The End of the Story (12 page)

When I received that poem from him I read it through once quickly, then several times more that day, until I understood most of it, and after that I could not take it out of its envelope again, as though it had too much power, as though the force of it was safe enough in the envelope, but not safe once it was out and unfolded.

Just now I have taken the poem out again and have been looking through different anthologies to see if I can find it and identify it. I found it once before, quite by accident, so I thought that when I next needed to, I would be able to find it easily. It is probably a well-known poem, or at least this was my impression after I found it by accident. It is probably one I should know, or one other people would think I should know because of my profession, but my knowledge of French literature is surprisingly poor, as is my knowledge of French history. Oddly enough, this doesn't usually affect the quality of my work. At worst I will miss only one or two references. But now and then it has embarrassed me.

The poem is a sonnet, and begins with the word
Nous.
I looked in the index of first lines of the book where I had been certain, all this time, that I would find it and saw only other first lines beginning with the word
Nous,
in the literal translations offered by the book:
We two have our hands to give. We have a clergy, some lime. We will not always live in these yellow lands.
I did not find the line I was looking for, which would be something like:
We have thought pure things.
I gave up, for the time being.

Then a peculiar thing happened. I watched, as though from a distance, while my two hands put his letter back in its envelope. I did not handle it carefully, almost reverently, as I had a short time before when I took it out, but hastily, and carelessly, because I was frustrated that I had not found out what the poem was. And because I am so used to seeing my hands do this every day to other letters, I believed, or some independent part of my brain believed, for an instant, that this was a letter I had just received, just brought home from the post office to open at my desk. Now his handwriting on the envelope suddenly had a sense of purpose and immediacy all over again—the letter seemed to be a real, active communication.

Then the instant passed, or the part of my brain that knew the truth caught up with the part that had believed something different for an instant. Once again, the letter had the faded permanence, the immutability, of a relic.

The letter is one of a small collection of things here in my room that seem to have some life of their own. Relics, they are heavier, or more magnetic, than the other objects in the house. Besides the poem he sent, and his story, the photograph of him, other letters, and a page he and I wrote together, on which his handwriting alternates with mine, there is a blanket he left in my house, a plaid shirt he gave me, a second plaid shirt whose sleeves are so frayed they have fallen into rags, and at least three books. One of the books is a novel by Faulkner that I read after he left me, a paperback so old that its pages are yellow and its outer margins brown, its glue so brittle that each page, after I had read it and turned it, fell quietly off the spine, and because I did not close the book whenever I put it aside, but left it lying open face up on the windowsill by my bed, not really a bound book any longer but two piles, one of bound pages and one of loose pages, the book did not close on the story, and the story remained present in the room while I was reading the book and for many days after, as if it were loose in the room, had floated up from the pages, and hung there under the raftered ceiling—the woman's sullen illness, the thrashing of the wild palms around the prison where the man sits, the high wind, the wide river the man can see out the cell window, the frail cigarette that he can't roll tightly because his hands tremble so badly.

*   *   *

I thought the feeling of emptiness and bleakness did not appear until February. I thought it was mild. The truth is, it appeared in December, before I went East for the first time. In fact, it had been present before then, even close to the beginning, but in the beginning it did not matter. Because I went away, in December, and came back again, I forgot my uneasiness. I missed him and then I had him back. But in February it reappeared, and was acute, and went on day after day.

There were two trips East, but I don't know if I will describe the first one first and the second one second, because today I am feeling that chronological order is not a good thing, even if it is easier, and that I should break it up. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?

Or is it only that I am irritable today? I have to be careful, because there are days when I am so irritable that not only do I want to disrupt the chronological order, I also want to delete a great deal of what I have written. Take this sentence out, I say to myself, with a kind of furious pleasure, and that paragraph, too—I never liked or respected it.

But if I give in to all these impulses when I am in a bad mood, I will have almost nothing left.

At such times, the irritation I feel toward the writing is just as personal as the irritation I feel when the old man gets stubborn and I come up against the blank wall of his refusal, or during an argument with Vincent when he will not listen to me but either rolls his eyes up at the ceiling or closes them or looks at the newspaper. As though I think this novel has a life and will of its own and is simply refusing to do what I want it to do.

I don't always trust myself, because I have never tried to write a novel before. At first I thought this novel should be like the sort of novel I admire. But then I realized that of course I admire more than one sort of novel. For a while, I thought it should be like the novel I was translating at the time he left me, not because that was what I was doing then, but because I admire that novel. But if I took that as my model, I would have to cut out most of what happens in this one. In that novel, the characters only walk in and out of rooms, look through doorways, arrive at apartments, go up and down stairs, look out windows from inside, look in windows from outside, and make brief remarks to each other that are hard to understand.

For a while after that, I wanted this to have the same high moral tone as the work of another writer I admire, but it won't, because I don't have the same strong moral principles he does.

My uneasiness in December was sometimes boredom, and sometimes, at its worst, a panic at being trapped in the empty space of our silence or the awkwardness of the way we tried to talk to each other.

Once, we were alone together in a restaurant and I was becoming exhausted by the effort of sitting there across from him trying to talk to him, trying to make him talk to me, and then trying to think about other things when I couldn't talk and couldn't make him talk. I was moving through the time of our evening together as though I were pulling a weight along with me from one minute to the next. It didn't seem to help that I was going to leave a few days later. I became so tired, then, feeling so little life between us, that out of the deepest boredom I proposed that we play a game: taking a piece of paper and passing it back and forth, we would make up a story together, each writing one sentence.

We did this, but the story was bad, or worse than bad: each sentence followed from the sentence before, but seemed arbitrary, clearly produced by boredom and anger, and this arbitrariness began to frighten me after a while, because it seemed to show how arbitrary other sentences were that followed from one another, and other stories, too. When we stopped trying to write it, there was even less life between us.

How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.

Another thing that bothered me more acutely now was the way I changed when I was with him, into a person I did not quite recognize, even though I told myself I did not have to be the same. I was only a little different with another woman, or with a man who was a friend, but with a man who was to me what he was to me, my constant companion, the one who shared my bed not just now and then but every night, the one I came back to when I was away, the one who came back to me, I would often play the part of a person I hardly recognized and usually did not like, and the more uncomfortable I was, the nastier this person became.

I wasn't even playing a part, really, since I did not do it deliberately. And I didn't really become a different person either. It was not a different person who appeared at these times but a side of myself that did not appear when I was alone or with other friends, one that was flippant, condescending, self-centered, sarcastic, and mean. To be all these things was quite natural to me, even though I did not like them.

*   *   *

During this time when I was often bored and restless, Madeleine was often angry, and I did not know why. It would begin early in the morning. Dawn would come with a band of milky white below a cloud. The sky would turn a cool, snowy blue. The first sounds would be a neighbor closing his gate, starting his car, and driving off. He awoke one bird who made a noise like a plucked wire and then went back to sleep for a while. I looked to see how much light was in the sky and the cat mewed once. Now the bird was awake again, and it made a noise like a cricket chirping.

Madeleine would begin banging around in the kitchen, and I would begin daydreaming. The palms would thrash. Later Madeleine would go outside and rake. I would lie on my bed indoors and hear the sound of the rake's teeth grating over the dirt of the driveway. She was raking up the pine needles. She would work her way around the hummock of rubbery sea fig by the road and the bags of red clay sitting in plastic under the cedar tree. She would rake the needles into little piles all over, and then burn them. She liked making fires of them.

Morning would be warm and clear. Then, after noon, the fog would move slowly up the hill from the ocean, cars coming up out of it with their headlights on while the air was still clear where I was. Then the air near my windows would turn white, the trees at a distance become faint, and the bushes close to the house very distinct, suddenly, against the white fog.

At this time of the year there were monarch butterflies all over the hillside, in fives and sixes. Because it was close to Christmas, special services were conducted in the church down the hill, and organ music and singing came up to me. Listening to it, I would look out the bathroom window and see, over car tops and rooftops, the Santa on the chimney of a brick building down the hill, turning by electricity slowly one way and then the other.

Madeleine raked, and she slammed doors. She would pick up the receiver of the phone, which was just outside the door to my room, dial a number, and then slam the receiver down. Or there would be a gentle rattle as she picked the phone itself up and carried it out of my earshot, down the hall or around the corner into the kitchen, where she would talk in a hushed, angry voice, often in Spanish or Italian, the kitten mewing again and again in the background. Once, I know, she was angry at a friend of hers, a wealthy Spanish woman who lived at the top of our hill. I was sure Madeleine's relationships with all her friends and lovers were complicated, but she never told me anything about them and I never asked.

She always preferred to eat with chopsticks, often a dish made with millet and garlic, and she drank many cups of tea during the day. The sink was often littered with chopsticks and teaspoons and separate scattered grains of millet and tea leaves, and in these days, because I knew how angry she was, even the chopsticks and the perforated, hinged metal spoons looked angry lying there in the pale green sink.

*   *   *

But despite my discouragement and impatience, I did not want to leave him when the time came for me to go East. It seemed true, just then, that he belonged to me and I belonged to him beyond any boredom, beyond any diminishing of feeling between us. At the same time, I did not know which to believe—that I had only a little feeling for him, as I seemed to have sometimes, or a great deal.

In the East, I was suddenly surrounded by so many difficulties and sorrows unrelated to him, unrelated even to me, that his importance shrank to something very small.

But when I thought my mind was altogether taken up with other things, as I stood on a railway station platform, waited by a car, entered or left a house, walked up or down a driveway, went out into the cold, went back in out of the cold, I would suddenly remember the sweet smell of his skin, and I would miss his open arms, how perfectly still he was when he opened his arms to me, as though all his attention was on me and on taking me into his arms, whereas with another man before him, and then another, there had been no room for me, they were all hard surface, they were always moving too quickly, rushing here and there, usually away from me, or past me, intent on their own business, only now and then straight toward me, when I, too, became their business. He paid attention, he watched, he listened, he thought about me when he was not with me, nothing was lost on him, nothing of me as he perceived me. Even in his sleep, he was attentive, and woke up enough to tell me he loved me, whereas other men, intent on the business of sleeping, would be disturbed and hiss at me: “Stop moving!”

*   *   *

I thought of combining the two visits East into one, in the novel, in order to be economical, since I don't know how much he was involved in those days, if I was so far away from him. But even at a distance my feelings about him changed from day to day, either because each thing that happened to me, though it had nothing to do with him, changed the way I felt about him, and what happened during the night, too, in a dream, or because my feelings simply aged and developed, day after day, like independent creatures, grew in intensity or weakened, deteriorated, sickened, healed.