Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

The book was open in front of me, but I could not understand what it was saying, or if I concentrated hard on the sentences, whose many parts all had to be kept in mind at once, and understood it, I forgot almost immediately what I had read. My mind wandered from it constantly, I constantly pulled my mind back to it, and finally I was exhausted by this struggle, and still didn’t remember anything from the few pages I had read.

I stopped to think about other things, people in other places who had injured me. For instance, he was not the only person who owed me money. There was the owner of a small city newspaper who had given me bad checks for my typesetting work, and also a couple from Yuma, Arizona, who had backed their van into my car in a state park. I couldn’t forget these sums of money, though I knew other people might feel that a debt could gradually be forgotten as time went by, until it no longer had to be honored.

There was also a landlady of mine, a ruthless, heartless woman who owned many properties in the part of the city where I lived and who had charged me rent for several days during which I no longer lived in her apartment. I thought about the shabby apartment I had rented from her, its large, empty rooms, how the streetlights shone in through the curtainless windows, how the traffic lights at the corner clicked as they changed in the silence of the early morning, how during the day the heavy trucks and vans rattled over the dents in the street under my windows, how she would not spend the money needed to maintain the place, and how she was later murdered in her garage. I thought about the streets I walked through in those days on my way to work, early in the morning, how I unlocked the empty newspaper building with my own key, how I sat alone typesetting ads and news items in a small windowless room on the ground floor.

The checks with which I was paid for this work kept bouncing, I kept putting them back into my account, and a few never cleared. But still I had more of a regular income and more to live on at this time than I would later. Twice later, that I can remember, I spent what money I had until I had nothing left and no other money available anywhere, except for, once, the thirteen dollars that a friend owed me. She paid me back and I don’t know what I did then, unless it was just at that time that I had an opportunity to earn some money giving private language lessons to two women. They offered to come to my apartment, but I did not want them to see the place where I lived, so for the first lesson we agreed to meet at a restaurant some distance away. I had a strange lapse that day, figuring that in order to meet them at one o’clock I would have to leave home at one o’clock. By the time I arrived they had given up on me and were in the middle of their sandwiches, with mayonnaise on their fingers. They couldn’t handle papers or pencils, or even talk very well.

Instead of making up a plausible excuse, I told them the truth, which only mystified them. There was no time for a lesson after they were finished with lunch, but they politely offered to pay me anyway. I took their money, though I was ashamed. It was just the opposite of what I wanted to do, but I had no other money. One of them stopped the lessons soon after that, but the other, who was wealthier, went on for a few months.

I picked up the book again and forced my eyes onto the page and read. Though the weight was on me, the darkness pressing in on me, I wouldn’t look at it, I wouldn’t think about it, I held it off a few feet away from me. Line by line I forced my eyes across the page, and with great attention at last began to see the story for myself, though it took all the strength and attention I had to shape this thickness of words.

Little by little, as though the pages I had turned were forming a shield between me and my pain, or as though the four edges of each page became the four walls of a safe room, a resting place for me within the story, I began to stay inside it with less effort, until the story became more real to me than my pain. Now I read on, still stiff and heavy with pain, but having a balance between my unhappiness and the pleasure of the story. When the balance seemed secure, I turned off the light and fell asleep easily.

Then, before dawn, I woke a little. I was still asleep, really, but I opened my eyes and thought I was awake. I was lying on my side. Directly in front of me across the width of the bed, across the sheet, I saw his face, over near the wall. I reached out my right arm as far as it would go and put up my hand to touch his face. His face vanished, and there was nothing there but the wall. Then the pain I had been holding away from me by force rushed into me with an unexpected violence, and tears sprang into my eyes so suddenly they seemed to have nothing to do with the pain or even with me. They filled my eyes, spilled over, and rolled down like glass beads before I could blink, and then, as I lay perfectly still, too surprised to move, collected in the hollows of my face.

* * *

During these weeks, each day had the same center — the question of whether I would see him or not, or his car. I drove into the college parking lot one morning just in front of him, and he saw me and pulled in next to me. We got out of our cars and talked to each other. I saw him put money into the parking meter and then I remembered to do the same. Our conversation had a jerky, fitful rhythm to it. He would make a remark and I would respond without thinking, so distracted that what he said registered only on a superficial level. A moment later I would respond a second time, more thoughtfully. He was reacting the same way. Together we walked away from the parking lot toward the college buildings.

A few hours later, returning to my car, I was sure his would not be there anymore, and it wasn’t. A strange car was there instead, one I had never seen before, one that was profoundly uninteresting to me, that I found ugly because it was so small, dark, and new, instead of large, white, and old, even somehow nasty because it had nothing to do with me and belonged to another life that must be small and neat like the car.

He had driven away without leaving a word, a note. He had been with me, our cars had stood side by side for an hour or more, and now he was gone again and I did not know where he was. All I had now, though it was a piece of information I valued, was the fact that he came to the campus every Wednesday morning.

If I did not actually meet him, I might catch a glimpse of him from a distance. He might be standing outside the gas station or walking away from it, his car in the shadows by the building, or he might be turning a corner in his car, sitting very straight, alone or with his girlfriend. Or I might see what I thought was his car and follow it through town or around the campus, and it might be his and it might not. Once I saw an old white car of the same model in front of the supermarket, but the license plate was different. I said the number over to myself as I shopped, trying to remember it: I thought I might try to learn the numbers of all the old white cars of that model in town. But when I came out, the car was gone. All I knew was that there were three others like his in town, one license starting with a C, one with an E, and one with a T.

That night, on my way out to dinner with friends, I caught sight of him from a distance. He was walking through a thin rain to the office of the gas station wearing a blue denim jacket. As soon as we arrived at the Chinese restaurant, I went into a phone booth by the restrooms and called the gas station. A man with a cheerful voice answered the phone and told me that he had finished work and left not five minutes before. I stayed by the phone for a while. The booth, a small, private place within a larger, public place, was closer to him at that moment than any other spot in the restaurant, because I sometimes could, if I was lucky, even though I was in a public place and far away from him, bring him so close to me that his voice was in my ear, his thin voice coming through a wire into my ear like a face inside my head.