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

he had suddenly mistaken me for an old friend to whom he could confide his worries or complaints about Kitty.
    Kitty appeared in his room a few weeks later, and the reason he gave me for her visit did not make sense to me when I tried to understand it.
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    His reading was on a Sunday afternoon, in an elegant old house on a hill in a run-down part of the city. The house had heavy banisters and stained-glass windows in the stairwells, thick curtains drawn back from the doorways with velvet cords, alcoves and bay windows, high ceilings and chandeliers. He read with another poet, a man my age, but I can’t remember who it was, and I also confuse this reading with another one in the same house months later, after he had left me, in which a woman read a story about Robinson Crusoe. I stood at the back of the room, where I could look away from the rows of people through an arched doorway into the next room, which was empty. I watched what I could see of him where he stood, the length of the room away from me, at a lectern. I could see only his head and shoulders above the heads of the audience. I was prepared to be embarrassed, for his sake, if he did not read well or if he read something that was not very good. But he read clearly and confidently, and nothing he read sounded bad, though I did not particularly like the story he read. Kitty did not come.
    *   *   *
    I could say more about the house where he read, but I’m not sure how much description to have in the novel. Another thing I could describe would be the landscape, the reddish, sandy earth spilling onto the edges of the sidewalks everywhere, the lines of cliffs above the ocean and the eroded sandy ravines descending to the water, the ocean so close I could hear the waves late at night, like a curtain coming down again and again, if the tide was high. It was not a lush landscape, because the climate was so dry. Part of each year, the hills were brown, and the only thick green vegetation grew up in the clefts of the hills where the dampness would gather, or in the towns where plants were watered and the succulent ground cover thrived and fat shrubs with glistening leaves hugged the shops. Because I had not known the landscape before, it interested me. It was so difficult, with broad highways cutting through everything and always some new construction rising abruptly off a brown hill, houses stacked or piled on top of each other in the wide-open spaces as though anticipating future congestion, or in a small canyon a line of new houses along a new road, and at the end of the line the latest house under construction, a framework of raw wood, while the first houses were already occupied, with cars in the driveways. Only rarely did a vestige of something older remain like a vision, an old ranch house at a distance from the road, a weedy, dusty track leading to it and a grove of gnarled live-oak trees and eucalyptus around it.
    Eucalyptus trees with their smoky, oily smell grew everywhere, very tall, the boles going far up before sending out a branch. They were untidy trees, with wood soft and weak. They kept losing branches, so that there were great gaps along the trunks. They kept dropping their narrow, tan, spear-shaped leaves, which littered the ground under them, and layers of bark fell from them in long strips, along with little wooden buttons, brown with crosses carved out of them on one side, powdery blue on the other. An old professor at the university often complained that as he lay in bed at night he was kept awake by the hooting of a nearby owl and by those wooden buttons which dropped onto the roof over his head and rolled down to the eave, one by one, dropping and rolling, dropping and rolling all night long.
    *   *   *
    After his reading, in the late afternoon, he and I went with a group of others to a friend’s house on another hill nearby, directly under a flight path to the airport out in