Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Ms. Kohm must have turned them. Ms. Kohm must have been running them. Ms. Kohm, who, if he was the political geographer, must surely have been (with all the coordinates, inside info and morning line she put out on him) the political geographer’s geographer. Who’d told Schiff they took care of their own, but really meant she did, and had organized committees and subcommittees like this one on a moment’s notice. Apparently she had named him a sudden, inexplicable vital interest. Why? Had she set her cap for him? What was this all about anyway? How had he — the defective, misbegotten schlepp — managed to become a target of opportunity, anyone’s eligible man?

Leaning on his walker and reciting at them like a moron, “Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths. Let’s have your coats.” Which, had they given them to him, would surely have knocked him down.

“Will it be all right,” Mary Moffett said, “if we put these up now? They’re for the party tonight.”

She held a shopping bag out for his inspection. In it, like wires, lights, tinsel, and Christmas-tree ornaments that could be used, put away, and used again the next year, were a variety of comic maps in assorted joke projections. (Their rendition of The New Yorker’s rendition of the United States.) Some, certain classic campaigns (the siege of Troy, the Norman Conquest, Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn), were offbeat versions of history, even of epochs (Schiff’s St. Louis suburb at the time of the Ice Age), and many were as topical, or once were, as the monologues of talk-show hosts. All were cartoonish, satirical. There was, Schiff recognized (and had, the sad man, even before he’d become so sad), a kind of desperation in these efforts, almost as if his students were pretending to be like the campus’s engineers and architects, who turned out prototypes of ingenious machines and interesting buildings that seemed to have sprung up overnight on celebratory weekends and occasions. There, tossed at his feet on the hall carpet like a sample of fabric, was this pleated string of construction- paper, accordion-fold maps, silly, insignificant as party favors.

He had to sit down or die, so scarcely had time to do more than acknowledge the presence of the course party’s inherited, cumulative two- or three-year archive.

“Yes, yes,” Schiff said, “very nice, very nice.”

Fred Lipsey carried a sort of easel under one arm, a paper bundle of what could have been placards under the other. Joe Disch held a small stepladder, a Scotch-tape dispenser.

“That won’t stick to the walls, will it?” Schiff said. “It won’t pull the paint off with it?”

“No sir,” Disch said.

“Because that’s all I need, if the paint started chipping and peeling away from the walls.”

“It’s one of those low-grade adhesives.”

“I mean because that’s all I need,” Schiff said, inexplicably close to tears, “this place turned into a total shithouse.”

“No,” Joe Disch said, “that won’t happen. I use it to hang posters and prints in my apartment all the time. It comes away as easily as if you were turning the pages in a newspaper.”

“Posters and prints,” Schiff said. “You graduate students don’t know how good you have it, do you? These are the best years of your life, you know that? You have any idea how happy you are? What you get away with at your age? I mean, for God’s sake, just on the level of posters and prints. You can decorate a whole apartment with bullfight posters, airline ads for Bora Bora, Big Ben, the Great Wall. Low- slung canvas chairs, do they still have those? They were very popular when I was a graduate student. We thought them quite beautiful. Red light bulbs screwed into the lamps. The place looked like a fucking darkroom. The stub of an incense candle stuck into a Chianti bottle, wax on the colored glass and collected in the fishnet that wrapped it like a package. Then, you threw in a few boards over building blocks for your bookcase and you were all set. Remember hi-fis, LPs?

“Well,” Schiff said, “listen to me, will you, running on at the mouth about the old days. I go back. Hell, I remember when Oldsmobile introduced Hydra-Matic transmission. We thought that was a miracle. Who’d have believed there’d ever be a system a cripple could install in his house, or anyone on their own, really, that if they fell all they had to do was press a button and practically in minutes have an entire hospital at their disposal? Well,” he said, “I’m just going to sit down over here and let you do what you have to. Do the departments still have softball leagues? We were out every Saturday. I played first base.”

And some of this, he couldn’t have told you the exact percentage because he wasn’t that sure himself, but probably, conservatively, oh, eighty or ninety percent, was for their benefit. Put on. Made up. They wanted fear and trembling, he’d give them fear and trembling. Hey, it was their party. (“Remember hi-fis?” the old first basemen had asked them.) He was his own comic projection, something fun- house-mirror to his reality, the same distorted representation on the flat surface of his curved personality as Greenland’s. That was Schiff, all right. A joke like Greenland, sprawled across the top of the world like a continent.

And now sat down over here, just as he said. To let them get on with it. Never letting them out of his sight. Never letting himself out of theirs.

At about three he sent out for pizzas. Two large with the works for his tiny crew. Plus Cokes in cans. Though he hated, he said, to buy them at the prices they charged for a Coke these days. He remembered when Coca-Cola was a nickel.

“A nickel?” said little Miss Moffett. “Really? A nickel?”

“Damn right,” Professor Schiff said. “Twentieth part of a dollar. That’s what the candy butchers at burlesque shows used to call nickels in the old days.”

“I never knew Coca-Cola was a nickel.”

“Pepsi-Cola was a nickel and you got twelve ounces! Automobiles were four hundred dollars. The Sunday paper cost two cents. You furnished a five-room house in a stable neighborhood for a hundred dollars.”

“A hundred dollars? Really?”

“Tenth part of a thousand.”

“Professor Schiff’s jerking you around, Mary,” Fred Lipsey said.

“A grand piano set you back ten bucks.”

“My goodness,” Mary Moffett said.

“Scalpers wanted fifty cents a pop for the hottest ticket in town. Kidnappers asked seventy-five simoleons if you ever wanted to see your kid alive again. Oh, yeah,” Schiff said, “it was simpler times. A meal in a good restaurant was free, and a Picasso…” He didn’t finish the sentence. What were these children doing in his house? He was sixty years old, why was he still throwing parties? Why had Claire left him? Did she think she could change her life? At her age? What would she change it to? Admitted, living with him couldn’t have been any picnic. It was hard work. Granted. The hours were awful and the sex was lousy. They’d left life long ago. Ten years easy. Now they floated above it like folks in an out-of-body experience, or like people drugged. They had no children and couldn’t even fall back on the surrogate joy of watching their kids succeed— seeing them through school, finding partners, a career, having children of their own. Or on even the motions of going through a life— taking up a hobby, going on vacations, celebrating holidays, even their own birthdays and anniversaries. He wasn’t for a minute pessimistic on the world’s account, only on his and Claire’s. He didn’t resent other people’s happiness — he was that cut off — only his and Claire’s misery. Nor did he question why they’d been singled out. They hadn’t. It was all luck of the draw. Everything. Luck of the draw. Nature never screwed anyone. That’s why disciplines like his were invented. To explain the borders, to draw up new ones. To make, in the best light of the best-case scenario, amends, restitution, seeking, in that same good light, what there could be, and when, and where, of order. It was like anything else. A political geographer who determined his own political geography had a fool for a traveler. Which was why he was more disappointed than angered by Claire. Had she learned nothing from her years with him? She would change her life? Yes? How? Tell him that, how? Oh, she could become a bag lady. Just as he could throw his lot in with the homeless. (Hadn’t he had this thought today? Yesterday? It seemed to him he had, though he couldn’t put his finger on it, or in what context, which circumstances. Though if it had occurred to him earlier, it just went to show that it was on his mind, that he was that far from taking violent charge of his life. Though he wouldn’t have given you two cents for his consistency: Help me. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. This block is protected by armed vigilantes!)