This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (11 page)

So it was from Monsieur Bernard's bookshelves—from the forgotten, mostly unreadable notes of a dead professor, obscure even to his wife—that, on the quiet days at the beginning of her stay in Paris, Martha discovered the law of simultaneous contrasts and found, to her surprise, that she was not a lover of pictures, or of stories, as she had always supposed, but—like Monsieur Bernard—a
scientist
at heart.

Though the images were often blurred badly in the old books, Martha pored over the small isolate points of the later Signacs, attempting to see them at first as just that: singular, and insignificant. She found that then, when she stood back to look at the complete image, it was as though for a moment both things existed: the smallnesses and the whole, though no single mark in the images ever touched another, or blended in colour or tone. This sort of exercise could be frustrating with the badly copied old books, but when Martha landed the job at Al-bears, she took herself often to the Jeu de Paume, where she spent hours in front of the Signacs, especially the boats.

Again and again she marvelled over the manner in which the small points of colour maintained themselves independently of the image they conveyed, while at the same time they
gave themselves up to it entirely
. Like a mosaic, she thought, except the reverse, because instead of being scattered and then brought, suddenly, to a whole,
it was apparent that with the paintings (which had no natural compulsion toward smallness or disjunction) it had been the painter who deliberately chose the fragmentation every time.

What the point was, exactly, of such division, if the image would after all turn out to be a large and straightforward thing, was something that troubled Martha. But always, over top of any doubts, there was that other thing: a confusion, a nearly religious sensation of wonder or awe. She found that, in looking at the paintings in their full, imposing, and somewhat muted form (the dots, she realized, were of course so much more spread apart than they had appeared on the shrunken page, and it was both a disappointment and a joy to her to find out that in fact the
holes did show
), this larger, stranger feeling always overshot the worry, so that she went away always palpably impressed.

MARTHA NEVER TOLD GINNY
about Monsieur Bernard, or the boats, and fell into the defence of “pictures” mostly because she despised Ginny's snobbery. She continued to defend them even as she began to realize that what she admired in Signac was not the pictures themselves but their reverse: the practical assembly of the image on the page. She argued, privately to herself, that it was different with Signac. That with him there was always still the
picture
, the image, the
life conveyed
. Still the picnic in the park, and the tall parasols. Still the boats at the river.

It was Seurat who disturbed her. The way that with his
bold lines and colour he could profess to direct his paintings through his stroke and tone alone; his dark and descending lines confidently occasioning sadness, for example—warm and cool tones, in equal measure, occasioning calm.

The bright ascending lines, of course, were joy.

Martha did not like to feel (when she stood in front of the paintings and felt just the way that Seurat and his lines had predicted) that it all had to do purely with optics and geometry. Though at heart she was a scientist, she certainly did not want things to turn out to be as simple as that.

So maybe she was not a scientist after all; it depressed her that her ideas and reactions could be so tediously accounted for. But when, one day, she admitted all of this to Charlie, he was not even surprised. She was still working at Al-bears then, and they were sitting out back, on crates that had been propped up sideways for them to smoke on. Exactly one month later Al would be beaten to death outside the La Chapelle Métro, and the restaurant would suddenly close.

“I don't see why you think they're so separate,” Charlie had said. “Science” (he weighed it, heavily, on the one hand) “and art. It's only lately—it's only—
human beings
” (and he said the words as if they meant something different from what the words themselves supposed) “who've come up with the ridiculous idea to set them at odds.”

He looked at her then, and leaned in, so that his shoulder pressed against her own. It was true that they had often been happy together.

For example, already Martha was not thinking of what she had been saying, but was instead imagining herself as … a field mouse, or some other creature—precognitive. Who had not yet been, and never would be, set so at odds …

She found the image hard, but still there was something in it a little like the feeling she got standing in front of Signac and his boats. Maybe it was not really altogether different, that feeling. From the one that the field mouse had. Of everything collided, and occurring at once, and for a very brief moment she existed like that, next to Charlie: a simple form. Looking out at the world as though from almost underground—everything from that position appearing blurred, and without distinction.

It was not only her imagination. She was, indeed, a small and a simple creature in those days, when she first knew Charlie. When, for what seemed like the first time, things were happening to her like in other people's lives, and the little distinctions that she'd made for herself, prior to that time, had begun, slowly, to fade away.

This, she realized, of course, was love. It was the first time she'd known anything about it and felt surprised that it had in fact
simplified
her, when she'd thought it would have made her at the same time more integral, and more complex. As if she would have suddenly found herself a functional thing, like a clock, or a television, with an infinite number of separate mechanisms and parts that worked on their own, and she knew what for, and why.

C
LEATS

 

For Peggy

THE CLEATS HAD BEEN
received from Carey himself on the occasion of her fifty-second birthday. Fay had opened them up after the meal and, to the amusement of their guests, tried them on in the middle of the living room—making small dents in the carpeting. They looked like any ordinary pair of tennis shoes: blue canvas, with three white stripes. But on the bottom, where a soft rubber sole would otherwise have been, was a hard plastic plate studded with blunt nubs. Everyone exclaimed that they had never seen anything quite like them. “Carey! He's always had such a sense of humour.” “Who would have thought?
Garden
cleats! Well, quite practical, really!” “Or nearly so …”

Carey had grinned at her from across the room, making his exaggerated eyes at her: a demonstration of the true sentiment that they both still assumed—even after all those years—he really did feel and would have expressed to her then, if it had been within his capacity to do so.

It turned out that the cleats were indeed only “nearly” practical, because it was only a few days after that that Fay got stuck in the yard. She'd wandered out, leaving her shoes on the flagged stones of the patio, and at first had paced easily, back and forth, along the sloped edge of the lawn.
But then, descending to where the grass dipped suddenly and a drain drew the water to the gutter of the drive, Fay felt the cleats stick more firmly in the wet dirt; there was a little popping sound as they stuck. She shifted her weight from side to side in an effort to free herself, but that only seemed to work her in more deeply.

At first, it was not panic. It was only a dull, half-remembered flavour of something, a taste that she couldn't name, and didn't wish to. She continued to stand, her arms outstretched as though afraid she would fall, though she was not off-balance—then, tentatively at first, as if she was joking, she called out. For Carey, who she knew was somewhere in the house. When he didn't come, she called louder. Then again, louder—leaving less and less time in between calls for him to actually arrive.

It was Eva who came. Nonchalantly, to the upstairs window. Her bedroom overlooked the small lawn. “What's
wrong
?” she asked, letting the syllables drag. From her perspective, there was nothing at all
wrong
with her mother. She was only standing, as she'd often done, in the middle of the lawn. When Fay explained about the cleats—a little sheepish now, ashamed of herself for shrieking, and wishing it had not been her daughter to discover her—Eva laughed so hard that her head disappeared below the window. “Mom!” she said, when she returned, through bursts of laughter. “Just take the damn things off!” So Fay bent down, as her daughter had instructed, and took off the cleats. She stepped in her sock feet onto the grass. Without
the cleats it was just the moist lawn underfoot and, sturdily on the ground, she reached down and tugged them from the wet dirt. They came up easily. She could still hear Eva from the upstairs window. “Are
you okay
?” Eva was saying, in false concern. Still laughing. “
Mom,
are you
all right
?”

IT WAS EVA, THOUGH,
that Fay paused over, and not Carey, when three months later, in early September, she left them both and moved to Paris to live with Martha. Eva herself seemed hardly to notice the event. She had just entered her second year at a private college not far from their home, and seemed only very minimally aware that she had parents at all. Carey, on the other hand, called every day—sometimes two or three times in an hour—and left messages on her portable telephone until the message box filled. He wondered where Fay “got off,” that's how he put it, assuming she'd some different set of rules to live by than everyone else in the world. She had, Carey said, over and over again, “chosen a life”—and now, he said, a touch of hurt in his voice, like a child, that life
needed attending
. It caused in Fay, briefly, in the moment that she heard it—that
thing
quivering there in his voice, canned in the telephone, on the other end of the line—a sweeping sadness, the depth of which she was not brave enough even to properly feel, let alone gauge or understand.

But then, when she repeated Carey's words to herself in her own head, what he had
actually
said, she could not help picturing the life that Carey described as the small
and somewhat neglected houseplant that she'd left on the kitchen windowsill, which she did not care for.

Eva, though. At the thought of her, Fay would feel sorry for everything all over again. It really was such a shame, the way you could be so careful, and for so long, and then go ahead and undo it all in the end, as though nothing had ever been held together by anything at all.

EVA HAD ALWAYS
had what Fay and Carey referred to as an “overactive mind.” What other child (Fay would ask herself sometimes with no small degree of pride) might arrive home from the fourth grade with a new government system worked out on a scrap of paper—claiming that she'd figured out a way to “make everybody really happy.” It turned out that what Eva had come up with was, essentially, Communism, but Fay had applauded the effort anyway. She'd added, however, and in no uncertain terms, that one or two other people had come up with Eva's idea before—and what the outcomes had been. “The ideas are good, though,” she'd told Eva. “You keep having ideas.” And Eva had. But each time there was some new flaw that, necessarily, Fay would feel obliged to point out. In order, she said to both Carey and herself, that Eva would not later be unduly surprised or disappointed by the world—and the way that ideas did or did not work upon it.

But then one day Eva could not get out of bed, and Fay realized that she had made a serious mistake. In truth, they had thought at first that it was only a resurgence of the mild
case of Lyme disease Eva had experienced the summer before, but shortly afterward it became clear that nothing in fact was—physically, at least—wrong with Eva at all. When they admitted it, and went to see the psychoanalyst instead, Fay felt ashamed. Like everyone else of her generation, she'd extolled the virtues of therapy for years, but had always imagined (as it now became clear) that it applied to
other
people—whose lives had not been, as Eva's had, so carefully considered, and arranged. Her own troubles, or those of her friends—their respective faltering careers and marriages—she easily understood. There were always the usual (outside, and unaccountable) factors to be considered. Inattentive fathers. Catholicism. A generation of mothers who thought that pain medication and jelly doughnuts were good antidotes to an adolescent in the house. As silly as it now seemed, it appeared that Fay
had truly believed
that unhappiness in its different forms existed in the world only through a series of avoidable blunders. In the summer of Eva's paralysis, however, Fay was forced to admit that these were blunders that she too had somehow, inadvertently, made. Carey tried his best to comfort her: “You're not the only thing in her life, you know,” he said. “She's a smart kid. She's too smart. She notices things.”