The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (18 page)

He kissed me a number of times there in his old maroon Ford with the radio on, so that I could have imagined I was a teenager again except that when I was a teenager I had never done anything like that. Then we got out of the car and went to the edge of the cliff to look down at the ocean, the black water of the bay, and the strings of lights that reached out into the water from the town where we had been playing pool. We sat down on the sand not far from the edge of the cliff and he told me a little more about how hard it had been with his wife, how he had tried to get back together with her, how he had done his best to charm her and she wouldn’t be charmed. He told me he had been alone with his little girl for six months now, and his wife was coming home in a few days to try living with him again, even though nothing he did had ever worked. He said he wouldn’t be able to see me again. I told him I wasn’t expecting that anyway, because I was leaving the West soon. It wasn’t quite true that I hadn’t expected to see him again, but it was true that I was leaving soon. Finally he took me home and kissed me good night.

As far as I could tell, I didn’t mind the way the date turned out, though I started crying the next day in my car on my way to the drive-in bank. I thought I was crying for him, his fears, his difficulties, the mysterious men he thought were after him and his daughter, but I was probably crying for myself, out of disappointment, though exactly what I wanted I’m not sure. Months later, after I was living in the East again, I called him long-distance one night after having a couple of beers by myself in my apartment, and when he answered there was noise in the background of people talking and laughing, either his family or a party, I can’t remember which, and he sounded just as pleased to hear from me, and flattered, as he had sounded when I asked him out on the date.

I still imagine marrying a cowboy, though less often, and the dream has changed a little. I’m so used to the companionship of my husband by now that if I were to marry a cowboy I would want to take him with me, though he would object strongly to any move in the direction of the West, which he dislikes. So if we went, it would not be as it was in my daydream a few years ago, with me cooking plain food or helping the cowboy with a difficult calf. It would end, or begin, with my husband and me standing awkwardly there in front of the ranch house, waiting while the cowboy prepared our rooms.

When our women had all turned into cedar trees they would group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind. At first, with our wives gone, our spirits rose and we all thought the sound was beautiful. But then we ceased to be aware of it, grew uneasy, and quarreled more often among ourselves.

That was during the year of high winds. Never before had such tumult raged in our village. Sparrows could not fly, but swerved and dropped into calm corners; clay tiles tumbled from the roofs and shattered on the pavement. Shrubbery whipped our low windows. Night after night we drank insanely and fell asleep in one another’s arms.

When spring came, the winds died down and the sun was bright. At evening, long shadows fell across our floors, and only the glint of a knife blade could survive the darkness. And the darkness fell across our spirits, too. We no longer had a kind word for anyone. We went to our fields grudgingly. Silently we stared at the strangers who came to see our fountain and our church: we leaned against the lip of the fountain, our boots crossed, our maimed dogs shying away from us.

Then the road fell into disrepair. No strangers came. Even the traveling priest no longer dared enter the village, though the sun blazed in the water of the fountain, the valley far below was white with flowering fruit and nut trees, and the heat seeped into the pink stones of the church at noon and ebbed out at dusk. Cats paced silently over the beaten dirt, from doorway to doorway. Birds sang in the woods behind us. We waited in vain for visitors, hunger gnawing at our stomachs.

At last, somewhere deep in the heart of the cedar trees, our wives stirred and thought of us. And lazily, it seemed to us, carelessly, returned home. We looked on their mean lips, their hard eyes, and our hearts melted. We drank in the sound of their harsh voices like men coming out of the desert.

The problem was the cats in the prison recreation hall. There were feces everywhere. The feces of a cat try to hide in a corner and when discovered look angry and ashamed like a monkey.

The cats stayed in the prison recreation hall when it rained, and since it rained often, the hall smelled bad and the prisoners grumbled. The smell did not come from the feces but from the animals themselves. It was a strong smell, a dizzying smell.

The cats could not be driven away. When shooed, they did not flee out the door but scattered in all directions, running low, their bellies hanging. Many went upward, leaping from beam to beam and resting somewhere high above, so that the prisoners playing Ping-Pong were aware that although the dome was silent, it was not empty.

The cats could not be driven away because they entered and left the hall through holes that could not be discovered. Their steps were silent; they could wait for a person longer than a person would wait for them.

A person has other concerns, but at each moment in its life, a cat has only one concern. This is what gives it such perfect balance, and this is why the spectacle of a confused or frightened cat upsets us: we feel both pity and the desire to laugh. It faces the source of danger or confusion and its only recourse is to spit a foul breath out between its mottled gums.

The prisoners were all small men that year. They had committed crimes that could not be taken very seriously and they were treated with leniency. Now, although small men are often inclined to take pride in their good health, these prisoners began to develop rashes and eczemas. The backs of their knees and the insides of their elbows stung and their skin flaked all over. They wrote angry letters to the governor of their state, who also happened to be a small man that year. The cats, they said, were causing reactions.

The governor took pity on the prisoners and asked the warden to take care of the problem.

The warden had not been inside the hall in years. He entered it and wandered around, sickened by the curious smell.

In the dead end of a corridor, he cornered an ugly tomcat. The warden was carrying a stick and the cat was armed only with its teeth and claws, besides its angry face. The warden and the cat dodged back and forth for a time, the warden struck out at the cat, and the cat streaked around him and away, making no false moves.

Now the warden saw cats everywhere.

After the evening activities, when the prisoners had been shut up in their cell blocks, the warden returned carrying a rifle. All night long, that night, the prisoners heard the sound of shots coming from the hall. The shots were muffled and seemed to come from a great distance, as though from across the river. The warden was a good shot and killed many cats—cats rained down on him from the dome, cats flipped over and over in the hallways—and yet he still saw shadows flitting by the basement windows as he left the building.

There was a difference now, however. The prisoners’ skin condition cleared. Though the bad smell still hung about the building, it was not warm and fresh as it had been. A few cats still lived there, but they had been disoriented by the odors of gunpowder and blood and by the sudden disappearance of their mates and kittens. They stopped breeding and skulked in corners, hissing even when no one was anywhere near them, attacking without provocation any moving thing.

These cats did not eat well and did not clean themselves carefully, and one by one, each in its own way and in its own time died, leaving behind it a different strong smell that hung in the air for a week or two and then dissipated. After some months, there were no cats left in the prison recreation hall. By then, the small prisoners had been succeeded by larger prisoners, and the warden had been replaced by another, more ambitious; only the governor remained in office.

Wife one calls to speak to son. Wife two answers with impatience, gives phone to son of wife one. Son has heard impatience in voice of wife two and tells mother he thought caller was father’s sister: raging aunt, constant caller, troublesome woman. Wife one wonders: is she herself perhaps another raging woman, constant caller? No, raging woman but not constant caller. Though, for wife two, also troublesome woman.

After speaking to son, much disturbance in wife one. Wife one misses son, thinks how some years ago she, too, answered phone and talked to husband’s raging sister, constant caller, protecting husband from troublesome woman. Now wife two protects husband from troublesome sister, constant caller, and also from wife one, raging woman. Wife one sees this and imagines future wife three protecting husband not only from raging wife one but also from troublesome wife two, as well as constantly calling sister.

After speaking to son, wife one, often raging though now quiet woman, eats dinner alone though in company of large television. Wife one swallows food, swallows pain, swallows food again. Watches intently ad about easy-to-clean stove: mother who is not real mother flips fried egg onto hot burner, then fries second egg and gives cheerful young son who is not real son loving kiss as spaniel who is not real family dog steals second fried egg off plate of son who is not real son. Pain increases in wife one, wife one swallows food, swallows pain, swallows food again, swallows pain again, swallows food again.

I stare at four fish in a tank in the supermarket. They are swimming in parallel formation against a small current created by a jet of water, and they are opening and closing their mouths and staring off into the distance with the one eye, each, that I can see. As I watch them through the glass, thinking how fresh they would be to eat, still alive now, and calculating whether I might buy one to cook for dinner, I also see, as though behind or through them, a larger, shadowy form darkening their tank, what there is of me on the glass, their predator.

A woman has written a story that has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting. But in this story the hurricane threatens the city without actually striking it. The story is flat and even, just as the earth seems flat and even when a hurricane is advancing over it, and if she were to show it to a friend, the friend would probably say that, unlike a hurricane, this story has no center.

It was not an easy story to write, because it was about religion, and religion was not something she really wanted to write about. Something, though, made her want to write this story. Now that it is finished, it puzzles her, and there is a peculiar yellow pall over it, either because of the religion or because of the light in the sky before the hurricane.

She can’t think where the center of the story might be.

She was reading the Bible in a time of hurricane, not because she was afraid of a major disaster, though she was afraid, or because these days also happened to be the High Holy Days, but because she needed to know exactly what was in it. She read slowly and took many notes. Outside her apartment, the weather was changing: the wind rose, the branches swayed on the young trees, and the leaves fluttered. She read about Noah and the Ark and tried to picture very exactly what she read, the better to understand it: a man hundreds of years old trying to walk and give directions to his family, the mud covering the earth after the flood receded, the stink of rot, and then the sacrifice of animals and the stink of burning hair, fur, and horn.

She did little else but read the Bible for several days, and she looked out the window often and listened to the news. Certainly the Bible and the hurricane belong in the story, though whether at the center or not she does not know. She had started the story with her landlady. Her landlady, an old woman from Trinidad, was alone in the downstairs hall talking quietly about the mayor, while she was upstairs, thinking of writing a letter to the president. Her landlady said the red carpet remnant on the hall floor was given to her by her friend the mayor. She will probably take out the president and the landlady, but leave in the Bible and the hurricane. Perhaps if she takes out things that are not interesting, or do not belong in the story for other reasons, this will give it more of a center, since as soon as there is less in a story, more of it must be in the center.

In another part of the story, a man is very ill and thinks he is dying. He was not dying, he had eaten something that poisoned him and drunk too much on top of it, but he thought he was dying, and telephoned her to come help him. This was at the very moment the hurricane was supposed to strike the city, and some of the windows in the neighborhoods between her house and his were covered with tape in the shape of asterisks. In his room, the blinds were drawn, the light was yellow, and the windows rattled. He lay on his back in bed with a hand on his bare chest. His face was gray.

It is unclear what his place is, in the story. Certainly his illness has little connection with the rest of the story except that it overcame him at the height of the hurricane. But then he also told her something on the phone about blasphemy. He had recently blasphemed in a dreadful way, he said, by committing a certain forbidden act on a Holy Day. What he realized as he did it, he said, was that for complicated reasons he was trying to hurt God, and if he was trying to hurt God he must believe in Him. He had experienced the truth of what he had been taught long ago, that blasphemy proved one’s belief in God.

This man, his illness, his fear for his life, and the blasphemy that had caused his illness, as he probably thought, and also something else he said about God that she remembered later, riding a train out of the city, could be at the center of the story, with the Bible and the hurricane at the edge of it, but there may not be enough to tell about him for him to be the center, or this may be the wrong time to tell it.