by Lydia Davis
A Few Things Wrong with Me
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.
I may ask his friends what they think about this, because they know him better than I do. They’ve known him for more than fifteen years, whereas I’ve known him for only about ten months. I like them, and they seem to like me, though we don’t know each other very well. What I want to do is to have a meal or a drink with at least two of them and talk about him until I begin to get a better picture of him.
It’s easy to come to the wrong conclusions about people. I see now that all these past months I kept coming to the wrong conclusions about him. For example, when I thought he would be unkind to me, he was kind. Then when I thought he would be effusive he was merely polite. When I thought he would be annoyed to hear my voice on the telephone he was pleased. When I thought he would turn against me because I had treated him rather coldly, he was more anxious than ever to be with me and went to great trouble and expense so that we could spend a little time together. Then when I made up my mind that he was the man for me, he suddenly called the whole thing off.
It seemed sudden to me even though for the last month I could feel him drawing away. For instance, he didn’t write as often as he had before, and then when we were together he said more unkind things to me than he ever had before. When he left, I knew he was thinking it over. He took a month to think it over, and I knew it was fifty-fifty he would come to the point of saying what he did.
I suppose it seemed sudden because of the hopes I had for him and me by then, and the dreams I had about us—some of the usual dreams about a nice house and nice babies and the two of us together in the house working in the evening while the babies were asleep, and then some other dreams, about how we would travel together, and about how I would learn to play the banjo or the mandolin so that I could play with him, because he has a lovely tenor voice. Now, when I picture myself playing the banjo or the mandolin, the idea seems silly.
The way it all ended was that he called me up on a day he didn’t usually call me and said he had finally come to a decision. Then he said that because he had had trouble figuring all this out, he had made some notes about what he was going to say and he asked me if I would mind if he read them. I said I would mind very much. He said he would at least have to look at them now and then as he talked.
Then he talked in a very reasonable way about how bad the chances were for us to be happy together, and about changing over to a friendship now before it was too late. I said he was talking about me as though I were an old tire that might blow out on the highway. He thought that was funny.
We talked about how he had felt about me at various times, and how I had felt about him at various times, and it seemed that these feelings hadn’t matched very well. Then, when I wanted to know exactly how he had felt about me from the very beginning, trying to find out, really, what was the most he had ever felt, he made this very plain statement about how there were things about me that he hadn’t liked from the very beginning. He wasn’t trying to be unkind, but just very clear. I told him I wouldn’t ask him what these things were but I knew I would have to go and think about it.
I didn’t like hearing there were things about me that bothered him. It was shocking to hear that someone I loved had never liked certain things about me. Of course there were a few things I didn’t like about him too, for instance an affectation in his manner involving the introduction of foreign phrases into his conversation, but although I had noticed these things, I had never said it to him in quite this way. But if I try to be logical, I have to think that after all there may be a few things wrong with me. Then the problem is to figure out what these things are.
For several days, after we talked, I tried to think about this, and I came up with some possibilities. Maybe I didn’t talk enough. He likes to talk a lot and he likes other people to talk a lot. I’m not very talkative, or at least not in the way he probably likes. I have some good ideas from time to time, but not much information. I can talk for a long time only when it’s about something boring. Maybe I talked too much about which foods he should be eating. I worry about the way people eat and tell them what they should eat, which is a tiresome thing to do, something my ex-husband never liked either. Maybe I mentioned my ex-husband too often, so that he thought my ex-husband was still on my mind, which wasn’t true. He might have been irritated by the fact that he couldn’t kiss me in the street for fear of getting poked in the eye by my glasses—or maybe he didn’t even like being with a woman who wore glasses, maybe he didn’t like always having to look at my eyes through this blue-tinted glass. Or maybe he doesn’t like people who write things on index cards, diet plans on little index cards and plot summaries on big index cards. I don’t like it much myself, and I don’t do it all the time. It’s just a way I have of trying to get my life in order. But he might have come across some of those index cards.
I couldn’t think of much else that would have bothered him from the very beginning. Then I decided I would never be able to think of the things about me that bothered him. Whatever I thought of would probably not be the same things. And anyway, I wasn’t going to go on trying to identify these things, because even if I knew what they were I wouldn’t be able to do anything about them.
Late in the conversation, he tried to tell me how excited he was about his new plan for the summer. Now that he wasn’t going to be with me, he thought he would travel down to Venezuela, to visit some friends who were doing anthropological work in the jungle. I told him I didn’t want to hear about that.
While we talked on the phone, I was drinking some wine left over from a large party I had given. After we hung up I immediately picked up the phone again and made a series of phone calls, and while I talked, I finished one of the leftover bottles of wine and started on another that was sweeter than the first, and then finished that one too. First I called a few people here in the city, then when it got too late for that I called a few people in California, and when it got too late to go on calling California, I called someone in England who had just woken up and was not in a very good mood.
Between one phone call and the next I would sometimes walk by the window and look up at the moon, which was in its first quarter but remarkably bright, and think of him and then wonder when I would stop thinking of him every time I saw the moon. The reason I thought of him when I saw the moon was that during the five days and four nights he and I were first together, the moon was waxing and then full, the nights were clear, we were in the country, where you notice the sky more, and every night, early or late, we would walk outdoors together, partly to get away from the various members of our families who were in the house and partly just to take pleasure in the meadows and the woods under the moonlight. The dirt road that sloped up away from the house into the woods was full of ruts and rocks, so that we kept stumbling against each other and more tightly into each other’s arms. We talked about how nice it would be to bring a bed out into the meadow and lie down on it in the moonlight.
The next time the moon was full, I was back in the city, and I saw it out the window of a new apartment. I thought to myself that a month had passed since he and I were together, and that it had passed very slowly. After that, every time the moon was full, shining on the leafy, tall trees in the backyards here, and on the flat tar roofs, and then on the bare trees and snowy ground in the winter, I would think to myself that another month had passed, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. I liked counting the months that way.
He and I always seemed to be counting the time as it passed and waiting for it to pass so that the day would come when we would be together again. That was one reason he said he couldn’t go on with it. And maybe he’s right, it isn’t too late, we will change over to a friendship, and he will talk to me now and then
long distance, mostly about his work or my work, and give me good advice or a plan of action when I need one, then call himself something like my “éminence grise.”
When I stopped making my phone calls, I was too dizzy to go to sleep, because of the wine, so I turned on the television and watched some police dramas, some old situation comedies, and finally a show about unusual people across the country. I turned the set off at five in the morning when the sky was light, and I fell asleep right away.
It’s true that by the time the night was over I wasn’t worrying anymore about what was wrong with me. At that hour of the morning I can usually get myself out to the end of something like a long dock with water all around where I’m not touched by such worries. But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.
Sketches for a Life of Wassilly
1
Wassilly was a man of many parts, changeable, fickle, at times ambitious, at times stuporous, at times meditative, at times impatient. Not a man of habits, though he wished to be, tried to cultivate habits, was overjoyed when he found something that truly, for a time, seemed necessary to him and that had possibilities of becoming a habit.
For a while, he sat in his wing chair every evening after supper and found it pleasant. He once thoroughly enjoyed smoking a pipe of fragrant tobacco and thinking over what had happened to him during the day. But the next evening he suffered from wind and could not sit still; the pipe, also, kept going out; the lights for some reason flickered and dimmed constantly, and after a while he gave up the pretense of leisurely contemplation.
Some months later, he decided that a stroll after dinner was also a popular thing to do and might easily become a habit. For many days he went out of his house at a fixed hour and walked through the neighboring streets, successfully evoking in himself a mood of calm speculation, gazing at the swallows as they flew over the river and at the red sun-soaked housefronts and deducing various ill-founded scientific principles from what he saw; or he let his thoughts dwell on the people who walked by him in the street. But this did not become a habit either: he realized with great disappointment that once he had exhausted all the possible routes within an hour’s stroll of his house he became frankly bored with walking, and that instead of benefiting his constitution, it upset his stomach enough so that he had to treat himself with some pills upon returning home. The strolls stopped altogether when his sister came unexpectedly to visit him, and did not resume when she left.
Wassilly was ambitious to learn, and yet sometimes for days on end he could not bring himself to study, but would sneak off into a corner, as if to avoid his own anxious gaze, and spend a long time bent over a crossword puzzle. This made him irritable and dull. He tried to throw the puzzles into a more favorable light by including them in his scheme for self-improvement. During three days, he tested himself against his watch: he did most of a puzzle in twenty minutes on one day, all of it in twenty minutes on the next, and then almost none of it in twenty minutes on the third. On that day he changed the rules and decided he would try to finish the puzzle every day, no matter how long it took. He clearly saw the time coming in which he would be master of the game. To this end he started keeping a notebook in which he wrote down all the more obscure words that appeared regularly in the puzzles and that he otherwise forgot as soon as he learned them, such as “stoa: Greek porch.” In this way he persuaded himself that he was learning something even from the puzzles, and for a few wonderful hours he saw the conjunction of his baser inclinations and his higher ambitions.
His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life.
Sometimes Wassilly had an inkling that he suffered from a deeper boredom than he could completely picture to himself. At these times, he would brood about the yearly allowance his father gave him: perhaps it was the most unfortunate thing that had ever happened to him; it might ruin what was left of his life. Yet one of the only things Wassilly could be sure of in himself was the recurring hope that things would not turn out as badly as they seemed to be.
His effect on the world was potentially astonishing.
2
Wassilly’s few real successes left him unmoved. Or rather, he could not bear to look at an article he had published and would allow his copies of the magazine to become covered with coffee stains and bent at the edges. He could not feel that his printed name was really his, or that the words on the page had really come from his own pen. His sister confirmed this feeling by remaining utterly silent about what he sent to her and also by treating him in exactly the same way she always had—as an agreeable but ineffectual person—when he felt his accomplishments should have made her see him in a new light. As some sort of retaliation, he occasionally wrote her long, deeply serious, and carefully phrased letters criticizing her personal life. These she would mention only months later and in an offhand way.
Not only did his published name and works seem to belong to someone else, but he derived little joy from anything he wrote. Once he had done it, it was out of his hands: it lay in a no-man’s-land. It was neutral. It did not speak to him. He wanted to be proud of himself, but felt only guilty—that he had not done more, or better. He envied people who set out to write a book, wrote it, and were pleased with it, and when it was published read it through again with fresh pleasure and turned easily to their next project. He felt only a frightening emptiness ahead of him, a vacancy where there should have been plans, and all his work grew out of impulses.
3
Wassilly was so extremely self-conscious that at times even the soft eyes of his dog made him blush with embarrassment when he tried to attract her attention by some stupid action. Talking to friends on the telephone he would put fantastic interpretations on what they said and respond with clumsy remarks that left them bewildered and nervous.
In strange company he spoke too softly to be heard, afraid that his remarks would be misunderstood. His confidence was further weakened by the fact that people looked puzzled every time he spoke, since they were trying to hear what he was saying, or did not even notice that he had spoken.
Sometimes he was not certain whether or not he should say goodbye to a stranger. He compromised by whispering and looking off to one side.
He did not know exactly when to thank his hostess after attending a dinner or a weekend party. In his uncertainty, he would thank her over and over again. It was as though he did not believe his words carried any weight and hoped to achieve through the effect of accumulation what one speech alone could not accomplish.
Wassily was puzzled by the fact that these social responses did not come naturally to him, as they evidently did to others. He tried to learn them by watching other people closely, and was to some extent successful. But why was it such a difficult game? Sometimes he felt like a wolf-child who had only recently joined humanity.
4
Wassilly kept falling in love. Even with the dullest and plainest women since he was so isolated, out there in the country, that his loneliness soon overcame his initial disgust; when he awoke from his madness he would feel disgusted again and embarrassed.
Wassilly had difficult relations with the girl at the grocery. He felt insulted by her cold manner. At home, he sometimes worked himself into a rage against her and made cutting remarks to her out loud. Then he would become ashamed of himself and try to adopt a more enlightened attitude, realizing that she was only an unattractive girl in a small town working in a grocery, someone with no hopes, no ideals, no future. This would restore his sense of proportion. Then he would remember a ce
rtain day the previous spring. At the shooting match on a hill above the town she had flaunted herself in a white hat and had not acknowledged his presence by so much as a nod, though all around him people were in the highest of spirits. As if this was not enough, he had taken a shot at the target on the next hilltop and the gun had recoiled and hurt him badly in the shoulder. Everyone had laughed. But after all, he said to himself, they were experienced hunters and he was only a fat intellectual.
5
There were days when nothing went well, in spite of his good intentions. He would mislay everything he needed for work—pen, notebook, cigarettes—then after settling down would be called away to the telephone or would run out of ink, would resume work and become suddenly hungry, would be delayed by an accident in the kitchen and sit down again too distracted to think.
Even after an hour of good work, the day might be lost: he would feel that a fruitful afternoon was opening up for him, and on the strength of that feeling would take a break, stretching his legs in the garden. He would look up at the sky, his attention would be caught by an unfamiliar bird, and he would take up his bird book and follow the bird over the wild acres outside his garden, plunging through the underbrush, scratching his face, and gathering burrs on his socks. Returning home, he would be too hot and tired to work, and with a sense of guilt would lie down to rest, reading something light.
6
Wassilly sometimes suspected that he worked on his articles only because he enjoyed writing with a fountain pen and black ink. He could not, for example, write anything good with a ballpoint pen. And his work did not go well if he worked with blue ink. When he and his sister played gin rummy together, he enjoyed keeping score—yet if all they had at hand was a pencil, he allowed his sister to keep score.