The End of the Story Read Free Page B

felt like a dull translator, or a cautious professor, much older than he was. I had been feeling older and older anyway at that time, maybe because I was in a new place and a new situation, and had to see myself freshly and size myself up as though I was not as familiar to myself as I had thought. I was not really so old, but I was still many years older than he was.
    There is more that I don’t like remembering: my hesitation, my sudden worry, my anxiety as I hurried after him, the embarrassment of having run after him, my lack of grace, feeling older but not acting my age, I thought.
    He walked with such determined steps out of the café after the performance was over, without saying anything to me, that I thought he was hurt by my hesitation. We had not spoken more than a dozen sentences to each other and already I thought I had hurt his feelings, which isn’t surprising since I often thought he was hurt, and angry, even when I had known him much longer than just a few hours. Of course, the fact that I rushed out after him must have shown how much I wanted to go off somewhere with him, despite my hesitation. When I went out after him he told me he was only removing some things from his car. It was his own awkwardness that had made him leave so abruptly.
    As we stood by our cars outside the café, he asked me where we might go. Then, bolder again than I expected, he asked me if we might go to my house. I hesitated again, and this time he apologized. I liked his modesty in doing that. I knew almost nothing about him, so each thing he did and said showed me an entirely new aspect of him, as though he were unfolding in front of me. I did not mind going straight home, because I was tired. I got into my car, and he got into his. I waited for him so that he could follow me, and when he turned on his engine, his large, old, white car roared. It continued to roar so loudly, as it followed just behind me, that my teeth began to chatter and my hands shook on the steering wheel, which I gripped until my knuckles hurt.
    With his headlights filling my rearview mirror, and my hands tight on the wheel, we drove down the coast through another town where a movie theater was emptying out, on down by the water, across some marshland, and up a dry hillside into my town, past the traffic lights and the outdoor café on the corner, and after a left turn, up the hill to my house.
    It seems to me that he stumbled in the dark as he crossed the rutted dirt driveway under the cedar tree, but I may be confused about that, because I myself fell backward off the bank of sea fig into the driveway a few days later, as he was leaving. I was waving goodbye to him. I did not actually fall, but stumbled back off the high bank in front of the house on which the cedar grew. I was always awkward with him, I had trouble controlling my arms and legs when I walked through the room, when I sat down in a chair. He said I was awkward because I was so eager, and moved too fast for my own body.
    Now I walked ahead of him, and by the front wall he lifted a stem of thorns that hung down from an overgrown climbing rose so that I could pass without scratching myself. Or maybe he couldn’t have done this in the dark, and it was on another day, in the daylight. Or it was that night, but the night was not entirely dark. In fact, it is only dark in my memory of that particular night, because I know there were two bright streetlamps nearby: one of them shone into my room.
    We made our way across the circular drive and past the untidy rosebush, which grew by the window where I sat so much of the time staring out, and around the side of the house past the jade bushes. We followed a brick path to a gate of white painted wood set in a fence of white painted wood, and through the gate into the arcaded walkway past the windows of my room to the door of my room. An electric light shone from inside a lantern fixed to the white stucco wall next to the door.
    Inside, we