Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

On the far side of the dump, fires were blazing. The flames were barely visible in the sunlight. The meadows beyond trembled in the heat.

I telephoned the police and reported his murder. I hung up when they asked my name.

Often I think that his idea of what we should do is wrong, and my idea is right. Yet I know that he has often been right before, when I was wrong. And so I let him make his wrong decision, telling myself, though I can’t believe it, that his wrong decision may actually be right. And then later it turns out, as it often has before, that his decision was the right one, after all. Or, rather, his decision was still wrong, but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while it was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.

One day when the Tanuk men were away from their village hunting, an entire village of Tunit men came to their igloos and raped their women to satisfy an old grudge. When the Tanuk men returned and saw the traces of blood and tears, they vowed to take revenge for this insult and immediately left for the village of the Tunit, several days’ journey away over the thick coastal ice. They knew they would find the Tunit men sleeping as only men can sleep who have raped and traveled several days through the bitter winds of midwinter. Yet when they arrived in the Tunit village and crept through the passageways into the Tunit igloos, they found them cold and empty. They hacked off pieces of frozen meat from Tunit seal carcasses and chewed them as they deliberated upon their next move.

But in the absence of the Tanuk men, as the Tanuk women slowly recovered their calm, the Tunit men came creeping into their camp again and down the passageways into their igloos. Again the Tunit men lay with the Tanuk women and vanished into the vast stretches of sunless, icebound land that lay beyond the circle of igloos. While this was happening, however, the Tunit women returned to their camp and found the Tanuk men dozing there in frustration. Too disheartened to rape the Tunit women in revenge, as they might have done, the Tanuk men left them in order to search for the Tunit men elsewhere.

As they started toward home, Nigerk, the south wind, filled the air with snow and made it difficult for them to walk. They struggled on through the wall of dancing flakes, and suddenly before them they saw the shapes of men. They sprang with blood lust, thinking vengeance was within reach. Yet the shapes of men melted away at their touch and re-formed at a distance. Though the Tanuk men attacked them again and again, they could not harm them, for these were not the Tunit, as the Tanuk thought, but merely polar spirits.

Several days later, the Tanuk men reached their village and the igloos of their crazed wives and sisters. As their men had remained away, the women had been visited a third time by the Tunit and then, as though that were not injury enough, by the polar spirits as well, and they no longer recognized their own husbands and brothers. Their fear did not leave them until the sun rose in the spring. Only then, as the ice began to loosen its hold and the waters to reappear, did their eyes rest once again gently on their husbands and brothers.

These days I try to tell myself that what I feel is not very important. I’ve read this in several books now: what I feel is important but not the center of everything. Maybe I do see this, but I do not believe it deeply enough to act on it. I would like to believe it more deeply.

What a relief that would be. I wouldn’t have to think about what I felt all the time, and try to control it, with all its complications and all its consequences. I wouldn’t have to try to feel better all the time. In fact, if I didn’t believe what I felt was so important, I probably wouldn’t even feel so bad, and it wouldn’t be so hard to feel better. I wouldn’t have to say, Oh, I feel so awful, this is like the end for me here, in this dark living room late at night, with the dark street outside under the streetlights, I am so very alone, everyone else in the house asleep, there is no comfort anywhere, just me alone down here, I will never calm myself enough to sleep, never sleep, never be able to go on to the next day, I can’t possibly go on, I can’t live, even through the next minute.

If I believed that what I felt was not the center of everything, then it wouldn’t be, but just one of many things, off to the side, and I would be able to see and pay attention to other things that were equally important, and in this way I would have some relief.

But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it. So I still act as though my feelings were the center of everything, and they still cause me to end up alone by the living-room window late at night. What is different, now, is that I have this idea: I have the idea that soon I will no longer believe my feelings are the center of everything. This is a real comfort to me, because if you despair of going on, but at the same time tell yourself that your despair may not be very important, then either you stop despairing or you still despair but at the same time begin to see how your despair, too, might move off to the side, one of many things.

They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a valuable ring, one a valuable button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am.

I happened to write to my friend Mitch telling him what my life here was like and what I did all day. I told him that among other things I watched the Mary Tyler Moore Show every afternoon. I knew that he, unlike some people, would understand this. I have just gotten a letter back from him saying that I am not the only person he knows who watches it.

Mitch has a lot of odd pieces of information about people, both famous people and ordinary people. He is always reading books and newspapers, he has a very good memory and a lot of curiosity, and he is always talking to people, both friends and strangers. If he talks to a stranger, he likes to know where that person went to high school. If he talks to a friend, he often asks what that person had for lunch or dinner. He once told me that he tried to remember everything he learned from a conversation with a stranger in order to use it to begin or develop a conversation with another stranger. How suddenly talkative a stranger would become when he found that Mitch already knew a good deal about the politics of Buffalo, New York, for instance. He told me this as we were standing in front of an expensive boutique with a sidewalk display of purses on a busy avenue in the city. We were surrounded by strangers and he had just had a conversation with the man selling the purses.

At this time, which was a few years ago, before he and I both moved out of the city, he used to call me on the phone regularly and talk to me for as long as an hour if I was able to talk that long. I usually told him at some point in the conversation that I couldn’t go on talking because I had to get back to work, and for that he would become annoyed with me. He wasn’t working himself and spent a lot of time in his apartment reading, thinking, playing with his dog, and calling the few friends he stayed in touch with. I never saw his apartment. He told me it was filled with old paperback mysteries. He also borrowed books on a variety of subjects from the public library. He was the only person I knew, at that time, who used the public library. When he asked me what I had had for lunch or dinner, I was always surprised, but also pleased to tell him, probably because no one else was interested in what I had had for lunch or dinner.