The End of the Story (20 page)

When he and I were still together I either knew where he was or did not mind not knowing, because we would not be separated long, and did not want to be separated. Now that he was away from me almost all the time, I knew he was away by choice and might not reappear unless I fought to get him where I could see him and keep him there. Worse, he might disappear completely, I might never be able to find him again.

A part of me had grown into him at the same time that a part of him had grown into me. That part of me was still in him now. I looked at him and saw not only him but myself as well, and saw that that part of myself was lost. Not only that, but I saw that I myself in his eyes, as he regarded me, as he loved me, was lost, too. I did not know what to do with the part of him that had grown into me. There were two wounds—the wound of him being still inside me and the wound of the part of myself in him torn out of me.

For an hour or so I watched and smoked. Was I also bored? Did I, just for a moment anyway, see him as nothing more than a boy in the distance, a college boy playing basketball? Or did it give me pleasure to reduce him to that, since it appeared to make him harmless? Or is it only now that I think I should have been bored, and my need was so strong just to know where he was that to satisfy it was enough and there was no question of being bored?

Then he walked away from the court toward my car, which I had parked in a spot he would have to pass on his way back to his apartment. He came close enough so that I could lean over to the open passenger window and call out to him. He looked around, surprised, at my second call, came over, laughed to see me there, and got into the car beside me. The heat from his body gradually covered the windows with mist. He smiled at me and put his hand on the back of my neck. While I talked to him and drove the few hundred yards to his building, I wondered exactly why he had his hand on my neck. Then he took his hand off my neck. I went up to his apartment with him. I sat on the edge of the bed and he sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. He seemed to consider going to the party with me. He was damp all over and still flushed. His sweat was drying on him, probably chilling him. I thought he was waiting for me to leave so that he could take a shower, and after a short time I left.

*   *   *

Vincent sits there in a flowered armchair in our living room and winces at the thought that I might put anything sentimental or romantic in the novel. He says that if the novel is about what I say it's about, there shouldn't be any intimate scenes in it. This makes sense to me. I don't like the intimate scenes that I have in it so far, though I'm not sure why. I should probably try to see why before I take them out, but I think that, instead, I will take them out first and try to understand why later. For instance, I have never liked describing my visit to his apartment after the basketball game, and I have made it shorter and shorter. I have not minded describing the thoughts I had while I sat smoking in the car.

Vincent happens to be reading a novel that includes the same sorts of things he hopes I will leave out. He doesn't think they belong in that novel either—he describes to me how the woman lusts for the man until she can hardly bear it, and how he consents to satisfy her, though he deserts her again after only a few hours. I don't think Vincent likes the book enough to go on with it.

But I suspect he thinks I should also leave out my feelings, or most of them. Although he values feelings in themselves and has many strong feelings of different kinds, they do not particularly interest him as things to be discussed at any length, and he certainly does not think they should be offered as justifications for bad actions. I'm not writing the book to please him, of course, but I respect his ideas, though they are often rather uncompromising. His standards are very high.

It occurs to me that although I used to go to a lot of parties, I describe only two in the novel and, in the case of the second, only what was missing from it. Now even the word “party” seems to belong to another time, to the life of a younger woman.

It is not that I don't go to parties. But I don't go often enough so that I think of myself as a person who goes to parties. Only a few nights ago, though, Vincent and I went to a reception. It was at a nearby college, for the incoming head of a department. It did not sound exciting even on the formal invitation, but for some reason which he would not explain, Vincent thought we should go. He said we should send back the formal acceptance card and ask the nurse to stay late.

When the night came, it was raining, as Vincent pointed out several times. He said it was supposed to turn colder and asked what we would do, for instance, if we came out of the reception and found that the road was a sheet of ice. He said we probably wouldn't know anyone there, but then he named two people who might be there. He said we would have to change our clothes, but since he clearly still felt we should go, we changed our clothes. I put on a woolen suit and he put on a clean shirt and a tie and an old sports jacket, and we started off through the rain. We were very late.

But the reception was at its height. There was a dense crowd of older men in dark suits, sober-looking younger men, and women in cocktail outfits. There was space only around the jazz trio. Vincent didn't seem to know anyone there, and if I drifted away from him to look at the selection of drinks or the platter of cheese and grapes on a table by itself in a corner, I would glance up to find he had followed me, agreeable and open to conversation, a plastic cup of mulled cider in his hand. We lingered here for a while, then went to look at the fire burning in the lobby fireplace, and then at a reading room in the back of the building. When we returned to the main room, the din of chattering voices was the same, and we still didn't see anyone we knew, so we found our coats in the hall and headed for the door. As we were leaving, a friendly young woman with a name tag pinned to her dress talked to us for a minute or two and thanked us for coming.

I had not drunk anything, and had eaten only a couple of grapes. On the way home, Vincent said that in fact he had recognized one man and spoken to him, but the man did not seem to remember him. Then he added that it was quite possible some people we knew had been there earlier and had left.

But the strange thing is that because the rooms in the old college building were so spacious and handsome, because food and drink and music were offered, because the young woman with the name tag said good night to us so pleasantly, and most of all because so many people were smiling and talking, even if not to us, a feeling of welcome and festivity still lingers today, despite the fact that Vincent and I arrived there and left almost unnoticed.

*   *   *

Madeleine often sensed, through the walls, from her part of the house, that I was about to do something I shouldn't. Then she came and kept me company, talked to me, told me stories, or took a walk with me. At least twice we went to the movies.

She told me how she met the man she later lived with in Italy. She was with another man at the time, a sailor. She was washing the side of a boat which her lover was about to take to Tahiti, when the end of her broom fell off into the water. The Italian, who happened to be nearby, paddled up, fished it out of the water, and handed it back to her. A few days later, she sat crying on the dock. Her lover had hit her in the mouth. The Italian saw her again and felt sorry for her. They lived in Cuba together and then in Italy with his family, where she had servants who did everything for her, who ironed her clothes for her. She said that made her uncomfortable.

I have been assuming that the port in which the boats were docked was in the city near where we lived, the same port where he would later be packing sea urchins, but this may not be true.

Other friends told me stories, too. Ellie told me about her life with her husband. After she agreed to marry him, she did not like him anymore, though she had liked him before. They went off to a resort town on the Atlantic coast, and there he seemed very short to her, shorter than he had ever been before. Once they were married, they argued. She was very loud and angry, and he was silent and anxious to end the argument, and this made her even angrier. She told me that there might be an argument before friends came to their house for dinner, and the argument would stop when the friends arrived. She and he would pretend there was nothing wrong, even though she had been throwing cheese and crackers around the room. By the time the friends left, her husband would think the argument was over, but the moment they were out of the house, she would start in again.

It is not easy to live with another person, at least it is not easy for me. It makes me realize how selfish I am. It has not been easy for me to love another person either, though I am getting better at it. I can be gentle for as long as a month at a time now, before I become selfish again. I used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers, writers who did not interest me otherwise, like Hippolyte Taine or Alfred de Musset. For instance, Taine said that to love is to make one's goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.

*   *   *

I have opened the envelope Ellie sent me and looked at the pictures. I won't look at them again very soon because I did not like the shock of seeing them. I did not know those faces, I did not recognize them. I did not know those prominent cheekbones. I did not know the man who belonged to them. And I could not make myself look at them long enough to get used to them.

Looking at the pictures made me think that I don't really know what sort of person he was, either, because I never saw him from the outside. I knew him for only half a day before I was too close to see him from the outside, and by then it was too late ever again to see him from the outside. I would like to know what I would think of him now.

I have images of him in my memory, fragments of things he said, and impressions, some of which are contradictory, either because he was inconsistent or because of my own mood now: if I am angry, he will seem shallow, cruel, and conceited; and if I am soft and tender, he will seem faithful, honest, and sensitive. The center is missing, the original is gone, all that I try to form around it may not resemble the original very much. I am thinking of some example from the natural world in which the living thing dies and then leaves a husk, sheath, carapace, shell, or fragment of rock casing imprinted with its form that falls away from it and outlasts it. Not knowing him now, I may be imagining his motives and feelings to be quite different from what they were, or since I am so constantly with Vincent, I may be borrowing motives from Vincent. I try to identify a motive, and identify one that could only belong to Vincent.

*   *   *

The first time Madeleine and I went to the movies, we drove several towns north to a small theater, a friendly place, warmly lit in the midst of the blackness around it. We saw a movie that frightened us both, about a dangerous political situation.

The next time we tried to go to the movies, it was in the same small movie theater. We were too early and had to sit through the end of the previous movie, then through a dreary short with fuzzy, underexposed still photographs of the town we were in, accompanied by inappropriate music. When the movie began, we were both so disturbed by the opening scenes in a Roman bath, involving white-faced figures in togas, that we left.

I had forgotten him while I was inside the movie theater, but as we drove back down the coast, we passed through his town, and then, at home, pictures of him kept floating between me and the pages of the book I was trying to read.

I had told myself to read books that would make me forget everything else. But I know the book I was reading that night was by Henry James. I can't understand why I would choose to read Henry James at such a time. Maybe I was simply more ambitious in those days. Now I will read almost anything, if it has a good story in it—the trials of a nurse in a large city hospital, the account of an English missionary leading Chinese children over the mountains to the Yellow River, the tale of a woman who cured herself of cancer in a Mexican clinic, the autobiography of a teacher of Maori children in New Zealand, the life of the Trapp family singers, etc. If I am trying to take my mind off something painful, this is the sort of book I will choose now. But then I did not choose books that really distracted me, only books that left part of my mind still free to wander away from what I was reading and search around restlessly for the same old bone to gnaw on.

The book was open in front of me, but I could not understand what it was saying, or if I concentrated hard on the sentences, whose many parts all had to be kept in mind at once, and understood it, I forgot almost immediately what I had read. My mind wandered from it constantly, I constantly pulled my mind back to it, and finally I was exhausted by this struggle, and still didn't remember anything from the few pages I had read.

I stopped to think about other things, people in other places who had injured me. For instance, he was not the only person who owed me money. There was the owner of a small city newspaper who had given me bad checks for my typesetting work, and also a couple from Yuma, Arizona, who had backed their van into my car in a state park. I couldn't forget these sums of money, though I knew other people might feel that a debt could gradually be forgotten as time went by, until it no longer had to be honored.

There was also a landlady of mine, a ruthless, heartless woman who owned many properties in the part of the city where I lived and who had charged me rent for several days during which I no longer lived in her apartment. I thought about the shabby apartment I had rented from her, its large, empty rooms, how the streetlights shone in through the curtainless windows, how the traffic lights at the corner clicked as they changed in the silence of the early morning, how during the day the heavy trucks and vans rattled over the dents in the street under my windows, how she would not spend the money needed to maintain the place, and how she was later murdered in her garage. I thought about the streets I walked through in those days on my way to work, early in the morning, how I unlocked the empty newspaper building with my own key, how I sat alone typesetting ads and news items in a small windowless room on the ground floor.