This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Read Online Free

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 .”
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œOh 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 outsidethe 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