Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

* * *

Not much time has gone by since I last worked, but when I sat down at my desk I was immediately confused by my new system. I have four boxes with pieces of paper in them. They are labeled MATERIAL TO BE USED, MATERIAL NOT YET USED, MATERIAL USED OR NOT TO BE USED and MATERIAL. Most of what is in the last, “Material,” has nothing to do with this novel. “Material Used or Not to Be Used” means what it says: material I have already used or don’t intend to use. What puzzled me today was the fact that there didn’t seem to be any difference between “Material Not Yet Used” and “Material to Be Used.” Then I remembered that the “Material to Be Used” was in finished form, ready to be incorporated, and the “Material Not Yet Used” was in rougher form. It was the word “ready” that would have clarified things, if I hadn’t been afraid to write it on the box.

I’ve just spoken to another friend who is about to go away to work on his novel. He is going to a hotel in Mexico. A surprising number of friends are writing novels, I realize, now that I stop to count them. One woman leaves her apartment every morning to write in a local coffee shop. She says she can write for only about two hours at a time, but if she moves on to another coffee shop she can extend the morning’s work a little. A man I know writes in an old shed behind his house while his children are at school. Another goes away to an artists’ colony to write, then returns home for a while to work as a carpenter so that he can earn enough money to go back to the colony. Another writes at night while his roommate is out driving a taxi. He has written 700 pages so far, and he says he is trying to make the novel funny, but that it is hard to be funny for so many pages.

* * *

I don’t know exactly why things were going wrong just when they were, but a day came that later seemed to be the beginning of everything going so wrong that we couldn’t get it right again. He had told me on the phone that he was at home working. Madeleine and I went out for a walk through town and stopped in at an art gallery. There he was, among the few people gazing soberly at the paintings, his army bag hanging from his shoulder. He seemed unpleasantly surprised to see us. He said he would come by later that night. I went out for the evening with two friends, leaving him a note, but when I returned he wasn’t there and hadn’t come.

I called him, letting the telephone ring fifteen times. I hung up and then drove over to his apartment. His car was there outside the building but his lights were off, and I was sure he was not alone. I went up to his apartment and knocked at the door. He opened it for me in the dark and went back to bed. He lay completely still and did not respond when I got into the bed and tried to talk to him. I got out of the bed. I said I was leaving, and he said nothing, unless it was “Goodbye” or “Whatever you like.”

At home I lay down on my bed and ate a slice of bread and cheese. I got up and brought another slice of bread and cheese back to bed, and then another. While I ate, I read a book of poems by a friend, a book that had come recently in the mail, so that while I was filling my mouth with food, I was also filling my eyes with the printed pages and filling my ears with the sound of my friend’s voice, and all this filling, all this feeding into different channels, did at last change my condition, whether it really filled something or simply calmed something.

* * *

Three nights later, I went to his room again, this time with him. But our companionship was not very strong now. It did not go much beyond the appearance of companionship. There was this appearance, and there was also a certain familiarity, though even the most complete familiarity would not have removed all the awkwardness between us. On the way there, we stopped to buy a pack of playing cards, a few bottles of beer, and a bag of corn chips. I can see now, and I sensed then, though I tried to ignore it, that I was bored, and that without the cards, the beer, and the chips I would not have known what to do with him, that these things were a distraction from the emptiness that would have been there in the room between us, they were a distraction I had to have in order to want to stay there with him at all and not prefer to be at home alone eating and reading and more fully engrossed in that than I could be in him.

I was probably there in the room with him then only because there had been something different earlier. If he was still there, with me, the same person, and I was still there, and there had once been something between us, certainly something ecstatic from time to time, it was hard to believe that that ecstasy was not still within our reach. But what we made together, now, was the form of a thing not alive anymore — a thing left behind that showed what the living thing had been like.

Now the very thought of those things we bought and took to his apartment fills me with a queasiness that tastes of tepid beer and stale chips and slides around like a playing card with warm grease on it. How miserable that attempt was. What weakness of character it showed, that I could not simply admit there was nothing I very much wanted to do with him, nothing left to do, that the only thing left was to say goodbye with all the friendliness I really felt for him. But instead I went to a store with him, one of those large, brightly lit stores, so vast they are disheartening, and bought with him things other people bought to have a good time together, as though by doing that we would have a good time, whereas I had no illusion that I would enjoy myself, or maybe I did think I could achieve something that would feel, at least for a little while, like a good time simply by going through the motions of it, that if I just carried on like that, my mood would suddenly change, and what had not been enjoyable would become enjoyable.

Now I would like to be in that room again, on that night. I am curious to see what he would say and what I would answer, because I have forgotten so much of the way he talked and the things he might think of saying to me. Now I would bring so much interest to the meeting with him that it would be full of a kind of life it did not have then.

There was no table where we could play cards, so we sat on the carpet by his bed. We drank the beer, ate the chips, and played gin rummy. The game was not interesting. I might have known, if I had been willing to think about it, that I could not hope for anything from the game itself, because if there was boredom between us, there would be no tension in the game either.

We played on and on, as though trying to force some interest from it. We drank more beer than we wanted, or at least it was more than I wanted, and were not affected by it either. The alcohol seemed to have no more power to intoxicate me than the game had power to interest me, and the situation was not changed by it, as I had hoped it would be, knowing that alcohol could usually change a situation at least a little. We ate the chips and maybe other things as well before the chips, or maybe we had had something odd or excessive earlier, for dinner, because when we finally went to bed, I began to feel sick, and I lay awake feeling sick, and then my sickness became so bad that I kept going into the bathroom and sitting on the floor next to the toilet, my arms on the toilet seat and my head on my arms, and then on the toilet, and then down on the floor again next to the toilet, for most of the night. He woke up slightly, once, but did not seem to notice that I was going back and forth so often or was awake for so much of the night.

The next day was his birthday. We went to a movie. After the movie, we went home to my house, ate thick sweet cake and ice cream, and sat on the foot of my bed while across the room, so large and empty that the bed at one end, and the piano, the card table, and the ugly metal chairs at the other seemed small on the expanse of dark tile floor, Madeleine, sitting on one of the hard chairs, read aloud to us in the light from one of the bare bulbs attached to the white plaster wall long, complex horoscopes from a magazine. Again I was uneasy, and sensed that without the food and Madeleine’s company, there would have been emptiness between him and me, and boredom, that the presence of Madeleine, in fact, who was so separate from us, drew us together a little, at the same time that what she was reading was so entertaining, and beyond that, her own reactions to it were so sharp. I ate too much, and I laughed too much. But the food held most of my interest and attention as long as it lasted and I was restless as soon as it was gone.