Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

What did boredom mean then? That nothing more would happen with him. It wasn’t that he was boring, it was that I no longer had any expectations for this companionship with him. There had been expectations, and they had died.

And why did that boredom make me so uncomfortable? Because of the emptiness of it, the empty spaces opening up between him and me, around us. I was imprisoned with this person and this feeling. Emptiness, but also disappointment: what had once been so complete was now so incomplete.

* * *

The evening before I left on my last trip contains another memory that is difficult, not so much because of my bad feelings about him, I think, as because of a combination of other things: the awkward spaces and ugly concrete walls of the barnlike building where the reception was held, the sickening sweetness of the cheap white wine, the rain afterward, the bare lawn outside, with no plantings on it at all, and the word “reception,” which I don’t like.

I was moving from one person to another, with a glass of that sweet wine in my hand, looking through the crowd from time to time, when suddenly I saw him standing there with a few of his young friends. I did not expect to see him, though now I can’t think why I wouldn’t have talked to him about the reception. This is the sort of question that bothers me the most, because I will never have an answer for it — what our relations were at that point, if I was planning to do something without him and without even mentioning it to him. Maybe that was not unusual for us, but it seems especially strange to me in this case, since I was leaving the next morning.

I can’t remember which friends he was with, or if I even noticed who they were, since I didn’t care, and I can’t remember if I went over to him as soon as I saw him or, remaining a few yards away, caught his attention and waved to him and continued to talk to other people, or didn’t try to catch his attention but simply watched him and kept track of where he was in the room. The last seems the most likely to me, maybe because this is what I have believed all these years. But it was also something I would be likely to do, given the reaction I had when I saw him, a reaction I do remember unmistakably. It was a feeling of absolute displeasure to see him there, as though he were a hostile element in that place, a thing that intruded where it didn’t belong, so that as I watched him among the moving figures, over the shoulders of the other people in the crowded place, those same features of his that had held such a positive attraction for me not long before, and that would exert such a fascinating force again not long after, were just then repugnant to me, blunt and deadly, primitive and vicious, without intelligence, without humanity, the color of clay.

Rain was coming down hard and a few people gathered by the open door, preparing to run to their cars. Although I don’t know how I came to stand by the door with him, I did go with him to my car, the two of us running across the sodden lawn under my umbrella or my raincoat, and I drove him the short distance to his own car. I certainly remember the spongy grass under my feet better than I remember what I said to him, or what he said to me. I was on my way out to dinner, and he was going off to some place where his friends were giving him a birthday party. He said he would come to my house late in the evening.

By the time he came, I had been at work several hours on a job I had to do before I left in the morning, and although it was already late by then, I was not finished. He went to bed at the other end of the room and fell asleep. I worked on, impatient to be done with what had turned out to be much more tedious than I had thought it would be. I was checking a friend’s translation, and I was doing it as a favor. The friend never really thanked me later, or not in any way proportionate to the amount of work I had done or the awkward moment when I had had to do it, though of course it wouldn’t be fair to expect her to know how awkward that moment was, especially since even I did not know it was the last night I would spend with him.

I finished and went to bed. He woke up, and then we talked to each other for close to an hour, unusually companionable and relaxed, as we might have been all along, as though we were taking our last chance for it.

The next morning we got into his car and he drove me to the airport. I did not see him again until I came back more than four weeks later, when he met me at the same airport and we got back into the same car. He waited until we were on our way up the highway to begin telling me that everything had changed. The distance in him was enough to let me know something had happened, though he had said nothing about it in the corridors of the airport or by the revolving tables of luggage. The distance was there because he had already begun a different way of being with me, whereas I was still in the old way of being with him.

* * *

I lost most of another day of work yesterday, because Vincent and I took his father to the county fair. We put a cap on him because it was a blistering hot day, and as we wheeled him around he peered out at everything attentively from under his visor. We took him to see the sheds of cattle, sheep, rabbits, and poultry, and the rubber tires of his chair rolled pleasantly over the fresh sawdust. A goose put its beak to the wire grille of its cage and honked at him and he kissed his hand back to the goose. I don’t know what he was thinking.

I suppose we were trying to entertain him with a spectacle more unusual than his television shows and what he sees from the back porch, where he sits so much of the time — the trees moving in the wind, the branches bobbing suddenly and rustling these days as the squirrels run back and forth, the green hickory nuts thumping down onto the lawn. It is true that as we left the animals and moved toward the exhibition halls and racetrack and Ferris wheel the intense heat, the brilliant sun, the constant motion of the crowd, the sweet smells of cotton candy and fudge washing up against him did seem to awaken a response: little spots of color appeared on his cheeks, his eyes brightened, and his gaze from under the visor was as intent, almost angry, as the gaze of one of those roosters in the poultry shed. Among the crowd were other speechless men and women like him, old and middle-aged, even young, being wheeled about or guided by the elbow or hand, making a visible effort to absorb what was around them, and they, too, seemed to have been brought out in order to be shocked into some kind of accelerated motion by the assault of this rowdy scene. So there we were, just another small group, another parcel of the seething mass, two middle-aged, our shirts damp with sweat, pushing a third, who was old, tiny, with an egg-like head under his cap, his body barely perceptible in his loose clothes.

Today he is cranky and a little sunburned on his freckled forearms and the backs of his bony hands. The nurse remarked, after being with him only a few minutes, that he was acting strange. I assured her he was only tired.

* * *

I had a dream last night in which I was looking for a good photograph of him and at last found one. The strange thing is that this photograph was a sharper and more complete picture than any waking memory I had of his face, and when I woke up I could still see him clearly, though by now the image has faded. So somewhere in my brain there must be a clear memory of his face that is hidden most of the time and was uncovered once, like a photograph, in the dream.

I am working more systematically now, and I feel more in control. But then I find things that disconcert me because I have no memory of them at all, such as an early plan for the novel which I jotted down in pencil in a spot where I wasn’t likely to find it again except by accident. It may not be a plan for the whole novel, though, since I see that large parts of the story are missing.