Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

In the morning, Madeleine called a friend of hers, a mechanic who did independent work, and he came over to look at my car, first outside the house in the rain and then, after he got it started, down in the garage. The phone rang while I was watching the mechanic out the window.

* * *

At this point in the story there is another difficult memory. He had called to say we were invited to the house of a man and woman who did not know we were not still together. I think I should include the visit just because it took place, but it irritates me. The four of us sat in a small living room and I kept looking across the carpet at him and feeling sick, pinching myself on the neck so that I wouldn’t faint, looking away from him out the plate-glass window or at the man and woman who had invited us here. The man was the one who had gone out on a boat with us to watch whales and ignored me so completely. After an hour or so, we left and he drove me home.

I don’t know why that visit bothers me so much. What I was looking at, through the picture window of their rented apartment, was a square patch of lawn and beyond it the tall grasses or reeds that bordered a narrow stream. This was the same stream, though at a different point in its course, that I had seen from the other side, and much farther away, when he and I walked out on the coast road to buy beer at the small grocery many months before.

Was it that I didn’t know these two people very well and didn’t like them very much? Or that their rented, furnished apartment was so small and so ugly, with its brown furniture, brown walls, and metallic, yellowish drapes? Or that he and I had to pretend, in this place and with these people, that nothing had changed? The man and the woman were coming to the end of their stay here, and this was part of their preparation to leave — one last, awkward social visit with us and then a few days later they would call him and ask him if he could drive them to the airport.

* * *

After he told me so abruptly that it was over, I lost interest in everything else. What he was doing to me now, the fact that he was not with me but with someone else, had become a substance that seeped through my brain, that ebbed, rose again, was present and then gone, like a smell or taste. It would fade away for a while, and I would be aware that it was not in me. Then suddenly, for no reason, it would rise again and its bitterness would spread and penetrate everywhere.

I couldn’t help thinking he might still come back to me because he had loved me so much before, and because I had never known him any other way but loving me. For the first few days, I did not give up trying to persuade him to talk to me. I did not care that he was with another woman. I used the telephone. He had to answer it, since it might be someone else. Then he had to talk to me at least briefly, to be polite.

I couldn’t argue with him if he said he didn’t want to go on with it, but I also couldn’t help trying to make him talk to me about it. He wouldn’t talk to me in any way that satisfied me. I thought he should tell me he had once loved me deeply, and that he was still the same person, but that his feelings had changed for certain reasons that he could explain. He should then explain what his feelings had been and why they had changed. He should also admit that he had left me without warning, and that when he had told me on the telephone, long distance, that things were still all right, he was lying.

If I couldn’t be with him and he wouldn’t talk to me, I at least wanted to know where he was. Sometimes I found him, though more often I did not. Even if I did not, I still preferred looking for him to sitting at home.

One evening, I drove several towns north to have dinner with Mitchell. I could hardly talk to him and only felt sick, again, at the sight of the ham rolled up into little bundles and the butter on the table. Mitchell always took great care over his meals, so there must have been good bread, maybe special pickles and special mustard. He was concentrating on his plan for the meal and on serving it, while I was trying to stay in control of what I was feeling. At last he mentioned something too difficult for me to hear just then and I could not go on eating.

Soon after dinner I left and drove down the coast road toward home. It was raining hard, but because the road passed through the town where he lived, within a block of his apartment, I could not drive on through it but had to turn and drive a block toward the ocean, through a small square with a fountain. I turned right again, out of the square, and stopped the car by the curb where I could look over a rooftop to his balcony and his lighted windows. There were no curtains over the windows, but I couldn’t see anything inside the apartment very clearly because it was far away and high up, and because of the heavy rain.

I rolled down my window. I saw a form moving back and forth across his kitchen window. It seemed to be moving more quickly than he would move, and the hair on its head was darker than his hair. I decided to go up to the balcony and see exactly who it was. I started the car again, and drove into the parking lot behind his building. The rain was drumming on the concrete balcony, covering the sound of my footsteps as I climbed softly up the stairs. Below me, as I walked along the balcony, was the roof of the cactus nursery, and around it, in the nursery yard, the indistinct shapes of the massed cactus plants. I was wearing a dark slicker and boots. It was dark outside, where I was, and light inside, in his rooms.

I looked in quickly through a window and saw a woman with short brown hair lying on his bed reading. Her legs were crossed at the ankles. From this distance, across the wide room, and through the wet window, her face looked smug and unpleasant. I looked to the right and saw him moving around silently in his little kitchen. I turned away to look again at the woman on his bed, and he appeared suddenly in the doorway to the room, unexpectedly close to me, though on the other side of the glass, and he was speaking to her, though I could not hear what he said but could only see his mouth moving. I stepped back from the window.

I left the balcony, went down to the car, and drove away. My cheeks were hot. I turned the radio on. I realized later that the rain had made it easier for me to do what I did, because it separated me not only from what I saw outside the car but even from myself, and the sound of the rain separated me from what I might have thought.

As soon as I took my slicker and boots off, at home, I went to work putting the hooks back in the curtains I had washed earlier and began hanging them up on their iron rods. I was moving fast in order to avoid what I might start thinking. Then, knowing for once just where he was, I left the pile of curtains and called him. He was not unfriendly, and he agreed to come see me the next day. I finished hanging the curtains and got undressed for bed, but then, though it was late, sat down to work at my table.

My eyes were wide open as though stuck. I did not feel tired. I had gone out to dinner, and come home in the rain, and the brandy I had had with Mitchell did not make me too sleepy to go on working at my table with my brain moving fast. I was not hungry, though I could feel that my stomach was empty. I had looked at what I might eat. I couldn’t swallow any of it.

I worked hard and the work seemed to go well. As I worked, I seemed to be waiting for something, though I did not know what. Then I realized I was waiting until I could be sure he and she had stopped making love and had gone to sleep. Once they were asleep I could go to sleep myself.

The next morning I sat at my table translating again. He had said he would come at a certain hour of the morning and he did not come, and he did not call. I kept looking up from my work, out the window. Each time I looked up I saw the same things: the fence across the street, the top of the house set back behind it, and a few trees. Now and then something came between me and what I saw, and then I watched it, whatever it was, until it was gone.