Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she said.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I think I may have dozed off.” It was a lie, but he did feel refreshed. He watched the efficient movement of Miss Simmons’s fingers, her accomplished cybernetics. It would be like this in a home, he thought. All the activity of the nurses, their aides, the physical and occupational therapists, the people who brought you your trays, the nimbleness with which they stripped the little lids from your jellies and butters and creamers, undid the impossible knots of Saran Wrap from around your salads and sandwiches. He wondered if he could talk the university into letting him teach his classes from his room in a home. He wondered if the laws protecting the disabled covered cases like that, if his entitlements extended to people to mark his papers for him, deliver his lectures, lead his discussions. Because otherwise, Schiff thought, the deal was off. If he had to lend anything to the process except his presence (his consciousness, he meant, his sheer witness) the spell would be broken. Because that’s what it was, all that activity — Miss Simmons’s, the nurses’ and aides’, the food servers’ and PTs’ and OTs’, as much as the sudden, explosive summer storm — had been — a spell, an enchantment, and as quickly broken. And the lines had been down then, too. (Perhaps that’s what had put him in mind.)

“Oh,” she said, “I forgot about your cordless. I’ll have to put an adapter in that, too.”

He handed it over.

“These,” said Miss Simmons, “are a son of a bitch.”

“Oh, now,” Schiff said.

She grinned. Schiff didn’t remember her but thought she must have been a good student.

“Is everything hooked up yet?” he asked when she gave back his phone.

“Almost. Maybe another half hour.”

Because of course there were calls he had to make. (As a cripple, he lived like a bookie.) The listmaker had not forgotten his situation, the necessary stations of his crip’s paced cross. Had not forgotten the party for his students that had still to be called off. Had not forgotten the probable roasts and hams, turkeys and pâtés, and could easily imagine the possible meaty haunches — goats’, stags’, and rams’—ticking their timed shelf life in Claire’s party-stocked refrigerator even now; the spoiling berries, oxidizing melon balls, and splinters of crystallized ice creams forming even as he thought of them, as they went on his lists; the sweet, separating, stratified milks and creamy desserts turning, going off, the freezer-burned breads tanning cancerous in the kitchen. Because (now it occurred) it wasn’t the banks he’d needed to call, it was all the little food boutiques, awning’d purveyors of powerhouse cheeses, of tinned smoked delicacies, oysters and fruits de mer (squid and tiny, fetal octopi, lavender as varicose veins), as if fed-up Claire, working their only recently annual party like a serial killer, had taken it into her angry old head that even getting even wasn’t enough, that only vengeance and wrath would serve.

“Jesus!” oathed Schiff, sniffing violently, taking rapid, shallow gusts of air into his hyperventilate nostrils, slapping his head, clipping it with the heel of his hand like a self- inflicted personal foul. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

“What,” Miss Simmons asked, “what is it? What’s wrong?”

And, believe it or not, it was suddenly revealed to Schiff that it was no mere accident that Jenny Simmons had been a former student of his, that she’d been — yes, he knew how he sounded, he knew just how he sounded — like Creer, like Beverly Yeager, bowed beneath the weight of their mad, customized agendas — sent like the closing couplet in some fabulous poetic justice to save them. Jenny d’Arc. If all that “Oh, now” had been genuine nurturing and not just conventional courtesy, let her nurture him now or forever hold her peace.

“I was thinking,” he said. “I haven’t had anything in my stomach all day. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

“Really?” she said. “You haven’t eaten all day?”

“It puts me off my feed,” Schiff said, “when my wife walks out on me.”

“You’ve got to eat.”

“I know,” Schiff said.

“Shall I make you a sandwich?”

“Jeez,” Schiff said, “that’d be putting you to a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? I’m going to have to get connected up with one of those Meals-on-Wheels deals or something.”

“Well, but I could make you a sandwich.”

“I am hungry,” admitted Schiff.

“I’ll just make you a sandwich. What would you like?”

“Gosh, anything. I think Claire may have left some stuff in the refrigerator.”

“Coming right up,” she said.

“And if anything suits your fancy …” Schiff said, breaking off.

She was back within minutes. There, on a plate on a tray, was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the bread perfectly toasted, its crusts almost surgically removed. There was a tall glass of innocent-seeming milk.

“Peanut butter and jelly?” Schiff said.

“Don’t you like peanut butter and jelly? I thought everyone did. You haven’t eaten all day and it’s easy to digest.”

“No no,” Schiff said, “this is fine. It’s just I had this craving for some of that gourmet shit my wife left in the freezer for this party we’re giving. Were giving. She stocked up, I thought she left stuff in the refrigerator. I was going to cancel out anyway, I just didn’t want it all to go to waste.”

“There’s nothing in the refrigerator.”

“In the freezer part.”

“I looked in the freezer part. There’s nothing in the refrigerator.”

“That’s impossible,” Schiff said. “The party’s tomorrow night. We give it every year for my students.”

“Well, maybe,” Miss Simmons said, “she planned to leave you. If she was planning to leave you, why would she take the trouble of going to specialty shops and charcuteries to stock up on exotic foods she knew were never going to be eaten in the first place? That stuff isn’t cheap. Why would she waste the money?”

Planning to leave him, planning to leave him? Schiff couldn’t quite take it all in, but if she was planning to leave him — he’d announced the party to his class three weeks ago, Claire knew that — that somehow put everything into an altogether different light. A poorer light, a darker light. Could this have been up her sleeve for three weeks now? Had she been setting him up for three weeks? More? At the inside three weeks? Had she been setting him up all term? Longer? From the beginning of the school year? Boy oh boy, thought Schiff, who understood he was no prize, who for years now, even when he’d been on the cane, even when he’d still wielded it with some authority, when it had been simple ancillary to his balance, pure latency, say, like peroxide, analgesics, tapes, and bandages in a first-aid kit, had begun to notice something long in the tooth about himself in mirrors and photographs— particularly photographs — something faintly sour and beginning to go off in his posture and features like all those imaginary delicacies in his refrigerator, must she have had it in for me! So planning, planning to leave him? Planning, that is, to set him up, planning to wait until the day before their annual party before she stepped out on him. (Who knew how important these parties had become to him!) What did it mean, wondered the old geographer. Would she have already notified his students, the party called on account of divorce, or at least an upcoming separation down the road she knew of and let his students in on but that the old geographer himself hadn’t heard about yet? What did it mean? What did it mean, eh?