The End of the Story (22 page)

The rain had stopped, so we put the card table out on the terrace and ate there, though it was dark. A little light came from candles on the table and the electric lights under the arcade, but it was still hard to see the food. I had not made any bad mistakes with the main part of our dinner, but I had put so much salt on the salad it was almost impossible to eat. Laurie said it was fine.

Laurie had brought a box of pastries for dessert. Madeleine came out of her wing of the house to say hello, and I invited her to have one. She took one, and stood there a little back from us eating it in the shadows of the large shrubs that grew against the glass wall of the arcade. She said a few things to Laurie that had an edge to them I don't think Laurie heard, mainly because Laurie did not think Madeleine was a person who needed to be listened to carefully, and then returned to her part of the house. I knew that later she would make fun of Laurie, for this was the sort of woman whose behavior, whose very nature, Madeleine despised—the glib sort of intelligence, the compulsive flirtations, the prurient curiosity, the lack of compassion. Laurie had other, better qualities, but they would not be likely to appear in Madeleine's presence.

I also knew that while Madeleine would now be sitting in her room brooding with disapproval about Laurie, her face no longer tender and kind, as it sometimes was, but sly and sarcastic, Laurie would also be contemplating Madeleine, and feeling comfortably fortunate compared to Madeleine with her solitude, her strange ways, her severity, her faded and musty Indian clothes, her smell of stale linen and garlic, her poverty.

By the time Laurie was gone, several hours had passed since I had walked around in the rain, and those hours now stood stoutly, as a good protection, between me and what I had been feeling and thinking before.

I spent the next morning working on a long letter to him. Then I stopped, not at the end of it, but because I had become more and more hopeless the longer I worked on it, and at last my hopelessness was too heavy to drag any farther: how weak those cramped black letters seemed, lying there on the page, page after page of them, babbling on to themselves, explaining, reasoning, complaining, pointing out logical inconsistencies, describing, persuading, etc.

I realize now that Laurie must also be the “L.H.” I was having lunch with when the skunk appeared among the students and faculty.

*   *   *

Late at night, when things were quiet, I heard not only the waves pounding on the beach but often, too, voices rising all around me, first the cat yowling with cries that were almost articulate, then the dog roused from its sleep, sleepy and gruff, and then, if I was reading, I would also hear the words I was reading, and if I was angry, they would be thin, mean, or querulous, traveling in lines across the page.

Trying to sleep, I lay on my side with my knees together and my hands, palms together, between my thighs. Or I lay on my back with my hands crossed over my chest and my feet crossed at the arches. I needed to touch my limbs together in a symmetrical arrangement, I needed to connect everything as much as possible, to feel tied together, and tied down to the mattress. If I lay still long enough, my body would seem to melt into the mattress so that there was nothing left there but a head on the pillow, eyes blinking, a brain in the head.

At times I could sleep only if I sat almost straight up against the bolster and two pillows. I coughed less in this position, and could fight off the disturbances that came to settle on my chest. I was less in the position of a person sleeping, and if I had the light on, too, I was closer to a person in a waking state, which was an easier state because it was more in my own control.

I was learning to wake myself up as soon as I began to fall asleep, and to correct myself when I began to dream: This is a dream, my mind would say, and I would wake up in order to start over again correctly. Sometimes my mind would not stop working in the first place.

Or sleep would descend suddenly on every part of my body at once, and my mind would notice this with surprise and wake me up. Or an odd noise would wake me up and first my heart would pound, then I would be filled with anger, and then my mind would begin working again, and go faster and faster.

In the middle of the night the cat, outside, would mew over a kill, then jump onto the screen, climbing and tangling her claws in the web with a harsh racket. Or a car with a loud motor would stop at the corner and my eyes would fly open. Either I lay still and listened or I kneeled on the bed and looked out the window. The car would drive on, and I would lie down again. Though my eyelids were closed, behind them my eyes were still open, staring into the darkness.

If I turned on the light, though it was so painfully bright, and wrote down what I was thinking, that might be enough. Or I read, or I got up and made warm milk or tea and went back to bed to drink it. It was not the drink that helped, probably, but the fact that I had done something to take care of myself, like a mother or a nurse.

And occasionally my mind would stop overseeing and correcting, my thoughts would become unreasonable, as they began to turn into dreams, and I had the sense, then, that my mind was actually eager to change everything from what it was into something else, that, in fact, it was just sitting there waiting for me to let go of my tight control.

As I was falling asleep, he would walk into a scene and wake me up, or images of him would become confused with other images and go on to become part of a dream. In one dream he said to me, “I've never had another lover like you,” but then he went away, to work in a café, he said. I followed him into the café, because, as always, I had more to say. But inside, he was in the driver's seat of a small dark car filled with other people, including a very pretty woman in the back seat. I felt betrayed again, that he had lied to me, and that he was with other people. He left the car and went into the men's room. I could not follow him there, so I went into a phone booth. But I did not call him.

Asleep, I was even more helpless against him. Yet sometimes it was a comfort to be with him that way in the night, even if it was only in a dream. Once, he came to where I was, in the dining hall of a public institution. He had changed: his face was lined and thinner and very sober. What mattered to me was that he had come back. There was a finality to it that ended many things besides my daydreaming. It was so final that we did not even discuss it, I simply knew we would be getting married now. I told my mother, and she was surprised, not because I had been on the point of marrying another man, as I had been, but because, as I told her about him, she confused him with a certain black man in show business. In the morning I stayed in bed as though to stay inside the long dream that still lay over the sheets.

All I remembered from another dream was that his vulgarity had not bothered me, though I did not know what that vulgarity had been. In yet another, my mother, old and not well, though still independent and cheerful, needed a companion. She told me, embarrassed, that he had agreed to go to Norway with her if the university would pay him a certain grant twice over.

On another night I was reading a book by Freud, and applying what I read directly to him as I read it. He had lent me three books that I had not given back. He had also brought over, one chilly night, a green plaid blanket that I had not given back. Now I lay under the blanket with two of his books next to me, reading the third. What I was reading was about forgetfulness. I read that for the person who forgot, forgetting was an adequate excuse, but for no one else. Everyone else correctly said, “He didn't
want
to do it! The matter did not interest him!” Freud called it “counter-will.” I said to myself that he forgot everything that did not touch him at the moment. But that was not entirely true or fair. If he wished to, however, he could forget everything else, particularly everything he found unpleasant, such as old creditors, old lovers, and other angry people in his life.

After turning off the light, I lay in the dark, relaxed and peaceful, and conjured up his image for the pleasure of looking at him, and for company, though I was too tired to imagine anything more—only his image standing in a well-lit place, against the wall of a room. I had him there, though he looked irritated, but as I began to fall asleep, of his own accord he turned and walked away, out of my sight, as though off a stage and into the wings, and I was startled. I woke up to think about what had happened: I had brought him there, but I had been too weak to hold on to his image and had lost control of it. Even though he was only an image, he had his own feelings, and he was there under protest, and as soon as I grew too weak to hold him, he walked away out of my sight.

*   *   *

I still have trouble sleeping. I am always a little short of sleep. If I slept more, the color might come back into my face and I wouldn't have such trouble holding on to a thought, or two at once, and I wouldn't keep getting sick. But it's complicated: if I get too much sleep one night I'm not tired enough to sleep well the next—either I can't fall asleep in the first place or I wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying. So I'm afraid of getting too much sleep and would rather get not quite enough so that I will sleep soundly.

Now and then I am too excited to sleep, because I have a plan to reform something: if not what we eat, which should be the diet of the hunter-gatherers, then what we have in our house, which should include as little plastic as possible and as much wood, clay, stone, cotton, and wool; or the habits of the people in our town, who should not cut down trees in their yards or burn leaves or rubbish; or the administration of our town, which should create more parks and lay down a sidewalk by the side of every road to encourage people to walk, etc. I wonder what I can do to help save local farms. Then I think we should keep a pig here to eat our table scraps, and that the Senior Citizens Center should keep a pig, too, because so much food is thrown out when the old people don't eat it, as I used to see when I went to pick up Vincent's father at lunchtime. The pig could be fattened on these scraps until the holiday season, and then provide the senior citizens with a holiday meal. A new baby pig could be bought in the spring and amuse the senior citizens with its antics.

Nowadays my nights are broken anyway, by Vincent's father, who has taken to rising at all hours. He wanders the hallways, creeping softly because he is so slow, and each time, when I hear the creak of a floorboard and get up, it is unnerving to find him out there barely moving, dimly lit by the streetlamp and the headlights of passing cars, his nightshirt white, his skin pale, his crooked hands outstretched for balance, his stale smell floating around him, a rather kindly smile on his face.

And then the next day, because I am so tired or maybe because of a state of mind induced by something else, as I sit here working I will see, out of the corner of my eye, mice running across my floor, but when I turn my head and look, they are only knotholes in the floorboards.

Tired, I try to make out a word I've written. I can't be sure of it. At the same time, I hear a voice in my head. It is my own voice speaking the word, strangely insistent, though my eyes still do not know what the word is.

On other days, my hand will keep typing a period after a word, trying to end a sentence before I'm ready to end it, as if my hand is trying to stop me from saying what I want to say.

The old man is up during the night, but he sleeps more and more during the day. Even when he is awake he sits quietly in one place, staring into the distance. His company is peaceful, like the company of a cow. In fact, like a cow, he often chews his cud as he stares into the distance. But it was not so long ago that he would grow excited if a visitor came to the house, and stand up, leaning on his walker. If he was asked a question about his health, he would begin to talk about Communism.

I have had trouble sleeping lately because I have been worrying about time and money again. I thought I could finish this in a year even if I stopped now and then to work on a translation. I did stop once to translate a very difficult story by an eighteenth-century writer I had never heard of. It was a silly story about a tryst in a summer house. But I was glad of the change, because in that work, the most important decisions had already been made by another person. I stopped again to translate another story from the eighteenth century, and then a third. Then I realized this was not a very good idea after all, because the year was passing quickly and I had no time to work on the novel. I had to think of something else. So I signed a contract for another, more extensive project, took a large advance for it, and then did not start working on it but instead continued working on the novel. Soon, whether I like it or not, I will have to begin translating again.

Because of all this worry, I began having problems with my stomach. I fussed over it, but I also abused it. I had to have my three or four cups of coffee in the morning even though I knew they were bad for me. I also ate no fruits or vegetables, only white bread and crackers. My health began to suffer.

Maybe I am trying to sabotage this as I come within sight of the end so that if I can't finish it I will have good excuses: a cold over the holidays that grew worse, turning into a mild case of pneumonia; two cracked ribs from coughing so hard; then what seemed like acute food poisoning but turned out to be a stomach flu. The flu lingered and became a general squeamishness about food, but when I realized my stomach problems were by then self-induced, they got better and I came down with another bad cold, this time affecting my sinuses.

A silly thought occurred to me the other day as I stopped work, went into the bathroom, and glanced at myself in the mirror. When I started trying to write this novel, years ago, I thought I looked pretty much like a translator but not at all like a novelist. Now on certain days I think I am beginning to look like a novelist. Glancing in the mirror, I said to myself, Maybe as long as I do not look like a person who has written a novel, I will have to go on working on this, and when at last I look like a person who could have written a novel, I will be able to finish it.