Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  “Well,” Schiff said, “listen to me, will you, running on at the mouth about the old days. I go back. Hell, I remember when Oldsmobile introduced Hydra-Matic transmission. We thought that was a miracle. Who’d have believed there’d ever be a system a cripple could install in his house, or anyone on their own, really, that if they fell all they had to do was press a button and practically in minutes have an entire hospital at their disposal? Well,” he said, “I’m just going to sit down over here and let you do what you have to. Do the departments still have softball leagues? We were out every Saturday. I played first base.”

  And some of this, he couldn’t have told you the exact percentage because he wasn’t that sure himself, but probably, conservatively, oh, eighty or ninety percent, was for their benefit. Put on. Made up. They wanted fear and trembling, he’d give them fear and trembling. Hey, it was their party. (“Remember hi-fis?” the old first basemen had asked them.) He was his own comic projection, something fun- house-mirror to his reality, the same distorted representation on the flat surface of his curved personality as Greenland’s. That was Schiff, all right. A joke like Greenland, sprawled across the top of the world like a continent.

  And now sat down over here, just as he said. To let them get on with it. Never letting them out of his sight. Never letting himself out of theirs.

  At about three he sent out for pizzas. Two large with the works for his tiny crew. Plus Cokes in cans. Though he hated, he said, to buy them at the prices they charged for a Coke these days. He remembered when Coca-Cola was a nickel.

  “A nickel?” said little Miss Moffett. “Really? A nickel?”

  “Damn right,” Professor Schiff said. “Twentieth part of a dollar. That’s what the candy butchers at burlesque shows used to call nickels in the old days.”

  “I never knew Coca-Cola was a nickel.”

  “Pepsi-Cola was a nickel and you got twelve ounces! Automobiles were four hundred dollars. The Sunday paper cost two cents. You furnished a five-room house in a stable neighborhood for a hundred dollars.”

  “A hundred dollars? Really?”

  “Tenth part of a thousand.”

  “Professor Schiff’s jerking you around, Mary,” Fred Lipsey said.

  “A grand piano set you back ten bucks.”

  “My goodness,” Mary Moffett said.

  “Scalpers wanted fifty cents a pop for the hottest ticket in town. Kidnappers asked seventy-five simoleons if you ever wanted to see your kid alive again. Oh, yeah,” Schiff said, “it was simpler times. A meal in a good restaurant was free, and a Picasso…” He didn’t finish the sentence. What were these children doing in his house? He was sixty years old, why was he still throwing parties? Why had Claire left him? Did she think she could change her life? At her age? What would she change it to? Admitted, living with him couldn’t have been any picnic. It was hard work. Granted. The hours were awful and the sex was lousy. They’d left life long ago. Ten years easy. Now they floated above it like folks in an out-of-body experience, or like people drugged. They had no children and couldn’t even fall back on the surrogate joy of watching their kids succeed—— seeing them through school, finding partners, a career, having children of their own. Or on even the motions of going through a life—— taking up a hobby, going on vacations, celebrating holidays, even their own birthdays and anniversaries. He wasn’t for a minute pessimistic on the world’s account, only on his and Claire’s. He didn’t resent other people’s happiness—he was that cut off—only his and Claire’s misery. Nor did he question why they’d been singled out. They hadn’t. It was all luck of the draw. Everything. Luck of the draw. Nature never screwed anyone. That’s why disciplines like his were invented. To explain the borders, to draw up new ones. To make, in the best light of the best-case scenario, amends, restitution, seeking, in that same good light, what there could be, and when, and where, of order. It was like anything else. A political geographer who determined his own political geography had a fool for a traveler. Which was why he was more disappointed than angered by Claire. Had she learned nothing from her years with him? She would change her life? Yes? How? Tell him that, how? Oh, she could become a bag lady. Just as he could throw his lot in with the homeless. (Hadn’t he had this thought today? Yesterday? It seemed to him he had, though he couldn’t put his finger on it, or in what context, which circumstances. Though if it had occurred to him earlier, it just went to show that it was on his mind, that he was that far from taking violent charge of his life. Though he wouldn’t have given you two cents for his consistency: Help me. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. This block is protected by armed vigilantes!)

  Meanwhile the PGPC subcommittee on decorations was directing a sort of traffic in his dining room, Mary Moffett the traffic cop on duty, signaling Lipsey and Joe Disch where to hang the maps, and reciting a sort of background litany, which in other circumstances might almost have been comforting: “A little to the left. A little more. No, good. Now up on the right. Right there, hold it right there. No, you went too far over. All right, good, that’s got it, though maybe the whole thing ought to be a little lower so everyone can read it better. What do you think, Dr. Schiff?”

  Dr. Schiff thought it astonishing he hadn’t thrown them out.

  “Oh,” he said, “you know, mi casa, su casa. I defer to your judgment.”

  “No,” she said, “really.”

  “My dear,” said Schiff, suddenly finding himself trying out a new role on them (who had played so many; who had kept his studied, professional distance and who, even on the occasion of his annual party when the barriers came down for a few hours, but only, he’d always been careful to assure himself, in the interest of preserving them, rather like those old-time, once-a-year, red-letter bashes of the aristocratic when the servants and rabble, and all the good people from the village, had the run of the grounds and great house, and stayed up late into the night, taking such liberties and doing such damage—damage encouraged and even willingly eaten by the squire, just part of the expense of doing business as a landowner, of having vast holdings—that they would hate themselves in the morning, ashamed, accepting, even embracing, their fate for another year), “have I forgotten to mention I’ve worked up the will to go homeless? That it’s true what they say—— you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. No no,” said Schiff, holding his hand up as if to forestall an objection (and not knowing, really, where he was going, only that surely, really, this was too much: that she should have left him at this juncture, good God, what a sense of timing, because he knew she knew, he even remembered their having discussed it just this week, Claire herself suggesting that maybe they should open the party up to some of their colleagues, and Schiff considering it until Claire said no, on second thought it probably wasn’t such a good idea, that it would dilute the point of the evening if they did that, and throwing in, too, that it could hardly be expected to put the students at their ease if they had to sit around at attention all evening with a bunch of old farts, and Schiff agreeing, saying, right, that was a good point, no old farts, and here he was, one of the oldest, throwing his tantrum, making his scene, going Christ- knew-where with their attention tucked under his arm like a football—— only that he had to keep on talking, like a drunk who knew he had to make himself presentable for important company, perhaps, and who was determined to walk off the toxins). “Well, isn’t it always darkest before the dawn or somesuch? Political folk wisdom has it right, the word on the street. Contrast plays its role in life. Well, the element of surprise, for instance. Being what it is in both warfare and negotiation. Have you noticed how often they play down our expectations, then go off to the summit and come away with a treaty you wouldn’t have guessed was in the cards for another twenty years?

  “Listen,” Schiff said, “I really appreciate your coming over. It’s cost you your afternoon, putting out the party favors, throwing your lot in with the old prof like this. I only hope Ms. Kohm, God bless her, didn’t do too much damage to your a
rms when she twisted them. No? Good. Because she means well, she really does. She means well by me, she means well by you. Heck darn it, it isn’t too much, or telling tales out of school, to say she means well by the entire hemisphere and all the ships at sea. She’s one of those women who abhors a vacuum. I mean, well, I spoke to her last night. I wanted to call this party on account of, hey, you name it—— I’m crippled, the place is a mess, there’s nothing in the house to serve, my wife couldn’t be here because she’s running around on me. But Ms. Kohm wouldn’t have any of it. She told me to hang tough, to wait till she showed up with the torch and touched the holy fire to the holy fire. I’m sorry the nuts and dip aren’t out, the crackers and candy, but Ms. Kohm will be by soon with fruit, with melon in season. Smoke if you got ’em,” Schiff said, eying his living room.

  The tops of the pizza boxes had been torn from their bottoms, and everywhere, teetering on the arm of the sofa, on the coffee table, left on a seat cushion, on a stereo speaker, in the makeshift dishes, the smeared, greasy, bronzed mix- and-match of the cardboard china, lay pieces of cold, uneaten pizza like long slices of abstract painting, their fats congealing, fissures opening in their cooling yellow cheeses, burst bubbles of painterly cholesterol, chips of pepperoni raised on them like rusty scabs. Bits of green bell peppers, tiny facets of oily onion, bright hunks of tomato like semiprecious stones caught Schiff’s eye, glinted up at him from the carpet. Crumpled paper napkins, like the soiled sheets of wet beds, soaked up spilled Coke. There was an aluminum rubble of crushed cans.

  “The geopolitical reasons for Daylight Saving Time,” Schiff said suddenly. “Mr. Disch?”

  Mr. Disch, holding a beer, extended an arm, raised it toward Schiff in a sort of dippy, upward salute, body English for “Have one, Professor?”

  His professor scowled narrowly, tersely shook his head, body English for “No thanks, where’d that come from, the sun ain’t over the yardarm, take care you don’t spill it!” (For he was, this clumsy, even, by disease-defaulted, sloppy-appearing man, almost compulsively neat, spic ’n’ span in his arrangements, who’d have his own narrow area ordered as the universe. Which was maybe why he went into political geography in the first place, as though the planet, its seas and landmasses, its rivers and mountain ranges, its hemispheres and continents, its nations and borders and cities and towns, its houses, its rooms, was ultimately rather like a class of furniture, like closets, like dressers, like wardrobes, like cupboards and desks and chiffoniers, like cabinets and files and chests of drawers, language a furniture, too, finally, only a way of gathering and organizing all the far-flung stuff of Earth.) Schiff looked toward Mary Moffett and Fred Lipsey, hunkered down over Mary Moffett’s shopping bag (meant to hold more, evidently, than the committee’s joke maps and decorations), pulling cans of beer from it like dogs scrabbling at dirt. “If I’m not mistaken,” Schiff said loftily, “there’s a question on the floor.”

  “We’re on break,” said Miss Moffett.

  Schiff, oddly unconcerned, thought, She’s drunk, and wondered when that had happened, suspecting he’d dozed off, suspecting they’d heard him snore, greedily scoop great gobs of air into his nose, pass gas, probably giggling about their old political geography teacher (who’d turned out to have a behind, habits), not only crippled, but reduced, too, and was impatient for the party to begin, knew it had, and already yearned for the time when they’d all clear out and he could go back to bed. And realized (having taken this all in, his brief snooze, their surreptitious drinking and, glancing once more at the remains of lunch, at the beer cans scattered about the landfill starting up—which was a sort of furniture, too, wasn’t it? perhaps some final furniture, some ultimate piece—in what was his hall, his dining and living rooms) the farce question about Daylight Saving’s geopolitical reasons had been merely his failed, reflexive, face-saving opening salvo, like dropping the checkered flag, say, not only after the gentlemen had already started their engines but had already completed their first several laps. It was out of his hands. Officially or not, the annual class party had begun!

  Changing his mind, accepting Joe Disch’s beer, and abruptly all over them with a riff of gag questions. “Why have ocean currents been the casus belli of most civil wars?” “Explain how prevailing winds determine national borders.” “Discuss the concept of the island. How is it a macrocosm of the tribe but a microcosm of the family?” “How do the animals indigenous to a nation determine the character of that nation’s underlying political structure?” “What’s the difference between a ‘region’ in a first-world country like Italy and a third-world country like Paraguay?” “How is it that the so-called ‘hot-bloodeď peoples have had fewer revolutions than their more northerly neighbors?” “Speculate on the reasons for the inverse ratio between the beauty of a nation’s flag and its contributions to the fields of art, music, and poetry.” “If individuality, rather than community, accounts for most of the world’s great inventions and economic progress, why is it that countries with the greatest populations tend to be the most backward in their cultural and economic development?”

  “Mr. Lipsey? Miss Moffett? Mr. Disch?

  “Ms. Kohm? Mr. Hughes? Miss Simmons? Mr. Wilkins? Mr. Tysver? Miss Carter? Miss Freistadt? You, Dickerson? You, Bautz?”

  Because these others (without, he noticed, their two or three spouses in tow—— was this, he wondered, out of deference to him, or were all marriages foundered on the rocks?) had begun to drift in while Schiff was still in the nervous throes of his rap. Because he missed Claire and hoped and, despite himself, almost believed she would relent, reverse herself and, using her incredible sense of timing for good, still show up to save him, and because on one, the most furious, level of his forced, inspired hospitality, he was playing (for all that he knew better) for time, for some impossible dispensation, as though, could he but keep coming up with his loopy diversionaries, he might never have to answer to the still (for him) more alarming demands of serious social obligation. Soon, he quite feared, he might be telling them everything, conducting his guests on the grand tour around the posted neighborhoods and dark, off-limits districts of his heart.

  “Tell me would you if you will all the ways the counterclockwise movements of water going down a drain in the southern hemisphere may account for the greater number of languages and dialects spoken below the equator.”

  They stared at him.

  “Anyone?

  “No? No one? Well, I should do some checking if I were you, you degree candidates, for that’s a question that’s almost certain to turn up on your prelims. Really, people, if you haven’t got the basics down, I don’t know how you hope to be political geographers. Do you think others in the political sciences are as unfamiliar with their areas of concentration as you seem to be—— the political biologists, the political chemists, the political comp. lit. majors?

  “Well,” Schiff said, apparently relenting, “let the wild rumpus begin. Miss Simmons,” he told the somewhat surprised-looking woman who had separated herself from the graduate students and was approaching the wheelchair to which he had transferred and in which he was now sitting, “how nice to see you! How good of you to come!”

  “I brought you your key back.”

  “Listen,” he said, lowering his voice, “can you stay? We give this party for my students. I may have told you. I’m caught short here. Claire’s left me. I’m caught short here, I could really use the buffer. You’d be doing me a favor. Really. Please don’t go, please stay. It’d be swell if you would. You don’t know how much more comfortable I’d feel.”

  “I came with your key. I haven’t even been home yet. I’m not dressed for a party.”

  “Well, of course she’ll stay. How do you do, dear? I’m Molly Kohm. I’m very pleased to meet you. How interesting our professor is, what astonishing resources he has! Practically a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair (even a somewhat older paraplegic), yet here he is dispensing keys to his home as if there were no tomorrow and ne
ither one of you had ever even heard of an actuarial table. My goodness, how fast one may get about in a wheelchair! I hadn’t realized! Oh, and you mustn’t even think of returning that key. Don’t take it back, Professor. It was a misunderstanding. These things happen, they’re worked out every day. And night.”

  “This is Jenny Simmons,” Schiff said. “Miss Simmons was a student of mine.”

  “A student. Really, a student. Oh, now I am jealous, I quite actually am! Professor, you rascal, if only I’d known. I might have made a play for you myself. I might have,” she told Miss Simmons. “And I wouldn’t be threatening him with the return of his keys,” she added huskily. She bent down in front of Schiff’s chair and, resting her hand across the inside of his thigh, almost absent-mindedly, began stroking it. “Oh good,” she said, “there’s evidently still some feeling down there.” Schiff caught slight gusts of conditioned, alcoholic essence coming from her, pleasant, agreeable (despite her obvious drunkenness) as the gentle drafts and enticing steams one smells outside a steakhouse. Also, he saw up past her crouching, silk-stocking’d knees and along her own flexed thighs high into the dark of her skirt where they joined like perspective in a painting.

  Ms. Kohm suddenly seemed as oddly capable as a witch, an impression enhanced by her pitch, shiny hair, the bright, thin streaks of white silver that crackled through it like some personal storm of the head. A dramatic purple-and- black-checked cape hung about her shoulders and over a dark tank top. She wore no brassiere, and Schiff saw the hard points of her nipples rising from what he momentarily conceived of as rings of soft, purple, lava-like slabs, imagining their faintly brackish taste in his mouth like the flavor of struck matches.