This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

by Johanna Skibsrud

  It was true; it was a fine picture. Clarence appeared just as he had in the dark living room earlier that day. His eyes nearly lost in his head, which sat perched above his wide, and by comparison large and unaltered, woodcutter’s frame. In every photograph, and this one was no exception, his mouth appeared to be shut tight, a firm and single line.

  “Now, see, it’s all about the angle of the thing,” Guy said the next day, as I prepared for my departure—taking longer than usual. He himself was leaned comfortably back in his bendable chair, which he would not be required to depart from—that day, or any other. I nodded. Though I could not imagine what possible “angle” might illuminate, with Clarence, any story at all—let alone one worthy of the anniversary special. Finally, there being very little to do in the way of preparation, and so no means of drawing it out any longer, I made my way to the door. “Tell me,” Guy shouted after me—sensing my concern, which I had found difficult to hide—“tell me if there isn’t a man alive won’t say a few words for the front-page news.”

  Despairingly, I pulled the door shut behind me, muffling Guy’s final words, but just as I did so—it hit me. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Like most good ideas, what had occurred to me then was very simple, so that now that I had thought of it, it seemed very obvious that I had. By the time I had arrived at Clarence’s house, I was in a completely altered mood. Even the atmosphere of the old place seemed changed. Even Clarence (when, after once again being met at the door, I was led down the seemingly destinationless hall to join him) seemed different somehow. He seemed—more relaxed. Almost cheerful. Instead of the whispering ventriloquism of the day before, a heavy silence prevailed, but even this did not trouble me, so certain was I that my idea would in no time have us all—myself, Clarence, and Clarence’s wife—smack on the front page of the anniversary special. It was true—it was all about the angle of the thing. At that very moment, Clarence’s wife (who had once again greeted me at the door, saying, “I was starting to wondah if you was coming at all”) was upstairs, readying herself for her own feature photo. Much to my relief, she had quickly agreed to the suggestion—disappearing hurriedly up the dark stairs, in order, she said, to change into something that would “suit.” It was, of course, Clarence’s wife—not Clarence himself—who could answer the few and simple questions I’d prepared, and fill in the gaps of the story. I simply had to wait.

  And so, in the silence that did not weigh so heavily now, I began to tell Clarence a story of my own, about the time when I was fifteen years old and I saw a snake devour a trout, in shallow water, at the bottom of the Lakehead road. I don’t know why that was the story I thought of just then. At first, I thought I might inspire Clarence to tell some story of his own. That an errant word might stir in him some long-forgotten remembrance—but after a while I forgot about Clarence almost altogether.

  I had been out with my brother, Frankie—I said—in our uncle Trevor’s boat. Uncle Trevor used to be married to Aunt June, but now he lived in Bangor, and didn’t have a boat, and I never saw him. Frankie worked at the mill in town, but I hardly saw him either. Even when I did, it was like we hardly knew each other the way we always had to try so hard just to find something to say. But back then, it was different. We often went off together, sometimes for whole afternoons, and when we could find it to take—a couple of beers, or when we were especially lucky, some of Uncle Trevor’s homegrown weed—we did, and drank it, or smoked it, or both, and felt for an hour and a half better than we ever had, or ever likely would again. It was as if it was not then—sitting at the edge of the lake in Uncle Trevor’s boat, with a long line dropped straight down, which we never bothered to recast—but at every other time that the world was only half-real, and we were half-men, and full of illusions.

  On that particular day Frankie had found a quarter bottle of Uncle Trevor’s whiskey in the bottom of the boat, all wrapped up in a life preserver. When he found it, he gave a whoop and a holler, swinging it above his head for me to see, and then the two of us drank it down, all of it. Or what was left. Our eyes bugging out of our heads with all the effort it took not making a face. Then we sat around in the hot sun for some time. Not feeling real at all—or grown-up, or anything. After a while, Frankie staggered up and puked into the lake. I watched him, but it was hard. The whole world, and he with it, seemed to spin unsteadily in slow circles. I had to hold on to my head in order to make sure that it was not my head that spun. But no—my head stayed in its place, and the world spun. Something must have come unfixed inside me. Either that or the world—and my position within it—was a lot less solid than I had so far supposed. Perhaps this—I thought suddenly—was what dying would be like someday, when it happened. A beginning to … unravel somehow, break away. Until, finally, all the small and disconnected pieces that had somehow, inside you, mysteriously, and for so long, conjoined, began to slowly disentangle themselves from one another, be sent—spinning—away …

  I did not, at first, hear Frankie yell. Or, rather, I heard the yell, but I did not hear Frankie. That was how disconnected everything had become. But finally I realized that it was Frankie who yelled. That the yell stemmed from a probable cause—was directed toward an equally probable effect. I got up reeling, dragging myself down in the direction of the lake. Then, there it was. The snake, his jaw slackened and unhinged, inching his way over the body of a fish, over three times his size, which had been floating, dead, in the shallow water.

  It must have been nearly three-quarters of an hour before the snake finally swam away, the fish devoured. All that time, Frankie and I—even in the state we were in, or more likely because of it—watched. Both of us transfixed, unmoving. It was the only time I ever saw my brother approach anything close to what you might call awe. When it was over, and the snake—his belly stretched and fish-shaped—had swum unevenly away, Frankie said, “Wow! That … was amazing,” and then he began to laugh in a way that I hadn’t heard him laugh in a long time, even then, and I felt really sad for a minute when I heard him, because it made me remember that things had changed, and that being real and grown-up-feeling sometimes meant that also you didn’t feel the way you used to feel. And that things were, from now on, going to keep on going that way; and that has certainly turned out to be true. That afternoon, though, it was just Frankie, with his eyes all wide, looking at me, giggling in this funny way, and saying: “That was like a baby being born … but different.” So that then I started to giggle, too—managing only to say, “Yeah, but—really—fucking—different,” between fits, and then we nearly killed ourselves, doubled over, laughing, and finally I threw up.

  I HAD BEEN INTENDING TO tell Clarence just a bit of the story. Just the part about the snake, leaving out everything else. Get him going, I thought. Some line of his own. But then, when he didn’t respond—when he only continued to stare, disinterestedly ahead, a slight smile on his face, as though he already knew everything and was only patiently hearing me out—I really did, I began to forget all about him. I began to flesh out the details; that was how Uncle Trevor’s whiskey got in. And then the strange way I felt then. In the approximately three-quarters of an hour in which Frankie and I sat on the edge of the lake in Uncle Trevor’s boat, watching a snake eat a fish. The way that, when I found my attention slip, in its reeling state—even for a fraction of a moment—away, I would say to myself, in that voice that spoke—that was still itself inside my brain—“This … is extraordinary …” and that would serve somehow, at once, to bring me back. I didn’t know what for. Or why that word in particular was the one that came to mind. It was just the one that did, and I told Clarence about it. And then about how I had been thinking—just then, as I spoke, as Clarence and I sat, waiting together, for his wife to come downstairs finally, and finish the story—that maybe that’s all you ever needed, really. To find, and hold on to, some extraordinary thing.

  It wasn’t until I had finished that I realized that Clarence was dead. That he had in fact been dead a lo
ng time. Perhaps all afternoon. I’m not sure now why it suddenly dawned on me then, instead of before—or, for that matter, why I had noticed it at all, and not continued to go on believing that he was alive. I just—all of a sudden—knew. It did not even surprise me. I got up slowly, and walked carefully from the room, plunging into the dark hall.

  “Hello?” I called out, standing now at the bottom of the staircase, beyond which, some time before, Clarence’s wife had disappeared. There was no response. “Ma’am,” I called again. “Hello?”

  Finally, she arrived. Down the long front stairs. In a costume dress with starched high sleeves, her hair done up in a stiff cascade, and at her throat a single strand of pearls. The pearls had been polished so bright that—even in the thin stream of light that, from a small slit in the blind of a hall window, had fallen on the stair (that light the one sign in the whole house that there existed an outside world at all)—they positively glowed.

  For a moment she looked … divine. As though she were arriving not just from another region of the large house but from a distant planet.

  “Well,” she said, as she descended. “I never got a chance to wear it out. I’ll get it in the picture, then at least it’ll be used.”

  “Ma’am,” I said.

  “My sister sent it,” she continued—the stairs nearly fully descended now. “From Farmington, some years ago. Not long after I was married. Still fits. Imagine!”

  “Ma’am,” I said again. “He’s—” And paused a second time—unsure, suddenly, of how I should refer to the old man—what proper name to use, if any. “He’s—dead.”

  IT WAS SHE, THEN, and not I, who led the way. Who entered the room, and crossed it with a steady tread. Who bent stiffly toward her husband in his chair—obscuring him with her puffed sleeves almost entirely.

  Sure enough, Clarence was dead. I remained where I was—hovering at the door—while Clarence’s wife rose and remarked that, indeed, what I had said was true. She smoothed the creases in the lapel of his coat, and centred the cap on his head. She didn’t need to shut his eyes, because—tucked in their folds, like windows decked out for the Fourth of July—they were already quite as good as closed.

  “He looks all right,” Clarence’s wife said then. Stepping back to get a better look. “He looks,” she said, “the same as ever.” Then, turning suddenly toward me, she said, “Well, that’s some comfort anyway, isn’t it? If death don’t change a man,” she said, “then, I guess—well—nothing woulda.”

  But she did not laugh. As I had expected that she might. Perhaps it hadn’t been a joke at all. That was what I wanted then. For it all to turn out to be a little joke. For her to laugh; to, with that laugh, convince me of something that I did not feel. And though there was no doubt that it would have been odd if she’d complied—if she had, at that moment, as I wished that she would, let out an uproarious shout—it would not have been so odd as what she did do.

  Tugging once more at the starched collar of Clarence’s shirt and spinning to face me—a hand resting now on a shoulder, on Clarence’s large, almost unaltered woodcutter’s frame—she said, “Well, where do ye want me?”

  I did not understand, and only stared at her, blankly. “What?” I said. There was a new expression on her face now. An impatience. “For the pikcha,” she said. Almost beseechingly. “I had,” she explained—indicating the dress—“an awful job gettin’ in.”

  So, because I could think of nothing else to do, I took her picture. Just in the way that she’d arranged it—which was, after all, quite the same as I’d imagined. A gloved hand resting on one of Clarence’s high shoulders—in death still as straight and tall as Clarence’s house, or any of the houses on the Lakehead road. His wife beside him—leaning ever so slightly forward, as if to meet the very limit of the frame. And smiling. Like a country pageant queen.

  SIGNAC’S BOATS

  For John

  WHEN MARTHA FIRST met Charlie, and fell in love, she was still working at a place called Fat Albert’s on the rue des Halles. It was an American place, but even the Americans pronounced the “Albert” as if it were French. Albert himself, who, to his face, everyone just called Al, was from Jacksonville, Florida, and had come to Paris at the age of twenty-two after reading Giovanni’s Room. He made the best food that Martha had ever, or would ever, taste, although later she could never be sure if it was just that she never ate that much butter again. Chicken that fell from the bone. Five different kinds of potatoes. Okra that arrived from somewhere.

  At night, the place was bursting. No one ever wanted to go home once they came, so they stayed, and ordered more bottles of wine until they were dancing. Shuffling out between tables. Knocking into those who—elbows out—were still eating, and using their hands. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was dancing and who was calling out for more hoppin’ John or wings.

  When Ginny introduced herself to Martha she said, “It’s not so bad, if you don’t mind feeling like a piece of meat yourself,” but she loved it there, at Al’s. Ginny was one of a dozen or so of the girls, all of them slim, and American, and pretty—just thrilled to pieces, like Martha was, to be in Paris, and not back home like everyone else. There were the great Nordic ice queens of the Midwest, the brunettes of New England, and two brash redheads: one from Washington State, and the other from somewhere in the Carolinas. Martha was from Port Jarvis, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, and rather old-fashioned looking—her hair a russet colour, something in between. Still—she was pretty, and could pass.

  It was a sort of a joke that they all had French names. Martha was Chantelle, and Ginny was Lucille. They wore their names on the collars of their shirts, and with the growing roar of the restaurant crowd they would hear their names begin to echo from every corner of the room. “Chan-teeeelle,” the customers would call out, in their American accents, affected or real. Sometimes other, less decorous names were called. It was the Americans who were the worst. They looked like outmoded GIs, as if thirty years hadn’t passed, and they still came to Al’s place when they got homesick, bored of the French girls in Pigalle. The worst she ever got, though, was a slap on the ass. Other than that, no one ever laid a finger on her, and the tips were great.

  AFTER THEIR LATE SHIFTS, Ginny and Martha would find some quiet place where they could split a bottle of wine and count out their cash. Martha thumbed briskly through the bills, exclaiming the total in a single, jubilant note, but Ginny was more careful and divided hers into three neat and separate rows, writing the totals of each pile in the small black ledger book that she carried with her everywhere.

  Ginny was going to be a Guggenheim. The first of the piles was for that. It was untouchable: gallery money. The second and larger pile was for art. Every month she allowed herself the purchase of a single piece, and so frequented the boutiques, when she wasn’t working, in the affordable part of town. The third and smallest amount went, regret-fully, toward the week’s expenses—these, though, were next to nothing in those days.

  All of Martha’s own savings went toward getting herself “on her feet”; she had only just arrived and was still renting a room at Madame Bernard’s. But then, nearly all at once after she met Ginny, she met Charlie, and then she didn’t care particularly about “her feet” anymore. She didn’t tell Ginny this, but Ginny knew. At their post-shift communions, when they drank too much wine, Ginny would say, regarding her own neat piles, “Really, Martha, it’s just so good to have a plan.”

  But Martha, at that time, knew of only two kinds of plans, and one was for those, like her friends back at home, who had made them too simple and so were already done, and the other was for people like Ginny, who never would be. There didn’t seem to be any plan for the kinds of things that Martha desired.

  At the time, the closest she could come was Charlie.

  THE MOST SURPRISING THING for Martha in those first months in Paris was that, although she had travelled all the way from Newark—that is, all the way from one side of the world to the ot
her—she had not actually seen it. Not, anyway, in the way that they spoke of it back home—as if “the world” was a single, observable thing.

  It was a disappointment to have to realize that her own limited perspective had neither increased nor lessened in France, but had remained, instead, stubbornly, the same. The street disappeared against the limit of the horizon at a vanishing point no farther away than it had in Newark—or even in Port Jarvis. The sounds of the pedestrians and traffic were no clearer or more relevant to the ear.

  Overall, though, she was not dissatisfied, and it was this, perhaps, that was most bewildering. To realize that she had found—after all, and so simply—everything that she might need or desire not only in a place that, like Port Jarvis, was single and measurable, but in a person, in Charlie—a person who (she was beginning to suspect), much as she loved him, would turn out that way, too.

  It seemed that there would, after all, be much of the world that Martha would just let go—unnoticed and undesired.

  Once, Martha made the mistake of mentioning something along these lines to Ginny, and Ginny, in her “learn from me” tone, had said, “You’re always going to be capable of wanting more, Martha.” It had been one of their after-Al-bear specials. “The trick,” Ginny had said, “is being satisfied with what you’ve got.”

  Ginny herself seemed satisfied just for saying it.

  “Funny for you to say” is what Martha said. Her feelings were hurt even if she otherwise would have agreed. “I’ve been being satisfied. You’re the one who wants to be a Guggenheim.”

  Ginny snorted through her nose. “It’s not like that,” she told Martha. “It’s not about being someone, something. It’s about—” she paused and looked at Martha, shaking her head, “having something to work toward,” she said. “It’s about Art.”