Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

He had fallen asleep with his back to me, his broad white shoulder outside the sheet. I lay next to him, raised on one elbow, and looked at all of him that I could see, every detail, and especially his head, especially his pale forehead, the side of it that I could see, since it was turned away from me, and especially his hair, which was close to the light, right under the lamp. I looked at it, then I touched it, and he was not disturbed. His hair was straight and not long, thin over his forehead and thicker in back, a light reddish-brown with blond streaks in it. I looked hard at the color of it and touched it again. Although I knew it did not matter what color his hair was, that night everything about him seemed important to me. I thought I loved that hair and the color of it, and it seemed to me that everything about him had to be the way it was, and could not have been any other way.

Then, in his sleep, he murmured something. I leaned over and asked him what he had said, though I thought he would only go on sleeping. But he said the same thing again, a purely gentle and loving thing.

I got up, finally, at two in the morning and made some warm milk for myself, and sat smoking a cigarette in the kitchen. I thought about what I had just been thinking about his hair, that he was with me now, even more so because he was asleep and I was awake, but if he left me again, or if I left him, and we stayed apart, he would still have hair of a light reddish-brown color with a few blond streaks in it, and I would know exactly, closely, the particular way his hair looked, and would still have that, so that a part of him would still belong to me and there would be nothing he could do about it.

The fact that he came back to me after leaving me, that time, may have made me think that no matter what I said, no matter what I did, and no matter how long he stayed away from me, he would always come back to me, and that I did not have to love him very deeply, or considerately, for him to go on loving me.

* * *

The noise of traffic is becoming heavy, a constant din above the sound of the rain, the tires hissing on the wet road surface, and this tells me that four o’clock has come and maybe even gone and I will have to stop work soon.

The cars are right under my window. The road is one of the main routes for traffic going north and south along this side of the river. Many heavy trucks go by, shaking the ground. The heaviest even shake me up here in my chair. Now and then whole houses go by.

Vincent and I bought this place despite the road, because we liked the back yard so much, with its grapevines and raspberry patches, pear trees and lilacs, shagbark hickories and other trees and flowering shrubs. Then we began trying to block out the noise of the traffic. I would look down from my window and see Vincent standing in the front yard and I knew he was trying to figure out where the worst of the noise came in. I would join him and we would talk about the noise. We talked about the noise a great deal, how it was reflected off hard surfaces and how it was best absorbed. Vincent built a fence inside the hedge along the front of the property. Then we planted a line of arborvitae inside the fence. Some of the noise seemed to be coming in under the fence, so we moved dirt from other parts of the yard to pile up against the base of the fence. Then Vincent extended the fence around the sides of the property, and we planted some hemlocks inside the line of arborvitae. A neighbor offered us a young pine from his yard and though it is only a foot high we have put it in among the hemlocks. Now we are thinking that we can further shield the back yard if we build a room off the side of the house at an angle.

At times I am not just nervous about this work but frightened, and think I am going through a crisis, one that could be called existential. Then I realize the problem is much simpler — I have had no breakfast and too much coffee, and my nerves are raw, so tender that I am almost unbearably disturbed to look out the window and see a truck carrying one car on its back and pulling another behind it.

But at other times I am really confused and uncomfortable. For instance, I am trying to separate out a few pages to add to the novel and I want to put them together in one box, but I’m not sure how to label the box. I would like to write on it MATERIAL READY TO BE USED, but if I do that it may bring me bad luck, because the material may not really be “ready.” I thought of adding parentheses and writing MATERIAL (READY) TO BE USED, but the word “ready” was still too strong despite the parentheses. I thought of throwing in a question mark so that it read MATERIAL (READY?) TO BE USED but the question mark immediately introduced more doubt than I could stand. The best possibility may be MATERIAL — TO BE USED, which does not go so far as to say that it is ready but only that in some form it will be used, though it does not have to be used, even if it is good enough to use.

Sometimes I think that if only I could go away for a while my mind would be clearer and I could work better. I spoke to a friend the other night who said he had gone away for two weeks to a colony in the mountains to work on his novel and had just come back. He wrote eighty pages in those two weeks. I have never written eighty pages in two weeks. He said that he worked all day long and after dinner, too. He said other people there would leave their rooms and go for walks, even two or three times a day. He said it was pretty quiet. A man down the hall from him played exercise tapes and did exercises, but this did not really bother him. He said the food was not very good. It was plain American food. At first it seemed good enough, but after a while it became hard to eat. For instance, they served ham in very thick pieces, almost an inch thick, and after a few bites he would feel sick. He learned to eat very little at dinner and more at the other meals, which were better. I asked him many questions about this place because I was thinking I should try to go away somewhere to work on my novel, even though I went away once and it didn’t make any difference.

I was living alone in the city then. I was given a grant and I used part of the money to pay the overdraft on my bank account. I used more to rent a cottage for the summer. After stocking the cottage with food and repairing my car, I had almost nothing left of the grant, though I had received the money only two weeks before.

The cottage was one of a cluster of small summer bungalows built about sixty years earlier by a German woman named Mary and her husband. The doorways of the cottage were odd sizes, the ceilings and walls bulged, nail heads showed everywhere, the linoleum on the floors bent up at the edges, and mushrooms grew out of the bathroom floor next to the shower stall with its platform of wooden slats. Mary’s husband had died and after a few years she had sold the property to one of the summer tenants, another woman named Mary, whose husband then died also. A bench was erected in his memory halfway down the path to the lake. It was unveiled just before I rented my cottage.

It was very peaceful there. Most of the other tenants were about thirty years older than I was, which made me feel young and energetic. When I went down to the weedy lake to swim in the middle of the day, I always seemed to meet old women I hadn’t met before walking firmly but slowly up and down the steep path, or resting on the bench halfway down, or unfolding deck chairs on the warm, warped boards of the dock with its hovering wasps. Almost everyone I met seemed to be named Ruth, or if not Ruth, then Mary. Some were the sisters of other women named Ruth or Mary, or the sisters-in-law. Some had their husbands with them. I worked well there in my cottage, but did not do as much as I had thought I would.