as much a mystery to him as to others without his medical training. He makes a telling linguistic slip when he imagines himself as a medieval knight and confuses the word “vassal” (a servant in a feudal society who is in service to their “superior”) and the word “vessel” (a blood vessel). Even in his romantic fantasies, Mel is still a doctor who thinks of the heart as a machine.

Much of the narrative comprises Mel’s retelling of a road traffic incident he attended, which ends with an elderly couple being encased in plaster casts. He believes the husband to be depressed because of the accident. However, he learns that the man’s “heart was breaking” (137) because he couldn’t move his head to see his wife. To Mel, this shows true love, one that is based not on physical looks or touch, but on a more spiritual connection. At the same time, his comments break down in confusion as he subconsciously realizes that he can’t properly explain what love is.

In the end, Nick can hear his own heart beating along with everyone else’s. He describes their heartbeats as “human noise,” providing a connection between the characters that goes beyond words and binds them together as human beings.

Carver was a heavy drinker, as were other American novelists and short story writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, and Ernest Hemingway. Like Carver, these writers used alcohol as a motif to express their characters’ desire to escape from reality or as a way of symbolizing a malaise at the core of modern-day society. Olivia Laing explores these authors’ use of alcohol in the 2017 book The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking. In Carver’s story, gin is a motif that thematically develops The Inability to Define Love and shows how Talking About Love Is Ineffectual. Nick, Laura, Mel, and Terri spend the afternoon drinking their way through two bottles of gin. Their growing inebriation mirrors their inability to define love and to understand one another. Eventually, their conversation falls apart as the last drop is drained from the bottle. They are left sitting in silence and in the literal and metaphorical darkness.

Initially, drinking together is a symbol of unity, allowing friends to share a pleasant afternoon together. Terri quickly upends pleasantries when she graphically details her ex-partner’s abuse. In tandem, Mel’s gory description of a road traffic incident turns the mood from playful to somber. The conversation is ritualistically punctuated by the fetching, pouring, and sipping of drinks. The characters make various toasts to love, even though none of them can define what it means: “We raised our glasses again and grinned at each other like children who had agreed on something forbidden” (131). It is as if they are play-acting at being in an adult world that they don’t understand. The consumption of alcohol allows the characters to loosen their grasp on reality and forget and/or not care. Nick talks about the room becoming enchanted and the four of them as children, almost as if he wants to escape back into a simpler, more innocent time. Similarly, Mel fantasies about being a medieval knight who follows the chivalric code and jousts for a lady’s favors.

As the day wears on, the confusion over the meaning of love intertwines with their befuddled, alcohol-induced states. Mel studies the label on the gin bottle “as if studying a long row of numbers” (135), and Nick finds it hard to keep things in focus. All except Nick want to find some food to eat, with Laura in particular saying that she’s never been so hungry. However, Mel decrees that they can’t leave the discussion until the second bottle is emptied. When no alcohol remains, the characters are still unsure of how to proceed: “Now what?” (138). No one replies to Terri, and the characters are left alone with their thoughts, isolated from one another.