The End of the Story (18 page)

As soon as I took my slicker and boots off, at home, I went to work putting the hooks back in the curtains I had washed earlier and began hanging them up on their iron rods. I was moving fast in order to avoid what I might start thinking. Then, knowing for once just where he was, I left the pile of curtains and called him. He was not unfriendly, and he agreed to come see me the next day. I finished hanging the curtains and got undressed for bed, but then, though it was late, sat down to work at my table.

My eyes were wide open as though stuck. I did not feel tired. I had gone out to dinner, and come home in the rain, and the brandy I had had with Mitchell did not make me too sleepy to go on working at my table with my brain moving fast. I was not hungry, though I could feel that my stomach was empty. I had looked at what I might eat. I couldn't swallow any of it.

I worked hard and the work seemed to go well. As I worked, I seemed to be waiting for something, though I did not know what. Then I realized I was waiting until I could be sure he and she had stopped making love and had gone to sleep. Once they were asleep I could go to sleep myself.

The next morning I sat at my table translating again. He had said he would come at a certain hour of the morning and he did not come, and he did not call. I kept looking up from my work, out the window. Each time I looked up I saw the same things: the fence across the street, the top of the house set back behind it, and a few trees. Now and then something came between me and what I saw, and then I watched it, whatever it was, until it was gone.

The young girl came home to the house across the street with her tennis racket in her hand and a sweater over her arm.

An old man passed, moving slowly down the hill with many small steps. He was the one I often saw kneeling among the flowers in his front yard next door to the church.

Before a small breeze, a red blossom tumbled, end over end, in the soft dust.

Two dogs came up close to the window. The larger dog sniffed at a bush, its nose and neck outstretched. The smaller dog stood behind the large dog and stretched its nose and neck up to sniff under the tail of the large dog.

Several times I went down the hall to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, brushed my hair, rinsed my mouth out, and then returned to the table. Finally I went out to the store, came back, and called him. There was no answer. I called him a second time, and then a third. The third time he answered and said he had called me, but I knew he hadn't, because Madeleine had been in the house while I was out. He asked me what good it would do to talk.

*   *   *

On another day I persuaded him to meet me after work. Passing the time until the evening, I went downtown to a music store and from there to Ellie's apartment, where Evelyn and her children were sitting on the floor and the sofa. We walked out into the rain and down half a block to the seawall to look at the high gray waves, then drove up in Evelyn's car to a restaurant for supper. The car was steaming from the dampness of our clothes, with so many of us crowded in together.

I made sure to be home in time, but he did not come. He called instead and said he could not come because he had to get up early the next morning. Then he asked to borrow my car. He had to drive that older couple to the airport. He must have thought my car was more suitable than his. I told him I kept it in the garage now, and that I would leave the keys in it.

Later in the morning, after he had gone to the airport and brought my car back to the garage, we met for breakfast at a restaurant up the coast. I was afraid that if I was clumsy and let food fall from my mouth or dropped my fork, everything would be ruined, though I knew this could not be true.

We sat side by side on a wooden bench with hanging plants over our heads. He leaned his shoulder against the back of the bench, facing me. He talked a great deal, mostly about himself and his plans, and I listened. I was not eating more than a little toast from the heavily filled plate in front of me. I wanted to smoke. After we paid and walked out, we stood on the sunny terrace and he hugged me for a long time.

When I was alone in my car again driving south, I thought only about the different things he had said, trying first to make sure I understood them and then to see if they meant what I thought they meant.

The memory of that meal is another one that bothers me. Is it because meeting him did not make any difference, it was only hours wasted, as I was pulled weakly here and there by my thin string of hope? But the scene itself and every aspect of it seem to become an enemy—the uninteresting landscape of brown dirt outside the window, the earth-moving machines and brand-new wooden constructions standing nearby, the bland sunlight inside, the foolish hanging plants, his smiling with a cruel friendliness, his talking with a cruel openness, the poisonous blond wood paneling on the walls, and the load of breakfast food.

*   *   *

Later that day Ellie told me a friend of ours was giving a party. I thought I would call him and see if he wanted to go to it with me. But when I tried, there was no answer. I drove up to the gas station and to his house. Then I drove up and down the streets of my town. I had heard that friends of his lived near the water, though I did not know exactly where. All the streets below the coast road were near the water, so I drove through all those streets looking for his car. By now I wasn't planning to speak to him, since that would have meant ringing a stranger's doorbell. But once I started looking for him I had to do everything I could to find him. This time I couldn't find him. At last I reached him by telephone late in the evening. He asked me abruptly what I wanted. He said he did not think he could go to the party. He yielded only a little in the conversation after that, enough to laugh once, though maybe he was merely being polite. I did not understand how he could be so affectionate in the morning and so cool to me now.

I sat down at my table to work, but every time I looked up, his face appeared in front of me.

I must have known there was not much hope. But still, for four days after I returned, I told myself there was some hope that he would come back to me, though he did almost nothing to encourage me: he hugged me once, he kissed me once, and two or three times he mentioned things in his life that might include me.

Late in the afternoon of the fifth day, on my way home from the party he had not wanted to go to, I stopped by the gas station, a little drunk. I asked him lightheartedly if he had changed his mind yet.

Across the road from us where we stood awkwardly near the gas pumps, as though waiting for something, a freight train rolled by slowly. Beyond it, at some distance, rose another hill with a straight line of palm trees along the top of it. Behind us, hidden by low buildings, the sun hung above the ocean, and its warm orange light lay over the palms on the hill and the palms closer by, lower and thicker, that stood around the fountain in the middle of the town. The sense of the ocean so far below us made the level asphalt of the station seem to be a high plateau. A cool spring evening was beginning, but the air was soft and fragrant. A camper stopped by the pumps and a thin, wide-hipped woman climbed out and asked timidly where she might buy some butane or propane. Before I left, he said, also lightheartedly, that he had not made up his mind yet, and he thanked me for stopping by.

While I was standing there with him, I could tolerate what was happening, but once I was alone again I could not. I had nothing to distract me, and Madeleine was not there to stop me, so I called him at the gas station. We talked for half an hour. He kept leaving the phone to wait on a customer. Each time he left, I planned what I would say to him next, as though I could say the right thing and he would come back to me. Each time he returned to the phone I said what I had planned to say. I finally told him I wanted to see him, and he said I must not drive up to the gas station. But he would not come down to see me after work either. We hung up, and then I got back in my car and drove to the gas station.

From the road I could see him sitting in the office that was so fluorescent in the darkness it was like a showcase where he was behind glass, flooded with light. He sat at the desk reading. When I walked in he stood up and came around the desk, his broad shoulders braced as though against the sight of me and stronger than they needed to be.

He talked to me about what he was reading, because he clearly did not want to talk about the two of us. Sitting at the desk, he had been reading a novel by Faulkner. He was reading all of Faulkner now, just as months before he had been reading all of Yeats. He wanted to talk about Faulkner, but I did not, and now our talk went nowhere, because I could not bear the situation as it was and he would not do what I wanted him to do.

I began to cry and he put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Go home.” He said he had to close the station. He walked me out to my car. He walked away toward the office. I got into my car and went on crying with my head on the wheel. He came back out, said my name, was silent a moment, and then said that if I did this I made it all impossible. I did not understand what I could be making impossible. He left to serve a customer, then came back angry, an oily rag in his hand. He said he had to go and clean the toilets, it was nearly nine o'clock, now he would not get out of here until nine-thirty, and he would not be paid for any work he did after nine o'clock. All his anger at this small job was in his voice. Then I became angry, too, that he valued his four dollars an hour more than he valued me, and at last I drove away. His anger felt better than his kindness. I couldn't have left if he hadn't become angry and made me angry. Then I was back in my own hands, and I could act again.

*   *   *

After those five days, I gave up, or at least I stopped trying so hard to go after him, and a different kind of bleakness closed down around me. I was so angry I wanted to hurt someone. I told myself how careless he was, how vain, shallow, and vulgar he was, how nasty, unfeeling, irresponsible, and deceitful. I said he had no conscience, betrayed friends, insulted women, and abandoned lovers. I said he was so deeply selfish that even his good friends became irritations to him, and when they tried to help him, he saw this as just another irritation.

Now I passed in and out of several different states of mind every few minutes, first anger, then relief, then hope, then tenderness, then despair, then anger again, and I had to struggle to keep track of where I was.

My mind kept filling with the thought of him, and it was painful every time. I knew that part of the reason it had ended was my own dissatisfaction. While I was still in it, I had been restless. But out of it now, I was still attached to it. I had had to ruin it to get out of it, but once I was out of it I had to remain attached to it, as though what I needed was to be on the edge of it.

I had not understood how to love him. I had been lazy with him and did not do anything that was not easy to do. I had not been willing to give up anything for him. If I could not have everything I wanted, I still wanted it and did not stop trying to have it.

I felt more tenderness and concern for him now that he had left me, even though I knew that if he came back my feelings would weaken. Now I would have done anything to have him back, but only because I knew I could not have him back. Before, I was difficult, and sometimes harsh toward him. Now I was only easy, and soft, though he rarely felt my softness, since I was mainly alone with it in my room. Before, I would tell him what I found wrong with him, without sparing his feelings. Now it would have hurt me to do this, though maybe not as much as it had hurt him. Before, I liked to listen to myself talk and was less interested in what he said. Now, when it was too late and he did not particularly want to talk to me, I wanted to listen to him.

After thinking of these things, I became inspired to start all over again with him. Excited, I thought I could do it very differently this time, if only he would agree. But this resolution was just as empty as my hope that he would come back to me. It could not mean anything as long as I knew he did not want to share it with me.

In the first few days, I had been impatient, as though things were resisting me. Now I was angry, not only at him, but also at myself, at certain other people, and at things in my room. I was angry at my books, because they did not hold my interest enough to stop me from thinking about him—they were not alive now, they were not ideas but only paper. I was angry at my bed, and did not want to go to bed. The pillows and sheets were unfriendly, they looked off in another direction. I was angry at my clothes, because when I looked at them I saw my body, and I was angry at my body. But I was not angry at my typewriter, because if I went to use it, it worked with me and helped me not to think of him. I was not angry at my dictionaries. I was not angry at my piano. I practiced the piano very hard now, several hours a day, starting with scales and five-finger exercises and ending with two pieces which improved steadily.

There was a lot of hatred in me. It was a feeling of wanting to get rid of the thing that was bothering me. The hills that had been brown in September were now green. But now I hated this landscape. I needed to see things that were ugly and sad. Anything beautiful seemed to be a thing I could not belong to. I wanted the edges of everything to darken, turn brown, I wanted spots to appear on every surface, or a sort of thin film, so that it would be harder to see, the colors not as bright or distinct. I wanted the flowers to wilt just a little, I wanted rot to appear in the creases of the red and violet flowers. I wanted the fat, water-filled blades of the sea figs to lose their water, dry up into sharp, rattling spears, I wanted the smell to go out of the eucalyptus trees at the bottom of the hill, and the smell to go out of the ocean, too. I wanted the waves to become feeble, the sound of them to be muffled.

I hated every place I had been with him, and by then that was almost every place I went. If I saw a woman ten years younger than I was, I hated her. I hated every young woman I did not know. And there were a great many young women walking through the streets of the town where I lived, though most of them were tall, with fluffy blond hair and sweet smiles, while she was short, dark-haired, and rather sour, from what I had seen.