This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (10 page)

It wasn't until I had finished that I realized that Clarence was dead. That he had in fact been dead a long time. Perhaps all afternoon. I'm not sure now why it suddenly dawned on me then, instead of before—or, for that matter, why I had noticed it at all, and not continued to go on believing that he was alive. I just—all of a sudden—
knew.
It did not even surprise me. I got up slowly, and walked carefully from the room, plunging into the dark hall.

“Hello?” I called out, standing now at the bottom of the staircase, beyond which, some time before, Clarence's wife had disappeared. There was no response. “Ma'am,” I called again. “Hello?”

Finally, she arrived. Down the long front stairs. In a costume dress with starched high sleeves, her hair done up in a stiff cascade, and at her throat a single strand of pearls. The pearls had been polished so bright that—even in the thin stream of light that, from a small slit in the blind of a hall window, had fallen on the stair (that light the one sign in the whole house that there existed an outside world at all)—they positively glowed.

For a moment she looked … divine. As though she were arriving not just from another region of the large house but from a distant planet.

“Well,” she said, as she descended. “I never got a chance
to wear it out. I'll get it in the picture, then at least it'll be used.”

“Ma'am,” I said.

“My sister sent it,” she continued—the stairs nearly fully descended now. “From Farmington, some years ago. Not long after I was married. Still fits. Imagine!”

“Ma'am,” I said again. “He's—” And paused a second time—unsure, suddenly, of how I should refer to the old man—what proper name to use, if any. “He's—dead.”

IT WAS SHE, THEN,
and not I, who led the way. Who entered the room, and crossed it with a steady tread. Who bent stiffly toward her husband in his chair—obscuring him with her puffed sleeves almost entirely.

Sure enough, Clarence was dead. I remained where I was—hovering at the door—while Clarence's wife rose and remarked that, indeed, what I had said was true. She smoothed the creases in the lapel of his coat, and centred the cap on his head. She didn't need to shut his eyes, because—tucked in their folds, like windows decked out for the Fourth of July—they were already quite as good as closed.

“He looks all right,” Clarence's wife said then. Stepping back to get a better look. “He looks,” she said, “the same as ever.” Then, turning suddenly toward me, she said, “Well, that's some comfort anyway, isn't it? If death don't change a man,” she said, “then, I guess—well—nothing woulda.”

But she did not laugh. As I had expected that she might. Perhaps it hadn't been a joke at all. That was what I wanted
then. For it all to turn out to be a little joke. For her to laugh; to, with that laugh, convince me of something that I did not feel. And though there was no doubt that it would have been odd if she'd complied—if she had, at that moment, as I wished that she would, let out an uproarious shout—it would not have been so odd as what she did do.

Tugging once more at the starched collar of Clarence's shirt and spinning to face me—a hand resting now on a shoulder, on Clarence's large, almost unaltered woodcutter's frame—she said, “Well, where do ye want me?”

I did not understand, and only stared at her, blankly. “What?” I said. There was a new expression on her face now. An impatience. “For the pikcha,” she said. Almost beseechingly. “I had,” she explained—indicating the dress—“an awful job gettin' in.”

So, because I could think of nothing else to do, I took her picture. Just in the way that she'd arranged it—which was, after all, quite the same as I'd imagined. A gloved hand resting on one of Clarence's high shoulders—in death still as straight and tall as Clarence's house, or any of the houses on the Lakehead road. His wife beside him—leaning ever so slightly forward, as if to meet the very limit of the frame. And smiling. Like a country pageant queen.

S
IGNAC
'
S
B
OATS

 

For John

WHEN MARTHA FIRST
met Charlie, and fell in love, she was still working at a place called Fat Albert's on the rue des Halles. It was an American place, but even the Americans pronounced the “Albert” as if it were French. Albert himself, who, to his face, everyone just called Al, was from Jacksonville, Florida, and had come to Paris at the age of twenty-two after reading
Giovanni's Room
. He made the best food that Martha had ever, or would ever, taste, although later she could never be sure if it was just that she never ate that much butter again. Chicken that fell from the bone. Five different kinds of potatoes. Okra that arrived from somewhere.

At night, the place was bursting. No one ever wanted to go home once they came, so they stayed, and ordered more bottles of wine until they were dancing. Shuffling out between tables. Knocking into those who—elbows out—were still eating, and using their hands. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was dancing and who was calling out for more hoppin' John or wings.

When Ginny introduced herself to Martha she said, “It's not so bad, if you don't mind feeling like a piece of meat yourself,” but she loved it there, at Al's. Ginny was
one of a dozen or so of the girls, all of them slim, and American, and pretty—just thrilled to pieces, like Martha was, to be in Paris, and not back home like everyone else. There were the great Nordic ice queens of the Midwest, the brunettes of New England, and two brash redheads: one from Washington State, and the other from somewhere in the Carolinas. Martha was from Port Jarvis, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, and rather old-fashioned looking—her hair a russet colour, something in between. Still—she was pretty, and could pass.

It was a sort of a joke that they all had French names. Martha was Chantelle, and Ginny was Lucille. They wore their names on the collars of their shirts, and with the growing roar of the restaurant crowd they would hear their names begin to echo from every corner of the room. “Chan-teeeelle,” the customers would call out, in their American accents, affected or real. Sometimes other, less decorous names were called. It was the Americans who were the worst. They looked like outmoded GIs, as if thirty years hadn't passed, and they still came to Al's place when they got homesick, bored of the French girls in Pigalle. The worst she ever got, though, was a slap on the ass. Other than that, no one ever laid a finger on her, and the tips were great.

AFTER THEIR LATE SHIFTS,
Ginny and Martha would find some quiet place where they could split a bottle of wine and count out their cash. Martha thumbed briskly through
the bills, exclaiming the total in a single, jubilant note, but Ginny was more careful and divided hers into three neat and separate rows, writing the totals of each pile in the small black ledger book that she carried with her everywhere.

Ginny was going to be a Guggenheim. The first of the piles was for that. It was untouchable: gallery money. The second and larger pile was for art. Every month she allowed herself the purchase of a single piece, and so frequented the boutiques, when she wasn't working, in the affordable part of town. The third and smallest amount went, regret-fully, toward the week's expenses—these, though, were next to nothing in those days.

All of Martha's own savings went toward getting herself “on her feet”; she had only just arrived and was still renting a room at Madame Bernard's. But then, nearly all at once after she met Ginny, she met Charlie, and then she didn't care particularly about “her feet” anymore. She didn't tell Ginny this, but Ginny knew. At their post-shift communions, when they drank too much wine, Ginny would say, regarding her own neat piles, “Really, Martha, it's just
so good
to have a
plan
.”

But Martha, at that time, knew of only two kinds of plans, and one was for those, like her friends back at home, who had made them too simple and so were already done, and the other was for people like Ginny, who never would be. There didn't seem to be any plan for the kinds of things that Martha desired.

At the time, the closest she could come was Charlie.

THE MOST SURPRISING THING
for Martha in those first months in Paris was that, although she had travelled all the way from Newark—that is, all the way from one side of the world to the other—she had not actually
seen
it. Not, anyway, in the way that they spoke of it back home—as if “the world” was a single, observable thing.

It was a disappointment to have to realize that her own limited perspective had neither increased nor lessened in France, but had remained, instead, stubbornly, the same. The street disappeared against the limit of the horizon at a vanishing point no farther away than it had in Newark—or even in Port Jarvis. The sounds of the pedestrians and traffic were no clearer or more relevant to the ear.

Overall, though, she was not dissatisfied, and it was this, perhaps, that was most bewildering. To realize that she had found—after all, and so simply—everything that she might need or desire not only in a place that, like Port Jarvis, was single and measurable, but in a
person
, in Charlie—a person who (she was beginning to suspect), much as she loved him, would turn out that way, too.

It seemed that there would, after all, be much of the world that Martha would just let go—unnoticed and undesired.

Once, Martha made the mistake of mentioning something along these lines to Ginny, and Ginny, in her “learn from me” tone, had said, “You're
always
going to be capable of wanting
more,
Martha.” It had been one of their after-Al-bear specials. “The trick,” Ginny had said, “is being satisfied with what you've got.”

Ginny herself seemed satisfied just for saying it.

“Funny for you to say” is what Martha said. Her feelings were hurt even if she otherwise would have agreed. “I've
been
being satisfied. You're the one who wants to be a Guggenheim.”

Ginny snorted through her nose. “It's not like
that
,” she told Martha. “It's not about being some
one
, some
thing
. It's about—” she paused and looked at Martha, shaking her head, “having something to work
toward
,” she said. “It's about
Art
.”

Martha snorted, too. “It's about
nothing
is what it's about,” she said. And then, made brazen by argument and wine, she continued, pointedly: “And I don't like your art.”

Ginny was not offended. She rolled her eyes. “You like
pictures
, Martha,” she said, and then, as if she were addressing an invisible audience beside them: “Let's get one thing clear before this discussion goes any further. Martha doesn't like
art
, she likes ‘
pictures
.'”

Martha liked Charlie's art though, and Ginny knew it. And it wasn't just because she liked Charlie. Even some of the more abstract things that he did, like a purplish splash, or a study of a red ball that looked like a badly drawn version of the Japanese flag. He'd given that one to Ginny, and Martha had even been a bit sore about it at the time. To Martha he had always given the simple landscapes, and one time a sketch of a girl who didn't even really look like her.

“I just think there has to be—some kind of story,” Martha said. Although more tentatively now.

“
Martha
,” Ginny said, again in her “learn from me” tone, “don't you see that's
so limiting
?”

“At least,” Martha said irritably, “it's real. Limitations,” she said, “are real.” She was beginning to get upset but didn't know why. Any other time she would have just let it go.

IN TRUTH, MARTHA DID NOT
know if she believed what she said, and she certainly did not only like “pictures.” She found this out one day while still living on the Left Bank with blind old Madame Bernard, when Madame had introduced her to the bookcase of Monsieur Bernard, her dead husband—a professor at the university. She and Madame had leafed together through the heavy pages of Signacs and Seurats, and then they came to a book that Monsieur himself had written. Madame traced her hand over the cover to find her husband's name embossed there in raised letters, then she took Martha's hand and made her feel it, too, even though she could see it quite plainly. The book had large, smooth pages, as though blank, but Madame passed her hand over them anyway, just as she did her books in Braille.

When later Martha, on her own, examined the books more carefully, she found that they were scattered with cross-references and addenda: all of Monsieur's old yellowed notes taped into the margins, which defined and explicated each technique and style. In one of the books' opening pages there was an underlined quotation beside
the word
Chromoluminarisme
, for example, which Martha roughly translated as “Make of art an exact science!!!”