The End of the Story (2 page)

But as I thought this, he walked up to me where I sat close by a tall bookcase. He leaned down to me and gently asked me if I would like a cup of tea, and when he brought it to me I thanked him and drank it. It was strong and hot, though so bitter it parched my tongue.

*   *   *

This seemed to be the end of the story, and for a while it was also the end of the novel—there was something so final about the bitter cup of tea. Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. It would have been simpler to begin at the beginning, but the beginning didn't mean much without what came after, and what came after didn't mean much without the end. Maybe I did not want to have to choose a place to start, maybe I wanted all the parts of the story to be told at the same time. As Vincent says, I often want more than is possible.

If someone asks me what the novel is about, I say it's about a lost man, because I don't know what to say. But it is true that for a long time now I have not known where he is, after first knowing and then not knowing, knowing again and then losing him again. He once lived on the outskirts of a small city a few hundred miles from here. He once worked for his father, a physicist. Now he may be teaching English to foreigners, or teaching writing to businessmen, or managing a hotel. He may be in a different city, or not in a city at all, though a city is more likely than a town. He may still be married. I was told that he and his wife had a daughter and that they named her after a European city.

When I moved to this town five years ago I stopped imagining that he would appear suddenly in front of me, because it was too unlikely. It had not been so unlikely in other places I lived. In at least three cities and two towns, I kept expecting him: if I was walking down a street, I imagined him coming toward me. If I was walking through a museum, I was sure he would be in the next room. Yet I never saw him. He might have been there, in the same street or even the same room, watching me from a short distance. He might have slipped away before I noticed him.

I knew he was alive somewhere, and for several years I lived in a city he would almost surely visit, though my neighborhood was a dirty, run-down area by the harbor. The closer I went to the center of the city, in fact, the more I expected to see him. I would find myself walking behind a familiar figure, broad, muscular, not much taller than I was, with straight, fair hair. But the head would turn and the face would be so unlike his, the forehead wrong, the nose wrong, the cheeks wrong, that it would become ugly just because it could have been his and was not. Or a man would come toward me from a distance with his arrogant, tense bearing. Or, close by, in a crowded subway car, I would see the same pale blue eyes, pink skin with freckles, or high, prominent cheekbones. Once, the features were his but exaggerated, so that the head was like a rubber mask: hair the same color but thicker, eyes so light they were almost white, forehead and cheekbones jutting out grotesquely, red flesh hanging from the bones, lips pressed together as though in a rage, body absurdly wide. Another time, the version of his face was so lacking in definition, so smooth and open, that I easily saw how, in time, it would develop into that other face I had loved so much.

I saw his clothes on many people: of good but coarse material, often threadbare or faded, always clean. And I couldn't help believing, though I knew it made no sense, that if enough men were to wear these clothes in the same place, he would be forced to appear by a sort of magnetism. Or I imagined that one day I would see a man wearing exactly what he wore, a red plaid lumber jacket, or a light blue flannel shirt, and white painter's pants, or blue jeans torn at the cuffs, and this man would also have straight reddish-gold hair combed to one side of his broad forehead, blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, tight lips, a broad strong body, a manner that was both shy and arrogant, and the resemblance would be complete, down to the last detail, the pink in the whites of his eyes, or the freckles on his lips, or the chip in his front tooth, as though all his elements had come together and the only thing needed, to change this man into him, was the right word.

*   *   *

Although I remember it was on a sunny late afternoon in October, on the top floor of a tall public building, I can't remember the reason for the reception. Surrounded by other people, in a sort of atrium, either circular or octagonal and flooded with sunlight, with doorways opening out from it, I was taken up to him by Mitchell, who told me his name. I forgot his name immediately, as I almost always did when I was introduced to someone. He already knew who I was, so he didn't forget my name. Mitchell went away, leaving us alone. We stood there in the midst of women moving slowly and tentatively through the rooms singly and in pairs, in and out of the strong sunlight. He told me he had imagined I would be older. I was surprised that he had imagined anything. I was surprised by several things: his frankness, the way he was dressed, in what seemed to me a hiking outfit, and, more than that, the fact that he existed at all, standing here talking to me, since no one had mentioned him to me before. I did not think about him after I left the place, maybe because he was so young.

Later that day, I went up to a shabby café on the coast road to the north of my town where he and a few friends, along with other people I didn't know, had come to watch a performance of some kind that included primitive tribal chants. When I came in, the room was already darkened except for the spotlights on the stage. The only empty chair I could see at the long table was the one next to him, though a piece of clothing and maybe a purse were hanging from the back of it. When he saw me hesitate over the empty chair, he stood up and removed these things, taking them down to the other end of the table. In fact, another woman came to the chair soon after the performance began, in the dim light, and with irritation walked away to another seat. I don't know who this woman was.

He was sitting at one end of the table, looking down the length of it, his back to the door I had come in by, and I was sitting to his left, facing a small stage where two men were performing, one chanting and singing, the other plucking a bass fiddle. Across from me was Ellie. I didn't know her very well then. He kept leaning over to her during the performance, which was so noisy and close to us in the crowded room that no one could talk during it except by speaking directly into another person's ear.

At that time I liked to drink. I always needed a drink if I was going to sit and talk to someone. If I had to sit in a public place that did not serve alcohol, I was uncomfortable and could not enjoy the time, just as, if I was invited to someone's house for the evening, I liked to be offered a drink as soon as I walked in.

At the first intermission, I asked him and Ellie if the café served alcohol, and they said it did not. I asked them where I could go to buy something to drink. They said there was a little grocery a short walk away where I could buy beer, and he offered to go with me, and again quickly stood up from his chair.

Outdoors, he walked along beside me over the beaten dirt at the edge of the road, through the litter of dry leaves and wood buttons from the eucalyptus trees.

I can't remember what we talked about, but in those days I almost never remembered what I had talked about with a person I had just met because I had so many other things on my mind. I was worried not only about whether there was something wrong with my clothes or hair, but also about how I was standing, walking, or holding my head and neck, and where I was putting my feet. And if I was not walking but trying to eat and drink as I talked, I worried about how to swallow the food and drink in such a way that I wouldn't choke, and sometimes I did choke. All of this kept me so busy that although I remembered a sentence long enough to answer it, I didn't think about it long enough to remember it later.

The road was dark by the time we went out, at seven-thirty or eight. Or rather, the side of the road where we were walking was lit by streetlights and floodlights around the café and the stores near it, and the other side of the road was dark, lined by eucalyptus trees shading the road from the electric lights. A sign or two hung among the trees, and beyond the trees lay two pairs of railroad tracks, also dark, and across the tracks a small streambed, not visible itself but marked by the tall grasses that bordered it, and then another road, smaller and not much traveled, but well lit, at the foot of a bare hillside. In the other direction, in back of the café and the stores, the ocean was a few hundred yards away at the base of a hill or cliff, so large and dark that even though I couldn't see it, its darkness hovered over the road and the electric lights fought against it.

I'm not sure whether we walked on dirt or asphalt, what we passed, or how he walked next to me, whether awkwardly or gracefully, quickly or slowly, close to me or a few feet away. I think he was bending toward me in his eagerness to talk and hear what I was saying, which was difficult, since I spoke very quietly. I'm not sure what brand of beer we bought, just what the confusion was about the money and the brand of beer, whether he paid for my beer as well as his own. Maybe I wanted a more expensive brand and bought two bottles of that, while he had only enough money for two bottles of a cheaper brand and spent the last money he had on them. I know he spent his last money on something because much later in the night or the early hours of the morning he ran out of gas and having no money at all, asked a stranger on the street for a dollar. He told this to Ellie in the library the next day and she told it to me, though long after.

There was his invitation, once we were back in the café, my hesitation, his boldness, my misunderstanding, then the noise of his car, my fear, the coast at night, my town at night, my yard and the rosebush, the jade bushes and my fence, my house, my room, the metal chairs, our beer, our conversation, his misstatements of fact, his boldness again, and so forth.

When he asked me to go out for a drink with him, and the first thing I said was that I really should be home working, I felt like a dull translator, or a cautious professor, much older than he was. I had been feeling older and older anyway at that time, maybe because I was in a new place and a new situation, and had to see myself freshly and size myself up as though I was not as familiar to myself as I had thought. I was not really so old, but I was still many years older than he was.

There is more that I don't like remembering: my hesitation, my sudden worry, my anxiety as I hurried after him, the embarrassment of having run after him, my lack of grace, feeling older but not acting my age, I thought.

He walked with such determined steps out of the café after the performance was over, without saying anything to me, that I thought he was hurt by my hesitation. We had not spoken more than a dozen sentences to each other and already I thought I had hurt his feelings, which isn't surprising since I often thought he was hurt, and angry, even when I had known him much longer than just a few hours. Of course, the fact that I rushed out after him must have shown how much I wanted to go off somewhere with him, despite my hesitation. When I went out after him he told me he was only removing some things from his car. It was his own awkwardness that had made him leave so abruptly.

As we stood by our cars outside the café, he asked me where we might go. Then, bolder again than I expected, he asked me if we might go to my house. I hesitated again, and this time he apologized. I liked his modesty in doing that. I knew almost nothing about him, so each thing he did and said showed me an entirely new aspect of him, as though he were unfolding in front of me. I did not mind going straight home, because I was tired. I got into my car, and he got into his. I waited for him so that he could follow me, and when he turned on his engine, his large, old, white car roared. It continued to roar so loudly, as it followed just behind me, that my teeth began to chatter and my hands shook on the steering wheel, which I gripped until my knuckles hurt.

With his headlights filling my rearview mirror, and my hands tight on the wheel, we drove down the coast through another town where a movie theater was emptying out, on down by the water, across some marshland, and up a dry hillside into my town, past the traffic lights and the outdoor café on the corner, and after a left turn, up the hill to my house.

It seems to me that he stumbled in the dark as he crossed the rutted dirt driveway under the cedar tree, but I may be confused about that, because I myself fell backward off the bank of sea fig into the driveway a few days later, as he was leaving. I was waving goodbye to him. I did not actually fall, but stumbled back off the high bank in front of the house on which the cedar grew. I was always awkward with him, I had trouble controlling my arms and legs when I walked through the room, when I sat down in a chair. He said I was awkward because I was so eager, and moved too fast for my own body.

Now I walked ahead of him, and by the front wall he lifted a stem of thorns that hung down from an overgrown climbing rose so that I could pass without scratching myself. Or maybe he couldn't have done this in the dark, and it was on another day, in the daylight. Or it was that night, but the night was not entirely dark. In fact, it is only dark in my memory of that particular night, because I know there were two bright streetlamps nearby: one of them shone into my room.

We made our way across the circular drive and past the untidy rosebush, which grew by the window where I sat so much of the time staring out, and around the side of the house past the jade bushes. We followed a brick path to a gate of white painted wood set in a fence of white painted wood, and through the gate into the arcaded walkway past the windows of my room to the door of my room. An electric light shone from inside a lantern fixed to the white stucco wall next to the door.

Inside, we sat down on two folding metal chairs between the green card table where I worked and a rented upright piano. I brought back from the kitchen two beers, which we drank on the uncomfortably hard chairs.