Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

When the night came, it was raining, as Vincent pointed out several times. He said it was supposed to turn colder and asked what we would do, for instance, if we came out of the reception and found that the road was a sheet of ice. He said we probably wouldn’t know anyone there, but then he named two people who might be there. He said we would have to change our clothes, but since he clearly still felt we should go, we changed our clothes. I put on a woolen suit and he put on a clean shirt and a tie and an old sports jacket, and we started off through the rain. We were very late.

But the reception was at its height. There was a dense crowd of older men in dark suits, sober-looking younger men, and women in cocktail outfits. There was space only around the jazz trio. Vincent didn’t seem to know anyone there, and if I drifted away from him to look at the selection of drinks or the platter of cheese and grapes on a table by itself in a corner, I would glance up to find he had followed me, agreeable and open to conversation, a plastic cup of mulled cider in his hand. We lingered here for a while, then went to look at the fire burning in the lobby fireplace, and then at a reading room in the back of the building. When we returned to the main room, the din of chattering voices was the same, and we still didn’t see anyone we knew, so we found our coats in the hall and headed for the door. As we were leaving, a friendly young woman with a name tag pinned to her dress talked to us for a minute or two and thanked us for coming.

I had not drunk anything, and had eaten only a couple of grapes. On the way home, Vincent said that in fact he had recognized one man and spoken to him, but the man did not seem to remember him. Then he added that it was quite possible some people we knew had been there earlier and had left.

But the strange thing is that because the rooms in the old college building were so spacious and handsome, because food and drink and music were offered, because the young woman with the name tag said good night to us so pleasantly, and most of all because so many people were smiling and talking, even if not to us, a feeling of welcome and festivity still lingers today, despite the fact that Vincent and I arrived there and left almost unnoticed.

* * *

Madeleine often sensed, through the walls, from her part of the house, that I was about to do something I shouldn’t. Then she came and kept me company, talked to me, told me stories, or took a walk with me. At least twice we went to the movies.

She told me how she met the man she later lived with in Italy. She was with another man at the time, a sailor. She was washing the side of a boat which her lover was about to take to Tahiti, when the end of her broom fell off into the water. The Italian, who happened to be nearby, paddled up, fished it out of the water, and handed it back to her. A few days later, she sat crying on the dock. Her lover had hit her in the mouth. The Italian saw her again and felt sorry for her. They lived in Cuba together and then in Italy with his family, where she had servants who did everything for her, who ironed her clothes for her. She said that made her uncomfortable.

I have been assuming that the port in which the boats were docked was in the city near where we lived, the same port where he would later be packing sea urchins, but this may not be true.

Other friends told me stories, too. Ellie told me about her life with her husband. After she agreed to marry him, she did not like him anymore, though she had liked him before. They went off to a resort town on the Atlantic coast, and there he seemed very short to her, shorter than he had ever been before. Once they were married, they argued. She was very loud and angry, and he was silent and anxious to end the argument, and this made her even angrier. She told me that there might be an argument before friends came to their house for dinner, and the argument would stop when the friends arrived. She and he would pretend there was nothing wrong, even though she had been throwing cheese and crackers around the room. By the time the friends left, her husband would think the argument was over, but the moment they were out of the house, she would start in again.

It is not easy to live with another person, at least it is not easy for me. It makes me realize how selfish I am. It has not been easy for me to love another person either, though I am getting better at it. I can be gentle for as long as a month at a time now, before I become selfish again. I used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers, writers who did not interest me otherwise, like Hippolyte Taine or Alfred de Musset. For instance, Taine said that to love is to make one’s goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.

* * *

I have opened the envelope Ellie sent me and looked at the pictures. I won’t look at them again very soon because I did not like the shock of seeing them. I did not know those faces, I did not recognize them. I did not know those prominent cheekbones. I did not know the man who belonged to them. And I could not make myself look at them long enough to get used to them.

Looking at the pictures made me think that I don’t really know what sort of person he was, either, because I never saw him from the outside. I knew him for only half a day before I was too close to see him from the outside, and by then it was too late ever again to see him from the outside. I would like to know what I would think of him now.

I have images of him in my memory, fragments of things he said, and impressions, some of which are contradictory, either because he was inconsistent or because of my own mood now: if I am angry, he will seem shallow, cruel, and conceited; and if I am soft and tender, he will seem faithful, honest, and sensitive. The center is missing, the original is gone, all that I try to form around it may not resemble the original very much. I am thinking of some example from the natural world in which the living thing dies and then leaves a husk, sheath, carapace, shell, or fragment of rock casing imprinted with its form that falls away from it and outlasts it. Not knowing him now, I may be imagining his motives and feelings to be quite different from what they were, or since I am so constantly with Vincent, I may be borrowing motives from Vincent. I try to identify a motive, and identify one that could only belong to Vincent.

* * *

The first time Madeleine and I went to the movies, we drove several towns north to a small theater, a friendly place, warmly lit in the midst of the blackness around it. We saw a movie that frightened us both, about a dangerous political situation.

The next time we tried to go to the movies, it was in the same small movie theater. We were too early and had to sit through the end of the previous movie, then through a dreary short with fuzzy, underexposed still photographs of the town we were in, accompanied by inappropriate music. When the movie began, we were both so disturbed by the opening scenes in a Roman bath, involving white-faced figures in togas, that we left.

I had forgotten him while I was inside the movie theater, but as we drove back down the coast, we passed through his town, and then, at home, pictures of him kept floating between me and the pages of the book I was trying to read.

I had told myself to read books that would make me forget everything else. But I know the book I was reading that night was by Henry James. I can’t understand why I would choose to read Henry James at such a time. Maybe I was simply more ambitious in those days. Now I will read almost anything, if it has a good story in it — the trials of a nurse in a large city hospital, the account of an English missionary leading Chinese children over the mountains to the Yellow River, the tale of a woman who cured herself of cancer in a Mexican clinic, the autobiography of a teacher of Maori children in New Zealand, the life of the Trapp family singers, etc. If I am trying to take my mind off something painful, this is the sort of book I will choose now. But then I did not choose books that really distracted me, only books that left part of my mind still free to wander away from what I was reading and search around restlessly for the same old bone to gnaw on.