The End of the Story (16 page)

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The evening before I left on my last trip contains another memory that is difficult, not so much because of my bad feelings about him, I think, as because of a combination of other things: the awkward spaces and ugly concrete walls of the barnlike building where the reception was held, the sickening sweetness of the cheap white wine, the rain afterward, the bare lawn outside, with no plantings on it at all, and the word “reception,” which I don't like.

I was moving from one person to another, with a glass of that sweet wine in my hand, looking through the crowd from time to time, when suddenly I saw him standing there with a few of his young friends. I did not expect to see him, though now I can't think why I wouldn't have talked to him about the reception. This is the sort of question that bothers me the most, because I will never have an answer for it—what our relations were at that point, if I was planning to do something without him and without even mentioning it to him. Maybe that was not unusual for us, but it seems especially strange to me in this case, since I was leaving the next morning.

I can't remember which friends he was with, or if I even noticed who they were, since I didn't care, and I can't remember if I went over to him as soon as I saw him or, remaining a few yards away, caught his attention and waved to him and continued to talk to other people, or didn't try to catch his attention but simply watched him and kept track of where he was in the room. The last seems the most likely to me, maybe because this is what I have believed all these years. But it was also something I would be likely to do, given the reaction I had when I saw him, a reaction I do remember unmistakably. It was a feeling of absolute displeasure to see him there, as though he were a hostile element in that place, a thing that intruded where it didn't belong, so that as I watched him among the moving figures, over the shoulders of the other people in the crowded place, those same features of his that had held such a positive attraction for me not long before, and that would exert such a fascinating force again not long after, were just then repugnant to me, blunt and deadly, primitive and vicious, without intelligence, without humanity, the color of clay.

Rain was coming down hard and a few people gathered by the open door, preparing to run to their cars. Although I don't know how I came to stand by the door with him, I did go with him to my car, the two of us running across the sodden lawn under my umbrella or my raincoat, and I drove him the short distance to his own car. I certainly remember the spongy grass under my feet better than I remember what I said to him, or what he said to me. I was on my way out to dinner, and he was going off to some place where his friends were giving him a birthday party. He said he would come to my house late in the evening.

By the time he came, I had been at work several hours on a job I had to do before I left in the morning, and although it was already late by then, I was not finished. He went to bed at the other end of the room and fell asleep. I worked on, impatient to be done with what had turned out to be much more tedious than I had thought it would be. I was checking a friend's translation, and I was doing it as a favor. The friend never really thanked me later, or not in any way proportionate to the amount of work I had done or the awkward moment when I had had to do it, though of course it wouldn't be fair to expect her to know how awkward that moment was, especially since even I did not know it was the last night I would spend with him.

I finished and went to bed. He woke up, and then we talked to each other for close to an hour, unusually companionable and relaxed, as we might have been all along, as though we were taking our last chance for it.

The next morning we got into his car and he drove me to the airport. I did not see him again until I came back more than four weeks later, when he met me at the same airport and we got back into the same car. He waited until we were on our way up the highway to begin telling me that everything had changed. The distance in him was enough to let me know something had happened, though he had said nothing about it in the corridors of the airport or by the revolving tables of luggage. The distance was there because he had already begun a different way of being with me, whereas I was still in the old way of being with him.

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I lost most of another day of work yesterday, because Vincent and I took his father to the county fair. We put a cap on him because it was a blistering hot day, and as we wheeled him around he peered out at everything attentively from under his visor. We took him to see the sheds of cattle, sheep, rabbits, and poultry, and the rubber tires of his chair rolled pleasantly over the fresh sawdust. A goose put its beak to the wire grille of its cage and honked at him and he kissed his hand back to the goose. I don't know what he was thinking.

I suppose we were trying to entertain him with a spectacle more unusual than his television shows and what he sees from the back porch, where he sits so much of the time—the trees moving in the wind, the branches bobbing suddenly and rustling these days as the squirrels run back and forth, the green hickory nuts thumping down onto the lawn. It is true that as we left the animals and moved toward the exhibition halls and racetrack and Ferris wheel the intense heat, the brilliant sun, the constant motion of the crowd, the sweet smells of cotton candy and fudge washing up against him did seem to awaken a response: little spots of color appeared on his cheeks, his eyes brightened, and his gaze from under the visor was as intent, almost angry, as the gaze of one of those roosters in the poultry shed. Among the crowd were other speechless men and women like him, old and middle-aged, even young, being wheeled about or guided by the elbow or hand, making a visible effort to absorb what was around them, and they, too, seemed to have been brought out in order to be shocked into some kind of accelerated motion by the assault of this rowdy scene. So there we were, just another small group, another parcel of the seething mass, two middle-aged, our shirts damp with sweat, pushing a third, who was old, tiny, with an egg-like head under his cap, his body barely perceptible in his loose clothes.

Today he is cranky and a little sunburned on his freckled forearms and the backs of his bony hands. The nurse remarked, after being with him only a few minutes, that he was acting strange. I assured her he was only tired.

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I had a dream last night in which I was looking for a good photograph of him and at last found one. The strange thing is that this photograph was a sharper and more complete picture than any waking memory I had of his face, and when I woke up I could still see him clearly, though by now the image has faded. So somewhere in my brain there must be a clear memory of his face that is hidden most of the time and was uncovered once, like a photograph, in the dream.

I am working more systematically now, and I feel more in control. But then I find things that disconcert me because I have no memory of them at all, such as an early plan for the novel which I jotted down in pencil in a spot where I wasn't likely to find it again except by accident. It may not be a plan for the whole novel, though, since I see that large parts of the story are missing.

When I find something like this, I don't know what I may find next. Then I become annoyed with myself, as though someone else had made these careless notes and left them lying around for me to figure out without a clue as to what they are for or what they mean.

I am trying to sort out the different phone calls I made to him while I was away in the East for the second time, staying in an apartment borrowed from an old friend who was in the West. There was one call late at night, after the stranger left me. There was one during which I could hear the sound of typing in the background. There was one in which I learned he was seeing another woman, one of his friends, the one who had given him a birthday cake the night before I left, and the one, in fact, that he later married. And there was a phone call in which he assured me that this was not important, that she did not mean as much to him as I did, and it did not change anything. But I don't know if these were all different phone calls.

I seem to have written two accounts of one of these phone calls and the days surrounding it. I have just rediscovered the earlier one, and it seems less accurate and more sentimental. For instance, I say that after he told me he was seeing another woman, I was in pain because I still held him in a little corner of my heart. Now the idea of my heart having a corner bothers me, and other things about the sentence bother me, too. I also said I remembered how happy it made me to hear him laugh and see him smile, which was certainly not true.

The earlier account includes things I later left out because although they had to do with my life at the time they had nothing to do with the story: how I attended a university lecture, and a dinner beforehand, with very pale university professors; how I did not understand their questions after the lecture; the lofty conference room overlooking the lights, far below, of a poor and dangerous part of the city; the wide hallways of the empty building; the bags of trash around every bend and crowding the elevator as we were leaving. How I had dreams about certain men and there was far more anger in the dreams than I ever felt when I was awake. How the apartment in which I was staying was in a part of the city where many old people lived, and the sidewalks were full of canes and walkers, the old people swaying among them. How I knew I was trying to find the answers to certain questions, answers that would probably come only with time, by trial and error.

I didn't seem able to understand much, after all. I didn't understand what my attachment to him meant, or what it meant to love and honor a man, or even what he had said on the phone. As I strained after answers, I was more confident about the correctness of certain kinds of thoughts than others. Those others seemed weak and tentative, or the muscles with which I was thinking them seemed weak—yet they were the very thoughts that should have been correct, that could have helped me if they had been correct. There would be a question, and next to it an answer, obviously wrong, and I couldn't seem to find any other answer. The question of what it meant to love a man was one that would take a lot of time and thought to answer, but an easier one, which I felt I should have been able to answer, and couldn't, was why it had embarrassed me to hear him play the drums.

Neither account includes a literary party I went to, where a writer said to me: “What anybody will buy, that's what I am.”

I recently found the phone bill from that time, and it shows five phone calls to his number within twelve days. One conversation lasted thirty-seven minutes, and it may have been that night that they were making bread, though it may equally well have been an earlier night, when I spoke to him for only fourteen minutes.

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I wrote a letter to him and watched it lying there on the desk before I sent it, and wondered what kind of communication it was if it was written but couldn't be sent because of the lateness of the hour, or if it was written and could be sent but wasn't sent. Would it be any kind of communication as long as he had not read it?

In the earlier account, I seem to be sure the letter I'm studying is the same one that was later returned to me by the post office, and in the later account I only guess that this may be so. I can't decide why I was sure one day and less sure another.

The letter that never reached him was sent back to me unopened by the post office, though it was correctly addressed to the place where he was living at the time and was still living when I returned. Since it was sent back, I still have it and can read it now, and I have just done that again. I don't know if my impression of it is the same or nearly the same as the one he would have had. It seems cheerful, uncomplaining, and very young—young because it is so open, so frank, without guile, wariness, innuendo, or insinuation. In the letter I tell him how I telephoned a man I had met at a New Year's Eve party and invited him up to my apartment. I don't know why I told him about this, since the encounter with this stranger had not worked out very well and certainly did not reflect well on me.

I had been out to dinner with an old friend who left early because he had to go home and walk his dog, he said. I was alone in my apartment, and restless. Although I didn't recall this stranger very clearly, I telephoned him and invited him to come up. I had an idea that only later seemed odd to me. I thought I had learned to do something I hadn't known how to do before, and it would always be enjoyable, never again dry, colorless, strained, hasty, or awkward, so that all I had to do was to invite a man I found attractive to come to me, and it would be enjoyable.

But when this man appeared, climbing the last steep flight of stairs, and looked up at me, as I looked down into the stairwell at him, his face was not what I had remembered. Inside the apartment, he talked about his religion, and he went on talking about his religion. He had changed distinctly between the first meeting and the second. He had been attractive and spirited in the midst of the party and now, some weeks later on the top floor of a narrow brownstone, was not so attractive, as though every part of his face had in the meantime shifted slightly, or thickened, at the same time that his mind had slowed down considerably and become fixed on one idea. I sat there and let the time pass and pass, because I thought that although it was too late to change anything, at least I could be as tired as possible and a little drunk when it happened.

In bed with me he continued to talk about his religion. Then, after he was finished, because I lay with my back turned to him and only grunted when he spoke to me, he must have seen that I wanted him to leave, and he did leave, at last, and after he was well out the door I got up and went into the living room in my bathrobe. I was trembling violently, in large quakes and shudders. I went to the phone.

It was three hours earlier there. He was with a friend, he said, and they were making bread. He asked me a question about the bread and I told him not to let it rise too long. I thought if he was making bread with this woman there must be something between them and it was probably all over for him and me, considering how badly things had been going before I left. I said some of this to him, and he answered with sudden irritation that there was nothing to worry about. His irritation convinced me he was telling the truth. I said I missed him. I didn't tell him about the man who was then riding home on the subway, who had left a present of three books of his for me to find after he was gone, three books I looked at but did not read or keep or even give away. I considered taking them to the bookstore down the street, but instead threw them in the wastebasket. I had never done that before, to a book.