Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  Giving him a soft, dismissive pat on the knee, she rose effortless as a yogi from the deep squatting position she had held before him like some patronizing tribute. (As if he’d been a child, say, to whose level she’d lowered herself—— or the cripple he was. And Schiff, as though Ms. Kohm, come to him almost like some Dickensian specter, had an abrupt image of himself through women’s eyes. Why, he was like somebody behind and over whose head life was conducted, arrangements made, a kid traveling alone, say, or someone handicapped—well, hell, he thought, I am someone handicapped—whose needs were negotiated indirectly, guided past metal detectors in airports for a hand- check as if he were absent, a party in the third person, as though his earlier impression of having left life were true as far as it went, only reversed, life floating about a foot or so above him. Schiff some doll-like object present less in spirit than in sheer, brutal deadweight, his feet there to be stockinged and shod, his arms to be helped into the sleeves of his jackets, whatever was left over, say his spirit, to be lulled and comforted, regarded, even loved, admired as a piece of art might be admired, something not responsible for itself, diligently plied into being, as anything worked on hard enough or worried over long enough had to be turned into an object worthy of the effort, like silverware polished down to its highlights. This was how women saw him. For it was only women—he had left life—who dealt with him these days. It was how Miss Simmons, who had gone out of her way to bring him his key, saw him, how Ms. Kohm, who single-handed had refused to let his party go into the record books with an asterisk this year, did. Finally, it was how Claire must have seen him up until the time she discovered that enough was enough and refused to take one more minute of him, and left him, on the day of her incredible sense of timing, on the eve of his party, to deal with the women who would deal with him. Well, you know what? Saving Claire’s absence, he didn’t much mind, was willing as ever to throw himself on their—on women’s—mercies like a log on a fire.)

  She turned around and made a signal to her helpers. (The rest of the students, he meant.) Without a word, Miss Carter appeared with a big galvanized pail. The pail was new, shiny, the sort of pail one associates with mops and wringers, with dark, greasy water. (Oh, shit, he thought, suddenly remembering the eggs, surely exploded by now, he’d dropped into the rusty water that morning.) It was filled to the brim with salad. With great leaves of lettuce, violently torn from what must have been eight or nine heads. There were long shards of cucumber and zucchini. There were whole rings of sweet onion like small quoits. There were jagged slices of tomato and, here and there, dollops of red, tomatoey pulp like a sort of jam. Sprinkled throughout were raisins like the droppings of rodents. Mr. Tysver carried an open butter tub of oil-and-vinegar dressing, already mixed, and Miss Freistadt and Mr. Wilkins each swung three or four large cartons of pasta like Chinese takeout from their thin metal handles like a sort of Jack and Jill. Bautz brought bread and Dickerson paper plates, white plastic cutlery, a box of salt, tins of colored seasonings, napkins. Each appeared before Ms. Kohm with his or her offering.

  “Does this go in the kitchen, Molly?” asked Miss Carter of the galvanized pail.

  “Put it down here. We’ll be eating soon, why make two trips?” She was pointing at the carpet.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” objected Schiff from his wheelchair.

  But she had already set down her burden on the living- room carpet.

  “Hey,” said Schiff. “Hey.”

  No one listened to him. Many seemed drunk. Schiff turned to Ms. Kohm. “Hey,” he said, “hey.”

  An awful picnic of the awful graduate student food began to blossom on the carpet beneath him. Pieces of lettuce and cucumber and zucchini spilled over the pail or fell from heaps stacked too high on the paper plates and lay on Schiff’s beige carpet as if they grew there in actual nature. Bright bits of tomato, red onion, and pasta spotted the carpet like flowers. They’ve turned the place into a damn garden, Schiff thought bitterly. You could dig for worms in here. Miss Simmons, bless her heart, seemed as appalled as Schiff, and made no move to leave. Between trips to the salad bar on his floor for refreshment, Disch, Lipsey, and Moffett spelled each other as bartenders, offered mixed drinks from the remarkable bag where they had set up shop. Schiff, who didn’t think he saw that many takers, couldn’t account for the astonishing level of intoxication in the room. This crowd was high! Either they were already three sheets to the wind when they came in, or something about being in his house had unsettled them, roused them he meant, sprung them he meant, from the general graduate- student monasticism and hole-and-corner roughhouse of their days. Something about being in their mid-to-late twenties and still under the vows of delayed gratification, their lives unbegun. It was the old story of the total shit- house Schiff had complained of earlier, of posters and prints, of canvas chairs and incense, cement-block bookcases and all the make-do improvisation of their lives. Sprung from that. Grown-up for a day! Not Ms. Kohm. He excepted Ms. Kohm. Ms. Kohm was their ringleader, their unmoved mover, something thwarted in Ms. Kohm, something about Ms. Kohm profoundly unchecked and envious, infiltrated and into deep cover.

  Only then did he understand what he had noted earlier—— that there were no spouses here, not even his own. So sprung from spouses, too, from mewling babes, even from baby-sitters they couldn’t afford to pay and so had— another improvisation—to trade off with, time-sharing each other’s kids as if they lived in a commune. It was how Claire, high on a whiff of the other guy’s air, must have felt. Only God forbid that Claire was in some other old gent’s place finger-painting with pasta on the rugs.

  Whether they knew it or not, whether they meant to or not, they were looking for trouble. In some weird, incomprehensible way, understood neither by him nor themselves, they had entered into some odd conspiracy with him. Drawn, it could be (though pushed by Ms. Kohm) by his handicap, by his own low troubles.

  Somebody came by and offered him a plate of food, of the handled salad drenched in dressing, of the cold, pasted, stuck-together pasta. Which he refused like someone gently shaking off a sign. As much out of his own stuck-together dignity as from any failure of hunger. Though he was hungry. Could have done right now with some of the terrific foods he and Claire used to put out—— the turkey and roasts, the pâtés and swell cheeses. (As much, perhaps, out of some need to wow them into respect as to satisfy the inner man.)

  He accepted a poor plate of church supper from Miss Simmons, the plastic cutlery wrapped in what he now saw were cocktail napkins.

  “Join me?” he said.

  “Well,” Miss Simmons said hesitantly.

  “No really,” he said, “make up a plate of rabbit food for yourself and rough it with me, why don’t you?”

  “Well,” she said again.

  “Afraid of ruining your appetite?”

  It was difficult for him to eat in the wheelchair. He had lost considerable muscle mass in his hips, whatever it was that kept one upright, and he bobbed, weaved, swayed, lunged and lost his balance whenever he tried to fork food from the thin, fragile, wet paper plates and bring it to his mouth. He was spilling salad all over himself, on his lap, down the front of his shirt. There were salad-dressing stains on both shirt cuffs, high up his sleeves. “Can’t tempt you, eh?” he said, and this struck him as very funny, starting what might have been an out-of-control, almost hysterical laugh, but quickly turned into a helpless series of snorts. “No,” he managed, “can’t seem (snort) to (snort) tempt (snort, snort) you!” Long, extended snort. Snorting through. Snorting while his heart was breaking.

  “No,” he said when he was in control again, correcting himself, “not rabbit food. But look at the pail. Doesn’t it remind you of something?”

  “Of what?”

  “No, you’ll get it,” he said, still the teacher. “What does it remind you of? Where have you seen pails like it before? All that chopped-up green shit?”

  “Where?”

  “At the zoo! In cages at the zoo! In t
he gorilla house. Where the elephant roams, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “right.”

  “Look at this place,” he said.

  “Oh, it’ll be all right. No permanent damage has been done.”

  “Look at this place. Look what I’ve allowed to happen. My wife would kill me.” He was quite sad. It was as if Claire were dead and his house were being reclaimed by nature.

  To keep himself from falling forward again, or from slipping to the side, he hooked his left arm under the arm of the wheelchair and steadied himself, sitting in a sort of stolid, struggled balance. In this way, planted as somebody in a tug-of-war, he managed to feed himself some of the pasta and salad. But it was rigid work, he knew how stiff he looked.

  It was as if she could read his mind.

  “Would you like me to help you with that?” Miss Simmons volunteered.

  Still hungry but pretending not to have heard her, Schiff set the plastic fork down on the paper plate. He took a cocktail napkin and tapped at the corners of his lips in mock satiety. Had he the ability to belch at will he might have fired off the better part of a twenty-one-gun salute in Miss Simmons’s direction. He patted his stomach in a round, broad dumbshow of yum-yum satisfaction. Miming full holiday dinners, a kind of exhaustion, a vow not to eat again for a week, to forgo feasts forever. With his faked belly applause and silent, phony tongue-in-tooth, chewy exaggeration, it was almost as if he were congratulating himself. He was conscious that his forearm was still hooked under the arm of his wheelchair, that he might even have appeared defiant the way he held on to his balance for dear life, protecting himself from all comers like a kid playing king-of- the-hill. He might almost have seemed to have been challenging someone to break his hold, to see if they could tip him over. It seemed an odd thought for an old fellow with an S.O.S. amulet under his shirt, around his neck. “I know you wouldn’t think it to look at me,” he told Miss Simmons, “but I actually used to be fairly athletic I won’t even say when I was a kid but back before I was stricken, while I was still a professor even, almost up until the time it might have begun to appear maybe a little unseemly for somebody my age to be scrambling around doing the run, jump, hit, and throw with fellows ten years younger than himself, almost as if he was trying to recapture his lost youth or something. That wasn’t the way of it,” he said. “I wasn’t even particularly competitive. Except in table tennis. I was good at table tennis. Oh, I wasn’t one of those guys who stand twenty feet back from the table, I’m not saying that, but I had a relatively exceptional slam. That’s why I preferred sandpaper over rubber paddles. To my way of thinking, a rubber paddle was for putting spin and English on the ball, to deceive your opponent to death, to turn Ping-Pong into a game of chess. For me it was always a physical, aggressive sport. With sandpaper you could hear all the bang-bang and take-that that the game was designed for. Whenever my opponents took up a rubber paddle I pretty much knew what I was in for—— defense and stinking strategy. Some joker who’d just pretty much just stand there and let me wear myself out. I loved playing with the punchers and always pretty much resented the little judo and ju-jitsu guys who nickeled-and-dimed me and in the end usually beat my brains out. You think that’s odd in a fellow trained in the art of political geography? It probably is, but probably it was my way of letting off steam, of that final, futile satisfaction one must feel after he’s dropped the big one.

  “It was pretty much the same when I played softball,” Schiff said. “I was a fairly lousy first baseman, but not a bad hitter. Good hit, no field. Story of my life. And you’ll have to take my word for this—— Hell, I have to take my word for it, because seeing how I am now it’s pretty difficult to believe, but I was actually something of a diver back in high school. My specialty was a double somersault off the high board, though I have to admit I always lost a few points for my angle of entry when I hit the water. If you were anywhere near the pool you probably still feel the splash, and …”

  Hearing himself, his flagrant boasting, Schiff quite suddenly paused, broke off. “Well,” he said a few seconds later, “you get the idea. I knew him, Horatio. I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know why I take on like this. Possibly to keep you from noticing the salad dressing on my pants.”

  “Oh, those stains come right out. They’re nothing to worry about,” Miss Simmons said.

  “No, I’m not worried,” Schiff said.

  “I’m like that, too,” Miss Simmons said, “I think everyone is. It’s a nuisance when you get all dressed up, then spill something on yourself.”

  “Good hit, no field.”

  “That’s right,” Jenny Simmons said.

  Schiff was thanking his lucky stars he’d had enough sense not to loosen his grip on the arm of his chair, fall forward and kiss her—presence of mind, he thought, regarding the terrible disorder throughout his house, the joke decorations that had come undone and fallen, draped now in waves of construction paper over his sideboard, his dining-room table, over the Oriental rug in his entrance hall like a comic treasure map, casting an eye on the abandoned picnic table that was his living-room floor, the uneaten plates of food, the crushed cocktail napkins working their capillary action on the liquory dregs and stubbed, cold cigarettes at the bottoms of the plastic glasses of booze, abandoned, displaced sofa cushions, on the carpet, against the living-room walls; presence of mind when all about you are losing theirs— when he became conscious of the buzz and grind of his Stair-Glide. Unmistakably—from where he sat he could not see this, merely heard their joyous squeals as they went up his stairs—people were riding his chair, Ms. Kohm directing them like someone working a ride in an amusement park, the Ferris wheel, say, the carousel.

  “All right, Bautz, you’ve had your turn. Get off and let Miss Carter have a ride.”

  “Aw, come on, Molly, one more time. Please?”

  “No, it’s Carter’s turn. Then Tysver, Miss Freistadt next, then Wilkins, Dickerson, Lipsey, Miss Moffett, and Disch.”

  “I don’t see why she gets to have all the say-so.”

  “What are you complaining about? You’re next. I don’t get to go until last.”

  “Disch, you’re such a baby!”

  “I’m not a baby. I was here putting up the decorations hours before anyone else even showed up.”

  “Oh, yeah, hours,” Dickerson said.

  “Well, I was.”

  “Big fucking federal deal,” Dickerson said.

  “Yeah,” Tysver said.

  “If you want,” Miss Freistadt said, “you can ride up with me. You can sit on my lap.”

  “Really?”

  “Would I tease a baby?”

  “Hey!” Schiff called. “Hey!” He turned to Miss Simmons. “Are they really using my Stair-Glide, you think?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Shall I go see?”

  “Go see,” Schiff said.

  In seconds she was back. A trip that would have taken him five minutes at least, he couldn’t help thinking. If he was even up to it.

  “They are,” she said.

  “Hey,” called Schiff. “Hey now.”

  There was hysterical squealing, shouting, a terrible clamor of drunken, almost falsetto rivalry. Schiff would recall crying out at them to cut the foofaraw, using this word which he’d not only never used before but which he couldn’t remember having ever even heard. Remembering, moreover, that he called it out not once but three times. Like some magic cockcrow in legend. Angered now, crying, “Cut out that foofaraw! Knock off the foofaraw! Enough with this foofaraw!” Thrice denying them foofaraw, forbidding them foofaraw within his house, as if to say, not in this household you don’t, or, take that outside where it belongs, or proclaiming that the neighborhood wasn’t zoned for foofaraw. But overruled. At the very least ignored. Almost, so unmindful of him were they, cut.

  Close to tears now he was, the rage of his helplessness. As if they didn’t understand him or, worse yet, as if they did, some nice question of cho
ice here, equating the hick, obsolete word with the hick, obsolete professor. Their continued laughter and cackle not merely an unmindfulness of his sovereignty here, but of his simple (simple, hah!), physical (physical, hah!) presence, an absolute refutation of his existence, an argument against his claims and rights as a landlord. The inmates were in control of the asylum. The students were calling the shots, making the assignments, handing out the grades. Now he was scared, beside himself.

  “He is, he is on her lap!”

  “How is that, Disch? You like that?”

  “May I ride with Dickerson, Ms. Kohm?”

  “Little Miss Moffett.”

  “Sat on Dickerson’s tuffet.”

  Their voices were like noises made in free-fall, a glimpse of the abyss from the apogee at the lip of a thrill ride. Then, suddenly, abruptly, their brassy shrillness ceased—— all their odd, excited, asexual soprano. Displaced by a screech. Something mechanical. A sick, scraping sound. Something unoiled and harsh. To Schiff’s ears, perfectly pitched for the noises of stuck, soiled machinery, stalled, soured works.

  “Take me in there,” he commanded Miss Simmons. “Bring me, take me. Hurry, I have to see! My wheelchair. Damn,” he said, “the brakes are locked. Wait, I’ll unlock them. Shit,” he said, “my feet aren’t on the footrests. Wait, no, those swing into place. No, the whole whoosis swings over. Right. Yeah. Listen, can you lift up my legs? There. Thanks. There. Hey, thank you. Thanks. Push me into the hall.

  “Hey,” he called in the hall, “what’s going on?” But he could see what was going on. His Stair-Glide was stuck, on the blink. Engaging the buttons on its arms, Dickerson could not get it to move. All ten of his students were arranged on the stairway. Frozen in his stare, they seemed like deer startled by headlights on the highway, like folks caught confused in a burning building, not knowing which way to turn in the fire, whether to try to make it to the top of the stairs where it wasn’t yet burning, or to plunge through the fire toward the door. Indeed, some seemed headed in one direction, others in another. Ms. Kohm had somehow been stripped of her powers. Schiff, to judge from the way they looked at him, at least temporarily restored to his. Yet he wasn’t sure he wasn’t mistaken about this. Many of them could have been hiding their real attitudes toward him under what might have been smirks behind the hands they held in front of their mouths. Smirks, or fear, or outright laughter.