Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

Ellie finally read the pages I had sent her. By then she was about to move to a foreign country after all, though only for one year and not because of her young lover, and my manuscript was part of the business she had to take care of before she left. She seemed to like it, but she said the names were wrong. She did not want the hero to be named Hank. She thought no one could fall in love with someone named Hank. She said it made her think of “handkerchief.” Of course it isn’t true that no one can fall in love with someone named Hank. But she meant I could choose any name I liked for my hero, while men named Hank, and the men and women who fall in love with them, are not free to choose.

After Ellie objected so much to Hank, I called the woman Laura and the man Garet for a while. But I did not really like the name Laura for this woman, since a woman named Laura feels to me like a peaceful woman, or at least a graceful one. Susan might have been better, but a woman named Susan would be too sensible to walk from one end of a town to the other and back again for an hour at a time, at night, looking for a man and his old white car even if he is with another woman, just because she is determined to have at least a glimpse of him. She would not drive to his house in the rain and walk up onto a balcony and look in the window of his apartment.

So then I called her Hannah, and then Mag, and then Anna again. I described my room, and how this woman, Anna, sat at the card table trying to work despite everything. In other versions it was Laura at my card table, or Hannah playing the piano, or Ann in my bed. For a long time I called him Stefan. I was even calling the novel Stefan at that point. Then Vincent said he did not like the name because it was too European. I agreed that it was European, though I thought it suited him. But I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it anyway, so I tried to think of another name.

A friend of mine who has written several novels told me a few months ago that in one novel she went ahead so fast, looking back only a page or two each day, that she later discovered, when she reread the novel, that the name of one character changed twelve times in the course of the book.

* * *

What I saw, when I saw him standing by the path waiting for me, was not only his face, not only his hands, and not only the position of his body, but also his red plaid flannel shirt, frayed at the collar, his thready white sweatshirt, his khaki army pants, and his hiking boots. He had a pipe in his hand and a bag over his arm.

Each time I met him, in the beginning, I paid such close attention to what I saw when he appeared, and what was different about him from what I had last seen, that I remember his clothes with surprising clarity.

If I put my arms around him, what I felt under my fingers, against my skin, was the material of his clothes, and only when I pressed harder did I feel the muscles and bones of his body. If I touched him on the arm I was actually touching the cotton sleeve of his shirt, and if I touched him on the leg, I was touching the worn denim of his pants, and if I put my hand on his lower back, I felt not only the two ridges of muscle, hard as bone, but also the soft wool of his sweater warming to the warmth of my hand, and if he was hugging me against his chest, what I would see, within an inch of my eye, was the weave of cotton threads of his shirt or woolen threads of his sweater or the fuzzy nap of his lumber jacket.

Just as he looked a little different to me each time I saw him, I also learned new things about him each time. Each thing I learned about him came as a small shock, and either pleased me or disturbed me, and disturbed me either a little or a good deal. When we sat in the bar later that day, the first day, he surprised me by saying angry things about some of my students and then about Mitchell. His tone was a tone of jealousy, though he had no reason to be jealous. And when he said these angry things, he abruptly seemed a stranger to me again, one I didn’t like. Only when I knew him better did I understand that the anger I heard came from his disappointment, and he was often disappointed. Nearly everyone disappointed him and therefore angered him — nearly every man, anyway: he expected a great deal from men, and he wanted to admire them.

He was angry with certain men and he was indignant at certain great writers, and the two feelings came from the same sort of disappointment, I thought. He was always reading the great writers, as though determined to know all the best that had ever been written. He would read most of what one great writer had written, then he would become indignant. There was something wrong there, he would say. He respected the writer, but there was something wrong. He would read most of what another had written and again become indignant. There was something wrong there, too. It was as though these writers had failed him. To be great might mean to be perfect, in his eyes. When he pointed out how they failed, I couldn’t disagree — his reasons were not bad. But in his determined reading he left behind one failed writer after another. Maybe he had to see how they failed if he was to find a place in that world for himself.

One of the things I learned, because I asked him directly, was that there had been not just a few but many women before me, and that I was not even the oldest. At the time, this startled me and seemed to diminish what there was between us. Then, as time passed, I became used to the idea and accepted it.

Later I could say to myself that at least I was the last woman, since he married after he left me. But maybe he hadn’t even been telling me the whole truth. It was the slight pause before he answered me, and his look of embarrassment, that made me believe him. Maybe he was embarrassed by the crudeness of my question, and a false answer was the only answer to such a question.

* * *

The first time I told him I loved him he only looked at me thoughtfully without answering, as though considering what I had said. At the time, I did not understand his hesitation. The words were drawn out of me, almost despite me, and he did not answer. Now I think that if he could be so careful about saying the same thing to me, he probably loved me more deeply than I loved him. I had probably said what I said much too soon to mean it, and he knew that, though he couldn’t help saying the same to me a few days later, since he probably really did love me, or thought he did.

I say at one point that I fell in love with him quite suddenly, and that it happened when we were staring at each other by candlelight. But this seems too easy, and I also can’t remember just what candlelight I was talking about. There was no candlelight in the café the first evening, and there was no candlelight in my house later that night either, so I evidently don’t mean that I fell in love with him the first night. And yet I do remember that even as soon as the next morning, when I saw him again, I felt a sudden, strong emotion. If I wasn’t in love with him, I don’t know what I was feeling. If I had already fallen in love with him by then, it must have happened sometime between the moment he left me in the early morning and the moment I saw him again, unless it happened the very instant I saw him again.

Did it have to happen when he wasn’t present and when I wasn’t aware of it? Maybe it didn’t happen suddenly, after all, but gradually, so that what I felt when I saw him again was only a first degree of it, and there were further degrees — later that day, the next day, the next, and then two days after that, until it reached an extreme of intensity, not destined to go any further, and then wavered and fluctuated before declining gradually, so that the thing was always in motion? A candle may in fact have been burning in the room the first time I said I loved him, but that wasn’t the moment I fell in love with him, I know, so I’m still not sure what candlelight I meant.