The End of the Story (24 page)

On another card, there is another note full of reversals: by writing about him, I thought, I was taking him away from himself and doing him harm, even though he might never know it. This troubled me, not because I was doing him harm, but because I did not mind doing it. Yet as soon as I said this to myself I was more troubled, even frightened, and I wanted to ask him to forgive me. But at the same time I could see that this would not stop me from doing what I was doing. These feelings merely passed through me one after another.

I am sometimes afraid he will appear now, or call me on the phone suddenly, without warning. If I am thinking about him so much, won't he feel it, wherever he is? I am having a hard enough time writing this: I don't know what would happen if he interfered.

It is quite possible, though, that if only he had spent just a little time talking carefully to me as it was happening, and listening to me, he might have saved an immense amount of trouble, all this work. The novel might not have had to be written. Because I see that I really can't bear it, and never could, when someone refuses to listen to me for as long as I want to talk. I think I could talk endlessly if only someone was interested. I could probably stand outside the post office here in this town and just talk about some current issue.

I have many strong opinions about current issues. Vincent won't listen beyond a certain point. First he tells me to calm down and then he changes the subject. When we go out with friends I have to stop myself, because I become so interested in what I am saying. This is the opposite of what used to happen, when I was too shy to speak easily and waited so long that the room would fall silent when I finally spoke. Then what I said was not interesting, because it was always the safest thing to say. Now I'm afraid that when I have to stop talking, at what should be the end of the novel, I will not want to stop.

Occasionally a friend like Ellie has been generous enough to listen to me for a very long time, even though I could see her face grow more and more exhausted. For many years after I returned East, Ellie lived near enough so that I could call her cheaply and go visit her, even after I moved out of the city. Now she is gone and I miss her. But the strange thing is that when she told me she was leaving, it did not bother me. Maybe it seemed so right for her at that point in her life that I could not be disturbed by it, or maybe I thought I would see her almost as often. Then again, maybe I thought she had to leave so that I could finish the novel on my own. It is not that what she decides to do in her life depends on what I may happen to be doing, or that she has been helping me with the novel, except in the beginning, when I gave her the first pages to read. But the feeling persists anyway: I had reached a certain point with it, and had to continue on my own, so Ellie moved away and left me to it.

*   *   *

Certain friends, the ones with the strongest moral principles, were now keeping me company even when they were absent. Their voices had become voices in my head, because I had been listening to them so hard. I now let them decide things I couldn't decide for myself, and stop me from doing things I shouldn't do. “Stop!” the voices would say, shocked. “You can't do
that!
”

I said to myself that I would be alone now, and this thought was a secure place. Something in me seemed dead, or numbed, and I was glad to feel nothing, or very little, just as, at other times, I had been glad to feel something, even if it was pain.

I did not see myself particularly as a woman. I did not feel that I had any particular gender. But in a restaurant one day, where I sat with my foot in its sandal up on the edge of a chair, a stranger came over to talk to me and went back to his seat and then later, on his way out, passed me and leaned down to touch my bare toes. In my surprise, I was forced out of one way of being and into another. When I returned to the first way of being, I was not quite the same.

I was forced to remember there was something in me besides this mind working so hard and so monotonously, and that this body could appear to be not just for the use of this mind, to be alone with it for long periods of time, that this body and this mind could be social things.

In Ellie's health club, one afternoon, I sat on a tiled step in a bath of warm water and looked at all the different bodies of women around me, of different shapes and proportions. Some had small, flat breasts, and some heavy breasts that hung down toward their bellies. Some had round, sloping shoulders, and some had straight, bony shoulders. Some had plump, curved backs and square, dimpled buttocks, and some had narrow, straight backs and round buttocks. What surprised me most, about some women, was that the areoles of their nipples were so large and so dark, or so small and so pale as to be nearly invisible, and then, about others, that their pubic hair grew so far up their bellies, or was not dark but blond, or red.

In fact, all these other bodies were surprising to me if they were not like my own, as they came in an unending succession around one corner or another, out of the shower stalls, out of the steam room, down the tiled steps into the water, up the steps out of the water. And all these others seemed more fully sexual to me than my own, simply because I was accustomed to my own and because I used it for so many things that were not sexual. Though my breasts were always there under my shirt, most of the time they merely accompanied me as I walked through the town, or shopped, or drove the car, or stood holding a drink or a plate of food at a party. If I sat at my table working, my body merely supported me, my buttocks pressed into the chair seat, my legs and feet bracing me on either side of the chair, or stretched out in front of me, or crossed under me, my breasts resting on the tabletop as I grew tired and leaned on my elbow, my rib cage against the table edge. When my body stopped being merely useful and became what was supposed to be a sexual thing, this change sometimes appeared odd to me, and arbitrary.

*   *   *

After an evening spent in my room in the company of a few people, a man stayed behind when the others left, and then stayed on. He was a kind and gentle man, I thought, and I thought it would be a comforting thing for me to be with him and also a pleasure, but it was not either pleasant or unpleasant, in the end, just something to watch and wait out. This was not the man I was used to, and when I touched this body I had not known before, each part of him was a shock to my hand, which had known a different shape for each part: his buttocks were smaller and flatter, his thighs bonier, and on and on—wherever my hand reached for something, it was not familiar.

This man gave me instructions, though gently, and I lay there thinking that it was beginning to seem like a distant, mechanical operation. There was so much glass in the way, I thought, as though I had my glasses on, there in bed, and were looking at it all too clearly, or as though I had a microscope and were looking at it all too closely, in too much detail, with too much science in it, or as though I were watching him come together with me behind the plate glass of a shop window, with fluorescent light on it all, or as though there were sheets of glass between us, between all the parts of our two bodies, between our two skins as they met, so that while I saw it all so clearly I could not feel anything at all, or if anything, only something smooth and cold.

There was no confusion of our bodies. I knew which arm was his and which mine, and which leg, and which shoulder. I did not lose track and kiss my own arm, or whatever came near my mouth. The smallest motion did not immediately lead to another motion. It was not endless, I did not go more and more deeply into my body and his body as though to go as far as possible from my mind, and his mind, so conscious, so unrelenting. It did not end while it was still in the middle.

He woke up early in the morning, and when I only wanted to go on sleeping, he lit a cigarette and lay there smoking while I lay there waiting for him to be done smoking. Then he put out the cigarette and went back to sleep, while I lay there awake.

Later in the morning, when I got up and he got up, I did not feel comfortable, I did not feel easy, walking back and forth through the room, talking to him, moving around him in the kitchen, passing him in the hallway. Every movement of mine was too deliberate, every remark too planned, while every response of his was also too deliberate, I thought, and I thought, missing what I had had, how it had been so much easier, but then thought again, and remembered that it had not really been very different walking around and trying to talk to him, there was the same feeling, often, of shining a bright light on each word because he was so silent and looked at me so intently. He smiled more often than he spoke, he laughed quickly and readily, most of the time, when he wasn't angry at me, and he was almost never angry at first, though he was often hurt, probably, and he would now and then tell me he wished I would be silly with him. I was not silly, and I was not gentle.

*   *   *

I thought I had been missing him a long time, even though it had not been long since he left me. But at about the same time that my friends stopped asking me how I was, I, too, did not want to talk about it any longer. I woke up one morning to the same grief and felt I had simply had enough of it. It had run its course, I thought, it had been born, lived, and died. I no longer had part of my mind on him all the time, several hours would pass in which I did not have him in my imagination, for company, but only myself. I was pleased, as though at a piece of good news, something that should be celebrated.

But then I said to myself that since I seemed to be cured of my grief, he and I could enter into a new kind of relationship, and in the joy of that feeling I went looking for him yet again. I fooled myself every time, because at such moments part of me became clever and the other part stupid, just as much as was necessary.

This time I found him and he said he would have dinner with me, and this time he did not cancel the date. He came to the house after work, he took a shower, he sang in the bathroom while he dressed as though to keep me at a distance. He reappeared in clean clothes, with wet hair. We went down the hill to the corner café, and after dinner he came back to my house. He did not leave until late in the evening, but not because he wanted to stay with me, only because he had to stay somewhere. He could not go home until everyone in the place where he lived had gone to bed. He did not tell me why. He told me he usually spent the evenings in the library.

We talked about the library, and we talked about the desert, which was in bloom, and we talked about many other things. On the way out to his car, he had his arm around me. He said my house was very nice, and when I did not understand why he said that just then, he said he missed being there. Then I asked him if he would like to go to a party with me. This was the third party I invited him to. He said maybe he would, and he would call me in a week to let me know. After he was gone, I was sure the evening had been the beginning of something different. I was sure I would have more evenings with him. But I was wrong, so being sure meant nothing.

I thought he might turn around and come back that same night, but I was wrong about that, too, and I was wrong to think he would want to call me sooner, before a week had passed.

*   *   *

I was in the orchestra of a theater, walking toward a crowd at the door, telling everyone to leave, and around the corner I found him standing still, looking defiant. I woke and slept again, and I was sitting in the back of a taxicab, in darkness, when he appeared suddenly next to me, took my hand in his, and said “It's all right.” Trying to fall asleep again, I imagined wrapping my eyes in images of whiteness, white sheets floating around my eyes, and as I fell asleep these sheets became a dialogue in which nothing was said—blank, blank—until there was one last remark at the end of the exchange of silences.

I woke up in the morning to a heavy storm, the sea booming, the earth trembling under my feet, something just outside the house shaking and rattling, the wind wailing and the trees swaying into each other and rustling.

When I told Madeleine about my broken night, she remembered that she, too, had had a bad hour during the night. Her face became serious, almost angry. “I had a chill at three in the morning,” she said. “I wasn't really cold, but I had a chill. It was psychological.” I imagined, as though looking down at the two of us from above, how I in one part of the house had been lying awake while she in another part was having a chill.

The storm passed and the day became very hot. Across the street, three or four men were cutting down trees on my neighbor's property. I walked past their dented, rusty blue car on my way home from buying groceries, and looked in at the front seat, where a black dog lay on its back, its legs splayed, its eyes open, its long chain looping down out the window and in again.

Inside my house, sitting at my table trying to work, I saw the blue car from a different angle directly in front of me across the street. The sun beat down, baking something outside so that its fragrance floated in on the breeze in gusts. It was the lemony perfume of the jade bush by the fence, entering through the open window. It reminded me of the perfume of his skin, and came between me and my work, and then me and my reading. I wondered again why this had to go on so long.

He was still so much a part of me, inside me, that his body in all its sweetness, succulence, fragrance seemed to lie full-length inside mine. Now, after an evening in which he had been with me and had held almost nothing back, he had withdrawn into his silence again. His terrible silence put him at such a distance from me that he was in another country. I tried to guess what was in his mind and couldn't imagine it. His vast silence seemed as heavy as a cloud pressing down on a landscape that shrinks beneath its bulk, every living thing bending to the ground, continuing to wait in the airless presence of that awful cloud.

*   *   *

During this week, as I waited for his answer, I had lunch with three different men in three days. The first was a classics professor at the university. The second was so quiet and self-effacing I forgot him almost immediately, even though, having no other place to stay, he slept in our spare room that night and the next. I remembered him only months later, when I found among my things a modest note he had left the second night he was there: “Have gone to bed. Not feeling too good.” The third was Tim again. When it occurred to me that all three of them were English, I wondered if I could now tolerate only the gentle manners of Englishmen, or if it took three Englishmen to fill his place, or if he had somehow split into three Englishmen.