“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.
But later he said, “I myself was an actor, you know,” and I said, “I thought you were a painter,” and he said, “A person can be more than one thing.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what kind of actor were you?” He could be amusing after all.
“You just struck me,” he said, in answer to my previous question, and ignoring the last, “like me in a way. Like someone”—he looked up for the first time in a while—“who wishes they were more than they are in real life, or at least something—somebody—else sometimes. That’s an acting technique,” he told me. “I suppose you wouldn’t know that. Starting from zero so that then you can become something, or someone, entirely new.” He was working away diligently with the paints, the small canvas tilted—always—up and away from me so that I couldn’t see the progress that he made. “That’s what you should have done when you were a crow,” he told me. “Your problem was seeing yourself as a little girl who looked like a crow, and not being the crow yourself.” I nodded, and made a small sound like I was interested, and understood. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all to say what he had, and I did think that was interesting. What he said really did strike me as an essentially embarrassing thing to say. To admit, that is, that you were not, in and of yourself, enough. And would remain that way. To my American sense of things, which I—and I assumed that he, too—had retained (he had the accent, after all, stronger than my own), well, wasn’t that the very worst thing that a person could admit?
“I don’t think that’s me,” I told him quickly. “I think I’m all set to be just me. Just as I am.”
“So I was wrong again,” the man said, shrugging his shoulders again, like it was no big deal. “Just with me, it’s different,” he said after a while, “because I really was an actor.”
“Right,” I said. “What kind of actor did you say that you were?”
>
“A circus performer,” the man said. “I was the Electric Man in the Bulgarian Circus.”
I laughed even though he didn’t. “The electric man?” I said. I tried to become serious again, as if I had been all along. “What’s that?”
“Oh,” he said, putting his paints aside. “Oh, you don’t know about that, either.” And then he told me about how it was to be an Electric Man in the Bulgarian Circus. How every night he would go out into the ring, and put his hands on a shiny metal ball, and be pumped through with electricity that the silver ball shot out so that his hair stood up on his head and his clothes got singed and sometimes at the end of the night he would have small wounds on the tips of his fingers where the electricity had had nowhere else to go in his body and so burned its way out. “The crowd loved me the best,” the man said. He never wore his hat in the room, and he was bald as an apple. “I never saw it myself, from my position, but they said that from the stands I glowed.”
“That’s just crazy,” I said, but I was impressed. I didn’t know, of course, if I should believe him or not, but then I didn’t see why not, or what purpose it would serve either of us if I didn’t. “Did it hurt?” I asked. I remembered sticking my fingers into the electrical outlets at home sometimes, when I was a little kid. How much that had hurt. I did it more than once, but maybe no more than three times. You’d think it wouldn’t have taken more than the once, but I just always wondered at what point the electricity would arrive out of those tiny little slots where it looked like nothing could be.
“Oh yes,” the Electric Man told me, busying himself again with the task of my portrait. “Oh yes, it hurt very much,” he said. He picked up his tray of paints again and gazed down at the small canvas. It appeared that he did not want to talk after that, and after a quarter of an hour went by in which we didn’t speak at all, I asked him if he thought one day soon I could see the portrait. He said, “I leave tomorrow, you can see it then.” And then a little while later, he got up and said: “That will do.”
IN THE MORNING HE was not downstairs when I did the rounds with the butter, and when I went about by the shore collecting chairs and parasols from the beach I did not see him there either—shielded, as usual, by the broad rim of his woman’s straw hat.
He must have slipped out while I was down by the shore, because when I returned to the Auberge there was no one whose ice melted so fast and I spent the lazy pre-dinner hours casually refilling trays for the few guests who ate their little things very slowly and never seemed to need anything.
As usual, just before dinner, I checked my mail slot in the lobby of the Auberge, though there was rarely anything to find, and there it was: the small canvas, all wrapped up inside a rather tattered paper bag. I felt relieved—and not a little flattered. All that time, it would seem now, the painting had been just for me. But when I tore away the wrapping I saw that what he had left me was not a portrait at all, but the most banal seascape, not unlike the one outside the window of the Auberge, which the man with the hat would have seen quite clearly over my shoulder as I sat for all those hours opposite him in a straight-backed chair.
For a moment, I still hoped that he had kept the real portrait of me for himself and had given me this canvas only as a sort of substitute. But then I thought that it wasn’t very likely: I had only ever seen one canvas in the little room. It seemed the man was, after all, perhaps quite literally, insane. I felt disappointed, and was about to make my way back to my room, when I noticed there was something else in the bag. It was the broad-brimmed hat, all rolled up—I hadn’t imagined it could be made so small. It had a note attached to it, too, which said, in childish scrawl, Because you’re fair, like me, and must burn easily in too much sun.
WHEN, A DAY OR TWO after that, I returned a stack of French novels to the little library that the owners kept in the Auberge’s lounge, I slipped the canvas in with the books because I didn’t want to look at it anymore. There was something very sad to me about the uniform blue of the ocean and the perfect little m’s for birds that had been drawn onto the sky. I wanted to get rid of it, but I didn’t want to just throw it away.
My routine continued, unchanged by the Electric Man’s absence. I made my rounds with the butter in the morning, and then went down to the beach, where I collected abandoned chairs and parasols, and then stretched out in the shade—covered head to toe so I wouldn’t burn, and wearing the Electric Man’s broad-brimmed hat. I still did that—still stretched out on the beach in the shade—even after I’d stopped going down to the water anymore because it was actually cold and green, or pretending to read French novels because none of the words ever seemed to hang together in a consecutive way.
I would just stare around, my hand curled to my eye sometimes, like a telescope. A strange sort—most basic sort—of telescope, of course; it never made anything appear any closer, or farther away. I never tried to summon myself, as I had done as a child. Never tried to press myself—myself as I felt myself to be, most truly—through the small space that was left between my farthest-away finger and the curve of my thumb. I think I didn’t want to risk finding that, were I to try, I wouldn’t feel that tingling, rushing electric sensation that I had when I was a child.
Someday, I thought, while I lay stretched out on an Auberge chair in the shady spot of the beach—before returning to refill the trays and pass out drinks and bills, and then drinks again, to the late-afternoon guests—I would try it again. I would try to feel myself alive again in the way that I had when I was very young. Perhaps the Electric Man had inspired me. To find that “blank space” of myself—or whatever it was he had said. There was no real reason, after all, I thought to myself, that I could not feel that way again—it was, in fact, quite possible, and someday, I thought, when I was feeling particularly well, I would try.
THEN, AT THE VERY END of August, perhaps a week or two after I had last seen the Electric Man, Madame Rondelle, the owner of the Auberge, stopped me on the stair. “I had a note from Monsieur Wyatt,” she said. She always spoke to me in English, because she was no more French than me, though she spoke the language more perfectly. She was a Swede, but of course her English, as well as her French, was impeccable. I rarely saw her long enough to speak with her, though, and, in addition, she always made me nervous. She seemed so sure of herself all the time, and because I was never sure of anything, especially that summer, I always suspected that I was misunderstanding things—even in my own language. I had got that used to second-guessing.
I didn’t even know who Monsieur Wyatt was, for example.
“Who?” I asked.
Madame Rondelle looked up at me, sharply. “The man with the hat,” she told me. “He knows you,” she said. “He said to give you a kind hello.” She hesitated then, before stepping away—evidently wanting to say something more, but for some reason uncertain. “A very dear man,” she told me, as if that were an explanation of something. “I’m a friend of his sister. He’s been coming here for years.” Then she hesitated again. “A little strange,” she said, and her hand left the railing where she had placed it and fluttered up to her chest, as if it hoped to retain something there. “But a very dear dear man,” she insisted, as if that settled it. But still she did not immediately move to go, and in the space of time in which we both lingered—she on the stair, about to decide whether to finally complete her ascent, and I at the bottom, equally unsure of whether I should relieve her of the conversation, make some excuse to go—I tried to think of some perfect thing to say to her of him. But I couldn’t think of anything. I didn’t want to tell her about the painting, that was certain. Someday she would find it, in going through the library, and throw it out; I didn’t think she should know anything of its history if that were to be the case.
“What does he do now?” I asked, for want of anything else. “I mean,” I said, “how is it he has the time, and the—” I paused, “the resources, I mean, to stay?” Then I realized I’d been rude. But I wanted to know. I didn’t imagi
ne that a former member of the Bulgarian Circus would have a very large pension. I presumed, in that moment, because I had never thought of it before, that he must have been from one of those large and wealthy New England families who could afford to finance, and be responsible for, the whims—however fleeting—of their members. It was because that suddenly seemed clear to me that I thought with some shame that it would have been better for me not to have mentioned the money at all. Money was embarrassing when there was either too much or too little of it, and the means to the Electric Man’s situation—which was evidently comfortable—would have been better left unspoken.
But Madame did not seem perturbed by the question. If anything she adopted a more conciliatory tone. “From what I gather,” she said—she began her ascent once more as she spoke, but slowly—“he gets a fairly sizeable cheque from Veterans of Foreign Wars.” It would have been difficult to say whether she had whispered or shouted the words. There seemed, anyway, to be equal attention paid to both emphasizing and concealing the information that the sentence contained. Then she shrugged. “That’s what gets forwarded here,” she said.
I must have looked surprised, or like I was about to say something, and I don’t think that she wanted to be detained much longer. “He got wounded badly in one of the wars,” she explained—as if she wished now that she hadn’t brought it up at all. “I’m not sure which one, he was in so many. Sam—that’s his sister, my friend—she believes”—she had almost reached the top of the stair; pretty soon she would disappear—“they pay him to keep quiet about certain things, you know, that are too—” she paused again, just slightly, just before she was lost to the upstairs of the Auberge and said, “too awful to talk about.” She had another tone in her voice now, a very sad faraway note had crept in, and her hand had remained at her throat as she mounted the stair. “He used to bathe down at the shore when he first came with Sam,” she said. “But for some reason, he’s stopped bathing now.” She looked down to where I stood—it seemed a great distance. “It used to give me quite a fright to see him,” she continued. Then she made a face, and tossed her hand that had been held at her throat in the air as if whatever she’d wished to hold as she’d ascended was useless to her now. “Just—awful,” she said, “his whole body all scarred over the way it was. Whatever it was that happened to him, I don’t know. But I should hope,” she said, “that he’s getting, for it, a pretty compensation.” With a slight nod then, which served to mark her final departure, she turned, and continued up the stairs.
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 2
