The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (3 page)

Her son came and laid out three large gray shells on her thigh, and the visitor, sitting close to her on another hard chair, reached over to take up the middle one and look at it—an oval cowrie, with white lips.

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

Her son out on the terrace is dropping a brick over and over again on a plastic gun, breaking it into sharp pieces. The television is on in a room behind a closed door. Another woman comes out with her hair wet and a towel wrapped around her saying suddenly and loudly to him, That’s bad, stop it. Her son stands holding the brick, with fear on his face. She says, I was beginning to meditate and I thought the house was falling down. The pieces of red plastic shine on the painted clay around his feet.

How it works: Sometimes there is a thought that becomes a dream (she is laying out a long sentence and then she is out on Fourteenth Street laying out a long piece of black curb) and the mind says, But wait, this isn’t true, you’re beginning to dream, and she wakes up to think about thinking and dreaming. Sometimes she has lain awake a long time and the stroke of sleep comes down finally and softens every part of her body at once; then her mind notices and wakes because it is interested in how sleep comes so suddenly. Sometimes her mind won’t stop working in the first place and won’t stop for hours and she gets up to make a warm drink and then it is not the warm drink that helps but the fact that action has been taken. Sometimes sleep comes easily, but almost right away (she has been sleeping ten minutes or so) a loud noise or a soft but offensive noise wakes her and her heart races. First there is only inarticulate anger, then her mind begins working again.

•

Coughing, her head up on three pillows, warm tea beside her; or on another night a limp, melting rag of wet kleenex across her forehead.

She slept by her son on the beach; they lay parallel to the line of water. The water lapped up in sheets over the sand and drained off. People moved, took positions nearby, walked past, and the sound of the ocean was enough of a silence so that the two slept peacefully, the lowering sun on the boy’s face, grains of sand on his neck, an ant running over his cheek (he shuddered, his hand unclenched and then clenched again), her cheek in the soft grayish sand, her glasses and her hat on the sand.

Then there was the slow uphill walk home, and later they went into a dark bar to have dinner (her son nearly asleep bowing over the polished wood) and because of the dark, the crush, the noise, the violent noise, so that they seemed to be swallowing some of all the noise and darkness with their food, she was dizzy and confused when they walked out into the light and the silence of the street.

She is lying in the dark going through some complex turns to get to the point where she can sleep. It is always hard to sleep. Even on nights when it will turn out not to have been hard she expects it to be hard and is ready for it, so that maybe it might as well have been hard.

That night long ago there was nothing more to be done. She lay in a room crying. She lay on her left side with her eyes on the dark window. She was eight or nine, or so. Her left cheek on a soft old pillowcase covering a small old pillow with the smell in it still of old people. Near her, perhaps over against her, under her right arm, her stuffed elephant, nap worn off, trunk creased this way and that. Or more probably tonight, pillow tossed aside, elephant tossed aside, perhaps she has been lying on her right cheek staring at the light that runs under the door and shines on her floorboards, putting a hand down into the draft flowing across the floor; it has been a night of hoping the door will open again, there will be a relenting somewhere, the light will flood in from the hall, white, and against the white light a black figure come in. When the mother is gone at night she is gone very far away, though on the other side of the door, and when she opens the door and comes in, she comes directly to the child and stands at a great height above the child, light on half her face. But tonight the child has not been watching the door, she has her face to the dark window and she has begun crying hopelessly. Someone is angry; she has done some final thing for which there is no forgiveness tonight. No one will come in, and she can’t go out. The finality of it terrifies her. It is a feeling close to a feeling she will die of it. Then he comes in, almost of his own accord, though he is not real, she has invented him, he comes in for the first time standing there above her right shoulder, small, soft, self-effacing, something come to tell her she will be all right, come into being at the limit, at the moment when there was nothing ahead but darkness.

She was thinking how it was the unfinished business. This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over. Everything was still going on. The business not only not finished but maybe not done well enough.

Outside, a mockingbird sang, changing the song often, every quarter minute or so, as though trying parts of it. She heard him every night, but was not reminded every night but only now and then of a nightingale, which also sings in the dark.

The mockingbird sang, and behind it was the sound of the ocean, sometimes a steady hum, sometimes a sharp clap when a larger wave collapsed on the sand, not every night but when the tide was high at the time when she lay awake in the dark. She thought that if there was a way she could force a kind of peace into herself, then she would sleep, and she tried drawing up this peace into herself, as though it were a kind of fluid, and this worked, though not for long. The peace, when it began to fill her, seemed to come from her spine, the lower part of her spine. But it would not stay in her unless she kept it drawn in there and she could not go on with that for long.

Then she says to herself, Where is there some help in this? And the figure returns, to her surprise, standing above her right shoulder; he is not so small, not so plump, not so modest anymore (years have gone by) but full of a gloomy confidence; he could tell her, though he does not, but his presence tells her, that all is well and she is good, and she has done her best though others may not think so—and these others too are somewhere in the house, in a room somewhere down the hall, standing in a close line, or two lines, with proud, white, and angry faces.

He’s sitting there staring at a piece of paper in front of him. He’s trying to break it down. He says:

I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that would be anywhere from $33 to $50 an hour, which is expensive.

Though of course that wasn’t all that went on, because we were together almost all day long. She would keep looking at me and every time she looked at me it was worth something, and she smiled at me and didn’t stop talking and singing, something I said, she would sail into it, a snatch, for me, she would be gone from me a little ways but smiling too, and tell me jokes, and I loved it but didn’t exactly know what to do about it and just smiled back at her and felt slow next to her, just not quick enough. So she talked and touched me on the shoulder and the arm, she kept touching and stayed close to me. You’re with each other all day long and it keeps happening, the touches and smiles, and it adds up, it builds up, and you know where you’ll be that night, you’re talking and every now and then you think about it, no, you don’t think, you just feel it as a kind of destination, what’s coming up after you leave wherever you are all evening, and you’re happy about it and you’re planning it all, not in your head, really, somewhere inside your body, or all through your body, it’s all mounting up and coming together so that when you get in bed you can’t help it, it’s a real performance, it all pours out, but slowly, you go easy until you can’t anymore, or you hold back the whole time, you hold back and touch the edges of everything, you edge around until you have to plunge in and finish it off, and when you’re finished, you’re too weak to stand but after a while you have to go to the bathroom and you stand, your legs are trembling, you hold on to the door frames, there’s a little light coming in through the window, you can see your way in and out, but you can’t really see the bed.

So it’s not really $100 a shot because it goes on all day, from the start when you wake up and feel her body next to you, and you don’t miss a thing, not a thing of what’s next to you, her arm, her leg, her shoulder, her face, that good skin, I have felt other good skin, but this skin is just the edge of something else, and you’re going to start going, and no matter how much you crawl all over each other it won’t be enough, and when your hunger dies down a little then you think how much you love her and that starts you off again, and her face, you look over at her face and can’t believe how you got there and how lucky and it’s still all a surprise and it never stops, even after it’s over, it never stops being a surprise.

It’s more like you have a good sixteen or eighteen hours a day of this going on, even when you’re not with her it’s going on, it’s good to be away because it’s going to be so good to go back to her, so it’s still here, and you can’t go off and look at some old street or some old painting without still feeling it in your body and a few things that happened the day before that don’t mean much by themselves or wouldn’t mean much if you weren’t having this thing together, but you can’t forget and it’s all inside you all the time, so that’s more like, say, sixteen into a hundred would be $6 an hour, which isn’t too much.

And then it really keeps going on while you’re asleep, though you’re probably dreaming about something else, a building, maybe, I kept dreaming, every night, almost, about this building, because I would spend a lot of every morning in this old stone building and when I closed my eyes I would see these cool spaces and have this peace inside me, I would see the bricks of the floor and the stone arches and the space, the emptiness between, like a kind of dark frame around what I could see beyond, a garden, and this space was like stone too because of the coolness of it and the gray shadow, that kind of luminous shade, that was glowing with the light of the sun falling beyond the arches, and there was also the great height of the ceiling, all this was in my mind all the time though I didn’t know it until I closed my eyes, I’m asleep and I’m not dreaming about her but she’s lying next to me and I wake up enough times in the night to remember she’s there, and notice, say, once she was lying on her back but now she’s curled around me, I look at her closed eyes, I want to kiss her eyelids, I want to feel that soft skin under my lips, but I don’t want to disturb her, I don’t want to see her frown as though in her sleep she has forgotten who I am and feels just that something is bothering her and so I just look at her and hold on to it all, these times when I’m watching over her sleep and she’s next to me and isn’t away from me the way she will be later, I want to stay awake all night just to go on feeling that, but I can’t, I fall asleep again, though I’m sleeping lightly, still trying to hold on to it.

But it isn’t over when it ends, it goes on after it’s all over, she’s still inside you like a sweet liquor, you are filled with her, everything about her has kind of bled into you, her smell, her voice, the way her body moves, it’s all inside you, at least for a while after, then you begin to lose it, and I’m beginning to lose it, you’re afraid of how weak you are, that you can’t get her all back into you again and now the whole thing is going out of your body and it’s more in your mind than your body, the pictures come to you one by one and you look at them, some of them last longer than others, you were together in a very white clean place, a coffeehouse, having breakfast together, and the place is so white that against it you can see her clearly, her blue eyes, her smile, the colors of her clothes, even the print of the newspaper she’s reading when she’s not looking up at you, the light brown and red and gold of her hair when she’s got her head down reading, the brown coffee, the brown rolls, all against that white table and those white plates and silver urns and silver knives and spoons, and against that quiet of the sleepy people in that room sitting alone at their tables with just some chinking and clattering of spoons and cups in saucers and some hushed voices her voice now and then rising and falling. The pictures come to you and you have to hope they won’t lose their life too fast and dry up though you know they will and that you’ll also forget some of what happened, because already you’re turning up little things that you nearly forgot.

We were in bed and she asked me, Do I seem fat to you? and I was surprised because she didn’t seem to worry about herself at all in that way and I guess I was reading into it that she did worry about herself so I answered what I was thinking and said stupidly that she had a very beautiful body, that her body was perfect, and I really meant it as an answer, but she said kind of sharply, That’s not what I asked, and so I had to try to answer her again, exactly what she had asked.

And once she lay over against me late in the night and she started talking, her breath in my ear, and she just went on and on, and talked faster and faster, she couldn’t stop, and I loved it, I just felt that all that life in her was running into me too, I had so little life in me, her life, her fire, was coming into me, in that hot breath in my ear, and I just wanted her to go on talking forever right there next to me, and I would go on living, like that, I would be able to go on living, but without her I don’t know.

Then you forget some of it all, maybe most of it all, almost all of it, in the end, and you work hard at remembering everything now so you won’t ever forget, but you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can’t help thinking about it nearly all the time.