The End of the Story (19 page)

I did not want to say his name anymore. It brought him too much into the room. I let Madeleine say his name, and I answered with
he.

*   *   *

At times, during the weeks that followed, the days seemed like an endless succession of difficult mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights. It was often hard to leave my bed in the morning. I lay there and thought I heard footsteps in the dirt outside my window, but it was my own pulse, beating like sand in my ears. I was afraid of what was ahead. For as long as an hour, with my eyes closed, I dreamed, then began to worry, then began to plan. I often perceived things most clearly then, though what I perceived usually appeared in its worst possible guise. When I had planned enough to stop worrying so much, I would try to open my eyes. If I could keep them open, I would look around the room. I would think about him, and try to think about something else. But I could not think about anything else, and it seemed as though my body itself were preventing me, as though my flesh were steeped in some essence of him, because this essence would rise into my brain and fill every cell, and it was so strong that my attention would be drawn back to the thought of him, in spite of myself. Then at last I would get up. I would work in my nightgown and bathrobe for another few hours, and then finally dress, but in soft, loose clothing that was not unlike pajamas.

I could usually work till the morning was over. But the afternoon would be long and slow, so slow it just stopped and died where it stood. I liked to have daylight outside, and darkness hours away ahead of me and behind me. But I did not often want to go out into that light, and I kept the curtains closed. I liked to see the light at the cracks of the curtains, I liked to know it was out there. Then, when evening came and there was darkness outside, I kept the lights burning inside.

I did what I could to distract myself. I kept moving, cleaning something in the house, or walking outside, or I talked to friends and listened to them talk, or I tried to read a book that kept my mind busy, or do a kind of work at my table that did not allow my mind to wander. Sometimes the table in front of me seemed to be the only level place, and everything else fell away from it or rose steeply from it.

A good kind of work to do was translation, and I had a short novel I was supposed to be translating. So I sat at the card table on a metal chair and worked. I usually translated in the morning, but I also went back to it at other times, even late in the evening. It was a kind of work I could almost always do, in fact I worked better when I was unhappy, because when I was happy or excited, my mind would wander almost immediately. The more unhappy I was, the harder I concentrated on those foreign words there on the page in a strange construction, a problem to solve, just hard enough to keep me busy, and if I could solve the problem, my mind was captivated, though if the problem was very difficult and I couldn't solve it, as sometimes happened, my mind would knock up against it over and over, until at last it just floated free and drifted away.

It wasn't a long book, but it was difficult, and because I was distracted, I did not do a very good job of translating it, even though I was working so hard and felt my mind was so sharp. What I put down in English was strange, as I saw later.

As long as I was reading the sentence to be translated, or writing down the translation of it, or reading an entry in the dictionary, I was absorbed in the words of these other people, not the voices of the characters in the novel, since they seldom spoke, but the voice of the author of the novel, and the dry, precise voices of the editors of the dictionary offering definitions of the words I looked up, and the livelier voices of the different writers quoted in the dictionary. But during the brief interval when I stopped typing and picked up the dictionary, an interval that could not have lasted more than five seconds, when I was not staring at any words but looking out the window, and these voices died away, his image would swim up between me and the work and cause a fresh pain just because I had forgotten him for a few minutes, or pushed him to the back of my mind with these words I was studying so closely.

I also had letters to write. I wrote one to the man whose book I was translating, and as I wrote, I looked at myself and said: Look at her, writing to this man, and at the same time she can't stop thinking about that gas station attendant up the road. And yet the man I was writing to would have understood, because this was the sort of thing he wrote about in his novels.

I would work at my table, then I would often wash something, myself or something in the house, my clothes or something in the kitchen. I took one shower after another, scrubbing myself as if I could erase my body, rub out not only the dirt but my skin and my flesh, too, right down to my bones. I worked on the windows in my room. I cleaned both sides of every pane of glass until I could see through it as though it weren't there, see the plants outside and the red terrace and the white underside of the arcade roof, which turned pink in wet weather, reflecting the wet red terrace.

It rained a great deal that month. The darkness would gather around, the clouds massing up, and the rain would fall, coming straight down, heavily, and then stop after a short time. The sun would come out and shine from a clear sky. Reflections from the puddles outside the house would move like snakes up the dark wooden cabinets in the kitchen. The sun heated the wet roof so quickly that steam rose from the black shingles all over and the wind blew it down off the eaves in clouds like smoke. After the sun had shone for a little while, the dark would come again suddenly, and I would look down the length of the room at my bed and see the dark spreading, as though from that corner, from the dark blankets on the bed.

I could not always do what I had to do. For instance, I could not always do even a small cleaning job, and I stepped in my own messes. Once it was a wide smear of tomato pulp I had left on the kitchen floor. I was walking around in my socks talking out loud to him. I stepped in the tomato pulp, and instead of changing my sock I lay down on the bed and read a story, a quiet, well-written, but dull story about deer hunting, while my damp foot, hanging off the edge of the bed, grew colder and colder.

I had to think clearly, make good decisions, make plans, and could not. I was in the wrong place to understand, either too far inside each thing or too far outside it. I would believe a thing was the right thing to do, and then wonder if I would soon believe the opposite. Sometimes I would know what I ought to do but have no will to act; at other times, I would have the will to act but not take action. And because I came up against myself this way, I had to wonder how I could change what I was, so that I would not always be this person I had to contend with, this person who defeated me.

Then I would stop questioning everything and become stubborn. I would withdraw into myself, keep my head down, and not care what anyone did to me or what I did to anyone.

On other days I could hardly stop moving, and my brain would not stop working. Everything I turned to seemed to have an idea in it. The concentration of solitude around me, so thick, seemed to make the ideas press in on me and feed me without interruption. Only if there was a leak in that balloon of solitude, some of what I might have thought would seep away. And every idea had to be written down, on any piece of paper at all, on a shopping list, in a checkbook, in the margins and blank pages of a book I was reading. It had to be written down so that I would not forget it, even though I knew that later some of these ideas wouldn't seem worth remembering. And I was not always quick enough to write the thought down on paper and knew I had lost it and couldn't recover it, and was as aware of that thought as though it were a blank space on a page. I would have been even sorrier if I hadn't known that each thought was accidental anyway.

At these times, I talked fast on the telephone, I was impatient with everything that held me up, I did not want to bother eating, I did not eat until I was too distracted by hunger to go on thinking, and then I walked back and forth on the floor of my room while I ate. It was hard to eat anyway. There was already so much inside me, working so hard, that I had almost no room for food. I watched, as though I were outside myself, how my stomach turned when I tried to eat a bit of toast, biting and chewing slowly, swallowing a little at a time, the same with an apple. Sometimes I could swallow a little soup, or a bit of raw vegetable. It was bad one day, better the next.

I worked my body hard, walking, running, moving fast, and I began going to Ellie's health club now and then, not for health, but because I thought that if I hardened my body I would beat out those quivering, jellylike emotions that were so uncomfortable. I grew thinner, my muscles became as hard as my bones, my arms and legs felt like pieces of jointed metal. My pants hung loose, and the ring on my middle finger slipped off easily.

I smoked more and more cigarettes, one every few minutes, smoked in bed, smoked in the car, and smoked walking out to the shops. My lungs were congested and I coughed dryly all day long. I had not stopped coughing since I returned home. At times the coughing kept me awake for hours and I would get up and eat a spoonful of honey or drink some water and then try to sleep again, swallowing over and over.

The nights were always the worst. I thought that at least I should be able to read a great deal, but it was hard to concentrate. It was hard to rest. I could not go to bed early. It was hard to get into bed and stop moving, and hardest of all to turn off the light and lie still. I could have covered my eyes and put earplugs in my ears, but that would not have helped. Sometimes I wanted to plug up my nostrils, too, and my throat, and my vagina. Bad thoughts came into bed and crowded up against me, bad feelings came in and sat on my chest so that I couldn't breathe. I would lie on my right side, my bony knees pressing together until they were bruised, the right on top of the left and then, when I turned over, the left on top of the right. I would turn onto my back, then onto my stomach, first with my head on the pillow and then pushing the pillow aside and lying flat, then turning onto my right side again, holding the pillow between my knees and arms, then turning onto my back again and putting three pillows under my head, beginning to fall asleep and waking suddenly, startled by the fact that I was falling asleep.

I wondered, as though I were far away from all this, what would happen now, if I would eat less and grow thinner, if I would become still more occupied by the thought of him and go to further extremes in trying to make him talk to me and in searching for him.

*   *   *

I called an Englishman named Tim, and his voice was soft and high in my ear. I asked him if he wanted to have lunch with me. But when I hung up the phone, I did not feel encouraged. Now, I thought, I was left behind, he had left me behind, in a world that contained only gentle, delicate Englishmen.

I had planned that we should go to the corner café down the hill from my house and that we should sit at an outside table by the coast road. I had planned that I should sit facing the road where I could watch the traffic. Everything was arranged as I had planned it. Tim was an intelligent man, and he should have been good company, but nothing really interested me about this lunch except the cars that might go by on the road.

I sat over lunch for a long time, watching the traffic at the same time that I talked to Tim. Then at last, just as the light turned red, better than I could have planned it, his car came level with us, and he stopped, looked over at me, and kept his face turned toward me almost as long as the light was red. I could see this much out of the corner of my eye. I might have felt uncomfortable making such use of a decent man like Tim for my own purposes, to arrange to be seen eating lunch with another man, but feeling uncomfortable would not be enough to stop me.

Later that afternoon, Madeleine had to persuade me not to go up to see him at work. I should not make a scene where he worked, she said. She told me I was older than he was and should be able to handle this better. She sat with me and talked to me. Although I could have given myself the same reasons she gave me, I could not have stopped myself. If she had gone out just then, I would have called him. She offered to go to the movies with me again, or play cards. Then she cooked dinner. She said, “At least we've eaten dinner. That's something.”

*   *   *

Madeleine kept telling me not to go to the gas station when he wouldn't talk to me on the phone. She thought I should have more pride. She would have had more pride. But unless she was actually there to stop me, I would go. Sometimes I had excuses. I knew they were transparent, but they still served a purpose.

For instance, I invited him to parties at least three times. I knew these were parties he would want to go to and that probably no one else would invite him. He did not go to any of them, though each time he hesitated before refusing. The first time he waited a few minutes, the second time half a day, and the third time a week.

The second time, I found him playing basketball in the parking lot above the beach near his apartment. Seagulls wheeled around overhead, crying above the pines. I sat in my car watching him. My car filled with smoke from the cigarettes I kept lighting. I was watching him over the roofs of several cars and he was playing at the far end of the court, but I was close enough to study him carefully—his short, scanty trace of reddish beard, his reddish hair, straight on top with a little curl at the back of his neck, his white skin, his flushed face, his skin turning pink in the sun in a V shape down his chest, the exuberance of his body, how quickly he moved, how he sprang up suddenly, turned suddenly, always braced, always balanced. He was playing very well.

I was content, because for once I had him there in front of me, I knew where he was and what he was doing, and I could watch him as long as I liked, and from a safe distance: he couldn't do anything to hurt me and I didn't have to worry about how I looked or what I did or said.