The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (4 page)

And then when the pictures start to go you start asking some questions, just little questions, that sit in your mind without any answers, like why did she have the light on when you came in to bed one night, but it was off the next, but she had it on the night after that and she had it off the last night, why, and other questions, little questions that nag at you like that.

And finally the pictures go and these dry little questions just sit there without any answers and you’re left with this large heavy pain in you that you try to numb by reading, or you try to ease it by getting out into public places where there will be people around you, but no matter how good you are at pushing that pain away, just when you think you’re going to be all right for a while, that you’re safe, you’re kind of holding it off with all your strength and you’re staying in some little bare numb spot of ground, then suddenly it will all come back, you’ll hear a noise, maybe it’s a cat crying or a baby, or something else like her cry, you hear it and make that connection in a part of you you have no control over and the pain comes back so hard that you’re afraid, afraid of how you’re falling back into it again and you wonder, no, you’re terrified to ask how you’re ever going to climb out of it.

And so it’s not only every hour of the day while it’s happening, but it’s really for hours and hours every day after that, for weeks, though less and less, so that you could work out the ratio if you wanted, maybe after six weeks you’re only thinking about it an hour or so in the day altogether, a few minutes here and there spread over, or a few minutes here and there and half an hour before you go to sleep, or sometimes it all comes back and you stay awake with it half the night.

So when you add up all that, you’ve only spent maybe $3 an hour on it.

If you have to figure in the bad times too, I don’t know. There weren’t any bad times with her, though maybe there was one bad time, when I told her I loved her. I couldn’t help it, this was the first time this had happened with her, now I was half falling in love with her or maybe completely if she had let me but she couldn’t or I couldn’t completely because it was all going to be so short and other things too, and so I told her, and didn’t know of any way to tell her first that she didn’t have to feel this was a burden, the fact that I loved her, or that she didn’t have to feel the same about me, or say the same back, that it was just that I had to tell her, that’s all, because it was bursting inside me, and saying it wouldn’t even begin to take care of what I was feeling, really I couldn’t say anything of what I was feeling because there was so much, words couldn’t handle it, and making love only made it worse because then I wanted words badly but they were no good, no good at all, but I told her anyway, I was lying on top of her and her hands were up by her head and my hands were on hers and our fingers were locked and there was a little light on her face from the window but I couldn’t really see her and I was afraid to say it but I had to say it because I wanted her to know, it was the last night, I had to tell her then or I’d never have another chance, I just said, Before you go to sleep, I have to tell you before you go to sleep that I love you, and immediately, right away after, she said, I love you too, and it sounded to me as if she didn’t mean it, a little flat, but then it usually sounds a little flat when someone says, I love you too, because they’re just saying it back even if they do mean it, and the problem is that I’ll never know if she meant it, or maybe someday she’ll tell me whether she meant it or not, but there’s no way to know now, and I’m sorry I did that, it was a trap I didn’t mean to put her in, I can see it was a trap, because if she hadn’t said anything at all I know that would have hurt too, as though she were taking something from me and just accepting it and not giving anything back, so she really had to, even just to be kind to me, she had to say it, and I don’t really know now if she meant it.

Another bad time, or it wasn’t exactly bad, but it wasn’t easy either, was when I had to leave, the time was coming, and I was beginning to tremble and feel empty, nothing in the middle of me, nothing inside, and nothing to hold me up on my legs, and then it came, everything was ready, and I had to go, and so it was just a kiss, a quick one, as though we were afraid of what might happen after a kiss, and she was almost wild then, she reached up to a hook by the door and took an old shirt, a green and blue shirt from the hook, and put it in my arms, for me to take away, the soft cloth was full of her smell, and then we stood there close together looking at a piece of paper she had in her hand and I didn’t lose any of it, I was holding it tight, that last minute or two, because this was it, we’d come to the end of it, things always change, so this was really it, over.

Maybe it works out all right, maybe you haven’t lost for doing it, I don’t know, no, really, sometimes when you think of it you feel like a prince really, you feel just like a king, and then other times you’re afraid, you’re afraid, not all the time but now and then, of what it’s going to do to you, and it’s hard to know what to do with it now.

Walking away I looked back once and the door was still open, I could see her standing far back in the dark of the room, I could only really see her white face still looking out at me, and her white arms.

I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It’s hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I’ll take it, I’ll buy it. That’s what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn’t that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that’s why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.

So I’m just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt.

Mr. Burdoff is lodged in Cologne for the year with a petty clerk and family in order to learn German. The undertaking is ill conceived and ill-fated, for he will waste much of his time in introspection and will learn very little German.

He writes to an old school friend in America with great enthusiasm about Germany, Cologne, the house he is staying in, and his lofty room with its excellent view out over a construction site to the mountains beyond. But although his situation seems novel to him, it has actually been repeated many times before without spectacular results. To his old school friend, it sounds all too familiar: the house cluttered with knickknacks, the nosy landlady, the clumsy daughters, and the loneliness of his bedroom. The well-meaning language teacher, the tired students, and the strange city streets.

Mr. Burdoff is no sooner established in what he considers a productive routine than he falls into a state of lassitude. He cannot concentrate. He is too nervous to put down his cigarettes, and yet smoking gives him a headache. He cannot read the words of his grammar book and he hardly feels rewarded even when by a tremendous effort he manages to understand one construction.

Mr. Burdoff finds himself thinking about lunch long before it is time to go down to the dining room. He sits by his window smoking. He can already smell the soup. The table in the dining room will be covered by a lace tablecloth but not yet set for lunch.

Mr. Burdoff is gazing out at the construction site in back of the boardinghouse. In a cradle of raw earth three cranes bow and straighten and rotate from side to side. Clusters of tiny workmen far below stand still with their hands in their pockets.

The soup will be thin and clear, with liver dumplings floating in it, spots of oil on the surface, and specks of parsley under the coil of rising steam. More often than not, the soup will be followed by a thin veal cutlet and the cutlet by a slice of pastry. Now the pastry is baking and Mr. Burdoff can smell it. The sounds he has been hearing, the many different heavy engines of the cranes and bulldozers grinding down below, are muffled by the sound of the vacuum cleaner beyond his door in the hallway. Then the vacuum cleaner moves to another part of the house. At noon the machines down below fall quiet, and a moment later through the sudden silence Mr. Burdoff hears the voice of his landlady, the squeaking of floorboards in the lower hall, and then the festive rattle of cutlery. These are the sounds he has been listening for, and he leaves his room to go down to lunch.

His language teacher is pleasant and funny, and everyone in the class has a good time. Mr. Burdoff is relieved to see that although his comprehension is poor, he is not the slowest in the class. There are many unison drills out loud, and he joins in with gusto. He takes pleasure in the little stories the class studies so painfully: for example, Karl and Helga go on a sightseeing trip that ends with a mild surprise, and the students appreciate this with waves of laughter.

Mr. Burdoff sits beside a small Hawaiian woman and watches her very red lips as she describes with agony her travels in France. The hesitation of the members of the class as they attempt to speak is charming; a fresh innocence endows them as they expose their weakness.

Now Mr. Burdoff feels a growing attraction to the Hawaiian woman, who has moved to a seat directly in front of him. During each lesson he stares at her lacquered black ponytail, her narrow shoulders, and the lower edge of her buttocks that delicately protrude through the opening at the back of her chair within inches of his knees. He hungers for a glimpse of her neatly crossed legs, her ballet slipper bobbing as she struggles to answer a question, and her slim hand as it writes, regularly traveling out across the page and then withdrawing again from sight.

He is enchanted by the colors she wears and the objects she carries with her. Every night he lies awake and dreams of helping her out of a serious difficulty. Every dream is the same and stops just short of the first kiss.

His love, however, is more fragile than he knows, and it dies in a moment the day a tall and sumptuous Norwegian woman joins the class.

As she enters the room, swinging her hips around the crowd of silent students, she seems to Mr. Burdoff magnificent and unwieldy. No sooner has she pulled in her hip to accommodate the writing arm of a chair on one side than her low-slung breast on the other side dislodges the chignon of an angry woman from Aix. The students make some effort to shift out of her way, but their chairs are bolted together in threes and they cannot coordinate their efforts. A slow flush crawls up Helen’s throat and cheeks.

To Mr. Burdoff’s delight, she pushes past his knees and settles in the empty seat next to him. She smiles apologetically at him and at the class in general. A mingling of warm smells drifts from her armpits, her throat, and her hair, and Mr. Burdoff instantly forgets agreements, inflections, and moods, looks up at the teacher and sees only Helen’s white eyelashes.

Helen succumbs to Mr. Burdoff on their very first date, after an evening spent struggling in the wet grass behind a statue of Leopold Mozart. If it is not hard for Mr. Burdoff to lead Helen to the park in the first place, it is more of a problem to roll her damp girdle up around her waist and then to persuade her, after all the heaving and grunting is over, that she has not been seen by an authority figure or a close friend. Once she is easier on that score, her remaining question to Mr. Burdoff is: Does he still respect her?

Much against his own wishes but out of love for Helen, Mr. Burdoff agrees to attend a Wagner opera at the Cologne opera house. During the first act, Mr. Burdoff, accustomed as he is to the clarity of the eighteenth century, becomes short of breath and is afraid he may faint in his hard seat at the top of the hall. Schooled in the strict progressions of Scarlatti, he cannot detect any advance in this music. At what he considers an arbitrary point, the act ends.

When the lights go up, Mr. Burdoff examines Helen’s face. A smile hovers around her lips, her forehead and cheeks are damp, and her eyes glow with satiety, as though she has eaten a large meal. Mr. Burdoff, on the other hand, is overcome by melancholy.

During the rest of the performance, Mr. Burdoff’s mind wanders. He tries to calculate the seating capacity of the hall, and then studies the dim frescoes on the underside of the dome. From time to time he glances at Helen’s strong hand on the arm of her seat but does not dare disturb her by touching it.

Late in their affair, by the time Mr. Burdoff has sat through the entire
Ring
cycle and
The Flying Dutchman
, as well as a symphonic poem by Strauss and what seem to him innumerable violin concertos by Bruch, Mr. Burdoff feels that Helen has taken him deep into the nineteenth century, a century he has always carefully avoided. He is surprised by its lushness, its brilliance, and its female sensibility, and still later, as he travels away from Germany on the train, he thinks of the night—important to the progress of their relationship—when he and Helen made love during her menstruation. The radio was broadcasting Schumann’s
Manfred
. As Mr. Burdoff climaxed, sticky with Helen’s blood, he confusedly sensed that a profound identification existed between Helen’s blood, Helen herself, and the nineteenth century.