Lydia Davis: The End of the Story

I tried to imagine that what was happening now was actually happening in the past. Since the present would soon be the past, I could imagine I was looking back at it from the future at the same time that I was in the midst of it. In this way I removed it a little from myself and was more comfortable with it.

Certain things I wrote down in the first person, and others, the most painful things, I think, or the most embarrassing, I wrote down in the third person. Then a day came when I had used she for I so long that even the third person was too close to me and I needed another person, even farther away than the third person. But there was no other person.

So I went on in the third person, and after a time it became bland, and harmless. Then it became too bland, and too harmless — all those women who were not I but Ann or Anna or Hannah or Susan, weak characters or no characters, only names.

So that after it had been in the third person a long time, it had settled into that person so firmly that I could be convinced it had happened to someone else, and take it back into the first, claiming, as though falsely, that it had happened to me.

I don’t know why I didn’t stop writing about him after a while. I suppose I had written so much by then, and the idea of writing about him had been with me so long, and the frustration had continued so long, that I didn’t want to stop before I had finished something.

Maybe another reason I couldn’t let go of it later was that I did not have good answers for my questions. I could always find a few answers for each question, but I wasn’t satisfied with them: though they seemed to answer the question, the question did not go away. Why had he claimed on the telephone, when I called him long distance, that we were still together and there was nothing to worry about? Was he ever truly tempted to come back to me after I returned? Why did he send me that French poem a year later? Did he ever receive my answer? If he did, why didn’t he answer it? Where was he living when I went to look for him at that address? If he wrote to me once, why did I never hear from him again?

I began to wonder how the things I was writing could be formed into a story, and I began to look for a beginning and an end. One reason I was willing, later, to have him move into my garage was that it would give me an end to the story. But if he asked to live there and Madeleine refused to consider it, it would not make a very good ending, especially since I was not even the one who did the refusing. That was what happened, so I had to look for another ending. I could have invented one, but I did not want to do that. I was not willing to invent much, though I’m not sure why: I could leave things out and I could rearrange things, I could let one character do something that had actually been done by another, I could let a thing be done earlier or later than it was done, but I could use only the elements of the actual story.

* * *

I have just been staring at a note I wrote to myself some time ago. It is typical of the unhelpful notes I have now and then made. It has two blanks in it that must have seemed to me at the time too obvious to need supplying. It reads: “Strangely enough, once she had written down x— it seemed —. But then that feeling disappeared.”

I have come back to this note again and again, trying to get through to the thought that must be behind it. It must have something to do with reversals, things seeming true until they are written down, or true at one time and then untrue later. In fact it seems to refer to two reversals, one that occurs just after writing a thing down and one later, when the first reaction weakens. Of course, I may have written this thought down in another, clearer form somewhere else and incorporated it already without recognizing it.

In ink of a different color, on this same card, I instruct myself, with a certain officiousness, to include this thought with my other thoughts about writing about him. But if I don’t understand what the thought is, I can’t include it.

I never like losing a thought, but I regret losing this one more keenly than most because it seems so familiar I can almost recognize it. But I know I lose thoughts all the time. One day is always disappearing behind the next, carrying things off with it. I work hard to record a few things as accurately as I can, and even so I get a great deal wrong, but there is much more that slips away.

I take another note out of the box and try to read the top line, but the handwriting is upside down. I turn it around, but the handwriting is still upside down. Whichever way I turn it, the top line still seems to be upside down. At first I think I must be imagining things, or that my handwriting has gotten very bad. But then I see that the bottom line is always right side up: I ran out of room on the card and wrote around the edges of it.

On another card, there is another note full of reversals: by writing about him, I thought, I was taking him away from himself and doing him harm, even though he might never know it. This troubled me, not because I was doing him harm, but because I did not mind doing it. Yet as soon as I said this to myself I was more troubled, even frightened, and I wanted to ask him to forgive me. But at the same time I could see that this would not stop me from doing what I was doing. These feelings merely passed through me one after another.

I am sometimes afraid he will appear now, or call me on the phone suddenly, without warning. If I am thinking about him so much, won’t he feel it, wherever he is? I am having a hard enough time writing this: I don’t know what would happen if he interfered.

It is quite possible, though, that if only he had spent just a little time talking carefully to me as it was happening, and listening to me, he might have saved an immense amount of trouble, all this work. The novel might not have had to be written. Because I see that I really can’t bear it, and never could, when someone refuses to listen to me for as long as I want to talk. I think I could talk endlessly if only someone was interested. I could probably stand outside the post office here in this town and just talk about some current issue.

I have many strong opinions about current issues. Vincent won’t listen beyond a certain point. First he tells me to calm down and then he changes the subject. When we go out with friends I have to stop myself, because I become so interested in what I am saying. This is the opposite of what used to happen, when I was too shy to speak easily and waited so long that the room would fall silent when I finally spoke. Then what I said was not interesting, because it was always the safest thing to say. Now I’m afraid that when I have to stop talking, at what should be the end of the novel, I will not want to stop.

Occasionally a friend like Ellie has been generous enough to listen to me for a very long time, even though I could see her face grow more and more exhausted. For many years after I returned East, Ellie lived near enough so that I could call her cheaply and go visit her, even after I moved out of the city. Now she is gone and I miss her. But the strange thing is that when she told me she was leaving, it did not bother me. Maybe it seemed so right for her at that point in her life that I could not be disturbed by it, or maybe I thought I would see her almost as often. Then again, maybe I thought she had to leave so that I could finish the novel on my own. It is not that what she decides to do in her life depends on what I may happen to be doing, or that she has been helping me with the novel, except in the beginning, when I gave her the first pages to read. But the feeling persists anyway: I had reached a certain point with it, and had to continue on my own, so Ellie moved away and left me to it.