he narrator a kiss, but J.P. is uncomfortable about it. J.P. and Roxy go inside.
The narrator is depressed after meeting Roxy. He thinks again about his wife and girl friend. He thinks about drinking. He thinks about being asleep with his wife in their first house and being awakened by the landlord on a ladder outside scraping paint off the house. He looks out at the landlord---"a weird old hombre" (170), but the narrator himself is standing in the window naked.
He thinks about Frank Martin's Jack London story and London's "To Build A Fire," about a man who freezes to death in the snow. The narrator feels like the man in the snow. He plans to call his wife, then his girl friend, or his girl friend first, and then his wife. That's when the story ends.
1. The use of a first person narrator by Carver emphasizes the real confusion and depression and fear and pain that the recovering alcoholic feels as he tries to get and stay sober and live his life in a different way than he lived while drinking. If Carver had used a "clinical and sociological record" to tell the s
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