This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (2 page)

The way she said it, “sont comme ça,” as if it were the most inevitable and insignificant thing that it should be so, made me feel a little foolish for having allowed myself to be so bothered by the hatted man, who was—as Marie-Thérèse
said a little later—obviously “un peu cuckoo.” As she said it, she wound her finger as if around an invisible spool beside her ear, rolling her eyes up into her head so just the bottom bits of her irises showed.

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOONS
, before I had to go up to the deck to refill the guests' drink with ice, and take away and refill the trays with little things to eat, I would always go down to the beach myself, and lie out on one of the long fold-out chairs, in the shade. I always covered myself up completely, even in the shade, on account of my fair skin, which was so easily burned. I wasn't like the French girls who just got browner and browner as the summer wore on and could lie out from ten to two o'clock and not get burned, even on their most sensitive spots, which were also bare.

Because everyone else preferred the sun, I had my shady spots all to myself, and the beach felt secluded and private in the places that I chose. I liked it that way. It was a change from the constant hum of the Auberge, which was busy in the high season. Also, it made me feel as though, at least in those moments, I had control over my solitude. That it was a thing I had chosen.

Sometimes I would try to read, but I was allowing myself to read only French books during the day, and that was difficult. I could never get into the plot of anything. I understood the words, that wasn't the problem—it was just that that was all they seemed to be to me on the page. Just little, individual words—each one isolate, and independent
of any of the other little words, which I also understood, and therefore not seeming to be continuous, in any broader sense, beyond their exact and independent meaning.

So after a little reading I would give up, and put the book down on the sand, and stare around at the beach and out to the water, which always looked very blue and warm, even though if I ever went down to it, it turned out to be cold. Also, it was green and brown up close, and not brilliant and blue as it had looked from afar.

For some time I was always re-convinced from a distance that the next time I went down to the water it would really be how it appeared. But after a while I stopped going down at all. I didn't like to keep finding that I'd—again—been wrong.

So I stayed up in the shady spot that I had all to myself instead, not reading, and just looking around. I had rediscovered an old habit of mine, which was to look at things through a narrowed field of vision by cupping my hand around my eye. In this way I would reduce the world to such a small point—my palm curled like a telescope, and one eye closed—that all I could see was one particular thing. For example, I would look out at the ocean and narrow my palm in that way so that all I could see, beyond my own hand, was a completely uniform shade of blue, uninterrupted by any other shade, or by any of the noise and commotion of the bathers, who stayed in the shallow parts, near shore. Or else I would turn my head and with my telescope eye see just the top bit of a sail. Or
a radar reflector—glinting in the sun. Seeing neither, that is, the radar or the sun, but instead just—that
glinting
; just the reflection of metal and light.

It was, indeed, an old habit—back from when I was a kid, and would go out into the small front yard of my mother's house in Jacksonville and look at things like that, just a little at a time. After a while I knew the whole front yard that way—in small sections, each the size of a dime. What I liked best was to look at the natural things: the grass and the little scrubby flowering bushes in my mother's garden by the porch—and the sky. I could pretend that the rest of everything didn't exist. That I was a different sort of girl, who lived in the country instead of in town, and was surrounded by wilderness on all sides.

When I had chosen one unblemished spot, one particular, dime-sized part of the yard, I would concentrate on it very hard. I would try to press myself, every bit of myself, into that small space left between my palm and the curled-up pinky finger of my right hand. To rush right out of myself, just as—I imagined—that other girl, who was not me, and yet was ever so much more me than I myself could ever have been—might do.

It was a tingling, rushing, electric sensation that I felt coursing through my body then, when I tried so hard to push myself into the fragments of the lawn, and experience the world in the whole and real way that another (I imagined) might. Like maybe the little bits of me were on
fire and if I didn't get pressed into the spot that I wanted to press myself into, I might burn up and be gone.

It seemed important. To be able to get into blades of grass the way that I wanted to. Or into the two or three spots in the sky that weren't marked up by tall houses, or telephone poles.

ONE AFTERNOON
, down by the shore in front of the Auberge, just as I had set down my book that I wasn't really reading, the man with the hat came over and set up his chair next to mine. I saw him from a distance before he came. Before, that is, it was clear to me that it was in my direction, specifically, that he would come.

He was carrying his chair, and walked slowly, the chair banging on his leg with every second step. I made a tunnel of my right hand and held it up to my right eye, squinting the left so that it was entirely closed. Then I followed his hat, just the broad brim of his hat, until, when I took my hand away from my eye, I realized that he was almost upon me, and he could see very well what I was doing. I wiped my eyes, surprised, and then continued to do so as he approached, as if I hoped us both to believe that it was what I'd been doing all along. He put up his hand in greeting but didn't say anything until he had settled—quite near me—into his chair.

“Hello,” he said, naturally. As if, outside of my working hours, he respected that I was in no way responsible for any discomfort of his.

“Hello,” I said. But I was wary. I wondered what he would ask me, because he didn't have a drink, and I didn't have any ice.

“You probably don't know this about me,” he said. “I'm a painter.”

“Oh?” I asked, but he didn't say anything more. “That's interesting,” I said. “What sort of painting do you do?”

“Landscapes mostly,” he told me. Then paused again. “But I've been meaning”—he kept his eye on me as he spoke—“to try a portrait someday.” Again he paused. “I was wondering,” he said finally, “if you would be willing to sit for me someday soon.”

Because I didn't have a proper reason to refuse, I said that I would, and the next evening, as we'd arranged, I knocked on the door of his third floor room. I could hear him shout from the inside that I should come in, so I did, and there he was, sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs that were provided in the more modest rooms. Next to him was a dish of watercolours and a small stretched canvas. He had been waiting for me. He didn't have an easel or anything, and his watercolours appeared unused. There was another straight-backed chair opposite him with an uneven table behind it. On the table was a small lamp that cast a limited light around the otherwise dim room. I had made—I thought suddenly—a rather large mistake. He wasn't a real painter, that was obvious now—and was perhaps even more
cuckoo
, as Marie-Thérèse had said, than we had originally supposed.

I thought it best if I left immediately. Quickly and discreetly. And in the future—I thought—be even more certain not to disturb, or trouble, the man with the hat. But instead of leaving, and for somewhat of the same reason that I agreed in the first place—because I could not think how to refuse—I sat down in the chair he had arranged for me, opposite his own.

“Let me guess,” he said, after a while—he was sketching away at the canvas, with an ordinary pencil, his paints laid aside. Every now and then he would look up at me, but more often he looked down at the pencil. “Let me guess,” he said. “You wanted to be an—actress when you were a girl.”

It was not what I expected to hear. “No,” I said. I never had wanted to be an actress. I supposed he'd said it imagining that all girls who agreed to sit for portraits imagined themselves that way, then or at some other, earlier time of their lives. That they were all aware, and wanted to be made more so, of their own particularness, their singularity.

I liked the movies, but the theatre seemed exaggerated to me. It always rang a little false. One time I'd gone up north to a festival in Savannah with my friend Ariane. We sat right up front for a production of
A Single Afternoon
, which was put on by a British company that Ariane had told me I'd enjoy. They were “naturalists”—like in the movies. “They even have the backstage set up to look like another room of the set,” she explained. “So the actors don't get out of character between scenes.”

I had never been more bored in my life. Even Ariane was bored. You could feel it—boredom everywhere. Soon even the actors started to feel it. They sped up their lines, and started to look angry, when it didn't seem “right” or “real” that they should.

Not even midway through, Ariane leaned over and said, “I'm depressed.”

We were sitting so close to the stage that at a certain point—surely things were now drawing to a close—one of the actors came forward, so close that I could have reached up and touched him—and I did. Without really thinking—I did. I reached out and touched his foot, which was clothed in a very ordinary sock—the thick, pilly wool kind that lots of men wear, and that on occasion I had even worn myself.

Ariane, even with how into “making a scene” she was in those days, was horrified, and leaned away from me, as if in reflex. She looked at me from that new distance as though she had never seen me before in her life. It was no ordinary boundary, the look suggested, that I had crossed. The actor himself gave a kind of a jump when I touched him, and then shot me a startled and irritated glare. We were so close that I could see every line, and every slight change in the expression, on his face. He was older than he was pretending to be.

It was just: there was something ridiculous and sad about those socks. I wanted to touch them. All of a sudden, seeing them so close, all the little pilly hairs shooting off
from them in all directions, I'd thought, isn't it the saddest thing in the world that there was this sock—what seemed to me the single realest sock I'd ever seen—up there, in front of me on the stage, and it was pretending
not
to be a sock, or at least to be a sock in
another
afternoon, a sock that it, so evidently, was not.

A sock that would be realer than the sock that it
actually was
, was a thing that I could not imagine.

I TOLD THE MAN
with the hat that I hadn't ever wanted to be an actor. The closest I had come, I said, when he seemed surprised, was in a fourth-grade play when I was supposed to play a crow. “I didn't have any lines,” I told the man. “I was just supposed to fly around in the background, but that was fine by me.”

“I imagine you were a very good crow,” the man said with a little smile. He had picked up his tray of paints and was beginning to dab at the canvas.

“I wasn't,” I said. “I called in sick. My mother dressed me in the costume and painted my face, but then I looked in the mirror and started to cry. Nothing my mother could do could get me to leave the house looking like that.”

“I guess I was wrong,” the man said.

“I just kept saying,” I told him, “‘I don't want to be a crow! You can't make me!'” I laughed, but the man—who was not wearing his hat on this occasion—did not.

“That's sad,” he said. His old sideways look was back. It seemed his remark may have even been a sort of reproach.
For laughing at something that he saw—and that I should see too—wasn't very funny at all.

Well, it was
my
story.

“Oh, it's okay,” I said. I didn't think it was sad. “I thought I was supposed to be too
serious
anyway.”

I WENT BACK TWO OR
three more times to sit for the guest. In the daytime, we resumed our old routines, and he never mentioned anything about the painting when he saw me. Strangely, he didn't try to talk to me, either, as he had done before when I refilled his drink with ice in the late afternoons. He seemed more distant, and formal, as if we had never met at all, and that made me feel a little strange about the whole thing—as though I'd had a love affair with the old man, instead of simply sitting in a chair.

We acted like that with each other, for some reason. Overly polite and conventional like that. We didn't, either of us—as is often the case with the more humid matters of the heart—know quite how to understand the breach (though it had been, in our case, only the smallest, almost undetectable, tear) of our independence from one another, which we otherwise would have maintained.

ONE DAY, WHILE HE WAS
working away without even looking up at my face, which often for long stretches he was able to do, I said, “Why did you think that? Why did you ask me that before—if I'd wanted to be an actress?”

He said only, as I had suspected: “Doesn't every young girl?” And shrugged. He did not seem in the mood to discuss anything.

But instead of letting the subject drop, as I might have, I said I didn't think all young girls
did
want to be actresses. I said it was an unfair thing to assume. I guess that I was feeling a little hurt, because I'd thought, if nothing else, that he was a man who paid attention to things. Who was perceptive, and had perhaps seen something in me, something particular, that had made him ask that question, instead of its springing from either mere supposition or form.

So maybe I liked, after all, the way that he looked at me sideways when I answered his questions, as if I thought for a moment, too, with that look, that I had made it all up—that the details of my life weren't really my own. That I was perhaps someone altogether different—whose particulars I didn't, or was just about to, know.