Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

I think now this might have had something to do with Evelyn’s nature. Evelyn did not see things the way most people saw them. Everything was always so fresh and interesting to her, she was so often amazed and pleased by what she saw, for certain peculiar and unpredictable reasons of her own, that she would stop short in the middle of what she was doing, marveling at it, incapable of going on to anything else very quickly, so that even her meals reflected this, and were either incomplete, because she had gotten no further than one amazing food or one amazing dish, or complete, but served hours later than she had said she would serve them because she stopped and spent so long contemplating each part of them. She did not judge things, or her judgments were not harsh, or they did not have anything to do with the judgments of other people. So that, in her presence, everything seemed to be full of wonderful possibilities, and that afternoon I felt that what we had just then was entirely satisfying and good.

His life apart from me was not very real to me. He did not force me to pay much attention to it, because he was too modest or, if not truly modest, spoke of himself only briefly and then left the subject as though something would be lost or harmed if he dwelled on it for too long.

I did not know exactly what he did when he was away from me. I could imagine him alone in his room. I could see him working at a job, and the job was always menial, and demeaning. I could see him in his garage. Then there were the tedious daily things he must have done some of the time he was not with me, such as shop for food, cook, clean his apartment, wash his clothes. I could form only a vague picture of him with his friends, who were unknown to me, who lived in rooms in unknown places in the city. Most of his friends were as young as he was, and because I did not regard people of that age as very interesting, even though I had been that age myself, they tended to merge for me into an undifferentiated group. When I pictured him in their company he seemed much younger, as though they were his playmates and I were his aunt — not quite his mother, though his actual mother was herself so young, as I had discovered, so young that she seemed, even to him, like an older sister.

I didn’t know how much time he spent with his friends, since he didn’t always tell me he had seen them or, if he told me, give me any idea how long he had been with them. I couldn’t really believe that anything important took place when they were together. My impression was that he and his friends only sat somewhere and talked to each other in a way that didn’t add anything to them or change them but only marked time while they grew a little older and perhaps more capable of undergoing interesting changes, and that this talk went on in a room, an apartment, a house, a campus bar, or a student center — in a private place or a university place, but not a public place in town, such as the café where he met his older friend.

This was the one friend who might have interested me, an eccentric, reclusive man vaguely associated in my mind with literature, who was nearly an old man or was an old man, to my way of thinking at the time, though I now realize that he was probably no older than sixty, and of course, as I begin to approach fifty myself, sixty seems younger and younger to me. He would meet this friend in the café or go see him where he lived in a mysterious part of town which I imagined to be the heart of the oldest part, a part even older, perhaps, than was possible in that town, most of which was not very old. Perhaps I imagined it older and older the more I thought of it, just because I had so little idea where it was.

This friend lived in a single, small room crowded with bookshelves and books, and permeated with the stale smell of unwashed clothing and the strong, bitter smell of tobacco — or, since I never went to visit him myself, did I only imagine this when I imagined an old man living alone? I also saw the old man as bearded and a little plump around the waist, thighs, arms, and cheeks, but I don’t know if he told me this or if I instantly formed this picture of the man when he first told me he was visiting a bookish old man in a small room filled with books, and never questioned the picture, so that it registered in my mind as the truth.

Actually, many years before, I had known another bookish old man who was visited by another ardent young man, and maybe I simply applied the picture I knew to this old man.

Although this friend was more interesting to me than his young friends, and raised him a little in my estimation, while his young friends and what he might possibly be doing with them only lowered him, my interest in this friend was still very limited, because the friendship seemed not entirely innocent to me but contaminated, as I saw it, by his self-consciousness, as though he knew how touching it might be that an idealistic and ambitious and talented young man should have a friendship with a much older, poorer, better-educated man, in the presence of whom the younger man’s vanity would drop away and he would become pure and even good, or at least feel pure and good. Because I was sure that alongside his real interest in the old man was his awareness of himself visiting the old man, himself at the knees of an old man who had set himself apart from society, the pleasure he might bring to an isolated old man as he freely shared his youth, his freshness, his quick mind, his gentle manners. And he shared these things freely, because there could be no danger of any lasting hold, since his youth itself gave him permission not only to forget the old man for weeks at a time, distracted by the enormous effort of making or beginning some kind of life for himself, but also to move on abruptly and permanently, leaving him behind when the time came to go. So, although there was real tenderness and happiness in his voice when he spoke of him, it was mixed with a naïve elation, a naïve pride in the fact that he owned such an unusual and precious jewel as this friendship with an eccentric, smelly old man awake in the night and asleep in the day, belonging more to the East or even to Europe than to the West, and certainly nothing like the people we saw around us on the palm-lined streets of these seaside towns.

Now it comes back to me that several of the friends he saw were connected with the theater in town, although I’m not sure if they were students or professional actors, directors, or stagehands. I remember that when he talked to me about the theater and these friends, his tone was firmer, more confident, as though he hoped or expected that I would be impressed by this, at least, by the fact that friends of his, who evidently respected him, were involved in something as compelling as a theater performance. But I’m not sure my interest and respect could have been aroused by anything in his life except the very same things and people that aroused my interest and respect in my own life.

For instance, I know I respected him for having read certain books, and read them so closely and in such an orderly way, but these were always books that I myself intended to read. And I respected him for the way he wrote.

I would not have wanted to spend much time, anyway, or maybe any time at all, with his young friends, who were so much younger that I would have felt like an old woman or their teacher and they would have been respectful toward me as though I were their teacher.

But once we went to a play together and I met a few of them, though I have only a fleeting image of the inside of the theater, in fact only a corner of it near the front door, and a memory of shaking hands with a collection of people he knew.

I don’t know if it was on that day that we went out to a café afterward or if there was one more visit to the theater together, after which we met a friend of his, went to a bar or café for beer, and talked about plays and movies. But I never particularly enjoyed talking about plays or movies. And I was never very interested in the theater. He wanted to write for the theater. Just before we lost touch completely, he told me he had been given a scholarship to go to drama school. It was a scholarship he had been hoping to get, yet he told me he had decided not to take it. If he took it, he said, his life would be too easy. The reasons he gave me could have been the real reasons, or they could have been reasons invented or exaggerated to impress me. If they were the real reasons, I was impressed by them, but at the same time I was aware that they might not be the real reasons.