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

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 talk for a long time only 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