The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (5 page)

Mr. Burdoff comes to Germany. Lives in a rooming house from which he can see construction. Looks forward to lunch. Eats well every day and gains weight. Goes to class, to museums, and to beer gardens. Likes to listen to a string quartet in the open air, his arms on the metal tabletop and gravel under his feet. Daydreams about women. Falls in love with Helen. A difficult and uncomfortable love. Growing familiarity. Helen reveals her love of Wagnerian opera. Mr. Burdoff unfortunately prefers Scarlatti. The Mystery of Helen’s Mind.

Helen’s child falls ill and she goes home to Norway to nurse him. She is not sure she won’t continue her marriage. Mr. Burdoff writes to her at least once every day. Will she be able to return before he leaves for America? The letters she writes back are very brief. Mr. Burdoff criticizes her letters. She writes less frequently and communicates nothing Mr. Burdoff wants to hear. Mr. Burdoff, finished with his course of study, prepares to leave for America. Alone on his way to Paris, he looks out the train window, feels weak, incapable. Helen sits by her sleeping child, gazes toward the bedroom window, thinks of Mr. Burdoff. Is moved to remember earlier lovers, and their cars.

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Last night Mildred, my neighbor on the floor below, masturbated with an oboe. The oboe wheezed and squealed in her vagina. Mildred groaned. Later, when I thought she was finished, she started screaming. I lay in bed with a book about India. I could feel her pleasure pass up through the floorboards into my room. Of course there might have been another explanation for what I heard. Perhaps it was not the oboe but the player of the oboe who was penetrating Mildred. Or perhaps Mildred was striking her small nervous dog with something slim and musical, like an oboe.

Mildred who screams lives below me. Three young women from Connecticut live above me. Then there is a lady pianist with two daughters on the parlor floor and some lesbians in the basement. I am a sober person, a mother, and I like to go to bed early—but how can I lead a regular life in this building? It is a circus of vaginas leaping and prancing: thirteen vaginas and only one penis, my little son.

First a poet writes a story about a mouse, in moonlight in the snow, how the mouse tries to hide in his shadow, how the mouse climbs up his sleeve and he shakes it down into the snow before he knows what it is that is clinging to his sleeve. His cat is nearby and her shadow is on the snow, and she is after the mouse. A woman is then reading this story in the bath. Half her hair is dry and half of it is floating in the bathwater. She likes the story.

That night she can’t sleep and goes into the kitchen to read another book by the same poet. She sits on a stool by the counter. It is late and the night is quiet, though now and then at some distance a train passes and hoots before a crossing. To her surprise, though she knows it lives there, a mouse comes out of a burner from under a pot and sniffs the air. Its feet are like little thorns, its ears are unexpectedly large, one eye is shut and the other open. It nibbles something off the tray of the burner. She moves and it flashes back in, she is still and in a moment it comes out again, and when she moves again it flashes back into the stove like a snapped elastic. At four in the morning, though she is still wide awake, reading and sometimes watching the mouse, the woman closes her book and goes back to bed.

In the morning a man sits in the kitchen on a stool, the same stool, by the counter, and cradles their young cat in his arms, holding her neck in his broad pink hands and rubbing the crown of her head with his thumbs, and behind him the woman stands leaning against his back, her breasts flattened against his shoulder blades, her hands closed over his chest, and they have laid out crusts of bread on the counter for the mouse to smell and are waiting for the mouse to come out, blindly, and for the young cat to get it.

They stay this way wrapped in nearly complete silence, and they are nearly motionless, only the man’s gentle thumbs move over the cat’s skull and the woman sometimes lays her cheek down against the man’s fragrant soft hair and then lifts it again and the cat’s eyes are shifting quickly from point to point. A motor starts up in the kitchen, there is the sudden flare of the gas water heater, the swift passage of some cars on the highway below, and then a single voice in the road. But the mouse knows the company that is there and won’t come out. The cat is too hungry to keep still and reaches forth one paw and then another and frees herself from the man’s light hold and climbs up on the counter to eat the bread herself.

Often, whenever she can get into the house or is let into the house, the cat crouches sleepily on the counter by the stove, her eyes pointed at the burner where the mouse is likely to appear, but she is not more vigilant than that, half asleep, as though she likes just to place herself in this situation, hunting the mouse but perfectly motionless. Really she is keeping the mouse company, the mouse vigilant or sleeping inside the stove, the cat nearby outside. The mouse has had babies, in the stove, and the cat, too, is carrying kittens in her body, and her nipples are beginning to stand out in the downy fur of her belly.

The woman often looks at the cat and sometimes remembers another story.

The woman and her husband lived in the country in a large empty house. The rooms in this house were so large that the furniture sank into the empty spaces. There were no rugs and the curtains were thin, the windowpanes cold in the winter, and the daylight and the electric lights at night were cold and white, and lit the bare floor and the bare walls but did not change the darkness of the rooms.

On two sides of the house, beyond the yard, were stands of trees. One woods was deep and thick and climbed away up over a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a marshy pond in the trees where the water had been caught by the railroad embankment. The tracks and ties were gone from the embankment, and the mound of it was overgrown with saplings. The other stand of trees was thin and bordered a meadow, and deer crossed through to sleep in the meadow. In the winter the woman could see their tracks in the snow and follow where they leaped in from the road. When the weather grew cold the mice would start coming into the house from the woods and the meadow, and run through the walls and fight and squeak behind the baseboards. The woman and her husband were not troubled by the mice, except for the little black droppings everywhere, but they had heard that mice would sometimes chew through the wires in the walls and start fires, so they decided to try and get rid of them.

The woman bought some traps at the hardware store, made of bright brassy coils of metal and new raw wood printed with red letters. The man at the hardware store showed her how to set them. It was easy to get hurt because the springs were very strong and tight. The woman had to be the one to set them because she was always the one who did things like that. In the evening before they went to bed, she set one carefully, afraid of snapping her fingers, and put it down in a place where she and he would not be likely to walk on it when they came into the kitchen in the morning forgetting it was there.

They went to bed and the woman stayed awake reading. She would read until the man woke up enough to complain about the light. He was often angry about something and when she read at night it was the light. Later in the night she was still awake and heard the sound like a gunshot of the trap springing but did not go downstairs because the house was cold.

In the morning she went into the kitchen and saw that the trap had flipped over and there was a mouse in it and blood smeared around on the pink linoleum. She thought the mouse was dead, but when she moved the trap with her foot she saw that it was not. It started flipping around on the linoleum with the trap closed on its head. Her husband came in then and neither of them knew what to do about this half-dead mouse. They thought that the best thing would be to kill it with a hammer or some other heavy thing but if one of them was going to do it, it would be her and she did not have the stomach for it. Bending over the mouse she felt sick and agitated with the fear of something dead or nearly dead or mutilated. Both of them were excited and kept staring at it and turning away from it and walking around the room. The day was cloudy with more snow coming and the light in the kitchen was white and cast no shadows.

Finally the woman decided just to throw it outside, get it out of there, and it would die in the cold. She took a dustpan and pushed it under the trap and the mouse and walked quickly with it out the wooden door to the porch and through the porch and out the storm door and down the steps, afraid all the time that it would jump again and slip off the dustpan. She walked down the pitted concrete walk and across the driveway to the edge of the woods and threw the trap and the mouse out onto the frozen crust of snow. She tried to believe the mouse didn’t feel much pain and was in shock anyway; certainly a mouse did not feel exactly the way a person would lying with his head closed in a trap, bleeding and freezing to death out there on the white crust of snow. She could not be sure. Then she wondered if there was any animal that might come along and be willing to eat a mouse that was already dead but preserved by the frost.

They did not look for the trap later. In midwinter the man left and the woman lived on in the house alone. Then she moved to the city and the house was rented to a schoolteacher and his wife and a year later sold to a lawyer from the city. The last time the woman walked through it the rooms were still empty and dark, and the furniture set against the bare walls, though it was different furniture, had the same look of defeat under the weight of that emptiness.

Her lover lies next to her and since she has brought it up he asks her when it ended. She tells him it ended about a year ago and then she can’t say any more. He waits and then asks how it ended, and she tells him it ended stormily. He says carefully that he wants to know about it, and everything about her life, but that he doesn’t want her to talk about it if she doesn’t want to. She turns her face a little away from him so that the lamplight is shining on her closed eyes. She thought she wanted to tell him, but now she can’t and she feels tears under her eyelids. She is surprised because this is the second time today that she has cried and she hasn’t cried for weeks.

She can’t say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn’t been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman. Now and then she has heard news. Someone gets a letter from him, and the news is that he is nearly out of his financial troubles and is thinking of starting a magazine. Before that, someone else has news that he lives downtown with this woman he later marries. They have no telephone, because they owe the telephone company so much money. The telephone company, in those days, calls her from time to time and asks her politely where he is. A friend tells her he works nights at the docks packing sea urchins and comes home at four in the morning. Then this same friend tells her how he has offered something to a lonely woman in exchange for a large amount of money that makes the woman feel very insulted and unhappy.

Before that, when he still worked nearby, she would drive over to see him and argue with him at the gas station, where he read Faulkner in the office under the fluorescent lights, and he would look up with his eyes full of wariness when he saw her come in. They would argue between customers, and when he was filling a car she would think what she could say next. Later, after she stopped going there, she would walk through the town looking for his car. Once, in the rain, a van turned a corner suddenly at her and she stumbled over her boots into a ditch and then she saw herself clearly: a woman in early middle age wearing rubber boots walking in the dark looking for a white car and now falling into a ditch, prepared to go on walking and to be satisfied with the sight of the man’s car in a parking lot even if the man was somewhere else and with another woman. That night she walked around and around the town for a long time, checking the same places over and over again, thinking that during the fifteen minutes it had taken her to walk from one end of the town to the other he might have driven up to the spot she had left fifteen minutes before, but she did not find the car.

The car is an old white Volvo; it has a beautiful soft shape. She sees other old Volvos nearly every day, and some are tan or cream-colored—close to the color of his—and some are his color, white, but undented and unrusted. The license plates never have a
K
in them, and the drivers, always in silhouette, are either women or men with glasses or men with heads that are smaller than his.

That spring she was translating a book because it was the only thing she could do. Every time she stopped typing and picked up the dictionary his face floated up between her and the page and the pain settled into her again, and every time she put the dictionary down and went on typing his face and the pain went away. She did a lot of hard work on the translation just to keep the pain away.