However: Carver, in the grip of happiness, no longer sounded quite like that. Compare the sheer dizzying sad-sackery of “Why Don’t You Dance?” to the sense of communion that can be found in Carver’s next story collection, Cathedral. The book is still terse, still concerned with working-class people, but there is a new generosity. The title story tells of a couple hosting the wife’s old friend, who is blind, for a visit. The narrator—the husband—is skeptical of his wife’s friend before the two meet, as husbands sometimes are, but the evening goes more pleasantly than promised. The two men share a love of scotch, and the blind man accepts the narrator’s offer of weed. Relaxing on the couch, they watch a TV documentary about cathedrals, and the narrator realizes the blind man has no idea what a cathedral looks like. The narrator unfolds a grocery bag that previously held onions (like the narrator, earthy and sharp), and together they draw a cathedral: “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.”

The narrator has escaped himself, and the story closes with this simple (simplistic, even) line: “ ‘It’s really something,’ I said.”

It’s almost like a joke on the idea of the epiphanic short story—all that Joycean whatness, all those Cheeveresque intimations, boiled down into the flat vernacular. And it allows for human connection; in fact the possibility of connection is what the story is about.