The End of the Story (17 page)

Since the letter I wrote to him about the stranger's visit is dated, I can now figure out the date on which I saw the stranger and then telephoned with my pathetic question, and I see I was right: that was the conversation that lasted thirty-seven minutes. But what I also learn from the letter is that he had told me in an earlier conversation that he was now seeing this woman, and once I knew this I became more passionate, or more frantic.

I knew she was living there with him by then, spending nights with him. I knew she was more than just a friend from school. What worried me, what I wanted to know from him, and what he did not tell me honestly, was whether this thing that was going on between them was going to be permanent or was going to end when I returned home. I did not want him to see another woman, though I could see another man. I could see another man because that did not hurt me, and I avoided what would hurt me and went after what would give me pleasure.

But not wanting him to see another woman was more than jealousy. If he was with someone else, he was suddenly very far away from me. His attention was turned on her and not on me, as it had been before, even from such a distance. The light of his attention was off me.

It doesn't matter to me that we talked for exactly thirty-seven minutes, but it did matter to the telephone company, and while I was brooding about the conversation in the privacy of my borrowed apartment, and later, far away from there, not knowing just how long it had lasted, this large company, the phone company, was recording on this document, the phone bill, exactly how long the conversation had lasted, along with the other long-distance conversations I had on that phone, and it then sent out that information, though it didn't care what use was made of it as long as the bill was paid.

I don't know why I need to reconstruct all this—whether it is important for a reason I haven't discovered yet, or whether I simply like to answer a question once I see how to answer it.

*   *   *

The night I came home, he met me at the airport in his car, as he had promised he would, but he was not very friendly and told me on the way up the coast that he had some bad news.

I knew what the bad news was, but I didn't want him to tell me until we were sitting in the bar and I had a glass of beer in my hand. Then he told me everything had changed. He said it was all over for him, it hadn't been working out and he didn't want to go on with it. We had both ordered large meals. After he told me this, I couldn't eat anything, so he finished his meal and then ate most of mine. Because he had no money with him, I paid for the food. I didn't get angry or cry. I tried to be friendly, because as long as I was sitting there with him, it didn't seem to be over. After he was finished eating, a little more relaxed because of the beer, or touched by my protests, he kissed me and said he would have to come to see me again because he had nowhere to live.

He later denied saying this. It didn't make sense even to me, because he had a place to live. He was still living in his apartment. He was living with a woman his own age—a small, dark, athletic woman, Madeleine told me. She had seen them together in the supermarket. She was angry. She said he had left me while I was away, after I had helped him out of so many difficulties.

Later that evening, when I was alone, I was sorry I had been pleasant. In the days and weeks after that, I occasionally cried or got angry on the phone talking to him. But whenever I was with him again, I felt there was still a chance, so I was pleasant again.

I had trouble sleeping that night. I fell asleep at two, and dreamed about him, then woke at six, toward dawn, and lay awake. I had a grim vision that seemed true just because it formed so quickly and so distinctly: I saw myself turning forty within a few years, leading what I called an “empty” life, doing dull work and doing it badly, and not loving any man, or at least no man who also loved me.

Only some of this happened the way I had predicted it would. When I turned forty, my life was not empty. Some of the work I did was dull, and I did some of it badly, which embarrassed me, but I did more of it well, and most of it was interesting. I did love two men who did not love me, or not at the same time that I loved them, but I also loved one man who loved me, too, and at the same time, which seemed to me a rare piece of good fortune.

Although I was with other men after him, some who mattered only a little to me and others who mattered more, my feelings for him did not change as quickly as I would have thought. Where did I keep them during those years? Did they sit intact in a group in my brain somewhere? Did I have only to open the door to that small area of my brain to experience them again?

*   *   *

The next day, the hours passed slowly, as though much more time were passing, as though whole days were passing. Yet I could not get used to the new situation. I felt I had just heard this news a moment before.

There were other, smaller changes. The dryer was broken. Madeleine had been wearing my clothes, and she had burnt one of my shirts drying it in the oven. She told me she had allowed a friend of hers, a policeman, to sleep in my room while I was away, and he had left such a smell she had had to air the place out. There was something wrong with my car. It wouldn't start at first, and when it did start, it roared. He had had his car fixed but had not paid me back my money. Now his car was quiet and mine roared. Maybe he had been getting his car fixed with my money on the same day I had called that man I barely knew.

Because the dryer was broken, I hung my damp clothes from the rafter of the spare room, so that it was full of white garments swaying in the breeze that came in through the window.

I did what I had to do, though it was hard because I kept thinking about him. I was afraid of what would happen when the evening and the night came. A band of tightness around my throat now made it hard for me to swallow, and I kept pulling at the neck of my sweater. It was not my sweater choking me but something inside me.

I could hardly eat, though I wanted to get a little food into my body. I felt sick to my stomach at the smell of food and then at the first bite. I could only take a little fruit, dry bread, certain vegetables, water, and juice.

I seemed to float, as though anchored to nothing. Nothing was quite real, or it was hard to tell what was real and what was not. Real things in the room looked thin and transparent, part of a flat surface of colors and patterns lining the sides of the room.

When at last I went to bed that night, I couldn't stop coughing and lay in the dark trying to keep very still. Although I wouldn't be able to hear the sound of his car, now that it was fixed, I still listened for it because my ears were used to doing that, and I heard cars that had nearly the same sound his car had once had.

As I lay there, coughing, not sleeping, I became more and more angry. Though it was late, I got up and telephoned him. There was no answer. Now I was angrier, because if he was in another place, he was not alone, and if he was not alone, he was not even thinking of me. This was what disturbed me most, that he was almost surely not thinking of me. If he had forgotten me, where was I, and who was I? I could tell myself I was still there, and still myself, but I didn't feel it.

I went back to bed, tried to read, couldn't read, turned off the light, became angry at myself, too, and then at everyone I knew. I started to fall asleep, was woken by my own surprise at falling asleep, and began coughing again. Later I fell asleep again, and woke up coughing again. This happened over and over, until at last I put two pillows on top of a bolster and slept the rest of the night leaning up against them with a piece of wet kleenex on my forehead.

In the morning, Madeleine called a friend of hers, a mechanic who did independent work, and he came over to look at my car, first outside the house in the rain and then, after he got it started, down in the garage. The phone rang while I was watching the mechanic out the window.

*   *   *

At this point in the story there is another difficult memory. He had called to say we were invited to the house of a man and woman who did not know we were not still together. I think I should include the visit just because it took place, but it irritates me. The four of us sat in a small living room and I kept looking across the carpet at him and feeling sick, pinching myself on the neck so that I wouldn't faint, looking away from him out the plate-glass window or at the man and woman who had invited us here. The man was the one who had gone out on a boat with us to watch whales and ignored me so completely. After an hour or so, we left and he drove me home.

I don't know why that visit bothers me so much. What I was looking at, through the picture window of their rented apartment, was a square patch of lawn and beyond it the tall grasses or reeds that bordered a narrow stream. This was the same stream, though at a different point in its course, that I had seen from the other side, and much farther away, when he and I walked out on the coast road to buy beer at the small grocery many months before.

Was it that I didn't know these two people very well and didn't like them very much? Or that their rented, furnished apartment was so small and so ugly, with its brown furniture, brown walls, and metallic, yellowish drapes? Or that he and I had to pretend, in this place and with these people, that nothing had changed? The man and the woman were coming to the end of their stay here, and this was part of their preparation to leave—one last, awkward social visit with us and then a few days later they would call him and ask him if he could drive them to the airport.

*   *   *

After he told me so abruptly that it was over, I lost interest in everything else. What he was doing to me now, the fact that he was not with me but with someone else, had become a substance that seeped through my brain, that ebbed, rose again, was present and then gone, like a smell or taste. It would fade away for a while, and I would be aware that it was not in me. Then suddenly, for no reason, it would rise again and its bitterness would spread and penetrate everywhere.

I couldn't help thinking he might still come back to me because he had loved me so much before, and because I had never known him any other way but loving me. For the first few days, I did not give up trying to persuade him to talk to me. I did not care that he was with another woman. I used the telephone. He had to answer it, since it might be someone else. Then he had to talk to me at least briefly, to be polite.

I couldn't argue with him if he said he didn't want to go on with it, but I also couldn't help trying to make him talk to me about it. He wouldn't talk to me in any way that satisfied me. I thought he should tell me he had once loved me deeply, and that he was still the same person, but that his feelings had changed for certain reasons that he could explain. He should then explain what his feelings had been and why they had changed. He should also admit that he had left me without warning, and that when he had told me on the telephone, long distance, that things were still all right, he was lying.

If I couldn't be with him and he wouldn't talk to me, I at least wanted to know where he was. Sometimes I found him, though more often I did not. Even if I did not, I still preferred looking for him to sitting at home.

One evening, I drove several towns north to have dinner with Mitchell. I could hardly talk to him and only felt sick, again, at the sight of the ham rolled up into little bundles and the butter on the table. Mitchell always took great care over his meals, so there must have been good bread, maybe special pickles and special mustard. He was concentrating on his plan for the meal and on serving it, while I was trying to stay in control of what I was feeling. At last he mentioned something too difficult for me to hear just then and I could not go on eating.

Soon after dinner I left and drove down the coast road toward home. It was raining hard, but because the road passed through the town where he lived, within a block of his apartment, I could not drive on through it but had to turn and drive a block toward the ocean, through a small square with a fountain. I turned right again, out of the square, and stopped the car by the curb where I could look over a rooftop to his balcony and his lighted windows. There were no curtains over the windows, but I couldn't see anything inside the apartment very clearly because it was far away and high up, and because of the heavy rain.

I rolled down my window. I saw a form moving back and forth across his kitchen window. It seemed to be moving more quickly than he would move, and the hair on its head was darker than his hair. I decided to go up to the balcony and see exactly who it was. I started the car again, and drove into the parking lot behind his building. The rain was drumming on the concrete balcony, covering the sound of my footsteps as I climbed softly up the stairs. Below me, as I walked along the balcony, was the roof of the cactus nursery, and around it, in the nursery yard, the indistinct shapes of the massed cactus plants. I was wearing a dark slicker and boots. It was dark outside, where I was, and light inside, in his rooms.

I looked in quickly through a window and saw a woman with short brown hair lying on his bed reading. Her legs were crossed at the ankles. From this distance, across the wide room, and through the wet window, her face looked smug and unpleasant. I looked to the right and saw him moving around silently in his little kitchen. I turned away to look again at the woman on his bed, and he appeared suddenly in the doorway to the room, unexpectedly close to me, though on the other side of the glass, and he was speaking to her, though I could not hear what he said but could only see his mouth moving. I stepped back from the window.

I left the balcony, went down to the car, and drove away. My cheeks were hot. I turned the radio on. I realized later that the rain had made it easier for me to do what I did, because it separated me not only from what I saw outside the car but even from myself, and the sound of the rain separated me from what I might have thought.