Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

A year later, after I met Vincent, I left the city often to visit him. Again, I thought that away from the city I would have the peace and quiet I needed to work on my novel. I even thought the bus would be a good place to work. On the way out of the city, in the early evening, the other passengers were often tired and cross, and when they were cross they were usually quiet. There would be conflicts at the beginning of the ride, when everyone was getting settled, a woman might put her wet umbrella on top of a man’s luggage, but then they would quiet down. I would stuff kleenex in my ears and tie a kerchief around my head so that I could concentrate better. If I looked down at my page I did not have to think about anything but the work I was doing. If I looked up I could stop thinking about my work and watch the other passengers. But although I wrote a few short things on the bus, it was not a good place to write anything long.

* * *

When I wrote down what happened during the fifth quarrel he and I had, I left out what he said when I was watching him sleep. I said it was a gentle and loving thing, but I did not say what his actual words were. He said, “You’re so beautiful.” But now I don’t think it was gentle and loving, after all. I think it was a cry of frustration. He knew he was more helpless than he wanted to be, that if he hadn’t found me so beautiful he could have worked his way free of me, as he knew he should. In the end, he did get free of me, but it took longer, and I had to hurt him more often than if he had not been tied to me by what he saw as my beauty.

I also see, when I look at my notebook again, that I lost track of a few days, collapsing them into one. I say he came back to me and it was later the same night that I watched him while he slept, his reddish hair under the lamplight, and then went out to the kitchen and smoked a cigarette while I heated my milk. In fact, it was several nights later, and other things happened in the meantime.

After he came back, I asked him where he had been during the two days and one night that he had been away, and he told me. He told me he had gone to see Kitty in the afternoon and had made love to her to spite me. He went home in the evening, listened to the phone ring with my calls, and then went out again to a nightclub down on the beach, where he drank by himself. He spent all the next day with his friend the old man.

But even though I now knew where he had been, this did not change what I had imagined while he was gone, so that the two versions continued to exist side by side, and in fact, the version I had imagined was the stronger of the two, because it had developed in me so slowly and I had lived with it so much longer.

But this was not the end of it either, because he couldn’t simply do what he had done and then forget it as though it had never happened. Kitty would remind him, and he would have to continue or end something with her.

Though we woke up together the next morning, we were apart all day, and when I called him at home that night, he was in bed and did not want to see me.

He said he would come to lunch the next day, and I waited for him, but he was three hours late. As I waited for him I knew my nervousness would be out of all proportion to his explanation or apology, which would be very brief, as his apologies and his explanations always were when he was at fault in any way, brief and a little angry, as though he were angry at me first for putting him in a position to disappoint me and then for being disappointed in him.

We ate lunch, and then he left to go see Kitty again, and while he was with Kitty I walked down into the town with Madeleine. He returned late in the evening.

The next day he was cool to me, and told me he did not know whether to stay with me or go back to Kitty. It seemed to me it was all over between us. He left at three in the afternoon, then returned at four and said he wanted to stay with me. In fact, he wanted to move in with me, as though to make everything clearer. He thought he could move into the spare room. He said he would talk to Madeleine about it. I did nothing, but simply let him talk to Madeleine, as I let Madeleine do what she wanted in response to him. She did not want him living there and would not consider it. I had guessed that she would not want it, but I did not know whether I was relieved or not.

Although I did not really think she would agree to have him live there, I convinced myself briefly that she would want the money he could give toward the rent because she often had such trouble paying her share. But I was misjudging her yet again. Although she had so little money, money was never the most important consideration for her, and usually not a consideration at all. In fact, I think she was insulted that we were offering money in exchange for this disruption of her life.

The three of us went off in the car after talking about this, to a birthday party. As we drove, there was silence in the car. Madeleine sat in the back seat feeling insulted by us, while we sat in front feeling angry at her that she refused us what we asked from her, and wondering what we would do next about the two of us, although I don’t think my anger was very sincere. I had the luxury of being angry at her while at the same time I was not entirely unhappy that she had made this decision for me.

The next evening, despite the fact that he had been on the point of leaving me and had not left me, I went out to dinner with another man. I had already made that plan and I did not change it. He was not happy about it. While I was out, he stayed alone in my room reading and then took a walk, and when I returned he said very little to me and kept turning away from me, and because he kept turning away from me, I was frightened and couldn’t sleep after he fell asleep. It was then that I stared at him under the lamplight for a while before getting up to smoke and read in the kitchen, watching a mouse that came out of the stove to walk over the burners hunting for food. It was when I went back to bed that he said, as though in his sleep, “You’re so beautiful.”

In the morning, after he said what he said to me in his sleep, he sat on the same stool where I had sat the night before and held the young cat in his lap, rubbing the crown of her head. I stood behind him and held him around the shoulders. I put my cheek down against his soft hair. Now that he was with me again, after frightening me, I wanted to do something for him, to give him something, though I did not know what. But that impulse grew weaker after a few days and then passed.

The entire quarrel, starting with his leaving the house so angrily and ending with my staring at his white shoulder late at night, had lasted a week.

I think I did not at first write down the actual words he spoke because I was afraid this would seem vain, even though the novel claims to be fiction and not a story about me, and even though it was only his opinion, not necessarily the truth. In fact, I had to believe he saw something I could not see, because when I looked in the mirror or at a photograph, the face I saw, tense and motionless, or frozen in a strange position, only rarely seemed even pretty to me, and more often either plain or unpleasant, with features that floated or spun when I was tired, one cheek spotted with four dark moles in a pattern like a constellation, hair flat, of a dull brown, on a large squarish head, neck so thin as to seem scrawny, eyes startled or apprehensive, of a blue so pale as to be almost white staring out from behind the lenses of my glasses, though if I took my glasses off, as I occasionally did, I tended to frighten people, as I was told quite frankly by at least one friend.

What I also left out of this version was that when Madeleine and I were studying Italian together on the café terrace and then gave it up because we were so distracted, what finally stopped us was that a small green dropping landed on a page of the Italian grammar book. It had come from a sparrow in the tree above us. I did not put this in my account of that day because it did not fit in with the mood of what I was writing.