The End of the Story Read Free Page A

close to us in the crowded room that no one could talk during it except by speaking directly into another person’s ear.
    At that time I liked to drink. I always needed a drink if I was going to sit and talk to someone. If I had to sit in a public place that did not serve alcohol, I was uncomfortable and could not enjoy the time, just as, if I was invited to someone’s house for the evening, I liked to be offered a drink as soon as I walked in.
    At the first intermission, I asked him and Ellie if the café served alcohol, and they said it did not. I asked them where I could go to buy something to drink. They said there was a little grocery a short walk away where I could buy beer, and he offered to go with me, and again quickly stood up from his chair.
    Outdoors, he walked along beside me over the beaten dirt at the edge of the road, through the litter of dry leaves and wood buttons from the eucalyptus trees.
    I can’t remember what we talked about, but in those days I almost never remembered what I had talked about with a person I had just met because I had so many other things on my mind. I was worried not only about whether there was something wrong with my clothes or hair, but also about how I was standing, walking, or holding my head and neck, and where I was putting my feet. And if I was not walking but trying to eat and drink as I talked, I worried about how to swallow the food and drink in such a way that I wouldn’t choke, and sometimes I did choke. All of this kept me so busy that although I remembered a sentence long enough to answer it, I didn’t think about it long enough to remember it later.
    The road was dark by the time we went out, at seven-thirty or eight. Or rather, the side of the road where we were walking was lit by streetlights and floodlights around the café and the stores near it, and the other side of the road was dark, lined by eucalyptus trees shading the road from the electric lights. A sign or two hung among the trees, and beyond the trees lay two pairs of railroad tracks, also dark, and across the tracks a small streambed, not visible itself but marked by the tall grasses that bordered it, and then another road, smaller and not much traveled, but well lit, at the foot of a bare hillside. In the other direction, in back of the café and the stores, the ocean was a few hundred yards away at the base of a hill or cliff, so large and dark that even though I couldn’t see it, its darkness hovered over the road and the electric lights fought against it.
    I’m not sure whether we walked on dirt or asphalt, what we passed, or how he walked next to me, whether awkwardly or gracefully, quickly or slowly, close to me or a few feet away. I think he was bending toward me in his eagerness to talk and hear what I was saying, which was difficult, since I spoke very quietly. I’m not sure what brand of beer we bought, just what the confusion was about the money and the brand of beer, whether he paid for my beer as well as his own. Maybe I wanted a more expensive brand and bought two bottles of that, while he had only enough money for two bottles of a cheaper brand and spent the last money he had on them. I know he spent his last money on something because much later in the night or the early hours of the morning he ran out of gas and having no money at all, asked a stranger on the street for a dollar. He told this to Ellie in the library the next day and she told it to me, though long after.
    There was his invitation, once we were back in the café, my hesitation, his boldness, my misunderstanding, then the noise of his car, my fear, the coast at night, my town at night, my yard and the rosebush, the jade bushes and my fence, my house, my room, the metal chairs, our beer, our conversation, his misstatements of fact, his boldness again, and so forth.
    When he asked me to go out for a drink with him, and the first thing I said was that I really should be home working, I