Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

* * *

During this time when I was often bored and restless, Madeleine was often angry, and I did not know why. It would begin early in the morning. Dawn would come with a band of milky white below a cloud. The sky would turn a cool, snowy blue. The first sounds would be a neighbor closing his gate, starting his car, and driving off. He awoke one bird who made a noise like a plucked wire and then went back to sleep for a while. I looked to see how much light was in the sky and the cat mewed once. Now the bird was awake again, and it made a noise like a cricket chirping.

Madeleine would begin banging around in the kitchen, and I would begin daydreaming. The palms would thrash. Later Madeleine would go outside and rake. I would lie on my bed indoors and hear the sound of the rake’s teeth grating over the dirt of the driveway. She was raking up the pine needles. She would work her way around the hummock of rubbery sea fig by the road and the bags of red clay sitting in plastic under the cedar tree. She would rake the needles into little piles all over, and then burn them. She liked making fires of them.

Morning would be warm and clear. Then, after noon, the fog would move slowly up the hill from the ocean, cars coming up out of it with their headlights on while the air was still clear where I was. Then the air near my windows would turn white, the trees at a distance become faint, and the bushes close to the house very distinct, suddenly, against the white fog.

At this time of the year there were monarch butterflies all over the hillside, in fives and sixes. Because it was close to Christmas, special services were conducted in the church down the hill, and organ music and singing came up to me. Listening to it, I would look out the bathroom window and see, over car tops and rooftops, the Santa on the chimney of a brick building down the hill, turning by electricity slowly one way and then the other.

Madeleine raked, and she slammed doors. She would pick up the receiver of the phone, which was just outside the door to my room, dial a number, and then slam the receiver down. Or there would be a gentle rattle as she picked the phone itself up and carried it out of my earshot, down the hall or around the corner into the kitchen, where she would talk in a hushed, angry voice, often in Spanish or Italian, the kitten mewing again and again in the background. Once, I know, she was angry at a friend of hers, a wealthy Spanish woman who lived at the top of our hill. I was sure Madeleine’s relationships with all her friends and lovers were complicated, but she never told me anything about them and I never asked.

She always preferred to eat with chopsticks, often a dish made with millet and garlic, and she drank many cups of tea during the day. The sink was often littered with chopsticks and teaspoons and separate scattered grains of millet and tea leaves, and in these days, because I knew how angry she was, even the chopsticks and the perforated, hinged metal spoons looked angry lying there in the pale green sink.

* * *

But despite my discouragement and impatience, I did not want to leave him when the time came for me to go East. It seemed true, just then, that he belonged to me and I belonged to him beyond any boredom, beyond any diminishing of feeling between us. At the same time, I did not know which to believe — that I had only a little feeling for him, as I seemed to have sometimes, or a great deal.

In the East, I was suddenly surrounded by so many difficulties and sorrows unrelated to him, unrelated even to me, that his importance shrank to something very small.

But when I thought my mind was altogether taken up with other things, as I stood on a railway station platform, waited by a car, entered or left a house, walked up or down a driveway, went out into the cold, went back in out of the cold, I would suddenly remember the sweet smell of his skin, and I would miss his open arms, how perfectly still he was when he opened his arms to me, as though all his attention was on me and on taking me into his arms, whereas with another man before him, and then another, there had been no room for me, they were all hard surface, they were always moving too quickly, rushing here and there, usually away from me, or past me, intent on their own business, only now and then straight toward me, when I, too, became their business. He paid attention, he watched, he listened, he thought about me when he was not with me, nothing was lost on him, nothing of me as he perceived me. Even in his sleep, he was attentive, and woke up enough to tell me he loved me, whereas other men, intent on the business of sleeping, would be disturbed and hiss at me: “Stop moving!”

* * *

I thought of combining the two visits East into one, in the novel, in order to be economical, since I don’t know how much he was involved in those days, if I was so far away from him. But even at a distance my feelings about him changed from day to day, either because each thing that happened to me, though it had nothing to do with him, changed the way I felt about him, and what happened during the night, too, in a dream, or because my feelings simply aged and developed, day after day, like independent creatures, grew in intensity or weakened, deteriorated, sickened, healed.

And the two visits were not the same. During the first, I stayed in my mother’s house, a difficult place for me to be, and he and I missed each other intensely and straightforwardly. He wrote at least four letters to me, and I wrote back to him, though I don’t know how many times. I telephoned him at least twice. By the time I went East for the second time, my mother’s sister had moved in with her and I stayed in a borrowed apartment in the city and felt that what he and I had together was almost over.

I see that I’m shifting the truth around a little, at certain points accidentally, but at others deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable. If I now think I shouldn’t have had a certain feeling so early in the relationship, I move it to a later point in time. If I think I shouldn’t have had that feeling at all, I take it out. If he did something too dreadful to name, I either say nothing about it or describe it as dreadful without identifying it. If I did something too dreadful, I describe it in milder terms or do not mention it.

After all, there are things I like to remember and others I do not like to remember. I like to remember times when I behaved decently, also events that were exciting or interesting for another reason. I don’t like to remember times when I behaved badly, or ugliness of a drab sort, though I don’t mind a dramatic sort of ugliness. My boredom is unpleasant to remember, and so are certain events, like the visit he and I paid, after we were no longer together, to acquaintances of ours whom I did not like very much, in their ugly rented apartment, though for a long time I could not figure out why that particular visit was so unpleasant to remember.

* * *

One night, as I lay in bed in my mother’s house, I stopped to think about the hero of the book I was reading, who was good, innocent, handsome, intelligent, illiterate, gifted in music, and of noble but mysterious birth. I was reminded of him, not because they had many qualities in common, but because of the position the hero occupied in the story, and the attitude of the other characters toward him.

Close to midnight, I left my bed to call him. I carried the telephone into the kitchen and shut both doors. My mother was a light sleeper, often wakeful, and she would not close her bedroom door at night because she did not like to feel shut up in a room, and also, probably, because she liked to know as much as possible about what went on in her house. She therefore heard every noise, often thought a noise was unusual, wondered what it was as she continued to lie in her bed, or got up out of bed to see what it was. But there were nights when she was not worried about anything, when she slept soundly and did not hear what was happening in her house, and I thought there was a good chance, by now, that she was too deeply asleep to hear me.