This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud Page A

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 besidethe 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 hisbold 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