Varieties of Disturbance

by Lydia Davis

  Today in the late afternoon I went to have a beer in the outdoor café next to the small public library, which is an old house shaded by an old oak with a circular wooden bench around its thick trunk. The waiter asked me, “Is there one in your party?” Edith Piaf was singing in the background. I said “Yes” and he brought my beer.

  I am thinking about a recent mystery: On the day of the storm something washed ashore that was smooth, rubbery, and the size and shape of a dolphin’s nose, though not the right color. It might have been the back of an upholstered plastic seat from a boat. For a day or two it remained there, moving as the water moved it, sometimes in the water and sometimes on the sand, always in about the same place. Then I didn’t see it for a few days. Today as I was lying on the beach, a man in a ranger’s uniform went under the deck of the motel, dragged the thing out, and methodically tore it to pieces, separating it into different layers. Some layers he left lying on the sand, the rest of it he folded and carried away with him.

  The faces of the tourists here reflect what they see all day long, the harbor, the old buildings, the other people in the streets, with openness, even wonder. Only when they look in the shop windows, and seem to consider buying something, do they lose some of their ease and joy. Their faces close into expressions of intentness, care, even exhaustion.

  I have been with the old people again. It is restful to me after I have been working, though if the work has not gone well I will not see them at all, preferring to sit with the difficulty than to leave it behind.

  When I have made a little progress I am glad to leave it and have their company. In contrast to the work, to the denseness of all the information I am trying to put in some order, their conversation is undemanding. The old woman will talk endlessly if I ask her a question or two; the old man listens to her and sometimes adds a brief comment of his own. They do not seem to notice if I do not talk. Nothing at all is required of me when one says to the other, “Did you take your pills?”

  The old man often sits in the passenger seat of the car waiting for his wife to return from doing an errand. He tells me he likes to watch the people going past. He will wait almost any length of time if he can watch the people and think his thoughts, which he finds interesting. Today he saw three women approach together, one of them feeble-minded, as he called her, her head bobbing constantly. The leader of the group stopped by the hood of his car, set a pile of papers down on it, and began searching her purse for something. She took a long time searching and the old man sat there watching her directly in front of him and also watching the feeble-minded woman, who stood at the edge of the sidewalk all that time, her head bobbing.

  At the end of one pier tonight, two men were casting far out for blue-fish. One remarked to the other that the slapping of the lure on the water over and over might be frightening the fish. At the other pier, fishing boats were lined up side by side, thick clumps of nets hanging from the masts, dinghies tied down onto the tops of cabins, stacks of new wooden crates on the decks, along with piles of baskets—only what was needed for the work.

  From the beach, at dusk, I look back at the land and I see steeples against the sky, and, on a roof, what look like four white statues of women in robes against the sky, as in a cemetery, but then look more carefully and see that they are four white folded beach umbrellas with large knobs on top. In the water, small boats all point the same way on their moorings, only one suddenly will move independently, wandering a little and turning.

  At night the Unitarian Universalist church burns a light in its steeple in remembrance of those lost at sea.

  At the entrance of the alley, my alley, where it opens into the street, as at the mouth of a stream, there is the life of the street, turbulent, eddying, restlessly moving into the early hours of the morning.

  At dawn I was woken by a thrashing in the patch of garden outside my door. It was a skunk caught in some brambles.

  The travels of my French historian have taken him away from the damp river valley and out to the Midwest now. He is studying the structures of municipal governments in newly incorporated towns. This interests me only a little, but the historian himself is good company, and so his intelligence illuminates these subjects and they become tolerable.

  Yesterday I took a walk in the rain and saw: tough-stemmed old stalks of Queen Anne’s lace with their several heads waving in the wind and banging against a gravestone; the cemetery that has been allowed to go wild and is posted with signs prohibiting overnight camping; a woman awkwardly turning her car in a dead-end lane and crushing some tall stands of purple loosestrife outside a fenced garden; the man in the garden on his knees weeding a flower bed; a uniformed nurse in a small paddock talking over the fence about her horse to a neighbor in the road; the oldest house in town, built of wood from wrecked ships, with a plaque in front of it describing its circular brick cellar, whose technical name was included, though I now forget what it was; a street called Mechanic Street.

  Last Sunday I decided to go to church. It didn’t matter to me which one I went to. I was on my way to the Catholic church, St. Peter’s, with its onion-shaped steeple of dark painted wood, when the bell began to toll in the belfry of the Unitarian Universalist church; I was walking slightly uphill in a narrow lane where I could see the belfry close at hand; I changed my mind and went back down the lane, into the yard past the flea market on the front lawn, into the church building, and upstairs to the chapel itself with its trompe l’oeil interior. Even the columns that looked so real were not real columns; the sparse congregation and the minister might have been trompe l’oeil, too.

  But the minister was a young woman from the Harvard Divinity School, full of information, with an emphatic and direct manner; the music played on the organ was well chosen and performed; the soloist sang well from the organ loft; and the hymns were familiar old ones. Downstairs, after the service, sweet lemonade was served, with rounds of toast covered with sliced egg and olives laid out on a table that stood between the door to the musty basement thrift shop and the outer doorway with its rectangle of bright sunlight.

  Later, on the street, I was thinking about a funny story the minister had told. A bronzed man on a motorcycle with impenetrable dark glasses and a bandanna around his forehead passed me and gave me a long dark look. I had been smiling, inadvertently, at him.

  Recent dreams about animals: I was about to take an exam given by Z. when a small animal, a shrew or a mouse, escaped and I went off to help catch it. At that point I discovered other loose animals, larger ones. I alerted people and tried to get the animals back into their cages. This was taking place in a school, and the animals were probably connected with the exam.

  On another night I was the one who let four animals loose in a field—a brown-and-white goat, a palomino horse, and two other large animals whose descriptions I was going to advertise so that they could be recovered. I stood watching the horse gallop into the field among other horses.

  Yesterday I was sitting in the back seat of the old people’s car. We were driving out to the ocean beach. The old man made a statement that shocked me, though neither he nor the old woman noticed it. I sat there shocked behind the old woman, who had great trouble driving straight into the setting sun.

  I go for a long walk on a railroad track near the old people’s house. The rails have been taken up, and the bed is straight and narrow and visible ahead of me for a great distance. A thin, bearded man dressed in layers of ragged clothing comes ambling along toward me with his black dog, which ranges around him nosing in the underbrush. The old people’s cat, which has been walking with me, turns broadside to the dog and arches its back.

  Last night, after midnight, walking barefoot near the kitchen sink, I stepped on something slippery and hard. On the mat lay what looked like some animal part, a glistening innard of uniform color and texture. I bent down to examine it: it was a slug. I was afraid I had killed it. I picked it up: it was cool and moist. As I held it in my palm, this dollop of glistening muscle, t
wo bumps appeared at one end of it and then grew steadily into two long horns, as below them symmetrically two more bumps grew into slighter protrusions which I guessed were eyes, and at the same time the body thinned out and tensed, and then the slug set off and glided around my wrist and up my arm.

  Tonight I heard the footsteps of a neighbor returning down the concrete path, then more footsteps, then many more all at once, and they continued so long and so steadily that I realized they were not footsteps: it was the rain. Heavy drops splashed on the leaves in the garden and on the planks of the wooden decks. Then, among the splashes of rain, I did hear the footsteps of a neighbor coming home, and it was the man above me, now walking over my ceiling.

  Yesterday I rode a bicycle along a winding macadam trail past lily-choked ponds and through a thin forest of young beeches. On my way back, I stopped on the pier to watch fishermen mending their nets before they set out to sea. They pull large comblike implements through the squares of the net and tie knots in it. One man holds the net while the other does the mending with quick, economical motions. Small clusters of tourists stand on the pier above looking down at them respectfully where they work in the boats.

  Not far away, three men fished off the pier for mackerel, casting again and again, pulling up silver fish that fought hard, all muscle, then unhooking them and slipping them carefully into a Styrofoam cooler where they flopped so violently that the cooler shook and thudded for a while after it was closed.

  At the same time, a bright red oil truck was fueling the boats. It would stop next to them on the pier where they were tied two or three deep alongside and send the long hose down into one, over one into the next, and then into the third. At the same time, a steel cable that extended the length of the pier into what seemed to be a fish-packing shed was being wound mechanically onto a drum in one of the fishing boats. The winding went on and on. A group of tourists watched this carefully, too.

  The tourists took pictures of the fishermen mending their nets. If a tourist asked a fisherman to smile, the fisherman would glance up soberly, with a neutral expression on his face, and keep still for the picture, but he would not smile.

  I went out to eat recently with the two old people and two old friends of theirs. We sat in a room surrounded by water and they all ordered lobster. The plates came, and the red lobsters looked pretty lying on their lettuce leaves next to their little white cups of melted butter. Now the conversation died and the table was silent except for the furious cracking, pulling, and prying of those old people, who suddenly showed such competent physical strength, intent on destroying their lobsters.

  People I see here: the clerk at the post office; the friendly checkout woman at the supermarket; my neighbors; my landlady; the woman across the garden, who once asked me in a neutral, curious tone what I was doing here; last night, a plump, gregarious off-duty bartender attending the free movie at the public library, though I did not speak to him. He wore a bandanna tied around his forehead and cowboy boots. He was there to see the 1954 movie, whose title I forget. Most of the small audience were old people calling back and forth to each other.

  “Everybody’s here!” someone cried.

  I felt I was included in “everybody,” though I was sitting by myself waiting for the movie to begin. I listened to the bartender talk to the other people. Then we all watched the movie.

  A plumber came to my room yesterday to fix the shower. He told me his family had lived here for generations. He said that these days there isn’t much cod or haddock and the fishermen are taking shellfish off the Great Bank about six miles west of the tip of the land; the beds there seem to be inexhaustible.

  I have seen great crates of these shellfish, which I thought were quahogs, coming up onto the pier, hoisted by a small crane on a boat. The crates were stacked on the wharf while tractor trailers from Maryland with their engines running prepared to load them. Seagulls ran around on the asphalt with their wings raised threatening one another over the scraps. Only one gull sat on a crate at the top of a stack and pulled the slimy, elastic flesh of a quahog up through the slats, leaning back as he pulled, bending forward to get another grip, and leaning back again in the midst of a great noise from the boat’s engines.

  This was at twilight, and as the sky darkened, the lights on the boats grew brighter, and a handful of tourists watched, standing gingerly at the edge of the pier. The young fishermen, bare-chested, wearing shorts and high rubber boots, went about their work steadily, maneuvering hooks, hoisting a dredger, then a large piece of grating. The boat’s engine throbbed, sometimes thundered.

  On another night it was later. I was the only one watching. Sparks flew up into the darkness from a boat where something was being welded or soldered. Another boat set out to sea after blowing its whistle. A black fisherman ran to the stern of the boat as it pulled away. He looked up, smiled, and waved.

  I have just come back from looking at the motorcycles on the pier. They are parked side by side in great numbers near the snack bars that sell such surprisingly good Portuguese fish soup. They are of all kinds, plain and fancy. The fancy ones are decorated with antlers, and with leopard skins.

  More crickets are singing now as the air grows colder and colder. It is the last day of August and the season is changing suddenly. Just as it is time for me to leave, the historian, too, has finished his tour and will be returning to Europe.

  Almost Over: What’s the Word?

  He says,

  “When I first met you

  I didn’t think you would turn out to be so

  …strange.”

  A Different Man

  At night he was a different man. If she knew him as he was in the morning, at night she hardly recognized him: a pale man, a gray man, a man in a brown sweater, a man with dark eyes who kept his distance from her, who took offense, who was not reasonable. In the morning, he was a rosy king, gleaming, smooth-cheeked and smooth-chinned, fragrant with perfumed talc, coming out into the sunlight with a wide embrace in his royal red plaid robe…

  “ALL WHO KNOW [DAVIS’S] WORK PROBABLY REMEMBER THEIR FIRST TIME READING IT. IT KIND OF BLOWS THE ROOF OFF OF SO MANY OF OUR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WHAT CONSTITUTES SHORT FICTION. I READ IT ON THE F TRAIN FROM 6TH AVENUE TO PARK SLOPE—IT’S A LONG RIDE AND THAT BOOK ISN’T ALL THAT LONG—AND BY THE END I FELT LIBERATED. SHE’D BROKEN ALL OF THE MOST CONSTRAINING RULES. SOME OF HER STORIES HAVE PLOTS BUT MOST DON’T. SOME ARE IN THE RANGE OF ACCEPTABLE SHORT STORY LENGTH, MOST AREN’T. MANY STRADDLE A LINE BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY, POETRY AND FICTION, CATEGORIES THAT SEEM MEANINGLESS BECAUSE HER STORIES JUST WORK. THERE IS RARELY A PLOT AS WE EXPECT FROM PLOT. THE CHARACTERS IN THE COURSE OF THE STORY DON’T UNDERGO A FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE. THE PLOT, RATHER, STEMS FROM THE NARRATOR’S TRYING TO GET AT SOME TRUTH. [DAVIS’S] STORIES ARE AS OFTEN AS NOT MENTAL EXERCISES, A BRAIN TRYING TO CONCLUDE. BECAUSE TRUTH IS WHAT SHE’S AFTER. THERE IS AN UNRELENTING AND MERCILESS TRUTH PRESENTED, OR AT LEAST FUMBLED FOR, IN EVERYTHING [SHE] WRITES…DAVIS IS ONE OF THE MOST PRECISE AND ECONOMICAL WRITERS WE HAVE.”

  —DAVE EGGERS, MCSWEENEY’S

  Also by Lydia Davis

  Stories

  Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

  Almost No Memory

  Break It Down

  Story and Other Stories

  Sketches for a Life of Wassilly

  The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories

  Novel

  The End of the Story

  Selected Translations

  Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

  Hélène by Pierre Jean Jouve

  Rules of the Game, I: Scratches by Michel Leiris

  The Spirit of Mediterranean Places by Michel Butor

  The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot

  Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot

  LYDIA DAVIS

  DAVID IGNASZEWSKI

  Varieties of Disturbance

  Lydia Davis’s story collections includes Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, a Village Voice favorite, and Almos
t No Memory, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. The acclaimed translator of the new Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, and recipient of a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, she teaches at SUNY Albany, where she is also a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the magazines in which the following stories appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:

  32 Poems: “Getting Better,” “Two Types”

  Avec: “Forbidden Subjects”

  American Letters & Commentary: “Her Mother’s Mother” (as “Her Mother’s Mother: 1,” “Her Mother’s Mother: 2”)

  Bomb: “Almost Over: What’s the Word?,” “A Man from Her Past,” “Suddenly Afraid”

  Columbia: “Enlightened”

  Conjunctions: “Television,” “Burning Family Members,” “Reducing Expenses”

  Fence: “Kafka Cooks Dinner”

  Gulf Coast: “The Senses”

  Hambone: “20 Sculptures in One Hour,” “How It Is Done”