Free The End of the Story by Lydia Davis Page A

tray in his hands, looking displeased. I thought he was disappointed that so many people were sitting there in the sun, and all the seats were taken, but he could have been frowning because his eyes were not good, or because the sunlight was so bright, since he frowned often, especially in the sunlight. I don’t know if he saw us and came over, if he sat with us, or if he simply turned around and left. If I hadn’t written anything in my notebook about that week, and if I hadn’t remembered the reading, I don’t think I would be so acutely aware of those days about which I can’t remember anything.
    I am working from my memories and my notebook. There is a great deal I would have forgotten if I had not written it in my notebook, but my notebook also leaves out a great deal, only some of which I remember. There are also memories that have nothing to do with this story, and there are good friends who do not appear in it, or appear only indistinctly, because at the time they had nothing or little to do with him.
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    When I think of him frowning in the sunlight as he looked out at the café terrace, I wonder if I have been wrong, all this time, about another occasion on which he was frowning. The only photograph I have of him shows him frowning at me from a distance of about fifteen feet. He is on a sailboat belonging to a cousin of mine, he is bending over, his hands are busy, perhaps fastening a rope, and he is looking up sideways at me, frowning. The picture is not very sharp, probably taken with a poor camera. I have assumed all this time that he was frowning in annoyance at me for taking his picture at such a time, when he was trying to do something difficult on the boat of a man who made him uncomfortable because he barked orders at him to do things like fasten certain ropes and also because he clearly did not approve of this relationship. But now I realize he might have been frowning merely because he was looking up suddenly into the bright sunlight.
    A year after this picture was taken I went sailing with the same cousin, on the same boat. Back home, I happened to take the picture out and look at it again. This time I had trouble reconciling what I saw with what I knew. He was there on the boat, in the picture, and I was looking at him, but he was not on that boat any longer: I had just been there the day before, and I knew he was not there. Within an hour after the picture was taken, in fact, he was no longer on the boat, because we were at the dock when I took it, preparing to go ashore. But as long as he and I were still together he was somehow still on the boat, he was not distinctly absent from it, as he was a year later.
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    I have been thinking about that photograph, because I mentioned it to Ellie recently on the phone. Except for her one year in England, Ellie has lived near me for a long time. But now she is about to move again, this time to the Southwest. She told me she had gone down to the basement of her apartment building the day before to look through her things. First she discovered that she couldn’t open the padlock on her storage bin. Another tenant, believing the storage bin was his, had instructed his secretary to break off the lock Ellie had put on it many years before and replace it with a new one. The lock had belonged to Ellie’s father. It had been the only thing of his she had left. Everything to do with this move was disturbing to her anyway. Now she was further disturbed because her father’s lock had been destroyed and removed by a stranger, and she was shut out of her bin. Then, when she was able to get into it, she found that a flood had ruined some of her books and papers.
    But she was calling to tell me she had discovered several photographs of him in one of her boxes, and she thought I might like to have them. She said there were two, but then, as she went on talking to me and at the same time looked