The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (41 page)

Directly across the courtyard from me lives a middle-aged woman, the ringleader of the building. Sometimes she and I open our windows simultaneously and look at each other for an instant in shocked surprise. When this happens, one of us looks up at the sky, as though to see what the weather is going to be, while the other looks down at the courtyard, as though watching for late visitors. Each is really trying to avoid the glance of the other. Then we move back from the windows to wait for a better moment.

Sometimes, however, neither of us is willing to retreat: we lower our eyes and for minutes on end remain standing there, almost close enough to hear each other breathing. I prune the plants in my windowbox as though I were alone in the world and she, with the same air of preoccupation, pinches the tomatoes that sit in a row on her windowsill and untangles a sprig of parsley from the bunch that stands yellowing in a jar of water. We are both so quiet that the scratching and fluttering of the pigeons in the eaves above seems very loud. Our hands tremble, and that is the only sign that we are aware of each other.

I know that my neighbor leads an utterly blameless life. She is orderly, consistent, and regular in her habits. Nothing she does would set her apart from any other woman in the building. I have observed her and I know this is true.

She rises early, for example, and airs her bedroom; then, through the half-open shutters, I see what looks like a large white bird diving and soaring in the darkness of her room, and I know it is the quilt that she is throwing over her bed; late in the morning her strong, pale forearm flashes out of the living-room window several times and gives a shake to a clean dustrag; in housedress and apron she takes vegetables from her windowsill at noon, and soon after I smell a meal being cooked; at two o’clock she pins a dishcloth to the short line outside her kitchen window; and at dusk she closes all the shutters. Every second Sunday she has visitors during the afternoon. This much I know, and the rest is not hard to imagine.

I myself am not at all like her or like anyone else in the building, even though I make persistent efforts to follow their pattern and gain respect. My windows are not clean, and a lacy border of soot has gathered on my windowsill; I finish my washing late in the morning and hang it out just before a midday rainstorm breaks, when my neighbor’s wash has long since been folded and put away; at nightfall, when I hear the clattering and banging of the shutters on all sides, I cannot bear to close my own, even though I think I should, and instead leave them open to catch the last of the daylight; I disturb the man and woman below me because I walk without pause over my creaking floorboards at midnight, when everyone else is asleep, and I do not carry my pail of garbage down to the courtyard until late at night, when the cans are full: then I look up and see the housefronts shuttered and bolted as if against an invasion, and only a few lights burning in the houses next door.

I am very much afraid that by now the woman opposite has observed all these things about me, has formed a notion of me that is not at all favorable, and is about to take action with her many friends in the building. Already I have seen them gather in the hallway and have heard their vehement whispers echoing through the stairwell, where they stop every morning on their way in from shopping to lean on the banisters and rest. Already they glance at me with open dislike and suspicion in their eyes, and any day now they will circulate a petition against me, as my neighbors have done in every building I have ever lived in. Then, I will once again have to look for another place to live, and take something worse than what I now have and in a poorer neighborhood, just so as to leave as quickly as possible. I will have to inform the landlord, who will pretend to know nothing about the activity of my neighbors, but who must know what goes on in his buildings, must have received and read the petition. I will have to pack my belongings into boxes once again and hire a van for the day of departure. And as I carry box after box down to the waiting van, as I struggle to open each of the many doors between this apartment and the street, taking care not to scratch the woodwork or break the glass panes, my neighbors will appear one by one to see me off, as they always have. They smile and hold the doors for me. They offer to carry my boxes and show a genuinely kind interest in me, as though all along, given the slightest excuse, they would have liked to be my friends. But at this point, things have gone too far and I cannot turn back, though I would like to. My neighbors would not understand why I had done it, and the wall of hatred would rise between us again.

But sometimes, when this building with its bitter atmosphere becomes too oppressive for me to bear it any longer, I go outside into the city and wander back to the houses I used to live in. I stand in the sun talking to my old neighbors, and I find comfort and relief in their warm welcome.

My sister died last year leaving two dau ghters. My husband and I have decided to adopt the girls. The older one is thirty-three and a buyer for a department store, and the younger one, who just turned thirty, works in the state budget office. We have one child still living at home, and the house is not big, so it will be a tight fit, but we are willing to do this for their sake. We will move our son, who is eleven, out of his ro om and into the small room I have been using as a sewing room. I will set up my machine downstairs in the living room. We will put a bunk bed for the girls in my son’s old room. It is a fair-sized room with one closet and one window, and the bathroom is just down the hall. We will have to ask them not to bring all their things. I assume they will be willing to make that sacrifice in order to be part of this family. They will also have to watch what they say at the dinner table. With our younger son present we don’t want open conflict. What I’m worried about is a couple of political issues. My older niece is a feminist, while my husband and I feel the tables have been turned against males nowadays. Also, my younger niece is probably more pro-government than either my older niece or my husband and me. But she will be away a good deal, traveling for her job. And we have developed some negotiating skills with our own children, so we should be able to work things out with the two of them. We will try to be firm but fair, as we always were with our older boy before he left home. If we can’t work things out right away, they can always go to their room and cool off until they’re ready to come back out and be civil. Excuse me.

The day after the patient was admitted to the hospital, the young doctor operated on her upper colon, where he felt sure the cause of her illness lay. But his medical training had not been good, the doctors who taught him were careless men, and he had been pushed through school quickly because he was clever and the country was desperate for doctors; the hospital was poorly staffed and the building itself was falling into ruin because of government mismanagement: piles of broken plaster choked the hallways. Because of all this, or for some other reason, the woman’s condition did not improve, but grew rapidly worse. The young doctor tried everything. At last he admitted that there was nothing more he could do and that she was on the point of dying. He was overwhelmed by the grief and guilt that come with the first death of a patient. He was at the same time filled with strange excitement, and felt he had joined the ranks of serious men of the world, men who hold the lives of others in their hands and are like gods. Inexplicably, then, the woman did not die. She lay peacefully in a twilight coma. As each day passed with no change, the young doctor grew more and more maddened by her immobility. He could not sleep and his eyes became bloodshot. He had trouble eating and his face became gaunt. At last he could not contain his frustration any longer. He went to her bedside and drove his fist again and again into her pinched, yellow face until she did not look human anymore. One last breath leaked from her mouth and then, battered and bruised, she died.

She knows she is right, but to say she is right is wrong, in this case. To be correct and say so is wrong, in certain cases.

She may be correct, and she may say so, in certain cases. But if she insists too much, she becomes wrong, so wrong that even her correctness becomes wrong, by association.

It is right to believe in what she thinks is right, but to say what she thinks is right is wrong, in certain cases.

She is right to act on her beliefs, in her life. But she is wrong to report her right actions, in most cases. Then even her right actions become wrong, by association.

If she praises herself, she may be correct in what she says, but her saying it is wrong, in most cases, and thus cancels it, or reverses it, so that although she was for a particular act deserving of praise, she is no longer in general deserving of praise.

Alvin and I worked together typesetting for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. We came in every Friday. This was the autumn that Reagan was elected president, and everyone at the newspaper suffered from a sense of foreboding and depression.

The old gray typesetting machines, with their scratches and scars, were set back to back in a tiny room next to the toilet. People raced in and out of the toilet all day long and the sound of flushing was always in our ears. Pinned to the corkboard walls around us as we bent over our keyboards was an ever-thickening forest of paper strips. The damp paper strips were covered with type, and when they had dried, they were taken away by the paste-up people to become columns on the newspaper page.

The work we had to do was not hard, but it required patience and care, and we were under constant pressure to work faster. I typed straight copy, and Alvin set ads. If the machines stopped rumbling for more than a few minutes, the boss would come downstairs to see what was holding us up. And so Alvin and I continued to type while we ate our lunch, and when we talked to each other, as we did from time to time, we talked surreptitiously, sticking our eyes up over the tops of the machines.

We were blue-collar workers. Every time I thought about how we were blue-collar workers, it surprised me, because we were also, with any luck, performing artists. I played the violin. As for Alvin, he was a stand-up comedian. Every Friday Alvin told me about his career and his life.

For seven months he had auditioned over and over again without success at a well-known club. At last the manager had relented and given him a spot. Every week now he came on in the dead early hours of Sunday morning for five minutes to close the show. Sometimes the audience liked him and sometimes it did not respond at all. If the manager occasionally left him onstage for ten minutes or gave him a spot earlier in the evening, at nine thirty, Alvin felt this was an important advance in his career.

Alvin could not describe his art except to say that he had no script, no routine, that he never knew just what would happen onstage, and that this lack of preparation was part of his act. From the snatches of monologue he spoke for me, however, I could see that some of his patter was about sex—he made jokes about cream and sperm—and that some of his patter was about politics, and that he also liked to do impersonations.

He usually worked without any props. In the week of Election Day, in November, he carried to the nightclub a special patriotic kerchief covered with red, white, and blue American symbols to wear over his head. Most often, though, what he took out onstage was only himself, as though his long, solemn face were a mask, or his body a marionette that he controlled with strings from above, slim, loose-jointed, floating over the floor. He had his stance, his silences, his bald head, and his clothes. He wore the same clothes onstage that he wore to work: dark formal pants and often a shirt of cheap synthetic material covered with palm trees or pine trees on a white background.

When I arrived at the office, Alvin would be typing at his machine in his stocking feet, and his long, narrow shoes would be sitting next to my machine. If Alvin was glum, neither of us said much. If he was elated, he could not help standing up from his machine and talking. And on some days I would speak to him and he would look at me blankly. He would later admit that he had been smoking hash for days on end.

Over the clicking of the machines Alvin told me that he lived apart from his wife and son. His son did not like Alvin’s friends or the food Alvin ate, and made the same excuse over and over again not to see him. He told me about his circle of friends—a group of Brooklyn vegetarians. He was planning to eat Thanksgiving dinner with these vegetarians and he was planning to spend the Christmas holiday sleeping at the YMCA. He told me about his travels—to Boston and places in New Jersey. He asked me many times to go out on a date with him. We went once to the circus.

He told me about the typesetters’ agency that never found him any work. “Don’t I seem ambitious to you?” he asked. He complained to me about the lack of order in our office, and about the poor writing in the pieces we were given to typeset. He said it was not part of his job to correct spelling and grammar. He told me with indignation that he would not do more than should be expected of him. He and I had a sense of our superiority to those in charge of us, and this was only aggravated by the fact that we were so often treated as though we had no education.

Because Alvin was good-natured and presented himself to the rest of the newspaper staff without reservation, because his whole art consisted of isolating and exposing himself as a figure of fun, he was well liked by many of them but also became a natural victim of some: the manager of the production department, for instance, kept pushing him to work faster and often asked him to do his ads over again, and talked against Alvin behind his back. Alvin responded to this goading with injured pride. But worse than the production manager was the owner of the paper, who worked most of the week upstairs in his office but on press day came down to the production department and sat on a stool alongside the others.