Envoy by Caleb Crain, 2017
The magic trick:
Approaching his main ideas directly at the outset
A second encounter with an angel of death for you this weekend, following yesterday’s John Cheever feature, “Torch Song.” Whereas Cheever plays coy with his meanings in “Torch Song,” even after he’s apparently revealed them, Caleb Crain is more direct here.
“It was pleasant to be flirted with,” his narrator admits very early in this story, continuing, “so pleasant that I wondered if I might in the end turn out to be straight.” This, after he has specifically speculated that the woman he has just met might be the angel of death.
So there you go – two very key differences from the Cheever story. Crain directly addresses the ideas of an angel of death, and most crucially, queerness.
In that way then, I suppose you could say the Crain story is a little less artistically done than the Cheever. Subtlety usually is synonymous with artistic, I think. And listen I’m not really trying to compare the two in terms of quality. “Torch Song” is probably (I’m just making this number up without giving it any thought but still…) one of the 200 best short stories of the 20th century. It’s not really a fair fight.
But I’d like to hail what Crain does here with his direct presentation of stakes as a strength, not some kind of artistic failing. It points the reader in the proper direction from the start.
And that’s quite a trick on Crain’s part.
The selection:
As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk.
“I’m not thirty, I’m fifty,” I confessed. “I don’t know why I said thirty.”
“You can’t be fifty, either,” the woman said.
In fact, I wasn’t, but it seemed right to exaggerate slightly in the other direction now. How old was she? I studied the corners of her eyes. At one moment they were wizened and at another they were fresh, and it occurred to me that she might be of no age because she was the angel of death, who would have to come for me at some point.
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