LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039488

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039489

ISBN 978-1-68137-434-5

v1.0

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Contents

Introduction

THE END OF ME

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INTRODUCTION

Alfred Hayes’s penultimate novel, The End of Me, is written in the first person, like its predecessors In Love and My Face for the World to See. It differs from those two self-lacerating narratives in one crucial respect: this time the desperate storyteller has a name. The mordantly witty author calls him Asher, after the biblical son of Jacob. The name means “happy” in Hebrew.

Asher has much in common with his anonymous brothers-in-arms. He, too, is a writer of sorts, though he’d describe himself as a “writher.” He was a moderately successful screenwriter before his tale of woe begins, living comfortably, if not happily, with his social-climbing second wife in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. But Hollywood no longer requires his services: “The door closes that had always been open. The phone is silent that had always rung.” To add to the humiliation of being suddenly jobless, he has discovered that his unnamed wife is having an affair with her tennis coach. Although he has come to despise her acquisitiveness and the snobbish disdain with which she treats her genial, uneducated father, he succumbs to a fit of jealousy that shows little sign of abating. His confidence, already depleted, is shattered. She has made a patsy of him. He is tempted to burn down their luxury residence, but decides instead to leave the lights blazing in every room before he escapes from the horror confronting and consuming him.

He flies to New York, the city of his childhood and early manhood. He books into a hotel, taking a room on the eighth floor, a “well-furnished cave” offering a distant view of Central Park. He favors the idea of hiding there indefinitely, but can’t resist the temptation to visit old haunts and walk along the busy streets undisturbed. He goes to a delicatessen in the North Bronx where he last ate ten years ago and wonders why Max Gitlitz, the owner, isn’t sitting by the cash register. A waiter provides the answer. He tells Asher that Max is long gone and that the place has been “alterated” three times. The unhappy chronicler relishes the idiosyncratic coinage, setting it down in italics—alterated reminds him, briefly, of the unexpected pleasure to be gained by listening to the things people say.

He goes to see his eighty-six-year-old Aunt Dora, who lives alone now that her husband has died. She is frail but is comforted by the fact that her doctor lives nearby. For her, Asher is the famous one in the family, the boy who made good, with a lovely home in a sunny state and a wife to care for him. He lies to her when she asks him how he and his “fine wife” are faring, assuring her that all is well. He learns that Dora’s daughter has a son called Michael who has ambitions to be a writer, too. Perhaps Asher could give him some useful advice.