Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Enough! Enough and enough!

He moved off the bed, as demanding of himself as a physical therapist. Thinking: Tonight’s the party. People are coming, students, maybe two or three spouses, Jenny Simmons is dropping off the key to the house. Thinking for the first time since God knew when: Not thinking, Push, Step, Pull, or I think I can, I think I can, or doing any of his other play-by-plays and routines. Merely hauling his ass like any other severely disabled human being; merely minding his business, his heart too full of its sorrows to pay much attention to anything but his business, to his problems and their solution. Hey, he thinks, this is serious; perhaps he should call it off, put his foot down, get back to Ms. Kohm, tell her he’s made up his mind about it once and for all, this party’s canceled, ask could she get word to the others, tell them he’s sorry, hand them some blah blah about maybe later when he was feeling better, maybe once he knew where he stood, maybe, as it were, next year— Or no, forget that, just tell them it’s off. Besides, he sees through his window how dark it is out, how rotten it looks, how it’s probably going to Sturm und Drang buckets, how he wouldn’t want it on his conscience, couldn’t stand it in fact, if a student of his, any young person, liquor- or weather-impaired, should be hurt in an accident in the rain, sideswiped dead in the slick, slippery streets on the way to or fro any party of his. How he’d never forgive himself, who’d been there and back, if he were even merely the glancing, proximate cause of — never mind actually killing him or her — putting a person in his educational charge into a cast or brace for so much as a week or even a day, an hour, even a minute. He was sorry, he’d tell her, it was just the way he was. I am what I am. He is what he is. And if that was the bedrock bottom line of why Mrs. Professor S. left Mr. Professor S., well then, so be it, the leopard couldn’t change its spots or the doggie its growl. One was stuck with oneself. The world had too few competent political geographers as it was, he’d be darned if he helped contribute to the further diminution of talent in his field.

Somehow he showered.

Somehow, dispensing with the services of both wife and valet, he dressed.

Somehow, the cook run off to join the circus, the navy, see the world, take Europe by storm, he managed breakfast. Two handfuls of dry cereal, some grape jelly spooned into his mouth from a jar, a few sips of half-and-half from an open carton. Even preparing future meals for himself by holding a carton of eggs carefully in his lap and propelling himself across the smooth linoleum toward the gas stove by alternately hunkering his upper torso, then suddenly pressing himself hard against the back of the wheelchair so that he seemed to move by a kind of peristaltic action, rather like a gigantic inch worm. It was slow work, and exhausting, but when he reached the stove he laid down his dozen eggs gently as possible into a large, high pot a little less than half filled with water left there to soak a sort of rusty crust of Claire’s days-old tomato sauce from the pot’s insides. He set the flame very low.

And somehow, awfully tired now and the butler nowhere in sight, he managed to get back to the second floor and, fully dressed, settle into his unmade bed. From which he would have put through his call to Ms. Kohm on the spot had not he first turned on the television and, quickly reviewing the thirty-or-so network and cable channels available in his city, taken up his remote-control wand and recorded the finals of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit competition on ESPN.

Schiff had long ago discovered the mildly erotic possibilities of the Pause button on his VCR, the flagrantly concupiscent ones inherent in slo-mo and super slo-mo. Certain music videos played back in the super slo-mo mode made Schiff, for all his physical deficits, ardent as something in rut, and caused him to participate in a sort of endless, extended foreplay, the images on the screen grainy as the thrown, close-up pouts and moues of received pornography, his own responses as real in their way as the perspiratory, steamy efforts of the actual. He did not so much play with as handle himself, fondle himself, his eyes on the television screen, on the practically time-lapse movements of the girls, muscles barely visible to the naked eye pronounced, vivid and fluid as avatars in dreams in the delicate, strobographic revelations before him, so that what he saw was a sort of palpable anatomical demonstration, some nudity beneath nudity, going on under the flesh, oily, somehow slow and forbidden as an exhibition of mandatory poses of female field slaves on an auction block.

But could not quite bring himself off, this all-but sixty- year-old man, only sensation available to him, love’s mood music, his hand finally falling away from himself, satisfaction locked up tight inside him like a kind of sexual arthritis.

And might have called Ms. Kohm then and there had not something warned him not to be too precipitate (he knew what it was, that weird boldness and devil-may-care indifference to consequence of the cautious), not to cut off (whatever the hell he meant by that) his chances (maybe only to preserve for as long as he could the last faint, surviving buzz of sexual vibration lengthening in frequency in him like a neurologist’s tuning fork held against the skin). Hanging on, he meant. Hoping, that is, to be saved by the bell. Which, believe it or not, he literally was. His doorbell rang just as he was about to give in and call Ms. Kohm. Once he managed to get into the Stair-Glide, ride downstairs and open the door, it turned out that the PGPC’s subcommittee on decorations was standing on his doorstep in all its rigged and prompted patience under the light rain, which just that moment had begun to fall.

“Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths,” Schiff welcomed, breezy as a man half his age and many times more healthy.

For presumedly bluff volunteers — Schiff thought of “neighbors” in films come to raise a barn or bring in a harvest — there was something rather hangdog and shamed in their bearing.

Schiff, a stiff and somewhat formal grown-up better than twice their age who called them “Miss,” who called them “Mister,” supposed them in on their professor’s domestic secrets, supposed himself (one of those — he supposed they supposed — hotshot, crisis celebs, a consultant in times of national stress to movers and shakers with means at their disposal — their bombs and high-tech devices — quite literally to move and shake the very political geography that had hitherto been merest contingency, simple textbook, blackboard example, his finger — their professor’s — on the planet’s pulses, its variously scant or bumper crops, its stores of mineral, vegetable, animal, and marine wealth — currents where the advantageous fish hung — an advisor — he supposed they supposed — to presidents, kings, and others of the ilk, who could determine a vital interest simply by naming it, pronouncing it, pointing to it chalktalk fashion on a map, virtually talking the hotspots into being) fallen in their youthful, fickle estimation, emotional, skittish as a stock exchange. So no wonder they seemed so nervous around him. His wife had left him, he stood as exposed as a flasher. His wife had left him, and now they perceived Professor S. as one who evidently — and oh so feebly — pulled his pants up over his uncovered ass one damaged leg at a time; a man, in the absence of crisis, not only like any other — his wife had walked, had taxicabbed out on him — but maybe even more so. He was revealed to them here on his — the political geographer’s and erstwhile hotshot, crisis celeb’s — very turf as one more defective, pathetic, poor misbegotten schlepp.