The End of the Story (8 page)

I am working from my memories and my notebook. There is a great deal I would have forgotten if I had not written it in my notebook, but my notebook also leaves out a great deal, only some of which I remember. There are also memories that have nothing to do with this story, and there are good friends who do not appear in it, or appear only indistinctly, because at the time they had nothing or little to do with him.

*   *   *

When I think of him frowning in the sunlight as he looked out at the café terrace, I wonder if I have been wrong, all this time, about another occasion on which he was frowning. The only photograph I have of him shows him frowning at me from a distance of about fifteen feet. He is on a sailboat belonging to a cousin of mine, he is bending over, his hands are busy, perhaps fastening a rope, and he is looking up sideways at me, frowning. The picture is not very sharp, probably taken with a poor camera. I have assumed all this time that he was frowning in annoyance at me for taking his picture at such a time, when he was trying to do something difficult on the boat of a man who made him uncomfortable because he barked orders at him to do things like fasten certain ropes and also because he clearly did not approve of this relationship. But now I realize he might have been frowning merely because he was looking up suddenly into the bright sunlight.

A year after this picture was taken I went sailing with the same cousin, on the same boat. Back home, I happened to take the picture out and look at it again. This time I had trouble reconciling what I saw with what I knew. He was there on the boat, in the picture, and I was looking at him, but he was not on that boat any longer: I had just been there the day before, and I knew he was not there. Within an hour after the picture was taken, in fact, he was no longer on the boat, because we were at the dock when I took it, preparing to go ashore. But as long as he and I were still together he was somehow still on the boat, he was not distinctly absent from it, as he was a year later.

*   *   *

I have been thinking about that photograph, because I mentioned it to Ellie recently on the phone. Except for her one year in England, Ellie has lived near me for a long time. But now she is about to move again, this time to the Southwest. She told me she had gone down to the basement of her apartment building the day before to look through her things. First she discovered that she couldn't open the padlock on her storage bin. Another tenant, believing the storage bin was his, had instructed his secretary to break off the lock Ellie had put on it many years before and replace it with a new one. The lock had belonged to Ellie's father. It had been the only thing of his she had left. Everything to do with this move was disturbing to her anyway. Now she was further disturbed because her father's lock had been destroyed and removed by a stranger, and she was shut out of her bin. Then, when she was able to get into it, she found that a flood had ruined some of her books and papers.

But she was calling to tell me she had discovered several photographs of him in one of her boxes, and she thought I might like to have them. She said there were two, but then, as she went on talking to me and at the same time looked through the pile of pictures in her hand, pictures of a party she couldn't remember, and more of people we both knew and people only she knew, she discovered another of him, although in this picture he was partly obscured by a cluster of people. She asked me if I wanted copies of them. I told her I did, though I also said that when the envelope arrived I might not open it right away.

By now I am used to the version of his face that I have created from my own memory and the one snapshot I have. If I saw a clear picture of him or, even worse, several pictures from different angles and in different lights, I would have to get used to a new face. I don't want to be unsettled just now, and I know I will be tempted not to open the envelope at all. But I will also be curious.

*   *   *

The nurse, downstairs, is playing the piano to entertain Vincent's father. She is making mistakes just where I know she will. I listen for the mistakes and can't hear the words I am trying to write. The old man loves it when she plays, though.

These days, in the warm weather, spiders spin webs between the bottoms of the lampshades and the sides of the lamps. Many strange small black insects fly constantly about the lamp. We have screens on all the windows and doors, but the cat has torn holes in the bottom corners of some. Spiders also spin single strands of web across the paths in the yard at night, even in the time it takes me to walk out to the corner grocery store and back, so that when I come in from the street the soft threads collect on my bare legs.

Before the meadow was plowed over in preparation for building the townhouses, I began learning to identify the wildflowers that grew there, then the wild grasses. I had never thought of identifying kinds of grass before. Now I realize that I should be able to identify spiders, too, by their appearance, the forms of their webs, their habits, and where they choose to live, so that I can name them instead of calling them “big spider,” “little spider,” “little tan spider,” etc.

At times I have the feeling someone else is working on this with me. I read a passage I haven't looked at in weeks and I don't recognize much of it, or only dimly, and I say to myself, Well, that's not bad, it's a reasonable solution to
that
problem. But I can't quite believe I was the one who found the solution. I don't remember finding it, and I am relieved, as though I expected the problem still to be there.

In the same way, I will decide to include a certain thought in a certain place in the novel and then discover that several months before, I made a note to include the same thought in the same place and then did not do it. I have the curious feeling that my decision of several months ago was made by someone else. Now there has been a consensus and I am suddenly more confident: if she had the same plan, it must be a good one.

But at other times I discover that this person working with me has been hasty or careless, and now my work is even more difficult, because I have to try to forget what she wrote. Not only do I have to erase it or cross it out but also forget the sound of it or I will write it again, as though from dictation. I should know better, because when I translate, I have to make the English as good as I can when I first write it down or the bad sound of a bad version will stay with me and make it harder for me to write a good version.

Another problem, on some pages, is that I keep putting a sentence in because it seems to belong there, and then I keep taking it out again. I have just figured out why this happens: I put the sentence in because it is interesting, believable, and clearly expressed. I take it out again because something about it is wrong. I put it in again because the sentence is good in itself and could be true. I take it out again because I have at last examined it closely enough to see that for this situation it is simply not true.

There is another reason why I will write a sentence and then immediately take it out: in certain cases I have to write a sentence on the page before I know it won't work in the novel, because it may be interesting when I say it to myself but no longer interesting when I write it down.

*   *   *

For a long time, there was the same pattern to our days and nights. I would work all day and sometimes into the evening, or spend the evening with other friends of mine, and he would go to his classes and study and write and see his friends, and then fairly late in the evening he would come by and we would have a beer together and talk and go to bed and get up in the morning and separate for the day. We rarely slept apart from each other, because I had such trouble sleeping if I was by myself and because during the first months, anyway, he had no bed in his room, only his sleeping bag on the floor. He told me he would not buy a bed as long as he could sleep in mine.

He had almost no money. He had no extra money for such a thing as a bed. He had less and less money the longer I knew him. He was waiting for a student loan that was put off from week to week. I had so much money, just then, and was so unused to having money, that I spent it without thinking, and twice I lent him a particular sum of money that he needed. Both times he was reluctant to take it, though the first time more reluctant than the second. The first time, I lent him a hundred dollars, though he was already a little uncomfortable about being twelve years younger and a student, without taking my money, too. He paid it back quickly, but the second sum, $300, which I lent him before I went East for the second time, he never paid back.

He also had great difficulty getting a job. It seems to me he worked in the university library for a while. At the time he left me he was working at a gas station.

Sometimes I played the piano for him. He liked me to play for him. He would sit very still, on the edge of the bed or on a hard chair on the bare floor, and watch me and listen. His face, as usual, gave me no hint of what he might be thinking. We played tennis together, until I did not seem to be able to improve any further and became discouraged. We saw friends together, but these were almost always friends of mine. Though they had known him longer, they were not close friends of his, either because he was so much younger or for some other reason, but they soon became close friends of mine. Once we had a drink with Ellie in a grand old bayside hotel. Ellie later told me she thought I had been rather unkind to him as the three of us sat there talking, side by side on a sofa, watching the guests of the hotel walk by and pause over an antique jigsaw puzzle laid out on a nearby table.

Not long after we met, we went together to visit Evelyn, a friend of Ellie's and mine who lived with her two young children in three rooms in the back half of a small house. The children were frantic the day we visited, they almost never stopped moving at high speed, laughing or bursting into tears or flailing each other or their mother with their fists. While we talked to Evelyn in the larger room, where she prepared meals, ate, slept, worked, and read books from the library, the children played wildly together, sometimes out in the grove of bamboo trees and around the trash cans in the alley behind the house, and sometimes in their bedroom, where they jumped off the windowsill onto the bed over and over again, or hid from their mother and called out to her, or took off their clothes and sat in large straw baskets. Evelyn kept getting up to scold the children in her gentle, ineffectual way, or to take a lightbulb from the bathroom, or a handful of toilet paper, because she never bought enough of any supply to have extra and was always borrowing something from one room to use in another. Each time Evelyn left the room, I would look over at him where he sat with me at the large, round dining table and feel how content I was with him, how content we were simply to sit there and look at each other, and it seemed to me easier and simpler to love him there than in any other place.

I think now this might have had something to do with Evelyn's nature. Evelyn did not see things the way most people saw them. Everything was always so fresh and interesting to her, she was so often amazed and pleased by what she saw, for certain peculiar and unpredictable reasons of her own, that she would stop short in the middle of what she was doing, marveling at it, incapable of going on to anything else very quickly, so that even her meals reflected this, and were either incomplete, because she had gotten no further than one amazing food or one amazing dish, or complete, but served hours later than she had said she would serve them because she stopped and spent so long contemplating each part of them. She did not judge things, or her judgments were not harsh, or they did not have anything to do with the judgments of other people. So that, in her presence, everything seemed to be full of wonderful possibilities, and that afternoon I felt that what we had just then was entirely satisfying and good.

His life apart from me was not very real to me. He did not force me to pay much attention to it, because he was too modest or, if not truly modest, spoke of himself only briefly and then left the subject as though something would be lost or harmed if he dwelled on it for too long.

I did not know exactly what he did when he was away from me. I could imagine him alone in his room. I could see him working at a job, and the job was always menial, and demeaning. I could see him in his garage. Then there were the tedious daily things he must have done some of the time he was not with me, such as shop for food, cook, clean his apartment, wash his clothes. I could form only a vague picture of him with his friends, who were unknown to me, who lived in rooms in unknown places in the city. Most of his friends were as young as he was, and because I did not regard people of that age as very interesting, even though I had been that age myself, they tended to merge for me into an undifferentiated group. When I pictured him in their company he seemed much younger, as though they were his playmates and I were his aunt—not quite his mother, though his actual mother was herself so young, as I had discovered, so young that she seemed, even to him, like an older sister.

I didn't know how much time he spent with his friends, since he didn't always tell me he had seen them or, if he told me, give me any idea how long he had been with them. I couldn't really believe that anything important took place when they were together. My impression was that he and his friends only sat somewhere and talked to each other in a way that didn't add anything to them or change them but only marked time while they grew a little older and perhaps more capable of undergoing interesting changes, and that this talk went on in a room, an apartment, a house, a campus bar, or a student center—in a private place or a university place, but not a public place in town, such as the café where he met his older friend.

This was the one friend who might have interested me, an eccentric, reclusive man vaguely associated in my mind with literature, who was nearly an old man or was an old man, to my way of thinking at the time, though I now realize that he was probably no older than sixty, and of course, as I begin to approach fifty myself, sixty seems younger and younger to me. He would meet this friend in the café or go see him where he lived in a mysterious part of town which I imagined to be the heart of the oldest part, a part even older, perhaps, than was possible in that town, most of which was not very old. Perhaps I imagined it older and older the more I thought of it, just because I had so little idea where it was.