The End of the Story (11 page)

I went off on three trips by myself. One was for a weekend. The second was for three weeks in early winter, when my term of teaching was over. We wrote letters to each other and spoke on the phone once or twice. The last trip, and the longest, came at the end of winter. I called him a few times and wrote him one letter that never reached him. That was when I was staying in a borrowed apartment and he was living above the cactus nursery.

The third quarrel was more serious than the first or the second, and occurred five days after the quarrel that was interrupted by the piano tuner. I was about to go off on the first of my trips away from him, the shortest one. I think he was angry at me for going away, no matter how good my reasons were, and this was why, the evening before I went, he left a brief message with Madeleine, who passed it on to me indignantly. In this message he told me he couldn't see me despite a plan we had had. He did not explain.

He spent that evening with Kitty instead, first going to the movies with her and then talking to her in his room. He said she had a problem and needed to talk to him. I kept calling him until I reached him, then I quarreled with him on the phone, then I called him again, and at last, though it was so late, I got into my car and drove to where he lived. I wanted to be with him even if only for a short time.

Because of the lateness of the hour, or the absurdity of what I was doing, my lack of dignity, the fact that I had had to change out of my nightgown and back into my clothes to do this, or for some other reason, when I came to the long, wide curve of road around the racetrack parking lot, heading toward the trailer camp and within sight, in the distance, of the highway with its pairs of yellow lights moving down the coast and red lights moving up the coast, and I could see far up the train tracks a train coming south, with its single headlight and its two long tines of reflected light shining down the straight tracks at me, with nothing but darkness and emptiness on either side of me, layer upon layer of different shades of darkness and emptiness, only enough light just here to see the dark side of the hill beyond the barbed fence, beyond the dirt flat, beyond the channel of brown water, I felt I was no longer observing this landscape, but that, instead, it was now observing me: I was the only moving thing right here, by this empty lot, and I was suddenly turned back on myself, as though reflected by the landscape, and forced to see what I was doing at this moment.

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.

I was traveling that mile up the coast with only one purpose, to consume that mile and reach the other end of it. I found him, but he wouldn't let me into his room. We talked outside, and he apologized. I drove back home and went off on my trip the next morning without being sure what was true and what was not, about his story.

It was Thanksgiving Day. I was flying to a city north of us, the same city, in fact, where years later I spent most of one afternoon looking for his latest address, though of course in my memory there are two cities, quite different. Not long after I arrived, I was taken to a house I had never been to before, and then later that night I was taken, in the dark, through streets I didn't know, to another house I had never been to before. It was a cottage that stood by itself back from the street over the distance of a very large lawn, a full city lot, I think, unless the size of the lawn has grown in my memory over time. I did not know where I was in the city and I had not known I would be going there.

I was left there, and no one else was in the house but someone's teenage son sleeping upstairs, whom I never saw, either that night or the next morning, so that I seemed to be alone in the house. I felt not only the hours separating me from him but the succession of strange places, too, as though the more hours passed and the more strange places I went into, the farther I moved from him, and I would have to go back through that time and each of those places to find him again. Then, though it was late, the phone rang, and when I answered it, what I heard in the receiver was his voice. He could not know where I was, I thought, since even I did not know where I was. He could not have called me. But he had found me, simply because he wanted to find me.

The same sort of thing had happened a few weeks earlier, when I had wanted more than anything else to hold him in my arms, and thought he was somewhere else and with other people. I had opened a door to go out into a hall and he was there in front of me, waiting for me.

It was at times like these, and maybe only at times like these, when I was away from him and wanted to be with him, that there was no confusion in me and I didn't hold anything back from him.

I returned home two days later and found a small bunch of blue flowers on the piano and a note from him saying he was waiting for me down the hill, at the bar. All I had to do was choose the moment to go, wash my face and hands, walk down the hill, and find him in the crowded place, where he would be sitting on a stool, one of a row of backs, a close line of people shoulder to shoulder, his back, when he turned to look for me, pressing against the back of another man, as I made my way through the crowd to him. Then I would have him in my arms, where I wanted him.

But even so, I put off the moment a little, I looked through my mail and opened a few letters before I went down the hill. I held that moment a short distance away, maybe in order to enjoy it just where it was, in the near future. In fact, maybe I was happiest in exactly that situation, having him nearby, having the prospect of him there before me, feeling the desire to be so close to him that nothing separated us, and knowing I would be able to satisfy it at any moment I chose. It was a perfectly secure position, untouched by any trouble, any conflict or contradiction, and I had the time to savor it. Nothing could disturb it, except to try to stay in it too long.

And when I realize that, I go on to consider that maybe what I found so intolerable after he left me was not the obvious thing, that he and I were no longer together, that I was alone, but rather the less obvious, that I no longer had that wonderful possibility available to me, of going to find him wherever he was and being welcomed by him. I wanted to go find him but did not know where he was, and if I knew where he was, and found him, I was not welcomed by him.

*   *   *

When he had appeared suddenly, as though brought by the force of my wanting him there, in the hall outside the door, a party was going on in my house. It was a party he and I were giving together, although I can't remember if there was any particular reason for it. There were many people in the house. We were trying to roast pieces of chicken to feed these people, but we had not planned it right and were not fast enough. So many people crowded around and tried to eat or waited or asked to eat that we became almost frightened by their hunger. We were roasting the chicken outside on the terrace, on a grill built of stone, and over and over again we turned the soft flesh of the chicken with its gleam of fat in the dim light from inside the house, but the chicken would not cook. Some of the people ate, at last, and others never did, and as the hour moved on, the hunger of all these people was satisfied or not satisfied but forgotten. The next morning there was a pleasant smell of beer in the rooms, and piles of crumbs from crushed bread here and there on the tiles, and someone's felt hat left behind on a table.

*   *   *

Soon after I returned from my weekend trip, I went to see him in his garage. I had not gone there very often. I did not ask how he worked or when he worked. I would have asked, or maybe I had asked once, but there must have been something in the way he answered, maybe too briefly, that made me think he did not like me to ask.

I came away with a few books I had been wanting to read. I put these books on the shelf in the alcove above my bed alongside the other books I had recently acquired: the books given to me on my trip and the books I had bought with him a few days before.

I looked at their spines often. The colors of their spines, and the few words of their titles, naming other possible visions of the world, were always part of what I saw in the room, and I always liked to have these signs of other worlds near me, even if for months or years I did not open the books, even if there were many I never read but packed into boxes and unpacked again, over and over, taking them with me from one place to the next. Some, in fact, I still have on shelves here in this house, still unread.

When I visited him in his garage, he showed me more closely what he had in this place where he worked, and I was impressed by the books, not knowing, yet, that most of them were not his. The garage was larger than his room in the back of the building. Harsh yellow light shone over the concrete walls and the tall bookcases that stood strangely in rows in the middle of the space. He stepped lightly and easily around the bookcases, showing me how he had arranged the books. He never wasted his motions. He moved, and yet always seemed still. He paused before he moved, then moved economically and deliberately, whereas I often hurled myself at things, stumbled, and was awkward. He seemed to think economically, too, as though he also paused before he thought, as he also paused before he spoke. Of course even pausing and taking care, he sometimes said something wrong, or clumsy, and I thought of the way a cornered animal will pause and then, with its perfectly developed instincts, make a move that should be successful but is not, because there are elements in the situation the animal has not understood and could not have understood.

I did not visit him in his garage again after that, as far as I can remember. I did not help him move, when he moved a month or two later from that place to the rooms overlooking the concrete yard of a nursery full of potted cactuses. I can't remember just when that move was. I think I was away, I think I had gone back East. There was a dispute surrounding the move. Either he owed rent, or the landlord did not like him, or a friend came back and claimed the place, or that friend or a different friend was angry about the books, either that they had been left behind in the garage or that they had not been left, or that the landlord had kept them, or that they had been damaged, or that some were missing.

*   *   *

I noticed even then, before I was angry at him myself, long before Ellie told me the story of another woman who was deeply insulted by a proposition of his, something he offered to do for her in exchange for money, that many people seemed to get angry at him. Certainly in any sort of business arrangement, anything involving practical matters or money, sooner or later he did not do the right thing and caused disturbance in the person he was dealing with. In the beginning, he would make a good impression, as for instance on a landlord, since he was neat and clean, friendly and intelligent, and good-looking in an open, unassuming way, and the landlord would be pleased with the arrangement and well-disposed toward him. But then he would be late with a rent payment, or offer only a part of it and then miss one altogether, and the landlord would be first puzzled, then nervous, then angry, and then adamant in asking him to leave.

He had been quick to pay back the first loan I made him, the $100, but he did not pay back the $300 I lent him later, enough to have his muffler fixed, probably because by the time I returned he had left me, so the debt was not something that might come between us but something he would want to forget, just as he would want to forget me, too, as quickly as possible, put me behind him and move on.

I realized later that he went to a woman and became attached to her in somewhat the same way that he moved into an apartment and lived there a few months and then moved out again after some unpleasantness with the landlord, always defaulting on the rent and owing money. He needed to stay with her and become part of her, not lose himself completely, but not keep himself entirely separate either. Then, after a time, he left her and became attached to another woman.

A woman anchored him in the real world, connected him to something. Without her, he floated. He did not keep track of the passing hours or the passing days very well, anyway, he did not plan how to make money or spend it or save it, or if he did, his plans were not connected to anything very real, though he kept himself clean and neat, and began projects and worked at them hard, and was a hard worker, if he did not often finish them.

He did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and in the same way, he sometimes did not know what he was saying, or did not think about how it related to the last thing he had said, or to what he was doing, or to the true situation, so that there was often a lack of connection between one thing and another in his conversation and in his life. Many of the things he said to me were not true, and even more were not what he meant to say. He did not always know what he was saying because his mind was often on something else. Once he told me he made Portuguese fish soup very well, then corrected himself and said that he had never made it but believed he could make it very well. Sometimes he said something he thought was true but said it in such a strange way that it did not express what he meant to say. Sometimes he was simply confused or mistaken. Some things he said wrong out of nervousness and then either heard what he had said or did not hear. Some things he deliberately distorted or exaggerated. Sometimes he deliberately lied.

When I first knew him, I did not know that he could lie, so I believed everything he said. Later, when I looked back at what he had said, knowing he could lie, I had to wonder which thing was true and which was not. And each thing I doubted made me change what I thought I knew about him.

*   *   *

I think he wanted to forget me as well as the money he owed me, even though he did send me that French poem a year after I last saw him. Sending it could have been a momentary impulse. Maybe the memory of me broke through his cloud of forgetfulness briefly and was then swallowed up again, so that by the time he received my answer, if he ever received it, he was once again inclined to forget me and only read it quickly, suppressed anything he felt reading it, and put it away to be forgotten as soon as possible—not deliberately in a drawer or a box, and not in the wastebasket, but in a place on his table or desk where it would look like something he intended to answer, but would be buried by other papers, mislaid, and eventually forgotten.