The End of the Story (21 page)

The checks with which I was paid for this work kept bouncing, I kept putting them back into my account, and a few never cleared. But still I had more of a regular income and more to live on at this time than I would later. Twice later, that I can remember, I spent what money I had until I had nothing left and no other money available anywhere, except for, once, the thirteen dollars that a friend owed me. She paid me back and I don't know what I did then, unless it was just at that time that I had an opportunity to earn some money giving private language lessons to two women. They offered to come to my apartment, but I did not want them to see the place where I lived, so for the first lesson we agreed to meet at a restaurant some distance away. I had a strange lapse that day, figuring that in order to meet them at one o'clock I would have to leave home at one o'clock. By the time I arrived they had given up on me and were in the middle of their sandwiches, with mayonnaise on their fingers. They couldn't handle papers or pencils, or even talk very well.

Instead of making up a plausible excuse, I told them the truth, which only mystified them. There was no time for a lesson after they were finished with lunch, but they politely offered to pay me anyway. I took their money, though I was ashamed. It was just the opposite of what I wanted to do, but I had no other money. One of them stopped the lessons soon after that, but the other, who was wealthier, went on for a few months.

I picked up the book again and forced my eyes onto the page and read. Though the weight was on me, the darkness pressing in on me, I wouldn't look at it, I wouldn't think about it, I held it off a few feet away from me. Line by line I forced my eyes across the page, and with great attention at last began to see the story for myself, though it took all the strength and attention I had to shape this thickness of words.

Little by little, as though the pages I had turned were forming a shield between me and my pain, or as though the four edges of each page became the four walls of a safe room, a resting place for me within the story, I began to stay inside it with less effort, until the story became more real to me than my pain. Now I read on, still stiff and heavy with pain, but having a balance between my unhappiness and the pleasure of the story. When the balance seemed secure, I turned off the light and fell asleep easily.

Then, before dawn, I woke a little. I was still asleep, really, but I opened my eyes and thought I was awake. I was lying on my side. Directly in front of me across the width of the bed, across the sheet, I saw his face, over near the wall. I reached out my right arm as far as it would go and put up my hand to touch his face. His face vanished, and there was nothing there but the wall. Then the pain I had been holding away from me by force rushed into me with an unexpected violence, and tears sprang into my eyes so suddenly they seemed to have nothing to do with the pain or even with me. They filled my eyes, spilled over, and rolled down like glass beads before I could blink, and then, as I lay perfectly still, too surprised to move, collected in the hollows of my face.

*   *   *

During these weeks, each day had the same center—the question of whether I would see him or not, or his car. I drove into the college parking lot one morning just in front of him, and he saw me and pulled in next to me. We got out of our cars and talked to each other. I saw him put money into the parking meter and then I remembered to do the same. Our conversation had a jerky, fitful rhythm to it. He would make a remark and I would respond without thinking, so distracted that what he said registered only on a superficial level. A moment later I would respond a second time, more thoughtfully. He was reacting the same way. Together we walked away from the parking lot toward the college buildings.

A few hours later, returning to my car, I was sure his would not be there anymore, and it wasn't. A strange car was there instead, one I had never seen before, one that was profoundly uninteresting to me, that I found ugly because it was so small, dark, and new, instead of large, white, and old, even somehow nasty because it had nothing to do with me and belonged to another life that must be small and neat like the car.

He had driven away without leaving a word, a note. He had been with me, our cars had stood side by side for an hour or more, and now he was gone again and I did not know where he was. All I had now, though it was a piece of information I valued, was the fact that he came to the campus every Wednesday morning.

If I did not actually meet him, I might catch a glimpse of him from a distance. He might be standing outside the gas station or walking away from it, his car in the shadows by the building, or he might be turning a corner in his car, sitting very straight, alone or with his girlfriend. Or I might see what I thought was his car and follow it through town or around the campus, and it might be his and it might not. Once I saw an old white car of the same model in front of the supermarket, but the license plate was different. I said the number over to myself as I shopped, trying to remember it: I thought I might try to learn the numbers of all the old white cars of that model in town. But when I came out, the car was gone. All I knew was that there were three others like his in town, one license starting with a C, one with an E, and one with a T.

That night, on my way out to dinner with friends, I caught sight of him from a distance. He was walking through a thin rain to the office of the gas station wearing a blue denim jacket. As soon as we arrived at the Chinese restaurant, I went into a phone booth by the restrooms and called the gas station. A man with a cheerful voice answered the phone and told me that he had finished work and left not five minutes before. I stayed by the phone for a while. The booth, a small, private place within a larger, public place, was closer to him at that moment than any other spot in the restaurant, because I sometimes could, if I was lucky, even though I was in a public place and far away from him, bring him so close to me that his voice was in my ear, his thin voice coming through a wire into my ear like a face inside my head.

On my way home later, I drove past the gas station and it was closed, the lanes of pumps dark under their roof, the empty office and the rubbish in the large wastebasket brightly lit in their fluorescent bath. I drove through a few streets of his town and then headed down the coast to my own. Although I had told myself I wouldn't go looking for him again, when I entered my town I turned right instead of left and drove down by the railway station and went along through the streets very slowly. I had seen an old white car like his there the day before at a time when I could not stop, and the car was there again in the same spot. I drove a little past it on the other side of the street, made a U-turn, and inched back alongside it. I thought the license number was not his, but just to make sure, as though I might look harder and discover that it was his after all, I turned around again, in a driveway, and drove straight at it on the wrong side of the street, my headlights on the front of it. It was not the same car.

When I couldn't find him after circling the town, I grew discouraged, then listless, looking in the windows of one house after another as I passed them, seeing in almost every one the white-dotted blue flicker of a television screen.

Back at home the tough branches of the jade plants poked out over the brick path, bumping me as I pushed by, their thick rubbery leaves full of water, so thick and aggressive they were like animals, there in the dark. A white moon hung in the black sky, three bright stars near it, and a shred of white cloud, and the moonlight filled the terrace where I stood still for a while just looking at it, the shadows very black under the eaves of the arcade.

Inside, Madeleine asked me to guess what had happened a little while ago. I waited. She said he had come by the house. The dog was barking and she went out and found him there. He had walked up the hill. He had talked for five minutes with her. Later she saw his car parked in front of the convenience store nearby. She thought his car had broken down and he wanted my help. “He probably wanted to borrow your car,” she said.

I had imagined a visit like this many times, including the dog barking. Now it had happened. But as it was happening, I was down near the railway station nosing my car back and forth around a different old white car.

*   *   *

It occurred to me that if he did not want to be with me anymore, then when I went to find him, just because I wanted to see him, smell him, and hear his voice, regardless of what he wanted, I was turning him into something less than another human being, as though he were as passive as anything else I wanted, any other object that I wanted to consume—food, drink, or a book.

Yet when I went in search of him I was passive myself, more passive, really, than if I had done nothing, because I was trying to put myself in his hands again, to be a thing he should do something about. Doing nothing about him in the first place would have been the most active thing to do, and yet I couldn't do that.

I felt that my eyes themselves had a place in them for the image of his body, the muscles of my eyes were used to tightening just the right way to take in his form, and now they suffered from not having it before them.

*   *   *

The day I invited Laurie to dinner, telling her to bring her flute, I tried to call him, but there was no answer. It was growing dark and beginning to rain. I went out in the rain and walked down the main street of the town looking at cars, turned back toward home, and then saw his car, I thought, go by with two people in it. I looked at it: it was gone in a moment. I could not be sure it was his. I walked past my own house to see if Laurie was there yet, but she was not, so I went on toward the supermarket. If his car was there in the lot, I would not do anything more to find him. I only wanted to know where he was. I was walking down the middle of the road. When I had nearly reached the end, a van turned suddenly into it in front of me and caught me in its headlights. I stumbled into a shallow ditch to one side and stopped there while the van drove on past. Then I climbed out of the ditch. I stood still in my rubber boots and slicker and looked at myself, at what I was doing, a woman my age—something drifting around in the night and in the rain, not so much a person as something else, like a dog.

I walked on into the middle of another road, a broad road that ran steeply down from the crest of the hill far above to the park by the ocean, and stopped there again, disoriented, turning my head this way and that. I looked down at the supermarket parking lot, the last place I would look for his car. It was not there.

I knew he sometimes shopped in that supermarket. A few weeks back, Madeleine had seen him there. He did not look as happy as he used to, she said, but rather troubled. She had thought he would stop to talk to her, but he had headed on to the meat section. He was with his girlfriend. Madeleine had said, “She looks very young—seventeen. Very young. Nice. Yes, quite pretty.” I had not seen her yet, then.

I saw her only twice, I think, once across the room through that wet pane of glass and once when Ellie and I were coming away from a movie. We were in a bleak part of town with many empty spaces, driving out of what seems to me now a vast parking lot outside a vast movie theater, passing a long line of small black figures waiting for the next showing of the movie, when Ellie, gazing out the window to her right as I drove looking straight ahead, spotted him and pointed him out to me, standing there in line with his girlfriend and another woman, a fellow student so much taller that he and his girlfriend were both bending their necks back to look up at her, all three of them ridiculously tiny and dark in that sprawling white landscape.

They could not actually have been as small as I remember them—they have become smaller and smaller in that memory, and everything else larger and larger, as time has passed.

Why did I ask Madeleine if she was pretty? How much did that matter? Was it some kind of witchcraft, to be pretty?

But I myself wanted to be as pretty as I could be, in case he should see me, as though it did matter, even though he had always accepted me just the way I was, looking tired, with a few wrinkles. But I was not as pretty as I could be. I had cut my hair too short, my face looked older, more worn, and my clothes were loose on me. Because I was so often indoors during the day, my skin was white, like other things that stay out of the light. Or, when I looked at my face in the mirror in the morning, as though I were looking at the sky or the newspaper, I would see that today my skin was not white but yellow and orange, or sometimes a mottled pink, and my eyes were smaller.

I did not have time to check everywhere again, walking through the town and back. I sometimes did this. I sometimes went to one end of the town and imagined he was at the other end, and then went back to the other end and imagined he was at the end I had just come from. Since time kept passing as I did this, it was always possible that he might have come to one place while I was at the other.

Back at home, I heard a car stop outside and then the gate latch click. It was Laurie. She did not know that she had so little to do with what was going on here, with me. She must have thought she was at the beginning of a pleasant evening in which she would eat a good dinner and have some good conversation and play some music, and she probably thought I was also looking forward to our evening together. She smiled and started talking right away. But there was a sort of fog over my eyes and I had trouble hearing her. Other things already filled my brain, pressing on the walls of it, so that there was barely any room for anything she said to me and even less room for me to make any kind of answer. And as I tried to listen to her and think what to answer, I was cooking our dinner at the same time.

I could have told Ellie I felt sick, but I could not tell Laurie—she was hungry for gossip, and she was always pleased by other people's misfortunes, because they made her feel fortunate. She was pleased to see others overweight or plain, because they made her feel slim and pretty, though she was slim and pretty enough without that. She was pleased to see others lonely, because then she felt safe from being lonely.