This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories
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THIS WILL BE DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN
and other stories
ALSO BY JOHANNA SKIBSRUD
Fiction
The Sentimentalists
Poetry
Late Nights with Wild Cowboys
I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being
THIS WILL BE DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN
and other stories
JOHANNA SKIBSRUD
HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2011
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Johanna Skibsrud, 2011
“The Electric Man” first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Kate Hall and Heather Jessup of Delirium Press (April 2005). “The Limit” first appeared in Stickman Review (December 2005). “This will be difficult to explain” first appeared in Issue 69 of Glimmer Train (Winter 2009) as “This will be difficult to explain, and other stories.” “French Lessons” first appeared in Vol 15, No 1 of Zoetrope: All-Story (Spring 2011).
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Skibsrud, Johanna, 1980–
This will be difficult to explain : and other stories / Johanna Skibsrud.
ISBN 978-0-670-06630-8
I. Title.
PS8587.K46T55 2011 C813’.54 C2011-904907-4
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Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca
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CONTENTS
The Electric Man
The Limit
French Lessons
This will be difficult to explain
Clarence
Signac’s Boats
Cleats
Angus’s Bull
Fat Man and Little Boy
Acknowledgments
THE ELECTRIC MAN
For Rebecca
THE FIRST TIME I saw him he was sitting out on the deck of the Auberge DesJardins, drinking something out of a tall glass. He had a broad-brimmed straw hat on, the kind that women wear, and he was reading The Herald Tribune. I was always looking out for The Herald Tribune that summer, because it indicated to me the English-speaking visitors when they came. Though I could no longer excuse the great loneliness of that summer by the dearth of English newspapers in the place, I was always happy to see The Herald Tribune.
The Auberge was a spot more popular among the Continentals. The Americans and the Brits and even most of the Australians stayed at the bigger resorts, closer to town. We kept mostly Swiss and Belgian visitors, many of whom had been coming to stay at the Auberge for many years, and so were not—as the Americans always seemed to be doing—simply passing through.
By that point in the summer, my French was good enough for just about every purpose except being able to actually say anything. My accent was all right, the guests all said so: I could carry it off. It wasn’t marvellous, they didn’t say that, but they did say, to my credit, that I didn’t sound like an American, pretending, or—and this was worse—a Canadian, being sincere.
When I saw him the first time I was doing the afternoon rounds on the deck—sweeping through, as I did every four o’clock—collecting empty glasses and trays and asking if the guests were quite as comfortable as could be expected. Everyone mostly said that they were. The Auberge—especially out on the deck, in the pre-dinner hours—was a comfortable place, and very few people thought to complain. Except, of course, on the occasion that they should need a drink, or the bill, or else another drink, and then they did ask, but so politely—in so light and detached a way—that it was as if they wished to indicate that the lack, indicated by the request, was in fact just another element from which was composed an all-around satisfactory whole. One or two guests, however, over the course of the weeks that I stayed on at the Auberge, could be counted on to be more exacting than most. The man with the hat was, it turned out, one of those.
THE FIRST TIME I saw him was not the first time he saw me, and when I made my way over to his table and said, “Tout va bien, Monsieur?” because he looked like a man who didn’t need a thing in the world, he said, “Non.” He said: “I saw you pass this way fifteen minutes ago, and I tried to get your attention. There’s not enough ice in my drink.” He rattled his tall glass so that I could see that it was true.
From his accent I guessed he was from somewhere in the Northeast. Connecticut, New Hampshire, maybe, and I thought it was too bad that he could tell right away that I wasn’t French. Usually it was just the people who really were French who could tell. But maybe, I thought, he was one of those guests whose French was so bad they didn’t even try. Who just spoke English as though they expected everyone to understand, or else learn in a hurry.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, in my friendliest voice. “We’ll get that fixed up for you right away,” and he said, “I didn’t expect you to be from the South. I would have pegged you as being from Minnesota or something. St. Paul. Aren’t you a little serious,” he said, “for the South?”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew he didn’t mean to be nice. He had a teasing, half-mean look in his eye and held his glass away from me when I leaned over to take it away. I could tell he was going to be a most scrupulous guest, and any hope that I’d had for striking up more than the usual conversation with him was gone. I just wanted to get back to the kitchen, to get him more ice for his drink like he’d asked.
The glass itself, however, the man with the hat had by then retracted—just enough that I would have had to really reach for it in order to take it away. He watched me carefully as he held it there, at that particular distance, looking interested in what I might do. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there with my hand—not extended, but just open and waiting between us—until he got bored with the game and simply handed me the glass.
That’s the way things went for some time. He didn’t like me very muc
h, and I didn’t like him. Or else he liked me too much, and I didn’t like him. I couldn’t decide, and neither one pleased me.
I could never please him, either. I wasn’t, perhaps, quite authentic enough for him. Whenever I answered his questions—about where I had come from and why—he always gave me a suspicious sideways look, as if he supposed I was lying and he and I both knew it but we weren’t going to say anything about it—at least for a while.
He was the one who asked questions—I never volunteered information on my own. And he never believed what I told him. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling, because his questions were never particularly complicated, and I had never before had anyone doubt the answers I gave to questions as simple as those.
I SAW A LOT of the man with the hat after that. He stayed on at the Auberge for the final part of July and most of August. Unlike the other guests, he didn’t go into town, or take weekend excursions to Provence or down along the Côte d’Azur. Like me, he stayed at the Auberge pretty much all of the time.
I would see him in the mornings in the dining room when I delivered curled-up butter to the tables, and then later I would see him down at the beach, sitting in one of the Auberge’s folding chairs, his woman’s hat on, when I went down to the shore to collect the beach furniture that had been abandoned by the other guests. In the late afternoons, I would always see him on the deck, before the dining room reopened—he was always very prompt at mealtimes—and I would laboriously refill his tall glass with ice that, it seemed, melted unnaturally fast in his hands.
One afternoon, I said to Marie-Thérèse, who was a niece of Madame and Monsieur Rondelle, the owners of the Auberge, and had worked in the dining room three summers in a row, “Il n’est jamais contente!” As I spoke, I tossed my hands in the air in order to emphasize my disdain for a man who could never be contente with a thing. I was always talking with my hands in those days—to make up, I suppose, for how I always suspected my words to fall so short of whatever it was I was trying to say. Marie-Thérèse just shrugged. She was a very easygoing girl, quite contente herself, almost all of the time. “Quelque personnes,” she told me, “sont comme ça.” She shrugged again, and went out onto the deck to check on a guest, who was just then at the very beginning stages of needing something.
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, outsi
de 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.