Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

* * *

After those five days, I gave up, or at least I stopped trying so hard to go after him, and a different kind of bleakness closed down around me. I was so angry I wanted to hurt someone. I told myself how careless he was, how vain, shallow, and vulgar he was, how nasty, unfeeling, irresponsible, and deceitful. I said he had no conscience, betrayed friends, insulted women, and abandoned lovers. I said he was so deeply selfish that even his good friends became irritations to him, and when they tried to help him, he saw this as just another irritation.

Now I passed in and out of several different states of mind every few minutes, first anger, then relief, then hope, then tenderness, then despair, then anger again, and I had to struggle to keep track of where I was.

My mind kept filling with the thought of him, and it was painful every time. I knew that part of the reason it had ended was my own dissatisfaction. While I was still in it, I had been restless. But out of it now, I was still attached to it. I had had to ruin it to get out of it, but once I was out of it I had to remain attached to it, as though what I needed was to be on the edge of it.

I had not understood how to love him. I had been lazy with him and did not do anything that was not easy to do. I had not been willing to give up anything for him. If I could not have everything I wanted, I still wanted it and did not stop trying to have it.

I felt more tenderness and concern for him now that he had left me, even though I knew that if he came back my feelings would weaken. Now I would have done anything to have him back, but only because I knew I could not have him back. Before, I was difficult, and sometimes harsh toward him. Now I was only easy, and soft, though he rarely felt my softness, since I was mainly alone with it in my room. Before, I would tell him what I found wrong with him, without sparing his feelings. Now it would have hurt me to do this, though maybe not as much as it had hurt him. Before, I liked to listen to myself talk and was less interested in what he said. Now, when it was too late and he did not particularly want to talk to me, I wanted to listen to him.

After thinking of these things, I became inspired to start all over again with him. Excited, I thought I could do it very differently this time, if only he would agree. But this resolution was just as empty as my hope that he would come back to me. It could not mean anything as long as I knew he did not want to share it with me.

In the first few days, I had been impatient, as though things were resisting me. Now I was angry, not only at him, but also at myself, at certain other people, and at things in my room. I was angry at my books, because they did not hold my interest enough to stop me from thinking about him — they were not alive now, they were not ideas but only paper. I was angry at my bed, and did not want to go to bed. The pillows and sheets were unfriendly, they looked off in another direction. I was angry at my clothes, because when I looked at them I saw my body, and I was angry at my body. But I was not angry at my typewriter, because if I went to use it, it worked with me and helped me not to think of him. I was not angry at my dictionaries. I was not angry at my piano. I practiced the piano very hard now, several hours a day, starting with scales and five-finger exercises and ending with two pieces which improved steadily.

There was a lot of hatred in me. It was a feeling of wanting to get rid of the thing that was bothering me. The hills that had been brown in September were now green. But now I hated this landscape. I needed to see things that were ugly and sad. Anything beautiful seemed to be a thing I could not belong to. I wanted the edges of everything to darken, turn brown, I wanted spots to appear on every surface, or a sort of thin film, so that it would be harder to see, the colors not as bright or distinct. I wanted the flowers to wilt just a little, I wanted rot to appear in the creases of the red and violet flowers. I wanted the fat, water-filled blades of the sea figs to lose their water, dry up into sharp, rattling spears, I wanted the smell to go out of the eucalyptus trees at the bottom of the hill, and the smell to go out of the ocean, too. I wanted the waves to become feeble, the sound of them to be muffled.

I hated every place I had been with him, and by then that was almost every place I went. If I saw a woman ten years younger than I was, I hated her. I hated every young woman I did not know. And there were a great many young women walking through the streets of the town where I lived, though most of them were tall, with fluffy blond hair and sweet smiles, while she was short, dark-haired, and rather sour, from what I had seen.

I did not want to say his name anymore. It brought him too much into the room. I let Madeleine say his name, and I answered with he.

* * *

At times, during the weeks that followed, the days seemed like an endless succession of difficult mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights. It was often hard to leave my bed in the morning. I lay there and thought I heard footsteps in the dirt outside my window, but it was my own pulse, beating like sand in my ears. I was afraid of what was ahead. For as long as an hour, with my eyes closed, I dreamed, then began to worry, then began to plan. I often perceived things most clearly then, though what I perceived usually appeared in its worst possible guise. When I had planned enough to stop worrying so much, I would try to open my eyes. If I could keep them open, I would look around the room. I would think about him, and try to think about something else. But I could not think about anything else, and it seemed as though my body itself were preventing me, as though my flesh were steeped in some essence of him, because this essence would rise into my brain and fill every cell, and it was so strong that my attention would be drawn back to the thought of him, in spite of myself. Then at last I would get up. I would work in my nightgown and bathrobe for another few hours, and then finally dress, but in soft, loose clothing that was not unlike pajamas.

I could usually work till the morning was over. But the afternoon would be long and slow, so slow it just stopped and died where it stood. I liked to have daylight outside, and darkness hours away ahead of me and behind me. But I did not often want to go out into that light, and I kept the curtains closed. I liked to see the light at the cracks of the curtains, I liked to know it was out there. Then, when evening came and there was darkness outside, I kept the lights burning inside.

I did what I could to distract myself. I kept moving, cleaning something in the house, or walking outside, or I talked to friends and listened to them talk, or I tried to read a book that kept my mind busy, or do a kind of work at my table that did not allow my mind to wander. Sometimes the table in front of me seemed to be the only level place, and everything else fell away from it or rose steeply from it.

A good kind of work to do was translation, and I had a short novel I was supposed to be translating. So I sat at the card table on a metal chair and worked. I usually translated in the morning, but I also went back to it at other times, even late in the evening. It was a kind of work I could almost always do, in fact I worked better when I was unhappy, because when I was happy or excited, my mind would wander almost immediately. The more unhappy I was, the harder I concentrated on those foreign words there on the page in a strange construction, a problem to solve, just hard enough to keep me busy, and if I could solve the problem, my mind was captivated, though if the problem was very difficult and I couldn’t solve it, as sometimes happened, my mind would knock up against it over and over, until at last it just floated free and drifted away.