Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Jack, I swear —” he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.
Not a single word is wasted in this very short Annie Proulx story. It has the weight of a novel, with every word so carefully chosen, with every deceptively simple sentence packing an unexpected punch.
It’s a story of love punctuated by the weight of fear, longing that never gets rewarded, crushing loneliness that is meant to stay, and the price of denial of your needs. It’s the story of regret, the one that comes when it’s too late.
I can say it’s heartbreaking, but it’s actually way more subtle than that. It doesn’t as much break your heart – from the beginning you know there is no happy ending here – but instead makes it ache in a raw, haunting way.
“There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”
Two young men in working-class rural 1960s America where living life together in the open could have had dire consequences. And one of them was unwilling to take that risk. And so they carried out their affair in stolen minutes and days here and there over two decades — “One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”
And it’s a protracted gut punch.
“Try this one,” said Jack, “and I’ll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn’t do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on that. It’s all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don’t never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you’ll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it. You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I’m not you. I can’t make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You’re too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.”
So sad, but such a well-written utterly devastating story. Those two shirts on a wire hanger — that’s the image that will always stay in my mind. The price of prejudice, denial and regret. And love.
5 stars.
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A link to the pdf version of this story: https://www.taosmemory.com/oscar/Brok…
books are life 
That shirt-buttoning scene is unendurably sad. So tender…when it no longer matters.
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Yes, it is. So sad — tenderness that came too late. I loved both Ledger and Gyllenhaal in that movie, and I’m impressed how that entire movie was so faithful to this story.
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