Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Physical things? Physical things?” Harry Ald said. “What the hell else is there? It took you fifteen minutes to answer the telephone. This doesn’t do something to a man’s soul? But all right, okay, you’re still the same old Jack Schiff. The spitting image. But me, I’ve changed. I’m a roughneck. I’ve got tabs in bars. Sixty years old and I’m a regular in bars. Sixty years old and I’ve got, you know, girlfriends. I’m living right now with a squaw.”

“A squaw? Really?”

“Well, a half-breed, really, but this is the Pacific Northwest. It ain’t that big a deal with the braves, but the women take it very seriously. You know what they say about Catholic converts, how they’re more Catholic than the pope? Well, that’s what your half-breed squaw is like.”

“More Catholic than the pope?”

“Ha ha,” Ald said, “that’s a good one on me all right.”

“What?” Schiff asked. “What would happen?”

“If Claire showed up here? Oh, nothing. She’d get gut shot is all. Flowers of the Field would see to it personally.”

“Flowers of the Field? This is your squaw’s name?”

“It’s a beautiful name.”

“It is a beautiful name,” Schiff said.

“You don’t believe me? You want me to put her on? Wait, I’ll put her on, she’ll tell you herself. Hey, Flowers of the Field, put down the Maize Flakes a minute, come over here and tell my old friend what you’d do if all of a sudden his wife showed up and wanted to move in with me.”

“I’d gut shoot the bitch,” a woman said.

“Jesus,” Schiff said.

“How do you like that?” Harry Ald, who’d taken the phone back, said. “And don’t think for a minute this is some young bimbo we’re talking about here, Jack. She’s got almost a decade on me.”

“She sounds like a pistol,” Schiff admitted.

“She’s a bow-and-arrow.”

He told Harry Ald about his graduate students coming over that night. He explained about the PGPC. Harry thought it was wonderful, that it would do him a world of good. “Just don’t let them mug you,” he warned.

“Mug me? They’re my students. Why would they mug me?”

“Sometimes,” Harry Ald said, “graduate students see a helpless old professor in his house, they can’t help themselves, they mug him, then they throw him down the stairs.”

Schiff couldn’t have explained it, but he thought he was feeling better. Sometimes a good laugh, of course, but he felt stronger, too. He got off the bed and, moving about his bedroom, tested himself on the walker. He actually was a little stronger, back to Push, Step, Pull, from Push, Step, Drag, down to the occasional huff puff from the occasional huff puff huff puff. This wasn’t, he understood, mere fancy. He’d been to too many neurologists by this time, and knew that it was in such tiny incrementals and small diminishments that the state of his disease was tracked, his particular pathology relatively long-haul, even his death a matter more of yards than of inches. (He thought now might be a good time to fit the handle of the urinal over the walker’s crossbar, take it into the toilet, and flush its contents down the commode, but then he realized he’d have to rinse out the pisser in the bathroom sink, that, or sit with it on his shower bench and let water into it from the faucet in the tub, running over his feet, spilling on his legs.) But already his strength draining, settling, separating, retreating into its nooks, crannies, holes and corners— all the ragged features and interiority of its customary itty-bitties. The phone ringing again and Schiff fading fast.

Sam Creer was on the line, the law school’s Native American activist, its expert on Treaty Law, practically its inventor, in fact; world famous, in fact, who had turned down an offer from Harvard because, as he said, he’d be damned if he’d teach school in a place that had been hacked out of pure aboriginal real estate. Sam wanted to know if Jack happened to have heard from Claire yet. No, Schiff told him, and said that as long as he had Sam on the line, he wondered, had Creer ever run across a dame called Flowers of the Field?

“Flowers of the Field,” Creer mused, “Flowers of the Field. Is she Penobscot?”

“There’s no telling,” Schiff said.

Others called wanting to know about Claire. Even folks with whom Schiff couldn’t recall having ever brought up the subject.

“You know,” he was saying to a colleague with whom he hardly ever had contact, “for a guy as protective of his dignity as I am, people seem to know a whole shitload about my affairs. Every Tom and Dick. Maybe I’m not half as dignified as I think I am.”

“No,” said the colleague, a man whose face Schiff couldn’t conjure and even whose voice was unfamiliar, “I don’t think that’s it. Why, your wheelchair alone earns you a certain amount of dignity, say thirty to thirty-eight percent. Then, anyone who ever saw you struggle on your walker into a men’s room or maneuver it into a stall would grant you at least another couple dozen dignity points. That’s, what, sixty-two? Dignity-wise, all you’d need for a gentleman’s C would be another ten or so points.”

“Just see to it my fly is shut when I come out of the stall, as it were.”

“As it were,” said the colleague.

He was in bed, absently fingering the S.O.S. collar about his throat and resting up for his assault on the shower, when the phone rang again.

“Hello?” Schiff said.

“Professor Schiff?”

Speak of the devil, it was S.O.S. itself. In the voice of Miss Simmons.

“Miss Simmons?”

“What happened? Are you all right? If it’s anywhere near you, see if you can pull the blanket off the bed and cover yourself with it. Try to stay warm. Try to keep calm. Now tell me what happened. I’m not so concerned with the extraneous details as I am with your precise location. Where are you right now? Does anything hurt? What hurts? Do you know where your wounds are? Do you know if you’re bleeding? If you’re not in a position to tell, can you say if there’s a sticky sensation that might be blood? Do you feel as if you’re going to faint? Does my voice sound muffled, does it sound like it’s coming from far away? On a scale of one to ten, mild to severe, what would you estimate the extent of your injuries to be? Do you have any chest pain, or pain radiating down your left arm? An ambulance has been dispatched to your house and should be arriving within seven minutes.”

“Well, gee,” said Schiff, “I think I may have the wrong number.”

“The wrong number? You haven’t fallen? You’re not exhibiting the classic symptoms of heart-attack discomfort?”

“As a matter of fact,” Schiff said, “for me, I’m feeling pretty darned relatively good.”

“You turned in a false alarm. There’s a two-hundred dollar fine for turning in a false alarm,” Miss Simmons said.

“A false alarm? Hey, no,” Schiff said.

“You were playing with your button, weren’t you?”

“Not consciously I wasn’t,” Schiff said.

“Unconsciously is just as bad. S.O.S. has three teams on call. One’s out on a job and the second’s on its way to 225 Westgate. If the third’s called away and we get a call and are left unprotected, do you know who’s responsible if there’s a disaster that results in a subsequent lawsuit?”

“Me, I bet you,” Schiff said.

“That’s right,” said Miss Simmons.

“How can this be?”

“You’re a consenting adult, you signed papers.”

“Ah, papers,” said Schiff.

“That’s right.”

“They aren’t here yet, call them back.”

“It’s too late, I’m not allowed. You’ll just have to absorb the two-hundred-dollar fine and pray there are no emergency complications.”