Lydia Davis - Can't and Won't - Stories

The problem is this: she is passing through the city and needs to spend some time in the public library. But the library coat check will not accept her suitcase — she must leave it somewhere else. The answer seems clear: she will go down the street to the railway station and leave her suitcase, and then come back to the library. She walks in the wind and the rain with a small umbrella in one hand and the handle of her rolling suitcase in the other, to the railway station. She walks all over the station looking for the left-luggage office. There are restaurants and shops, a beautiful high ceiling with constellations on it, marble floors and walls, grand staircases and sloping walkways, but there is no left-luggage office. At an information window she asks about left luggage, and the angry employee silently reaches under the counter for a flyer and hands it to her. It is the flyer of a commercial left-luggage establishment that has two addresses, neither of which is in the station. She must go either several blocks uptown or several blocks down.

She walks uptown in the wind and the rain and then several blocks east, in the wrong direction, and then several blocks west, in the right direction, and finds the address, an old, narrow building between a fast-food store and a travel agent. She rides up in the elevator with a couple who are planning to get married in Brazil. They are on their way to a notary public. The woman is explaining to the man that he needs to swear before a notary that he has not been married before. Besides the notary public and the left-luggage office, this building contains a Western Union office where money can be sent or received.

The whole of the small top floor, the sixth, is the left-luggage place — one room on the street side and one in the back. The street-side room is entirely empty and flooded with sunlight. In the back room, a long folding table has been pushed across the doorway, and a man sits at the table beside a large roll of little pale blue tickets, the sort that are given out for rides at a country fair. There are some suitcases grouped against the walls in the room behind him. He smiles and speaks to her with an Eastern European accent. His smile is friendly. Some of his teeth are crooked and some are missing. She pays $10 in advance, gives the man her suitcase, and takes a pale blue ticket. Then she goes back down in the elevator and starts walking in the wind and the rain back towards the public library, thinking about her suitcase. In her haste and confusion, she has not locked it. She hopes her foreign currency won’t be stolen.

She has just flown into the city from another city, in another country. They do it differently there, she thinks: in that place, there was a locker right in the middle of the station, and the locker opened onto a conveyor belt that took all the luggage to some holding area. There, she had deposited her suitcase in the locker, for a fee equivalent to $5, which seemed expensive to a man standing near her, who opened his eyes and his mouth wide and said, “ Donnerwetter!! ” When she was ready to pick up her suitcase, it was returned to her at the same place, by conveyor belt. She thinks about this as she walks. She will forget about it for a while, in the library, as she works in the quiet, chilly, thinly populated room. But as she walks, she thinks, But I am home now, and this is how we do it, in this city, in our country.

We sit in the airplane so long, on the ground, waiting to take off, that one woman declares she will now write her novel, and another in a neighboring seat says she will be happy to edit it. Food is being sold in the aisle, and the passengers, either hungry from waiting or worried that they will not see food again for some time, are eagerly buying it, even food they would not normally eat. For instance, there are candy bars long enough to use as weapons. The steward who is selling the food says he was once attacked by a passenger, though not with a candy bar. Because the plane had been delayed so long, he said, the passenger threw a drink in his face, damaging one eyeball with a piece of ice.

rant from Flaubert

How nature laughs at us—

And how impassive is the ball at which the trees dance — and the grass, and the waves!

The bell of the steamship from Le Havre rings so furiously I have to stop working.

What a raucous thing a machine is.

What a racket industry makes in the world!

How many foolish professions are born of it!

What a lot of stupidity comes from it!

Humanity is turning into an animal!

To make a single pin requires five or six different specialists.

What can you expect from the people of Manchester—

who spend their lives making pins? !!

The sky is always above a tract house in Los Angeles. As the day passes, the sun comes in the large window from the east, then the south, then the west. As I look out the window at the sky, I see cumulus clouds pile up suddenly in complex, pastel-colored geometrical shapes and then immediately collapse and dissolve. After this has happened a number of times in succession, at last it seems possible for me to begin painting again.

dream

The story is only two paragraphs long. I’m working on the end of the second paragraph, which is the end of the story. I’m intent on this work, and my back is turned. And while I’m working on the end, look what they’re up to in the beginning! And they’re not very far away! He seems to have drifted from where I put him and is hovering over her, only one paragraph away (in the first paragraph). True, it is a dense paragraph, and they’re in the very middle of it, and it’s dark in there. I knew they were both in there, but when I left it and turned to the second paragraph, there wasn’t anything going on between them. Now look …

dream

We are in Egypt. We are about to go deep-sea diving. They have erected a vast tank of water on land next to the Mediterranean Sea. We strap oxygen to our backs and descend into this tank. We go all the way to the bottom. Here, there is a cluster of blue lights shining on the entrance to a tunnel. We enter the tunnel. The tunnel will lead into the Mediterranean. We swim and swim. At the far end of the tunnel, we see more lights, white ones. When we have passed through the lights, we come out of the tunnel, suddenly, into the open sea, which drops away beneath us a full kilometer or more. There are fish all around and above us, and reefs on all sides. We think we are flying, over the deep. We forget, for now, that we must be careful not to get lost, but must find our way back to the mouth of the tunnel.

dream

The washing machine in spin cycle: “Pakistani, Pakistani.”

The washing machine agitating (slow): “Firefighter, firefighter, firefighter, firefighter.”

Plates rattling in the rack of the dishwasher: “Neglected.”

The glass blender knocking on the bottom of the metal sink: “Cumberland.”

Pots and dishes rattling in the sink: “Tobacco, tobacco.”

The wooden spoon in the plastic bowl stirring the pancake mix: “What the hell, what the hell.”

An iron burner rattling on its metal tray: “Bonanza.”

The suction-cup pencil sharpener being peeled up from the top of the bookcase: “Rip van Winkle.”

Markers rolling and bumping in a drawer that is opened and then shut: “Purple fruit.”

The lid of a whipped butter tub being prised off and then put down on the counter: “Horóscopy.”