Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

But sometimes, when this building with its bitter atmosphere becomes too oppressive for me to bear it any longer, I go outside into the city and wander back to the houses I used to live in. I stand in the sun talking to my old neighbors, and I find comfort and relief in their warm welcome.

My sister died last year leaving two daughters. My husband and I have decided to adopt the girls. The older one is thirty-three and a buyer for a departmentstore, and the younger one, who just turned thirty, works in the state budget office. We have one child still living at home, and the house is not big, so it will be a tight fit, but we are willing to do this for their sake. We will move our son, who is eleven, out of his room and into the small room I have been using as a sewing room. I will set up my machine d ownstairs in the living room. We will put a bunk bed for the girls in my son’s old room. It is a fair-sized room with one closet and one window, and the bathroom is just down the hall. We will have to ask them not to bring all their things. I assume they will be willing to make that sacrifice in order to be part of this family. They will also have to watch what they say at the dinner table. With our younger son present we don’t want open conflict. What I’m worried about is a couple of political issues. My older niece is a feminist, while my husband and I feel the tables have been turned against males nowadays. Also, my younger niece is probably more pro-government than either my older niece or my husband and me. But she will be away a good deal, traveling for her job. And we have developed some negotiating skills with our own children, so we should be able to work things out with the two of them. We will try to be firm but fair, as we always were with our older boy before he left home. If we can’t work things out right away, they can always go to their room and cool off until they’re ready to come back out and be civil. Excuse me.

The day after the patient was admitted to the hospital, the young doctor operated on her upper colon, where he felt sure the cause of her illness lay. But his medical training had not been good, the doctors who taught him were careless men, and he had been pushed through school quickly because he was clever and the country was desperate for doctors; the hospital was poorly staffed and the building itself was falling into ruin because of government mismanagement: piles of broken plaster choked the hallways. Because of all this, or for some other reason, the woman’s condition did not improve, but grew rapidly worse. The young doctor tried everything. At last he admitted that there was nothing more he could do and that she was on the point of dying. He was overwhelmed by the grief and guilt that come with the first death of a patient. He was at the same time filled with strange excitement, and felt he had joined the ranks of serious men of the world, men who hold the lives of others in their hands and are like gods. Inexplicably, then, the woman did not die. She lay peacefully in a twilight coma. As each day passed with no change, the young doctor grew more and more maddened by her immobility. He could not sleep and his eyes became bloodshot. He had trouble eating and his face became gaunt. At last he could not contain his frustration any longer. He went to her bedside and drove his fist again and again into her pinched, yellow face until she did not look human anymore. One last breath leaked from her mouth and then, battered and bruised, she died.

She knows she is right, but to say she is right is wrong, in this case. To be correct and say so is wrong, in certain cases.

She may be correct, and she may say so, in certain cases. But if she insists too much, she becomes wrong, so wrong that even her correctness becomes wrong, by association.

It is right to believe in what she thinks is right, but to say what she thinks is right is wrong, in certain cases.

She is right to act on her beliefs, in her life. But she is wrong to report her right actions, in most cases. Then even her right actions become wrong, by association.

If she praises herself, she may be correct in what she says, but her saying it is wrong, in most cases, and thus cancels it, or reverses it, so that although she was for a particular act deserving of praise, she is no longer in general deserving of praise.

Alvin and I worked together typesetting for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. We came in every Friday. This was the autumn that Reagan was elected President, and everyone at the newspaper suffered from a sense of foreboding and depression.

The old gray typesetting machines, with their scratches and scars, were set back to back in a tiny room next to the toilet. People raced in and out of the toilet all day long and the sound of flushing was always in our ears. Pinned to the corkboard walls around us as we bent over our keyboards was an ever-thickening forest of paper strips. The damp paper strips were covered with type, and when they had dried, they were taken away by the paste-up people to become columns on the newspaper page.

The work we had to do was not hard, but it required patience and care, and we were under constant pressure to work faster. I typed straight copy, and Alvin set ads. If the machines stopped rumbling for more than a few minutes, the boss would come downstairs to see what was holding us up. And so Alvin and I continued to type while we ate our lunch, and when we talked to each other, as we did from time to time, we talked surreptitiously, sticking our eyes up over the tops of the machines.

We were blue-collar workers. Every time I thought about how we were blue-collar workers, it surprised me, because we were also, with any luck, performing artists. I played the violin. As for Alvin, he was a standup comedian. Every Friday Alvin told me about his career and his life.

For seven months he had auditioned over and over again without success at a well-known club. At last the manager had relented and given him a spot. Every week now he came on in the dead early hours of Sunday morning for five minutes to close the show. Sometimes the audience liked him and sometimes it did not respond at all. If the manager occasionally left him on stage for ten minutes or gave him a spot earlier in the evening, at 9:30, Alvin felt this was an important advance in his career.

Alvin could not describe his art except to say that he had no script, no routine, that he never knew just what would happen on stage, and that this lack of preparation was part of his act. From the snatches of monologue he spoke for me, however, I could see that some of his patter was about sex — he made jokes about cream and sperm — and that some of his patter was about politics, and that he also liked to do impersonations.

He usually worked without any props. In the week of Election Day, in November, he carried to the nightclub a special patriotic kerchief covered with red, white, and blue American symbols to wear over his head. Most often, though, what he took out on stage was only himself, as though his long, solemn face were a mask, or his body a marionette that he controlled with strings from above, slim, loose-joined, floating over the floor. He had his stance, his silences, his bald head, and his clothes. He wore the same clothes on stage that he wore to work: dark formal pants and often a shirt of cheap synthetic material covered with palm trees or pine trees on a white background.

When I arrived at the office, Alvin would be typing at his machine in his stocking feet, and his long narrow shoes would be sitting next to my machine. If Alvin was glum, neither of us said much. If he was elated, he could not help standing up from his machine and talking. And on some days I would speak to him and he would look at me blankly. He would later admit that he had been smoking hash for days on end.