Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

* * *

I called an Englishman named Tim, and his voice was soft and high in my ear. I asked him if he wanted to have lunch with me. But when I hung up the phone, I did not feel encouraged. Now, I thought, I was left behind, he had left me behind, in a world that contained only gentle, delicate Englishmen.

I had planned that we should go to the corner café down the hill from my house and that we should sit at an outside table by the coast road. I had planned that I should sit facing the road where I could watch the traffic. Everything was arranged as I had planned it. Tim was an intelligent man, and he should have been good company, but nothing really interested me about this lunch except the cars that might go by on the road.

I sat over lunch for a long time, watching the traffic at the same time that I talked to Tim. Then at last, just as the light turned red, better than I could have planned it, his car came level with us, and he stopped, looked over at me, and kept his face turned toward me almost as long as the light was red. I could see this much out of the corner of my eye. I might have felt uncomfortable making such use of a decent man like Tim for my own purposes, to arrange to be seen eating lunch with another man, but feeling uncomfortable would not be enough to stop me.

Later that afternoon, Madeleine had to persuade me not to go up to see him at work. I should not make a scene where he worked, she said. She told me I was older than he was and should be able to handle this better. She sat with me and talked to me. Although I could have given myself the same reasons she gave me, I could not have stopped myself. If she had gone out just then, I would have called him. She offered to go to the movies with me again, or play cards. Then she cooked dinner. She said, “At least we’ve eaten dinner. That’s something.”

* * *

Madeleine kept telling me not to go to the gas station when he wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. She thought I should have more pride. She would have had more pride. But unless she was actually there to stop me, I would go. Sometimes I had excuses. I knew they were transparent, but they still served a purpose.

For instance, I invited him to parties at least three times. I knew these were parties he would want to go to and that probably no one else would invite him. He did not go to any of them, though each time he hesitated before refusing. The first time he waited a few minutes, the second time half a day, and the third time a week.

The second time, I found him playing basketball in the parking lot above the beach near his apartment. Seagulls wheeled around overhead, crying above the pines. I sat in my car watching him. My car filled with smoke from the cigarettes I kept lighting. I was watching him over the roofs of several cars and he was playing at the far end of the court, but I was close enough to study him carefully — his short, scanty trace of reddish beard, his reddish hair, straight on top with a little curl at the back of his neck, his white skin, his flushed face, his skin turning pink in the sun in a V shape down his chest, the exuberance of his body, how quickly he moved, how he sprang up suddenly, turned suddenly, always braced, always balanced. He was playing very well.

I was content, because for once I had him there in front of me, I knew where he was and what he was doing, and I could watch him as long as I liked, and from a safe distance: he couldn’t do anything to hurt me and I didn’t have to worry about how I looked or what I did or said.

When he and I were still together I either knew where he was or did not mind not knowing, because we would not be separated long, and did not want to be separated. Now that he was away from me almost all the time, I knew he was away by choice and might not reappear unless I fought to get him where I could see him and keep him there. Worse, he might disappear completely, I might never be able to find him again.

A part of me had grown into him at the same time that a part of him had grown into me. That part of me was still in him now. I looked at him and saw not only him but myself as well, and saw that that part of myself was lost. Not only that, but I saw that I myself in his eyes, as he regarded me, as he loved me, was lost, too. I did not know what to do with the part of him that had grown into me. There were two wounds — the wound of him being still inside me and the wound of the part of myself in him torn out of me.

For an hour or so I watched and smoked. Was I also bored? Did I, just for a moment anyway, see him as nothing more than a boy in the distance, a college boy playing basketball? Or did it give me pleasure to reduce him to that, since it appeared to make him harmless? Or is it only now that I think I should have been bored, and my need was so strong just to know where he was that to satisfy it was enough and there was no question of being bored?

Then he walked away from the court toward my car, which I had parked in a spot he would have to pass on his way back to his apartment. He came close enough so that I could lean over to the open passenger window and call out to him. He looked around, surprised, at my second call, came over, laughed to see me there, and got into the car beside me. The heat from his body gradually covered the windows with mist. He smiled at me and put his hand on the back of my neck. While I talked to him and drove the few hundred yards to his building, I wondered exactly why he had his hand on my neck. Then he took his hand off my neck. I went up to his apartment with him. I sat on the edge of the bed and he sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. He seemed to consider going to the party with me. He was damp all over and still flushed. His sweat was drying on him, probably chilling him. I thought he was waiting for me to leave so that he could take a shower, and after a short time I left.

* * *

Vincent sits there in a flowered armchair in our living room and winces at the thought that I might put anything sentimental or romantic in the novel. He says that if the novel is about what I say it’s about, there shouldn’t be any intimate scenes in it. This makes sense to me. I don’t like the intimate scenes that I have in it so far, though I’m not sure why. I should probably try to see why before I take them out, but I think that, instead, I will take them out first and try to understand why later. For instance, I have never liked describing my visit to his apartment after the basketball game, and I have made it shorter and shorter. I have not minded describing the thoughts I had while I sat smoking in the car.

Vincent happens to be reading a novel that includes the same sorts of things he hopes I will leave out. He doesn’t think they belong in that novel either — he describes to me how the woman lusts for the man until she can hardly bear it, and how he consents to satisfy her, though he deserts her again after only a few hours. I don’t think Vincent likes the book enough to go on with it.

But I suspect he thinks I should also leave out my feelings, or most of them. Although he values feelings in themselves and has many strong feelings of different kinds, they do not particularly interest him as things to be discussed at any length, and he certainly does not think they should be offered as justifications for bad actions. I’m not writing the book to please him, of course, but I respect his ideas, though they are often rather uncompromising. His standards are very high.

It occurs to me that although I used to go to a lot of parties, I describe only two in the novel and, in the case of the second, only what was missing from it. Now even the word “party” seems to belong to another time, to the life of a younger woman.

It is not that I don’t go to parties. But I don’t go often enough so that I think of myself as a person who goes to parties. Only a few nights ago, though, Vincent and I went to a reception. It was at a nearby college, for the incoming head of a department. It did not sound exciting even on the formal invitation, but for some reason which he would not explain, Vincent thought we should go. He said we should send back the formal acceptance card and ask the nurse to stay late.