Free The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis Page A

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.

A Few Things Wrong with Me
    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 known him for only 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