The End of the Story (27 page)

During the time when the telephone company used to call me, a new, wide bridge was built beside the old narrow one I used to cross toward the racetrack and the fairgrounds. After it was finished and in use, the old one was closed off, then dismantled and removed. I realized that in a few years no one would know it had been there. And if houses were built on the mud flats, as I was sure they would be, everyone would forget that the flats had been bare and brown and that during the fair every year people had parked there, bumping over the ruts.

*   *   *

The friends who gave the last party I invited him to moved away not long after, so that what I have been imagining, the living room where the party was held, and the front door through which I kept thinking he would come with his girlfriend, as vivid and present to me as if I were still standing there, have changed in a way I can't imagine, in the hands of other tenants. In fact, not only these friends but almost all the other friends I had in that place have also moved by now, either away from that city and those neighboring towns or out of whatever house they were living in when I knew them there, and some of them I have not visited since, so that I have to imagine those familiar faces within the walls of houses I have never seen.

The living room in which the party took place while I waited all evening for him to appear belongs to the same house in whose back yard the other party took place months earlier, after his reading, in the shade of a lime tree with airplanes flying overhead. But because these two parties were so far apart in time and so different in mood, for me, I find it difficult to bring them close enough together to be located on the same plot of land. He and I entered that back yard party through a gate at the side of the house, without going into the house itself. When we went indoors to get another beer from the refrigerator, we went up a short flight of wooden steps through the back door into the kitchen. Most of the kitchen, though, is not part of my memory of that afternoon but of other visits to the house in which I went to the refrigerator for another beer or looked for a paper towel and didn't find one or washed some lettuce in a sink that was already full of pots and dishes. That day we did not go on into the dining room, which belongs to other memories, of one evening, or maybe two, spent playing a word game at the large dining table, and of a birthday party at which one of the table legs gave way suddenly and the birthday cake either threatened to slide off and fall onto the floor or actually did.

These memories are sometimes correct, I know, but sometimes confused, a table in the wrong room, though I keep moving it back where it belongs, a bookcase gone and another in its place, a light shining where it never shone, a sink shifting a foot from where it was, even, in one memory, an entire wall absent in order to make the room twice as large. But there is always the same food in the cupboards and on the counters, the same din of voices, and the same shadowy figures of people moving just out of my direct sight.

He might say it was not true that I invited him to that party. He might say he was invited by the people giving the party. I was presuming too much to say he should not come with his girlfriend. He was thinking of my feelings, in the end, when he stayed away.

He could be right. What I remember may be wrong. I have been trying to tell the story as accurately as I can, but I may be mistaken about some of it, and I know I have left things out and added things, both deliberately and accidentally. In fact, he may think that many parts of this story are wrong, not only the facts, but also my interpretations. But there was only what I saw, what he saw, and what other people saw, if they gave it any attention. A handful of them, still, must remember some of this, and if I mentioned it to them they would almost certainly make a remark about it that would show it in an entirely different light or remind me of a horrifying or absurd thing I had forgotten, something that would force me to change everything I have said, if only slightly, if it were not too late.

There are some inconsistencies. I say he was open to me, and I say he was closed to me. I say he was silent with me, and that he was talkative. That he was modest, and arrogant. That I knew him well, and that I did not understand him. I say I needed to see friends, and that I was alone a great deal. That I needed to move very fast, and that I often lay in bed unwilling to move at all. Either all these things were true at different times or I remember them differently depending on my mood now.

*   *   *

I will want to show the novel to someone before I say it is finished. I may show it to Ellie, even though she knows most of the story already. I will show it to Vincent, but not until I have shown it to someone else who says it is finished. I can't show it to anyone until I think it is finished myself. And before I show it, I will have to guess what its weak points may be, so that I won't be taken by surprise.

When Vincent asked me who I was planning to show it to, I mentioned a few names, and he said, “Aren't you going to show it to any men?” I added another name to the list, because I had not intended to exclude men.

*   *   *

The last piece of news I heard of him a few months ago, from Ellie, was that he turned up unexpectedly, well dressed or at least formally dressed, in the office of a mutual friend of ours in the city. I don't remember why he appeared there. I don't know if Ellie knew and told me or if Ellie did not know. I think it had to do with an odd request, either for a favor or for information. He was working at a hotel at the time.

Now that Ellie is living in the Southwest, she will be less in touch with mutual friends and I will be less likely to hear anything more about him.

*   *   *

The sun is sitting on top of a hill that I can see beyond the back yard out my bedroom window. If he is on this coast, he may be ending a day's work just now, since many kinds of work end at five o'clock, or he may be ending something else, like an afternoon of reading in his room. He may be preparing to go out and take a walk in city streets older than the streets on that other coast.

He could just as well be on the other coast, but the very fact that it is two o'clock there, a time of day I don't like, makes that seem less likely.

*   *   *

I have not moved the cup of bitter tea from the beginning, so it may make no sense to say that the end of the story is the cup of bitter tea brought to me in the bookstore as I sat in a chair too tired to move after searching so long for his last address. Yet I still feel it is the end, and I think I know why now.

But first I have to ask myself a question that has been nagging at me: Have I gotten even that particular incident right? Did I look at the expression on the face of the man in the bookstore and sense that the man saw me as a vagrant, and did I later articulate to myself what that impression had been? Or was it only later that I searched for that man's face in my memory and looked at it and then at the position of his body, motionless or nearly motionless and slightly stooped behind the counter as his face conveyed puzzlement; that I either took the face out of my memory or returned in my memory to stand in front of that man's face and study it? I know that I must have read more on that face later than I did immediately, because later I had more information—for instance, that he had felt enough compassion to bring me a cup of tea, and that therefore behind his expression of puzzlement he was feeling compassion or was about to feel compassion.

I think one reason the cup of tea in the bookstore seems like the end of the story even though the story went on afterward is that I did stop searching for him at that point. Although I still thought, from time to time, that I might see him around the next corner, and although I went on receiving news of him, I never again tried to get in touch with him by phone or by mail.

Another reason, maybe even more important, is that this cup of tea, prepared for me by a stranger to give me some relief from my exhaustion, was not only a gesture of kindness, from a person who could not know what my trouble was, but also a ceremonial act, as though the offer of a cup of tea became a ceremonial act as soon as there was a reason for ceremony, even if the tea was cheap and bitter, with a paper tab hanging over the side of the mug. And since all along there had been too many ends to the story, and since they did not end anything, but only continued something, something not formed into any story, I needed an act of ceremony to end the story.

A
LSO BY
L
YDIA
D
AVIS

STORIES

The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories

Sketches for a Life of Wassilly

Story and Other Stories

Break It Down

Almost No Memory

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

SELECTED TRANSLATIONS

Death Sentence
by Maurice Blanchot

The Madness of the Day
by Maurice Blanchot

Scratches
by Michel Leiris

Scraps
by Michel Leiris

Helene
by Pierre Jean Jouve

Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust

Praise for
The End of the Story
by Lydia Davis

“Passion and regret, writing and revision, the impossibility of describing, or even remembering, love—these themes animate Lydia Davis's brilliantly original, funny, wise, and quietly brave new novel.”

—Francine Prose

“Self-consciousness is one of the noblest literary virtues, especially as so exquisitely practiced by Lydia Davis in
The End of the Story.
This modular—modulating—novel is about the taste of memory and the awkwardness of lovesickness. Davis explores the decomposition of a relationship and, beyond that, an obscurer object of desire, the composition of her story. A fascinating, piercingly told, smoldering tale.”

—Charles Bernstein

“It is Davis's style that makes the novel come alive. Evocative physical description and somberly beautiful language are among her considerable gifts … some descriptions will lodge in your mind forever.”

—
The Boston Globe

“Brilliant … The palette of Davis's novel reminds me of green tea, bone, quartz light, and dried apricots, and its French room tone buzzes with the obsessiveness of Michel Leiris, the saltwater air of Jane Bowles, and the grouchy who-cares-a-damn silence of Jean Rhys. No contemporary writer has so bravely explored the grisaille of solitude, boredom, pique, and discontent in the midst of desire, or the severe elegance of a thinking woman.”

—
The Village Voice

“An aching love story recollected in tranquility.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“An excellent first novel … works on every level … both a coda to the traditional love story and an act of hesitant faith in the power of stories to transcend the flow of information.”

—
Poets & Writers

“Davis's distinctive voice has never been easy to fit into conventional categories.… What is remarkable about the book is Davis's depiction of her narrator's struggle … an excruciatingly detailed anatomy of a relationship [that is] engaging, self-mocking, and scrupulously truthful.”

—
The Times Literary Supplement
(U.K.)

“The disintegration of a short-lived affair and its aftermath recounted in mesmerizing detail. A cool, beautifully written first novel.”

—
Marie Claire
(U.K.)

“A brave, wildly unconventional and thought-provoking novel written with a wittily restrained intensity.”

—
Time Out
(London)

“Utterly compelling …
The End of the Story
is a comedy, but one of an unusually deep and astringent kind.… A remarkably original and successful novel.”

—
London Review of Books

THE END OF THE STORY
. Copyright © 1995 by Lydia Davis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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ISBN 0-312-42371-3

EAN 978-0312-42371-1

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Picador Edition: July 2004

eISBN 9781466869257

First eBook edition: March 2014