Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

I could have told Ellie I felt sick, but I could not tell Laurie — she was hungry for gossip, and she was always pleased by other people’s misfortunes, because they made her feel fortunate. She was pleased to see others overweight or plain, because they made her feel slim and pretty, though she was slim and pretty enough without that. She was pleased to see others lonely, because then she felt safe from being lonely.

The rain had stopped, so we put the card table out on the terrace and ate there, though it was dark. A little light came from candles on the table and the electric lights under the arcade, but it was still hard to see the food. I had not made any bad mistakes with the main part of our dinner, but I had put so much salt on the salad it was almost impossible to eat. Laurie said it was fine.

Laurie had brought a box of pastries for dessert. Madeleine came out of her wing of the house to say hello, and I invited her to have one. She took one, and stood there a little back from us eating it in the shadows of the large shrubs that grew against the glass wall of the arcade. She said a few things to Laurie that had an edge to them I don’t think Laurie heard, mainly because Laurie did not think Madeleine was a person who needed to be listened to carefully, and then returned to her part of the house. I knew that later she would make fun of Laurie, for this was the sort of woman whose behavior, whose very nature, Madeleine despised — the glib sort of intelligence, the compulsive flirtations, the prurient curiosity, the lack of compassion. Laurie had other, better qualities, but they would not be likely to appear in Madeleine’s presence.

I also knew that while Madeleine would now be sitting in her room brooding with disapproval about Laurie, her face no longer tender and kind, as it sometimes was, but sly and sarcastic, Laurie would also be contemplating Madeleine, and feeling comfortably fortunate compared to Madeleine with her solitude, her strange ways, her severity, her faded and musty Indian clothes, her smell of stale linen and garlic, her poverty.

By the time Laurie was gone, several hours had passed since I had walked around in the rain, and those hours now stood stoutly, as a good protection, between me and what I had been feeling and thinking before.

I spent the next morning working on a long letter to him. Then I stopped, not at the end of it, but because I had become more and more hopeless the longer I worked on it, and at last my hopelessness was too heavy to drag any farther: how weak those cramped black letters seemed, lying there on the page, page after page of them, babbling on to themselves, explaining, reasoning, complaining, pointing out logical inconsistencies, describing, persuading, etc.

I realize now that Laurie must also be the “L.H.” I was having lunch with when the skunk appeared among the students and faculty.

* * *

Late at night, when things were quiet, I heard not only the waves pounding on the beach but often, too, voices rising all around me, first the cat yowling with cries that were almost articulate, then the dog roused from its sleep, sleepy and gruff, and then, if I was reading, I would also hear the words I was reading, and if I was angry, they would be thin, mean, or querulous, traveling in lines across the page.

Trying to sleep, I lay on my side with my knees together and my hands, palms together, between my thighs. Or I lay on my back with my hands crossed over my chest and my feet crossed at the arches. I needed to touch my limbs together in a symmetrical arrangement, I needed to connect everything as much as possible, to feel tied together, and tied down to the mattress. If I lay still long enough, my body would seem to melt into the mattress so that there was nothing left there but a head on the pillow, eyes blinking, a brain in the head.

At times I could sleep only if I sat almost straight up against the bolster and two pillows. I coughed less in this position, and could fight off the disturbances that came to settle on my chest. I was less in the position of a person sleeping, and if I had the light on, too, I was closer to a person in a waking state, which was an easier state because it was more in my own control.

I was learning to wake myself up as soon as I began to fall asleep, and to correct myself when I began to dream: This is a dream, my mind would say, and I would wake up in order to start over again correctly. Sometimes my mind would not stop working in the first place.

Or sleep would descend suddenly on every part of my body at once, and my mind would notice this with surprise and wake me up. Or an odd noise would wake me up and first my heart would pound, then I would be filled with anger, and then my mind would begin working again, and go faster and faster.

In the middle of the night the cat, outside, would mew over a kill, then jump onto the screen, climbing and tangling her claws in the web with a harsh racket. Or a car with a loud motor would stop at the corner and my eyes would fly open. Either I lay still and listened or I kneeled on the bed and looked out the window. The car would drive on, and I would lie down again. Though my eyelids were closed, behind them my eyes were still open, staring into the darkness.

If I turned on the light, though it was so painfully bright, and wrote down what I was thinking, that might be enough. Or I read, or I got up and made warm milk or tea and went back to bed to drink it. It was not the drink that helped, probably, but the fact that I had done something to take care of myself, like a mother or a nurse.

And occasionally my mind would stop overseeing and correcting, my thoughts would become unreasonable, as they began to turn into dreams, and I had the sense, then, that my mind was actually eager to change everything from what it was into something else, that, in fact, it was just sitting there waiting for me to let go of my tight control.

As I was falling asleep, he would walk into a scene and wake me up, or images of him would become confused with other images and go on to become part of a dream. In one dream he said to me, “I’ve never had another lover like you,” but then he went away, to work in a café, he said. I followed him into the café, because, as always, I had more to say. But inside, he was in the driver’s seat of a small dark car filled with other people, including a very pretty woman in the back seat. I felt betrayed again, that he had lied to me, and that he was with other people. He left the car and went into the men’s room. I could not follow him there, so I went into a phone booth. But I did not call him.

Asleep, I was even more helpless against him. Yet sometimes it was a comfort to be with him that way in the night, even if it was only in a dream. Once, he came to where I was, in the dining hall of a public institution. He had changed: his face was lined and thinner and very sober. What mattered to me was that he had come back. There was a finality to it that ended many things besides my daydreaming. It was so final that we did not even discuss it, I simply knew we would be getting married now. I told my mother, and she was surprised, not because I had been on the point of marrying another man, as I had been, but because, as I told her about him, she confused him with a certain black man in show business. In the morning I stayed in bed as though to stay inside the long dream that still lay over the sheets.

All I remembered from another dream was that his vulgarity had not bothered me, though I did not know what that vulgarity had been. In yet another, my mother, old and not well, though still independent and cheerful, needed a companion. She told me, embarrassed, that he had agreed to go to Norway with her if the university would pay him a certain grant twice over.

On another night I was reading a book by Freud, and applying what I read directly to him as I read it. He had lent me three books that I had not given back. He had also brought over, one chilly night, a green plaid blanket that I had not given back. Now I lay under the blanket with two of his books next to me, reading the third. What I was reading was about forgetfulness. I read that for the person who forgot, forgetting was an adequate excuse, but for no one else. Everyone else correctly said, “He didn’t want to do it! The matter did not interest him!” Freud called it “counter-will.” I said to myself that he forgot everything that did not touch him at the moment. But that was not entirely true or fair. If he wished to, however, he could forget everything else, particularly everything he found unpleasant, such as old creditors, old lovers, and other angry people in his life.