The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (8 page)

Returning across the fields to my house, I looked at the red landscape and felt that it was deeply familiar to me, as though it had been mine long before I found it. The idea of leaving it seemed to make no sense at all. Within a few days my rage and disappointment had ebbed away, and now, as in the beginning, each thing I looked at seemed only a shell or a husk that would fall away and reveal a perfect fruit. Though I was tired, my mind raced forward: I cleared a patch of land by the house and put up a stable there; I led black-and-white cows into it, and nervous hens ran underfoot; I planted a line of cypress trees on the edge of my property, and it hid my neighbor’s house; I pulled down the ruined walls and with the same stones raised my own manor, and when it was finished, I looked upon a spectacle that would excite the envy of everyone who saw it. My dream would be realized as it was first meant to be.

I might have been delirious. It was not likely that things would end that way. But as I stumbled over the field, sinking deep into a furrow with one step and rising to a crest with the next, I was too happy to suspect that at any moment my frustrations and disappointments, like a cloud of locusts, would darken the sky and descend on me again. The evening was serene, the light smooth and soft, the earth paralyzed, and I, far below, the only moving creature.

He was so quiet, so small and thin, that he was hardly there. The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they did not know. Or where he came from, or if he would leave.

They could not guess where he slept at night, though they searched for a depression on the couch or a disorder among the towels. He left no smell behind him.

He did not bleed, he did not cry, he did not sweat. He was dry. Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun.

They hardly saw him: if they entered a room, he was gone like a shadow, sliding around the door frame, slipping over the sill. A breath was all they ever heard from him, and even then they could not be sure it hadn’t been a small breeze passing over the gravel outside.

He could not pay them. He left money every week, but by the time they entered the room in their slow, noisy way the money was just a green and silver mist on their grandmother’s platter, and by the time they reached out for it, it was no longer there.

But he hardly cost them a penny. They could not even tell if he ate, because he took so little that it was as nothing to them, who were big eaters. He came out from somewhere at night and crept around the kitchen with a sharp razor in his white, fine-boned hand, shaving off slivers of meat, of nuts, of bread, until his plate, paper-thin, felt heavy to him. He filled his cup with milk, but the cup was so small that it held no more than an ounce or two.

He ate without a sound, and cleanly, he let no drop fall from his mouth. Where he wiped his lips on the napkin there was no mark. There was no stain on his plate, there was no crumb on his mat, there was no trace of milk in his cup.

He might have stayed on for years, if one winter had not been too severe for him. But he could not bear the cold, and began to dissipate. For a long time they were not sure if he was still in the house. There was no real way of knowing. But in the first days of spring they cleaned the guest room where, quite rightly, he had slept, and where he was by now no more than a sort of vapor. They shook him out of the mattress, brushed him over the floor, wiped him off the windowpane, and never knew what they had done.

The only one awake, the house quiet, the streets darkened, the cold pressing down through his covers, he is unwilling to disturb his hosts and thus, first, his fetal curl, his search for a warm hollow in the mattress …

Then his stealthy excursion over the floor for a chair to stand on and his unsteady reach for the curtains, which he lays over the other coverings on his bed …

His satisfaction in the new weight pressing down upon him, then his peaceful sleep …

On another occasion this wakeful visitor, cold again and finding no curtain in his room, steals out and takes up the hall carpet for the same purpose, bending and straightening in the dim hallway …

How its heaviness is a heavy hand on him and the dust choking his nostrils is nothing to how that carpet stifles his uneasiness …

Everyone has a mother somewhere. There is a mother at dinner with us. She is a small woman with eyeglass lenses so thick they seem black when she turns her head away. Then, the mother of the hostess telephones as we are eating. This causes the hostess to be away from the table longer than one would expect. This mother may possibly be in New York. The mother of a guest is mentioned in conversation: this mother is in Oregon, a state few of us know anything about, though it has happened before that a relative lived there. A choreographer is referred to afterwards, in the car. He is spending the night in town, on his way, in fact, to see his mother, again in another state.

Mothers, when they are guests at dinner, eat well, like children, but seem absent. It is often the case that they cannot follow what we are doing or saying. It is often the case, also, that they enter the conversation only when it turns on our youth; or they accommodate where accommodation is not wanted; smile and are misunderstood. And yet mothers are always seen, always talked to, even if only on holidays. They have suffered for our sakes, and most often in a place where we could not see them.

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

She and her husband are so nervous that throughout their conversation they keep going into the bathroom, closing the door, and using the toilet. Then they come out and light a cigarette. He goes in and urinates and leaves the toilet seat up and she goes in and lowers it and urinates. Toward the end of the afternoon, they stop talking about the divorce and start drinking. He drinks whiskey and she drinks beer. When it is time for her to leave to catch her train he has drunk a lot and goes into the bathroom one last time to urinate and doesn’t bother to close the door.

As they are getting ready to go out, she begins to tell him the story of how she met her lover. While she is talking, he discovers that he has lost one of his expensive gloves and he is immediately upset and distracted. He leaves her to look for his glove downstairs. Her story is half finished and he does not find his glove. He is less interested in her story when he comes back into the room without having found his glove. Later when they are walking together on the street he tells her happily how he has bought his girlfriend shoes for eighty dollars because he loves her so much.

When she is alone again, she is so preoccupied by what has taken place during the visit to her husband that she walks through the streets very quickly and bumps into several people in the subway and the train station. She has not even seen them but has come down on them like some natural element so suddenly that they did not have time to avoid her and she was surprised they were there at all. Some of these people look after her and say “Christ!”

In her parents’ kitchen later she tries to explain something difficult about the divorce to her father and is angry when he doesn’t understand, and then finds at the end of the explanation that she is eating an orange, though she can’t remember peeling it or even having decided to eat it.

On the white painted bolt of a door that is never opened, a thick line of tiny black grains—the dung of cockroaches.

They nest in the coffee filters, in the woven wicker shelves, and in the crack at the top of a door, where by flashlight you see the forest of moving legs.

Boats were scattered over the water near Dover Harbor at odd angles, like the cockroaches surprised in the kitchen at night before they move.

The youngest are so bright, so spirited, so willing.

He sees the hand coming down and runs the other way. There is too far to go, or he is not fast enough. At the same time we admire such a will to live.

I am alert to small moving things, and spin around toward a floating dust mote. I am alert to darker spots against a lighter background, but these are only the roses on my pillowcase.

•

A new autumn stillness, in the evening. The windows of the neighborhood are shut. A chill sifts into the room from the panes of glass. Behind a cupboard door, they squat inside a long box eating spaghetti.

The stillness of death. When the small creature does not move away from the lowering hand.

We feel respect for such nimble rascals, such quick movers, such clever thieves.

From inside a white paper bag comes the sound of a creature scratching—one creature, I think. But when I empty the bag, a crowd of them scatter from the heel of rye bread, like rye seeds across the counter, like raisins.

Fat, half grown, with a glossy dark back, he stops short in his headlong rush and tries a few other moves almost simultaneously, a bumper car jolting in place on the white drainboard.

Here in the crack at the top of the door, moving on their legs, they are in such numbers conscious of us behind our flashlight beam.

It is in his moment of hesitation that you sense him as an intelligent creature. Between his pause and his change of direction, you are sure, there is a quick thought.

They eat, but leave no mark of eating, we think. Yet here in the leaf edge, little crescent shapes—their gradual bites.

•

He is like a thickened shadow. See how the shadow at the crack of a window thickens, comes out from the wall, and moves off!

In the cardboard trap, five or six of them are stuck—frozen at odd angles, alive with an uncanny stillness, in this box like a child’s miniature theater.

How kindly I feel toward another species of insect in the house! Its gauzy wings! Its confusion! Its blundering walk down the lampshade! It doesn’t think to run away!

At the end of the meal, the cheeses were brought. All white except the Roquefort, they lay scattered over the board at odd angles, like cows grazing or ships at sea.

After a week, I take a forgotten piece of bread from the oven where they have visited—now it is dry, a bit of brown lace.

The white autumn light in the afternoon. They sleep behind a child’s drawings on the kitchen wall. I tap each piece of paper and they burst out from the edges of pictures that are already filled with shooting stars, missiles, machine guns, land mines …

Many years ago, my husband and I were living in Paris and translating art books. Whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We went mostly to old American movies, which were very popular there, and we ate out a lot of the time because restaurant meals were cheap then and neither of us knew how to cook very well.

One night, though, I cooked some fillets of fish for dinner. These fillets were not supposed to contain bones, and yet there must have been a small bone in one of them because my husband swallowed it and it got caught in his throat. This had never happened to either of us before, though we had always worried about it. I gave him bread to eat, and he drank many glasses of water, but the bone was really stuck, and didn’t move.

After several hours in which the pain intensified and my husband and I grew more and more uneasy, we left the apartment and walked out into the dark streets of Paris to look for help. We were first directed to the ground-floor apartment of a nurse who lived not far away, and she then directed us to a hospital. We walked on some way and found the hospital in the rue de Vaugirard. It was old and quite dark, as though it didn’t do much business anymore.

Inside, I waited on a folding chair in a wide hallway near the front entrance while my husband sat behind a closed door nearby in the company of several nurses who wanted to help him but could not do more than spray his throat and then stand back and laugh, and he would laugh too, as best he could. I didn’t know what they were all laughing about.

Finally a young doctor came and took my husband and me down several long, deserted corridors and around two sides of the dark hospital grounds to an empty wing containing another examining room in which he kept his special instruments. Each instrument had a different angle of curvature but they all ended in some sort of a hook. Under a single pool of light, in the darkened room, he inserted one instrument after another down my husband’s throat, working with fierce interest and enthusiasm. Every time he inserted another instrument my husband gagged and waved his hands in the air.

At last the doctor drew out the little fishbone and showed it around proudly. The three of us smiled and congratulated one another.

The doctor took us back down the empty corridors and out under the vaulted entryway that had been built to accommodate horse-drawn carriages. We stood there and talked a little, looking around at the empty streets of the neighborhood, and then we shook hands and my husband and I walked home.

More than ten years have passed since then, and my husband and I have gone our separate ways, but every now and then, when we are together, we remember that young doctor. “A great Jewish doctor,” says my husband, who is also Jewish.

He said there were things about me that he hadn’t liked from the very beginning. He didn’t say this unkindly. He’s not an unkind person, at least not intentionally. He said it because I was trying to get him to explain why he changed his mind about me so suddenly.