Lydia Davis: Break It Down

Helen succumbs to Mr. Burdoff on their very first date, after an evening spent struggling in the wet grass behind a statue of Leopold Mozart. If it is not hard for Mr. Burdoff to lead Helen to the park in the first place, it is more of a problem to roll her damp girdle up around her waist and then to persuade her, after all the heaving and grunting is over, that she has not been seen by an authority figure or a close friend. Once she is easier on that score, her remaining question to Mr. Burdoff is: Does he still respect her?

Much against his own wishes but out of love for Helen, Mr. Burdoff agrees to attend a Wagner opera at the Cologne opera house. During the first act, Mr. Burdoff, accustomed as he is to the clarity of the eighteenth century, becomes short of breath and is afraid he may faint in his hard seat at the top of the hall. Schooled in the strict progressions of Scarlatti, he cannot detect any advance in this music. At what he considers an arbitrary point, the act ends.

When the lights go up, Mr. Burdoff examines Helen’s face. A smile hovers around her lips, her forehead and cheeks are damp, and her eyes glow with satiety, as though she has eaten a large meal. Mr. Burdoff, on the other hand, is overcome by melancholy.

During the rest of the performance, Mr. Burdoff’s mind wanders. He tries to calculate the seating capacity of the hall, and then studies the dim frescoes on the underside of the dome. From time to time he glances at Helen’s strong hand on the arm of her seat but does not dare disturb her by touching it.

Late in their affair, by the time Mr. Burdoff has sat through the entire Ring cycle and The Flying Dutchman, as well as a symphonic poem by Strauss and what seem to him innumerable violin concertos by Bruch, Mr. Burdoff feels that Helen has taken him deep into the nineteenth century, a century he has always carefully avoided. He is surprised by its lushness, its brilliance, and its female sensibility, and still later, as he travels away from Germany on the train, he thinks of the night — important to the progress of their relationship — when he and Helen made love during her menstruation. The radio was broadcasting Schumann’s Manfred . As Mr. Burdoff climaxed, sticky with Helen’s blood, he confusedly sensed that a profound identification existed between Helen’s blood, Helen herself, and the nineteenth century.

Mr. Burdoff comes to Germany. Lives in a rooming house from which he can see construction. Looks forward to lunch. Eats well every day and gains weight. Goes to class, to museums, and to beer gardens. Likes to listen to a string quartet in the open air, his arms on the metal tabletop and gravel under his feet. Daydreams about women. Falls in love with Helen. A difficult and uncomfortable love. Growing familiarity. Helen reveals her love of Wagnerian opera. Mr. Burdoff unfortunately prefers Scarlatti. The Mystery of Helen’s Mind.

Helen’s child falls ill and she goes home to Norway to nurse him. She is not sure she won’t continue her marriage. Mr. Burdoff writes to her at least once every day. Will she be able to return before he leaves for America? The letters she writes back are very brief. Mr. Burdoff criticizes her letters. She writes less frequently and communicates nothing Mr. Burdoff wants to hear. Mr. Burdoff, finished with his course of study, prepares to leave for America. Alone on his way to Paris, he looks out the train window, feels weak, incapable. Helen sits by her sleeping child, gazes toward the bedroom window, thinks of Mr. Burdoff. Is moved to remember earlier lovers, and their cars.

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her — there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Last night Mildred, my neighbor on the floor below, masturbated with an oboe. The oboe wheezed and squealed in her vagina. Mildred groaned. Later, when I thought she was finished, she started screaming. I lay in bed with a book about India. I could feel her pleasure pass up through the floorboards into my room. Of course there might have been another explanation for what I heard. Perhaps it was not the oboe but the player of the oboe who was penetrating Mildred. Or perhaps Mildred was striking her small nervous dog with something slim and musical, like an oboe.

Mildred who screams lives below me. Three young women from Connecticut live above me. Then there is a lady pianist with two daughters on the parlor floor and some lesbians in the basement. I am a sober person, a mother, and I like to go to bed early — but how can I lead a regular life in this building? It is a circus of vaginas leaping and prancing: thirteen vaginas and only one penis, my little son.

First a poet writes a story about a mouse, in moonlight in the snow, how the mouse tries to hide in his shadow, how the mouse climbs up his sleeve and he shakes it down into the snow before he knows what it is that is clinging to his sleeve. His cat is nearby and her shadow is on the snow, and she is after the mouse. A woman is then reading this story in the bath. Half her hair is dry and half of it is floating in the bathwater. She likes the story.

That night she can’t sleep and goes into the kitchen to read another book by the same poet. She sits on a stool by the counter. It is late and the night is quiet, though now and then at some distance a train passes and hoots before a crossing. To her surprise, though she knows it lives there, a mouse comes out of a burner from under a pot and sniffs the air. Its feet are like little thorns, its ears are unexpectedly large, one eye is shut and the other open. It nibbles something off the tray of the burner. She moves and it flashes back in, she is still and in a moment it comes out again, and when she moves again it flashes back into the stove like a snapped elastic. At four in the morning, though she is still wide awake, reading and sometimes watching the mouse, the woman closes her book and goes back to bed.

In the morning a man sits in the kitchen on a stool, the same stool, by the counter, and cradles their young cat in his arms, holding her neck in his broad pink hands and rubbing the crown of her head with his thumbs, and behind him the woman stands leaning against his back, her breasts flattened against his shoulder blades, her hands closed over his chest, and they have laid out crusts of bread on the counter for the mouse to smell and are waiting for the mouse to come out, blindly, and for the young cat to get it.

They stay this way wrapped in nearly complete silence, and they are nearly motionless, only the man’s gentle thumbs move over the cat’s skull and the woman sometimes lays her cheek down against the man’s fragrant soft hair and then lifts it again and the cat’s eyes are shifting quickly from point to point. A motor starts up in the kitchen, there is the sudden flare of the gas water heater, the swift passage of some cars on the highway below, and then a single voice in the road. But the mouse knows the company that is there and won’t come out. The cat is too hungry to keep still and reaches forth one paw and then another and frees herself from the man’s light hold and climbs up on the counter to eat the bread herself.