Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

I looked at their spines often. The colors of their spines, and the few words of their titles, naming other possible visions of the world, were always part of what I saw in the room, and I always liked to have these signs of other worlds near me, even if for months or years I did not open the books, even if there were many I never read but packed into boxes and unpacked again, over and over, taking them with me from one place to the next. Some, in fact, I still have on shelves here in this house, still unread.

When I visited him in his garage, he showed me more closely what he had in this place where he worked, and I was impressed by the books, not knowing, yet, that most of them were not his. The garage was larger than his room in the back of the building. Harsh yellow light shone over the concrete walls and the tall bookcases that stood strangely in rows in the middle of the space. He stepped lightly and easily around the bookcases, showing me how he had arranged the books. He never wasted his motions. He moved, and yet always seemed still. He paused before he moved, then moved economically and deliberately, whereas I often hurled myself at things, stumbled, and was awkward. He seemed to think economically, too, as though he also paused before he thought, as he also paused before he spoke. Of course even pausing and taking care, he sometimes said something wrong, or clumsy, and I thought of the way a cornered animal will pause and then, with its perfectly developed instincts, make a move that should be successful but is not, because there are elements in the situation the animal has not understood and could not have understood.

I did not visit him in his garage again after that, as far as I can remember. I did not help him move, when he moved a month or two later from that place to the rooms overlooking the concrete yard of a nursery full of potted cactuses. I can’t remember just when that move was. I think I was away, I think I had gone back East. There was a dispute surrounding the move. Either he owed rent, or the landlord did not like him, or a friend came back and claimed the place, or that friend or a different friend was angry about the books, either that they had been left behind in the garage or that they had not been left, or that the landlord had kept them, or that they had been damaged, or that some were missing.

* * *

I noticed even then, before I was angry at him myself, long before Ellie told me the story of another woman who was deeply insulted by a proposition of his, something he offered to do for her in exchange for money, that many people seemed to get angry at him. Certainly in any sort of business arrangement, anything involving practical matters or money, sooner or later he did not do the right thing and caused disturbance in the person he was dealing with. In the beginning, he would make a good impression, as for instance on a landlord, since he was neat and clean, friendly and intelligent, and good-looking in an open, unassuming way, and the landlord would be pleased with the arrangement and well-disposed toward him. But then he would be late with a rent payment, or offer only a part of it and then miss one altogether, and the landlord would be first puzzled, then nervous, then angry, and then adamant in asking him to leave.

He had been quick to pay back the first loan I made him, the $100, but he did not pay back the $300 I lent him later, enough to have his muffler fixed, probably because by the time I returned he had left me, so the debt was not something that might come between us but something he would want to forget, just as he would want to forget me, too, as quickly as possible, put me behind him and move on.

I realized later that he went to a woman and became attached to her in somewhat the same way that he moved into an apartment and lived there a few months and then moved out again after some unpleasantness with the landlord, always defaulting on the rent and owing money. He needed to stay with her and become part of her, not lose himself completely, but not keep himself entirely separate either. Then, after a time, he left her and became attached to another woman.

A woman anchored him in the real world, connected him to something. Without her, he floated. He did not keep track of the passing hours or the passing days very well, anyway, he did not plan how to make money or spend it or save it, or if he did, his plans were not connected to anything very real, though he kept himself clean and neat, and began projects and worked at them hard, and was a hard worker, if he did not often finish them.

He did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and in the same way, he sometimes did not know what he was saying, or did not think about how it related to the last thing he had said, or to what he was doing, or to the true situation, so that there was often a lack of connection between one thing and another in his conversation and in his life. Many of the things he said to me were not true, and even more were not what he meant to say. He did not always know what he was saying because his mind was often on something else. Once he told me he made Portuguese fish soup very well, then corrected himself and said that he had never made it but believed he could make it very well. Sometimes he said something he thought was true but said it in such a strange way that it did not express what he meant to say. Sometimes he was simply confused or mistaken. Some things he said wrong out of nervousness and then either heard what he had said or did not hear. Some things he deliberately distorted or exaggerated. Sometimes he deliberately lied.

When I first knew him, I did not know that he could lie, so I believed everything he said. Later, when I looked back at what he had said, knowing he could lie, I had to wonder which thing was true and which was not. And each thing I doubted made me change what I thought I knew about him.

* * *

I think he wanted to forget me as well as the money he owed me, even though he did send me that French poem a year after I last saw him. Sending it could have been a momentary impulse. Maybe the memory of me broke through his cloud of forgetfulness briefly and was then swallowed up again, so that by the time he received my answer, if he ever received it, he was once again inclined to forget me and only read it quickly, suppressed anything he felt reading it, and put it away to be forgotten as soon as possible — not deliberately in a drawer or a box, and not in the wastebasket, but in a place on his table or desk where it would look like something he intended to answer, but would be buried by other papers, mislaid, and eventually forgotten.

When I received that poem from him I read it through once quickly, then several times more that day, until I understood most of it, and after that I could not take it out of its envelope again, as though it had too much power, as though the force of it was safe enough in the envelope, but not safe once it was out and unfolded.

Just now I have taken the poem out again and have been looking through different anthologies to see if I can find it and identify it. I found it once before, quite by accident, so I thought that when I next needed to, I would be able to find it easily. It is probably a well-known poem, or at least this was my impression after I found it by accident. It is probably one I should know, or one other people would think I should know because of my profession, but my knowledge of French literature is surprisingly poor, as is my knowledge of French history. Oddly enough, this doesn’t usually affect the quality of my work. At worst I will miss only one or two references. But now and then it has embarrassed me.

The poem is a sonnet, and begins with the word Nous. I looked in the index of first lines of the book where I had been certain, all this time, that I would find it and saw only other first lines beginning with the word Nous, in the literal translations offered by the book: We two have our hands to give. We have a clergy, some lime. We will not always live in these yellow lands. I did not find the line I was looking for, which would be something like: We have thought pure things. I gave up, for the time being.