The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

by Lydia Davis

  It was so dark by then that only the whiteness of her dress would have been clearly visible to him at first. He remained silent—for, scrupulously polite, he was never the first to speak to a person from the front house—and quickly turned his eyes away from her. But not quickly enough, for she answered his look and spoke.

  She probably said something casual about how soft the evening was. If she hadn’t spoken, his fury might not have been unleashed by the gentle sound of her voice. But in that instant he must have realized that for him the evening could never be as soft as it was for her. Or else something in her tone—something too kind, something just condescending enough to make him see that he was doomed to remain where he was—pushed him out of control. He straightened like a shot, as though something in him had snapped, and in one motion drove his knife into her throat.

  I saw it all from above. It happened very quickly and quietly. I did not do anything. For a while I did not even realize what I had seen: life is so uneventful back here that I have almost lost the ability to react. But there was also something arresting in the sight of it: he was a strong and well-made man, an experienced hunter, and she was as slight and graceful as a doe. His gesture was a classically beautiful one; and she slumped down onto the cobblestones as quietly as a mist melting away from the surface of a pond. Even when I was able to think, I did not do anything.

  As I watched; several people came to the back door of the house in front and the front door of our own house and stopped short with their garbage pails when they saw her lying there and him standing motionless above her. His pail stood empty at his feet, scraped clean, the handle of her pail was still clenched in her hand, and her garbage had spilled over the stones beside her, which was, strangely, almost as shocking to us as the murder itself. More and more tenants gathered and watched from the doorways. Their lips were moving, but I could not hear them over the noise of the televisions on all sides of me.

  I think the reason no one did anything right away was that the murder had taken place in a sort of no-man’s-land. If it had happened in our house or in theirs, action would have been taken—slowly in our house, briskly in theirs. But, as it was, people were in doubt: those from the house in front hesitated to lower themselves so far as to get involved in this, and those from our house hesitated to presume so far. In the end it was the concierge who dealt with it. The body was removed by the coroner and M. Martin left with the police. After the crowd had dispersed, the concierge swept up the spilled garbage, washed down the cobblestones, and returned each pail to the apartment where it belonged.

  For a day or two, the people of both houses were visibly shaken. Talk was heard in the halls: in our house, voices rose like wind in the trees before a storm; in theirs, rich confident syllables rapped out like machine-gun fire. Encounters between the tenants of the two houses were more violent: people from our house jerked away from the others, if we met them in the street, and something in our faces cut short their conversations when we came within earshot.

  But then the halls grew quiet again, and for a while it seemed as though little had changed. Perhaps this incident had been so far beyond our understanding that it could not affect us, I thought. The only difference seemed to be a certain blank look on the faces of the people in my building, as though they had gone into shock. But gradually I began to realize that the incident had left a deeper impression. Mistrust filled the air, and uneasiness. The people of the house in front were afraid of us here behind, now, and there was no communication between us at all. By killing the woman from the house in front, M. Martin had killed something more: we lost the last traces of our self-respect before the people from the house in front, because we all assumed responsibility for the crime. Now there was no point in pretending any longer. Some, it is true, were unaffected and continued to wear the rags of their dignity proudly. But most of the people in the house behind changed.

  A night nurse lived across the landing from me. Every morning when she came home from work, I would wake to hear her heavy iron key ring clatter against the wooden door of her apartment, her keys rattle in the keyholes. Late in the afternoon she would come out again and shuffle around the landing on little cloth pads, dusting the banisters. Now she sat behind her door listening to the radio and coughing gently. The older Lamartine sister, who used to keep her door open a crack and listen to conversations going on in the hallway—occasionally becoming so excited that she stuck her sharp nose in the crack and threw out a comment or two—was now no longer seen at all except on Sundays, when she went out to early-morning Mass with a blue veil thrown over her head. My neighbor on the second floor, Mme Bac, left her laundry out for days, in all weathers, until the sour smell of it rose to me where I sat. Many tenants no longer cleaned doormats. People were ashamed of their clothes, and wore raincoats when they went out. A musty odor filled the hallways: delivery boys and insurance salesmen groped their way up and down the stairs looking uncomfortable. Worst of all, everyone became surly and mean: we stopped speaking to one another, told tales to outsiders, and left mud on each other’s landings.

  Curiously enough, many pairs of houses in the city suffer from bad relations like ours: there is usually an uneasy truce between the two houses until some incident explodes the situation and it begins deteriorating. The people in the front houses become locked in their cold dignity and the people in the back houses lose confidence, their faces gray with shame.

  Recently I caught myself on the point of throwing an apple core down into the courtyard, and I realized how much I had already fallen under the influence of the house behind. My windowpanes are dim and fine curlicues of dust line the edges of the baseboards. If I don’t leave now, I will soon be incapable of making the effort. I must lease an apartment in another section of the city and pack up my things.

  I know that when I go to say goodbye to my neighbors, with whom I once got along quite well, some will not open their doors and others will look at me as though they do not know me. But there will be a few who manage to summon up enough of their old spirit of defiance and aggressive pride to shake my hand and wish me luck.

  The hopeless look in their eyes will make me feel ashamed of leaving. But there is no way I can help them. In any case, I suspect that after some years things will return to normal. Habit will cause the people here behind to resume their shabby tidiness, their caustic morning gossip against the people from the house in front, their thrift in small purchases, their decency where no risk is involved—and as the people in both houses move away and are replaced by strangers, the whole affair will slowly be absorbed and forgotten. The only victims, in the end, will be M. Martin’s wife, M. Martin himself, and the gentle woman M. Martin killed.

  The Outing

  An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.

  A Position at the University

  I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

 
Examples of Confusion

  1

  On my way home, late at night, I look in at a coffee shop through its plate-glass front. It is all orange, with many signs about, the countertops and stools bare because the shop is closed, and far back, in the mirror that lines the back wall, back the depth of the shop and the depth of the reflected shop, in the darkness of that mirror, which is or is not the darkness of the night behind me, of the street I’m walking in, where the darkened Borough Hall building with its cupola stands at my back, though invisible in the mirror, I see my white jacket fluttering past disembodied, moving quickly since it is late. I think how remote I am, if that is me. Then think how remote, at least, that fluttering white thing is, for being me.

  2

  I sit on the floor of the bathroom adjoining my hotel room. It is nearly dawn and I have had too much to drink, so that certain simple things surprise me deeply. Or they are not simple. The hotel is very quiet. I look at my bare feet on the tiles in front of me and think: Those are her feet. I stand up and look in the mirror and think: There she is. She’s looking at you.

  Then I understand and say to myself: You have to say she if it’s outside you. If your foot is over there, it’s there away from you, it’s her foot. In the mirror, you see something like your face. It’s her face.

  3

  I am filled that day with vile or evil feelings—ill will toward one I think I should love, ill will toward myself, and discouragement over the work I think I should be doing. I look out the window of my borrowed house, out the narrow window of the smallest room. Suddenly there it is, my own spirit: an old white dog with bowed legs and swaying head staring around the corner of the porch with one mad, cataract-filled eye.

  4

  In the brief power outage, I feel my own electricity has been cut off and I will not be able to think. I fear that the power outage may have erased not only the work I have done but also a part of my own memory.

  5

  Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.

  6

  I am cleaning the kitchen floor. I am afraid of making a certain phone call. Now it is nine o’clock and I am done cleaning the floor. If I hang up this dustpan, if I put away this bucket, then there will be nothing left between me and the phone call, just as in W.’s dream he was not afraid of his execution until they came to shave him, when there was nothing left between him and his execution.

  I began hesitating at nine o’clock. I think it must be nearly nine thirty. But when I look at the clock, I see that only five minutes have gone by: the length of time I feel passing is really only the immensity of my hesitation.

  7

  I am reading a sentence by a certain poet as I eat my carrot. Then, although I know I have read it, although I know my eyes have passed along it and I have heard the words in my ears, I am sure I haven’t really read it. I may mean understood it. But I may mean consumed it: I haven’t consumed it because I was already eating the carrot. The carrot was a line, too.

  8

  Late in the evening, I am confused by drink and by all the turns in the streets he has led me through, and now he has his arm around me and asks me if I know where I am, in the city. I do not know exactly. He takes me up a few flights of stairs and into a small apartment. It looks familiar to me. Any room can seem like a room remembered from a dream, as can any doorway into a second room, but I look at it longer and I know I have been here before. It was another month, another year, he was not here, someone else was here, I did not know him, and this was an apartment belonging to a stranger.

  9

  As I sit waiting at a restaurant table I see out of the corner of my eye again and again a little cat come up onto the white marble doorstep of the restaurant entryway and then, every time I look over, it is not a little cat I see but the shadow, cast by the streetlamp, of a branch of large midsummer leaves moving in the wind from the river.

  10

  I am expecting a phone call at ten o’clock. The phone rings at nine forty. I am upstairs. Because I was not expecting it, the ring is sharper and louder. I answer: it is not the person I was expecting, and so the voice is also sharper and louder.

  Now it is ten o’clock. I go out onto the front porch. I think the phone may ring while I am out here. I come in, and the phone rings just after I come in. But again it is someone else, and later I will think it was not that person but the other, the one who was supposed to call.

  11

  There is his right leg over my right leg, my left leg over his right leg, his left arm under my back, my right arm around his head, his right arm across my chest, my left arm across his right arm, and my right hand stroking his right temple. Now it becomes difficult to tell what part of what body is actually mine and what part his.

  I rub his head as it lies pressed against mine, and I hear the strands of his hair chafing against his skull as though it is my own hair chafing against my own skull, as though I now hear with his ears, and from inside his head.

  12

  I have decided to take a certain book with me when I go. I am tired and can’t think how I will carry it, though it is a small book. I am reading it before I go, and I read: The antique bracelet she gave me with dozens of flowers etched into the tarnished brass. Now I think that when I go out I will be able to wear the book around my wrist.

  13

  Looking out through the window of the coffee shop, I watch for a friend to appear. She is late. I am afraid she will not find this place. Now, if the many people passing in the street are quite unlike my friend, I feel she is still far away, or truly lost. But if a woman passes who is like her, I think she is close and will appear at any moment; and the more women pass who resemble her, or the more they resemble her, the closer I think she is, and the more likely to appear.

  14

  I was an unlikely person to invite to this party, and no one is talking to me. I believe the invitation was for someone else.

  All day the clock answers my questions about the time very well, and so, wondering what the title of that book was, I look at the face of the clock for an answer.

  I so nearly missed the bus, I still believe I am not on it now.

  Because it is almost the end of the day, I think it is almost the end of the week.

  That was such a peculiar thing to say to me, I do not believe it was said to me.

  Because that expert gave me helpful information about his subject, which is horticulture, I think I can ask his advice about another subject, which is family relations.

  I had such trouble finding this place, I believe I did not find it. I am talking to the person I came here to meet, but I believe he is still alone, waiting for me.

  15

  The ceiling is so high the light fades up under the peak of the roof. It takes a long time to walk through. Dust is everywhere, an even coating of blond dust; around every corner, a rolling table with a drawing board on it, a paper pinned to the board. Around the next corner, and the next, a painting on a wall, half finished, and before it, on the floor, cans of paint, brushes across the cans, and pails of soapy water colored red or blue. Not all the cans of paint are dusty. Not all parts of the floor are dusty.

  At first it seems clear that this place is not part of a dream, but a place one moves through in waking life. But rounding the last corner into the remotest part, where the dust lies thickest over the boxes of charcoal sticks from Paris, and a yellowed sheet of muslin over the window is torn symmetrically in two spots, showing a white sky through two small panes of dusty glass, a part of this place that seems to have been forgotten or abandoned, or at least lain undisturbed longer than the rest, one is not sure that this place i
s not a place in a dream, though whether it lies entirely in that dream or not is hard to say, and if only partly, how it lies at once in that dream and in this waking—whether one stands in this waking and looks through a doorway into that more dusty part, into that dream, or whether one walks from this waking around a corner into the part more thickly covered with dust, into the more filtered light of the dream, the light that comes in through the yellowed sheet.

  The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists

  In this race, it is not the swiftest who wins, but the slowest. At first it would seem easy to be the slowest of the motorcyclists, but it is not easy, because it is not in the temperament of a motorcyclist to be slow or patient.