by Lydia Davis
Also by Lydia Davis
NOVEL
The End of the Story
STORIES
Break It Down
Almost No Memory
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
Varieties of Disturbance
SELECTED TRANSLATIONS
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot
The Spirit of Mediterranean Places by Michel Butor
Rules of the Game, I: Scratches by Michel Leiris
Rules of the Game, II: Scraps by Michel Leiris
Hélène by Pierre Jean Jouve
The Collected Stories of
LYDIA DAVIS
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
HAMISH HAMILTON
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2009
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2010
Copyright © Lydia Davis, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following material:
‘Worstward Ho’, copyright © 1983 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. In ‘The Walk’, quotations from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and revised by Terence Kilmartin, copyright © 1981 by Marcel Proust, used by permission of Random House, Inc.; quotations from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, copyright © 2002 by Lydia Davis, used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. ‘Extracts from a Life’ is adapted from Nurtured by Love by Sinichi Suzuki, and is used by permission of Exposition Press. The tale in ‘Once a Very Stupid Man’ is adapted from the traditional Hasidic story recounted in Martin Buber’s The Way of Man, and is used by permisson of Citadel Press. ‘Lord Royston’s Tour’ was adapted from The Remains of Viscount Royston: A Memoir of His Life by the Rev. Henry Pepys, London, 1838.
Samuel Johnson is Indignant was first published by McSweeney’s Books.
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96289-4
Contents
BREAK IT DOWN (1986)
Story
The Fears of Mrs. Orlando
Liminal: The Little Man
Break It Down
Mr. Burdoff’s Visit to Germany
What She Knew
The Fish
Mildred and the Oboe
The Mouse
The Letter
Extracts from a Life
The House Plans
The Brother-in-Law
How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend’s House:
Mothers
In a House Besieged
Visit to Her Husband
Cockroaches in Autumn
The Bone
A Few Things Wrong with Me
Sketches for a Life of Wassilly
City Employment
Two Sisters
The Mother
Therapy
French Lesson I: Le Meurtre
Once a Very Stupid Man
The Housemaid
The Cottages
Safe Love
Problem
What an Old Woman Will Wear
The Sock
Five Signs of Disturbance
ALMOST NO MEMORY (1997)
Meat, My Husband
Jack in the Country
Foucault and Pencil
The Mice
The Thirteenth Woman
The Professor
The Cedar Trees
The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall
Wife One in Country
The Fish Tank
The Center of the Story
Love
Our Kindness
A Natural Disaster
Odd Behavior
St. Martin
Agreement
In the Garment District
Disagreement
The Actors
What Was Interesting
In the Everglades
The Family
Trying to Learn
To Reiterate
Lord Royston’s Tour
The Other
A Friend of Mine
This Condition
Go Away
Pastor Elaine’s Newsletter
A Man in Our Town
A Second Chance
Fear
Almost No Memory
Mr. Knockly
How He Is Often Right
The Rape of the Tanuk Women
What I Feel
Lost Things
Glenn Gould
Smoke
From Below, as a Neighbor
The Great-Grandmothers
Ethics
The House Behind
The Outing
A Position at the University
Examples of Confusion
The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists
Affinity
SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT (2001)
Boring Friends
A Mown Lawn
City People
Betrayal
The White Tribe
Our Trip
Special Chair
Certain Knowledge from Herodotus
Priority
The Meeting
Companion
Blind Date
Examples of Remember
Old Mother and the Grouch
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:
New Year’s Resolution
First Grade: Handwriting Practice
Interesting
Happiest Moment
Jury Duty
A Double Negative
The Old Dictionary
Honoring the Subjunctive
How Difficult
Losing Memory
Letter to a Funeral Parlor
Thyroid Diary
Information from the North Concerning the Ice:
Murder in Bohemia
Happy Memories
They Take Turns Using a Word They Like
Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman
Mir the Hessian
My Nei
ghbors in a Foreign Place
Oral History (with Hiccups)
The Patient
Right and Wrong
Alvin the Typesetter
Special
Selfish
My Husband and I
Spring Spleen
Her Damage
Workingmen
In a Northern Country
Away from Home
Company
Finances
The Transformation
Two Sisters (II)
The Furnace
Young and Poor
The Silence of Mrs. Iln
Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms
Money
Acknowledgment
VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE (2007)
A Man from Her Past
Dog and Me
Enlightened
The Good Taste Contest
Collaboration with Fly
Kafka Cooks Dinner
Tropical Storm
Good Times
Idea for a Short Documentary Film
Forbidden Subjects
Two Types
The Senses
Grammar Questions
Hand
The Caterpillar
Child Care
We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders
Passing Wind
Television
Jane and the Cane
Getting to Know Your Body
Absentminded
Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho
The Walk
Varieties of Disturbance
Lonely
Mrs. D and Her Maids
20 Sculptures in One Hour
Nietszche
What You Learn About the Baby
Her Mother’s Mother
How It Is Done
Insomnia
Burning Family Members
The Way to Perfection
The Fellowship
Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality
Reducing Expenses
Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans
For Sixty Cents
How Shall I Mourn Them?
A Strange Impulse
How She Could Not Drive
Suddenly Afraid
Getting Better
Head, Heart
The Strangers
The Busy Road
Order
The Fly
Traveling with Mother
Index Entry
My Son
Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room
Cape Cod Diary
Almost Over: What’s the Word?
A Different Man
BREAK IT DOWN (1986)
Story
I get home from work and there is a message from him: that he is not coming, that he is busy. He will call again. I wait to hear from him, then at nine o’clock I go to where he lives, find his car, but he’s not home. I knock at his apartment door and then at all the garage doors, not knowing which garage door is his—no answer. I write a note, read it over, write a new note, and stick it in his door. At home I am restless, and all I can do, though I have a lot to do, since I’m going on a trip in the morning, is play the piano. I call again at ten forty-five and he’s home, he has been to the movies with his old girlfriend, and she’s still there. He says he’ll call back. I wait. Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that when he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband. And then I go on to write, in the third person and the past tense, that clearly she always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love. He calls back before I have time to finish writing all this down. When he calls, it is a little after eleven thirty. We argue until nearly twelve. Everything he says is a contradiction: for example, he says he did not want to see me because he wanted to work and even more because he wanted to be alone, but he has not worked and he has not been alone. There is no way I can get him to reconcile any of his contradictions, and when this conversation begins to sound too much like many I had with my husband I say goodbye and hang up. I finish writing down what I started to write down even though by now it no longer seems true that anger is any great comfort.
I call him back five minutes later to tell him that I am sorry about all this arguing, and that I love him, but there is no answer. I call again five minutes later, thinking he might have walked out to his garage and walked back, but again there is no answer. I think of driving to where he lives again and looking for his garage to see if he is in there working, because he keeps his desk there and his books and that is where he goes to read and write. I am in my nightgown, it is after twelve and I have to leave the next morning at five. Even so, I get dressed and drive the mile or so to his place. I am afraid that when I get there I will see other cars by his house that I did not see earlier and that one of them will belong to his old girlfriend. When I drive down the driveway I see two cars that weren’t there before, and one of them is parked as close as possible to his door, and I think that she is there. I walk around the small building to the back where his apartment is, and look in the window: the light is on, but I can’t see anything clearly because of the half-closed venetian blinds and the steam on the glass. But things inside the room are not the same as they were earlier in the evening, and before there was no steam. I open the outer screen door and knock. I wait. No answer. I let the screen door fall shut and I walk away to check the row of garages. Now the door opens behind me as I am walking away and he comes out. I can’t see him very well because it is dark in the narrow lane beside his door and he is wearing dark clothes and whatever light there is is behind him. He comes up to me and puts his arms around me without speaking, and I think he is not speaking not because he is feeling so much but because he is preparing what he will say. He lets go of me and walks around me and ahead of me out to where the cars are parked by the garage doors.
As we walk out there he says “Look,” and my name, and I am waiting for him to say that she is here and also that it’s all over between us. But he doesn’t, and I have the feeling he did intend to say something like that, at least say that she was here, and that he then thought better of it for some reason. Instead, he says that everything that went wrong tonight was his fault and he’s sorry. He stands with his back against a garage door and his face in the light and I stand in front of him with my back to the light. At one point he hugs me so suddenly that the fire of my cigarette crumbles against the garage door behind him. I know why we’re out here and not in his room, but I don’t ask him until everything is all right between us. Then he says, “She wasn’t here when I called you. She came back later.” He says the only reason she is there is that something is troubling her and he is the only one she can talk to about it. Then he says, “You don’t understand, do you?”
I try to figure it out.
So they went to the movies and then came back to his place and then I called and then she left and he called back and we argued and then I called back twice but he had gone out to get a beer (he says) and then I drove over and in the meantime he had returned from buying beer and she had also come back and she was in his room so we talked by the garage doors. But what is the truth? Could he and she both really have come back in that short interval between my last phone call and my arrival at his place? Or is the truth really that during his call to me she waited outside or in his garage or in her car and that he then brought her in again, and that when the phone rang with my second and third calls he let it ring without answering, because he was fed up with me and with arguing? Or is the truth that she did leave and did come back later but that he remained and let the phone ring without answering? Or did he perhaps bring her in and then go out for the beer while she waited there and listened to the phone ring? The last is the least likely. I don’t believe anyway that there was any trip out f
or beer.
The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it’s not the truth and sometimes I don’t know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don’t believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry at me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves her or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.
The Fears of Mrs. Orlando
Mrs. Orlando’s world is a dark one. In her house she knows what is dangerous: the gas stove, the steep stairs, the slick bathtub, and several kinds of bad wiring. Outside her house she knows some of what is dangerous but not all of it, and is frightened by her own ignorance, and avid for information about crime and disaster.
Though she takes every precaution, no precaution will be enough. She tries to prepare for sudden hunger, for cold, for boredom, and for heavy bleeding. She is never without a bandaid, a safety pin, and a knife. In her car she has, among other things, a length of rope and a whistle, and also a social history of England to read while waiting for her daughters, who are often a long time shopping.
In general she likes to be accompanied by men: they offer protection both because of their large size and because of their rational outlook on the world. She admires prudence, and respects the man who reserves a table in advance and also the one who hesitates before answering any of her questions. She believes in hiring lawyers and feels most comfortable talking to lawyers because every one of their words is endorsed by the law. But she will ask her daughters or a woman friend to go shopping with her downtown, rather than go alone.
She has been attacked by a man in an elevator, downtown. It was at night, the man was black, and she did not know the neighborhood. She was younger then. She has been molested several times in a crowded bus. In a restaurant once, after an argument, an excited waiter spilled coffee on her hands.
In the city she is afraid of being carried away underground on the wrong subway, but will not ask directions from strangers of a lower class. She walks past many black men who are planning different crimes. Anyone at all may rob her, even another woman.