Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Good Christ, Schiff thought, taking another reading off the television screen, it was already eleven twenty-nine (again thirteen). Almost an hour had passed since the last time he’d checked. Was it too late to call his students to tell them the party had been scrubbed? Well, they were graduate students, accustomed, he would have thought, to burning the not-yet-but-almost midnight oil, hitting the books or, sunk in the creases of their own complicated lives, their various affairs and dramatized politicals, even their own ardent lonelinesses (drinking or partying or doing their thing in their stricken privacies), so he was pretty certain he wouldn’t be waking them, ripping their sleep like the torn fabrics over the furniture in their secondhand rooms. Rather, it was still a question of his dignity-meister’s guarded dignity. Full professors didn’t telephone graduate students. Not at this hour. Not at high noon. He couldn’t conceive of a message that would not wait. That’s what campus mail was for, stairways, restrooms, and corridors where you could bump into each other, office hours, those three or four minutes before class started up, the choreographed minute or so afterward when one hefted garments and maneuvered briefcases or bookbags into the fast-closing stream of things at the door. (“A word with you, Bumas, please, when you have a chance.”) It was bad enough when the student called the professor up. Oh, Schiff didn’t mind the kid’s preliminary feint and shuffle, his nerves and courtesy like a bout of flu, was even a little grateful for the tribute of all those deferential, stammered reluctancies. (“I hope I’m not calling you at a bad time, Professor, that I’m not interrupting your and Mrs. Schiff’s dinner or anything. I hate bothering you at home like this, sir.”) But bad enough anyway. Because you had to be on your toes when the phone rang. You had to see to it that the TV was inaudible, had to fumble for the Mute button on the remote control, or turn down the volume on the radio, make certain the silence the kid heard at his end of the line was the pure, unadulterated noise of interruption, the sound of difficult, significant books being read, the quiet of a busted, damaged concentration.

Of course Schiff’s being crippled excused him from a lot of that crap. He didn’t get to campus often enough to use campus mail, he no longer kept regular office hours, people tended to steer clear of him in the corridors, he never went near a stairway, and no longer did choreography in the fast- closing stream of things at the door, don’t ask him. So he could have called. Technically. It was the message that would have compromised his dignity. Announcing at damn near midnight that their — well, his, his now that Claire had blown him off — party would have to be canceled. And not only damn near midnight, but, by the time he’d reached all of them, damn near one o’clock, too, later, the very A.M. of the very P.M. of the party in question. Still, he could have called. Technically. Even, technically, his message notwithstanding. Though then the embarrassment would be on the other foot. He’d be the one breaking the peace, breaking into the peace, calling at a bad time and interrupting God-knew- what, bothering their lovemaking perhaps, disturbing their youth. His own stammered hesitations and uneasiness barely audible over the unturned-down volume of hi-fi and boom box. (“Professor Schiff here. Schiff. SCHIFF!”)

What time was it now? Twelve one-niner. (Again thirteen? This was beyond high odds. This was into fate.)

Still protective of his dignity, he thought, fuck it, picked up the phone and asked Information for the telephone number of Molly Kohm.

Miss Kohm (though this was unclear, she could well have been married; older than his other students, in, he judged, her early forties, and got up always in the costumes, the cloaks, boots, skirts, and dresses of ladies, he imagined, on symphony, museum, and various other arts boards; and something too dramatic, even a little hysterical, about her dark makeup, its etched or engraved character, almost as if it were not makeup at all but a sort of tattoo, a kind of stenciled quality to her enduring tan, something about Miss — or Mrs. — Kohm that suggested, well, weekends spent elsewhere, her passport in her purse as surely as her car keys, coins for tolls; something — he admitted this though she was not his type — vaguely exciting about her, her intelligence grounded — if that was the word — in intimacy and some mysticism of the far, as though — he had no other way of putting this— Schiff was the geographer but she was the traveler) picked up on the very first ring. And, when he identified himself (hemming and hawing, beating about the bush, shuffling with the best of them), pretending — he assumed pretending — she’d been expecting his call.

“Oh,” she said, “you poor man, I was going to call you.”

“You were?”

“Well, when I heard what your not-so-better-half had done to you … And on the eve of your party! Outrageous! People ought to know that some of the most significant damage one can do to others is to force them to change their plans at the last minute. Too too rude, I think. To treat other persons’ lives as though they were subject to alterations like something off-the-rack. Barbaric!”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I—?”

“Call me,” he asked her.

“I thought Dickerson would take care of it. Dickerson was supposed to take care of it. That’s what we arranged at any rate.”

“We? You and Dickerson? Arranged?

“We, the members of the Political Geographers Party Committee.”

“There is such a thing?”

“Well, now there is. The people in your seminar threw it together as soon as we heard.”

“Heard? Heard what?”

“Why, what Mrs. Professor S. did to Mr. Professor S., of course.”

“What’s none of your business is none of my business, I suppose, but I’d like to know—” Schiff said formally, and with as much dignity as the thought would allow, “this just happened — who put the word out? How did you know? Is it some jungle telegraph thing?” Then, risking the inside joke, “Or are you folks connected to Information, too?” Chilled to the bone when Miss or Mrs. Kohm gave her immense and raucous board member’s society laugh.

“We take care of our own, dear,” is what she said.

“The Political Geographers Party Committee,” Schiff said. “Is that like a fan club or something?”

“Would you like a fan club?”

“I’d like,” said Schiff, sorry as soon as he permitted the words to escape, “for my life to go into remission.”

“Well,” she said, “there’s nothing the seminar can do about that one, of course, but it can and will rally round its annual party.”

“The party,” Schiff said, “the party is off.”

“Of course the party’s not off. As far as the party’s concerned, well, damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead.”

“It’s off,” Schiff said.

“Why? Give me one good reason.”

“I’ve nothing to serve.”

“Eats,” she said, “the subcommittee on eats is taking care of that.”

“There’s a subcommittee on eats?”

“There’s a subcommittee on booze, there’s a subcommittee on party decorations.”

“Who organized all this? Did you?”

“Oh, that isn’t important,” Ms. Kohm — it was how he neutrally addressed her in class, too — dismissed. “You won’t have to lift a finger.”

“I can’t lift a finger.”

“You won’t have to.”

“Look,” Schiff said, “it’s late. There are other people in the seminar I still have to get in touch with.”

“But I told you, there’s nothing for you to do. Dickerson will take care of it.”