Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

A short gust of wind, then calm, then the sea is dark gray and the rain comes down hard, and the wind blows against the awnings. My neighbor in the room above goes to his door, then begins walking around over my head.

To get to the beach from my room I go down the narrow boardwalk between two wooden buildings, mine and the motel next door. The two buildings lean together above me as I pass the windows of the motel apartments, waist high; at certain hours women are working in the kitchens, and there are snatches of conversations in the living rooms. These people seem louder and at the same time more stationary because they are idle and on vacation.

The different groups of people here: the year-round residents, who are sometimes artists and often shop owners; the tourists, who come in couples and families and are generally large, young, healthy, tanned, and polite; of these tourists, most are American, but some are French Canadian, and of these, some do not speak English; Portuguese fishermen, but they are harder to discover; some Portuguese who are not fishermen but whose fathers or grandfathers were fishermen; some fishermen who are not Portuguese.

I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine.

Fog comes in over the next hill, foghorns sound, now and then boats whistle. Waves of mist blow like curtains, or smoke.

The noises here at different times of day: At five a.m., when sunlight pours into this room, there is relative quiet that continues until after eight thirty. Then there is increasing noise from the street: after ten a.m., a gentle Central American music, constant, inoffensive plucking and pinging, as well as the sound of passing cars, voices in conversation, the clatter of silverware from an upstairs terrace restaurant across the street, car engines turning over in the parking lot to one side of my room, people calling out to each other, laughing and talking, and all of this then continues through the day and the evening and past midnight.

I will probably not think about the whale jawbones once I am home again. I have noticed that it is only when I am at the seaside, for one short period of the year, though not every year, that the things of the sea become interesting to me — the shells, the creatures, even the seaweed; the boats and how they are built and what their functions are; and nautical history, including the history of whaling. Then, when my visit is over, I go away and I don’t think about them.

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For two days I did not speak to anyone, except to ask for my mail at the post office and say hello to the friendly checkout woman at the small supermarket.

When the storm began today I heard the footsteps of the man who lives above me going across to the door that leads out to his deck, pausing there for a while, and coming away again. The ceiling is low, and the sound of these footsteps is a very loud crunch, so that I feel they are almost on my head. When he comes home, first I hear the clanging of the street gate, then his brisk steps down the concrete walk of the alley, then the hollow wooden clatter as he climbs the stairs inside the building, then the loud crunch over my head. Steps in one direction, steps in another, then steps crisscrossing over my ceiling. Then there is silence — he may be reading or lying down. I know he also paints and sculpts, and when I hear the radio going I think that is what he is doing.

He is a friendly man in late middle age with a loyal group of friends. I discovered this one of the first nights I was here. He had been away in the city for a few days celebrating his aunt’s hundredth birthday, as I heard him tell his friends, and was loudly welcomed back by a hoarse-voiced, middle-aged woman trailing a string of other people standing outside our building in the alley. They had come by to see if he was back. I know he is friendly because of a smile and greeting he gave me on his way into the building once, a greeting that lifted my spirits.

Sometimes there are loud thumps from above. At other times he seems to be standing still, and there is something a little mysterious and disturbing in the stillness, since I have trouble imagining what he is doing. Sometimes I hear just a few notes from a saxophone, the same notes repeated the same way a few times or just once before he stops and does not play again, as though something were wrong with the instrument.

There are two buildings on this property, one fronting the street and the other behind it, by the beach, with a small garden in between. My low, ground-floor room does not look out on the beach but on the damp garden. Each house is divided into apartments or rooms, maybe six in all. The landlady sells antique jewelry from a store in the building on the street. Most of the people who live in the buildings have seasonal work here and come to these rooms every summer. They are all quiet and sober, as the landlady made very clear before I moved in. She calls my room an apartment, even though it is just a room, as though there were something vulgar about the word room.

I was wrong about my neighbor upstairs. He is not the friendly man who once greeted me. He is barely polite. He has silver hair and a silver goatee and an unpleasant expression around his bulbous nose.

I was also wrong about the saxophone, which is not played by the man upstairs but by my neighbor across the patch of garden, a woman with a dog.

All week long I had heard people saying there would be a storm. I went out onto the beach, into its first fury, to see it hit the water. After I had stood for a while sheltering my face under my hand and watching the buildings on the piers in the distance vanish behind the curtains and sheets of rain, I went down to the water’s edge, where the wind was much stronger, to see more closely how the rain hit the water. A man in a yellow slicker was dragging a rowboat up onto the sand. The wind came in so hard that it lifted the rowboat and turned it over. It lifted and flung the sand against my legs, stinging them. I took shelter under the motel deck next door, which is up on stilts off the beach. On the deck over my head, plastic chairs were being slung around and tumbled into corners by the wind.

Now the rain is coming down steadily, and the streets, which were empty at the beginning of the storm, are filling with people again, and there is, again, a heavy fish smell in the air. I have hung my clothes to dry from nails in the beams and posts of my room, so that it is a forest of damp garments swaying in the gusts of wind from the door and the windows.

The essay is taking shape now. As the time passes here, time is passing in the travels of the French historian. I trace and describe his itinerary through this country; he progresses, I progress in the essay, and the days pass. I am coming to feel that he is more my companion, in this room, than the live people in this town. This morning, for instance, because in my imagination I had been traveling with him ever since dawn, I felt I was not here in this seaside town but in a damp river valley some hundreds of miles to the west of here. I was in the previous century. This morning, the historian was watching fireworks from a boat in the middle of a broad river. For him it was evening.

It is not an easy piece of writing. I understand the information in the sources I am using, but I have no general background knowledge to draw on. I am afraid it will be very easy for me to make a mistake.

From within the town I look out at the harbor and across the harbor to the sea beyond. The horizon is very far away. But that view itself, because it hardly changes, becomes a sort of confinement. The streets, too, teeming with people, seem always the same. I feel as though I were knocking up against myself at every turn. I am sometimes almost in a panic. That may be because I am also knocking up against the limits of what I can do with this work.