In Iowa City, Raymond Carver lived in the Iowa House at the Iowa Memorial Union: his room was two floors above John Cheever’s room, and both of them used to spend the days and nights there, talking and drinking. Donald Justice remembered:

I’d see [Carver] around the offices quite a bit. Our paths crossed mostly in socializing, at parties. I remember a poker game in his room on the Iowa House one Sunday evening in which I lost heavily. Ray bluffed me out of a couple of hands.