Lydia Davis - Break It Down

They eat, but leave no mark of eating, we think. Yet here in the leaf edge, little crescent shapes — their gradual bites.

He is like a thickened shadow. See how the shadow at the crack of a window thickens, comes out from the wall, and moves off!

In the cardboard trap, five or six of them are stuck — frozen at odd angles, alive with an uncanny stillness, in this box like a child’s miniature theater.

How kindly I feel toward another species of insect in the house! Its gauzy wings! Its confusion! Its blundering walk down the lampshade! It doesn’t think to run away!

At the end of the meal, the cheeses were brought. All white except the Roquefort, they lay scattered over the board at odd angles, like cows grazing or ships at sea.

After a week, I take a forgotten piece of bread from the oven where they have visited — now it is dry, a bit of brown lace.

The white autumn light in the afternoon. They sleep behind a child’s drawings on the kitchen wall. I tap each piece of paper and they burst out from the edges of pictures that are already filled with shooting stars, missiles, machine guns, land mines …

Many years ago, my husband and I were living in Paris and translating art books. Whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We went mostly to old American movies, which were very popular there, and we ate out a lot of the time because restaurant meals were cheap then and neither of us knew how to cook very well.

One night, though, I cooked some fillets of fish for dinner. These fillets were not supposed to contain bones, and yet there must have been a small bone in one of them because my husband swallowed it and it got caught in his throat. This had never happened to either of us before, though we had always worried about it. I gave him bread to eat, and he drank many glasses of water, but the bone was really stuck, and didn’t move.

After several hours in which the pain intensified and my husband and I grew more and more uneasy, we left the apartment and walked out into the dark streets of Paris to look for help. We were first directed to the ground-floor apartment of a nurse who lived not far away, and she then directed us to a hospital. We walked on some way and found the hospital in the rue de Vaugirard. It was old and quite dark, as though it didn’t do much business anymore.

Inside, I waited on a folding chair in a wide hallway near the front entrance while my husband sat behind a closed door nearby in the company of several nurses who wanted to help him but could not do more than spray his throat and then stand back and laugh, and he would laugh too, as best he could. I didn’t know what they were all laughing about.

Finally a young doctor came and took my husband and me down several long, deserted corridors and around two sides of the dark hospital grounds to an empty wing containing another examining room in which he kept his special instruments. Each instrument had a different angle of curvature but they all ended in some sort of a hook. Under a single pool of light, in the darkened room, he inserted one instrument after another down my husband’s throat, working with fierce interest and enthusiasm. Every time he inserted another instrument my husband gagged and waved his hands in the air.

At last the doctor drew out the little fishbone and showed it around proudly. The three of us smiled and congratulated one another.

The doctor took us back down the empty corridors and out under the vaulted entryway that had been built to accommodate horse-drawn carriages. We stood there and talked a little, looking around at the empty streets of the neighborhood, and then we shook hands and my husband and I walked home.

More than ten years have passed since then, and my husband and I have gone our separate ways, but every now and then, when we are together, we remember that young doctor. “A great Jewish doctor,” says my husband, who is also Jewish.

He said there were things about me that he hadn’t liked from the very beginning. He didn’t say this unkindly. He’s not an unkind person, at least not intentionally. He said it because I was trying to get him to explain why he changed his mind about me so suddenly.

I may ask his friends what they think about this, because they know him better than I do. They’ve known him for more than fifteen years, whereas I’ve only known him for about ten months. I like them, and they seem to like me, though we don’t know each other very well. What I want to do is to have a meal or a drink with at least two of them and talk about him until I begin to get a better picture of him.

It’s easy to come to the wrong conclusions about people. I see now that all these past months I kept coming to the wrong conclusions about him. For example, when I thought he would be unkind to me, he was kind. Then when I thought he would be effusive he was merely polite. When I thought he would be annoyed to hear my voice on the telephone he was pleased. When I thought he would turn against me because I had treated him rather coldly, he was more anxious than ever to be with me and went to great trouble and expense so that we could spend a little time together. Then when I made up my mind that he was the man for me, he suddenly called the whole thing off.

It seemed sudden to me even though for the last month I could feel him drawing away. For instance, he didn’t write as often as he had before, and then when we were together he said more unkind things to me than he ever had before. When he left, I knew he was thinking it over. He took a month to think it over, and I knew it was fifty-fifty he would come to the point of saying what he did.

I suppose it seemed sudden because of the hopes I had for him and me by then, and the dreams I had about us — some of the usual dreams about a nice house and nice babies and the two of us together in the house working in the evening while the babies were asleep, and then some other dreams, about how we would travel together, and about how I would learn to play the banjo or the mandolin so that I could play with him, because he has a lovely tenor voice. Now, when I picture myself playing the banjo or the mandolin, the idea seems silly.

The way it all ended was that he called me up on a day he didn’t usually call me and said he had finally come to a decision. Then he said that because he had had trouble figuring all this out, he had made some notes about what he was going to say and he asked me if I would mind if he read them. I said I would mind very much. He said he would at least have to look at them now and then as he talked.

Then he talked in a very reasonable way about how bad the chances were for us to be happy together, and about changing over to a friendship now before it was too late. I said he was talking about me as though I were an old tire that might blow out on the highway. He thought that was funny.

We talked about how he had felt about me at various times, and how I had felt about him at various times, and it seemed that these feelings hadn’t matched very well. Then, when I wanted to know exactly how he had felt about me from the very beginning, trying to find out, really, what was the most he had ever felt, he made this very plain statement about how there were things about me that he hadn’t liked from the very beginning. He wasn’t trying to be unkind, but just very clear. I told him I wouldn’t ask him what these things were but I knew I would have to go and think about it.

I didn’t like hearing there were things about me that bothered him. It was shocking to hear that someone I loved had never liked certain things about me. Of course there were a few things I didn’t like about him too, for instance an affectation in his manner involving the introduction of foreign phrases into his conversation, but although I had noticed these things, I had never said it to him in quite this way. But if I try to be logical, I have to think that after all there may be a few things wrong with me. Then the problem is to figure out what these things are.