Break It Down

by Lydia Davis

  How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend’s House:

  The only one awake, the house quiet, the streets darkened, the cold pressing down through his covers, he is unwilling to disturb his hosts and thus, first, his fetal curl, his search for a warm hollow in the mattress …

  Then his stealthy excursion over the floor for a chair to stand on and his unsteady reach for the curtains, which he lays over the other coverings on his bed …

  His satisfaction in the new weight pressing down upon him, then his peaceful sleep …

  On another occasion this wakeful visitor, cold again and finding no curtain in his room, steals out and takes up the hall carpet for the same purpose, bending and straightening in the dim hallway …

  How its heaviness is a heavy hand on him and the dust choking his nostrils is nothing to how that carpet stifles his uneasiness …

  Mothers

  Everyone has a mother somewhere. There is a mother at dinner with us. She is a small woman with eyeglass lenses so thick they seem black when she turns her head away. Then, the mother of the hostess telephones as we are eating. This causes the hostess to be away from the table longer than one would expect. This mother may possibly be in New York. The mother of a guest is mentioned in conversation: this mother is in Oregon, a state few of us know anything about, though it has happened before that a relative lived there. A choreographer is referred to afterwards, in the car. He is spending the night in town, on his way, in fact, to see his mother, again in another state.

  Mothers, when they are guests at dinner, eat well, like children, but seem absent. It is often the case that they cannot follow what we are doing or saying. It is often the case, also, that they enter the conversation only when it turns on our youth; or they accommodate where accommodation is not wanted; smile and are misunderstood. And yet mothers are always seen, always talked to, even if only on holidays. They have suffered for our sakes, and most often in a place where we could not see them.

  In a House Besieged

  In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

  Visit to Her Husband

  She and her husband are so nervous that throughout their conversation they keep going into the bathroom, closing the door, and using the toilet. Then they come out and light a cigarette. He goes in and urinates and leaves the toilet seat up and she goes in and lowers it and urinates. Toward the end of the afternoon, they stop talking about the divorce and start drinking. He drinks whiskey and she drinks beer. When it is time for her to leave to catch her train he has drunk a lot and goes into the bathroom one last time to urinate and doesn’t bother to close the door.

  As they are getting ready to go out, she begins to tell him the story of how she met her lover. While she is talking, he discovers that he has lost one of his expensive gloves and he is immediately upset and distracted. He leaves her to look for his glove downstairs. Her story is half finished and he does not find his glove. He is less interested in her story when he comes back into the room without having found his glove. Later when they are walking together on the street he tells her happily how he has bought his girlfriend shoes for eighty dollars because he loves her so much.

  When she is alone again, she is so preoccupied by what has taken place during the visit with her husband that she walks through the streets very quickly and bumps into several people in the subway and the train station. She has not even seen them but has come down on them like some natural element so suddenly that they did not have time to avoid her and she was surprised they were there at all. Some of these people look after her and say “Christ!”

  In her parents’ kitchen later she tries to explain something difficult about the divorce to her father and is angry when he doesn’t understand, and then finds at the end of the explanation that she is eating an orange, though she can’t remember peeling it or even having decided to eat it.

  Cockroaches in Autumn

  On the white painted bolt of a door that is never opened, a thick line of tiny black grains—the dung of cockroaches.

  They nest in the coffee filters, in the woven wicker shelves, and in the crack at the top of a door, where by flashlight you see the forest of moving legs.

  Boats were scattered over the water near Dover Harbor at odd angles, like the cockroaches surprised in the kitchen at night before they move.

  The youngest are so bright, so spirited, so willing.

  He sees the hand coming down and runs the other way. There is too far to go, or he is not fast enough. At the same time we admire such a will to live.

  I am alert to small moving things, and spin around toward a floating dust mote. I am alert to darker spots against a lighter background, but these are only the roses on my pillowcase.

  A new autumn stillness, in the evening. The windows of the neighborhood are shut. A chill sifts into the room from the panes of glass. Behind a cupboard door, they squat inside a long box eating spaghetti.

  The stillness of death. When the small creature does not move away from the lowering hand.

  We feel respect for such nimble rascals, such quick movers, such clever thieves.

  From inside a white paper bag comes the sound of a creature scratching—one creature, I think. But when I empty the bag, a crowd of them scatter from the heel of rye bread, like rye seeds across the counter, like raisins.

  Fat, half grown, with a glossy dark back, he stops short in his headlong rush and tries a few other moves almost simultaneously, a bumper-car jolting in place on the white drainboard.

  Here in the crack at the top of the door, moving on their legs, they are in such numbers conscious of us behind our flashlight beam.

  It is in his moment of hesitation that you sense him as an intelligent creature. Between his pause and his change of direction, you are sure, there is a quick thought.

  They eat, but leave no mark of eating, we think. Yet here in the leaf edge, little crescent shapes—their gradual bites.

  He is like a thickened shadow. See how the shadow at the crack of a window thickens, comes out from the wall, and moves off!

  In the cardboard trap, five or six of them are stuck—frozen at odd angles, alive with an uncanny stillness, in this box like a child’s miniature theater.

  How kindly I feel toward another species of insect in the house! Its gauzy wings! Its confusion! Its blundering walk down the lampshade! It doesn’t think to run away!

  At the end of the meal, the cheeses were brought. All white except the Roquefort, they lay scattered over the board at odd angles, like cows grazing or ships at sea.

  After a week, I take a forgotten piece of bread from the oven where they have visited—now it is dry, a bit of brown lace.

  The white autumn light in the afternoon. They sleep behind a child’s drawings on the kitchen wall. I tap each piece of paper and they burst out from the edges of pictures that are already filled with shooting stars, missiles, machine guns, land mines …

  The Bone

  Many years ago, my husband and I were living in Paris and translating art books. Whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We went mostly to old American movies, which were very popular there, and we ate out a lot of the time because restaurant meals were cheap then and neither of us knew how to cook very well.

  One night, though, I cooked some fillets of fish for dinner. These fillets were not supposed to contain bones, and yet there must have been a small bone in one of them because my husband swallowed it and it got caught in his throat. This had never happened to either of us before, though we had always worried about it. I gave him bread to eat, and he drank many glasses of water, but the bone was really stuck, and didn’t move.

  After several hours in which the pain intensified and my husba
nd and I grew more and more uneasy, we left the apartment and walked out into the dark streets of Paris to look for help. We were first directed to the ground-floor apartment of a nurse who lived not far away, and she then directed us to a hospital. We walked on some way and found the hospital in the rue de Vaugirard. It was old and quite dark, as though it didn’t do much business anymore.

  Inside, I waited on a folding chair in a wide hallway near the front entrance while my husband sat behind a closed door nearby in the company of several nurses who wanted to help him but could not do more than spray his throat and then stand back and laugh, and he would laugh too, as best he could. I didn’t know what they were all laughing about.

  Finally a young doctor came and took my husband and me down several long, deserted corridors and around two sides of the dark hospital grounds to an empty wing containing another examining room in which he kept his special instruments. Each instrument had a different angle of curvature but they all ended in some sort of a hook. Under a single pool of light, in the darkened room, he inserted one instrument after another down my husband’s throat, working with fierce interest and enthusiasm. Every time he inserted another instrument my husband gagged and waved his hands in the air.

  At last the doctor drew out the little fishbone and showed it around proudly. The three of us smiled and congratulated one another.

  The doctor took us back down the empty corridors and out under the vaulted entryway that had been built to accommodate horse-drawn carriages. We stood there and talked a little, looking around at the empty streets of the neighborhood, and then we shook hands and my husband and I walked home.

  More than ten years have passed since then, and my husband and I have gone our separate ways, but every now and then, when we are together, we remember that young doctor. “A great Jewish doctor,” says my husband, who is also Jewish.

  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 only known him for 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 only talk for a long time 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 t
hat 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.