Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“That’s just where it was,” she called up in a couple of minutes. “I’ve already checked to see if it’s the right one. This is it, all right. It unlocked your front door straight off.”

“That’s terrific,” he called. “It was clever of you to think of the tchtchk.”

“People have patterns,” she called back up the stairs. “It’s human nature.”

“You’re right,” he said from where he sat on his bed, projecting perfectly now from all the practice he’d had on their dry run through the base stations, “it is human nature.”

“Goodbye,” she called. “I’ll have this duplicated ASAP. I’ll see to it someone gets it back to you. Oh, and Profesor”

“Yes?”

“You mustn’t worry about any of this. It’s like health, or fire, or automobile insurance. It’s for your peace of mind. You hope you never have to use it. You just know it’s there for you if you ever do.” It was exactly what Bill would have said. He heard the front door close behind her.

So much, Schiff thought, for love.

Well, thought dignified old Schiff, that was a close one. Because for a few minutes there he’d begun to rethink his decision to call off the party. He was going to invite Miss Simmons. If she’d come upstairs to say goodbye properly he would have. It wasn’t crazy. He could have asked without embarrassing either of them. It was perfectly natural. She’d been his student, too, once. Of course, she seemed put off when he mentioned the party, but that was because she thought he was trying to get her to stand in for Claire. She’d seen there was nothing in the fridge, that the cupboard was bare. She may have thought he wanted her to do his shopping for him. She was a busy woman, he knew that. A dozen or so phone calls, he could have taken care of it himself. What did Miss Simmons know of his arrangements with Information?

Well, he thought, there’s no fool like an old fool. Hold it right there, old fool, he told himself. Because where, really, was the foolishness in all this? Hadn’t she recognized him? It had been fifteen years. At least fifteen years. She could have been a sophomore when she’d taken his class. Even, with permission of the instructor, a freshman. So at least fifteen years, probably sixteen, but possibly seventeen or eighteen. If she wanted to get her distribution requirement in political science out of the way.

But say fifteen years. She knew him when, he’d said. She’d known him when. He didn’t kid himself. He knew well enough what he looked like these days, his frail, shot, worn-out, emeritus looks and cripple’s diminished, broken bearing. Yet she’d recognized him through all the schmutz of disability, through all the scaffolding of his wheelchairs, Stair-Glides and walkers, the heavy disguise of his ruined body. So where was the old foolishness? Where exactly? He was a geographer, show him on a map. And if it had been fifteen years since she’d graduated, that made her, what, thirty-seven? (At least thirty-seven.) Which would have made him about forty-four — she knew him when — when she knew him. Or, depending on those distribution requirements, that permission of the instructor, conceivably only forty-one. Looked at in this light, not so much sub specie aeternitatis as in the enchanted, almost charming relativity of love and other such matters, that made them practically contemporaries. So where, where was the foolishness? Where was there even such a big-deal age difference? Because didn’t young women often develop crushes — he used the lightest, most flattering term for such things — on their professors? Didn’t they fall in outright love with them? Develop grand passions for them that ended up not just in some motel room but frequently in actual officially sanctioned, ceremonially blessed marriage beds? He could name at least half a dozen such arrangements right here on this campus. Sure. Happens all the time. (And, frequently, with happier, longer-lasting outcomes than his and Claire’s.) Or maybe she didn’t care for him in that way (or it could be she knew all too well what was happening and had simply been too shy to come up), but how did no-fool-like-an-old-fool apply? He could have as easily said — this was love he was talking about, that grand enchantment, that charming relativity that smashed time’s tenses — that he’d been thinking like a high school kid, and what did he see in her, a woman at least thirty-seven?

All right, that was stretching things. But he at least wanted it on the record that he was taking back all his disclaimers. He was ruling nothing in, he was ruling nothing out. And if this was some May and December thing, okay, all right, but at least it was some late May, early December thing!

And besides, Schiff thought, he was alone in the house, he was in enough trouble as it was. He had to think about something that would keep his spirits up.

And not only alone in the house, left alone in the house. Left like some kid babysitting himself for the first time. Face it, he was spooked. Not by ghosts and not by darkness. But by all the hobgoblins of contingency, what Charley called pratfall, a comic term that didn’t fool him for a minute, that he knew all along masked a broken hip. Or worse. Help, Schiff rehearsed over and over in his head, help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

When he woke he figured from the fullness of his bladder he must have slept for at least two hours. He reached into the nightstand where he’d stashed the basin and pisser and peed into it without even having to Credé himself. Added to what was already there, there’s now about seven hundred cc in the urinal. Jesus, he thinks, and prays that next time it will be his ordinary dribs and drabs again. Ultimately, of course, he would have to risk walking into the bathroom, but he doesn’t think he feels up to it tonight. He’s still spooked, wants to get this first night left alone in the house behind him before he tries anything brave. And Damn, he thinks, feeling hunger pangs, and maybe even a little thirst there at the back of his throat, that son of a bitch. Meaning Claire. Who’d abandoned him to his bare necessities, his basic needs and what to do with his wastes and grimes. That no-good whoreheart! Damn her and all who sail in her!

He takes up the remote control for his television set and turns the power on, not because he wants to watch television but because he needs to see the yellow date and time stretched across the top of the screen like a banner headline. Ten thirty-nine. Figures, he figures. (He’s not particularly superstitious, but he doesn’t like it when numerals add up to thirteen.)

Well, he wonders, knocked back on his own devices, what to do, what to do?

Idly at first, his head and heart not only not really in it but not even aware that that’s what they’re doing, he begins to make up another of his messages for the answering machine he does not yet even own. Please leave a message at the beep, he composes, then, inspired, takes out the “please.” Leave a message at the beep. Yes! he thinks. That’s it! No frills. No chinks in the sheer insurmountability in so imposing a cliff face. What could be simpler, yet pack more powerhouse ambiguity? Thieves, even those professionals cops so loved to brag on and seemed to respect (if not flat- out admire, as if they were so many Sherlock Holmeses confronting so many Professors Moriarity), thugs worthy of them, thugs with mettle, thugs with brains, would be put off. Or would they? Is this guy for real, they might wonder. Who does he think he’s fooling with this bluff? Surely, if they were truly worthy of the professionalism the cops claimed to respect them for, they’d recognize the Mayday appeal in such a communiqué. Oh, oh, the looseness of cripples, mourned buffeted, crippled Schiff, who, on second thought had seen that real professionals, genuine gangsters, or even only revved kids hopped-up on drugs, could read the vulnerable, terrified wimp factors right through such ploys. It was practically an open invitation practically. Why not just come out and say just come out and get it?