The End of the Story (9 page)

This friend lived in a single, small room crowded with bookshelves and books, and permeated with the stale smell of unwashed clothing and the strong, bitter smell of tobacco—or, since I never went to visit him myself, did I only imagine this when I imagined an old man living alone? I also saw the old man as bearded and a little plump around the waist, thighs, arms, and cheeks, but I don't know if he told me this or if I instantly formed this picture of the man when he first told me he was visiting a bookish old man in a small room filled with books, and never questioned the picture, so that it registered in my mind as the truth.

Actually, many years before, I had known another bookish old man who was visited by another ardent young man, and maybe I simply applied the picture I knew to this old man.

Although this friend was more interesting to me than his young friends, and raised him a little in my estimation, while his young friends and what he might possibly be doing with them only lowered him, my interest in this friend was still very limited, because the friendship seemed not entirely innocent to me but contaminated, as I saw it, by his self-consciousness, as though he knew how touching it might be that an idealistic and ambitious and talented young man should have a friendship with a much older, poorer, better-educated man, in the presence of whom the younger man's vanity would drop away and he would become pure and even good, or at least feel pure and good. Because I was sure that alongside his real interest in the old man was his awareness of himself visiting the old man, himself at the knees of an old man who had set himself apart from society, the pleasure he might bring to an isolated old man as he freely shared his youth, his freshness, his quick mind, his gentle manners. And he shared these things freely, because there could be no danger of any lasting hold, since his youth itself gave him permission not only to forget the old man for weeks at a time, distracted by the enormous effort of making or beginning some kind of life for himself, but also to move on abruptly and permanently, leaving him behind when the time came to go. So, although there was real tenderness and happiness in his voice when he spoke of him, it was mixed with a naïve elation, a naïve pride in the fact that he owned such an unusual and precious jewel as this friendship with an eccentric, smelly old man awake in the night and asleep in the day, belonging more to the East or even to Europe than to the West, and certainly nothing like the people we saw around us on the palm-lined streets of these seaside towns.

Now it comes back to me that several of the friends he saw were connected with the theater in town, although I'm not sure if they were students or professional actors, directors, or stagehands. I remember that when he talked to me about the theater and these friends, his tone was firmer, more confident, as though he hoped or expected that I would be impressed by this, at least, by the fact that friends of his, who evidently respected him, were involved in something as compelling as a theater performance. But I'm not sure my interest and respect could have been aroused by anything in his life except the very same things and people that aroused my interest and respect in my own life.

For instance, I know I respected him for having read certain books, and read them so closely and in such an orderly way, but these were always books that I myself intended to read. And I respected him for the way he wrote.

I would not have wanted to spend much time, anyway, or maybe any time at all, with his young friends, who were so much younger that I would have felt like an old woman or their teacher and they would have been respectful toward me as though I were their teacher.

But once we went to a play together and I met a few of them, though I have only a fleeting image of the inside of the theater, in fact only a corner of it near the front door, and a memory of shaking hands with a collection of people he knew.

I don't know if it was on that day that we went out to a café afterward or if there was one more visit to the theater together, after which we met a friend of his, went to a bar or café for beer, and talked about plays and movies. But I never particularly enjoyed talking about plays or movies. And I was never very interested in the theater. He wanted to write for the theater. Just before we lost touch completely, he told me he had been given a scholarship to go to drama school. It was a scholarship he had been hoping to get, yet he told me he had decided not to take it. If he took it, he said, his life would be too easy. The reasons he gave me could have been the real reasons, or they could have been reasons invented or exaggerated to impress me. If they were the real reasons, I was impressed by them, but at the same time I was aware that they might not be the real reasons.

I did not know if he wanted me to know his young friends. I knew he wished I would be more playful with him, and not so serious, because he would sometimes tell me explicitly: “I wish you would play with me more.” And I knew he wished we would spend more time where he lived. But I was more comfortable surrounded by my own things, close to the things I could do and the things of mine that interested me.

For the same reason, I think, I almost never rode in his car. I told him I did not want to ride in it because the roar from the broken muffler was so loud, but now, of course, that does not seem to be a very good reason. I could have put up with the deafening roar, or even enjoyed it, if I hadn't been afraid of being consumed by his world, if I hadn't clung stubbornly to my own—my own car, my own house, my own town, and my own friends.

I have been trying to remember the inside of it. I see something red in it, but I don't know if this was his plaid jacket, or a blanket he kept in the car, or the seats. I am almost certain the air inside was heavy with the musty smell of a very old car, of the dried leather of the seats or the stuffing inside them, and that this smell was overlaid with a smell of fresh laundry, since his clothes were always fresh. And I am certain that the back seat of it and even the front seat were cluttered with clothes and books, notebooks, loose paper, pens, pencils, sports equipment, and other odds and ends. I know that after he lost his second apartment, when he was sleeping in his girlfriend's apartment but had no place to put his things, he carried all his clothes around with him in the car and probably other things besides, whatever would fit.

Yet after he left me I used to look for his car all the time, so constantly and for so many months that I never quite lost the habit afterward of noticing cars like his, and the car began to assume its own independent life, became a living creature, a kind of animal, a pet, a pet dog, friendly, loyal, or a strange dog, menacing, vicious.

*   *   *

It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.

The idea that he was twelve years younger interested me. I did not know if I was moving back through those twelve years to be with him, or if he was moving up through them to be with me, if I was his future or he was my past. I sometimes thought I was repeating an experience I had had a long time before: once again I was with an idealistic, ambitious, talented young man, as I had been when I was that young myself, but now, because I was older, I had a confidence and an influence over him that I had not had with that other young man. But there was also a distance between us because of this that would not have been there otherwise.

I said to him that it made me feel younger than I was, to be with him, and he said it made him feel older to be with me. But of course the reverse must have been true at the same time: I felt even older than I actually was, by contrast with him, and he felt even younger. He must have been uncomfortable about how old I was, some of the time, because it made him so careful about what he said when he was talking about things I knew well, but at the same time this difference in age must have made him feel more sophisticated.

He told me he was afraid of saying something that would make him seem young in my eyes. I realize now what an effort it must have been for him, each time he spoke, to imagine, before he opened his mouth, what would seem young to me, and to avoid saying it.

I knew more than he did, at least about certain things, and now and then I corrected him when he said something wrong. I wasn't used to knowing more than another person. I wasn't used to feeling I knew much of anything at all. I knew more only because I had lived twelve years longer. More knowledge was in me, not because I went after it and held on to it the way he did, but because it had accumulated in me as though against my will.

He was embarrassed or uncomfortable that I knew more. But what I saw was that our minds were simply different, and his opened out over its own territory and mine over its own territory, and one was not richer than the other. But he wanted to be able to teach me things, he told me, he wanted to be able to help me, even find a job for me, though I had a job already. He wanted to find me a job, but he couldn't have found me a job, he couldn't even find a job for himself at that time. More than once, he said he wanted to take me away somewhere. I don't remember if he named any other place but Europe and the desert. But we never went to the desert, and he couldn't have taken me to Europe, he couldn't afford to take me anywhere.

A friend of mine once told me about a love affair he had had with a woman much older. He, too, had wanted to take her away to a place where nothing would distract her and she would belong entirely to him, a place so inaccessible it was almost imaginary. As he told me the story from beginning to end, with all its details, I saw other similarities, though I said nothing to him: their first night together also began with a moment at which shoes were taken off, though in his case, she asked him to take off her shoes, and he took them off in her bedroom. She was the one, in this case, who worked at a gas station, and after she ended their love affair, he was the one who would go find her at the gas station and argue with her—though I am sure that since he is a gentler person than I am, he was not as persistent.

My friend told me he could not stop writing down certain things about it. He could not speak to her because she would not listen to him, so he wrote things about it that other people would read, so that she might read it, too, and be not only affected by it but more affected because it was public. If she was not, he would at least have the satisfaction of telling it all out loud, and also of turning that love affair, which had not lasted as long as he had wanted it to, into something that would last longer.

*   *   *

It was as though I were taking part in the very beginning of his life, his life as an adult, and this was exciting to me. There was a simple strength in him that had to do with his youth, a pure vigor, and a sense of limitless possibilities, which was something that would change, I thought, in twelve years. In the beginning there was every possibility, I thought, and over the years some of those possibilities disappeared. I did not mind that, but I liked being with a person who hadn't gone through it yet.

But now and then I needed to talk to someone who had experienced those twelve years and arrived at the same sort of point with the same sorts of conclusions I had, and then I wanted to be with people my own age, and I would even go so far as to turn away from him, if we were at a table in a restaurant, and toward people my own age, and when I was in that mood, if he spoke to me I would turn to him to answer, but immediately turn away again, as though he were a contagion, or as though I were afraid of being pulled back into his youth, of losing my grip on my own age and my own generation, slipping back through those years to an innocence or freshness that also had a certain helplessness attached to it. I did not want that youth for myself. I only wanted it there with me, at arm's reach, in him.

Yet the fact of leaving him out so pointedly, at these times, also made me more intensely aware of him at my side either sitting silent, stunned by my rudeness, and listening to the conversation or thinking his own thoughts, or overlooking my rudeness and talking to the person on his other side, so that mingled with my uneasiness at what I was doing was an intensified pleasure in his proximity, as though the fact of leaving him out, having him next to me but behind me, only increased my sense of how close to me he was, a richness still intact. It was as though refusing, for a moment, the pleasure he and I took in each other only further concentrated it. But he must have been aware of this division in my feelings for him, and must have been hurt by it.

*   *   *

One evening I hadn't expected to see him, either because he was busy himself or for some other reason, and I had asked Mitchell to come have dinner with Madeleine and me. We had finished eating and were still sitting at the table in the arcade by the terrace, Mitchell talking about a recent trip, when he came through the gate and across the terrace to us. The sight of him provoked a sharp feeling of annoyance in me, because I did not want to see him just then, but he must not have suspected that I could feel anything like that. Quite comfortably, he sat down with us and listened while Mitchell finished telling us about his trip. After Mitchell went home, he took me down the hill to the bar at the bottom of my street, to meet a teacher of his whom he admired very much. Two other students were present also. My feeling of annoyance only continued, and increased, as I sat there vehemently disliking both this teacher and his students, who paid such close attention to him they barely seemed to see or hear anything else. But I don't know if my dislike of those three men fed my annoyance at him, so that it did not dissipate all evening, or if I disliked them so vehemently only because I was already annoyed.

Now that I have remembered this teacher, whom I had forgotten, I also remember that he lived farther up the hill and a little to the south of me in that same town, and that he used to hold his classes at his house, so that his students, in small seminars, would gather there.