Martha snorted, too. “It’s about nothing is what it’s about,” she said. And then, made brazen by argument and wine, she continued, pointedly: “And I don’t like your art.”
Ginny was not offended. She rolled her eyes. “You like pictures, Martha,” she said, and then, as if she were addressing an invisible audience beside them: “Let’s get one thing clear before this discussion goes any further. Martha doesn’t like art, she likes ‘pictures.’”
Martha liked Charlie’s art though, and Ginny knew it. And it wasn’t just because she liked Charlie. Even some of the more abstract things that he did, like a purplish splash, or a study of a red ball that looked like a badly drawn version of the Japanese flag. He’d given that one to Ginny, and Martha had even been a bit sore about it at the time. To Martha he had always given the simple landscapes, and one time a sketch of a girl who didn’t even really look like her.
“I just think there has to be—some kind of story,” Martha said. Although more tentatively now.
“Martha,” Ginny said, again in her “learn from me” tone, “don’t you see that’s so limiting?”
“At least,” Martha said irritably, “it’s real. Limitations,” she said, “are real.” She was beginning to get upset but didn’t know why. Any other time she would have just let it go.
IN TRUTH, MARTHA DID NOT know if she believed what she said, and she certainly did not only like “pictures.” She found this out one day while still living on the Left Bank with blind old Madame Bernard, when Madame had introduced her to the bookcase of Monsieur Bernard, her dead husband—a professor at the university. She and Madame had leafed together through the heavy pages of Signacs and Seurats, and then they came to a book that Monsieur himself had written. Madame traced her hand over the cover to find her husband’s name embossed there in raised letters, then she took Martha’s hand and made her feel it, too, even though she could see it quite plainly. The book had large, smooth pages, as though blank, but Madame passed her hand over them anyway, just as she did her books in Braille.
When later Martha, on her own, examined the books more carefully, she found that they were scattered with cross-references and addenda: all of Monsieur’s old yellowed notes taped into the margins, which defined and explicated each technique and style. In one of the books’ opening pages there was an underlined quotation beside the word Chromoluminarisme, for example, which Martha roughly translated as “Make of art an exact science!!!”
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 par
ts that worked on their own, and she knew what for, and why.
CLEATS
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.”
Eva did, it turned out, have a certain rare disease. It was some comfort to Fay, just to have it be called something. In what Carey (insulted) referred to as his “layman’s terms,” the doctor described the manner in which their daughter had only tricked her body into feeling a pain that did not, in fact, exist at all. Eva’s mind, the doctor told them, had essentially sent out alarm signals to her body (pain, he had added, in brackets, for Carey and Fay) in preparation for a trauma that never actually arrived. Now both mind and body needed to be persuaded that the pain was super-fluous. That the trauma was a figment of her imagination. Almost a narrative device, which her mind had employed in lieu of any other adequate means.
All of this was at first perhaps even harder for Carey than for Fay to grasp. He was a methodical man with a quick mind, and was therefore used to understanding things right away. He was in fact so used to this that he no longer believed in anything that he didn’t immediately comprehend. At first, therefore, he didn’t believe in Eva’s disease either. He had scoffed at the doctor and his “layman’s terms,” which had succeeded only in convincing him that the doctor himself didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. It seemed unthinkable to Carey that if his daughte
r was experiencing pain, it was not a legitimate effect stemming from a legitimate cause. “How could that possibly be a real disease?” he asked Fay. “Pain is pain,” he said. They had been assured, however, that although the disease was rare, it was not abnormal, whatever that was supposed to mean, and although Carey was, eventually, somewhat appeased by all the explanations (lay or otherwise) of the medical validity of his daughter’s affliction, Fay became only more convinced by all of the reiteration that the real cause of her daughter’s illness was neither physical nor psychological, but stemmed instead from a sudden and extreme loss of faith, which she herself was directly responsible for.
Eva was hospitalized for the rest of that summer, and, until she forced herself to walk again, was refused everything that was substantial enough to be taken away. Parents’ visits. TV. Books. Any somewhat edible food. These were returned slowly, as she began to progress. At first, they were disappointed in her advancement—her weight and her spirits continued steadily to diminish. Her legs, already thin, had begun to look useless and frail. Fay had panicked again—terrified that there had once more been some mistake, and that Eva’s affliction was purely physical after all. She couldn’t tell anymore what she wanted to be true. The doctor reassured her. It was certainly a “stubborn” case, he admitted, but there was no cause to worry. Eva would be walking again—he added encouragingly—very soon. And it was true.
That was at the beginning of September. By October Eva was back at school, easily making up the schoolwork she had missed, and seeming curiously optimistic.
FAY DID NOT RECOVER quite so rapidly, and continued to blame herself for her daughter’s ordeal—citing, to Carey, different and often conflicting logic in order to prove her own guilt. It must have been, she would tell him, in those early years, before she knew any better. “That’s what everyone is saying now. Did you know that?” she’d ask. “That the damage done to a child in those foremost years makes almost every effort afterward practically obsolete? It must have been then,” she’d say. Carey, however, even when pressed, could not remember this careless period at all, and truth be told, neither could Fay. When she first mentioned it to him, he had said only: “That’s ridiculous. You’ve always been terrific with Evaline. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 8
