Lydia Davis: The End of the Story

We talked about the library, and we talked about the desert, which was in bloom, and we talked about many other things. On the way out to his car, he had his arm around me. He said my house was very nice, and when I did not understand why he said that just then, he said he missed being there. Then I asked him if he would like to go to a party with me. This was the third party I invited him to. He said maybe he would, and he would call me in a week to let me know. After he was gone, I was sure the evening had been the beginning of something different. I was sure I would have more evenings with him. But I was wrong, so being sure meant nothing.

I thought he might turn around and come back that same night, but I was wrong about that, too, and I was wrong to think he would want to call me sooner, before a week had passed.

* * *

I was in the orchestra of a theater, walking toward a crowd at the door, telling everyone to leave, and around the corner I found him standing still, looking defiant. I woke and slept again, and I was sitting in the back of a taxicab, in darkness, when he appeared suddenly next to me, took my hand in his, and said “It’s all right.” Trying to fall asleep again, I imagined wrapping my eyes in images of whiteness, white sheets floating around my eyes, and as I fell asleep these sheets became a dialogue in which nothing was said — blank, blank — until there was one last remark at the end of the exchange of silences.

I woke up in the morning to a heavy storm, the sea booming, the earth trembling under my feet, something just outside the house shaking and rattling, the wind wailing and the trees swaying into each other and rustling.

When I told Madeleine about my broken night, she remembered that she, too, had had a bad hour during the night. Her face became serious, almost angry. “I had a chill at three in the morning,” she said. “I wasn’t really cold, but I had a chill. It was psychological.” I imagined, as though looking down at the two of us from above, how I in one part of the house had been lying awake while she in another part was having a chill.

The storm passed and the day became very hot. Across the street, three or four men were cutting down trees on my neighbor’s property. I walked past their dented, rusty blue car on my way home from buying groceries, and looked in at the front seat, where a black dog lay on its back, its legs splayed, its eyes open, its long chain looping down out the window and in again.

Inside my house, sitting at my table trying to work, I saw the blue car from a different angle directly in front of me across the street. The sun beat down, baking something outside so that its fragrance floated in on the breeze in gusts. It was the lemony perfume of the jade bush by the fence, entering through the open window. It reminded me of the perfume of his skin, and came between me and my work, and then me and my reading. I wondered again why this had to go on so long.

He was still so much a part of me, inside me, that his body in all its sweetness, succulence, fragrance seemed to lie full-length inside mine. Now, after an evening in which he had been with me and had held almost nothing back, he had withdrawn into his silence again. His terrible silence put him at such a distance from me that he was in another country. I tried to guess what was in his mind and couldn’t imagine it. His vast silence seemed as heavy as a cloud pressing down on a landscape that shrinks beneath its bulk, every living thing bending to the ground, continuing to wait in the airless presence of that awful cloud.

* * *

During this week, as I waited for his answer, I had lunch with three different men in three days. The first was a classics professor at the university. The second was so quiet and self-effacing I forgot him almost immediately, even though, having no other place to stay, he slept in our spare room that night and the next. I remembered him only months later, when I found among my things a modest note he had left the second night he was there: “Have gone to bed. Not feeling too good.” The third was Tim again. When it occurred to me that all three of them were English, I wondered if I could now tolerate only the gentle manners of Englishmen, or if it took three Englishmen to fill his place, or if he had somehow split into three Englishmen.

In this same week, my mother and her sister arrived to stay with us for a while, and the house seemed suddenly full of people, because the two of them talked so much more, and so much more loudly, than Madeleine and I did, and made so many complicated plans, and left their things, their sweaters and purses, newspapers, magazines, pens, and glasses, in little heaps in whatever room they entered. Madeleine felt crowded and went up the hill to stay with a friend.

It was while they were here that I had the worst dream of all, though a very simple one: I was fondling the body of some sort of wild animal, probably a warthog.

* * *

At last, on the afternoon of the party, he called to say that he did want to go, but added quickly that he intended to take his girlfriend with him. I became angry and told him he could not do that. Now he became angry. I became even angrier, that he had dared to be angry at me.

Over and over again, after I hung up, I imagined him walking into the party with this woman. I saw them standing together in the front doorway, even though the front doorway would have been too narrow. I imagined being violent in some way toward him. But as I sat there in my room, and then stood and walked around, being violent in my imagination, he could not feel this violence, wherever he was. At the time, it seemed to me it would not be wrong to be violent.

Since I spent most of that evening within sight of the front door, waiting for him at the same time that I was talking to other people and drinking, the party seemed empty, though it was crowded. Part of my mind was always outside, on the wide, dark highway floating or gliding down the coast between high gasoline signs, in the car with him and his girlfriend as they sat together looking ahead at the road, the lights of the oncoming cars shining on their faces, and then in the small streets in the neighborhood of the party, where the stores were all closed, the low clouds in the sky pink from the downtown city lights nearby, the tall and short palms dark against them, and the old, single-storied, stucco houses set back from the road on uneven, weedy lawns behind shabby stone walls and rusty iron railings.

I returned from the party in the early hours of the morning. As I waited, nearly home, for the light to change at a deserted intersection, as I kept my eyes on the red light and the green light, surrounded by silence after the babble of voices I had been hearing for so many hours, music came suddenly from somewhere very loud in the stillness and then stopped just as suddenly, and I felt two or three things coming together to reveal something to me. Then there was no revelation, after all, only a blank space.

In the afternoon, I sat outside on the terrace in the sun. Little lavender flowers were appearing in the beds of rubbery sea fig out by the road, and because I hadn’t expected this, it was like a sudden gift. Nearby there were larger cups of yellow on another plant, and then on the heavy jade bush that leaned over the fence, those tiny white blossoms with their thick, sweet lemon smell that so often blew in the window or hit me in a wave as I walked in under the trees from the road.

For several hours I sat on the terrace, my head in the shade of a tree, now and then thinking of my mother and her sister at the animal park, waiting for them to come back. It was a long wait. His anger floated over the pages of my book. He had told me it wasn’t good that I still cared for him. Really, I thought, he was angry because he had wanted to go to the party. His anger was a childish anger that excluded everything but himself. Then there had been his sudden violence when he said, “No!” to some question of mine.