The End of the Story (4 page)

I often heard a train going by at some distance, down the hill from me, close to the water. It was easier to hear at night. During the day, many other noises came between me and it: the voices of my pleasant neighbors with time on their hands talking in the street outside my window, the occasional cars winding their way slowly up and down the side of the hill, the constant traffic of cars and trucks two blocks down from me on the coast road, the engines of heavy machinery at construction sites a few blocks away, the sound of hammering and sawing from the same sites, and other noises I couldn't distinguish creating a general din that seemed benevolent because it went on under the steady, hot sun and in the midst of an orderly profusion of dark green, thick-leaved shrubs and trees and ground cover scattered with dark red and pale blue flowers.

At night, the air, soft and fragrant, was clear of most of these noises, as it was clear of the hot sun and the profuse colors, as the plants, in the dark, were only soft shapes against the walls of buildings or against the curb of the street, and through this emptier air I could hear the wheels of the train clattering along the track and the hoot of its whistle, as pure as its single yellow eye.

During the day I might leave my table to go outside, and if I had been inside for a long time, the warmth of the sun, the sweetness of the breeze, and the colors of the plants beyond the white fence were so intensified by the hours indoors that they seemed an almost unbearable assault. I would drive Madeleine to get clay or to shop for food. Or I would walk down to the main street past the fenced yard of cactuses and bare dirt, past an old man in a straw hat and overalls gardening very slowly with large leather pads strapped to his shins, past the Norwegian church, past the wooden medical offices with their spotless windows, sprinklers coming on and going off everywhere in the beds of sea fig, endless sunshine glinting off the chrome of the cars.

Or I walked on the beach or the hillside, alone or with Madeleine. When she was not busy making something out of clay or papier-mâché, in her room or out on the terrace, when she was not cooking or eating, when she was not meditating or watching television, all of which she did with the same serious, undivided attention, she would walk for hours at a time with a steady, restless energy, her dog by her side, stopping only to talk to someone she knew or to fend off small gangs of boys who teased her and called her by insulting names because she was not like the other people in the town. She walked up and down the main street, she walked beyond the shops to the park, she walked beyond the railroad station to the beach, by the water into the distance and then back to the point she had started from and into the distance again in the other direction.

If I walked with Madeleine, we walked on the beach or along the cliff overlooking the ocean, and if I walked alone, I went up the hill away from the house.

Because the town was built on a steep hill, and because all the towns along the coast were built on hillsides or on top of the cliff above the ocean, I always had the sense of living above something, of living on a small level spot, a ledge or a plateau, with steep slopes above and below. My house and its terrace were one level place. The coast road was another. The park below it was another, and a short drop below that the railroad tracks another, carved into the hillside above the beach. The roads above my house were now steep, now level for a moment, now rising gently, as I walked up past lush gardens hanging off the hillside, yards so thickly planted that it wasn't always easy to see that a grove of trees was part of a property, a private property, attached to a house that was often concealed. The properties were carefully tended, but on the edge of each there might be a single beer bottle or can, by the road, as though the road itself, running like a river through this place of private properties, carried on its back the life of the outside world, and had thrown up on its banks signs of the outside world that the owners of the properties would carefully remove, walking along the edges of their groves or lawns by day, and that the road with its flotillas of joyriding, fast-moving teenagers, a river rising and then falling again, would leave again by night. And almost every road tended to climb the hillside and descend again, whether it went straight up, steeply, when, as I walked, my back would be to the ocean, or went gently up, running across the hillside almost parallel to the ocean, when I would see the ocean from almost every point on the road, either a bit of blue sheeting behind the branches of a pine or a broad plain of blue, or silver, or black, where I had come out past a house and above any planting, so that if I followed it up far enough it always went down again, as though it could only resist the force of gravity for so long. At a distance ahead of me in the middle of the crossroads I might see a large pinecone, or it might be a mourning dove, dark and cone-shaped. The breath of the eucalyptus would be so heavy on the air it coated my open lips.

Because this landscape and this climate were new to me, I liked to study them, though less often on foot and more often through the windows of my room or my car. The coast road roughly followed the line of the coast, sometimes veering inland on the other side of the hill from the ocean and sometimes staying within sight of it, but high above, on a cliff. When it descended to run right alongside the beach and close to the water, I would look out at the waves, looming over my head, or up at the hang gliders in the air like great birds, or across the sand at the black-suited surfers coming back toward the road with their surfboards under their arms, all these people not only on the sand but also in the water, and in the air. In the air were also kites and once or twice a great, striped, hot-air balloon racing inland.

People on the beach were often in pairs, two divers in suits weighed down with gear occupied with buckling or unbuckling their things, or two hefty bearded men in shorts exercising side by side, or a middle-aged man and wife with straight brown legs and spotless sweatshirts and shorts walking at a brisk pace, or a muscular blond student, glasses pushed back on his head, in a chair reading a heavy leather-bound book while his blond girlfriend lay near him on a towel. If I was not in the car but down on the beach, from a certain spot I could look up and see the little seaside train station, trains coming in with ringing bells, thick crowds edging the platform.

*   *   *

There is a train near here, too, a freight train that takes so long to go by that I have forgotten all about it by the time it has passed. It, too, is easier to hear late at night, when the road is quiet and the rhythmic click of the wheels bounces off the hillside behind it. Or in wet weather, when the tracks seem so near they might lie just out of sight beyond the trees.

This morning I ache all over because I worked so hard yesterday cleaning the house and preparing a complicated meal for one guest, a lone man who seems all the more lone because he is so tall and thin and has such a simple name, Tom, and who, maybe for the same reason, always gives the impression of being a quiet man though he talks quite readily. The dinner went off fairly well despite the fact that Vincent's father was such a distraction to us, sitting in an armchair to my right and asking for pieces of my food.

So much time has gone by since I started working on this novel that first I left my city apartment and moved in with Vincent, and then his father moved in with us, causing extra work and bringing a succession of nurses into the house to care for him.

During the same time, a meadow I used to pass on my walks was replaced by a small townhouse development. The meadow had many wildflowers, and at least four different varieties of grasses. It had a small grove of spindly saplings at one end, and at the other a great oak tree set back against the rocky hillside near a trolley shed. Now the oak is gone, and the row of townhouses sits back against the hillside. In front of it, where the meadow lay, is only the fresh black asphalt of a new driveway and a considerable stretch of bare lawn.

On another empty lot outside our village, a car wash has been built. And only a few months ago, a large project of residential housing and offices was approved despite the opposition of almost everyone in the town. It will occupy some wild acres down the road from here where the chicken farmer used to roam around when he was a boy. The chicken farm has also closed down its operation and the farmer makes birdhouses to sell in his roadside store. These are only a few of the changes.

We have a new nurse for Vincent's father, and she is on duty downstairs now. She seems responsible and a hard worker, and more cheerful than the last, though something of a hypochondriac. She wears a tattoo on her upper arm that I haven't yet dared to examine. At the moment, the old man is demanding a different lunch from the lunch I wrote down for him. The whole time I am up here I am also listening to them with one ear. The old man accepted her very sweetly this morning, and put his arms around her when she came, though it is only her second day. She whispered to me, “I think he likes my hair.” If she does not keep him distracted, though, he will begin asking for me.

I have had almost constant problems with these nurses. Although they like the old man, they don't last very long. One came only half the time, came late when she did come, and offered a different excuse each time—illness, car trouble, a heavy menstruation, the change to daylight saving time, etc. Another contracted to work the whole summer and then, after a few weeks, abruptly told me she was going off to the Caribbean Islands to teach cooking. When I protested, she became indignant and disappeared altogether without even coming to say goodbye to Vincent's father, who continued to be puzzled by this no matter what we told him.

In the living room below me now, the nurse is coughing and picking out a tune on the piano, maybe to let me know it is time for me to stop work and relieve her. One of them used to come up and announce the time if I was five minutes late going down. Another just let the old man begin climbing the stairs, though it was so hard for him.

*   *   *

He told me, after several days had gone by, that he had left at daybreak after the first night because he did not know if I would want to wake up with him. Later that morning he went to see Ellie in the library. He wanted her advice. He wanted to know if she thought he should wait for me to come out of my class, if he should stand by the path to my classroom building and meet me. Ellie said of course he should. He wanted to know if it would make me uncomfortable. She said of course it would not. So it was with Ellie's encouragement that he waited for me later, carefully posed, holding or smoking his pipe. Ellie told me all this months after.

The second time he came, he stayed on into the morning and spent the day with me. We went walking on the beach. As he climbed down to the sand over the rocks I could not look at him, though I was not sure why. We walked a long way past the rocks and over the drifts of broken seashells without talking. I was uncomfortable. I thought he was silent out of timidity. I made efforts to talk to him, but it was hard. The silence between us was so thick that words were not so much spoken as forced through it. I stopped trying.

*   *   *

I did not know what his last name was, and I was not sure of his first name. If it was what I thought it was, it was unusual and I had never known anyone with such a name. I was embarrassed to ask him. I hoped I would see it or hear it somewhere.

I wonder, now, why I did not call someone up and ask. There were at least two people I could have called. But I did not know them very well, as I would later. It is easier for me to see why I did not ask him directly. The moment had passed long before when I could have done that without feeling foolish.

I did not find out what his name was for several days, because during these days I was almost always alone with him. And because I did not have a name for him, he continued to seem like a stranger, even though he was very quickly becoming so close to me. When I did learn his name, I was learning the name of someone like a husband, a brother, or a child to me. But because I learned it only after I knew him so well, his name also seemed strangely arbitrary, as though it did not have to be that one but could have been any other.

*   *   *

Two days after I met him, I came home late and went to bed and lay there in the dark, nervous, thinking about him, wishing he were with me, then sleeping lightly for only a moment or two before waking again to think about him. Suddenly, after two in the morning, a car roared up the hill past my window, headlights swam over the room, the engine died, and the headlights went off. I looked out the window by my bed and saw the white hood of a car parked beyond the big cedar in front of the house. I heard a voice speaking, and I could distinguish some of what it said: “I want you … I can't … this carousel … this old carousel … into the city…” I was sure he was the one talking to himself out there, because the car was white, it roared, and it had stopped outside my house. I thought that if he did this, it might mean he was a little crazy. But I did not yet know him very well. I did not know if he was crazy. I only knew he became distracted from time to time, and forgot what he was doing and where he was. At this point, I was willing to accept whatever I might learn next, though it frightened me a little.

I put on some clothes. I walked out by the side of the house and under the cedar tree along the driveway to the edge of the street. But now I saw that the car was smaller than his. It was not his car after all. Now I was frightened for a different reason—this was a stranger out of control, even more unpredictable. I turned back toward the house, the headlights came on again and caught me, and the voice said, “Are you all right?” I stopped walking and asked, “Who are you?” and the voice said something like “I'm just trying to sort myself out.”

I went back in. I went down the hall to the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet and saw that my hands and legs were shaking.