The End of the Story (25 page)

In this same week, my mother and her sister arrived to stay with us for a while, and the house seemed suddenly full of people, because the two of them talked so much more, and so much more loudly, than Madeleine and I did, and made so many complicated plans, and left their things, their sweaters and purses, newspapers, magazines, pens, and glasses, in little heaps in whatever room they entered. Madeleine felt crowded and went up the hill to stay with a friend.

It was while they were here that I had the worst dream of all, though a very simple one: I was fondling the body of some sort of wild animal, probably a warthog.

*   *   *

At last, on the afternoon of the party, he called to say that he did want to go, but added quickly that he intended to take his girlfriend with him. I became angry and told him he could not do that. Now he became angry. I became even angrier, that he had dared to be angry at me.

Over and over again, after I hung up, I imagined him walking into the party with this woman. I saw them standing together in the front doorway, even though the front doorway would have been too narrow. I imagined being violent in some way toward him. But as I sat there in my room, and then stood and walked around, being violent in my imagination, he could not feel this violence, wherever he was. At the time, it seemed to me it would not be wrong to be violent.

Since I spent most of that evening within sight of the front door, waiting for him at the same time that I was talking to other people and drinking, the party seemed empty, though it was crowded. Part of my mind was always outside, on the wide, dark highway floating or gliding down the coast between high gasoline signs, in the car with him and his girlfriend as they sat together looking ahead at the road, the lights of the oncoming cars shining on their faces, and then in the small streets in the neighborhood of the party, where the stores were all closed, the low clouds in the sky pink from the downtown city lights nearby, the tall and short palms dark against them, and the old, single-storied, stucco houses set back from the road on uneven, weedy lawns behind shabby stone walls and rusty iron railings.

I returned from the party in the early hours of the morning. As I waited, nearly home, for the light to change at a deserted intersection, as I kept my eyes on the red light and the green light, surrounded by silence after the babble of voices I had been hearing for so many hours, music came suddenly from somewhere very loud in the stillness and then stopped just as suddenly, and I felt two or three things coming together to reveal something to me. Then there was no revelation, after all, only a blank space.

In the afternoon, I sat outside on the terrace in the sun. Little lavender flowers were appearing in the beds of rubbery sea fig out by the road, and because I hadn't expected this, it was like a sudden gift. Nearby there were larger cups of yellow on another plant, and then on the heavy jade bush that leaned over the fence, those tiny white blossoms with their thick, sweet lemon smell that so often blew in the window or hit me in a wave as I walked in under the trees from the road.

For several hours I sat on the terrace, my head in the shade of a tree, now and then thinking of my mother and her sister at the animal park, waiting for them to come back. It was a long wait. His anger floated over the pages of my book. He had told me it wasn't good that I still cared for him. Really, I thought, he was angry because he had wanted to go to the party. His anger was a childish anger that excluded everything but himself. Then there had been his sudden violence when he said, “No!” to some question of mine.

The mourning doves in the cedar tree flapped and cooed. Laughter nearby echoed off a wall. Either a kite or a bird floated up against the clouds in the far distance.

I missed him all over again now that my mother and her sister were here, as though I had to miss him all over again in every new situation. That evening, I left them in their room and went into my own room, though I did not close my door. I sat down to work at my card table, but only stared at the window. Although it was early in the evening, I was too tired to work and too tired even to go to bed. I moved my work aside and started putting together a jigsaw puzzle instead. An hour went by. The evening was warm, and through the open windows floated the smells of the flowers again and of the cedar tree. Along with the smells came the sounds of a party across the street: bursts of loud laughter, music on a piano, and car doors slamming. My mother and her sister started talking in low voices in the hallway, worried about me, I was sure. Then my mother, wearing a soft robe, came in with the air of an emissary, evasive, hesitant, touching the edge of my table, wanting to communicate something. I did not want to communicate anything or hear anything, and as I barely spoke to her, at last she left.

Now I was too embarrassed by their attention to continue with the puzzle. I took a step out the door and walked away from the house. My errand was to buy some cat food. The road was dark and quiet. The cat was very pregnant and we were waiting for her to have her kittens any day now. We were worried because she was so young. I walked to the store smoking a cigarette and bought the cat food and a pack of cigarettes and lit another cigarette before leaving the store. I walked down the street slowly. I walked to the supermarket parking lot. By now I had done it so often that it was not much more than a habit. The road was the most likely place I would find him, if I was going to find him, or his car. And a dark road at night always reminded me of other dark roads, so that there seemed to be more room to breathe and to think, and more possibilities. Even away from the house, a strong smell of flowers continued to hang on the air, from other gardens. Old people were walking in one direction and another. I saw many cars in the parking lot, but not his. I had never seen it there, all the many times I had looked for it.

I walked back up the steep hill. In the darkest shadows under some trees, away from the lights of the supermarket, a bowed old man stood still, hugging a large brown bag of groceries. When I came up to him, he asked me with formal politeness what was happening: there were so many cars in the parking lots of the church and the supermarket. It took me a minute to connect one thing with another, and when I did, I told him the teenagers one street over were having a large party. He merely said, “Thank you,” and turned away up the hill while I entered my own road, darker and narrower. Returning to myself after going out to the old man, I found that most of my difficult mood was gone, as though he had taken it away up the hill with him. His dignity, and the simplicity of his question and my answer, had changed something.

Later that night, after the party quieted down, I heard cicadas trilling rhythmically, steadily, and in the distance a mockingbird singing a song that kept changing in the dark and went on and on, for hours. In the shower, I watched a soaked little moth climb the inside of the shower curtain. The wallpaper peeled up from the gray plaster with its black mildew stains. When I got into bed there were drifts of dark gray sand in my sheets.

*   *   *

I saw him only two or three more times after that, as though the spring, growing hotter day by day, were drying him, a damp spot, out of my life.

He came to the house one evening. He must have realized from the way I stood or talked to him that I was not trying to go after him anymore, because he said a few things, and made a gesture or two, that seemed to invite me back to him again.

Out on the street, looking around at the house and the neighborhood, he said suddenly, as though he had just thought of it, that maybe he could live in my garage. I walked down to it with him and we stood inside it in the dark. There was enough light to see the oil stains in the concrete. He asked me if he was crazy to think of it. It was dry inside and smelled clean. Yes, I thought, he could live there, in my garage, we would fix the electric light, I would make sure he was all right, I would have him there where I could watch him, where I could see him come and go, and he would have to be friendly to me, because he would be living in my garage. I did not know whether or not he meant to bring his girlfriend with him.

But Madeleine did not want this. She said she would not be able to stand it, and no, it wouldn't help him, no, it wouldn't help us either, and no, in this sort of neighborhood you certainly couldn't have people living in a garage.

After this, I thought he wouldn't communicate with me again. Why would he bother?

I was again trying to plan how I would write the story of it, though it was still going on. I thought I would start it in the sun and end it in the sun. I thought I would start it in his garage and end it in a different garage, my garage. Though he hadn't moved into my garage, I would say that he had. There would be a great deal of rain in the middle of the story.

But I was wrong. After a few days, he did call. It was evening. In the background was a violent clatter of laughing voices. It was too bad about the garage, he said. He said he didn't actually need a place to sleep, just a place to work. And he really had in mind the garage, not the spare room. Well, it didn't matter, he said.

Two weeks later he called again, this time to say that he needed a place to store his things. He asked me if he could keep them in my garage. I was just then putting my mother and her sister and their luggage into my car. I must have said I would call him back. I drove them down to the airport. I don't know if it was then that I saw so many soldiers and sailors in the airport, as though the country were mobilizing for a war. They were strolling about in pairs, their heads closely sheared, or sitting silently between their parents, their elbows on their knees, staring at the carpet. I do remember that the music in the background had nothing to do with the mood of any of us, my family or the soldiers, and that outside the window was a black figure, spread-eagled, cleaning the plate glass. Instead of talking, we let our eyes follow the motions of this figure as we waited for their plane to be announced.

He did store his things in my garage, but I don't remember just when he moved them in. I walked down to see it while he did it, he and another man. They unloaded a small truck, I suppose it was a pickup truck.

He put his things in my garage, and Madeleine lent him and his girlfriend a pup tent, because now they had nowhere to live. They slept in the pup tent in the thick eucalyptus woods on the campus, continuing to go to their classes during the day. There was hardly any sign of him through May, or through June.

I saw him once in that time. I was walking past the cafeteria on campus, and he called after me, but I could not stop to talk and he seemed sorry. It was still hard for me to see him. But I don't know if the pain still came directly from the separation or if by then I associated a certain familiar pain with the sight of him and always would, so that even now, all these years later, I would feel the same pain if I saw him, though it would be strangely unconnected to anything else in my life.

*   *   *

In June a fair came to town. By the coast road the lights of the fairgrounds at night were reflected in the water of the inlet, the colors turning on the Ferris wheel and the other rides. From a distance the sound of the Ferris wheel was like a steady wind in the trees, blowing on and on. It was a little colder at night now. The smell of woodsmoke hung in the air over the streets, and around the house a smell like honeysuckle. The spare room, empty and chilly, filled with the pungent smell of eucalyptus.

Classes were over, people went away, and there were long periods of time, that summer, when the town was quiet and I was alone so much that I sank into a peculiar listlessness in which everything became exaggerated, what I perceived and how I reacted. I was acutely aware of the smallest sounds in the room, in the silent house. Sometimes the sound came from a living creature, usually an insect, and these creatures felt like companions because they had chosen, as far as they could choose anything, to be in the room with me. Any encounter I had with them, even watching them, became a personal encounter.

A beetle with a hard carapace ticked along the top edge of the room, locating itself in its flight. A tawny moth clung to the white wall like a chip of wood. A gray moth flew straight at me out of a closet and landed on my glasses. I walked into the kitchen, saw a cockroach on the floor, and took care to step over it. As I lay reading in bed, a large black moth blundered into my cup of water and thrashed around in circles there on its back. I went on reading. The moth stopped moving and floated, then began thrashing again. At last I lifted it out with a piece of kleenex, and after it had rested, it began diving through my light again, slapping into my book, my glasses, and my cheek. I had saved it so that it could continue annoying me. But for all its persistence and energy it would not live much longer anyway.

The dog kept coming in, so silent that I never noticed at first. I would hear a wet smacking sound and look up to see her lying on the cool tiles in the far corner, gnashing at fleas, her face anxious, her hair stiff and yellow as straw.

Inanimate things became animate, and then they, too, became companions: a cigarette ash glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as it sped across the desk in a stray breeze became a spider running and stopping, running and stopping. A single inked letter in a white margin became a kind of a mite walking up the page. Or a lock of hair shifting on my head was some other small creature making its way in toward my scalp.

Because I was alone so much, I would think about how I could do things in a more logical way, as though it weren't enough just to do what had to be done one way or another. I would make a system of rewards for myself: no smoking until evening, for instance. Or I set aside different hours of the day for different activities. I said I would write one letter every day after the mail came. But I did not do that for long. I did not answer most of the letters that came to me. I would plan to walk south in the early part of the afternoon, so as to get a little sun on my face. But I did not do that for long. Although I liked the idea of a rigid order, and seemed to believe that a thing would have more value if it was part of an order, I quickly became tired of the order.