Read Online The End of the Story by Lydia Davis - Free Book Online

and taking part in the arrangements of my house.
    *   *   *
    I was waiting for him in a crowded room. He had not come to meet me and I decided he was not going to come. I thought he had left me already, before we had been together even a week. My disappointment was so acute that the room seemed to empty of whatever life it had had, and the air became thin. The people, chairs, sofas, windows, curtains, lectern, microphone, table, tape recorder, and sunlight were empty shells of what they had been before.
    When he actually left me, months after that, the world was not empty but worse than empty, as though the quality of emptiness had become so concentrated it turned into a kind of poison, as though each thing appeared alive and healthy but had been injected with a poisonous preserving agent.
    This time he had not left me, he had only come late. He was there in the crowd by the door when I stood up to go. The life came back into everything in the room. He explained to me that he had lost track of the time. He occasionally lost track of the time and what he was doing, he did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and it was hard for him, at times, to do what he had to do.
    We left the place together to go to a friend’s house and we quarreled on the way.
    *   *   *
    There must have been at least seven readings that I went to while I knew him, or even more. It is hard to describe a reading in a way that is exciting, and it would be harder still to describe more than one in the same novel, even if some of the poetry I heard made me angry, which it did. I could change them to something else, like lectures, or dances, but I don’t think I would have gone to more than one dance. The last reading was a reading of sound poetry, the most difficult one for me. Because I was forced to sit still while my mind had nothing much to hold on to, it wandered away from me and went through the plate-glass window searching yet again for him.
    *   *   *
    We were quarreling over his friend Kitty. We were sitting together in his car in a narrow, sunlit street. On either side of us were small patches of clipped green lawn that came right down to the white sidewalks. The houses set in these patches of lawn were small and white, of one story, with red-tiled roofs. A short palm tree grew beside one house, a shrub with rubbery leaves by another, a red-flowered vine by a third. Each house on this street seemed to have a lawn and just one other thing growing on the lawn, as if that were a rule. The sun shone down at an angle and reflected off the white sidewalk and the white walls of the houses, and because the houses were so low and small, with so few trees about, a great expanse of blue sky was visible. We were waiting to get out of the car and go into a friend’s house. Either we were the first to arrive or we were simply trying to finish our quarrel.
    He was going to give a reading himself in a few days. He was going to read a few of his poems and also a story. He told me he wanted to invite this woman Kitty to his reading because she had helped him to plan it.
    The last time he had talked about her had been in my office. He had come up behind me in the hallway outside my office, and put his arms around me and kissed me there, publicly, which had made me nervous. Though the hallway ahead of me seemed to be empty, I thought someone appeared suddenly behind me and vanished again.
    Sitting inside my office, first he complained about her, then he worried about her. I did not like hearing even this woman’s name, because as soon as he mentioned it he seemed to move away from me, to go out of the room and leave me sitting there opposite his face, which was abstracted and preoccupied, with a slight frown of annoyance on it, and opposite his body, which had become very still. I felt I had been forgotten, or at least what I was to him now had been forgotten, as though