The End of the Story (15 page)

But this was not the end of it either, because he couldn't simply do what he had done and then forget it as though it had never happened. Kitty would remind him, and he would have to continue or end something with her.

Though we woke up together the next morning, we were apart all day, and when I called him at home that night, he was in bed and did not want to see me.

He said he would come to lunch the next day, and I waited for him, but he was three hours late. As I waited for him I knew my nervousness would be out of all proportion to his explanation or apology, which would be very brief, as his apologies and his explanations always were when he was at fault in any way, brief and a little angry, as though he were angry at me first for putting him in a position to disappoint me and then for being disappointed in him.

We ate lunch, and then he left to go see Kitty again, and while he was with Kitty I walked down into the town with Madeleine. He returned late in the evening.

The next day he was cool to me, and told me he did not know whether to stay with me or go back to Kitty. It seemed to me it was all over between us. He left at three in the afternoon, then returned at four and said he wanted to stay with me. In fact, he wanted to move in with me, as though to make everything clearer. He thought he could move into the spare room. He said he would talk to Madeleine about it. I did nothing, but simply let him talk to Madeleine, as I let Madeleine do what she wanted in response to him. She did not want him living there and would not consider it. I had guessed that she would not want it, but I did not know whether I was relieved or not.

Although I did not really think she would agree to have him live there, I convinced myself briefly that she would want the money he could give toward the rent because she often had such trouble paying her share. But I was misjudging her yet again. Although she had so little money, money was never the most important consideration for her, and usually not a consideration at all. In fact, I think she was insulted that we were offering money in exchange for this disruption of her life.

The three of us went off in the car after talking about this, to a birthday party. As we drove, there was silence in the car. Madeleine sat in the back seat feeling insulted by us, while we sat in front feeling angry at her that she refused us what we asked from her, and wondering what we would do next about the two of us, although I don't think my anger was very sincere. I had the luxury of being angry at her while at the same time I was not entirely unhappy that she had made this decision for me.

The next evening, despite the fact that he had been on the point of leaving me and had not left me, I went out to dinner with another man. I had already made that plan and I did not change it. He was not happy about it. While I was out, he stayed alone in my room reading and then took a walk, and when I returned he said very little to me and kept turning away from me, and because he kept turning away from me, I was frightened and couldn't sleep after he fell asleep. It was then that I stared at him under the lamplight for a while before getting up to smoke and read in the kitchen, watching a mouse that came out of the stove to walk over the burners hunting for food. It was when I went back to bed that he said, as though in his sleep, “You're so beautiful.”

In the morning, after he said what he said to me in his sleep, he sat on the same stool where I had sat the night before and held the young cat in his lap, rubbing the crown of her head. I stood behind him and held him around the shoulders. I put my cheek down against his soft hair. Now that he was with me again, after frightening me, I wanted to do something for him, to give him something, though I did not know what. But that impulse grew weaker after a few days and then passed.

The entire quarrel, starting with his leaving the house so angrily and ending with my staring at his white shoulder late at night, had lasted a week.

I think I did not at first write down the actual words he spoke because I was afraid this would seem vain, even though the novel claims to be fiction and not a story about me, and even though it was only his opinion, not necessarily the truth. In fact, I had to believe he saw something I could not see, because when I looked in the mirror or at a photograph, the face I saw, tense and motionless, or frozen in a strange position, only rarely seemed even pretty to me, and more often either plain or unpleasant, with features that floated or spun when I was tired, one cheek spotted with four dark moles in a pattern like a constellation, hair flat, of a dull brown, on a large squarish head, neck so thin as to seem scrawny, eyes startled or apprehensive, of a blue so pale as to be almost white staring out from behind the lenses of my glasses, though if I took my glasses off, as I occasionally did, I tended to frighten people, as I was told quite frankly by at least one friend.

What I also left out of this version was that when Madeleine and I were studying Italian together on the café terrace and then gave it up because we were so distracted, what finally stopped us was that a small green dropping landed on a page of the Italian grammar book. It had come from a sparrow in the tree above us. I did not put this in my account of that day because it did not fit in with the mood of what I was writing.

*   *   *

Not much time has gone by since I last worked, but when I sat down at my desk I was immediately confused by my new system. I have four boxes with pieces of paper in them. They are labeled
MATERIAL TO BE USED, MATERIAL NOT YET USED, MATERIAL USED OR NOT TO BE USED
and
MATERIAL
. Most of what is in the last, “Material,” has nothing to do with this novel. “Material Used or Not to Be Used” means what it says: material I have already used or don't intend to use. What puzzled me today was the fact that there didn't seem to be any difference between “Material Not Yet Used” and “Material to Be Used.” Then I remembered that the “Material to Be Used” was in finished form, ready to be incorporated, and the “Material Not Yet Used” was in rougher form. It was the word “ready” that would have clarified things, if I hadn't been afraid to write it on the box.

I've just spoken to another friend who is about to go away to work on his novel. He is going to a hotel in Mexico. A surprising number of friends are writing novels, I realize, now that I stop to count them. One woman leaves her apartment every morning to write in a local coffee shop. She says she can write for only about two hours at a time, but if she moves on to another coffee shop she can extend the morning's work a little. A man I know writes in an old shed behind his house while his children are at school. Another goes away to an artists' colony to write, then returns home for a while to work as a carpenter so that he can earn enough money to go back to the colony. Another writes at night while his roommate is out driving a taxi. He has written 700 pages so far, and he says he is trying to make the novel funny, but that it is hard to be funny for so many pages.

*   *   *

I don't know exactly why things were going wrong just when they were, but a day came that later seemed to be the beginning of everything going so wrong that we couldn't get it right again. He had told me on the phone that he was at home working. Madeleine and I went out for a walk through town and stopped in at an art gallery. There he was, among the few people gazing soberly at the paintings, his army bag hanging from his shoulder. He seemed unpleasantly surprised to see us. He said he would come by later that night. I went out for the evening with two friends, leaving him a note, but when I returned he wasn't there and hadn't come.

I called him, letting the telephone ring fifteen times. I hung up and then drove over to his apartment. His car was there outside the building but his lights were off, and I was sure he was not alone. I went up to his apartment and knocked at the door. He opened it for me in the dark and went back to bed. He lay completely still and did not respond when I got into the bed and tried to talk to him. I got out of the bed. I said I was leaving, and he said nothing, unless it was “Goodbye” or “Whatever you like.”

At home I lay down on my bed and ate a slice of bread and cheese. I got up and brought another slice of bread and cheese back to bed, and then another. While I ate, I read a book of poems by a friend, a book that had come recently in the mail, so that while I was filling my mouth with food, I was also filling my eyes with the printed pages and filling my ears with the sound of my friend's voice, and all this filling, all this feeding into different channels, did at last change my condition, whether it really filled something or simply calmed something.

*   *   *

Three nights later, I went to his room again, this time with him. But our companionship was not very strong now. It did not go much beyond the appearance of companionship. There was this appearance, and there was also a certain familiarity, though even the most complete familiarity would not have removed all the awkwardness between us. On the way there, we stopped to buy a pack of playing cards, a few bottles of beer, and a bag of corn chips. I can see now, and I sensed then, though I tried to ignore it, that I was bored, and that without the cards, the beer, and the chips I would not have known what to do with him, that these things were a distraction from the emptiness that would have been there in the room between us, they were a distraction I had to have in order to want to stay there with him at all and not prefer to be at home alone eating and reading and more fully engrossed in that than I could be in him.

I was probably there in the room with him then only because there had been something different earlier. If he was still there, with me, the same person, and I was still there, and there had once been something between us, certainly something ecstatic from time to time, it was hard to believe that that ecstasy was not still within our reach. But what we made together, now, was the form of a thing not alive anymore—a thing left behind that showed what the living thing had been like.

Now the very thought of those things we bought and took to his apartment fills me with a queasiness that tastes of tepid beer and stale chips and slides around like a playing card with warm grease on it. How miserable that attempt was. What weakness of character it showed, that I could not simply admit there was nothing I very much wanted to do with him, nothing left to do, that the only thing left was to say goodbye with all the friendliness I really felt for him. But instead I went to a store with him, one of those large, brightly lit stores, so vast they are disheartening, and bought with him things other people bought to have a good time together, as though by doing that we would have a good time, whereas I had no illusion that I would enjoy myself, or maybe I did think I could achieve something that would feel, at least for a little while, like a good time simply by going through the motions of it, that if I just carried on like that, my mood would suddenly change, and what had not been enjoyable would become enjoyable.

Now I would like to be in that room again, on that night. I am curious to see what he would say and what I would answer, because I have forgotten so much of the way he talked and the things he might think of saying to me. Now I would bring so much interest to the meeting with him that it would be full of a kind of life it did not have then.

There was no table where we could play cards, so we sat on the carpet by his bed. We drank the beer, ate the chips, and played gin rummy. The game was not interesting. I might have known, if I had been willing to think about it, that I could not hope for anything from the game itself, because if there was boredom between us, there would be no tension in the game either.

We played on and on, as though trying to force some interest from it. We drank more beer than we wanted, or at least it was more than I wanted, and were not affected by it either. The alcohol seemed to have no more power to intoxicate me than the game had power to interest me, and the situation was not changed by it, as I had hoped it would be, knowing that alcohol could usually change a situation at least a little. We ate the chips and maybe other things as well before the chips, or maybe we had had something odd or excessive earlier, for dinner, because when we finally went to bed, I began to feel sick, and I lay awake feeling sick, and then my sickness became so bad that I kept going into the bathroom and sitting on the floor next to the toilet, my arms on the toilet seat and my head on my arms, and then on the toilet, and then down on the floor again next to the toilet, for most of the night. He woke up slightly, once, but did not seem to notice that I was going back and forth so often or was awake for so much of the night.

The next day was his birthday. We went to a movie. After the movie, we went home to my house, ate thick sweet cake and ice cream, and sat on the foot of my bed while across the room, so large and empty that the bed at one end, and the piano, the card table, and the ugly metal chairs at the other seemed small on the expanse of dark tile floor, Madeleine, sitting on one of the hard chairs, read aloud to us in the light from one of the bare bulbs attached to the white plaster wall long, complex horoscopes from a magazine. Again I was uneasy, and sensed that without the food and Madeleine's company, there would have been emptiness between him and me, and boredom, that the presence of Madeleine, in fact, who was so separate from us, drew us together a little, at the same time that what she was reading was so entertaining, and beyond that, her own reactions to it were so sharp. I ate too much, and I laughed too much. But the food held most of my interest and attention as long as it lasted and I was restless as soon as it was gone.

What did boredom mean then? That nothing more would happen with him. It wasn't that he was boring, it was that I no longer had any expectations for this companionship with him. There had been expectations, and they had died.

And why did that boredom make me so uncomfortable? Because of the emptiness of it, the empty spaces opening up between him and me, around us. I was imprisoned with this person and this feeling. Emptiness, but also disappointment: what had once been so complete was now so incomplete.