This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (6 page)

Failing that, what Daniel wishes is that at least they were back at the beginning of the drive and Anna was polite to him again.

The junction seems a long while to wait before he says anything again, so he says, “Whatcha thinking about, honey?”

He tries to make his voice sound cheerful and light, as if the question has come out of nowhere and isn't attached to anything else—even to any anticipation of reply.

Anna says, “
Nothing
,” and Daniel knows that he has made another mistake. After that he doesn't say anything for a moment, but then he feels reckless. He feels that maybe he doesn't even care anymore. He thinks,
What the hell, I'm just going to say any old thing, whatever I feel like
, and half turns to Anna and says, “I've always found that to be difficult.”

Anna ignores him, or perhaps she hasn't even heard. Daniel keeps going anyway. “I mean I've tried,” he says. “It's not that I haven't tried. But I just can never quite do
it. So, if
you
can,” he tells her, and by now his words are coming out a little faster and hard. He feels like a fool, and wishes he could just quit talking. Instead he shrugs. “Well,” he says—to wrap up—“I guess that's pretty cool for you.”

Anna is still ignoring him, but she doesn't look quite so angry now. Maybe it's just Daniel's imagination, but it occurs to him that he may have, now, the smallest of chances, so he tries again. “Are you
really
thinking of nothing?” he asks, and now he lets a teasing note creep into his voice. If he can get her to laugh before he gets to his mother's place, then everything will be all right. Eight months ago he could have done it. He remembers that about Anna, certainly. She'd never been good at holding a grudge. She'd get upset, enough to frighten him sometimes, but then—in a moment—she'd be happy again, just like that, as if those small frustrations, which had somehow got so out of hand, had never existed at all.

“I mean
really
really,” Daniel tries again. He smiles as he says it in her direction—to where she is looking out the window, at the approaching junction. In another second, without turning her head, she will be staring right down the road that they will turn down toward home. That is the way it is when you are travelling, even at a moderate pace, in a moving vehicle. What will she think then? Daniel wonders this but knows, even as he wonders it, that it is something he will never ask.

That is the pace they are travelling at. Daniel gets four words into the distance between the approach and the
turn, and then he wonders how many more he can get in before his mother's house. If the space between here and the house is enough. “I mean right now,” he says. “Are you thinking nothing …
now
?” He waits. “How about,” and pauses again, “now!” he says, very quickly and loud. Maybe she even jumps a little.

Before she smiles Daniel sees it. “Hey?” he asks. Encouraged. “Hey? Hey?” He says again, and takes a risk, and touches her. He takes a hand off the wheel and gives her a little poke on the shoulder to match his last “hey?”

She sways a little toward the window, but doesn't pull back from his touch, as he'd been afraid that she might. And she does, she smiles. At first she tries to hide it, but then she shifts in her seat, and tosses her hair over her shoulder to look at him—at Daniel—and then he can see that everything's all right.

“I didn't think so,” Daniel says, to answer his own question.

Once they make the turn, leaving what's left of the Knutsen place behind, the land really does seem to just fall away. It doesn't drop off, it just extends itself out—just stretches on and off, right out onto blankness. Especially this time of year, when all the colours are so muted and not even really colours at all but just a suggestion of the sort of colour they once had been. It just seems to go on for what, Daniel assumes, is as good as forever.

He thinks this, and then feels happy that he does. Happy, too, when he realizes he has chosen to stay out here,
in this part of the world, when it was not at all certain that that is what he would do. That he has chosen to stay in the Midwest, where a man can think thoughts like the one he has thought, just now, seems to him like the best kind of decision he could have made. He knows that on the East Coast and on the West, there is the imposition, always, of objects on other objects. The sky is interrupted by the hills, the hills by the trees, the trees by more hills, and houses, and so on. But out here, in the middle, it's possible to find a section of the road to look out at and not see anything for miles. It is possible just to see and see until it gets hazy and you can't see anymore—and even at that point, at the point where you stop being able to see any longer, it's not because what's out there is covered up by anything, it's just—that's the limit.

F
RENCH
L
ESSONS

Thereupon, the signifier (the third meaning) is not filled; it keeps in a permanent state of depletion (a term from linguistics that designates the empty, all-purpose verbs—for example, the verb
faire
). We might also say, on the other hand—and this would be quite as true—that this same signifier is not empty (cannot empty itself); it maintains a state of perpetual erethism, desire not finding issue in that spasm of the signified that normally causes the subject to sink voluptuously back into the peace of nominations.

—ROLAND BARTHES

 

For Sarah

WHEN MARTHA FIRST
arrived in Paris—before she met Charlie, and settled down, and her real life began—she stayed with blind old Madame Bernard on the Left Bank, in an old apartment with narrow rooms, which linked themselves like train cars all the way back. Madame took her coffee in bed, and at exactly 8
A.M
. Martha would fix it and carry it in, to where Madame, already raised on her pillows, would be reading books in Braille, her fingers skimming the surface of the page, making a whistling noise. If not for the morning coffee, Martha perhaps never would have been hired at all, because that was, very nearly, the extent of her duties for the day. She tidied the place, but more or less of her own accord, and sometimes she wondered if Madame would even notice if she let things go. This was absurd, of course—Madame noticed everything.

She would get up and dress herself without assistance—often wearing the same chemise that she'd slept in, along with a pair of trousers belonging to the professor (her husband, by then deceased), which she rolled to the knee. Then she listened to Wagner, placing the needle mid-record herself and allowing the aria to play through, at least several times. It was always the same: “Erda's
Warning,” from scene 4 of
Das Rheingold
. Initially it had agitated Martha to begin every morning in this way, but she grew used to it quickly, and after a while even began to look forward to the ritual. Within a single month she could replay the exact progression of the scene in her head and found herself doing so on occasion—sometimes long after she'd left Madame and Madame's apartment behind. Which she did, less than a year later. Arriving at Charlie's smaller, sunnier apartment in the Eleventh, with the French doors (it had seemed, when she'd visited Charlie and fallen in love, that it was for those doors, and not for Paris—or for Charlie—that she'd come), she found her mornings without the Wagner rather quiet.

Madame also insisted, despite Martha's repeated efforts, on assembling her own meals, which consisted of three long baguette sandwiches, for which Martha purchased the bread each morning. The cheese she bought according to the specific request of Madame from a vendor at the Thursday market who had been described in such unfaultable detail that she'd spotted him immediately, still several stalls away. She'd noticed his hair first, half curly, and then the way that his forehead sloped and completed itself—
“à ne pas manquer”
—in a long and narrow nose.

Once, at the beginning of her stay, Martha—having helped herself generously to the cheese—replaced it midweek with one from a Saturday market farther along the boulevard. This cheese had looked and smelled, to Martha, just the same, and she had hoped (knowing, truly,
nothing then) that it
was
. Madame Bernard, however, had frowned when opening the package and, with a polite sniff, asked Martha to refrain in the future from
les jeux
when it came to
les fromages
. Martha's French was still so poor that at first she assumed Madame was objecting to her
jupes
—the short skirts she wore in those days—until she remembered that Madame was blind.

Meals for Martha were to be included in the arrangement that she and Madame Bernard had agreed upon, but on her arrival nothing was provided and no mention of an alternative plan made. She walked by the fruit stands on market days, her eyes lingering on the apples and bananas and pears; but never once did she afford herself the luxury of purchasing anything. One Thursday, however, before leaving for the market, she worked up the courage to request a little extra money, with which she might buy a few items of her own. Madame was positioned comfortably in her favourite chair, reading in the dark, as she always did in the late afternoon. (It never failed to surprise Martha to come across her that way: in the near blackness, a book open on her knee.)

Madame did not look up as Martha approached—nor as, in elliptical sentences that looped back on themselves and led ultimately nowhere, she commenced her stumbling appeal. Not once did Madame interrupt, or offer anything—some predicate, some verb—into the silences that sometimes ensued. (It was within these silences that Martha seemed almost to live in those days, as though she
imagined that the words she did not yet know dwelt there, too, and so there she hunted for them—lucklessly.)

At last, when in a final and lingering hesitation Madame understood that Martha's request was complete, she removed her finger from the page, laid the book aside, and shuffled to the kitchen without a word—her rolled-up trousers rustling at the knee. Reaching up to the high shelf above the stove, she chose from among the other crowded objects a bowl of waxen fruit, which she offered to Martha, evidently pleased to honour her request. The fruit glinted, still shiny in places, in the light of the kitchen's single bulb. Martha's French was indeed so poor in those days that she would have found it nearly impossible to refuse—or to clarify her request in any way—so she accepted the fruit graciously, with a nod and a smile.

Especially in moments such as these, and with Madame there were many, Martha's progress in the language struck her as frustratingly slow. She was unable to concentrate on the verb charts and vocabulary words that she had posted on her bedroom walls, and so rarely studied them at all. Instead, she drifted off into a disturbed sleep, where her dreams, laboriously translated from the English, exhausted her and she woke up tired.

IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE
third month of her stay, long after the incident with the fruit, that she realized suddenly, and with what seemed like no progression toward it, that she understood; she hardly needed to concentrate anymore.
She was relieved, but at the same time—and this she never would have anticipated—a little disappointed, too. It was a different sort of Paris that she'd lived in when she'd understood so little. It had been like an object. Something she could
put on
, or
examine
, or
hold
. Only once that was gone did she realize how easy it was, even in Paris, to slip into the ordinary, to begin the inevitable depreciation of things.

She would long remember the last—great—misunderstanding, however. It took place during her sixth week in the apartment, when Madame told Martha about the death of her son. The details would always remain distorted and vague, just in the way that Martha had first received them. She found herself afterward wondering about him not infrequently, sometimes horrified by small things—a desk, a globe, a knife—fearing they might have come into play somehow in a story that she had so thoroughly failed to understand.

Later, Martha would tell Ginny of the event: “I thought I had it right. You know, you can't just nod and smile with Madame, like with everyone else. I had to figure it out, you see. Where all the funny bits were, and laugh. And then, when the story got sad, I had to
know
that it did. And I did. I said ‘aah' and ‘oh' in all the right places, I'm sure of it! But”—and here Martha rang her hand down flat on the table, making Ginny (who for some time already had sensed the punch line) smile—“I could have
sworn
,” Martha said, “that we were well
out
of the sad bits.” She paused. “It's
true, all stories have got to have both, but it just isn't fair when you aren't clear about which one is which.”

“And so?” Ginny said, still grinning. “What happened?”