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

one failed writer after another. Maybe he had to see how they failed if he was to find a place in that world for himself.
    One of the things I learned, because I asked him directly, was that there had been not just a few but many women before me, and that I was not even the oldest. At the time, this startled me and seemed to diminish what there was between us. Then, as time passed, I became used to the idea and accepted it.
    Later I could say to myself that at least I was the last woman, since he married after he left me. But maybe he hadn’t even been telling me the whole truth. It was the slight pause before he answered me, and his look of embarrassment, that made me believe him. Maybe he was embarrassed by the crudeness of my question, and a false answer was the only answer to such a question.
    *   *   *
    The first time I told him I loved him he only looked at me thoughtfully without answering, as though considering what I had said. At the time, I did not understand his hesitation. The words were drawn out of me, almost despite me, and he did not answer. Now I think that if he could be so careful about saying the same thing to me, he probably loved me more deeply than I loved him. I had probably said what I said much too soon to mean it, and he knew that, though he couldn’t help saying the same to me a few days later, since he probably really did love me, or thought he did.
    I say at one point that I fell in love with him quite suddenly, and that it happened when we were staring at each other by candlelight. But this seems too easy, and I also can’t remember just what candlelight I was talking about. There was no candlelight in the café the first evening, and there was no candlelight in my house later that night either, so I evidently don’t mean that I fell in love with him the first night. And yet I do remember that even as soon as the next morning, when I saw him again, I felt a sudden, strong emotion. If I wasn’t in love with him, I don’t know what I was feeling. If I had already fallen in love with him by then, it must have happened sometime between the moment he left me in the early morning and the moment I saw him again, unless it happened the very instant I saw him again.
    Did it have to happen when he wasn’t present and when I wasn’t aware of it? Maybe it didn’t happen suddenly, after all, but gradually, so that what I felt when I saw him again was only a first degree of it, and there were further degrees—later that day, the next day, the next, and then two days after that, until it reached an extreme of intensity, not destined to go any further, and then wavered and fluctuated before declining gradually, so that the thing was always in motion? A candle may in fact have been burning in the room the first time I said I loved him, but that wasn’t the moment I fell in love with him, I know, so I’m still not sure what candlelight I meant.
    If the light was on, I saw every detail of him down to the grain of his skin, and if the room was dark, I saw the outline of him against the dim sky outside, but at the same time knew his face so well that I could see that, too, and even what his expression was, though without the light not all the detail of him was there.
    I thought that in certain cases a person fell in love slowly and gradually, and in others very suddenly, but my experience was so limited I couldn’t be sure. It seemed to me I had fallen in love only once before.
    There were times when I felt I loved him, but other times when I did not, and because he was wary and intelligent he must have noticed exactly when I seemed to love him and when I did not, and maybe he did not quite believe me because of that. Maybe that was why he hesitated and let so many days go by, after I said I loved him, before he answered me.
    I think that a certain hunger for him came first and was followed by a feeling of tenderness, gradually increasing, for a