Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Meanwhile the PGPC subcommittee on decorations was directing a sort of traffic in his dining room, Mary Moffett the traffic cop on duty, signaling Lipsey and Joe Disch where to hang the maps, and reciting a sort of background litany, which in other circumstances might almost have been comforting: “A little to the left. A little more. No, good. Now up on the right. Right there, hold it right there. No, you went too far over. All right, good, that’s got it, though maybe the whole thing ought to be a little lower so everyone can read it better. What do you think, Dr. Schiff?”

Dr. Schiff thought it astonishing he hadn’t thrown them out.

“Oh,” he said, “you know, mi casa, su casa. I defer to your judgment.”

“No,” she said, “really.”

“My dear,” said Schiff, suddenly finding himself trying out a new role on them (who had played so many; who had kept his studied, professional distance and who, even on the occasion of his annual party when the barriers came down for a few hours, but only, he’d always been careful to assure himself, in the interest of preserving them, rather like those old-time, once-a-year, red-letter bashes of the aristocratic when the servants and rabble, and all the good people from the village, had the run of the grounds and great house, and stayed up late into the night, taking such liberties and doing such damage — damage encouraged and even willingly eaten by the squire, just part of the expense of doing business as a landowner, of having vast holdings — that they would hate themselves in the morning, ashamed, accepting, even embracing, their fate for another year), “have I forgotten to mention I’ve worked up the will to go homeless? That it’s true what they say— you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. No no,” said Schiff, holding his hand up as if to forestall an objection (and not knowing, really, where he was going, only that surely, really, this was too much: that she should have left him at this juncture, good God, what a sense of timing, because he knew she knew, he even remembered their having discussed it just this week, Claire herself suggesting that maybe they should open the party up to some of their colleagues, and Schiff considering it until Claire said no, on second thought it probably wasn’t such a good idea, that it would dilute the point of the evening if they did that, and throwing in, too, that it could hardly be expected to put the students at their ease if they had to sit around at attention all evening with a bunch of old farts, and Schiff agreeing, saying, right, that was a good point, no old farts, and here he was, one of the oldest, throwing his tantrum, making his scene, going Christ- knew-where with their attention tucked under his arm like a football— only that he had to keep on talking, like a drunk who knew he had to make himself presentable for important company, perhaps, and who was determined to walk off the toxins). “Well, isn’t it always darkest before the dawn or somesuch? Political folk wisdom has it right, the word on the street. Contrast plays its role in life. Well, the element of surprise, for instance. Being what it is in both warfare and negotiation. Have you noticed how often they play down our expectations, then go off to the summit and come away with a treaty you wouldn’t have guessed was in the cards for another twenty years?

“Listen,” Schiff said, “I really appreciate your coming over. It’s cost you your afternoon, putting out the party favors, throwing your lot in with the old prof like this. I only hope Ms. Kohm, God bless her, didn’t do too much damage to your arms when she twisted them. No? Good. Because she means well, she really does. She means well by me, she means well by you. Heck darn it, it isn’t too much, or telling tales out of school, to say she means well by the entire hemisphere and all the ships at sea. She’s one of those women who abhors a vacuum. I mean, well, I spoke to her last night. I wanted to call this party on account of, hey, you name it— I’m crippled, the place is a mess, there’s nothing in the house to serve, my wife couldn’t be here because she’s running around on me. But Ms. Kohm wouldn’t have any of it. She told me to hang tough, to wait till she showed up with the torch and touched the holy fire to the holy fire. I’m sorry the nuts and dip aren’t out, the crackers and candy, but Ms. Kohm will be by soon with fruit, with melon in season. Smoke if you got ’em,” Schiff said, eying his living room.

The tops of the pizza boxes had been torn from their bottoms, and everywhere, teetering on the arm of the sofa, on the coffee table, left on a seat cushion, on a stereo speaker, in the makeshift dishes, the smeared, greasy, bronzed mix- and-match of the cardboard china, lay pieces of cold, uneaten pizza like long slices of abstract painting, their fats congealing, fissures opening in their cooling yellow cheeses, burst bubbles of painterly cholesterol, chips of pepperoni raised on them like rusty scabs. Bits of green bell peppers, tiny facets of oily onion, bright hunks of tomato like semiprecious stones caught Schiff’s eye, glinted up at him from the carpet. Crumpled paper napkins, like the soiled sheets of wet beds, soaked up spilled Coke. There was an aluminum rubble of crushed cans.

“The geopolitical reasons for Daylight Saving Time,” Schiff said suddenly. “Mr. Disch?”

Mr. Disch, holding a beer, extended an arm, raised it toward Schiff in a sort of dippy, upward salute, body English for “Have one, Professor?”

His professor scowled narrowly, tersely shook his head, body English for “No thanks, where’d that come from, the sun ain’t over the yardarm, take care you don’t spill it!” (For he was, this clumsy, even, by disease-defaulted, sloppy-appearing man, almost compulsively neat, spic ’n’ span in his arrangements, who’d have his own narrow area ordered as the universe. Which was maybe why he went into political geography in the first place, as though the planet, its seas and landmasses, its rivers and mountain ranges, its hemispheres and continents, its nations and borders and cities and towns, its houses, its rooms, was ultimately rather like a class of furniture, like closets, like dressers, like wardrobes, like cupboards and desks and chiffoniers, like cabinets and files and chests of drawers, language a furniture, too, finally, only a way of gathering and organizing all the far-flung stuff of Earth.) Schiff looked toward Mary Moffett and Fred Lipsey, hunkered down over Mary Moffett’s shopping bag (meant to hold more, evidently, than the committee’s joke maps and decorations), pulling cans of beer from it like dogs scrabbling at dirt. “If I’m not mistaken,” Schiff said loftily, “there’s a question on the floor.”

“We’re on break,” said Miss Moffett.

Schiff, oddly unconcerned, thought, She’s drunk, and wondered when that had happened, suspecting he’d dozed off, suspecting they’d heard him snore, greedily scoop great gobs of air into his nose, pass gas, probably giggling about their old political geography teacher (who’d turned out to have a behind, habits), not only crippled, but reduced, too, and was impatient for the party to begin, knew it had, and already yearned for the time when they’d all clear out and he could go back to bed. And realized (having taken this all in, his brief snooze, their surreptitious drinking and, glancing once more at the remains of lunch, at the beer cans scattered about the landfill starting up — which was a sort of furniture, too, wasn’t it? perhaps some final furniture, some ultimate piece — in what was his hall, his dining and living rooms) the farce question about Daylight Saving’s geopolitical reasons had been merely his failed, reflexive, face-saving opening salvo, like dropping the checkered flag, say, not only after the gentlemen had already started their engines but had already completed their first several laps. It was out of his hands. Officially or not, the annual class party had begun!