Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance

January 2006

This is a problem you might have someday. It’s the problem of a couple I know. He’s a doctor, I’m not sure what she does. I don’t actually know them very well. In fact, I don’t know them anymore. This was years ago. I was bothered by a bulldozer coming and going next door, so I found out what was happening. Their problem was that their fire insurance was very expensive. They wanted to try to lower the insurance premiums. That was a good idea. You don’t want any of your regular payments to be too high, or higher than they have to be. For example, you don’t want to buy a property with very high taxes, since there will be nothing you can do to lower them and you will always have to pay them. I try to keep that in mind. You could understand this couple’s problem even if you didn’t have high fire insurance. If you did not have exactly the same problem, someday you might have a similar problem, of regular payments that were going to be too high. Their insurance was high because they owned a large collection of very good wine. The problem was not so much the collection per se but where they were keeping it. They had, actually, thousands of bottles of very good and excellent wine. They were keeping it in their cellar, which was certainly the right thing to do. They had an actual wine cellar. But the problem was, this wine cellar wasn’t good enough or big enough. I never saw it, though I once saw another one which was very small. It was the size of a closet, but I was still impressed. But I did taste some of their wine one time. I can’t really tell the difference, though, between a bottle of wine that costs $100, or even $30, and a bottle that costs $500. At that dinner they might have been serving wine that cost even more than that. Not for me, especially, but for some of the other guests. I’m sure that very expensive wines are really wasted on most people, including myself. I was quite young at the time, but even now a very expensive wine would be wasted on me, probably. This couple learned that if they enlarged the wine cellar and improved it in certain other specific ways, their insurance premiums would be lower. They thought this was a good idea, even though it would cost something, initially, to make these improvements. The bulldozer and other machinery and labor that I saw out the window of the place where I was living at the time, which was a house borrowed from a friend who was also a friend of theirs, must have been costing them in the thousands, but I’m sure the money they spent on it was earned back within a few years or even one year by their savings on the premiums. So I can see this was a prudent move on their part. It was a move that anyone could make concerning some other thing, not necessarily a wine cellar. The point is that any improvement that will eventually save money is a good idea. This is long in the past by now. They must have saved quite a lot altogether, over the years, from the changes they made. So many years have gone by, though, that they have probably sold the house by now. Maybe the improved wine cellar raised the price of the house and they earned back even more money. I was not just young but very young when I watched the bulldozer out my window. The noise did not really bother me very much, because there were so many other things bothering me when I tried to work. In fact, I probably welcomed the sight of the bulldozer. I was impressed by their wine, and by the good paintings they also owned. They were nice, friendly people, but I didn’t think much of their clothes or furniture. I spent a lot of time looking out the window and thinking about them. I don’t know what that was worth. It was probably a waste of my time. Now I’m a lot older. But here I am, still thinking about them. There are a lot of other things that I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t forgotten them or their fire insurance. I must have thought I could learn something from them.

Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!

You are in a Brooklyn coffee shop, you have ordered only one cup of coffee, and the coffee is sixty cents, which seems expensive to you. But it is not so expensive when you consider that for this same sixty cents you are renting the use of one cup and saucer, one metal cream pitcher, one plastic glass, one small table, and two small benches. Then, to consume if you want to, besides the coffee and the cream, you have water with ice cubes and, in their own dispensers, sugar, salt, pepper, napkins, and ketchup. In addition, you can enjoy, for an indefinite length of time, the air conditioning that keeps the room at a perfectly cool temperature, the powerful white electric light that lights every corner of the room so that there are no shadows anywhere, the view of the people passing outside on the sidewalk in the hot sunlight and wind, and the company of the people inside, who are laughing and turning endless variations on one rather cruel joke at the expense of a little balding redheaded woman sitting at the counter and dangling her crossed feet from the stool, who tries to reach out with her short, white arm and slap the face of the man standing nearest to her.

Shall I keep a tidy house, like L.?

Shall I develop an unsanitary habit, like K.?

Shall I sway from side to side a little as I walk, like C.?

Shall I write letters to the editor, like R.?

Shall I retire to my room often during the day, like R.?

Shall I live alone in a large house, like B.?

Shall I treat my husband coldly, like K.?

Shall I give piano lessons, like M.?

Shall I leave the butter out all day to soften, like C.?

Shall I have problems with typewriter ribbons, like K.?

Shall I have a strong objection to the drinking of juice, like K.?

Shall I hold many grudges, like B.?

Shall I buy large loaves of white bread from the baker, like C.?

Shall I keep tubs of clams in my freezer, like C.?

Shall I make a bad pun at the wrong moment, like R.?

Shall I read detective novels in bed at night, like C.?

Shall I take beautiful care of my own person, like L.?

Shall I smoke and drink heavily, like K.?

Shall I drink heavily and smoke sometimes, like C.?

Shall I welcome people into my house to visit and to stay, like C.?

Shall I be well informed about many things, like K.?

Shall I know the classics, like K.?

Shall I write letters by hand, like B.?

Shall I write “Dearest Both,” like C.?

Shall I use many exclamation marks and capitals, like C.?

Shall I include a poem in my letter, like B.?

Shall I often look up words in the dictionary, like R.?

Shall I admire the picture of the beautiful President of Iceland, like R.?

Shall I often look up etymologies, like R.?

Shall I bring a potted tulip to the back door as a gift, like L.?

Shall I give small dinner parties, like M.?

Shall I get a little arthritis in my hands, like C.?

Shall I keep a gray dove and a gray hound, like L.?

Shall I play the radio by my bed all night, like C.?

Shall I leave too much food in the rented house at the end of the summer, like C.?

Shall I often eat a single baked potato for my dinner, like Dr. S.?

Shall I have ice cream once a year, like Dr. S.?

Shall I swim in the bay alone, even in the worst weather, like C.?

Shall I drink vegetable cooking water, like C.?

Shall I label my folders in shaky handwriting, like R.?

Shall I chew my food slowly and thoroughly, like Dr. S.?

Shall I walk by the canal, like B.?

Shall I take my guests along the canal, like B.?

Shall I put daylily buds in the salad for my guests, like B.?