Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

When I find something like this, I don’t know what I may find next. Then I become annoyed with myself, as though someone else had made these careless notes and left them lying around for me to figure out without a clue as to what they are for or what they mean.

I am trying to sort out the different phone calls I made to him while I was away in the East for the second time, staying in an apartment borrowed from an old friend who was in the West. There was one call late at night, after the stranger left me. There was one during which I could hear the sound of typing in the background. There was one in which I learned he was seeing another woman, one of his friends, the one who had given him a birthday cake the night before I left, and the one, in fact, that he later married. And there was a phone call in which he assured me that this was not important, that she did not mean as much to him as I did, and it did not change anything. But I don’t know if these were all different phone calls.

I seem to have written two accounts of one of these phone calls and the days surrounding it. I have just rediscovered the earlier one, and it seems less accurate and more sentimental. For instance, I say that after he told me he was seeing another woman, I was in pain because I still held him in a little corner of my heart. Now the idea of my heart having a corner bothers me, and other things about the sentence bother me, too. I also said I remembered how happy it made me to hear him laugh and see him smile, which was certainly not true.

The earlier account includes things I later left out because although they had to do with my life at the time they had nothing to do with the story: how I attended a university lecture, and a dinner beforehand, with very pale university professors; how I did not understand their questions after the lecture; the lofty conference room overlooking the lights, far below, of a poor and dangerous part of the city; the wide hallways of the empty building; the bags of trash around every bend and crowding the elevator as we were leaving. How I had dreams about certain men and there was far more anger in the dreams than I ever felt when I was awake. How the apartment in which I was staying was in a part of the city where many old people lived, and the sidewalks were full of canes and walkers, the old people swaying among them. How I knew I was trying to find the answers to certain questions, answers that would probably come only with time, by trial and error.

I didn’t seem able to understand much, after all. I didn’t understand what my attachment to him meant, or what it meant to love and honor a man, or even what he had said on the phone. As I strained after answers, I was more confident about the correctness of certain kinds of thoughts than others. Those others seemed weak and tentative, or the muscles with which I was thinking them seemed weak — yet they were the very thoughts that should have been correct, that could have helped me if they had been correct. There would be a question, and next to it an answer, obviously wrong, and I couldn’t seem to find any other answer. The question of what it meant to love a man was one that would take a lot of time and thought to answer, but an easier one, which I felt I should have been able to answer, and couldn’t, was why it had embarrassed me to hear him play the drums.

Neither account includes a literary party I went to, where a writer said to me: “What anybody will buy, that’s what I am.”

I recently found the phone bill from that time, and it shows five phone calls to his number within twelve days. One conversation lasted thirty-seven minutes, and it may have been that night that they were making bread, though it may equally well have been an earlier night, when I spoke to him for only fourteen minutes.

* * *

I wrote a letter to him and watched it lying there on the desk before I sent it, and wondered what kind of communication it was if it was written but couldn’t be sent because of the lateness of the hour, or if it was written and could be sent but wasn’t sent. Would it be any kind of communication as long as he had not read it?

In the earlier account, I seem to be sure the letter I’m studying is the same one that was later returned to me by the post office, and in the later account I only guess that this may be so. I can’t decide why I was sure one day and less sure another.

The letter that never reached him was sent back to me unopened by the post office, though it was correctly addressed to the place where he was living at the time and was still living when I returned. Since it was sent back, I still have it and can read it now, and I have just done that again. I don’t know if my impression of it is the same or nearly the same as the one he would have had. It seems cheerful, uncomplaining, and very young — young because it is so open, so frank, without guile, wariness, innuendo, or insinuation. In the letter I tell him how I telephoned a man I had met at a New Year’s Eve party and invited him up to my apartment. I don’t know why I told him about this, since the encounter with this stranger had not worked out very well and certainly did not reflect well on me.

I had been out to dinner with an old friend who left early because he had to go home and walk his dog, he said. I was alone in my apartment, and restless. Although I didn’t recall this stranger very clearly, I telephoned him and invited him to come up. I had an idea that only later seemed odd to me. I thought I had learned to do something I hadn’t known how to do before, and it would always be enjoyable, never again dry, colorless, strained, hasty, or awkward, so that all I had to do was to invite a man I found attractive to come to me, and it would be enjoyable.

But when this man appeared, climbing the last steep flight of stairs, and looked up at me, as I looked down into the stairwell at him, his face was not what I had remembered. Inside the apartment, he talked about his religion, and he went on talking about his religion. He had changed distinctly between the first meeting and the second. He had been attractive and spirited in the midst of the party and now, some weeks later on the top floor of a narrow brownstone, was not so attractive, as though every part of his face had in the meantime shifted slightly, or thickened, at the same time that his mind had slowed down considerably and become fixed on one idea. I sat there and let the time pass and pass, because I thought that although it was too late to change anything, at least I could be as tired as possible and a little drunk when it happened.

In bed with me he continued to talk about his religion. Then, after he was finished, because I lay with my back turned to him and only grunted when he spoke to me, he must have seen that I wanted him to leave, and he did leave, at last, and after he was well out the door I got up and went into the living room in my bathrobe. I was trembling violently, in large quakes and shudders. I went to the phone.

It was three hours earlier there. He was with a friend, he said, and they were making bread. He asked me a question about the bread and I told him not to let it rise too long. I thought if he was making bread with this woman there must be something between them and it was probably all over for him and me, considering how badly things had been going before I left. I said some of this to him, and he answered with sudden irritation that there was nothing to worry about. His irritation convinced me he was telling the truth. I said I missed him. I didn’t tell him about the man who was then riding home on the subway, who had left a present of three books of his for me to find after he was gone, three books I looked at but did not read or keep or even give away. I considered taking them to the bookstore down the street, but instead threw them in the wastebasket. I had never done that before, to a book.