Lydia Davis: The End of the Story

If the light was on, I saw every detail of him down to the grain of his skin, and if the room was dark, I saw the outline of him against the dim sky outside, but at the same time knew his face so well that I could see that, too, and even what his expression was, though without the light not all the detail of him was there.

I thought that in certain cases a person fell in love slowly and gradually, and in others very suddenly, but my experience was so limited I couldn’t be sure. It seemed to me I had fallen in love only once before.

There were times when I felt I loved him, but other times when I did not, and because he was wary and intelligent he must have noticed exactly when I seemed to love him and when I did not, and maybe he did not quite believe me because of that. Maybe that was why he hesitated and let so many days go by, after I said I loved him, before he answered me.

I think that a certain hunger for him came first and was followed by a feeling of tenderness, gradually increasing, for a person who aroused such hunger and then satisfied it. Maybe that was what I felt for him that I thought was love.

The first feeling I had for him, though, even before that, was no more than a calm appreciation of him as I first saw him — an agreeable, intelligent, robust sort of person who found me attractive, too, so that in a simple way, that same night, like two hungry and thirsty people, we could decide we wanted to find a place to be alone together and remain together long enough to satisfy our appetite.

This appreciation, and this mild hunger that was not for him in particular but for any man who had some of the qualities I liked in him, did not grow stronger right away, and did not immediately become a particular hunger, a hunger that could be satisfied only by him. Another feeling came before, almost right away, within hours, certainly by the next day, the next time I saw him, and that was a kind of fascination, or a kind of distraction. He entered my mind as a distraction from what had been in my mind before. He took over a large part of my mind so that he was an obstruction to me: I had to think around him to think of anything else, and if I succeeded in thinking of something else, it was not long before the thought of him would push aside the other thought again, as though it had gained strength from being ignored a short time.

He was a distraction to me when I was not with him, and when I was with him, I was fascinated to look at him and listen to him. The sight of him, and the sound of him speaking, kept me still, or kept me near him. It was enough to be near him and watch and listen to him, half paralyzed, whereas just a day or two before I had not even known him.

It was the distraction that seemed to demand that I stop whatever I was doing and return to him, where I could see him, and then it was the fascination that made me need to be close to him, and then it was this need to be close to him that turned into a hunger that grew stronger and stronger in me and in him, too.

* * *

His room was in a town about a mile away from mine, past the racecourse and the fairgrounds and a long stretch of dirt used for parking during the races and fairs. When I drove there I followed a road that curved around the racetrack parking lot, and on one side there was the dark expanse, at night, of that empty lot and on the other another empty stretch, of rutted dirt, going back to a channel of water and farther back to the hills that had no houses on the side overlooking the racetrack but were thick with houses, including mine, on the other, the side above the ocean. I then crossed a narrow bridge over the channel of water that flowed out of the hills, where it was a rocky stream surrounded by scrubby, weedy trees and filled in late May with soft-shelled crawdads, its muddy banks littered with watermelon rinds and beer bottles, down to the ocean, where it was wide and shallow and at ebb tide drawn out by strong currents, its banks of sand eaten away and falling piece by piece into the moving water. I then climbed the inland side of another hill.

The first time I went there, I found my own way, following his directions. Behind a row of garages he had a single, narrow room with no bed, not even a mattress on the floor, only a sleeping bag on the carpet, and no other furniture, only books and clothes standing or falling in piles along the walls, a typewriter, too, unless he kept the typewriter in his garage, and a set of Indian drums. There was a small kitchen adjoining the room, and in the kitchen there was only a hotplate on a table, next to a small refrigerator. The bathroom was off the kitchen. I stayed for a little while, drinking a cup of tea with him or a glass of water, sitting on the carpet. He apologized for the size of the room, probably because I looked so uncomfortable.

After we drank our tea or water, he showed me his garage. He was proud of it. The concrete room was filled with freestanding bookcases containing a large number of books. I was impressed by the number of books he owned. He did not tell me that most of them belonged to a friend. The friend became very angry at him later about something to do with the books, maybe that the books were confiscated by the landlord when he was forced out. There was a desk facing the garage door, with a lamp and a typewriter on it, and he worked here. He often worked for long hours alone at his writing, though it was hard for me to find out from him what he was writing. Either he wouldn’t tell me when I asked or I didn’t want to ask.

I said to myself that the reason I did not often go to his room was that it was so small and dark, but after he moved up the coast one or two towns to a light, airy apartment overlooking a cactus nursery, I did not want to go there either, very often, once, that I remember, when I helped him arrange books in a low bookcase, and another time when he made a very large pot of rather thin cabbage soup for us to eat for supper, but only a few times after that, so I had to admit that I simply preferred to see him in my own house. When he left the apartment overlooking the cactus nursery, I was no longer talking to him very much or very openly, and I knew he had moved but did not know where he had gone. After that, I moved, and I don’t think he knew where I was living either.

* * *

He played the Indian drums, or at least he told me he did and I believed him. He told me he had lived in India when he was a child. He had returned to America on a boat with his mother and sister. He offered to play for me, but a long time went by before I would let him. At the thought of listening to him play this instrument, so strange to me, I felt the same embarrassment I felt some time later when another friend played his guitar and sang freedom songs. I asked him once to drum on my back, and he did, thumping me with his fingers and the heels of his palms. When at last he did play the drums for me, it was toward the end, when I was uncomfortable with him and felt very little for him, and he was hurt by me, and we were doing things that we had not done before, as though to see if we would feel anything more for each other, but I felt only the same embarrassment I had expected to feel.

* * *

When I first started working on the novel, I thought I had to keep very close to the facts about certain things, including his life, as though the point of writing the book would be lost if something like the Indian drums were changed and he were to play another instrument instead. Because I had wanted to write these things for so long, I thought I had to tell the truth about them. But the surprising thing was that after I had written them the way they were, I found I could change them or take them out, as though by writing them once I had satisfied whatever it was I had to satisfy.

At times the truth seems to be enough, as long as I compress it and rearrange it a little. At other times it does not seem to be enough, but I’m not willing to invent very much. Most things are kept as they were. Maybe I can’t think what to put in place of the truth. Maybe I just have a poor imagination.