The End of the Story (5 page)

Later that night I dreamed I had found a short piece of his writing on the hall floor. It had a title page and my name on it and my address at the university. Most of it was plainly written, but it contained a passage about Paris in which the writing became suddenly more lyrical, including a phrase about the “shudder of war.” Then the style became plain again. The last sentence was briefer than the rest: “We are always surprising our bookkeepers.” In the dream, I liked the piece and was relieved by that, although I did not like the last sentence. Once I was awake, I liked the last sentence, too, even more than the rest.

I see now that since I hadn't yet read anything by him at the time of the dream, what I was doing was composing something by him that I would like. And although this was my dream and he did not write what I dreamed he wrote, the words I remember still seem to belong to him, not to me.

*   *   *

Three days after we met, a friend called him by his first name in my presence and then I knew I had been right. Another two days went by, and I learned his last name when I went into the special section of the library containing little magazines and saw his full name printed with his poems.

I had wondered what I would do if I did not like his poems. But I had not even thought about seeing his last name on the page and was not prepared for the shock I felt. The shock did not come from the name itself, dense with consonants and difficult to pronounce, and one I had never seen before and would never see again, so that it seemed to belong only to him. The shock came from something else I couldn't at first identify.

Knowing his name, after I had waited so many days to learn it, seemed to increase his reality. It gave him a place in the world that he had not had before, and it allowed him to belong more to the day than he had before. Until then, he had belonged to a time when I was tired and did not think as well as I did in the daytime, and did not see as well, when there was darkness on all sides of whatever light there was, and he came and went through darkness and shadow more than light.

Then, too, as long as he had only a first name, he might belong to a story told me by someone else, or he might be no more than a friend of someone else, he might be a person I did not know very well. In fact, I did not know him very well, at the same time that I had already become so close to him that not an inch separated us.

But even after I knew his name, even when I had known him for weeks, I never quite lost the feeling that he was someone I had never seen in the daylight, who came suddenly into my room with me in the middle of the night and had a name I was not sure of.

I had another shock after I was done reading his poems and went to find Ellie in the back of the Rare Books section, when she told me that his mother was only five years older than I was.

*   *   *

For a long time, I did not know what to call him in the novel, or what to call myself either. What I really wanted was a one-syllable English name for him, to match his own actual name, but as I searched for an equivalent, I found my mind playing the same trick it played on me when I came up against a difficult problem in translating—the only solution that really seemed to fit was the original word itself. Finally I decided to take the names for the two characters from the names of the man and woman in a story he had written. So at that point I called them Hank and Anna. Then I gave Ellie the beginning of the novel to read. I said there was no hurry, she did not have to read it right away, but I did not expect her to take as long as she did. At first I did not mind that she hadn't read it, because I did not want to think about it myself. I wanted to rest from the novel. But finally I became impatient to hear what she had to say.

The reason she did not want to read it right away was that the story was too much like an experience she was having at the time. She had become very attached to a man younger than she was. He had not left her, but she was afraid he would. By the time he did leave her, soon after, she had still not read what I had given her, and now it was even harder, though she told me she was trying to prepare herself to do it. She was so angry she wanted to move to a foreign country.

In the meantime, I thought of showing it to someone else, but no one seemed quite right. Several friends had offered to look at it, but some of them, I knew, would not be objective, and others would probably not be helpful for other reasons. I could think of two who would be helpful, but I wanted to wait until I had more to show them.

Vincent asked me why I didn't show it to him. He seemed eager to read it, maybe in order to find out more about me, and about certain episodes in my life I have been hiding from him, he thinks, such as what he calls my “fling” in Europe. I would not call it a “fling” to be lying in a hotel bed for four nights next to a thin, nervous man, trying not to wake him up, and then, when I couldn't sleep, sitting on the tiles of the bathroom floor trying to read but too drunk to make sense of what I was looking at. This man had terrible trouble sleeping when he was away from home. He was often away on trips, and when he returned to his wife in the Jura Mountains he slept for several weeks. This was what he told me. His face white and tense with fatigue, he would creep through the darkened hotel room saying he had to sleep. He would crawl under the covers, curl up at my back, start talking into my neck, and continue for an hour or more. Then he would doze off. If I couldn't sleep, I would go into the bathroom, turn on the light, and sit on the floor, or I would leave the hotel.

The first night, I got out of the hotel all right and back into my own hotel. The second time I tried to leave, it was dawn and the front door was locked. I didn't want to wake the tired man, since he was sleeping at last, so I rang for the night clerk, who came out in his bathrobe, his face very cross, and unlocked the door only after a lot of arguing. I went out through the steamy entryway past a tiled basin of goldfish and into a street where a group of workmen in the early morning sun were repainting a yellow line on the road and looked up at me curiously, since I was still dressed in my black evening clothes. The front door of my own hotel was locked, too, so I walked around the village for a while, watching as people set up stalls in the marketplace.

Later that day, when I went to the beach to swim, I did not feel very well. All I could do was stand waist-deep in the water for a long time looking out at the horizon and then back at the other bathers, who lay flat on their straw mats or sat in the strong wind shading their eyes from the stinging sand. I soon began to feel faint from the heat and the glare, made my way out of the water and up the sand toward the beach café, and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting there in my robe under the concerned gaze of the owner and the waitress, holding ice against my forehead and eating a little salt off my fingertip. When the sun was low in the sky, a tall Englishwoman helped me across the sand to a taxi and then settled me in my hotel room with some aspirin and a glass of water.

I don't want to show this to Vincent just yet, because he seems so skeptical already. He knows more or less what the book is about, though I haven't told him directly, and he tends to regard all the love affairs in my life as having been sordid. I admit there were other men before him. There was a painter who lived alone in an old boat shop, and an anthropologist who used to take me to the opera with his mother. There was another directly after that one, who smiled a great deal, and another directly before him, who drank a great deal, and the one who took me into the desert, and another before that, who became very jealous over things he only imagined. But none of these affairs lasted very long, a few were not even consummated, and all were with entirely respectable sorts of men, most of them college professors.

Ellie finally read the pages I had sent her. By then she was about to move to a foreign country after all, though only for one year and not because of her young lover, and my manuscript was part of the business she had to take care of before she left. She seemed to like it, but she said the names were wrong. She did not want the hero to be named Hank. She thought no one could fall in love with someone named Hank. She said it made her think of “handkerchief.” Of course it isn't true that no one can fall in love with someone named Hank. But she meant I could choose any name I liked for my hero, while men named Hank, and the men and women who fall in love with them, are not free to choose.

After Ellie objected so much to Hank, I called the woman Laura and the man Garet for a while. But I did not really like the name Laura for this woman, since a woman named Laura feels to me like a peaceful woman, or at least a graceful one. Susan might have been better, but a woman named Susan would be too sensible to walk from one end of a town to the other and back again for an hour at a time, at night, looking for a man and his old white car even if he is with another woman, just because she is determined to have at least a glimpse of him. She would not drive to his house in the rain and walk up onto a balcony and look in the window of his apartment.

So then I called her Hannah, and then Mag, and then Anna again. I described my room, and how this woman, Anna, sat at the card table trying to work despite everything. In other versions it was Laura at my card table, or Hannah playing the piano, or Ann in my bed. For a long time I called him Stefan. I was even calling the novel
Stefan
at that point. Then Vincent said he did not like the name because it was too European. I agreed that it was European, though I thought it suited him. But I wasn't entirely satisfied with it anyway, so I tried to think of another name.

A friend of mine who has written several novels told me a few months ago that in one novel she went ahead so fast, looking back only a page or two each day, that she later discovered, when she reread the novel, that the name of one character changed twelve times in the course of the book.

*   *   *

What I saw, when I saw him standing by the path waiting for me, was not only his face, not only his hands, and not only the position of his body, but also his red plaid flannel shirt, frayed at the collar, his thready white sweatshirt, his khaki army pants, and his hiking boots. He had a pipe in his hand and a bag over his arm.

Each time I met him, in the beginning, I paid such close attention to what I saw when he appeared, and what was different about him from what I had last seen, that I remember his clothes with surprising clarity.

If I put my arms around him, what I felt under my fingers, against my skin, was the material of his clothes, and only when I pressed harder did I feel the muscles and bones of his body. If I touched him on the arm I was actually touching the cotton sleeve of his shirt, and if I touched him on the leg, I was touching the worn denim of his pants, and if I put my hand on his lower back, I felt not only the two ridges of muscle, hard as bone, but also the soft wool of his sweater warming to the warmth of my hand, and if he was hugging me against his chest, what I would see, within an inch of my eye, was the weave of cotton threads of his shirt or woolen threads of his sweater or the fuzzy nap of his lumber jacket.

Just as he looked a little different to me each time I saw him, I also learned new things about him each time. Each thing I learned about him came as a small shock, and either pleased me or disturbed me, and disturbed me either a little or a good deal. When we sat in the bar later that day, the first day, he surprised me by saying angry things about some of my students and then about Mitchell. His tone was a tone of jealousy, though he had no reason to be jealous. And when he said these angry things, he abruptly seemed a stranger to me again, one I didn't like. Only when I knew him better did I understand that the anger I heard came from his disappointment, and he was often disappointed. Nearly everyone disappointed him and therefore angered him—nearly every man, anyway: he expected a great deal from men, and he wanted to admire them.

He was angry with certain men and he was indignant at certain great writers, and the two feelings came from the same sort of disappointment, I thought. He was always reading the great writers, as though determined to know all the best that had ever been written. He would read most of what one great writer had written, then he would become indignant. There was something wrong there, he would say. He respected the writer, but there was something wrong. He would read most of what another had written and again become indignant. There was something wrong there, too. It was as though these writers had failed him. To be great might mean to be perfect, in his eyes. When he pointed out how they failed, I couldn't disagree—his reasons were not bad. But in his determined reading he left behind one failed writer after another. Maybe he had to see how they failed if he was to find a place in that world for himself.

One of the things I learned, because I asked him directly, was that there had been not just a few but many women before me, and that I was not even the oldest. At the time, this startled me and seemed to diminish what there was between us. Then, as time passed, I became used to the idea and accepted it.

Later I could say to myself that at least I was the last woman, since he married after he left me. But maybe he hadn't even been telling me the whole truth. It was the slight pause before he answered me, and his look of embarrassment, that made me believe him. Maybe he was embarrassed by the crudeness of my question, and a false answer was the only answer to such a question.

*   *   *

The first time I told him I loved him he only looked at me thoughtfully without answering, as though considering what I had said. At the time, I did not understand his hesitation. The words were drawn out of me, almost despite me, and he did not answer. Now I think that if he could be so careful about saying the same thing to me, he probably loved me more deeply than I loved him. I had probably said what I said much too soon to mean it, and he knew that, though he couldn't help saying the same to me a few days later, since he probably really did love me, or thought he did.