Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

The mourning doves in the cedar tree flapped and cooed. Laughter nearby echoed off a wall. Either a kite or a bird floated up against the clouds in the far distance.

I missed him all over again now that my mother and her sister were here, as though I had to miss him all over again in every new situation. That evening, I left them in their room and went into my own room, though I did not close my door. I sat down to work at my card table, but only stared at the window. Although it was early in the evening, I was too tired to work and too tired even to go to bed. I moved my work aside and started putting together a jigsaw puzzle instead. An hour went by. The evening was warm, and through the open windows floated the smells of the flowers again and of the cedar tree. Along with the smells came the sounds of a party across the street: bursts of loud laughter, music on a piano, and car doors slamming. My mother and her sister started talking in low voices in the hallway, worried about me, I was sure. Then my mother, wearing a soft robe, came in with the air of an emissary, evasive, hesitant, touching the edge of my table, wanting to communicate something. I did not want to communicate anything or hear anything, and as I barely spoke to her, at last she left.

Now I was too embarrassed by their attention to continue with the puzzle. I took a step out the door and walked away from the house. My errand was to buy some cat food. The road was dark and quiet. The cat was very pregnant and we were waiting for her to have her kittens any day now. We were worried because she was so young. I walked to the store smoking a cigarette and bought the cat food and a pack of cigarettes and lit another cigarette before leaving the store. I walked down the street slowly. I walked to the supermarket parking lot. By now I had done it so often that it was not much more than a habit. The road was the most likely place I would find him, if I was going to find him, or his car. And a dark road at night always reminded me of other dark roads, so that there seemed to be more room to breathe and to think, and more possibilities. Even away from the house, a strong smell of flowers continued to hang on the air, from other gardens. Old people were walking in one direction and another. I saw many cars in the parking lot, but not his. I had never seen it there, all the many times I had looked for it.

I walked back up the steep hill. In the darkest shadows under some trees, away from the lights of the supermarket, a bowed old man stood still, hugging a large brown bag of groceries. When I came up to him, he asked me with formal politeness what was happening: there were so many cars in the parking lots of the church and the supermarket. It took me a minute to connect one thing with another, and when I did, I told him the teenagers one street over were having a large party. He merely said, “Thank you,” and turned away up the hill while I entered my own road, darker and narrower. Returning to myself after going out to the old man, I found that most of my difficult mood was gone, as though he had taken it away up the hill with him. His dignity, and the simplicity of his question and my answer, had changed something.

Later that night, after the party quieted down, I heard cicadas trilling rhythmically, steadily, and in the distance a mockingbird singing a song that kept changing in the dark and went on and on, for hours. In the shower, I watched a soaked little moth climb the inside of the shower curtain. The wallpaper peeled up from the gray plaster with its black mildew stains. When I got into bed there were drifts of dark gray sand in my sheets.

* * *

I saw him only two or three more times after that, as though the spring, growing hotter day by day, were drying him, a damp spot, out of my life.

He came to the house one evening. He must have realized from the way I stood or talked to him that I was not trying to go after him anymore, because he said a few things, and made a gesture or two, that seemed to invite me back to him again.

Out on the street, looking around at the house and the neighborhood, he said suddenly, as though he had just thought of it, that maybe he could live in my garage. I walked down to it with him and we stood inside it in the dark. There was enough light to see the oil stains in the concrete. He asked me if he was crazy to think of it. It was dry inside and smelled clean. Yes, I thought, he could live there, in my garage, we would fix the electric light, I would make sure he was all right, I would have him there where I could watch him, where I could see him come and go, and he would have to be friendly to me, because he would be living in my garage. I did not know whether or not he meant to bring his girlfriend with him.

But Madeleine did not want this. She said she would not be able to stand it, and no, it wouldn’t help him, no, it wouldn’t help us either, and no, in this sort of neighborhood you certainly couldn’t have people living in a garage.

After this, I thought he wouldn’t communicate with me again. Why would he bother?

I was again trying to plan how I would write the story of it, though it was still going on. I thought I would start it in the sun and end it in the sun. I thought I would start it in his garage and end it in a different garage, my garage. Though he hadn’t moved into my garage, I would say that he had. There would be a great deal of rain in the middle of the story.

But I was wrong. After a few days, he did call. It was evening. In the background was a violent clatter of laughing voices. It was too bad about the garage, he said. He said he didn’t actually need a place to sleep, just a place to work. And he really had in mind the garage, not the spare room. Well, it didn’t matter, he said.

Two weeks later he called again, this time to say that he needed a place to store his things. He asked me if he could keep them in my garage. I was just then putting my mother and her sister and their luggage into my car. I must have said I would call him back. I drove them down to the airport. I don’t know if it was then that I saw so many soldiers and sailors in the airport, as though the country were mobilizing for a war. They were strolling about in pairs, their heads closely sheared, or sitting silently between their parents, their elbows on their knees, staring at the carpet. I do remember that the music in the background had nothing to do with the mood of any of us, my family or the soldiers, and that outside the window was a black figure, spread-eagled, cleaning the plate glass. Instead of talking, we let our eyes follow the motions of this figure as we waited for their plane to be announced.

He did store his things in my garage, but I don’t remember just when he moved them in. I walked down to see it while he did it, he and another man. They unloaded a small truck, I suppose it was a pickup truck.

He put his things in my garage, and Madeleine lent him and his girlfriend a pup tent, because now they had nowhere to live. They slept in the pup tent in the thick eucalyptus woods on the campus, continuing to go to their classes during the day. There was hardly any sign of him through May, or through June.

I saw him once in that time. I was walking past the cafeteria on campus, and he called after me, but I could not stop to talk and he seemed sorry. It was still hard for me to see him. But I don’t know if the pain still came directly from the separation or if by then I associated a certain familiar pain with the sight of him and always would, so that even now, all these years later, I would feel the same pain if I saw him, though it would be strangely unconnected to anything else in my life.

* * *

In June a fair came to town. By the coast road the lights of the fairgrounds at night were reflected in the water of the inlet, the colors turning on the Ferris wheel and the other rides. From a distance the sound of the Ferris wheel was like a steady wind in the trees, blowing on and on. It was a little colder at night now. The smell of woodsmoke hung in the air over the streets, and around the house a smell like honeysuckle. The spare room, empty and chilly, filled with the pungent smell of eucalyptus.