The End of the Story (13 page)

And the two visits were not the same. During the first, I stayed in my mother's house, a difficult place for me to be, and he and I missed each other intensely and straightforwardly. He wrote at least four letters to me, and I wrote back to him, though I don't know how many times. I telephoned him at least twice. By the time I went East for the second time, my mother's sister had moved in with her and I stayed in a borrowed apartment in the city and felt that what he and I had together was almost over.

I see that I'm shifting the truth around a little, at certain points accidentally, but at others deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable. If I now think I shouldn't have had a certain feeling so early in the relationship, I move it to a later point in time. If I think I shouldn't have had that feeling at all, I take it out. If he did something too dreadful to name, I either say nothing about it or describe it as dreadful without identifying it. If I did something too dreadful, I describe it in milder terms or do not mention it.

After all, there are things I like to remember and others I do not like to remember. I like to remember times when I behaved decently, also events that were exciting or interesting for another reason. I don't like to remember times when I behaved badly, or ugliness of a drab sort, though I don't mind a dramatic sort of ugliness. My boredom is unpleasant to remember, and so are certain events, like the visit he and I paid, after we were no longer together, to acquaintances of ours whom I did not like very much, in their ugly rented apartment, though for a long time I could not figure out why that particular visit was so unpleasant to remember.

*   *   *

One night, as I lay in bed in my mother's house, I stopped to think about the hero of the book I was reading, who was good, innocent, handsome, intelligent, illiterate, gifted in music, and of noble but mysterious birth. I was reminded of him, not because they had many qualities in common, but because of the position the hero occupied in the story, and the attitude of the other characters toward him.

Close to midnight, I left my bed to call him. I carried the telephone into the kitchen and shut both doors. My mother was a light sleeper, often wakeful, and she would not close her bedroom door at night because she did not like to feel shut up in a room, and also, probably, because she liked to know as much as possible about what went on in her house. She therefore heard every noise, often thought a noise was unusual, wondered what it was as she continued to lie in her bed, or got up out of bed to see what it was. But there were nights when she was not worried about anything, when she slept soundly and did not hear what was happening in her house, and I thought there was a good chance, by now, that she was too deeply asleep to hear me.

I was sure he would be surprised and happy to hear my voice, but he was quiet and rather cool, no more than mildly polite. After we had talked for a short time we hung up, and I stayed there in the kitchen sitting on a stool, trying to reason out why he was not more affectionate. I began to accept my disappointment. Then the phone rang. He was calling back, apologetic. Now he was everything he had not been before, ardent and talkative. He said he was sorry, and explained that he was trying to accept the fact that I was away, and had been managing pretty well, and that to hear my voice on the phone and to have to talk to me was difficult because it unsettled him, it undid the work he had done. He went on to say that he loved me and missed me very much, so much that it was painful.

At this point, over his voice, I heard my mother's footstep in the hall. The door from the hall opened, and my mother looked in. Her face in the full fluorescent light of the kitchen was swollen with sleep, disfigured, her eyes half shut against the light, her features disorganized. While I covered the mouthpiece of the receiver, as his tiny voice continued to talk on, unaware, away from my ear, she asked, “Is someone dead?”

*   *   *

By now, two letters had arrived from him. I read them over again and again, until the style in which they were written, impassioned and elegant at the same time, was so deeply impressed on me that when I myself wrote a letter to an old friend I found, as I wrote it, that I was writing in his style, and this felt like some sort of betrayal, though whether of him or my old friend I was not sure.

The distance made him seem even more silent, though in his two letters he might speak to me endlessly, as often as I read them and even when they only lay by my bed, unread but open.

A third letter arrived. I could tell it had been written a few days before, but it was dated a month earlier. He had these lapses, when his mind wandered, when he was not aware of the day and the hour or how the world outside worked, what schedule it worked to. At these times, he seemed to be looking away, and while he was looking away I could come closer to him than I could when he was fully conscious of the time and the place. And his lapses also seemed to be a proof of sincerity, because if he was not aware of the day of the week or the month, clearly he was not calculating all the moves he made, though he might be calculating some of them.

*   *   *

There are really only three things to include from that trip: my phone call to him, the letters he sent me, and my introduction to a certain man at a New Year's Eve party. I kept the phone number this stranger wrote down for me, and I called him two months later when I was in the East again. I think I kept it not because I was unhappy with what I had already but for quite the opposite reason, that coming together with one man in such perfect harmony, for a while anyway, had made me think that anywhere I went now, I might meet another man and come together with him in perfect harmony. The party was attended mainly by college teachers I did not know in a village a hundred miles from the city in the midst of a cold so bitter that the slightest breeze burned my face.

*   *   *

When I came back, my mind was more on my work than it was on him. It held my interest for longer periods of time without any thought of him distracting me.

There were other changes. Madeleine was always changing. She was always discovering something about herself, or entering a state or leaving a state, or entering a discipline or leaving a discipline, or consulting a specialist, or finding a new medium in which to work, or a new process, or a new place to work, and from time to time a new relationship, though whether it was more than a passionate and tumultuous friendship I could never be sure.

Now she had cut her hair very short. It gave her pale, lined face a look of frightening severity. She had been seeing an acupuncturist who told her everything in her body was reversed—the yin things were yang, he said. I did not understand very well what this meant, but with Madeleine I did not try to understand if I did not immediately grasp what she said. Now I would like to understand better, now I would ask what this meant.

He and I quarreled again. For two nights in a row, Madeleine had asked me for a potato and baked it, and this was all she had for supper. The third night I was cooking a steak and he had brought a bottle of wine to have with it, which was unusual. Madeleine asked me if she could eat with us. I thought I could not say no. She was generally spare in the way she lived and ate, she had very little money, and also seemed to prefer a way of life in which she needed and used very little. But now and then she would join me in a feast or another extravagance and partake with high spirits and wit, as though she were returning to an earlier way of life. This evening she ate a large piece of steak and drank several glasses of wine. I enjoyed her company, but he was angry that she was eating with us.

The next morning I became angry at him in turn, about something else, something he and Madeleine had done at dinner, and we quarreled. As for Madeleine, she complained to me that she had had trouble digesting the food, that so much meat and wine were not good for her. She spoke out angrily against all meat-eaters and went on for some time without appearing to expect an answer from me.

Only a few days later, he and I quarreled again. I had read aloud to him a story I had written in which he appeared and he was pleased, but then I took him out of it before I read it aloud to other people and he was angry. He thought I was ashamed of him. I denied it. As we quarreled, we became increasingly angry. I was angrier than he was, maybe realizing that what he said was true, in a certain sense, and why it was true, though I hadn't recognized it before. I wished it were not true, and I did not like him to point it out to me.

He left the house. I went to bed calm and angry and read a book, and a few hours after, he returned. He admitted later that he knew that staying away would have no effect on me, since I was too angry to care whether or not he stayed away, so he returned. Months later I put him back in the story in the same place he had been before, because I was sorry for what had happened. But by then he did not care anymore.

At some point during these days, maybe because he felt things between us were coming apart a little, he said we should get married. But since he could be almost certain I would refuse, his proposal did not seem sincere. Because it was sudden and even a little desperate, it seemed to mean only that he was trying to capture me, to keep me.

I think I made fun of him for it. But after he left me, I was the one who said I would marry him, if he wanted me to, and when that had no effect, when he resisted me, I went further, I offered more. I realized later that it was perfectly safe to say anything then, since nothing was possible. He seemed either insulted or ashamed for my sake, and impatient with me, as though I had belittled what he had once felt, and my own feelings, too. Now that I was willing, or said I was willing, to give him everything I had not been willing to give him before, he didn't want anything from me. Or all he wanted was for me to leave him alone, and I couldn't do that.

*   *   *

I was walking along a path surrounded only by cliffs, rocks, and sand—there were no plants of any kind. A young man ran past me, then stopped and turned back, disoriented and anguished, and told me that his home kept changing, so much that he could not recognize it. I woke up a little and realized that this was a dream, and went on dreaming. He and I entered a wooden house together. It was evidently his home. Then, even as we stood in it, it became the set for a play, and it changed each time the act changed, though I don't remember what went on in this play, if anything went on.

*   *   *

We quarreled again, it must have been for the fifth time. That night he left me, angry, and then came back. He came back as though against his will, since he was still angry. The next night and for several days after that he did not come to me at all, and during that time I did not know where he was. I had told him something that shocked him. It did not shock me, because I was only saying to him what I had been thinking for some time, and it did not hurt me, because I was the one saying it. It only shocked me later, when I saw it differently, and saw how he would not have wanted to hear it. At the time I thought I could tell him anything I liked, quite openly, and he would be able to understand it and sympathize with it, as though he were not a separate person anymore but a part of me, so that he could feel what I felt along with me and not be more troubled by it than I was.

He was calm at first, after I said what I said that shocked him, but then he became angry and went away. He went away, and then came back later, still angry. He took sheets from the dryer and put them on the bed while I watched. He went to bed and fell asleep without saying anything.

He did not appear the next night and did not call me. I called his apartment, and there was no answer. I kept getting up out of bed to call him and then going back to bed and trying to read. I was surprised to find, however, that even though he had slept in my bed nearly every night since we had met, I felt I had immediately returned to what I had been before, alone at night, as though I had never met him.

Yet at the same time I was thinking of him so constantly, so much more constantly than I had when he was with me, and with such concentration, that he was extremely present in the room, coming between me and whatever else I tried to think about. I could see that I had betrayed him by feeling what I had felt and saying what I had said, but I could also think that such a betrayal produced a kind of faithfulness, because I had aroused such feelings of ardor and remorse in myself that I managed to achieve a passionate loyalty I had not achieved before. So there I lay, alone, as though I would always be alone, but also strangely in his presence.

I was afraid to turn off the light, though it was past one in the morning, and then two, and then three. As long as the light burned next to me and I held a book in front of me and read the page now and then, I was safe, I was distracted from certain thoughts. The worst thought was that he might have gone to someone else out of revenge, and I could not avoid that thought for long before it came back to me. And this turned out to be what he had done, I found out later.

I knew it was not fair to believe I could do what I liked and he could not, that I could have a certain feeling for another man and he could not go to another woman, but I never decided anything according to what was fair, or maybe never decided anything in the first place but allowed myself to be pulled in one direction or another by what I wanted just at that moment.

Early in the morning, after I had been asleep a short time, I dreamed I heard his step on the terrace outside. In my dream the dog whined and he said to her gently: “Is she here?”

But he had not come by the time I woke up. Later in the day Madeleine and I went down the block to the corner café and sat at a table outside studying Italian together. We went through the lesson slowly because we were both distracted: I was watching out for him, and Madeleine was convinced that two people standing at a nearby corner were talking about her. She kept looking over her shoulder at them and mumbling, so that I, as I tried to take dictation from her, couldn't hear very well. After a while we stopped trying to work and just sat there in the sunlight.