Lydia Davis: The End of the Story

* * *

I used to like to go over every moment of that first evening, when he and I sat there at the table with friends on one side of me, friends on the other side of him, the noise of the performance so loud that no one could talk, when we walked out together, not knowing each other, and bought two bottles of beer each to bring back in, had drunk one bottle each, and had still one bottle unopened in its brown paper bag by our feet, and sat without opening it, saving it for a little while. This seemed to me, in a way, the best moment of all, when it had hardly begun. When we opened the second bottle of beer we would also be opening everything that came after, through the late fall and the winter, but as long as we sat without opening it we were on a sort of island, and all the happiness lay ahead of us, and would not begin until we opened the second bottle of beer. I couldn’t see this at the time, because I didn’t know what was going to follow, but later I could look back and see it.

Looking back at that evening was almost better than experiencing it the first time, because it did not go faster than I could manage it, I did not have to worry about my part, and I was not distracted by doubt, because I knew how it would come out. I relived it so often, it might have happened just so that I could relive it later.

Then, after he left me, the beginning was not only the first, happy occasion, opening into an infinite number of happy occasions, it also contained the end, as though the very air of that room where we sat together, in that public place, where he leaned over, barely knowing me, and whispered to me, were already permeated with the end of it, as though the walls of that room were already made of the end of it.

* * *

I had arrived in town a few weeks before I met him. I had a job but no place to live. I was staying in a tidy apartment belonging to a couple of graduate students who were out of town. I had come there to teach, but I had never taught before and I was frightened. Alone in that apartment I took books down from the bookshelves and read things I thought might help me answer the questions of the students. I imagined that the students would be smart and already know more than I did. But I read so hastily and so randomly that I did not remember anything.

Mitchell was the only person I knew, and he showed me around the city and the nearby towns, walked with me through the campus, answered my questions, and introduced me to people, though he often forgot the names of even his oldest colleagues because of his own shyness. There were two places where he thought I might want to live, a small furnished apartment I would have to myself and an unfurnished room in a large house that I would be sharing with another woman. He took me to see the house first and I never went to see the apartment.

The house was beautiful and nearly empty, the rooms in its two wings opening onto a terrace enclosed by a fence and old shrubs. I thought it was like a Spanish hacienda, though I was not sure what a Spanish hacienda was. The woman lived there with her dog and her kitten. No one knew her very well, but they had formed opinions of her. Mitchell led me through the gate onto the terrace, and the woman, Madeleine, came out of her rooms on the other side of the terrace to meet us. She was tall, with long reddish-blond hair tied back and a wide, tense, unchanging smile on her face, nervous, I could see, about meeting me, so nervous she was almost rigid with fear. It was midday, and the sun shone down on us brilliantly.

Besides the dog and the cat, the only things I saw on that first visit were some electronic equipment and some large unpainted cord pots that Madeleine had made. They were probably standing out in the sun. I never saw the electronic equipment again.

I was nervous, too, at the thought of living with a woman I did not know, whom no one knew very well, in that house with its musty smell of garlic, stale incense, millet, tea, dog, cat, and rug shampoo. Though Madeleine kept her part of the house very clean, it was infested with fleas from the animals. My room had no fleas in it but was covered with a layer of old dirt.

All I had in my room, at first, besides a box spring and mattress which Madeleine and I brought up out of a basement storeroom at the far end of the house, was the contents of my car, what I had brought with me across the country. Then we found, maybe also in the storeroom, the card table and the metal chairs.

Living in the same house together, we continued to act as though we were living alone. We went on talking to ourselves in our separate rooms. From one room, on a bad day, would come the word “shit,” from another the word “bitch.” Or there would be confusion: in the middle of the night Madeleine would remember that a half-finished pie had been left out and get up to put it away, but I had already put it away. She would think she had done it herself and forgotten.

Madeleine did not have the money for either a car or a telephone. I had a telephone installed and rented a piano. When I was out of the house Madeleine would bring into my room the only music she had, a tattered Schirmer’s edition of Chopin’s Nocturnes with rings of coffee stain on its yellow cover, and play the same pieces over and over in a languid style. Often enough, when I came home, I would find her there playing, sitting very straight, and I would be either pleased or irritated, depending on my mood and the state of our relations, which fluctuated constantly. In the evening after supper I would play Haydn sonatas. My style was monotonous, harsh, and mechanical.

But when she played the piano, and played badly, she did it with such grace and dedication that even though I knew her performance was imprecise and romantic, I was still convinced that it was somehow right. Because she did not doubt herself, because she did each thing with such conviction, I always believed her despite myself. I often felt clumsy next to her, or innocent to the point of stupidity. And yet I was not innocent. Later, when he was with us, he seemed even more innocent.

When I moved into the house, it was the dry season, and the skies were slow to grow heavy, slow to rain, letting go only a few drops at a time now and then. I taught one class each day. Driving home by the beaches I would look at the curling waves and think of the first beer I would drink when I got home. I would not eat right away but have a cold beer or a glass of wine. I was too worried about the next day’s class to see anyone in the evening, most evenings. I corrected papers and wrote down ideas for the class. Even after I had gone to bed, I went on teaching in the dark, sometimes for several hours. I expressed things better there in bed than I would the next day.

If I did spend the evening with other people, I liked the wine or beer to be poured freely. I would take off my glasses and put them in my lap, where they kept sliding down onto the floor. At last I would let them lie there, covering them with my bare feet. Outlines softened, features became illegible, and I slowly grew numb. If people around me stopped drinking, I did not like it, because it meant the evening was ending, real life was starting up again, and the next day loomed. I went on drinking alone, though I knew I shouldn’t, since I would have trouble driving the car home, I would not notice stop signs, I would grimace in concentration as the road curved down by the beach and up again over the hills, as I waited out the changing traffic lights in the empty intersections. But it was hard to stop drinking, because in a part of myself I must have believed that if I went on and on, to the point where my fingers lost their coordination, even beyond that to the point where my head drooped to one side and my eyes closed briefly, and even beyond that to where I could speak coherently only by deliberately collecting my thoughts and my words, I would come out the other end into a new condition, into a new world. Looking in the mirror once I was home, I would see that there were small changes: my cheeks were flushed, my hair was limp and disordered, and my lips were pale.