Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

I was sure he would be surprised and happy to hear my voice, but he was quiet and rather cool, no more than mildly polite. After we had talked for a short time we hung up, and I stayed there in the kitchen sitting on a stool, trying to reason out why he was not more affectionate. I began to accept my disappointment. Then the phone rang. He was calling back, apologetic. Now he was everything he had not been before, ardent and talkative. He said he was sorry, and explained that he was trying to accept the fact that I was away, and had been managing pretty well, and that to hear my voice on the phone and to have to talk to me was difficult because it unsettled him, it undid the work he had done. He went on to say that he loved me and missed me very much, so much that it was painful.

At this point, over his voice, I heard my mother’s footstep in the hall. The door from the hall opened, and my mother looked in. Her face in the full fluorescent light of the kitchen was swollen with sleep, disfigured, her eyes half shut against the light, her features disorganized. While I covered the mouthpiece of the receiver, as his tiny voice continued to talk on, unaware, away from my ear, she asked, “Is someone dead?”

* * *

By now, two letters had arrived from him. I read them over again and again, until the style in which they were written, impassioned and elegant at the same time, was so deeply impressed on me that when I myself wrote a letter to an old friend I found, as I wrote it, that I was writing in his style, and this felt like some sort of betrayal, though whether of him or my old friend I was not sure.

The distance made him seem even more silent, though in his two letters he might speak to me endlessly, as often as I read them and even when they only lay by my bed, unread but open.

A third letter arrived. I could tell it had been written a few days before, but it was dated a month earlier. He had these lapses, when his mind wandered, when he was not aware of the day and the hour or how the world outside worked, what schedule it worked to. At these times, he seemed to be looking away, and while he was looking away I could come closer to him than I could when he was fully conscious of the time and the place. And his lapses also seemed to be a proof of sincerity, because if he was not aware of the day of the week or the month, clearly he was not calculating all the moves he made, though he might be calculating some of them.

* * *

There are really only three things to include from that trip: my phone call to him, the letters he sent me, and my introduction to a certain man at a New Year’s Eve party. I kept the phone number this stranger wrote down for me, and I called him two months later when I was in the East again. I think I kept it not because I was unhappy with what I had already but for quite the opposite reason, that coming together with one man in such perfect harmony, for a while anyway, had made me think that anywhere I went now, I might meet another man and come together with him in perfect harmony. The party was attended mainly by college teachers I did not know in a village a hundred miles from the city in the midst of a cold so bitter that the slightest breeze burned my face.

* * *

When I came back, my mind was more on my work than it was on him. It held my interest for longer periods of time without any thought of him distracting me.

There were other changes. Madeleine was always changing. She was always discovering something about herself, or entering a state or leaving a state, or entering a discipline or leaving a discipline, or consulting a specialist, or finding a new medium in which to work, or a new process, or a new place to work, and from time to time a new relationship, though whether it was more than a passionate and tumultuous friendship I could never be sure.

Now she had cut her hair very short. It gave her pale, lined face a look of frightening severity. She had been seeing an acupuncturist who told her everything in her body was reversed — the yin things were yang, he said. I did not understand very well what this meant, but with Madeleine I did not try to understand if I did not immediately grasp what she said. Now I would like to understand better, now I would ask what this meant.

He and I quarreled again. For two nights in a row, Madeleine had asked me for a potato and baked it, and this was all she had for supper. The third night I was cooking a steak and he had brought a bottle of wine to have with it, which was unusual. Madeleine asked me if she could eat with us. I thought I could not say no. She was generally spare in the way she lived and ate, she had very little money, and also seemed to prefer a way of life in which she needed and used very little. But now and then she would join me in a feast or another extravagance and partake with high spirits and wit, as though she were returning to an earlier way of life. This evening she ate a large piece of steak and drank several glasses of wine. I enjoyed her company, but he was angry that she was eating with us.

The next morning I became angry at him in turn, about something else, something he and Madeleine had done at dinner, and we quarreled. As for Madeleine, she complained to me that she had had trouble digesting the food, that so much meat and wine were not good for her. She spoke out angrily against all meat-eaters and went on for some time without appearing to expect an answer from me.

Only a few days later, he and I quarreled again. I had read aloud to him a story I had written in which he appeared and he was pleased, but then I took him out of it before I read it aloud to other people and he was angry. He thought I was ashamed of him. I denied it. As we quarreled, we became increasingly angry. I was angrier than he was, maybe realizing that what he said was true, in a certain sense, and why it was true, though I hadn’t recognized it before. I wished it were not true, and I did not like him to point it out to me.

He left the house. I went to bed calm and angry and read a book, and a few hours after, he returned. He admitted later that he knew that staying away would have no effect on me, since I was too angry to care whether or not he stayed away, so he returned. Months later I put him back in the story in the same place he had been before, because I was sorry for what had happened. But by then he did not care anymore.

At some point during these days, maybe because he felt things between us were coming apart a little, he said we should get married. But since he could be almost certain I would refuse, his proposal did not seem sincere. Because it was sudden and even a little desperate, it seemed to mean only that he was trying to capture me, to keep me.

I think I made fun of him for it. But after he left me, I was the one who said I would marry him, if he wanted me to, and when that had no effect, when he resisted me, I went further, I offered more. I realized later that it was perfectly safe to say anything then, since nothing was possible. He seemed either insulted or ashamed for my sake, and impatient with me, as though I had belittled what he had once felt, and my own feelings, too. Now that I was willing, or said I was willing, to give him everything I had not been willing to give him before, he didn’t want anything from me. Or all he wanted was for me to leave him alone, and I couldn’t do that.

* * *

I was walking along a path surrounded only by cliffs, rocks, and sand — there were no plants of any kind. A young man ran past me, then stopped and turned back, disoriented and anguished, and told me that his home kept changing, so much that he could not recognize it. I woke up a little and realized that this was a dream, and went on dreaming. He and I entered a wooden house together. It was evidently his home. Then, even as we stood in it, it became the set for a play, and it changed each time the act changed, though I don’t remember what went on in this play, if anything went on.