Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

One reason I kept going back to work on the novel was that I thought I would be able to write it almost without thinking about it, since I knew the story already. But the longer I tried to write it, the less I understood how to work on it. I could not decide which parts were important. I knew which ones interested me, but I thought I had to include everything, even the dull parts. So I tried to write my way through the dull parts and then enjoy the interesting parts when I came to them. But in each case I passed the interesting parts without noticing, so I had to think maybe they were not so interesting after all. I became discouraged.

Several times I was tempted to give up on it. There were other things I wanted to do instead, another novel I wanted to write and a few stories I wanted to finish. I would have been glad to let someone else write this one for me if I could have — as long as it was written, I thought I did not care who wrote it. A friend of mine said that if I didn’t manage to write the novel I could at least save parts of it and make stories out of them, but I did not want to do that. In fact, I did not want to give it up, because I had spent so much time on it already by then. I’m not sure that is a good reason to go on with something, though in certain cases it must be. I once stayed with a man too long for the same reason, that there had already been so much between us. But maybe I had other, better reasons to keep on with this, even if I’m not sure what they were.

So I haven’t been able to write it almost without thinking about it, after all. I tried chronological order and that didn’t work, so I tried a random order. Then the problem was how to arrange a random order so that it made sense. I thought I could have one thing lead to another thing, each part grow out of the part that came before, and also include some relief from that. I tried the past tense, and then I put it in the present tense, even though I was tired of the present tense by then. After that, I left parts of it in the present tense and put the rest back in the past tense.

I kept stopping to translate. I told Vincent I was writing less than a page a week, and he laughed because he thought I was joking. But although it took me so long to write a page, I kept thinking the work would go more quickly. I always had a different reason for thinking it would go more quickly.

At times the novel seems to be a test of myself, both as I was then and as I am now. In the beginning, the woman was not like me, because if she had been, I could not have seen the story clearly. After a while, when I was more used to telling the story, I was able to make the woman more like me. I sometimes think that if there was enough goodness in me then, or enough depth or complexity, this will work, if I can make it work. But if I was simply too shallow or mean-spirited, it will not work, no matter what I do.

* * *

I was not the same with him as I was with other people. I tried not to be as determined, as busy, as hasty, as I was alone and with friends. I tried to be gentle and quiet, but it was hard, and it confused me. It also exhausted me. I had to leave him just to rest from it.

I had to leave him anyway, to work. I gave my students a great deal of work and that meant I had a great deal of work to do myself, reading their papers. I worked in my office and at home in the evenings, too.

My office, between two classics professors on the seventh floor of a new building, was roomy and full of bare shelves, with a row of tall, narrow windows looking out over tennis courts, groves of eucalyptus trees, and the ocean in the distance. The windows were sealed shut and soundproof. But through the walls, whenever I stopped work to listen, I would hear voices: the laughter of a student and teacher together, then the rhythmic chant of the teacher explaining, and then the drone of Latin conjugations — always, it seemed, the verb laudare, “to praise.”

I would stop working, look out the window, and put my hands and then my arms up to my nose and smell my skin. My own smell, of perfume and sweat, reminded me of him.

Another smell that made me think of him was the raw wool of the Mexican blanket on my bed. He would often leave early to let me sleep, but I would not be able to sleep. A few hours later he would come and find me in my office. When I was the first one up, and he got out of bed after I did, he would make the bed carefully and neatly. The first time he did this was the first morning he woke up there. Every time he did it, it seemed to me an act of tenderness, because he was arranging something of mine with such care, and taking part in the arrangements of my house.

* * *

I was waiting for him in a crowded room. He had not come to meet me and I decided he was not going to come. I thought he had left me already, before we had been together even a week. My disappointment was so acute that the room seemed to empty of whatever life it had had, and the air became thin. The people, chairs, sofas, windows, curtains, lectern, microphone, table, tape recorder, and sunlight were empty shells of what they had been before.

When he actually left me, months after that, the world was not empty but worse than empty, as though the quality of emptiness had become so concentrated it turned into a kind of poison, as though each thing appeared alive and healthy but had been injected with a poisonous preserving agent.

This time he had not left me, he had only come late. He was there in the crowd by the door when I stood up to go. The life came back into everything in the room. He explained to me that he had lost track of the time. He occasionally lost track of the time and what he was doing, he did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and it was hard for him, at times, to do what he had to do.

We left the place together to go to a friend’s house and we quarreled on the way.

* * *

There must have been at least seven readings that I went to while I knew him, or even more. It is hard to describe a reading in a way that is exciting, and it would be harder still to describe more than one in the same novel, even if some of the poetry I heard made me angry, which it did. I could change them to something else, like lectures, or dances, but I don’t think I would have gone to more than one dance. The last reading was a reading of sound poetry, the most difficult one for me. Because I was forced to sit still while my mind had nothing much to hold on to, it wandered away from me and went through the plate-glass window searching yet again for him.

* * *

We were quarreling over his friend Kitty. We were sitting together in his car in a narrow, sunlit street. On either side of us were small patches of clipped green lawn that came right down to the white sidewalks. The houses set in these patches of lawn were small and white, of one story, with red-tiled roofs. A short palm tree grew beside one house, a shrub with rubbery leaves by another, a red-flowered vine by a third. Each house on this street seemed to have a lawn and just one other thing growing on the lawn, as if that were a rule. The sun shone down at an angle and reflected off the white sidewalk and the white walls of the houses, and because the houses were so low and small, with so few trees about, a great expanse of blue sky was visible. We were waiting to get out of the car and go into a friend’s house. Either we were the first to arrive or we were simply trying to finish our quarrel.

He was going to give a reading himself in a few days. He was going to read a few of his poems and also a story. He told me he wanted to invite this woman Kitty to his reading because she had helped him to plan it.

The last time he had talked about her had been in my office. He had come up behind me in the hallway outside my office, and put his arms around me and kissed me there, publicly, which had made me nervous. Though the hallway ahead of me seemed to be empty, I thought someone appeared suddenly behind me and vanished again.