Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance

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 which 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.

She thought I had an Aunt Klara. It is true that I have an Aunt Klara, every Jew has an Aunt Klara. But mine died long ago. She said her own was quite peculiar, and inclined to make pronouncements, such as that one should stamp one’s letters properly and not throw things out the window, both of which are true, of course, but not easy. We talked about the Germans. She hates the Germans so much, but I told her she shouldn’t, because the Germans are wonderful. Perhaps my mistake was to boast that I had recently chopped wood for over an hour. I thought she should be grateful to me — after all, I was overcoming the temptation to say something unkind.

One more misunderstanding and she was ready to leave. We tried different ways of saying what we meant, but we weren’t really lovers at that moment, just grammarians. Even animals, when they’re quarreling, lose all caution: squirrels race back and forth across a lawn or a road and forget that there may be predators watching. I told her that if she were to leave, the only thing I would like about it would be the kiss before she left. She assured me that although we were parting in anger, it would not be long before we saw each other again, but to my mind “sooner” rather than “never” was still just “never.” Then she left.

With that loss I was more in the situation of Robinson Crusoe even than Robinson Crusoe himself — he at least still had the island, Friday, his supplies, his goats, the ship that took him away, his name. But as for me, I imagined some doctor with carbolic fingers taking my head between his knees and stuffing meat into my mouth and down my throat until I choked.

The evening was over. A goddess had walked out of the movie theater and a small porter was left standing by the tracks — and that was our dinner? I am so filthy — this is why I am always screaming about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell — you think you’re hearing the song of angels but it is that other song. Yet I decided to keep on living a little while longer, at least through the night.

After all, I am not graceful. Someone once said that I swim like a swan, but it was not a compliment.

Like a tropical storm,

I, too, may one day become “better organized.”

What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

Soon almost every subject they might want to talk about is associated with yet another unpleasant scene and becomes a subject they can’t talk about, so that as time goes by there is less and less they can safely talk about, and eventually little else but the news and what they’re reading, though not all of what they’re reading. They can’t talk about certain members of her family, his working hours, her working hours, rabbits, mice, dogs, certain foods, certain universities, hot weather, hot and cold room temperatures at night and in the day, lights on and lights off in the evening in summer, the piano, music in general, how much money he earns, what she earns, what she spends, etc. But one day, after they have been talking about a forbidden subject, though not the most dangerous of the forbidden subjects, she realizes it may be possible, sometimes, to say something calm and careful about a forbidden subject, so that it may once again become a subject that can be talked about, and then to say something calm and careful about another forbidden subject, so that there will be another subject that can be talked about once again, and that as more subjects can be talked about once again there will be, gradually, more talk between them, and that as there is more talk there will be more trust, and that when there is enough trust, they may dare to approach even the most dangerous of the forbidden subjects.