Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Also by Lydia Davis

NOVEL

The End of the Story

STORIES

Break It Down

Almost No Memory

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Varieties of Disturbance

SELECTED TRANSLATIONS

Swanns Way by Marcel Proust

Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot

The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot

The Spirit of Mediterranean Places by Michel Butor

Rules of the Game, I: Scratches by Michel Leiris

Rules of the Game, II: Scraps by Michel Leiris

Hlne by Pierre Jean Jouve

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

HAMISH HAMILTON

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First published in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2009

First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2010

Copyright Lydia Davis, 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following material:

Worstward Ho, copyright 1983 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. In The Walk, quotations from Swanns Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and revised by Terence Kilmartin, copyright 1981 by Marcel Proust, used by permission of Random House, Inc.; quotations from Swanns Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, copyright 2002 by Lydia Davis, used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Extracts from a Life is adapted from Nurtured by Love by Sinichi Suzuki, and is used by permission of Exposition Press. The tale in Once a Very Stupid Man is adapted from the traditional Hasidic story recounted in Martin Bubers The Way of Man , and is used by permisson of Citadel Press. Lord Roystons Tour was adapted from The Remains of Viscount Royston: A Memoir of His Life by the Rev. Henry Pepys, London, 1838.

Samuel Johnson is Indignant was first published by McSweeneys Books.

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-141-96289-4

I get home from work and there is a message from him: that he is not coming, that he is busy. He will call again. I wait to hear from him, then at nine oclock I go to where he lives, find his car, but hes not home. I knock at his apartment door and then at all the garage doors, not knowing which garage door is hisno answer. I write a note, read it over, write a new note, and stick it in his door. At home I am restless, and all I can do, though I have a lot to do, since Im going on a trip in the morning, is play the piano. I call again at ten forty-five and hes home, he has been to the movies with his old girlfriend, and shes still there. He says hell call back. I wait. Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that when he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband. And then I go on to write, in the third person and the past tense, that clearly she always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love. He calls back before I have time to finish writing all this down. When he calls, it is a little after eleven thirty. We argue until nearly twelve. Everything he says is a contradiction: for example, he says he did not want to see me because he wanted to work and even more because he wanted to be alone, but he has not worked and he has not been alone. There is no way I can get him to reconcile any of his contradictions, and when this conversation begins to sound too much like many I had with my husband I say goodbye and hang up. I finish writing down what I started to write down even though by now it no longer seems true that anger is any great comfort.

I call him back five minutes later to tell him that I am sorry about all this arguing, and that I love him, but there is no answer. I call again five minutes later, thinking he might have walked out to his garage and walked back, but again there is no answer. I think of driving to where he lives again and looking for his garage to see if he is in there working, because he keeps his desk there and his books and that is where he goes to read and write. I am in my nightgown, it is after twelve and I have to leave the next morning at five. Even so, I get dressed and drive the mile or so to his place. I am afraid that when I get there I will see other cars by his house that I did not see earlier and that one of them will belong to his old girlfriend. When I drive down the driveway I see two cars that werent there before, and one of them is parked as close as possible to his door, and I think that she is there. I walk around the small building to the back where his apartment is, and look in the window: the light is on, but I cant see anything clearly because of the half-closed venetian blinds and the steam on the glass. But things inside the room are not the same as they were earlier in the evening, and before there was no steam. I open the outer screen door and knock. I wait. No answer. I let the screen door fall shut and I walk away to check the row of garages. Now the door opens behind me as I am walking away and he comes out. I cant see him very well because it is dark in the narrow lane beside his door and he is wearing dark clothes and whatever light there is is behind him. He comes up to me and puts his arms around me without speaking, and I think he is not speaking not because he is feeling so much but because he is preparing what he will say. He lets go of me and walks around me and ahead of me out to where the cars are parked by the garage doors.

As we walk out there he says Look, and my name, and I am waiting for him to say that she is here and also that its all over between us. But he doesnt, and I have the feeling he did intend to say something like that, at least say that she was here, and that he then thought better of it for some reason. Instead, he says that everything that went wrong tonight was his fault and hes sorry. He stands with his back against a garage door and his face in the light and I stand in front of him with my back to the light. At one point he hugs me so suddenly that the fire of my cigarette crumbles against the garage door behind him. I know why were out here and not in his room, but I dont ask him until everything is all right between us. Then he says, She wasnt here when I called you. She came back later. He says the only reason she is there is that something is troubling her and he is the only one she can talk to about it. Then he says, You dont understand, do you?