by Lydia Davis
Mildred and the Oboe
Last night Mildred, my neighbor on the floor below, masturbated with an oboe. The oboe wheezed and squealed in her vagina. Mildred groaned. Later, when I thought she was finished, she started screaming. I lay in bed with a book about India. I could feel her pleasure pass up through the floorboards into my room. Of course there might have been another explanation for what I heard. Perhaps it was not the oboe but the player of the oboe who was penetrating Mildred. Or perhaps Mildred was striking her small nervous dog with something slim and musical, like an oboe.
Mildred who screams lives below me. Three young women from Connecticut live above me. Then there is a lady pianist with two daughters on the parlor floor and some lesbians in the basement. I am a sober person, a mother, and I like to go to bed early—but how can I lead a regular life in this building? It is a circus of vaginas leaping and prancing: thirteen vaginas and only one penis, my little son.
The Mouse
First a poet writes a story about a mouse, in moonlight in the snow, how the mouse tries to hide in his shadow, how the mouse climbs up his sleeve and he shakes it down into the snow before he knows what it is that is clinging to his sleeve. His cat is nearby and her shadow is on the snow, and she is after the mouse. A woman is then reading this story in the bath. Half her hair is dry and half of it is floating in the bathwater. She likes the story.
That night she can’t sleep and goes into the kitchen to read another book by the same poet. She sits on a stool by the counter. It is late and the night is quiet, though now and then at some distance a train passes and hoots before a crossing. To her surprise, though she knows it lives there, a mouse comes out of a burner from under a pot and sniffs the air. Its feet are like little thorns, its ears are unexpectedly large, one eye is shut and the other open. It nibbles something off the tray of the burner. She moves and it flashes back in, she is still and in a moment it comes out again, and when she moves again it flashes back into the stove like a snapped elastic. At four in the morning, though she is still wide awake, reading and sometimes watching the mouse, the woman closes her book and goes back to bed.
In the morning a man sits in the kitchen on a stool, the same stool, by the counter, and cradles their young cat in his arms, holding her neck in his broad pink hands and rubbing the crown of her head with his thumbs, and behind him the woman stands leaning against his back, her breasts flattened against his shoulder blades, her hands closed over his chest, and they have laid out crusts of bread on the counter for the mouse to smell and are waiting for the mouse to come out, blindly, and for the young cat to get it.
They stay this way wrapped in nearly complete silence, and they are nearly motionless, only the man’s gentle thumbs move over the cat’s skull and the woman sometimes lays her cheek down against the man’s fragrant soft hair and then lifts it again and the cat’s eyes are shifting quickly from point to point. A motor starts up in the kitchen, there is the sudden flare of the gas water heater, the swift passage of some cars on the highway below, and then a single voice in the road. But the mouse knows the company that is there and won’t come out. The cat is too hungry to keep still and reaches forth one paw and then another and frees herself from the man’s light hold and climbs up on the counter to eat the bread herself.
Often, whenever she can get into the house or is let into the house, the cat crouches sleepily on the counter by the stove, her eyes pointed at the burner where the mouse is likely to appear, but she is not more vigilant than that, half asleep, as though she likes just to place herself in this situation, hunting the mouse but perfectly motionless. Really she is keeping the mouse company, the mouse vigilant or sleeping inside the stove, the cat nearby outside. The mouse has had babies, in the stove, and the cat, too, is carrying kittens in her body, and her nipples are beginning to stand out in the downy fur of her belly.
The woman often looks at the cat and sometimes remembers another story.
The woman and her husband lived in the country in a large empty house. The rooms in this house were so large that the furniture sank into the empty spaces. There were no rugs and the curtains were thin, the windowpanes cold in the winter, and the daylight and the electric lights at night were cold and white, and lit the bare floor and the bare walls but did not change the darkness of the rooms.
On two sides of the house, beyond the yard, were stands of trees. One woods was deep and thick and climbed away up over a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a marshy pond in the trees where the water had been caught by the railroad embankment. The tracks and ties were gone from the embankment, and the mound of it was overgrown with saplings. The other stand of trees was thin and bordered a meadow, and deer crossed through to sleep in the meadow. In the winter the woman could see their tracks in the snow and follow where they leaped in from the road. When the weather grew cold the mice would start coming into the house from the woods and the meadow, and run through the walls and fight and squeak behind the baseboards. The woman and her husband were not troubled by the mice, except for the little black droppings everywhere, but they had heard that mice would sometimes chew through the wires in the walls and start fires, so they decided to try and get rid of them.
The woman bought some traps at the hardware store, made of bright brassy coils of metal and new raw wood printed with red letters. The man at the hardware store showed her how to set them. It was easy to get hurt because the springs were very strong and tight. The woman had to be the one to set them because she was always the one who did things like that. In the evening before they went to bed, she set one carefully, afraid of snapping her fingers, and put it down in a place where she and he would not be likely to walk on it when they came into the kitchen in the morning forgetting it was there.
They went to bed and the woman stayed awake reading. She would read until the man woke up enough to complain about the light. He was often angry about something and when she read at night it was the light. Later in the night she was still awake and heard the sound like a gunshot of the trap springing but did not go downstairs because the house was cold.
In the morning she went into the kitchen and saw that the trap had flipped over and there was a mouse in it and blood smeared around on the pink linoleum. She thought the mouse was dead, but when she moved the trap with her foot she saw that it was not. It started flipping around on the linoleum with the trap closed on its head. Her husband came in then and neither of them knew what to do about this half-dead mouse. They thought that the best thing would be to kill it with a hammer or some other heavy thing but if one of them was going to do it, it would be her and she did not have the stomach for it. Bending over the mouse she felt sick and agitated with the fear of something dead or nearly dead or mutilated. Both of them were excited and kept staring at it and turning away from it and walking around the room. The day was cloudy with more snow coming and the light in the kitchen was white and cast no shadows.
Finally the woman decided just to throw it outside, get it out of there, and it would die in the cold. She took a dustpan and pushed it under the trap and the mouse and walked quickly with it out the wooden door to the porch and through the porch and out the storm door and down the steps, afraid all the time that it would jump again and slip off the dustpan. She walked down the pitted concrete walk and across the driveway to the edge of the woods and threw the trap and the mouse out onto the frozen crust of snow. She tried to believe the mouse didn’t feel much pain and was in shock anyway; certainly a mouse did not feel exactly the way a person would lying with his head closed in a trap, bleeding and freezing to death out there on the white crust of snow. She could not be sure. Then she wondered if there was any animal that might come along and be willing to eat a mouse that was already dead but preserved by the frost.
They did not look for the trap later. In midwinter the man left and the woman lived on in the house alone. Then she moved to the city and the house was rented to a schoolteacher and his wife and a year later sold to a lawyer from the city. T
he last time the woman walked through it the rooms were still empty and dark, and the furniture set against the bare walls, though it was different furniture, had the same look of defeat under the weight of that emptiness.
The Letter
Her lover lies next to her and since she has brought it up he asks her when it ended. She tells him it ended about a year ago and then she can’t say any more. He waits and then asks how it ended, and she tells him it ended stormily. He says carefully that he wants to know about it, and everything about her life, but that he doesn’t want her to talk about it if she doesn’t want to. She turns her face a little away from him so that the lamplight is shining on her closed eyes. She thought she wanted to tell him, but now she can’t and she feels tears under her eyelids. She is surprised because this is the second time today that she has cried and she hasn’t cried for weeks.
She can’t say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn’t been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman. Now and then she has heard news. Someone gets a letter from him, and the news is that he is nearly out of his financial troubles and is thinking of starting a magazine. Before that, someone else has news that he lives downtown with this woman he later marries. They have no telephone, because they owe the telephone company so much money. The telephone company, in those days, calls her from time to time and asks her politely where he is. A friend tells her he works nights at the docks packing sea urchins and comes home at four in the morning. Then this same friend tells her how he has offered something to a lonely woman in exchange for a large amount of money that makes the woman feel very insulted and unhappy.
Before that, when he still worked nearby, she would drive over to see him and argue with him at the gas station, where he read Faulkner in the office under the fluorescent lights, and he would look up with his eyes full of wariness when he saw her come in. They would argue between customers, and when he was filling a car she would think what she could say next. Later, after she stopped going there, she would walk through the town looking for his car. Once, in the rain, a van turned a corner suddenly at her and she stumbled over her boots into a ditch and then she saw herself clearly: a woman in early middle age wearing rubber boots walking in the dark looking for a white car and now falling into a ditch, prepared to go on walking and to be satisfied with the sight of the man’s car in a parking lot even if the man was somewhere else and with another woman. That night she walked around and around the town for a long time, checking the same places over and over again, thinking that during the fifteen minutes it had taken her to walk from one end of the town to the other he might have driven up to the spot she had left fifteen minutes before, but she did not find the car.
The car is an old white Volvo; it has a beautiful soft shape. She sees other old Volvos nearly every day, and some are tan or cream-colored—close to the color of his—and some are his color, white, but undented and unrusted. The license plates never have a K in them, and the drivers, always in silhouette, are either women or men with glasses or men with heads that are smaller than his.
That spring she was translating a book because it was the only thing she could do. Every time she stopped typing and picked up the dictionary his face floated up between her and the page and the pain settled into her again, and every time she put the dictionary down and went on typing his face and the pain went away. She did a lot of hard work on the translation just to keep the pain away.
Before that, in late March, in a crowded bar, he told her what she was expecting to hear and what she dreaded hearing. Right away she lost her appetite, but he ate very well and ate her dinner too. He did not have the money to pay for the dinner and so she paid. After dinner he said, Maybe in ten years. She said, Maybe in five, but he didn’t answer that.
She stops by the post office to pick up a check. She is already late for where she is going, but she needs the money. She sees his handwriting on an envelope in her mailbox. Though it is very familiar to her, or because it is so familiar to her, she doesn’t know right away whose handwriting it is. When she realizes whose it is, she swears aloud over and over again walking back to the car. While she is swearing she is also thinking, and she decides that this envelope will have a check in it for some of the money he owes her. He owes her over $300. If he has been embarrassed about the debt, this would explain the year of silence, and if he now has some money to send her, this would explain the fact that now he is breaking the silence. She gets into the car, puts the key in the ignition, and opens the envelope. There is no check in it, and it is not a letter but a poem in French, carefully copied out in his handwriting. The poem ends compagnon de silence. Then his name. She doesn’t read all of it because she is late meeting some people she doesn’t know very well.
She goes on swearing at him until she gets to the highway. She is angry because he has sent her a letter, and because the letter has immediately made her happy, and then her happiness has brought back the pain. And she is angry because nothing can ever make up for the pain. Though of course it is hard to call it a letter, since it is nothing but a poem, the poem is in French, and the poem was composed by someone else. She is also angry because of the kind of poem it is. And she is also angry because even though later she will try to think of ways to answer this, she has seen right away that there is no possible answer to it. She begins to feel dizzy and sick. She drives slowly in the right-hand lane and pinches the skin of her neck hard until the faintness goes away.
All that day she is with other people and she can’t look at the letter again. In the evening, when she is alone, she works on a translation, a difficult prose poem. Her lover calls and she tells him how difficult the translation is but not about the letter. After she is finished working, she cleans the house very carefully. Then she takes the letter out of her purse and goes to bed to see what she can make of it now.
She examines first the postmark. The date and the time of day and the city name are very clear. Then she examines her name above the address. He might have hesitated writing her last name, because there is a small ink blot in a curve of one letter. He has addressed it a little wrong and this is not her zip code. She looks at his name, or rather his first initial, the G. very well formed, and his last name next to it. Then his address, and she wonders why he put a return address on the letter. Does he want an answer to this? It is more likely that he is not sure she is still here and if she is not still here he wants his letter to come back to him so that he will know. His zip code is different from the zip code of the postmark. He must have mailed this somewhere out of his neighborhood. Did he also write it away from home? Where?
She opens the envelope and unfolds the paper, which is clean and fresh. Now she notices more exactly what is on this page. The date, May 10, is in the upper-right-hand corner in a smaller, thicker, more cramped hand than the other writing on the page, as though he wrote it at a different time, either before or after the rest. He writes it first, then stops and thinks, his lips tight shut, or looks for the book he will take the poem from—though that is less likely, because he would have it ready in front of him when he sat down to write. Or he thinks after he is done that he will date it. He reads it over, then dates it. Now she notices that he has put her name at the top, with a comma after it, in line with his name below the poem. The date, her name, comma, then the poem, then his name, period. So the poem is the letter.
Having seen all this, she reads the poem more carefully, several times. There is a word she can’t decipher. It comes at the end of a line so she looks at the rhyme scheme and the word it should rhyme with is pures, pure (pure thoughts), so that the word she can’t read is probably obscures, dark (dark flowers). Then she can’t read another two words at the beginning of the last line of the octet. She looks at the way he has formed other capital letters and sees that this capital must be L, and the words must be La lune, the moon, the moon that is generous or kind aux insensés—to craz
ed people.
What she had seen first and the only words she could remember as she drove north on the highway were compagnon de silence, companion of silence, and some line about holding hands, another about green meadows, prairies in French, the moon, and dying on the moss. She hadn’t seen what she sees this time, that although they have died, or these two in the poem have died, they then meet again, nous nous retrouvions, we found each other again, up above, in something immense, somewhere, which must be heaven. They have found each other crying. And so the poem ends, more or less, we found each other crying, dear companion of silence. She examines the word retrouvions slowly, to make sure of the handwriting, that the letters really spell out finding each other again. She hangs on these letters with such concentration that for a moment she can feel everything in her, everything in the room too, and in her life up to now, gather behind her eyes as though it all depends on a line of ink slanted the right way and another line as rounded as she hopes it is. If there can be no doubt about retrouvions, and there seems to be no doubt, then she can believe that he is still thinking, eight hundred miles from here, that it will be possible ten years from now, or five years, or, since a year has already passed, nine years or four years from now.
But she worries about the dying part of it: it could mean he does not really expect to see her again, since they are dead, after all; or that the time will be so long it will be a lifetime. Or it could be that this poem was the closest thing he could find to a poem that said something about what he was thinking about companions, silence, crying, and the end of things, and is not exactly what he was thinking; or he happened on the poem as he was reading through a book of French poems, was reminded of her for a moment, was moved to send it, and sent it quickly with no clear intention.
