Men without women

It takes maybe 10 minutes to read Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Maybe you read it or saw it dramatized (faithfully) in Robert Altman’s 1993 movie “Short Cuts.” In 2006, Ray Lawrence—a film director who is Australia’s answer to Terrence Malick in that he makes beautiful and sometimes confounding movies about strange creatures called human beings and releases them infrequently—used the story as the jumping-off point for a remarkable movie called “Jindabyne.”

If you don’t know the story, you can probably find it on the Internet. Or you could buy a copy of Carver’s great short story collection from 1981, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” which might be the best collection of minimalist fiction produced in the second half of the 20th century.

The gist of it is this: Four men go on a fishing trip to a remote area. It’s an annual ritual, a chance to get away from their middle-class existence as “decent men, family men, men who take care of their jobs.” They fish, drink whiskey, play cards, and indulge in the sort of bromantic bonding and mutual confession men are prone to when in the vicinity of campfires.

But after they have hiked five miles into the wilderness with their gear and provisions, one of them finds the nude body of a woman floating in a stream. One of them—the story doesn’t say which one— wants to start back immediately to alert the authorities. (This was before cell phones, but you could transpose it into the present by putting the men beyond the reach of cell towers.) But the others aren’t inclined to do that, for practical reasons.

It’s getting late and will soon be dark. The woman is regrettably beyond help and “wasn’t going anywhere.” They have come all this way and dealing with the situation, which surely must be dealt with at some point, would disrupt their plans. They will walk out of the wilderness soon enough, and then they will do the right thing.

So they tether the woman’s body in the stream so she won’t float away. They fish and drink nearby. After two days, on their way home, they find a pay phone and call the police.

Carver tells the story through the character of Claire, one of the men’s wives, who has found out about what happened on the camping trip by reading about it in the newspaper. Now people are calling her house to curse her husband, who won’t put up with her getting all worked up over this because he did nothing wrong.

He didn’t ask to find the body. He just wanted to go fishing with his buddies. It was the one chance they had to get away all year. Why should he spend it answering questions in a police station?

No doubt there are callous women, but what”s heartbreaking about Carver’s story is its plausibility. Sure, let’s all stipulate that none of us would ever do anything like what the decent men in Carver’s story do, but I can on some level understand that husband. Men are awful. And heartbreakingly fragile.

It’s not all our fault; everyone is a product of their environment and their genes. Men are supposed to be a certain way, and it’s not easy to be that way. (But it’s probably easier than being the way women are supposed to be.) We seem to hear about this all the time now, what with the incels and the men’s rights advocates chirping on the Internet. (Last week I saw a story in

The Guardian about “Men Going Their Own Way,” which is allegedly a “toxic male separatist movement” comprised of men so fed up with “misandry”—their term for hatred of men—that they have decided to “eschew” all contact with women.

Get thee behind me, Jezebel. Cue 51 percent of the population rolling their eyes, pageant-waving buh-bye.)

I suspect we’re all born scared, and some of us never get over it. Maybe we ought to be a little more accepting of people brave enough to find an alternative to the rote gender roles we perform.

I’m just what I am, plain vanilla boring white dude. I tend to run it on first down. I like women. I know the Rolling Stones made a lot of misogynistic music but I still like them. I understand frustration and disappointment and how difficult it can be when aspiration outstrips aptitude. I too was born to be a center-fielder, but . . .

When I look at Kyle Rittenhouse, I don’t see what he meant to project, a warrior sheepdog protective of gentlenatured sheep.

I see a baby man, a boy bedazzled by mil-specgear and softened by the creature comforts that accrue to lower middle-class Americans—YouTube and TikTok and excited cable news talking heads. No doubt he was eager to prove himself to be more than the loser he suspected he was or might become. In another time, he might have been useful as cannon fodder, one of those gung-ho boys volunteering for slaughter duty, his idea of war and honor installed by Hollywood propagandists like John Wayne.

One of the perils of being a young man is that you might throw away your life for some stupid cause.

I used to think if you could make through your 20s without doing something irredeemably stupid you would probably turn out all right. I don’t think that people who have love in their lives turn out to be school shooters or vigilante killers. Timothy McVeigh would have been OK if he’d found someone who really got him.

Kyle Rittenhouse is a kid, and kids—no matter what their age—shouldn’t walk around with machines made for murder in their hands.

I’m not saying he’s not responsible for what he did, that he shouldn’t face whatever consequences might come; only that he’s a victim too. There’s a significant part of our society that is working hard to glamorize and exalt this kid as a hero, as a quasi-martyr.

Some idiot praised him for trying to maintain order “when no one else would.” Another tweeted she wanted him to be her president. As though he was somehow doing something noble rather than self-indulgent and wishful, something other than cosplaying with live ammo.

These people remind me of the mullahs who bless the suicide bombers.

We can rationalize that there is nothing we can do to change things, that all our actions are likely to do is buy us more trouble. We didn’t kill anybody; we never owned a slave or kneeled on anyone’s neck. All we want to do is fish and drink and live as men without women do—without conscience, blind to nuance, and secure in our fantasies of ourselves as good men.

We should never forget we are capable of deluding ourselves, of ignoring the body floating in the weeds.