Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

She may not even want to come anymore, not because she is fickle, but because she is exhausted, which is understandable. If she does not come it would be wrong to say I will miss her, because she is always so present in my imagination. Yet she will be at a different address and I will be sitting at the kitchen table with my face in my hands.

If she comes, I will smile and smile, I have inherited this from an old aunt of mine who also used to smile incessantly, but both of us out of embarrassment rather than good humor or compassion. I won’t be able to speak, I won’t even be happy, because after the preparation of the meal I won’t have the strength. And if, with my sorry excuse for a first course resting in a bowl in my hands, I hesitate to leave the kitchen and enter the dining room, and if she, at the same time, feeling my embarrassment, hesitates to leave the living room and enter the dining room from the other side, then for that long interval the beautiful room will be empty.

Ah, well — one man fights at Marathon, the other in the kitchen.

Still, I have decided on nearly all the menu now and I have begun to prepare it by imagining our dinner, every detail of it, from beginning to end. I repeat this sentence to myself senselessly, my teeth chattering: “Then we’ll run into the forest.” Senselessly, because there is no forest here, and there would be no question of running in any case.

I have faith that she will come, though along with my faith is the same fear that always accompanies my faith, the fear that has been inherent in all faith, anyway, since the beginning of time.

Felice and I were not engaged at the time of that unfortunate dinner, though we had been engaged three years before and were to be engaged again one week later — surely not as a result of the dinner, unless Felice’s compassion for me was further aroused by the futility of my efforts to make a good kasha varnishke, potato pancakes, and sauerbraten. Our eventual breakup, on the other hand, probably has more explanations than it really needs — this is ridiculous, but certain experts maintain that even the air here in this city may encourage inconstancy.

I was excited as one always is by something new. I was naturally somewhat frightened as well. I thought a traditional German or Czech meal might be best, even if rather heavy for July. I remained for some time undecided even in my dreams. At one point I simply gave up and contemplated leaving the city. Then I decided to stay, although simply lying around on the balcony may not really deserve to be called a decision. At these times I appear to be paralyzed with indecision while my thoughts are beating furiously within my head, just as a dragonfly appears to hang motionless in midair while its wings are beating furiously against the steady breeze. At last I jumped up like a stranger pulling another stranger out of bed.

The fact that I planned the meal carefully was probably insignificant. I wanted to prepare something wholesome, since she needed to build up her strength. I remember gathering the mushrooms in the early morning, creeping among the trees in plain sight of two elderly sisters — who appeared to disapprove deeply of me or my basket. Or perhaps of the fact that I was wearing a good suit in the forest. But their approval would have been more or less the same thing.

As the hour approached, I was afraid, for a little while, that she would not come, instead of being afraid, as I should have been, that she would in fact come. At first she had said she might not come. It was strange of her to do that. I was like an errand boy who could no longer run errands but still hoped for some kind of employment.

Just as a very small animal in the woods makes a disproportionate amount of noise and disturbance among the leaves and twigs on the ground when it is frightened and rushes to its hole, or even when it is not frightened but merely hunting for nuts, so that one thinks a bear is about to burst into the clearing, whereas it is only a mouse — this is what my emotion was like, so small and yet so noisy. I asked her please not to come to dinner, but then I asked her please not to listen to me but to come anyway. Our words are so often those of some unknown, alien being. I don’t believe any speeches anymore. Even the most beautiful speech contains a worm.

Once, when we ate together in a restaurant, I was as ashamed of the dinner as though I had made it myself. The very first thing they brought to the table ruined our appetite for the rest, even if it had been any good: fat white Leberknödeln floating in a thin broth whose surface was dotted with oil. The dish was clearly German, rather than Czech. But why should anything be more complicated between us than if we were to sit quietly in a park and watch a hummingbird fly up from the petunias to rest at the top of a birch tree?

The night of our dinner, I told myself that if she did not come, I would enjoy the empty apartment, for if being alone in a room is necessary for life itself, being alone in an apartment is necessary if one is to be happy. I had borrowed the apartment for the occasion. But I had not been enjoying the happiness of the empty apartment. Or perhaps it wasn’t the empty apartment that should have made me happy, but having two apartments. She did come, but she was late. She told me she had been delayed because she had had to wait to speak to a man who had himself been waiting, impatiently, for the outcome of a discussion concerning the opening of a new cabaret. I did not believe her.

When she walked in the door I was almost disappointed. She would have been so much happier dining with another man. She was going to bring me a flower, but appeared without it. Yet I was filled with such elation just to be with her, because of her love, and her kindness, as bright as the buzzing of a fly on a lime twig.

Despite our discomfort we proceeded with our dinner. As I gazed at the finished dish I lamented my waning strength, I lamented being born, I lamented the light of the sun. We ate something that unfortunately would not disappear from our plates unless we swallowed it. I was both moved and ashamed, happy and sad, that she ate with apparent enjoyment — ashamed and sad only that I did not have something better to offer her, moved and happy that it appeared to be enough, at least on this one occasion. It was only the grace with which she ate each part of the meal and the delicacy of her compliments that gave it any value — it was abysmally bad. She really deserved, instead, something like a baked sole or a breast of pheasant, with water ice and fruit from Spain. Couldn’t I have provided this, somehow?

And when her compliments faltered, the language itself became pliant just for her, and more beautiful than one had any right to expect. If an uninformed stranger had heard Felice he would have thought, What a man! He must have moved mountains! — whereas I did almost nothing but mix the kasha as instructed by Ottla. I hoped that after she went away she would find a cool place like a garden in which to lie down on a deck chair and rest. As for myself, this pitcher was broken long before it went to the well.

There was the accident, too. I realized I was kneeling only when I saw her feet directly in front of my eyes. Snails were everywhere on the carpet, and the smell of garlic.

Perhaps, even so, once the meal was behind us, we did arithmetic tricks at the table, I don’t remember, short sums, and then long sums while I gazed out the window at the building opposite. Perhaps we would have played music together instead, but I am not musical.

Our conversation was halting and awkward. I kept digressing senselessly, out of nervousness. Finally I told her I was losing my way, but it didn’t matter because if she had come that far with me then we were both lost. There were so many misunderstandings, even when I did stay on the subject. And yet she shouldn’t have been afraid that I was angry at her, but the opposite, that I wasn’t.