Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

So that behind my silence, and behind his silence, there was a good deal of talk, but that talk was in the pages of our notebooks, and was therefore silent, unless we chose to open the notebooks and read from them.

* * *

If he had been a bad writer, I think I could not have gone on with him. Or my lack of respect for the thing he did that was most important to him would have destroyed us before very long. But the fact that he wrote well did not help me to love him more deeply than I did. If I loved him at all, that had nothing to do with his writing, and when I talked to him about writing I felt I was not his lover and we were as distant as two people who did not know each other very well but respected and liked each other.

The distance between us at these times was not unlike the distance between us when we were with friends. We never gave any sign, in front of other people, of what was between us. It was evident to someone else only when we arrived together or left together, two moments I always savored, partly because they were in such contrast to all the other moments, when our closeness was unacknowledged. I wasn’t ashamed of him, or embarrassed, but I often wanted to move away from him, so that although I knew he was near me, I did not touch him. In fact, I wanted to have him near me and at the same time move away from him.

Maybe we never stopped being conscious of our oddness, that some people might disapprove of us because he was so much younger, or because I was a teacher and he was a student, though he was not my student and many other teachers were his friends, and though he was older than most of the other students. But maybe we also sensed that if we had even simply held hands in front of our friends, they would have paid close attention to this, and it would have satisfied their lively curiosity about just how we behaved together, just what our relationship was — did I act as a mother toward him? Was he protective of me, like a son or a father? Or were we the same age in our behavior? Were we tense or relaxed? Were we violent together or gentle? Were we mean or kind?

I knew their curiosity was lively because in that place, as long as I lived there, and even after I left, all of us had a great deal of interest in the lives of our friends and our acquaintances and even people we had never met. There was a great hunger for stories, especially stories involving emotion and drama, especially love and betrayal, though this curiosity and interest was not unkind, usually.

* * *

Another reading was given by someone I identified in my notebook as “S.B.” After that reading, where he sat behind me, we went out with a group of people to a Mexican restaurant. There were many meals in restaurants at that time, especially in Mexican restaurants, because groups of friends and groups hosting visitors to the university often went out to eat together. Later in the novel I mention a dinner in a Japanese restaurant during which I left the table and tried to call him from a phone booth by the restrooms. But I do not describe the meal or the friends, even though there were some interesting people present. In fact, throughout these months I was also seeing and meeting interesting people, so that everything surrounding the story, everything I am leaving out of it, would make another story, or even several others, quite different in character from this one.

Later, we stood alone in a friend’s living room and he was offended because I would not kiss him. He may have thought I was ashamed of him, but I simply did not want him to kiss me just then.

I can’t remember who “S.B.” is or what sort of reading it was. I also can’t remember, though I try over and over again, what happened in the week before it, when he and I were just getting to know each other. There are only two entries in my notebook for that week, and only one has anything to do with him. In that entry I describe what seems to me an incident without any importance at all: I was having lunch at a café on campus with a person I identify as “L.H.” We were sitting outdoors on the terrace. A skunk appeared in the concrete planter of a tree near us and caused some excitement among the students and faculty eating lunch. I happened to glance over at the doorway that led into the café, and I saw him standing there with a tray in his hands, looking displeased. I thought he was disappointed that so many people were sitting there in the sun, and all the seats were taken, but he could have been frowning because his eyes were not good, or because the sunlight was so bright, since he frowned often, especially in the sunlight. I don’t know if he saw us and came over, if he sat with us, or if he simply turned around and left. If I hadn’t written anything in my notebook about that week, and if I hadn’t remembered the reading, I don’t think I would be so acutely aware of those days about which I can’t remember anything.

I am working from my memories and my notebook. There is a great deal I would have forgotten if I had not written it in my notebook, but my notebook also leaves out a great deal, only some of which I remember. There are also memories that have nothing to do with this story, and there are good friends who do not appear in it, or appear only indistinctly, because at the time they had nothing or little to do with him.

* * *

When I think of him frowning in the sunlight as he looked out at the café terrace, I wonder if I have been wrong, all this time, about another occasion on which he was frowning. The only photograph I have of him shows him frowning at me from a distance of about fifteen feet. He is on a sailboat belonging to a cousin of mine, he is bending over, his hands are busy, perhaps fastening a rope, and he is looking up sideways at me, frowning. The picture is not very sharp, probably taken with a poor camera. I have assumed all this time that he was frowning in annoyance at me for taking his picture at such a time, when he was trying to do something difficult on the boat of a man who made him uncomfortable because he barked orders at him to do things like fasten certain ropes and also because he clearly did not approve of this relationship. But now I realize he might have been frowning merely because he was looking up suddenly into the bright sunlight.

A year after this picture was taken I went sailing with the same cousin, on the same boat. Back home, I happened to take the picture out and look at it again. This time I had trouble reconciling what I saw with what I knew. He was there on the boat, in the picture, and I was looking at him, but he was not on that boat any longer: I had just been there the day before, and I knew he was not there. Within an hour after the picture was taken, in fact, he was no longer on the boat, because we were at the dock when I took it, preparing to go ashore. But as long as he and I were still together he was somehow still on the boat, he was not distinctly absent from it, as he was a year later.

* * *

I have been thinking about that photograph, because I mentioned it to Ellie recently on the phone. Except for her one year in England, Ellie has lived near me for a long time. But now she is about to move again, this time to the Southwest. She told me she had gone down to the basement of her apartment building the day before to look through her things. First she discovered that she couldn’t open the padlock on her storage bin. Another tenant, believing the storage bin was his, had instructed his secretary to break off the lock Ellie had put on it many years before and replace it with a new one. The lock had belonged to Ellie’s father. It had been the only thing of his she had left. Everything to do with this move was disturbing to her anyway. Now she was further disturbed because her father’s lock had been destroyed and removed by a stranger, and she was shut out of her bin. Then, when she was able to get into it, she found that a flood had ruined some of her books and papers.