The End of the Story by Lydia Davis

was wrong—inaccurate, or not very intelligent, or not very interesting. Even when I did not mean to be unkind to him, I was unkind, and made him afraid to speak.
    His silence hid things, as his face hid things, what was in his mind and what he was feeling, and forced me to look at him more attentively, to try to search out what lay behind his silence. He never explained himself, unlike another man I had known who explained himself so fully that I never had to guess. I guessed at his reasons, I guessed at his thoughts, but when I asked him if I was right in my guesses, he did not answer me and I had to guess further, whether I had been right.
    This kept my attention on him, but at times I became impatient. I knew I should not be impatient with his silence, or with his indirect way of doing things, or with his slower way of doing things, and yet I was. I wanted everything to be quick, most of the time, except when I chose it to be slow. I simply wanted everything to be the way I chose it to be, quick or slow.
    If I look at how impatient I was with him, I have to wonder about the way I loved him. I think I was irresponsible in handling his love. I forgot it, ignored it, abused it. Only occasionally, and almost by chance, or on a whim, did I honor or protect it. Maybe I only wanted to be entrusted with his love: then I was willing to let him suffer, because I was safe in the trust of that love and did not suffer myself.
    It was not easy for me to speak to him, either. I wanted to speak, and my voice spoke inside me, I thought of the words to say and said them, but what I said was dry and stiff, the words did not communicate anything of what I was feeling. It was easier for me to touch him and to write things down.
    So there was sometimes this strange formality between us, a vacancy and difficulty, because of the awkwardness of what he said to me when he spoke, and the awkwardness of what I said to him, and the vast silences that fell between us. Maybe we did not have to talk, but when we were together we must have felt we should have something like a conversation. We tried over and over again to talk, and did it badly, there were so many barriers in the way.
    Other things about him bothered me, and he must have known that. I was uneasy if he sat very silent in company with other people, or if he made a remark that showed he had not understood what was being talked about, his enunciation clearest when he was most nervous, his t ’s noticeably crisp, or if he laughed in his self-conscious way, his voice tense and rising. Even his smile, broad as it was every time, seemed tense and self-conscious, as though he were offering himself to me then, standing behind his smile and behind his wide body, so straight and tense and quiet. I thought his body was unusually wide, his arms and legs unusually thick. I thought his skin was strangely white, the flesh of his limbs so wide and white it almost shone in the dark. It did shine in a dim light, in a darkened room with light coming in through the windows from the moon or a streetlamp. He was certainly nice-looking, his features were agreeable, but his nose was oddly pointed and upturned in his wide face, the skin of his face was pale, pink, and freckled, even his lips were freckled. He often fell into one self-conscious pose or another, his head thrown back, smiling or wary, or his head bowed, when he was not smiling and seemed angry, or ready to fight, but was not angry, looking up at me from under his eyebrows, his lips tight shut. I could not say his eyes did not have a pretty color of blue in them, though even the blue was very pale, and the whites often a little bloodshot.
    When we were no longer together, what had bothered me did not bother me anymore. It was harder for me to see anything wrong with him, because although the same things were there, they had shrunk, in my attention, to a point where they were barely visible.
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    I have been counting