Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

Classes were over, people went away, and there were long periods of time, that summer, when the town was quiet and I was alone so much that I sank into a peculiar listlessness in which everything became exaggerated, what I perceived and how I reacted. I was acutely aware of the smallest sounds in the room, in the silent house. Sometimes the sound came from a living creature, usually an insect, and these creatures felt like companions because they had chosen, as far as they could choose anything, to be in the room with me. Any encounter I had with them, even watching them, became a personal encounter.

A beetle with a hard carapace ticked along the top edge of the room, locating itself in its flight. A tawny moth clung to the white wall like a chip of wood. A gray moth flew straight at me out of a closet and landed on my glasses. I walked into the kitchen, saw a cockroach on the floor, and took care to step over it. As I lay reading in bed, a large black moth blundered into my cup of water and thrashed around in circles there on its back. I went on reading. The moth stopped moving and floated, then began thrashing again. At last I lifted it out with a piece of kleenex, and after it had rested, it began diving through my light again, slapping into my book, my glasses, and my cheek. I had saved it so that it could continue annoying me. But for all its persistence and energy it would not live much longer anyway.

The dog kept coming in, so silent that I never noticed at first. I would hear a wet smacking sound and look up to see her lying on the cool tiles in the far corner, gnashing at fleas, her face anxious, her hair stiff and yellow as straw.

Inanimate things became animate, and then they, too, became companions: a cigarette ash glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as it sped across the desk in a stray breeze became a spider running and stopping, running and stopping. A single inked letter in a white margin became a kind of a mite walking up the page. Or a lock of hair shifting on my head was some other small creature making its way in toward my scalp.

Because I was alone so much, I would think about how I could do things in a more logical way, as though it weren’t enough just to do what had to be done one way or another. I would make a system of rewards for myself: no smoking until evening, for instance. Or I set aside different hours of the day for different activities. I said I would write one letter every day after the mail came. But I did not do that for long. I did not answer most of the letters that came to me. I would plan to walk south in the early part of the afternoon, so as to get a little sun on my face. But I did not do that for long. Although I liked the idea of a rigid order, and seemed to believe that a thing would have more value if it was part of an order, I quickly became tired of the order.

There were many things I had to do that were necessary, and a few that were not necessary but good, and then others that were not necessary and not especially good, like lying on my bed eating and reading. But even these things seemed to have a purpose, if only to give me some relief from the good or necessary activities.

The solitude itself seemed to pull me down, as though by gravity, into a dull kind of depression. When I tried to think, I could not think. I felt that the constant state of my mind was ignorance. My mind seemed to contain almost nothing. I felt that the constant state of my mind and body both was paralysis: each alternative I considered was so strong I could not act, or each act I considered was countered by an unspoken criticism.

Falling asleep one night, I began to dream, and in my dream I asked what I should do with these two nouns “ignorance” and “paralysis,” and then watched as they turned into two different cheeses, one of which I chose not to eat because it was less savory than the other. I dreamed again, that in a dangerous situation I was about to cross the desert on a horse, but heard the rattling of bones or something like bones on the high mast of a ship. I dreamed again, that the beam of a flashlight was following a tiny mouse as it ran in panic back and forth in front of the doorsill.

Sometimes, if I was among other people, I was asked a question and couldn’t answer. An essential part of me seemed to be frozen. My brain still functioned, and observed, in a detached sort of way, how I could not speak — could not formulate an answer, could not take a breath deep enough, and could not move my tongue and lips.

Sometimes I could not even understand the words: I could only see them hanging there, as though surrounded by ice crystals, and hear them ringing in the air.

At this time, a friend wrote me a letter. He addressed me with the word “Dearest.” But however often I looked at the word “Dearest” and my name, I could not keep the two words together, because they did not seem related. He closed the letter by telling me to “have courage,” and I found, to my surprise, that if I simply looked at the words “have courage” there on the page, I had courage that I had not had a moment before.

I kept the letter in its envelope by my bed. Each time I looked at it, my name and address in my friend’s handwriting became loud and declarative, because his hand was speaking my name, repeating who I was and where I lived, and in that way locating me more securely.

I dreamed, a few days after receiving this letter, that I asked my friend to help me. But he was not big enough, in my dream, to help me, he was just as big as he was, he did not extend beyond the outline of his body.

* * *

A man came to the gate to ask a question, and I answered him over the top of it. He was courteous, gentle, and attractive but for his odd glasses. I met another man in a supermarket aisle. Younger, sportier than the first, he was attractive, too, but for his odd hairstyle.

I saw how recovery worked. I saw how, as time passed, other things came in between, as though a wall were being built. Events occurred and then receded in time. New habits formed. Situations in my life changed.

As long as everything stayed the same, it seemed possible for him to come back. As long as everything was the way he had left it, his place was open for him. But if things changed beyond a certain point, his place in my life began to close, he could not reenter it, or if he did, he would have to enter in a new way.

* * *

It was at some point now, in the middle of summer, that I saw him for the last time, when he came to remove his things from the garage, though I am remembering it a little differently today. He came through the gate onto the terrace, he was sweating, and he stopped to chat for a moment, asking if he could get himself a glass of water. But I’m not sure, after all, that he was relaxed and friendly. He may have been uneasy in the presence of the other woman, or in my presence, or because these two women were looking at him together. He may have had difficulty smiling, and spoken awkwardly. I remember now that he moved his things from my garage into the garage of a friend, and I heard later that he left them there much longer than the friend had expected.

At first I was sorry he had seen me this way, as one of two older women, especially when I realized it was the last time he saw me. But then I remembered how he loved women of all kinds, older women as well as younger women. He did not love only tight, smooth skin, or narrow hips, or perfectly round, plump breasts, he also loved wide hips, heavy breasts, small flat breasts, fleshy arms, a thick calf, a broad thigh, a sharp kneecap, loose skin under the chin and cheeks, a fold at the neck, lines around the eyes, a tired face in the morning. Each part of a woman, so particular to her, became precious to him if he loved her, more precious than it was to her.

* * *