The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (55 page)

After she had given her talk at the conference, she was approached by a short, stout man with a preoccupied, almost angry expression who concentrated his attention on her alone, ignoring everyone around them, and asked several pertinent questions and made several concise remarks about her talk. He was modest enough not to identify himself, and when she asked him who he was, he said he had just retired as librarian of this college and would be pleased, in fact, to give her a tour of the library. Since he seemed to be a highly competent person with many facts at his disposal, she thought to ask him the question she had been asking everyone else since the day before. The librarian said that of course he knew the house—it was right across the street. And he immediately led her out to the corner and pointed. There it was, its upper story and roof showing above its brick wall, as though the librarian had taken it from his jacket pocket and set it there just to please her.

The situation was not exactly the same, of course, since the librarian had not magically brought her home but had instead produced the very house she had been looking for. But now she told the story to the critic, with whom she felt a closer companionship after walking so far with him and bringing him safely back. She thought that now he would recognize the situation, and think of their walk and the passage from the book he knew so well.

In her version, the scene read:

But he was more interested in the great editor, and the house, and the mailbox directly in front of the house, which had been put there especially for the editor’s use and from which so many of the requests for quotations had been mailed. She thought she would comment to him on the parallel at some other time, in a letter, and then perhaps he would be amused.

It was late. The sun had at last gone down, though the sky was still filled with the lingering cool light of the solstice. After he had with some difficulty opened the front door with the unfamiliar key, they said good night inside the entrance to the college and went their separate ways, he up the stairs and she down the corridor, to their musty rooms.

It was too late for her to enjoy sitting alone in the room after the long day, as she generally liked to do; she had to be up early. But then, it was not in any case the sort of room in which to enjoy silence and rest, being so meagerly appointed, with its small, frail wardrobe, whose door kept swinging open, its inconvenient lamp, its hard, flat pillows, and that persistent smell of mold. True, the bathroom, by contrast, was fitted with old marble and porcelain, and its one narrow window looked out on a handsome garden, though even it had lacked certain necessary supplies: Soon after he arrived, the day before, while she was away touring the town, he had left a panicked note on her door, though they had not yet met, inquiring about soap.

She was not disappointed by the whole experience, she decided, as her thoughts sorted themselves out. She was in bed now, with a book open in front of her, trying to read by the inadequate lamp, but each time she returned her eyes to the page, another insistent thought occurred to her and stopped her. She would have been disappointed if she had not, in the end, seen Murray’s house, or if she had not seen the library, whose alarm she nearly triggered by walking across a perfectly open space at the top of an ancient staircase. She would have been disappointed in this building if the conference room had not been so gracious, with its high ceiling and dark oak beams, and she would perhaps have been disappointed in the conference itself if one of the speakers had not shown such interesting examples of the great writer’s rough drafts. She was disappointed that some of the other participants had not stayed on afterward for at least a little while, that they had, in fact, seemed to be in such a hurry to leave.

But then there was the long walk, and her changing impressions of the town, which had been so crowded, hot, and oppressive at midday the day before and was this evening so serene, with its empty streets, the hollow spaces of its courtyards and back gardens, the darkness, against the sky, of its church steeples and clock towers, with its short alleys and narrow lanes, and its soft stones that, in her memory, had reflected the sky in tints of coral, growing just a few shades dimmer, as the hours passed, in the cool night.

The peace and emptiness of the town in the evening had seemed fragile and temporary; the next day it would be submerged once again in the hot crowd. And because she had made so many circuits out of the town, by bus and then on foot, it seemed to her, too, that the weight of her experience of the town was here, at this distance from it, as though the town were always to be experienced from a distance exactly the length of those two streets which, arising here, and diverging, made their way to it.

At last her thoughts came at longer intervals and she read more than she stopped to think. She then read later than she meant to, gradually forgetting the lamp, the room, and the conference, though the walk remained, as a presence, somewhere behind or beneath her reading, until she relaxed completely and slept, no longer bothered by the hard pillow.

The next morning, when she came out with her suitcase, he was there, too, in a white summer suit slightly too ample for his small frame, standing by the porter’s lodge. He and she had ordered taxis for the same hour, the day before, and the two drivers were standing by the curb chatting in the early sunlight. He was, in fact, going to the same part of town, though not to the train station, but neither of them had suggested sharing a taxi. She waited while he talked on, for a few minutes, to the porter, and then they took leave of each other again before setting off in their separate taxis. As he stepped neatly into his, his last words to her, solemn and rather portentous, she thought, were ones that nobody, as it happened, had ever spoken to her before, but that she judged were likely to be correct, since he lived on the other side of the globe: “We will probably not meet again.” He then made a graceful gesture of the hand that she later could not remember exactly, and whose meaning she could not quite grasp, though it seemed to combine a farewell with a concession to some sort of inevitability, and his cab moved slowly down the street, followed, soon, by her own.

I have been hearing what my mother says for over forty years and I have been hearing what my husband says for only about five years, and I have often thought she was right and he was not right, but now more often I think he is right, especially on a day like today when I have just had a long conversation on the phone with my mother about my brother and my father and then a shorter conversation on the phone with my husband about the conversation I had with my mother.

My mother was worried because she hurt my brother’s feelings when he told her over the phone that he wanted to take some of his vacation time to come help them since my mother had just gotten out of the hospital. She said, though she was not telling the truth, that he shouldn’t come because she couldn’t really have anyone in the house since she would feel she had to prepare meals, for instance, though having difficulty enough with her crutches. He argued against that, saying “That wouldn’t be the
point
!” and now he doesn’t answer his phone. She’s afraid something has happened to him and I tell her I don’t believe that. He has probably taken the vacation time he had set aside for them and gone away for a few days by himself. She forgets he is a man of nearly fifty, though I’m sorry they had to hurt his feelings like that. A short time after she hangs up I call my husband and repeat all this to him.

My mother hurt my brother’s feelings while protecting certain particular feelings of my father’s by claiming certain other feelings of her own, and while it was hard for me to deny my father’s particular feelings, which are well known to me, it was also hard for me not to think there was not a way to do things differently so that my brother’s offer of help would not be declined and he would not be hurt.

She hurt my brother’s feelings as she was protecting my father from certain feelings of disturbance anticipated by him if my brother were to come, by claiming to my brother certain feelings of disturbance of her own, slightly different. Now my brother, by not answering his phone, has caused new feelings of disturbance in my mother and father both, feelings that are the same or close to the same in them but different from the feelings of disturbance anticipated by my father and those falsely claimed by my mother to my brother. Now in her disturbance my mother has called to tell me of her and my father’s feelings of disturbance over my brother, and in doing this she has caused in me feelings of disturbance also, though fainter than and different from the feelings experienced now by her and my father and those anticipated by my father and falsely claimed by my mother.

When I describe this conversation to my husband, I cause in him feelings of disturbance also, stronger than mine and different in kind from those in my mother, in my father, and respectively claimed and anticipated by them. My husband is disturbed by my mother’s refusing my brother’s help and thus causing disturbance in him, and by her telling me of her disturbance and thus causing disturbance in me greater, he says, than I realize, but also more generally by the disturbance caused more generally not only in my brother by her but also in me by her greater than I realize, and more often than I realize, and when he points this out, it causes in me yet another disturbance different in kind and in degree from that caused in me by what my mother has told me, for this disturbance is not only for myself and my brother, and not only for my father in his anticipated and his present disturbance, but also and most of all for my mother herself, who has now, and has generally, caused so much disturbance, as my husband rightly says, but is herself disturbed by only a small part of it.

No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.

Cora, who misses them all

Nellie Bingo: our darling, but she disappeared into a sanatorium

Anna the Grump

Virginia York: not a whirlwind

Birdell Moore: old-fashioned, with warm Southern sweetness

Lillian Savage: not insulted by drunks

Gertrude Hockaday: pleasant, but a perfidious hypochondriac

Ann Carberry: feeble, old, and deaf

The “Brava”: came irregularly, not to be considered a Negro

High school girl: worse than nothing

Mrs. Langley: English, and exactly what we need

Our Splendid Marion

Minnie Treadway: briefly a possibility

Anna Slocum: wished it had all been a bad dream

Shirley: like a member of the family

Joan Brown: philosopher of the condition

Before she is Mrs. D, she lives in the city with her little daughter and her maid, Cora. The daughter is four years old. She goes to nursery school and when at home is taken care of mainly by Cora. This leaves Mrs. D free to write and also to go out in the evenings.

Mrs. D writes short stories, some good, some less good, which she places mostly in ladies’ magazines. She likes to speak of “selling” a story, and she counts on earning a little money from it to supplement her salary. She will publish a story in one of the best magazines just before she is married. The story is called “Real Romance.”

When Mrs. D’s little daughter is six, Mrs. D marries again, and becomes Mrs. D. The ceremony takes place in the country at a friend’s house. It is a small wedding and the reception is out on the lawn under the trees. The season is early fall, but the women are still wearing summer dresses. The little daughter’s blond hair is now cut short. Cora is not at the wedding. She no longer works for Mrs. D, but they write letters to each other.

Mr. and Mrs. D set up house in a college town, where Mr. D has a job teaching. Mr. D gives his stepdaughter breakfast every morning and walks her to school. Mrs. D lingers in bed before beginning her day at the typewriter.