The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (29 page)

At the end of the half hour I am sorry the show is over. I hunger for more. If I could, I would watch another half hour, and another, and another. I wish the baby would go to sleep and my husband would not come home for dinner. I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited. I want to go on looking through a window into someone else’s life, someone else’s office, someone else’s apartment, a friend coming in the door, a friend staying for supper, usually salad, a woman tossing salad, always neatly dressed. There is order in that other world. Mary says that order is possible and, since she is gentle and kind if somewhat brittle, that kindness is possible, too. The friend who comes down from upstairs and stays for supper is not so tidy, and is not always kind, but sometimes selfish, so there is also room for human failing, and for a kind of recklessness or passion.

Another comedy follows this one, and now and then I try to watch it just in order to stay somewhere else for a while, but it is not well acted or well written, it is not funny, even the audience laughter sounds forced, and I can’t believe it. Instead, I go into the kitchen and begin to prepare dinner, if the baby will not stop me by holding on to my legs.

I am still trying to understand just how Glenn Gould identified with the orderly woman and the passionate woman, just what sort of companionship he found with these two women and the other characters, if that’s what it was. He was something of a recluse, by choice. He arranged his life as he wanted it, scheduled his outside appointments as it suited him, watched television when he needed to, and was able to be selfish without hurting anyone. He was a generous and considerate friend, but he didn’t meet his friends in person very often because he believed that personal encounters were distracting and unnecessary. He said he could comprehend a person’s essence better over the phone. He had long conversations with his friends over the phone, always with a cup of tea in front of him. These conversations usually started at midnight, just before he went to work, since he slept through the day and worked through the night.

Hummingbirds make explosions in the dying white flowers—not only the white flowers are dying but old women are falling from branches everywhere—in smoking pits outside the city, other dead things, too, are burning—and what can be done? Few people know. Dogs have been lost in more than one place, and their owners do not love the countryside anymore. No—old women have fallen and lie with their cancerous cheeks among the roots of oak trees. Everywhere, everywhere. And the earth is sprouting things we do not dare look at. And the smoking pits have consumed other unnamable things, things we are glad to see go. The smoke, tall and thick as mountains, makes our landscape. There are no more mountains. Long ago they were gone, not even in the memory of our grandfathers. The cloud, low over our heads, is our sky. It has been a long age since anyone saw a sky, saw anything blue. The fog is our velvet, our armchair, our bed. The trees are purple in it. The candles of flowers are out now. The fog is soft, it has no claws, not yet. Our grandmothers’ purple teeth crave. They crave things we would not even recognize anymore, though our grandmothers remember—they cry out at a bridge. Too many things to name are gone and we are left with this clowning earth, these cynical trees—shadows, all, of themselves. And we, too, are beyond help. Some only are less cancerous than others, that is all, some have more left, of their bones, of their hair, of their organs. Who can find a way around the smoking pits, the greedy oaks? Who can find a path to take among the lost and dying dogs back to where the hummingbirds, though mad, still explode the flowers, flowers still though dying?

If I were not me and overheard me from below, as a neighbor, talking to him, I would say to myself how glad I was not to be her, not to be sounding the way she is sounding, with a voice like her voice and an opinion like her opinion. But I cannot hear myself from below, as a neighbor, I cannot hear how I ought not to sound, I cannot be glad I am not her, as I would be if I could hear her. Then again, since I am her, I am not sorry to be here, up above, where I cannot hear her as a neighbor, where I cannot say to myself, as I would have to from below, how glad I am not to be her.

At the family gathering, the great-grandmothers were put out on the sun porch. But because of some problem with the children, at the same time as the brother-in-law had fallen into a drunken stupor, the great-grandmothers were forgotten by everyone for a very long time. When we opened the glass door, made our way through the rubber trees, and approached the sunlit old women, it was too late: their gnarled hands had grown into the wood of their cane handles, their lips had cleaved together into one membrane, their eyeballs had hardened and were immovably focused out on the chestnut grove where the children were flashing to and fro. Only old Agnes had a little life left in her, we could hear her breath sucking through her mouth, we could see her heart laboring beneath her silk dress, but even as we went to her she shuddered and was still.

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” I heard, on an interview program about ethics, that this concept underlies all systems of ethics. If you really do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you, you will be living according to a good system of ethics. At the time, I was pleased to learn of a simple rule that made such sense. But now, when I try to apply it literally to one person I know, it doesn’t seem to work. One of his problems is that he has a lot of hostility toward certain other people and when I imagine how he would have them do unto him I can only think he would in fact want them to be hostile toward him, as he imagines they are, because he is already so very hostile toward them. He would also want them to be suspicious of him to the same degree that he is suspicious of them, and bitter about him as he is bitter about them, because his feelings against them are so strong that he needs the full strength of what he imagines to be their feelings against him in order to continue feeling what he wants to feel against them. So, really, he is already doing unto those certain others as he would have them do unto him, though in fact it occurs to me that at this point he is only having certain feelings about them and not doing anything to them, so he may still be quite within some system of ethics, unless to feel something toward someone is in fact to do something to that person.

We live in the house behind and can’t see the street: our back windows face the gray stone of the city wall and our front windows look across the courtyard into the kitchens and bathrooms of the front house. The apartments inside the front house are lofty and comfortable, while ours are cramped and graceless. In the front house, maids live in the neat little rooms on the top floor and look out upon the spires of St-Étienne, but under the eaves of our house, tiny cubicles open in darkness onto a dusty corridor and the students and poor bachelors who sleep in them share one toilet by the back stairwell. Many tenants in the front house are high civil servants, while the house behind is filled with shopkeepers, salesmen, retired post-office employees, and unmarried schoolteachers. Naturally, we can’t really blame the people in the front house for their wealth, but we are oppressed by it: we feel the difference. Yet this is not enough to explain the ill will that has always existed between the two houses.

I often sit by my front window at dusk, staring up at the sky and listening to the sounds of the people across from me. As the hour passes, the pigeons settle over the dormers, the traffic choking the narrow street beyond thins out, and the televisions in various apartments fill the air with voices and the sounds of violence. Now and again, I hear the lid of a metal trash can clang below me in the courtyard, and I see a shadowy figure carry away an empty plastic pail into one of the houses.

The trash cans were always a source of embarrassment, but now the atmosphere has sharpened: the tenants from the house in front are afraid to empty their trash. They will not enter the courtyard if another tenant is already there. I see them silhouetted in the doorway of the front hall as they wait. When there is no one in the courtyard, they empty their pails and walk quickly back across the cobblestones, anxious not to be caught there alone. Some of the old women from the house in front go down together, in pairs.

The murder took place nearly a year ago. It was curiously gratuitous. The murderer was a respected married man from our building and the murdered woman was one of the few kind people in the front house; in fact, one of the few who would associate with the people of the house behind. M. Martin had no real reason to kill her. I can only think that he was maddened by frustration: for years he had wanted to live in the house in front, and it was becoming clear to him that he never would.

It was dusk. Shutters were closing. I was sitting by my window. I saw the two of them meet in the courtyard by the trash cans. It was probably something she said to him, something perfectly innocent and friendly yet that made him realize once again just how different he was from her and from everyone else in the front house. She never should have spoken to him—most of them don’t speak to us.

He had just emptied his pail when she came out. There was something so graceful about her that although she was carrying a garbage pail, she looked regal. I suppose he noticed how even her pail—of the same ordinary yellow plastic as his—was brighter, and how the garbage inside was more vivid than his. He must have noticed, too, how fresh and clean her dress was, how it wafted gently around her strong and healthy legs, how sweet the smell was that rose from it, and how luminous her skin was in the fading daylight, how her eyes glimmered with the constant slightly frenetic look of happiness that she wore, and how her light hair glinted with silver and swelled under its pins. He had stooped over his pail and was scraping the inside of it with a blunt hunting knife when she came out, gliding over the cobblestones toward him.

It was so dark by then that only the whiteness of her dress would have been clearly visible to him at first. He remained silent—for, scrupulously polite, he was never the first to speak to a person from the front house—and quickly turned his eyes away from her. But not quickly enough, for she answered his look and spoke.

She probably said something casual about how soft the evening was. If she hadn’t spoken, his fury might not have been unleashed by the gentle sound of her voice. But in that instant he must have realized that for him the evening could never be as soft as it was for her. Or else something in her tone—something too kind, something just condescending enough to make him see that he was doomed to remain where he was—pushed him out of control. He straightened like a shot, as though something in him had snapped, and in one motion drove his knife into her throat.

I saw it all from above. It happened very quickly and quietly. I did not do anything. For a while I did not even realize what I had seen: life is so uneventful back here that I have almost lost the ability to react. But there was also something arresting in the sight of it: he was a strong and well-made man, an experienced hunter, and she was as slight and graceful as a doe. His gesture was a classically beautiful one; and she slumped down onto the cobblestones as quietly as a mist melting away from the surface of a pond. Even when I was able to think, I did not do anything.

As I watched; several people came to the back door of the house in front and the front door of our own house and stopped short with their garbage pails when they saw her lying there and him standing motionless above her. His pail stood empty at his feet, scraped clean, the handle of her pail was still clenched in her hand, and her garbage had spilled over the stones beside her, which was, strangely, almost as shocking to us as the murder itself. More and more tenants gathered and watched from the doorways. Their lips were moving, but I could not hear them over the noise of the televisions on all sides of me.

I think the reason no one did anything right away was that the murder had taken place in a sort of no-man’s-land. If it had happened in our house or in theirs, action would have been taken—slowly in our house, briskly in theirs. But, as it was, people were in doubt: those from the house in front hesitated to lower themselves so far as to get involved in this, and those from our house hesitated to presume so far. In the end it was the concierge who dealt with it. The body was removed by the coroner and M. Martin left with the police. After the crowd had dispersed, the concierge swept up the spilled garbage, washed down the cobblestones, and returned each pail to the apartment where it belonged.

For a day or two, the people of both houses were visibly shaken. Talk was heard in the halls: in our house, voices rose like wind in the trees before a storm; in theirs, rich confident syllables rapped out like machine-gun fire. Encounters between the tenants of the two houses were more violent: people from our house jerked away from the others, if we met them in the street, and something in our faces cut short their conversations when we came within earshot.

But then the halls grew quiet again, and for a while it seemed as though little had changed. Perhaps this incident had been so far beyond our understanding that it could not affect us, I thought. The only difference seemed to be a certain blank look on the faces of the people in my building, as though they had gone into shock. But gradually I began to realize that the incident had left a deeper impression. Mistrust filled the air, and uneasiness. The people of the house in front were afraid of us here behind, now, and there was no communication between us at all. By killing the woman from the house in front, M. Martin had killed something more: we lost the last traces of our self-respect before the people from the house in front, because we all assumed responsibility for the crime. Now there was no point in pretending any longer. Some, it is true, were unaffected and continued to wear the rags of their dignity proudly. But most of the people in the house behind changed.