Lydia Davis - Break It Down

For several days, after we talked, I tried to think about this, and I came up with some possibilities. Maybe I didn’t talk enough. He likes to talk a lot and he likes other people to talk a lot. I’m not very talkative, or at least not in the way he probably likes. I have some good ideas from time to time, but not much information. I can only talk for a long time when it’s about something boring. Maybe I talked too much about which foods he should be eating. I worry about the way people eat and tell them what they should eat, which is a tiresome thing to do, something my ex-husband never liked either. Maybe I mentioned my ex-husband too often, so that he thought my ex-husband was still on my mind, which wasn’t true. He might have been irritated by the fact that he couldn’t kiss me in the street for fear of getting poked in the eye by my glasses — or maybe he didn’t even like being with a woman who wore glasses, maybe he didn’t like always having to look at my eyes through this blue-tinted glass. Or maybe he doesn’t like people who write things on index cards, diet plans on little index cards and plot summaries on big index cards. I don’t like it much myself, and I don’t do it all the time. It’s just a way I have of trying to get my life in order. But he might have come across some of those index cards.

I couldn’t think of much else that would have bothered him from the very beginning. Then I decided I would never be able to think of the things about me that bothered him. Whatever I thought of would probably not be the same things. And anyway, I wasn’t going to go on trying to identify these things, because even if I knew what they were I wouldn’t be able to do anything about them.

Late in the conversation, he tried to tell me how excited he was about his new plan for the summer. Now that he wasn’t going to be with me, he thought he would travel down to Venezuela, to visit some friends who were doing anthropological work in the jungle. I told him I didn’t want to hear about that.

While we talked on the phone, I was drinking some wine left over from a large party I had given. After we hung up I immediately picked up the phone again and made a series of phone calls, and while I talked, I finished one of the leftover bottles of wine and started on another that was sweeter than the first, and then finished that one too. First I called a few people here in the city, then when it got too late for that I called a few people in California, and when it got too late to go on calling California I called someone in England who had just woken up and was not in a very good mood.

Between one phone call and the next I would sometimes walk by the window and look up at the moon, which was in its first quarter but remarkably bright, and think of him and then wonder when I would stop thinking of him every time I saw the moon. The reason I thought of him when I saw the moon was that during the five days and four nights he and I were first together, the moon was waxing and then full, the nights were clear, we were in the country, where you notice the sky more, and every night, early or late, we would walk outdoors together, partly to get away from the various members of our families who were in the house and partly just to take pleasure in the meadows and the woods under the moonlight. The dirt road that sloped up away from the house into the woods was full of ruts and rocks, so that we kept stumbling against each other and more tightly into each other’s arms. We talked about how nice it would be to bring a bed out into the meadow and lie down on it in the moonlight.

The next time the moon was full, I was back in the city, and I saw it out the window of a new apartment. I thought to myself that a month had passed since he and I were together, and that it had passed very slowly. After that, every time the moon was full, shining on the leafy, tall trees in the back yards here, and on the flat tar roofs, and then on the bare trees and snowy ground in the winter, I would think to myself that another month had passed, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. I liked counting the months that way.

He and I always seemed to be counting the time as it passed and waiting for it to pass so that the day would come when we would be together again. That was one reason he said he couldn’t go on with it. And maybe he’s right, it isn’t too late, we will change over to a friendship, and he will talk to me now and then long distance, mostly about his work or my work, and give me good advice or a plan of action when I need one, then call himself something like my “éminence grise.”

When I stopped making my phone calls, I was too dizzy to go to sleep, because of the wine, so I turned on the television and watched some police dramas, some old situation comedies, and finally a show about unusual people across the country. I turned the set off at five in the morning when the sky was light, and I fell asleep right away.

It’s true that by the time the night was over I wasn’t worrying anymore about what was wrong with me. At that hour of the morning I can usually get myself out to the end of something like a long dock with water all around where I’m not touched by such worries. But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.

Wassilly was a man of many parts, changeable, fickle, at times ambitious, at times stuporous, at times meditative, at times impatient. Not a man of habit, though he wished to be, tried to cultivate habits, was overjoyed when he found something that truly, for a time, seemed necessary to him and that had possibilities of becoming a habit.

For a while, he sat in his wing chair every evening after supper and found it pleasant. He once thoroughly enjoyed smoking a pipe of fragrant tobacco and thinking over what had happened to him during the day. But the next evening he suffered from wind and could not sit still; the pipe, also, kept going out; the lights for some reason flickered and dimmed constantly, and after a while he gave up the pretense of leisurely contemplation.

Some months later, he decided that a stroll after dinner was also a popular thing to do and might easily become a habit. For many days he went out of his house at a fixed hour and walked through the neighboring streets, successfully evoking in himself a mood of calm speculation, gazing at the swallows as they flew over the river and at the red sun-soaked housefronts and deducing various ill-founded scientific principles from what he saw; or he let his thoughts dwell on the people that walked by him in the street. But this did not become a habit either: he realized with great disappointment that once he had exhausted all the possible routes within an hour’s stroll of his house he became frankly bored with walking, and that instead of benefiting his constitution, it upset his stomach enough so that he had to treat himself with some pills upon returning home. The strolls stopped altogether when his sister came unexpectedly to visit him, and did not resume when she left.

Wassilly was ambitious to learn, and yet sometimes for days on end he could not bring himself to study, but would sneak off into a corner, as if to avoid his own anxious gaze, and spend a long time bent over a crossword puzzle. This made him irritable and dull. He tried to throw the puzzles into a more favorable light by including them in his scheme for self-improvement. During three days, he tested himself against his watch: he did most of a puzzle in twenty minutes on one day, all of it in twenty minutes on the next, and then almost none of it in twenty minutes on the third. On that day he changed the rules and decided he would try to finish the puzzle every day, no matter how long it took. He clearly saw the time coming in which he would be master of the game. To this end he started keeping a notebook in which he wrote down all the more obscure words which appeared regularly in the puzzles and which he otherwise forgot as soon as he learned them, such as “ stoa : Greek porch.” In this way he persuaded himself that he was learning something even from the puzzles, and for a few wonderful hours he saw the conjunction of his baser inclinations and his higher ambitions.