Interesting Emendations: Maile Meloy's "Travis, B."

Maile Meloy’s "Travis, B." (The New Yorker, October 28, 2002) is, in my opinion, the finest short story to appear in the magazine in the last ten years. It’s about a twenty-two year old, part-Cheyenne loner named Chet Moran, who works feeding cows on a farm outside Glendive, Montana. Due to polio, contracted before he was two, and to broken bones suffered in horse-riding accidents, he’s physically disabled. He walks “as though turning to himself to ask a question.” He lives in “an insulated room built into the barn.” One winter night, just for something to do, he drives into town. He sees a light on in the school. People are going inside. He decides to join them. He meets Beth Travis, a young lawyer, who is teaching a course on school law. He tries to connect with her. At first Beth seems unresponsive. She seems distracted, preoccupied with her own troubles. The gap between them seems vast. Then something amazing happens. One night, Chet decides to saddle up his horse and ride into town to attend Beth’s course. After class, he offers to take her to the café on his horse. She agrees. “He held her briefcase against the pommel, and she held tightly to his jacket, her legs against his. He couldn’t think of anything except how warm she was, pressed against the base of his spine.” When they arrive at the café, she laughs. “She looked amazed.” It’s an astounding, elating scene; it seems, against all odds, that Chet has made a breakthrough with her. It’s the highpoint of the relationship. That evening, just before they part, Chet kisses her hand and then her cheek: “She didn’t move, not an inch, and he was about to kiss her for real when she seemed to snap out of a trance, and stepped away from him.” It’s the story’s turning point. The next night of class, Beth is absent; there’s a new teacher. Chet walks out of class and impulsively decides to drive the six hundred miles to Missoula, where Beth lives, to see her. It’s a romantic quest and it fails. He finds Beth in Missoula; he says to her, “I just knew that if I didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again, and I didn’t want that. That’s all.” But Beth doesn’t respond. “He stood there waiting, thinking she might say something, meet him halfway. He wanted to hear her voice again. He wanted to touch her, any part of her, just her arms maybe, just her waist. She stood out of reach, waiting for him to go.” Chet returns to the farm. It seems he still retains hope of seeing her again: “He wondered if maybe he had planted a seed, with Beth Travis, by demonstrating his seriousness to her.” But then he decides that she won’t come looking for him. “That was the thing that made him ache.” The story ends sadly: “He fished her phone number out of his pocket and studied it a while in the moonlight, until he knew it by heart, and wouldn’t forget it. Then he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it into a ball, and threw it away.”

I apologize for the roughness of the foregoing summary; it doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the story’s subtlety and poignancy.

I first read “Travis, B.” back in 2002 when it appeared in The New Yorker. There’s also a version of it in Meloy’s 2009 story collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Comparing the two versions, I found a number of interesting differences. For example, in the New Yorker version, Meloy describes Chet as follows:

He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts, his winter coat, and the rancher’s big oilskin, with his feet on the space heater, warming up soup on the stove. But he got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

The book version of that passage is sparer:

He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts and his winter coat, warming up soup on the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

Another example where the book version suffers loss of detail is a passage describing Chet at work. The magazine version is as follows:

That weekend was the longest one he’d had. He cleaned the tack for the team, and curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended. He dosed the calves that needed it with medicine, but mostly they were fine, and went bawling back to their mothers, who waited outside the barn. He wondered if the cows had an idea of their calf, with his habits and smells. Did they worry, or did they just wait for the next thing to happen?

In the book version, that passage is reduced to the following:

That weekend was the longest one he’d had. He fed the cows and cleaned the tack for the team. He curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended.

Some readers may prefer the shorter book version of the above-noted passages. But I confess I’m partial to the extra detail (oilskin, space heater, dosing the calves with medicine, etc.) in the New Yorker version.

The differences aren’t just with respect to details. Meloy’s descriptions of Chet’s and Beth’s reactions to each other seem slightly edgier, more intense, in the book version. For example, in the New Yorker story, when Chet offers to show Beth where the café is located, Meloy says:

She looked at him, as if wondering whether she could trust him, and then she nodded. “O.K.,” she said.

In the book version, describing Beth’s reaction to Chet’s offer, Meloy says:

She looked like she was wondering whether to fear him, and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said.

Meloy changed “trust” to “fear.” Why? Maybe to heighten our apprehension of the potential explosiveness of the “something dangerous” that Chet senses within himself. Does the story benefit from such heightening? Not necessarily. Chet’s character is ambiguous. He could be one of those quiet, bottled-up types who one day suddenly goes berserk. Or he could simply be a cowboy embodiment of Gatsby's "romantic readiness." Whatever the case, Chet's profile in the magazine story seems a hint more modulated than it does in the book version. And this seems to work to the story's advantage.

Meloy mentions the fear element again in the following passage, which is the same in both versions, except for the book's addition of “and restless”:

She studied him and seemed to wonder again if she should be afraid. But the room was bright, and he tried to look harmless. He was harmless, he was pretty sure. Being with someone helped – he didn’t feel so wound up and restless.

Chet also experiences fear. In the magazine version, Meloy writes:

He wanted to say that he wasn’t hungry when he was around her, but he feared she might shy away.

In the book version, Chet’s fear that Beth “might shy away” is changed to the more definite “she would shy away.” It’s a subtle change, but it reinforces my impression that Chet’s image in the book version is slightly more dangerous-seeming.

In conclusion, I count at least seventeen compositional differences between the New Yorker “Travis, B.” and the “Travis, B.” of Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Granted, most of the changes are minor. However, “Travis, B.” is a masterpiece, and so these variations matter. Overall, I’d say the New Yorker piece is the better version. I wonder why Meloy changed it.