Free Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis Page A

constructed on its site) must have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their alternate challenge and response, I can see it again with its lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon.
    Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask my mother—“Where are we?” Exhausted by the walk but still proud of her husband, she would lovingly confess that she had not the least idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. And then, as though he had produced it with his latchkey from his waistcoat pocket, he would point out to us, where it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own garden, which had come, hand-in-hand with the familiar corner of the Rue du Saint-Esprit, to greet us at the end of our wanderings over paths unknown.
    Since he had not noticed, she intended to mention it soon, but was at the moment more interested in pointing out to him a house they were about to pass. It had once been the home of Charles Murray, the great editor of The Oxford English Dictionary.
    When she had arrived in this town the day before, her strongest desire had been to see, not the more famous sights, but the house in which this editor had lived while doing the better part of his work, a personal account of which she had read by his granddaughter. She had taken pains to ask each person she met if he or she knew where this house might be. No one had been able to tell her, and as she ran out of time, she had given up the idea of finding it. Then, at the end of her day of touring, just as the tour bus had reached her street for the third time and stopped to let her off by the porter’s lodge of the college, the guide had said something about this same editor and his house. She was already climbing down the steps and half off the bus when she heard it, and could not question the guide further. She could not believe the house was right here, in this neighborhood where she was staying, and the next day she continued to ask each person she met where the house might be.
    After she had given her talk at the conference, she was approached by a short, stout man with a preoccupied, almost angry expression who concentrated his attention on her alone, ignoring everyone around them, and asked several pertinent questions and made several concise remarks about her talk. He was modest enough not to identify himself, and when she asked him who he was, he said he had just retired as librarian of this college and would be pleased, in fact, to give her a tour of the library. Since he seemed to be a highly competent person with many facts at his disposal, she thought to ask him the question she had been asking everyone else since the day before. The librarian said that of course he knew the house—it was right across the street. And he immediately led her out to the corner and pointed. There it was, its upper story and roof showing above its brick wall, as though the librarian had taken it from his jacket pocket and set it there just to please her.
    The situation was not exactly the same, of course, since the librarian had not magically brought her home but had instead produced the very house she had been looking for. But now she told the story to the critic, with whom she felt a closer companionship after walking so far with him and bringing him safely back. She thought that now he would recognize the situation, and think of their walk and the passage from the book he knew so well.
    In her version, the scene read:
    We would return by way of the station boulevard, which was lined by the most pleasant houses in the parish. In each garden the moonlight, like Hubert Robert, scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains, its half-open gates. Its light had destroyed the Telegraph Office. All that remained was a column, half shattered but preserving the beauty of an immortal ruin. I would be dragging my feet, I would be ready to drop with sleep, the fragrance of the lindens that perfumed the