Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  I came that close to spilling my seed over this one! Miller thought ruefully.

  But despite himself felt a sudden stirring, some attraction he felt to the rough leather of the woman’s character, and lo and behold he was nursing an extraordinary tight hard-on right there in the night café.

  He signed up for Les Alyscamps and L’Alleé des Sarcophages and the Roman amphitheater. He signed up for Saint-Rémy and the side trip to Auvers. (He sat as close to her as he could in the newly seated, newly air-conditioned bus and pressed tips into her hands for her splendidly educational commentaries.) He signed up for the boat trip down the Rhône delta and returned to Arles that evening exhausted from the air and the heavy Provençal sun (and from getting out of the little launch with Rita and the others and stooping most of the day examining the murky waters as they tramped barefoot along the river’s muddy bank searching out the rare reeds that grew there and which Rita cleaned and filed down and then sold in individual packets of a dozen to professional oboists all over the world, asking her again and again, “Is this one, is this?” and managing to bump against her, or even pretend to lose his footing in the insignificant current). He even signed up for the tour of the outdoor market where Rita was a shill, dutifully browsing the stalls for the faux relics (thrice faux: first when they were manufactured, twice when they were wholesaled to the trade and, finally, when Rita, the beautiful factotum-cum-desk clerk, cum-tour guide, cum-this and cum-that, performed her vicious gypsy triage over the toy SPQRs stamped into the hilts, helmets, and masonry of the little sections of viaduct manqué) but (still minding his pennies though he had lost his mind) making no purchases.

  He was her best customer. And wooed her as an old- timey, love-struck young mooncalf might once have sent unsigned flowers or been in attendance at every performance his heart’s ingenue ever gave, lost whole-hog for the run of the show. He was, this Miller was, some tied-tongue, stage- door Johnny of an admirer.

  But, at night, back in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, he still could not manage to put her into any of his imagination’s beds. It would have been like trying to bring himself off to some image of Leda, say, or Venus, or any other superstar of myth. (Because he couldn’t stop thinking of her as of some woman actually painted by Van Gogh, but something turned and awful in her beauty, hardened, slumped and stupored as a strumpet in the night café, thickened and stupid and mean as a peasant in the landscapes he always shared with her now on their outings. Though why this should have bothered him he couldn’t have said, and perhaps even Russell couldn’t have told him.)

  There were only four days left.

  Some of the Fellows—all the scholars who’d been in Arles when he and Paul Hartshine arrived had packed up and gone; piecemeal, or in little clumps of two or three, they had dropped off; Miller was part of the establishment now; no one but Rita, Russell, and Hartshine were left who had witnessed the disaster in the music room—decided to take a day trip to Cannes.

  They brought their idea to Rita, proposing to engage the brother-in-law’s bus. Well, but Cannes was not really her territory, she told them. She wasn’t that familiar with Cannes, Cannes was for tourists, not academics. Cannes was crowded this time of year, she couldn’t guarantee them special deals in the better restaurants. She was sure her brother-in-law was not licensed for Cannes, that there’d be special fees for parking his big, upgraded bus with its brand-new seats and special air-conditioning unit.

  She’s a genius, Miller thought. She’s more than a great European factotum, she’s a world-class piece of work. And wanted to rip out her heart and, simultaneously, devour her with kisses. But, with the others, dutifully ponied up all the vigorish, add-ons, and excise taxes she extorted, Miller thinking, There go the tips for the maids, there go the ones for the waiters, there goes Georges’s tip, there go the duty- free Gaulois.

  When the brother-in-law pulled up in front of the inn at Number 30 Lamartine on the morning of the day trip to Cannes, in addition to Miller, Russell, and Paul Hartshine (who hadn’t spoken to him since the afternoon he’d passed his remark in the music room), some of the Fellows who boarded the bus were Sir Ehrnst Riglin, a history historian at Uppsala University, Jesus Hans, the revolutionary political statistician for third-world countries, Samuels Kleist, a vernacular architect in his late sixties, Yalom and Inga Basset, pop psychiatrists, and Robert and Heidi Lear.

  With the exception of Russell and Hartshine, who averted his eyes whenever Miller looked his way, he knew none of them very well. For all that they’d spent entire days together on the recent flurry of excursions since Kaska Celli had run off to be with her grandchildren, and for all his decision to kick back and socialize, and for all their apparent friendliness, their reputations got in his way. (It was their reputations, only that. He’d seen photographs of Kleist’s queer structures, the strange, almost pueblo-like tiers of caves built into the sides of New Mexico’s red cliffs, and was convinced that the buildings were silly, uninhabitable, virtually inaccessible to mailmen, milkmen, the man who reads the meter. Only their reputations. For though he’d no clear notion of what someone in the history of history field did, it was the fact that Sir Ehrnst had been knighted for it that scared him off. Nor had he read the Bassets’ books. He’d heard them on their morning call-in talk show mediating the lunacies, counseling the killers, abusers, swingers, cheaters, and incestors, sometimes homing at least a little in on even his own small shames. It was the fact of their famous voices, however, that held him at arm’s length.)

  Of Robert and Heidi Lear he knew nothing at all, not even their disciplines (or whether they worked in tandem). What he had against them was that of all the people with whom he’d come into contact at Arles, Robert Lear was the only Fellow he actively disliked. This went back to an incident he’d observed in the music room. There’d been a bridge game one evening. Miller didn’t play bridge, of course, hadn’t enough knowledge of its rules even to kibitz. One of the other players—he couldn’t remember his name, the man was gone now—had asked Robert, aside from Miller the room’s only other smoker, if he might borrow one of his cigarettes. Robert had visibly hesitated.

  “It’s not your brand,” Robert said.

  “Oh,” said the guy, “that’s all right. I’ve run out. I’ve just had dinner. I’d smoke anything.”

  Robert hesitated again, frowned, and then finally, reluctantly, retrieved a cigarette from what seemed to Miller like a full pack and pushed it a little way across the table toward the bridge player. In about an hour the man asked if he could borrow a second cigarette. Robert frowned, scowled, openly sighed, and shook one from what now looked to be a considerably diminished pack.

  What Miller held against Heidi was that she was married to Robert.

  On the night before he was to leave, the bridge player appeared in the music room. He was holding a carton of cigarettes. They were Robert Lear’s brand. He brought it to the chair in which Lear was sitting and handed the carton to him. “Smoke them all in one place, why don’t you?” he said and left the room.

  Miller was scandalized. As much as he disliked Lear, he was astonished that anyone could be rude to someone who’d received the Foundation’s blessing and been invited to Arles. Indeed, though he was still shy, reserved, and even guarded with everyone else, he made at least a little effort, in spite of the fact that the Lears didn’t seem to welcome or even notice it, to be forthcoming with them.

  It was Heidi Lear, in fact, who seemed to have invented the scheme for their trip to Cannes. Miller learned of this only on the bus that morning.

  The trip was designed, at least in part, to be a sort of shopping expedition. Although Miller, Russell, and Hartshine would miss it, the Fellows were going to do a play reading the following week—in French —of The Misanthrope. Heidi had approached Rita to see if it was possible to procure the amphitheater one afternoon for their little production. Rita thought the idea of a play reading a good one and came up almost immediately with an even more ambitious proposal. Why
not, she suggested, have the reading at night in the amphitheater? Why not invite the townspeople of Arles, why not take advantage of the stadium’s lights and sound system? She thought she could arrange it so the entire evening wouldn’t cost them more than, oh, fifty dollars a person.

  They jumped at it. They jumped, too, at Heidi Lear’s additional embellishments. She thought the actors should be in costume. Oh, nothing elaborate of course. It was too late for anything fine, but Heidi had been associated for just years and years with socio-theatrics. That was her field, socio-theatrics—— theatrical therapies for prisoners, old people in homes, the dying in hospices, as well as individuals who found themselves temporarily thrown together in groups like the one the Foundation had assembled in Arles. It was how she’d met Robert (whose field it turned out was the inventorying of eighteenth-century houses). She was, at least according to Robert Lear (whose testimony in his wife’s behalf was the first indication of generosity Miller had seen in him), this genius of the make-do and at-hand. A wizard of odds and ends.

  Thus the shopping expedition to Cannes. For props and stuffs and materials. For the building blocks of all impromptu improvisation and inspired, makeshift arrangement. They would hit up the hotels, the special booths and shops a town like Cannes with its annual film festival and concomitant obligations to make the sets and adjust to the needs of some eleventh-hour show business would be sure to have.

  On the trip out that morning the coach was abuzz with plans for the upcoming show. Even Rita was excited, and Paul Hartshine (who was wearing his big print bow tie) had practically made up his mind to change his reservations and stay on at a hotel in Arles until after the performance. Russell said he would have stayed on too but that Bologna was paying him $200,000 for the year, and he was, at least putatively, Departmental Chair. Also, he’d already been away five weeks from a sinecure essentially carved out for him. They were nice people. He oughtn’t, he thought, take advantage, he mustn’t, he felt, hurt their feelings. Much as he might want to hang around and take in their Misanthrope leaving was the honorable thing to do.

  “Two hundred thousand?” Miller said.

  Russell looked at the scenery.

  Miller was astonished at how excited they were. Him too. It seemed odd that he, of all of them the most frivolous, the one with probably the least good reason to be there, should be the one under the greatest obligation to leave, to go home to what was only Booth Tarkington Community College in what was only Indianapolis in what was merely the State of Indiana, to get down to work at last on what was plainly the flimsiest of projects.

  It astonished him too how all this (about the real purpose of the trip to Cannes; about the Lears, Heidi’s talents, Robert’s devotion; about Hartshine’s decision to stay on; Rita’s genuine enthusiasm; Russell’s salary) came out on the bus. Other things too. Something ad hoc and original and abandoned in all of them, their lives made suddenly available, opened up like responses to the sunshine laws or the rules of discovery. Sir Ehrnst, for example, the history of history man from Uppsala, admitted that he never read his students’ papers. He distributed grades solely on the basis of his first impressions of how they dressed, if they wore glasses, whether they looked scholarly, how he expected they would strike a class of their own graduate students, sometimes on nothing more than how they smelled—— their colognes, their aftershaves and toilet waters, whether they seemed cloying. And old Samuels Kleist, whose wife was feeling too ill to make the trip with them to Cannes (and who, though he knew of her existence, Miller had never seen because she remained, to hear Kleist tell it, who, indeed, fetched her her breakfasts—bran muffins, an orange, tea— her lunches and suppers), was in love, had not one but two mistresses installed in a pair of his cliff dwellings back in New Mexico, and was on his way to Cannes to buy presents for both ladies. Though he had no idea, he gushed, what either of them wanted from France, no notion, God help him, of their sizes. Both drank wine, loved wine. If he could find a specially designed label with a pretty view of the beach at Cannes, the great architect said, a half-dozen bottles like that might be the very thing. He never touched the stuff himself, he said. Neither did his wife. Where could he hide them so they wouldn’t be discovered? He asked for suggestions.

  “Ship them,” Inga Basset suggested, “have them shipped.”

  “That’s so impersonal,” Samuels Kleist said.

  “Get them head scarves,” Sir Ehrnst Riglin said. “You can line a head scarf inside your trouser cuff or stuff it up the sleeve of your jacket.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Kleist said.

  And Yalom and Inga Basset, the drive-time psychiatrists, were openly contemptuous of the creatures who called them for help, contemptuous, even scurrilous, about psychiatry itself.

  “It’s a crock,” Yalom Basset said.

  “It’s gas in your pants,” said Inga, a slim, fit-looking woman in her forties, handsome and rakish in a Borsalino hat, a cigarillo in her lips, one eye squint shut against its smoke like the face of an experienced card player.

  “It leaves wind,” her husband put in.

  “It clouds men’s minds,” Inga said.

  Committing voluntary truth against themselves like people turning state’s evidence. All of them, all, all abandoned and vulnerable as so many summer houses in the winter.

  Jesus Hans, statistics advisor to the third world, running his mouth at the back of the bus.

  “I’m from Cali. They know you’re Colombian they want to dance you, they want love songs and good moves, that you give them dips. Famine girls from the horn of Africa.

  “I give old Kleist due. Hey, two mistresses? He worries about gifts because he’s an ancient, sentimental guy from the old school.

  “I have two sweet daughters, a wonderful wife who fucks like a mink. Better than my girlfriends even. She holds no candles to that Rita though.”

  Not Miller, Miller thought. Count Miller out, Miller thought. Keep your mystery, thought stunned Miller. Hold on tight to your famous poker-puss heart. Don’t give them a thing, not a thing. I gave at the office, Miller thought. I gave and gave out in the music room. Don’t, Miller thought. Don’t tell them you jerk off to ghosts and grandmas.

  And held his tongue all the way to Cannes.

  Which was still France, still Europe, only no longer Van Gogh’s Europe.

  The brother-in-law drove the big bus right up to what must have been one of the newest, grandest hotels in town. He opened the doors, waited until his passengers descended, then descended himself and casually tossed his bus keys to a broad, magnificent doorman, splendidly attired in what vaguely reminded Miller of the Zouave’s uniform in Van Gogh’s painting. The doorman handed the keys to a young man who was actually going to valet-park the damn bus, for God’s sake. Somehow this seemed the strangest, most extravagant thing Miller had ever seen.

  “We’ll cross the boulevard,” Rita said. “There’s the most marvelous café right on the beach. We’ll have a coffee there, freshen up in their facilities, and decide what we must do.”

  The air was ferociously bright. Hot and clear and bright. Miller felt the lack of sunglasses. As palpably as he might have felt the absence of an umbrella in a rainstorm.

  White yachts rode at anchor. Barebreasted, girls swam out from the beach and climbed rope ladders hanging down over the sides like a kind of nautical laundry. They boarded the yachts like dream pirates. A hundred feet off, women lay supine, topless in the powdery sand, their breasts sexlessly flattened against their chests.

  Salads, fruits, parfaits of bright ice creams. Careful clusters of color on black wrought-iron tables in the beach café. Miller greedily studied his menu. He demanded that Russell translate everything for him. He loved being in an outdoor café on a beach in Cannes. He didn’t want to ruin it by choosing the wrong food. At last he made his decision.

  The waiter brought him long cold spears of kelly-green asparagus topped with two perfectly fried eggs. There was the best iced coffee he had ever
tasted. For dessert he had a peeled pear that had been sliced and reassembled into a sort of fruit fan. It was spread out on a plate buttered with a dark chocolate sauce.

  “That was wonderful,” Miller said.

  “It looked wonderful,” Inga Basset said.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t order it,” Samuels Kleist said.