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| a walk at dusk by caspar david friedrich (detail) |
A Few Things Wrong With Me by Lydia Davis
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.
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.
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