“Well that doesn’t happen in a community college. There’s no hanky-panky. If they run into us at the library they know it’s not the Bodleian or the Widener, or see us climb into our cars in the parking lot they know full well it ain’t Harvard Yard. What I’m saying, there’s no stars in their eyes. To this day I’m single and not one of my students ever came on to me. They’ve no self-esteem,” Miller said. “Or maybe that’s backwards. The point is you don’t get points for anything that comes out of Cliff’s Notes or Masterplots.”
Someone raised his hand.
Uh oh, he thought, worried, recalling Hartshine’s challenge to the crippled political geographer, the hard time Anita Smynea had been given by one of the Fellows, even Russell’s private mockery of Arthur Barber, the infinity maven who’d forgotten to carry his two. “Yes,” Miller said, “is there a question?”
“What’s your project?” he asked politely.
“I’m trying,” he said, “to get some idea of the image of the community college in the eyes of establishment academia.” Then he fell out of his deep muslin chair and fainted.
When, moments later, he came to on the carpet (his tie had been loosened, his collar undone; establishment academia, giving him air, had moved back a floor lamp, his chair, cleared a broad avenue for him, and now stood patiently on either side of the room exactly like people quietly observing an accident from the curb), Russell, Miller’s wrist in his hand, was on one knee beside him. He was grinning so widely someone might just have brought him good news and holding a wink so steadily Miller thought for a moment he looked like someone engaged in an odd athletic event, like seeing how long he could go before taking a breath, say.
Miller, embarrassed, said “Where am I, where am I? Wherever in the world am I?” just to get Russell to open his eye.
“Dr. Rey is on call,” a girl said. “I sent for him.”
“Rita? Is that you, Rita?”
They put Miller to bed in Van Gogh’s room in Arles, and though he heard them go down the stairs and leave the yellow house he had the impression that they’d left someone behind to stand guard in the hall. Perhaps Russell, perhaps Hartshine or Rita, or even the one who’d asked him the question in the music room. Fear and anxiety—he’d never passed out before—had left him half conscious during the press of their urgent rush with him across the square to Number 2 Lamartine Place. It seemed important to Miller to learn who’d been chosen to stay with him, but he thought it better to discover the identity of whoever it was posted outside his door by listening to the nature of the silence, or whatever was done to disturb it, made by the person keeping the vigil, than to demand it outright. He closed his eyes so he might better concentrate on the problem. Never had his senses been sharper. He tried to judge his guardian’s sex and size by the creak of the weight made on the flooring, to see if he could reconstruct the nature of the clothing—its fabric, even its color—by the quality of the sound—its rustle or rub—made when it was brushed by a hand. And opened his eyes. To see could he detect some clue in the breathing or make out in the darkness some gloomy giveaway thickness or layer of shadow that might reveal the character of its source. There was nothing. He received no impressions, heard nothing, felt no pulsations shaken loose from the brusque agitations and invisible jitters and shivers of whatever body rested against the wall outside his room. He saw nothing. And so he closed them again and went to sleep.
Only to look when he waked, not so much refreshed or even rested as startlingly wakeful, directly into the very odd face of someone gazing down at him. The face was somehow as disturbingly familiar as it was strange.
“Oh,” said the man, “I am penitent to startle you. You must are the ill American monsieur, Mr. Miller.”
“Am I ill?” Miller asked, for he realized even before he took in the man’s old-fashioned black bag he must be the doctor.
“This is something we will shall be deciding together. Dr. Félix Rey, Mister Monsieur.”
“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.”
“Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.”
“You do,” Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!”
“Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey.
It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they were young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or -six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.
Miller kept shifting his glance from the picture postcard to the great-great-grandson. For all the flawlessness of their unquestioned resemblance it seemed a bit stagy, as though one of them were cross-dressing, say, or as if some feature on one of their faces—the beard, the plucked eyebrows—had been cultivated for a specific effect, accented as a nose or a hairline in a caricature.
“It is very remarkable, is it not, Mister Monsieur? Do I state the case amiss? One might summarize that Vincent was so geniused that he fixed the gene pool forever with his picture brush. But you will see from your eyes. There live in Arles to this day descendants from the peasant Patience Escalier; the postesman Joseph Roulin and his femme, Berceuse, their sons, Armand and Camille; and of Madame Ginoux and of even the fierce Zouave.”
Handing back the “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey,” Miller wondered if the physician had picked up his English in much the same sort of way Miller had picked up his French, studying rubrics on the backs of postcards as he had memorized vocabulary lists, Yet there was something about Dr. Rey’s speech Miller, admittedly no student of languages, didn’t quite buy. His accent, measured against the accents of Frenchmen in films, seemed wrong. It wasn’t so much uncultivated as uncluttered by their smoky, theatrical rumble and heavy breathiness. It seemed to Miller that even the man’s syntax was off by four or five hundred miles, as though it belonged at least that much further up the Mediterranean coast.
Now Rey listened to Miller’s heart, tuned in on his lungs, took the measures of his pressure and pulse and temperature. He examined Miller’s ears, ran light into Miller’s eyes, palpated Miller’s belly, dug his fingers painfully deep into Miller’s groin. He had Miller gag three strained ahhs under a rough wooden tongue depressor. He had him sit along the side of the bed and tested his reflexes with a little hammer. He took his pressure a second time, removed the stethoscope again from where he had stuffed it into a jacket pocket and asked Miller if he minded submitting to a second examination of his chest. He breathed on the little black disc at the bottom of the stethoscope, warming it the way one might move breath across one’s lenses before rubbing them clean with a tissue. Nothing the doctor had yet done so alarmed Miller as this little gesture of solicitude. Then he had Miller cough. Hard. Harder please, s’il vous plaît. Press, Miller interpreted freely, the pedal to the metal.
And Miller, accommodating, coughed with such force that he brought up the reduced, soured biles of the gorgeous great omelette, toast, tea, peeled fruit, and apéritifs of his delicious dinner. Félix Rey gave him a handful of toilet paper, which he removed from his doctor’s satchel.
It had been a thorough, even arduous, examination. “Is something wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” Miller asked nervously. “I’m no h
ypochondriac, doc, but I have to admit, ever since my arrival I’ve been a bit off my feed.” It was so. Whatever else, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Miller generally enjoyed good health. Almost thirty-seven, he was still active in sports, still played a good, hard-driving pickup basketball game with the students in the BTCC gym, or handball at the Indianapolis Y. Unlike many others younger than himself he detected no loss of spring in his step under the boards, and was, despite his liquor and cigarettes, still a strong jumper, and an aggressive, even combative, player. He usually drew more fouls than any other player on his team. (Indeed, he had a small reputation as something of a bad sport, and had always vaguely equated this as a sign of stamina and good physical health.) And on the lively YMCA handball courts he was as quick as ever, his aces and killers as devastating as they had ever been. “What’s wrong with me,” he asked again, “am I ill?” And felt, who’d been unable to pick up any of the steams and busted light waves pouring off the solid objects in his darkened room, his alarmed features anxiously arrange themselves on his face.
“Mais not, Mister Monsieur. I am just remarking what strange fabulousness is it that the physical qualities of so differents citizenships should such often present liberté, égalité, fraternité, the European as well as the Berber, the Berber as much as the Japanese, the man as the woman, a Mexican like an American like a Jewish gentleman like a Turk. Palpation and respiration and the rate of the heart are demonstrations. The Zulu and Eskimo are both at normal at centigrade thirty-six degrees.
“There is nothing needed for further testing, Monsieur Sir. Of wounds to your body there are none presenting. Nor pathologies neither. I have not need to take your blood, I have not need to collect your urines. If there are damages it is in your spirit you are weakly.”
“My spirit?”
“Oui.”
“My spirit?”
“Non non. Do not alarm. It will see you out the night.”
“The night. Terrific. That gives me, what, seven hours?”
“And more. How long is your arrangement at Arles?”
“Five weeks. This is my second day.”
“Mister Monsieur is an artist?”
“I teach at a junior college in Indiana.”
“But Mister Monsieur’s soul suffers?”
Miller stared at the odd-looking physician with his queer, Oriental, triangular face. He fixed on the man’s fiery left ear, his dagger’s-point beard, the sprawling flourish of his mustache like elaborate handwriting above his almost feminine lips. It was almost all he could do to keep himself from laughing at its foolish excesses. “Yes,” he admitted quietly, “it sure does.”
Then Dr. Félix Rey looked about the room, taking in his surroundings for apparently the first time.
“This is where he live.”
“Yes,” Miller said.
“Yes,” said Dr. Rey, “I have been here. Oh, many years since. But not much since the Foundation have kept it for Fellows. Well,” he said shyly, “for a group photograph once. Of the Club of the Portraits of Descendants of People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh. Here, may I present? My pleasure, my pleasure.”
He produced a second postcard from somewhere in his suit and extended it toward terminally cracked-spirit, soul- weakened Miller, a blurry black-and-white photograph of people as vaguely familiar to Miller as Dr. Félix Rey had been. In it, ranged about Van Gogh’s room at Arles, which somehow disappeared, was absorbed, swallowed up by their relentless, insistent, novelty presence as some historical place (where a famous general had died of his wounds, say, or the room where an important document had been signed or great book written) might be by the presence of tourists, were the peasant Patience Escalier, Joseph, Berceuse, Armand and Camille Roulin, Madame Ginoux (who herself bore a striking resemblance—they could have been sisters— to Kaska Celli), Rey himself, and the fierce Zouave. Six of the eight were crowded onto the room’s two chairs and along the side of Van Gogh’s bed. The other two, the postman Roulin with his salt-and-pepper, broad shaggy beard so layered with hair it was impossible to make out his neck or determine whether he wore a tie, or even if his shirt was buttoned, and the dashing soldier boy, surprisingly slight but with a large head and a powerful neck, posed for their picture in what was left of the room, in a small clearing on the tiled floor. It reminded Miller of some remarkable class photograph. (Good heavens, he thought, this might have been taken at one of the English-as-a-second-language courses back at Booth Tarkington.)
“We have not changed a day. It is as if the time stood still.”
“Indeed,” said Miller.
“I am a physician, Roulin is a postesman. Even the young lad is demob’d from the Foreign Legion.”
“And the peasant, Patience Escalier, is he still a peasant?”
“He is! It is a thing wondrous how that man wizardized us with his masterpieces left and right. It is beyond my poor proofs and scientifics. Art has its mysteriousness, eh, sir mister? We eat its dusts.”
Miller, though it struck him as an odd observation even at the moment he made it to himself, noticed that he was totally without appetite. Not even the burning, sour, transformed taste of his supper, still in his mouth from the bile he’d brought up when Dr. Rey had him cough, left him with even the most remote urge to clear it, neutralize it with a sip of water, the relief of gum. He guessed, too, that he’d had enough of Dr. Félix Rey.
Though he had complete, almost surprising, faith in Rey as a doctor, he understood that there’d been no reason to draw his blood, he understood that a sample of his pee would have revealed nothing of interest, and though Miller was as taken with his peculiar distinction (his residency in Van Gogh’s room at Arles) as the physician’s mad notion that in painting his great-great-grandfather, Van Gogh had somehow laid a spell on the great-great-grandson and fixed his fate forever. This, Miller realized, was probably not good medicine and he would have been content to bid the doctor goodnight and been permitted to turn the young man’s diagnosis (that he was weakly in spirit) and prognosis (that it would likely see him out his sojourn in Arles) over in his mind.
Then he noticed the muzzy class photo Félix Rey had given him and which he’d briefly examined and set down on the washstand. “You’ll want this,” he said and made to return it to the physician.
“Non non non. I insist not, Mr. Miller. It is yours to keep it. It is but a cheap trinket. The club makes them up.”
“Well,” he said, shifting, “thank you.” Miller, whose health, until Arles, had been so good he’d not had enough contact with doctors to understand that it was they rather than their patients who sent such signals, nevertheless hoped Rey had picked up enough English from the rubrics on his postcards—on this one, too, everything was in four languages—to guess by such shifts that their meeting was over.
As it happens he had.
Félix Rey rose from the rush-bottom chair beside Miller’s bed. “I shall see in on you again, Sir Mister Monsieur.”
“You don’t think you’d better leave me something to help me sleep?”
“What, pills?”
“Well sure, pills if you think that’s what I need.”
“An injection? Powders and sedatives?”
“You’re the doctor,” Miller said.
Félix Rey looked at him. “Did you know, Monsieur Mister, that it was to this chamber your neighbor called my great-great-grandfather on the night of the blood from the knife on his ear?”
“What,” Miller said, “because I asked you for something to help me sleep?”
“Does Mister have a gun?”
“If I had a gun do you think they’d have let me through airport security?”
“Knifes?”
“Please.”
“Ropes and poisons?”
“If I had any of that stuff what would I need with a sleeping pill?” Miller asked reasonably.
“Please,” said the doctor, “raise no hand against yourself. I know your position. You’ve nothing to fear from yo
ur position.”
“My position?”
“Your position, your bloom, your hale and your hardy. Your soul is a little sprained. It’s nothing. We see it all the time. If you like, I can ask them to alter your accommodations. It would be nothing.”
“My room? You mean my room? I like my accommodations, my accommodations suit me right down to the ground!” Miller shot back angrily, furiously really.
“Please? Suit you right down to the ground? Rest. Please Mister. I will see in on you.”
He was a country doctor, Miller reminded himself after Félix Rey had left. He was nothing but a country doctor. And a self-proclaimed curiosity. (Miller put him down as probably the president of that Sons of Van Gogh’s Subjects, or whatever it was, that he so liked going on about.) The Foundation probably called on him more for his language skills than for his medical ones.
What, Miller’s soul was sprained? He needed a doctor to tell him this? Ask the man who owns one! was all Miller had to say about it. And then the silly sod wouldn’t even leave him with a lousy sleeping pill to take a little of the edge off his god-awful wakefulness. What had he told him? Raise no hand against himself? This was his considered medical opinion? Well, thought Miller, we’ll just see about that! And then, to ease a little of that soul sprain and lift a little of the edge off that god-awful wakefulness, Miller, calling up images of Kaska Celli, got a wrong number, got Madame Ginoux instead (but who looked so like her) and, imagining the round, competent arms beneath the heavy sleeves of her thick black dress, raised a hand against himself and whacked off.
Van Gogh's Room at Arles Page 28
