The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

Author:Alfred Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

22

She was delightful. I had been married twice, and each time for a considerable length of time. Worms, of one sort or another, had always eaten at the hearts of the women I’d known. I could remember the dissatisfied faces; the ill-temper; the quarrel that had no beginning and no end. I had quarreled, and reconciled, and the reconciliations were perhaps the bitterest thing of all. It was impossible to trace the course by which love, or what had seemed to be love, had soured and gone wrong. But it had always soured and it had always gone wrong.

The years after my divorce from my first wife were the years that were identifiable I suppose as my successful years. They were the years of the big, or at least large, money. It is astonishing how much more easily the large money comes to you in that time than the small money did in the other years. I could remember how, somewhat clownishly, I had celebrated the occasion of my first big paycheck by having it split into ten-dollar bills and covering the top of an office desk from corner to corner. Money made a marvelous blotter.

My second wife had a passion for houses. We didn’t stay long in the hotel after my first wife agreed to the divorce and went back East. Our first house was modest. It was on a hilltop. It was the year for hilltops. We acquired a boxer: the first of our dogs to go with the first of our houses. We had this marvelous view: you know, lights? And horizons? But then the view, magnificent as it was, began to pall. Oh, just a little. My second wife had a look that always preceded the palling of something: a certain pinched look. About the mouth. And at the edges of her fine nostrils. You know: the mute evidence she was deprived of something. So the slope outside our house was terraced. And after the terraces came the pool. And after the pool, the enlargement of the living room. The boxer got extremely nervous. When it was all completed, the slope bordered with flowers, the pool filled, the living room extended its ten imperative feet, then the hilltop revealed itself as being the true source of her dissatisfaction. She complained it was too isolated, that friends hesitated to drive up its steep path, that we were too much alone though, at the time I’d bought the house, it was this isolation and the no friends and the opportunity to be alone that had seemed so desirable. So the hilltop was exchanged for something flat and ranchy: with trees down a driveway: and the boxer got a lady boxer because, I supposed, he too was a victim of the isolated view. We now looked out to a neighbor’s wire fence, his horses, his children’s treehouse, his luau parties, his searchlights over his patio. He kept guns, this neighbor, and owned a string of pizza parlors. I lived

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