[In the following excerpt, Runyon offers a stylistic analysis of “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.”]

In the title story [“What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”] of the collection [What We Talk about When We Talk about Love], two couples are sitting around talking and drinking gin: Mel, a cardiologist; his wife, Terri; the narrator, Nick; and his wife, Laura. Terri recalls her lover Ed, who used to beat her. “He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you, you bitch’” (138). Mel argues that such violent behavior couldn't have been love, while Terri maintains that it was. Mel recounts Ed's threats against his life, and Ed's eventual suicide.

Mel then wants to give what to him is the definitive example of true love. He had performed surgery on an elderly couple who were gravely injured in a car accident. They were given only a 50 percent chance of survival. Becoming increasingly drunk from the gin as he tells this story, Mel gets sidetracked and says that if he could be reincarnated he'd like to come back as a knight. “You were pretty safe wearing all that armor. … what I liked about knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn't get hurt very easy. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass” (148–49). Nick replies that the armor had its disadvantages—danger of suffocation, heart attacks from the heat.

Brought back to the story of the old couple, Mel describes them as bandaged head to foot in casts, side by side in the same hospital room. “Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes. … Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through. … I'd get up to his mouth-hole … and he'd say … it was because he couldn't see her through his eye-holes. … Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife” (151).

Getting sadder and sadder with the gin, Mel announces that he wants to place a call to the children from his former marriage. This brings him to the subject of his ex-wife, who is allergic to bees, and to his fantasy of going to her house dressed like a beekeeper. “You know, that hat that's like a helmet with the plate that comes down over your face, the big gloves, and the padded coat? I'll knock on the door and let loose a hive of bees in the house. But first I'd make sure the kids were out, of course” (153).

The couples had spoken of going out to eat in a new restaurant, but everyone now seems to lack the energy to move. Mel spills what gin remains in his glass. The narrator concludes, “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark” (154).

Earlier, sunlight had “filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink” (137). “The afternoon sun was like a presence in this room, the spacious light of ease and generosity. We could have been anywhere, somewhere enchanted” (144). But as Mel, the picture of confidence and good humor at the beginning of the story, becomes increasingly morose and increasingly drunk, darkness enters, the enchantment fades, and silence descends. Darkness invades the room in the last line of the story, by contrast with the cold that was kept outside in the last line of “Everything Stuck to Him”: “While everything else—the cold, and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway” (135). And we have seen how that last line contrasted with the opening of “Popular Mechanics”: “It was getting dark on the inside too”—which now finds its ultimate echo in the last words of the title story: “when the room went dark.” Certainly Mel's comment on Terri's former lover Ed—“The kind of love I'm talking about, you don't try to kill people” (139)—has its applicability to the love, or whatever it was, that impelled the father and mother to tear their child apart.

The sunlight whose splendor and gradual disappearance parallel the course of the friends' conversation and mood had provided the observant narrator with an instructive parable that is immediately applicable to this story, and ultimately to all those in the volume to which it gives its title. “The sunshine inside the room was different now, changing, getting thinner. But the leaves outside the window were still shimmering, and I stared at the pattern they made on the panes and on the Formica counter. They weren't the same patterns, of course” (150). They would have been the same patterns, evidently, had not the different surface—the counter top as opposed to the window panes—given the shadow of the leaves a different context in which to appear. The narrator's meditation appears between Mel's talking about knights in armor and his description of the old couple in their casts—he had begun the story of the injured couple before bringing up the knights but had not yet spoken of their casts. By the time he begins to describe their head-to-toe carapace with tiny holes for eyes, nose, and mouth, we are ready to apply the parable to the evident similarity between chivalric armor and these body casts: different surface, different contexts, thus different patterns—yet the same original projection. Mel clearly has this image of body armor so much on his mind that it keeps coming out in different images—of which there is of course a third, the beekeeper's protective gear.

Yet the parable of the patterns has greater relevance than what it can tell us about what is going on in Mel's mind. This instance of the same basic image in three different patterns—knight's armor, plaster casts, and beekeeper's outfit—enacts within a single story, and perhaps not by chance in the title story, what is enacted by all the stories in the collection. Every two stories (and sometimes three) display too the same basic image in different patterns, in different contexts. Like the elderly husband who knew his wife was right next to him but grieved because he couldn't see her, the stories too seem at times to be half-aware of the nearly identical mate that lies right next to them and almost yearn to break out of their boundaries to make the connection already half-visible beneath the surface. I am thinking of such moments as the mysterious telephone call for Charlie in one story that is answered, in a way, by the Charles in the next whom the narrator thinks he's seen before but can't at first remember where, or of the two sequential stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? where a character says something “not really knowing what he meant,” or of neighboring stories about neighbors, and other neighboring stories about a fence, or of the man in “Viewfinder” who was just “trying to make a connection” while his counterpart in “Why Don't You Dance?” had already made sure, thanks to his extension cord, that “everything was connected.” The elderly couple in their plaster casts enact the same phenomenon within “What We Talk About” that the stories they stand for do: placed between the description of knights in their armor and a beekeeper in his head-to-toe protective garb, they are flanked on either side by similarly covered bodies—different patterns from the same basic image—just as, on a more intimate level, each member of the couple has a similarly enveloped double for a neighbor.

Between the narrator's reflection on the way the shadow of the leaves projected differently on different surfaces and Mel's description of the old couple in their casts, Mel paused to stare at the narrator's wife and said, “Laura, if I didn't have Terri and if I didn't love her so much, and if Nick wasn't my best friend, I'd fall in love with you” (150–51). The husband in the immediately preceding story had expressed the same sentiment: “Sally was the girl's sister. She was striking. … The boy used to say to the girl, If we weren't married, I could go for Sally” (130). Like these marriages—Mel and Terri's and the young couple's in “Everything Stuck to Him”—these stories too could have turned out differently. Their constituent parts—characters, gestures, images, and turns of phrase—are sometimes so similar that we might wonder if they are not perhaps interchangeable.

Additional coverage of Carver's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 33–36R, 126; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 17, 34, 61; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 22, 36, 53, 55, 126; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 130; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, Vols. 84, 88; DISCovering Authors Modules: Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Reference Guide to American Literature; Reference Guide to Short Fiction; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 3, 6, 12, 13; and Twentieth-Century Western Writers, Vol. 2.