Charles Baxter: The Devil's Hiding Place

In my mind divorce is not merely a mess, but violent. There is tremendous bite to it, and rage. Someone dove into a bottle and struck his wife. Someone went fiercely into hiding, his wife reaching and clawing and clinging. His wife praying. Some husband working his way back as if to discover he doesn't really exist at all. He's dead. He's somewhere no one recognizes him. Not even God. There he is, a cloud of smoke, his wife a teeming fire, leaping for more air to swallow and burn up.

Baxter terrifies me with his stories, nearly all of them illustrating some small picture of a relationship gone numb, all the wounds fresh, hiding beneath t-shirts, and the slow peeling back of the clothes so we catch a glimpse. His stories are not violent. Not really. Not like the violence I expect in relationships; not the violence that seems to exist behind the scenes in so many "real" relationships.

When beginning, "Poor Devil," I always wonder, "Why?" Why are they splitting? And why are they both cleaning the house at the same time? Why aren't other people there? It seems, even in their divorce, they are companionable. As the narrator writes, "Okay; we may be divorced, but we're still married."

I also think of Emily's t-shirt and the Y shaped stain.

The first real movement in the story, the first piece of action occurs when the wife begins telling a story that is meant and succeeds in making Dennis, the narrator jealous. Before this movement, Baxter spends a page and a half merely setting the scene.

A friend of mine expressed that he seems to like plot driven stories whereas I seem to enjoy character driven stories. Perhaps this is why I love Baxter so. I have to re-read and search for movement. I have to remember what happened. What I remember about his stories are the characters, their oddities. I recall near the end of The Feast of Love, a shocking movement does take place, which rather disappointed me at first. It's not what I'm used to from Baxter, and whenever that happens, when a writer shocks me, I get pulled back from the story and can literally imagine the writer pausing in the process of writing, considering how they are going to make the story wrap up. Where's the conflict that will both flesh everything out, will have everyone's eyes dialating, and will eventually allow me to bring the story back down for an ending?

I do not like being reminded that I am reading a story. I like being able to go back to the story as if I'm going into my own memory, living something over, hoping to extract something for myself. I want to believe what's happening.

But also, I understand. Something must happen. This is what I need to learn in my writing. I need to know how to move. I need to remember that we do things, say things, have accidents, experience sudden trauma.

The movements in, "Poor Devil," are merely the characters telling stories, mishaps occurring while cleaning the house, a walk, a groping around in the dark like two blind people.

Perhaps what is more fascinating than movement in a story is the fact that it ends at all. A story closes, the light dims, but the characters, at least most of us believe, go on. In, "Poor Devil," we have this couple scrubbing their house for new owners. They're divorced. Near the end we have Dennis, the narrator, contemplating what could have happened as they groped around in the dark. He describes how they could have inspired each other at last, and embraced, made love. But that is not what happens. And the very last scene we have is what really went on. We have them bumping into each other in the dark, and apologizing. Apologizing. He writes that they could not have made up because they are both "unforgiveable." They are "two solitudes."

To me, I find this couple fascinating because they are ununited. They are both hiding from each other. Though, it seems to me Emily, the narrator's wife, wanted deeply to be known, she still withheld experiences, seemingly significant experiences from her husband. They each seemed to have an arsenol. None of it was violent. All of their issues deep and wide, collected and swelling far beneath the surface or their marriage. I suppose that's how it is in the violent, rageful divorces as well. The violence is a distraction. It is a physical representation, it is the deep pains, the caverns of untold stories, of truths withheld, of desires numbed over, that are being displayed by a sudden hand to throat, tight arm squeeze, push and shove.

It is astonishing how many layers we have, and how enormous those layers are. But in all our hiding, in all of our digging deeper and deeper into ourselves, we seem to be avoiding what we really desire: a sharing, a knowing of one another.