Lydia Davis: The End of the Story

As we stood by our cars outside the café, he asked me where we might go. Then, bolder again than I expected, he asked me if we might go to my house. I hesitated again, and this time he apologized. I liked his modesty in doing that. I knew almost nothing about him, so each thing he did and said showed me an entirely new aspect of him, as though he were unfolding in front of me. I did not mind going straight home, because I was tired. I got into my car, and he got into his. I waited for him so that he could follow me, and when he turned on his engine, his large, old, white car roared. It continued to roar so loudly, as it followed just behind me, that my teeth began to chatter and my hands shook on the steering wheel, which I gripped until my knuckles hurt.

With his headlights filling my rearview mirror, and my hands tight on the wheel, we drove down the coast through another town where a movie theater was emptying out, on down by the water, across some marshland, and up a dry hillside into my town, past the traffic lights and the outdoor café on the corner, and after a left turn, up the hill to my house.

It seems to me that he stumbled in the dark as he crossed the rutted dirt driveway under the cedar tree, but I may be confused about that, because I myself fell backward off the bank of sea fig into the driveway a few days later, as he was leaving. I was waving goodbye to him. I did not actually fall, but stumbled back off the high bank in front of the house on which the cedar grew. I was always awkward with him, I had trouble controlling my arms and legs when I walked through the room, when I sat down in a chair. He said I was awkward because I was so eager, and moved too fast for my own body.

Now I walked ahead of him, and by the front wall he lifted a stem of thorns that hung down from an overgrown climbing rose so that I could pass without scratching myself. Or maybe he couldn’t have done this in the dark, and it was on another day, in the daylight. Or it was that night, but the night was not entirely dark. In fact, it is only dark in my memory of that particular night, because I know there were two bright streetlamps nearby: one of them shone into my room.

We made our way across the circular drive and past the untidy rosebush, which grew by the window where I sat so much of the time staring out, and around the side of the house past the jade bushes. We followed a brick path to a gate of white painted wood set in a fence of white painted wood, and through the gate into the arcaded walkway past the windows of my room to the door of my room. An electric light shone from inside a lantern fixed to the white stucco wall next to the door.

Inside, we sat down on two folding metal chairs between the green card table where I worked and a rented upright piano. I brought back from the kitchen two beers, which we drank on the uncomfortably hard chairs.

He told me he had just finished writing a novel, but later this turned out not to be true. What he had just finished was not a novel but a story twenty pages long that he then cut down to six pages. Either I had not heard him right or he was so nervous that he said the word “novel” by mistake and did not hear it.

Because I did not know his name, he seemed only half real, and a stranger to me, though I was not afraid of him. I was startled by him a third time, after a couple of hours had gone by during which we sat talking politely, distantly and carefully about one thing and another, on our separate, hard chairs, when he asked me if he could take his boots off.

* * *

The fact that I must be mistaken about some of this doesn’t bother me. But I’m not sure what to include. There is my hesitation in the café and his persistence. The way I followed him out of the café and back in again. The roar of his car when he started it. The way the headlights and grille of his old white car filled my rearview mirror. The gentleness with which, next to my house, he lifted the strand of rose thorn out of my way so that I would not scratch myself. The hard metal chairs. Then the awkwardness of the bright light by my bed. The way my mind hovered like a little professor in glasses in the air above what was happening down below, and judged this and then judged that.

At dawn, I was asleep, and I woke up because he was saying something to me before he left. I woke up further to understand what he was saying. He was quoting some poetry to me as a way of leaving, and I understood why he was doing it, but it bothered me.

Then there was the roar of his car again when he drove away from my house, disturbing the peace of the wealthy neighborhood. Even if no one could see or hear him, I was embarrassed to have such a young man leave my house at dawn in a car that roared through the stillness of the elegant seaside town, going down the hill past the fenced and hedged properties of my neighbors: the people across the street in their pagoda-style house who owned a large part of the town and who later invited Madeleine and me, along with many others in the town, to a party in celebration of a new acquisition or construction, maybe their swimming pool; the elderly couple down the hill from them whose elaborate cactus garden bordered the small lane that led to the convenience store where I went to buy such things as cigarettes and cat food; the young couple next door to us down the hill in a little white cottage which they did not own but were renting, though I did not know it then, as I did not know that the young woman, who worked in a clothing store down on the main street and sold me something now and then, would be killed on the highway a few years later when a large truck ran into her from behind as she slowed approaching the exit ramp near our town; then past the Norwegian church of dark brown wood, with its line of eucalyptus trees in front, turning right at the bottom of the hill and roaring at a greater and greater distance, until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

* * *

I am close enough to the ocean here, too, so that now and then a seagull flies overhead. There is a creek not far away, so wide I used to call it a river before Vincent corrected me. It flows into a very broad tidal river which Vincent told me should not be called a river either, but an estuary. This village lies on a ridge between the two bodies of water.

But it is a different ocean. And I wouldn’t be able to get to it without passing through miles and miles of the city, because the city is built right out to its shores. There are no sea figs, no jade bushes, and no palms here. The rocks are not sandstone but granite and lime. The soil is not sandy and not reddish but dark brown and loamy.

It is March, and cold. Vincent’s thick cotton socks hang on the line, still damp after several hours in the sunshine. There is an inch of snow on the ground, but some migrating birds have already come back and are singing and looking for nesting spots. Finches flutter around the eaves of the back porch and we track mud into the kitchen.

I have just finished translating a long autobiography written in a difficult style by a French ethnographer. It is a good thing I am done, because the longer I spend on a book, the less money I have. I will send it off to the publisher along with my bill, and wait for my check to arrive.

Earlier today I was reading about a Japanese writer who lives in England and writes in English. His novels are meticulously constructed, have very little plot, and present information in a fragmentary, offhand way. The article seemed important to me for a reason I couldn’t identify, and I intended to save it and reread it, but I have lost the magazine. I am inefficient in the way I work on the novel, and that inefficiency infects other things I try to do. This was more understandable when I had to keep leaving the novel and coming back to it. Now, even though I work on it almost every day, I still become confused and forget what I was doing when I left off the day before. I have to write instructions to myself on little cards with an arrow in front of each. I look for the arrow, read the instruction, follow it, then gradually remember what I was doing and know where I am until I stop for the day, when I write myself another instruction. But on my worst days I just sit here in my nightgown, my own warm smell rising from the opening of my collar. I listen to the cars go by in an endless stream on the road below my window and think something is happening just because time is passing. I won’t get dressed until I have sat here half the day. I won’t always shower first, only at a point when I feel I have thoroughly ripened.