The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (42 page)

He was a little man with a red mustache and glasses who wore his flannel shirts tucked into his blue jeans and smelled of deodorant when he became excited. He never walked slowly and he was in and out of the toilet faster than anyone else: no sooner had the door shut behind him than we would hear the thunderous flush from the tank overhead and he would spring out the door again. For much of the week he talked to his employees with good humor, though not to us, the typesetters, and tolerated the caricatures of his face posted all over the room and the remarks about him written on the toilet wall. On press day, however, and when things were going badly at the paper, his sense of catastrophe would drive him to turn on us one by one and dress us down publicly in a way that was humiliating and surrounded by silence. What made this treatment especially hard to accept was that our pay was low and our paychecks bounced regularly. The accountant upstairs could not keep track of where the newspaper’s money was, and she added on her fingers.

Alvin received the worst of it and hardly defended himself at all: “I thought you said … I thought they told me to … I thought I was supposed to …” Any answer he made provoked another outburst from the boss, until Alvin retired in silence. I was embarrassed by his lack of pride. He was afraid of losing his job. But after Christmas his attitude changed.

Over the holidays, Alvin and I both performed. I played the violin in a concert of excerpts from
The Messiah.
Alvin’s performance was to be an entire evening of monologues and songs at a local club run by a friend. Before the event Alvin handed out a Xeroxed flyer with crooked lettering and a picture of himself wearing a beret. In his text he called himself “the widely acclaimed.” The tickets were five dollars. Our newspaper ran an ad for his performance and everyone who worked with us there showed great interest in the event, though when the evening came, no one from the newspaper actually went to see him.

When Alvin came in to work on the Friday following his performance, he was the center of attention for a few minutes and an aura of celebrity floated around him. But Alvin told a sad tale. There were only five people in the audience at his performance. Four were fellow comedians, and the fifth was Alvin’s friend Ira, who talked throughout his monologues.

Alvin was eloquent about his failure. He described the room, his friend the owner, his friend Ira. He talked for five minutes. The boss, who had been listening with the others, grew restless and distracted and told Alvin there was work waiting for him. Alvin raised a hand in concession and went into the typesetting room. The production people returned to their stools and bent over their pages. Our machines began rumbling. The boss hurried upstairs.

Then Alvin stopped typing. His pupils were dilated and he looked particularly remote. He stood up and walked out. He said to the production room at large: “Listen: I have work to do. But I haven’t started yet. I would like to perform for you first.”

Most of the production people smiled because they liked Alvin.

“Now I’m going to impersonate a chicken,” he said.

He climbed up on a stool and started flapping his arms and clucking. The room was quiet. The production people perched on their long-legged stools like a flock of resting egrets and stared at this bald chicken. When there was no applause, Alvin shrugged and climbed down and said, “Now I’m going to impersonate a duck,” and waddled across the room with his knees bent and toes turned in. The production people glanced around the room at one another. Their looks darted and hopped like sparrows. They gave Alvin a spattering of applause. Then he said, “Now I’m going to do a pigeon.” He shook his shoulders and jerked his head forward and back as he strutted in the circular patterns of a courting pigeon. He managed to convey something of the ostentation of a male pigeon. Abruptly he stopped and said to his audience, “Well, don’t you have any work to do? What are you sitting around for? All this should have been done yesterday!” The little hair he had was poking straight out from his head as though he were full of electricity. He swallowed his saliva. “That’s all we are,” he said. “A bunch of dumb birds.”

The smiles faded from the faces of his audience. The weariness of that leafless late December, our fear of our weakened government, our dread of its repressive spirit, descended on us once again.

Into the abrupt silence came the chiming of a church bell across the street. The production manager by reflex checked his watch. Alvin’s body sagged. He turned and walked into our tiny room. The back of his head had its own expression of defeat.

For a moment everyone stared at him in amazement. He sat slumped over his machine, solitary, flooded by fluorescent light, exhausted by his performance. He had not been very funny, in fact he was a poor actor, and yet something about his act had been impressive: his grim determination, the violence of his feelings. One by one the production people went back to work: paper rustled, scissors clattered on the stone tabletop, murmurs passed back and forth over the sound of the radio. I sat down at my machine and Alvin looked up at me from under his heavy lids. His look carried all the hurt, the humiliation, the mockery of the past few months. He said without smiling, “They think I’m nothing. They can think what they like. I have my plans.”

We know we are very special. Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?

The useful thing about being a selfish person is that when your children get hurt you don’t mind so much because you yourself are all right. But it won’t work if you are just a little selfish. You must be very selfish. This is the way it happens. If you are just a little selfish, you take some trouble over them, you pay some attention to them, they have clean clothes most of the time, a fresh haircut fairly often, though not all the supplies they need for school, or not when they need them; you enjoy them, you laugh at their jokes, though you have little patience when they are naughty, they annoy you when you have work to do, and when they are very naughty you become very angry; you understand some of what they should have, in their lives, you know some of what they are doing, with their friends, you ask questions, though not very many, and not beyond a certain point, because there is so little time; then the trouble begins and you don’t notice signs of it because you are so busy: they steal, and you wonder how that thing came into the house; they show you what they have stolen, and when you ask questions, they lie; when they lie, you believe them, every time, because they seem so candid and it would take so long to find out the truth. Well, if you have been selfish, this is what sometimes happens, and if you have not been selfish enough, then later, when they are in serious trouble, you will suffer, though even as you suffer you will continue, from long habit, to be selfish, saying, I am so distraught, My life has ended, How can I go on? So if you are going to be selfish at all, you must be more selfish than that, so selfish that although you are sorry they’re in trouble, sincerely and deeply sorry, as you will tell your friends and acquaintances and the rest of the family, you will be privately relieved, glad, even delighted, that it isn’t happening to you.

My husband and I are Siamese twins. We are joined at the forehead. Our mother feeds us. When we are moved to copulate we join lower down as well forming a loop like a certain espaliered tree. Time passes. I separate from my husband below and give birth to twins who are not joined together as we are. They squirm on the ground. Our mother cares for them. They are most often asymmetrical with each other, even in sleep when they lie still. Awake, they stay near each other, as though elastic bands held them, and near us and near our mother. At night the bond is even stronger and we snap together and lie in a heap, my husband’s hard muscles against my soft muscles, against our mother’s stringy old muscles, and our babies’ feather muscles, our arms around one another like so many snakes, and distant thumping music in the fields behind us.

I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly.

Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child.

On the counter lay a pile of plastic packets of duck sauce, soy sauce, and mustard from their Chinese dinner. In her anger she was provoked by the smooth, slippery little bodies and slammed her fist down among them. Two or three exploded. She could not see through her tears. Her bathrobe cuff was drenched in mustard, and the next morning he discovered a spatter of soy sauce, or maybe duck sauce, over the ceiling, two windows, and one wall. She cleaned it off the windows, but it wouldn’t come off the ceiling, where it had stained through the white paint, and then when she was done trying to get it off she saw that the drops of detergent and water falling on the wood floor had spotted the finish.

A few days later, carrying the baby, she stepped into a hole in the dining-room floor in the old house where a plank had been removed because of termites. She bruised her arm badly, though the baby was not hurt. Then she stopped up the coffeemaker with coffee grounds so that it overflowed onto the counter and floor when it went on in the morning. She sprayed the side of her face with the spray attachment at the sink. She burned her hand feeding the wood stove. The baby rolled off the side of their bed and fell onto the floor. She took the baby out for a walk late in the afternoon when the temperature was below freezing, its face turned red, and it started screaming with pain. This was the holiday season.

They sat talking peacefully before dinner. He said she probably needed to get more sleep. She was waiting for the oven to heat, but had forgotten to turn it on.

At dinner, he pointed out that the soy sauce had also spotted the apples in the fruit bowl and the lamp over the dining table. He went on to remind her of the toilet seat she had broken. It was an expensive red Swedish toilet seat. The lid had slipped out of her hand and dropped, cracking the seat. He had immediately taken the whole thing off and replaced it with a green one.

He had also replaced the plastic sheeting over the door to the deck because it had shattered when she left the door open in the cold. Then for the second time she disengaged the connection of a wire over the bedroom door. As he stood on a chair fixing it, she asked him if she could hold the light for him, but he said No, just don’t slam the door anymore when you get mad.

The most recent thing was that she took a roll of photographs with no film in the camera, though this did not cost them any money or cause any damage, except for the baby’s weariness in its many poses and her regret for the lost pictures, so many of which she remembered clearly, the last being a shot of an oil barge with a tugboat coming up the creek through the first winter ice toward her where she stood at the window, beginning to realize there was no film in the camera.

Now that we are living out here in the country the only people we see are workingmen who come to do jobs for us. They are independent and self-reliant, and they start work early in the day and they work hard without stopping. Last week it was Bill Bray, to install the washing machine. Next week it will be Jay Knickerbocker, to tear off the front of the porch. Today it is Tom Tatt. Tom Tatt is supposed to come disconnect some wires for us. Where is he? Early in the morning we stand in the kitchen together. Where is Tom Tatt? We walk outdoors. Here in the early sunshine is Tom Tatt. He has already finished the job, and is snubbing the cut ends of wire with little black snubs.

Magin was over seventy and not well. His right leg was lame and his lungs were weak. If his wife had been alive, she would not have let him go. As it was, his friends had told him to stay at home and wait for his brother Michael to come back. Yet he had never listened to anyone but his wife, and now he did not listen to anyone.

He was close to Silit, if the maps of the Trsk Land Office were correct. He had walked since early morning, very slowly, and his feet were sore. Just at noon, he came within sight of the town. His brother’s postcard had been sent from here. Karsovy, therefore, should be only a few miles to the north.

He set down his bag on the snow and rubbed his cramped fingers. He looked up at Silit: the street was lined by narrow houses with shuttered windows. Many of the roofs had fallen in and tumbled over the doorsills. Down by the well at the end of the street, under a couple of pine trees, he saw two old women knitting on a bench. He picked up his bag and walked to them and they stopped knitting to stare at him.

Until he shouted his question, they did not understand him. Then one of them opened her mouth and pointed wordlessly across the street.

In the shadow of the eaves, a man sat combing his brown beard with a broken comb. His eyes were on Magin. A roofless car was parked in the lane beside him.

Magin crossed the street. “Can you take me to Karsovy?” he asked in Trsk. The man stopped moving.

“There’s no such place,” he said.

“There must be,” said Magin. He pulled out the creased postcard from his brother and started to thrust it at the man.

“There is not. You are mistaken.”

Magin dropped his bag and shook his fist in the man’s face, crumpling the postcard. He would not argue. “I am not mistaken,” he shouted. His voice broke.

The man was startled. “Well,” he said, spitting on his palm and rubbing his boot with it, “I don’t often go there.”

Magin was trembling with anger and the blood at his temples throbbed. “How much?” he asked.

“I’ll take fifty,” the man said. Magin drew a purse from his back pocket and laid two coins on the man’s palm.

Magin picked up his bag and followed the man to the car. The man pulled himself up into the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead. Magin hoisted his bag onto the backseat and climbed in beside it. When he sat down, the springs gave way so far that he came to rest on something that felt like an iron rod. He did not move.