The End of the Story (7 page)

When he actually left me, months after that, the world was not empty but worse than empty, as though the quality of emptiness had become so concentrated it turned into a kind of poison, as though each thing appeared alive and healthy but had been injected with a poisonous preserving agent.

This time he had not left me, he had only come late. He was there in the crowd by the door when I stood up to go. The life came back into everything in the room. He explained to me that he had lost track of the time. He occasionally lost track of the time and what he was doing, he did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and it was hard for him, at times, to do what he had to do.

We left the place together to go to a friend's house and we quarreled on the way.

*   *   *

There must have been at least seven readings that I went to while I knew him, or even more. It is hard to describe a reading in a way that is exciting, and it would be harder still to describe more than one in the same novel, even if some of the poetry I heard made me angry, which it did. I could change them to something else, like lectures, or dances, but I don't think I would have gone to more than one dance. The last reading was a reading of sound poetry, the most difficult one for me. Because I was forced to sit still while my mind had nothing much to hold on to, it wandered away from me and went through the plate-glass window searching yet again for him.

*   *   *

We were quarreling over his friend Kitty. We were sitting together in his car in a narrow, sunlit street. On either side of us were small patches of clipped green lawn that came right down to the white sidewalks. The houses set in these patches of lawn were small and white, of one story, with red-tiled roofs. A short palm tree grew beside one house, a shrub with rubbery leaves by another, a red-flowered vine by a third. Each house on this street seemed to have a lawn and just one other thing growing on the lawn, as if that were a rule. The sun shone down at an angle and reflected off the white sidewalk and the white walls of the houses, and because the houses were so low and small, with so few trees about, a great expanse of blue sky was visible. We were waiting to get out of the car and go into a friend's house. Either we were the first to arrive or we were simply trying to finish our quarrel.

He was going to give a reading himself in a few days. He was going to read a few of his poems and also a story. He told me he wanted to invite this woman Kitty to his reading because she had helped him to plan it.

The last time he had talked about her had been in my office. He had come up behind me in the hallway outside my office, and put his arms around me and kissed me there, publicly, which had made me nervous. Though the hallway ahead of me seemed to be empty, I thought someone appeared suddenly behind me and vanished again.

Sitting inside my office, first he complained about her, then he worried about her. I did not like hearing even this woman's name, because as soon as he mentioned it he seemed to move away from me, to go out of the room and leave me sitting there opposite his face, which was abstracted and preoccupied, with a slight frown of annoyance on it, and opposite his body, which had become very still. I felt I had been forgotten, or at least what I was to him now had been forgotten, as though he had suddenly mistaken me for an old friend to whom he could confide his worries or complaints about Kitty.

Kitty appeared in his room a few weeks later, and the reason he gave me for her visit did not make sense to me when I tried to understand it.

*   *   *

His reading was on a Sunday afternoon, in an elegant old house on a hill in a run-down part of the city. The house had heavy banisters and stained-glass windows in the stairwells, thick curtains drawn back from the doorways with velvet cords, alcoves and bay windows, high ceilings and chandeliers. He read with another poet, a man my age, but I can't remember who it was, and I also confuse this reading with another one in the same house months later, after he had left me, in which a woman read a story about Robinson Crusoe. I stood at the back of the room, where I could look away from the rows of people through an arched doorway into the next room, which was empty. I watched what I could see of him where he stood, the length of the room away from me, at a lectern. I could see only his head and shoulders above the heads of the audience. I was prepared to be embarrassed, for his sake, if he did not read well or if he read something that was not very good. But he read clearly and confidently, and nothing he read sounded bad, though I did not particularly like the story he read. Kitty did not come.

*   *   *

I could say more about the house where he read, but I'm not sure how much description to have in the novel. Another thing I could describe would be the landscape, the reddish, sandy earth spilling onto the edges of the sidewalks everywhere, the lines of cliffs above the ocean and the eroded sandy ravines descending to the water, the ocean so close I could hear the waves late at night, like a curtain coming down again and again, if the tide was high. It was not a lush landscape, because the climate was so dry. Part of each year, the hills were brown, and the only thick green vegetation grew up in the clefts of the hills where the dampness would gather, or in the towns where plants were watered and the succulent ground cover thrived and fat shrubs with glistening leaves hugged the shops. Because I had not known the landscape before, it interested me. It was so difficult, with broad highways cutting through everything and always some new construction rising abruptly off a brown hill, houses stacked or piled on top of each other in the wide-open spaces as though anticipating future congestion, or in a small canyon a line of new houses along a new road, and at the end of the line the latest house under construction, a framework of raw wood, while the first houses were already occupied, with cars in the driveways. Only rarely did a vestige of something older remain like a vision, an old ranch house at a distance from the road, a weedy, dusty track leading to it and a grove of gnarled live-oak trees and eucalyptus around it.

Eucalyptus trees with their smoky, oily smell grew everywhere, very tall, the boles going far up before sending out a branch. They were untidy trees, with wood soft and weak. They kept losing branches, so that there were great gaps along the trunks. They kept dropping their narrow, tan, spear-shaped leaves, which littered the ground under them, and layers of bark fell from them in long strips, along with little wooden buttons, brown with crosses carved out of them on one side, powdery blue on the other. An old professor at the university often complained that as he lay in bed at night he was kept awake by the hooting of a nearby owl and by those wooden buttons which dropped onto the roof over his head and rolled down to the eave, one by one, dropping and rolling, dropping and rolling all night long.

*   *   *

After his reading, in the late afternoon, he and I went with a group of others to a friend's house on another hill nearby, directly under a flight path to the airport out in the bay. We spent most of the time in the back yard, and enormous airplanes flew low overhead frequently. Each time, we would stop talking and wait until they passed. The yard was weedy and a pretty lime tree grew near the house. Two little boys threw balls into the air over and over again, and the balls kept getting caught in the tree or landing on the roof of a shed at the back of the yard.

He had not read the story I knew already, the one he had described to me as a novel the first evening we met, a very clear, precise, and confident story about a man and a woman in their middle age who meet at the seaside where the woman is on vacation and the man works for a hotel, the setting vaguely European. It contained quiet, well-turned descriptions, including one about the effect of the sun on the woman's pale legs, that I liked each time I read them. I liked so many parts of the story that the rest of it also seemed good. Now I wonder if I was drawn to him because he had the sort of mind that would want to write that sort of story, the sort that I liked already, or if he was drawn to me because I had the sort of mind that would like the sort of story he liked to write. A friend of mine, after reading the story, said he did not like it, because the characters, so very silent and distant with each other, yet so firmly tied by their wordless understanding, were not people he would want to know. I did not think about that, but only about how the story was written.

Later he read me seven short poems that he had written for me. He told me he had made a rule for himself that each one had to contain a reference to a flower. He would not let me keep them because they were not finished. In the end, he never gave me a copy of the poems. Maybe he never finished them. So I don't have them here, where I could reread them and see what I think of them now, as I have the story. It is here in my room, in a folder by itself, though I have not looked at it often, in all these years, for fear of knowing it so well that I can't see it anymore for what it is. But every time I have read it, the phrases ring peacefully in my ears, the order and clarity still please me.

I remember a few lines from his poems, including one in which he said the coast had a mile in it. That was the mile between my house and his. I liked the poems, though they were more careful than the story, or rather the care he put into them was so evident they seemed cautious, whereas the care in the story seemed just right. I had heard those poems, and I heard others at his reading, and I had read still others in the library, or maybe the same ones he had read, and I knew one story well, and heard another at his reading, and later he would read to me from his notebook, and this was all I knew of his writing. He was always writing, and he told me from time to time that he was working on a story, or a play, or another play, and later a novel, but I never saw any of them because he never seemed to finish one thing before abandoning it or putting it aside temporarily, as he said, and starting another, and he wouldn't show me any work unless it was almost finished.

He wrote things in a notebook, and I wrote things in a notebook. Some of what we wrote was about each other, of course, and now and then we read aloud from our notebooks. The things we had written were often things we would not say to each other, though we would read them aloud. But we were not willing to say anything about them after we had read them either.

So that behind my silence, and behind his silence, there was a good deal of talk, but that talk was in the pages of our notebooks, and was therefore silent, unless we chose to open the notebooks and read from them.

*   *   *

If he had been a bad writer, I think I could not have gone on with him. Or my lack of respect for the thing he did that was most important to him would have destroyed us before very long. But the fact that he wrote well did not help me to love him more deeply than I did. If I loved him at all, that had nothing to do with his writing, and when I talked to him about writing I felt I was not his lover and we were as distant as two people who did not know each other very well but respected and liked each other.

The distance between us at these times was not unlike the distance between us when we were with friends. We never gave any sign, in front of other people, of what was between us. It was evident to someone else only when we arrived together or left together, two moments I always savored, partly because they were in such contrast to all the other moments, when our closeness was unacknowledged. I wasn't ashamed of him, or embarrassed, but I often wanted to move away from him, so that although I knew he was near me, I did not touch him. In fact, I wanted to have him near me and at the same time move away from him.

Maybe we never stopped being conscious of our oddness, that some people might disapprove of us because he was so much younger, or because I was a teacher and he was a student, though he was not my student and many other teachers were his friends, and though he was older than most of the other students. But maybe we also sensed that if we had even simply held hands in front of our friends, they would have paid close attention to this, and it would have satisfied their lively curiosity about just how we behaved together, just what our relationship was—did I act as a mother toward him? Was he protective of me, like a son or a father? Or were we the same age in our behavior? Were we tense or relaxed? Were we violent together or gentle? Were we mean or kind?

I knew their curiosity was lively because in that place, as long as I lived there, and even after I left, all of us had a great deal of interest in the lives of our friends and our acquaintances and even people we had never met. There was a great hunger for stories, especially stories involving emotion and drama, especially love and betrayal, though this curiosity and interest was not unkind, usually.

*   *   *

Another reading was given by someone I identified in my notebook as “S.B.” After that reading, where he sat behind me, we went out with a group of people to a Mexican restaurant. There were many meals in restaurants at that time, especially in Mexican restaurants, because groups of friends and groups hosting visitors to the university often went out to eat together. Later in the novel I mention a dinner in a Japanese restaurant during which I left the table and tried to call him from a phone booth by the restrooms. But I do not describe the meal or the friends, even though there were some interesting people present. In fact, throughout these months I was also seeing and meeting interesting people, so that everything surrounding the story, everything I am leaving out of it, would make another story, or even several others, quite different in character from this one.

Later, we stood alone in a friend's living room and he was offended because I would not kiss him. He may have thought I was ashamed of him, but I simply did not want him to kiss me just then.

I can't remember who “S.B.” is or what sort of reading it was. I also can't remember, though I try over and over again, what happened in the week before it, when he and I were just getting to know each other. There are only two entries in my notebook for that week, and only one has anything to do with him. In that entry I describe what seems to me an incident without any importance at all: I was having lunch at a café on campus with a person I identify as “L.H.” We were sitting outdoors on the terrace. A skunk appeared in the concrete planter of a tree near us and caused some excitement among the students and faculty eating lunch. I happened to glance over at the doorway that led into the café, and I saw him standing there with a tray in his hands, looking displeased. I thought he was disappointed that so many people were sitting there in the sun, and all the seats were taken, but he could have been frowning because his eyes were not good, or because the sunlight was so bright, since he frowned often, especially in the sunlight. I don't know if he saw us and came over, if he sat with us, or if he simply turned around and left. If I hadn't written anything in my notebook about that week, and if I hadn't remembered the reading, I don't think I would be so acutely aware of those days about which I can't remember anything.