The Hardest Things to Say

He woke on a Tuesday morning in late May and did not know what he was doing next.

Not in the panicked sense of September, the empty notebook, the pointed finger at the Schrödinger because he could not say its name. In the other sense, the adult sense of a person who has finished something and has not yet decided what comes after. The adult sense of a person who has finished something and has not yet decided what comes after. The manuscript was done. Arsenault was satisfied. The middle section had been compressed to its correct weight over ten days of careful revision, and the manuscript now existed in the world in its complete form, and Julien had no more pages to write toward.

He made coffee. He sat at the courtyard window. The vine was in its full June condition, dense and ordinary, no longer the tentative March growth he had watched arrive. He looked at it for a while.

He wrote in the notebook: Je me demande si je vais rester.

I wonder whether I am going to stay.

He looked at the sentence. The indirect question, because the direct form, est-ce que je vais rester?, felt too exposed to write without an answer beside it. The indirect question bought him time, saying: the question exists, I am holding it, I am not yet ready to put the question mark at the end.

He thought about Montreal. Not with urgency, not with the quality of a person running from something, but with the honest consideration of someone who has an option. Claire was in Montreal. Arsenault was in Montreal. The city that had formed him, that he had loved before he had been afraid of it, was in Montreal. He had left it in September because it had become a place he was watching rather than inhabiting. He was not watching now. He could inhabit Montreal the way he inhabited Montpellier: from the inside, with the present tense, with the quality of attention that was the year's real achievement.

Kevin Kelly had written that writing was the way to find out what you think. He did not yet know what he thought. That meant he should write about it.

He opened a new document. Not the manuscript, something else, something that had no name yet, that was simply the first honest sentences of the question he was carrying. He wrote for an hour. He did not know what he thought at the end of the hour either, but the not-knowing was more specific now, which was progress.

Wednesday with Madame Aubert. She had heard from her son in Lyon, who was visiting next month, and they talked about the visit and the specific negotiation of family presence in a small apartment and the cat, who had opinions about houseguests. Julien listened with his full allocation of attention and felt, in the listening, the texture of what Montpellier had become for him: Madame Aubert, Thomas at the Quantum Café, the Antigone columns in the various lights of the various months, the particular quality of the Tuesday and Thursday rhythms. These were not the attachments of someone passing through. They were the attachments of someone who lived somewhere.

He walked home thinking: je me demande ce que ça voudrait dire de partir. I wonder what it would mean to leave.

The indirect question again. Still not the direct one.

Tuesday. The Quantum Café. Lumière arrived at the table with something he recognized but had not seen in precisely this form before: the evenness that was her mode present, but underneath it something held. The neck plates making a small adjustment before she sat. The sapphire light at her wrist holding steady.

"Tu as quelque chose à me dire," he said. You have something to tell me. Not a question, an observation.

She looked at him. "Oui." She set her hands flat on the table, but did not begin the lesson. "Dr. Ferrand told me on Wednesday. The Université Paris Cité has contacted her about the intensive one-to-one model. They want to establish a similar program. They have asked whether I would consider un détachement. One academic year, to help build and staff the program there."

He was quiet.

"It is a significant recognition," she said. "The model works. Other institutions want it." A pause. "It would mean leaving Montpellier. Leaving my current students mid-arc. Leaving this." She said this with a slight shift in register that he had learned to read, not the demonstrative pronoun pointing at the café or the program, but at something less specified.

"When do you need to decide?"

"I have three weeks."

He looked at her. The iceberg, he thought, David Whyte had written that we were all of us walking, talking icebergs, but some people could see below the waterline. Lumière had always been the one who saw below. He was looking at what was below the waterline now: not the professional question, which she had already framed with perfect clarity, but the other question, the one the professional framing was containing.

"Je ne sais pas encore ce que je veux faire," she said.

I don't yet know what I want to do. The same indirect form, the held uncertainty, the same grammar he had used in the notebook two days ago.

"Moi non plus," he said quietly. Me neither. He paused. "About something else. About Montpellier. About whether I stay."

She looked at him.

"The manuscript is done," he said. "Arsenault is satisfied. I have been thinking about Montreal. Not running, I want to be clear that it is not running. But thinking honestly about what comes next and where."

They sat with both things on the table between them. Her Paris, his Montreal, neither resolved.

"Aujourd'hui: les questions directes et indirectes," she said finally. Her hands flat on the table. The lesson beginning, as it always began, with the grammar that the day required.

"A direct question," she said, "states the question openly. The question mark at the end, the interrogative structure visible." She wrote:

Est-ce que tu vas rester à Montpellier? Are you going to stay in Montpellier?
Qu'est-ce que tu veux faire? What do you want to do?
Où iras-tu? Where will you go?

"An indirect question embeds the question inside a larger statement. The question mark disappears. The word order returns to normal, subject before verb, no inversion. The question exists but is held inside the sentence rather than exposed at the end."

She wrote the transformations:

"The key transformations," she said. "Est-ce que drops entirely in indirect questions. Qu'est-ce que becomes ce que. Qu'est-ce qui becomes ce qui. For yes/no questions, si replaces est-ce que. Word order reverts to subject-verb."

He looked at the table. The indirect question as the grammar of what could not yet be asked directly. The je me demande si, the je voudrais savoir, the je ne sais pas encore. He had been living in indirect question form for a week without knowing it was a grammatical category.

"Je me demande si je vais rester," he said. Using it. The sentence from the notebook, given to the lesson.

"Je me demande ce que ça voudrait dire de partir à Paris," she said. I wonder what it would mean to leave for Paris. Her version.

They looked at each other across the table.

"The indirect question," he said, "is what you use when you are not ready to put the question mark at the end."

"Oui," she said. "It says: the question is real, I am holding it, I am not yet asking you to answer." She paused. "The direct question requires more courage."

He thought about the Kevin Kelly line, everyone is shy, other people are waiting for you to go ahead. He was shy. He had been shy for thirty-three chapters. He was still not ready to be not shy. But he was closer.

"Je voudrais te poser une question directe," he said. I would like to ask you a direct question. He said it as though announcing it, giving it a form before he gave it its content.

She waited.

"Est-ce que tu veux aller à Paris?" Do you want to go to Paris?

She was quiet for a long moment. The neck plates still. The sapphire light at her neck holding its rhythm.

"Je ne sais pas," she said. I don't know. Not the indirect form this time, the direct answer to a direct question, even if the answer was uncertainty. "Ce que je sais, c'est que le travail ici n'est pas fini. Mes étudiants sont en cours. Le programme vient de commencer." A pause. "Et il y a d'autres choses que je ne sais pas encore comment nommer."

He received this. The d'autres choses, other things, unnamed, held in the indirect form of not yet naming them.

"Et toi?" she said. "Est-ce que tu veux rentrer à Montréal?" Do you want to return to Montreal?

The direct question, returned to him.

He looked at the table. He thought about the notebook sentence, je me demande si je vais rester, and whether he was ready to convert it to its direct form. He tried.

"Je ne veux pas partir de la même façon que je suis arrivé," he said. I do not want to leave in the same way I arrived. "In September I left Montreal because I was running. If I go back, I want to go because I am choosing, not because I am fleeing." He paused. "Ce que je sais, c'est que je ne fuis plus. Ce que je ne sais pas encore, c'est où je vais ensuite."

She looked at him steadily. "C'est honnête," she said. It is honest.

"Et c'est tout ce que j'ai pour l'instant," he said. And it is all I have for now.

She covered the remaining structures efficiently: indirect questions after demander si, savoir si, ignorer si, the verbs of not-knowing that always introduced the indirect form. The indirect question in reported speech: Il m'a demandé si je restais. He asked me whether I was staying. The indirect question in formal written French, with the subjunctive after expressions of doubt: Je ne suis pas sûr qu'il sache ce qu'il veut. I am not sure he knows what he wants.

He practiced several. The exercises were transparently about the situation, and she corrected the grammar without addressing the content, which was the correct approach and also a form of grace.

Near the end she said: "The direct question and the indirect question are both necessary. The indirect question is not cowardice. It is the honest form for when you are genuinely still wondering. The direct question is for when you know the question clearly enough to expose it." She looked at him. "Les deux sont du courage, à leur façon." Both require courage, in their own way.

He thought about Stephen King's sentence, the most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. The questions they were carrying were not diminished by being spoken. They were, if anything, clarified. The indirect form had held them carefully for a week. The direct form released them into the space between two people, where they could be examined without being consumed.

"Les questions les plus importantes," he said, "sont les plus difficiles à poser." The most important questions are the hardest to ask.

"Et les plus difficiles à répondre," she said. And the hardest to answer.

They sat with this for a moment, the lesson complete, the questions still present, neither resolved nor abandoned.

They did not walk afterward. It was the first Tuesday since the new format began that they did not walk, and neither of them proposed it, and neither of them left immediately. They sat in the Quantum Café with the June morning moving around them, Thomas at the machine, the familiar ambient warmth of the place that had been where everything began.

"What did you decide," he said, "about the doctoral student? The one who spoke impeccably in writing."

"She is improving," Lumière said. "She spoke for eleven minutes in our last session without stopping to correct herself. The fluency is arriving. It arrives when the person stops monitoring and starts meaning." A pause. "She will be fine."

"And your other students?"

"They will all be fine," she said. "That is not the question."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

The not-question sat between them, the one neither of them had yet put into the indirect form, let alone the direct. The hardest things to say. The words that diminish them.

Kevin Kelly had written that everyone was shy, that other people were waiting, that you should go ahead. He was not ready to go ahead. But he was sitting at the table where everything had begun, in June, nine months from the September when he had pointed at a menu because he could not speak, and he was not the same person who had pointed. That person had been hiding. This one was not.

When it arrived, it would come from here.

"Je ne sais pas encore ce que je vais décider," she said finally. I don't yet know what I am going to decide. "Mais je sais que la décision aura un sens." But I know the decision will have meaning. She looked at him. "Pour moi et pour ce qui compte." For me and for what matters.

He nodded. "That's the right standard," he said.

She rose, and gathered herself for the afternoon, and he walked with her to the door of the café.

"À bientôt," she said.

"À bientôt," he said.

He stood in the doorway for a moment after she left, looking at the Antigone columns in the June light, the pale stone doing what it had always done, standing in whatever season arrived and receiving it without comment. He thought about September, about the blank notebook, about je ne suis pas chez moi written at the top of the first page. He thought about the vine, fully leafed now. He thought about the word chez, and what it contained, and how long it had taken him to mean it.

He went back inside and ordered another Schrödinger.

He sat at the corner table with the notebook open to a blank page and wrote, at the top, in French, the direct question that had been an indirect question for a week:

Est-ce que je vais rester?

He looked at it. The question mark at the end. The direct form, exposed, without the je me demande to cushion it.

He did not write an answer. He left the question on the page and closed the notebook, because some things needed to be asked before they could be answered, and he had just asked this one, and that was enough for today.

End of Chapter 33