Lydia Davis: The End of the Story

As the summer wore on, people came to the house, stayed for a few days or a week, and then left again. I think Madeleine only said to me, each time, that we would be having a guest for a few days. But the silence was not disturbed. Whether Madeleine told them we did not like noise or they were quiet by nature, these people crept from room to room, handled pot lids gently, and spoke in whispers. Quietest of all was a plump woman in long robes, some sort of Buddhist, who was slow to move, slow to speak, and slow to respond when spoken to. She washed rice in the sink and carried it outside to dry in the sun. When I asked her why she did this, she said she did not know, but she had been told to do it.

With these other people coming and going, Madeleine was angry more often now, though I did not know if some particular thing made her angry. In the heat of midday she would turn on the oven and bake a sweet potato, so that for an hour or two the kitchen was hot and the house filled with the sweet smell. Or she would hide her pot, her pan, and her bowls where no one would find them and stay in her room, coming out only when the others were gone.

* * *

Months went by in which I had no news of him. I still looked at the gas station each time I passed it. Though I knew he didn’t work there anymore, I still expected to see him or his car. Then I learned that the pup tent and everything in it had been stolen and that he and his girlfriend had gone to stay with friends, and that after some time these friends had asked them to leave. I heard they were now living downtown, in the city, and he was working the night shift at the docks, packing sea urchins.

I imagined driving there in the middle of the night looking for him at the docks, by the water. He would be sweating hard, packing and lifting crates, the water would be black behind him, the warehouses dark around him, floodlights shining on the boards of the piers and on a moored fishing boat, and a few isolated patches of light floating on the black water. There would be a strong smell of the sea, of dead fish, and of oil.

The other men working with him would stop for a moment to watch as he came over to speak to me. He would be tired and preoccupied, annoyed at being interrupted because now the night would seem all the longer, or embarrassed that I should see him doing this work, or embarrassed before the other men to be having a visit from a woman, or else happy to have a break in the monotony of the work, to have unexpected company at his job in the middle of the night, and pleased in front of the other men.

Since I now knew he lived somewhere in the city, I tried to find out what his telephone number was, but he didn’t seem to have a phone. He probably owed the phone company some money, because it was during this time that a woman from the company, surprisingly courteous and understanding each time, called me occasionally to ask me where he could be reached. He must have given my name as a reference. I was courteous, too, but I did not know where he was. I heard later that he had not paid his last phone bills and that when he and his girlfriend started another phone service in her name, they couldn’t pay those bills either.

I heard something about the merchant navy and then something about a job washing dishes. I heard that he had started a magazine and then that he had moved north and was looking for work again. I seized upon each new, discrete piece of information and added it to what I already knew. Sometimes it was neutral and came to me fairly directly, and sometimes it was distressing and came to me by a circuitous route, first conveyed by a woman he had insulted, who passed it on to another who hated him, who conveyed it to another who was puzzled and disappointed in him, who passed it on to me. I was always curious to learn the next piece of information in the story of his life, and I imagined his end. When I heard distressing news I imagined a bad end. Would I visit him in prison?

I heard all this news before I moved back East. Ellie had not moved back East yet either, though she would go before I did, and she was the one who told me he was married now. She told me it had happened in Las Vegas. The brother of the woman he married worked near her in the library and he had told her. On the afternoon that she gave me this news, I sat in my coat at a long table in front of a wall of books waiting for her to finish work. This was in the Rare Books section behind a locked metal gate. Ellie sat across from me in front of another wall of books. To one side of us, a curtain was drawn across a plate-glass window, hiding the view I knew was out there, of a small canyon behind the library.

After she told me this news, Ellie looked at me across her piles of books and asked me if I was upset. I couldn’t say exactly, though as I tried to explain it to her I began to understand: in one sense, it didn’t matter what became of him, since he no longer had anything to do with me, but each piece of news was painful when I heard it because it reminded me that now he was only someone I heard news of, from other people, and that there were many things I didn’t know about him now, whereas I wanted to believe I knew all there was to know, that what I didn’t know didn’t exist — that he himself didn’t exist, in fact, except as I knew him.

As we talked, the woman’s brother, who was now his brother-in-law, worked near us beyond the locked gate, shelving books. He walked back and forth, disappeared among the bookcases, and came out again carrying small stacks of books or wheeling a cart, and sometimes stopped to talk to a friend or answer the question of a stranger. Whenever he appeared, I stared at him, in his dark pants and white shirt.

Later, walking with Ellie toward the elevators, I passed him where he leaned over a desk speaking on the telephone. I stared again at what I could see of him, his body and the side of his face, as though it were important to notice whatever I could about him. I was acutely aware of the way in which he and I were related, but if he had looked around at me now, he would have seen only a woman he did not know.

But this marriage didn’t actually change anything for me in the way I went on thinking of him, watching for him, searching for him, with a part of my mind anyway, while another part had moved on, away from him. I don’t know whether it was because searching for him had become such a habit by now, or because I thought he might marry a woman as easily as he might ask me if he could live in my garage, for the sake of convenience.

When spring came around again, he sent me that poem in French, and for once I could be sure that although I did not know it, he had been thinking of me.

* * *

Things did change, and as more time went by, more things changed. The young cat had her kittens. Madeleine kept them on the floor of her closet. They were anemic from flea bites, and although Madeleine cared for them tenderly, either she did not know the right thing to do or she was not willing to do it, and most of them died while they were still tiny. We buried them, one by one, in the red earth of the yard under a large pine tree at the side of the house. When Madeleine moved away, the cat stayed behind, but lived outdoors on her own, fed by neighbors.

We had to leave the house because the owner was planning to remodel it and move back in with her family of stepchildren. I left before Madeleine, and went to an apartment complex for married students rather like a military compound. The smells were different, the sounds were different. There was open country and a canyon nearby, with sage on the slopes, crows overhead, a yellow bulldozer at the bottom of it, and I would come indoors from the canyon with my skin smelling of sage and yellow dust on my clothes and under my fingernails. Yellow dust covered the inside of the apartment, which smelled of straw from the mats on the floor. I heard the crows cawing in the canyon and tennis players calling out on the courts across the street as their balls pocked over and over. I heard the voices and thumps of families on the other sides of the walls, snatches of opera like mosquitoes whining, water running, and something like applause, almost constant, and then in the bathroom, something like a whisper or a moan, and, during a rainstorm, water blowing across the flat roof and pebbles rustling as they rolled in the water. I stayed in this place for a few months.