Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Changing his mind, accepting Joe Disch’s beer, and abruptly all over them with a riff of gag questions. “Why have ocean currents been the casus belli of most civil wars?” “Explain how prevailing winds determine national borders.” “Discuss the concept of the island. How is it a macrocosm of the tribe but a microcosm of the family?” “How do the animals indigenous to a nation determine the character of that nation’s underlying political structure?” “What’s the difference between a ‘region’ in a first-world country like Italy and a third-world country like Paraguay?” “How is it that the so-called ‘hot-bloodeď peoples have had fewer revolutions than their more northerly neighbors?” “Speculate on the reasons for the inverse ratio between the beauty of a nation’s flag and its contributions to the fields of art, music, and poetry.” “If individuality, rather than community, accounts for most of the world’s great inventions and economic progress, why is it that countries with the greatest populations tend to be the most backward in their cultural and economic development?”

“Mr. Lipsey? Miss Moffett? Mr. Disch?

“Ms. Kohm? Mr. Hughes? Miss Simmons? Mr. Wilkins? Mr. Tysver? Miss Carter? Miss Freistadt? You, Dickerson? You, Bautz?”

Because these others (without, he noticed, their two or three spouses in tow— was this, he wondered, out of deference to him, or were all marriages foundered on the rocks?) had begun to drift in while Schiff was still in the nervous throes of his rap. Because he missed Claire and hoped and, despite himself, almost believed she would relent, reverse herself and, using her incredible sense of timing for good, still show up to save him, and because on one, the most furious, level of his forced, inspired hospitality, he was playing (for all that he knew better) for time, for some impossible dispensation, as though, could he but keep coming up with his loopy diversionaries, he might never have to answer to the still (for him) more alarming demands of serious social obligation. Soon, he quite feared, he might be telling them everything, conducting his guests on the grand tour around the posted neighborhoods and dark, off-limits districts of his heart.

“Tell me would you if you will all the ways the counterclockwise movements of water going down a drain in the southern hemisphere may account for the greater number of languages and dialects spoken below the equator.”

They stared at him.

“Anyone?

“No? No one? Well, I should do some checking if I were you, you degree candidates, for that’s a question that’s almost certain to turn up on your prelims. Really, people, if you haven’t got the basics down, I don’t know how you hope to be political geographers. Do you think others in the political sciences are as unfamiliar with their areas of concentration as you seem to be— the political biologists, the political chemists, the political comp. lit. majors?

“Well,” Schiff said, apparently relenting, “let the wild rumpus begin. Miss Simmons,” he told the somewhat surprised-looking woman who had separated herself from the graduate students and was approaching the wheelchair to which he had transferred and in which he was now sitting, “how nice to see you! How good of you to come!”

“I brought you your key back.”

“Listen,” he said, lowering his voice, “can you stay? We give this party for my students. I may have told you. I’m caught short here. Claire’s left me. I’m caught short here, I could really use the buffer. You’d be doing me a favor. Really. Please don’t go, please stay. It’d be swell if you would. You don’t know how much more comfortable I’d feel.”

“I came with your key. I haven’t even been home yet. I’m not dressed for a party.”

“Well, of course she’ll stay. How do you do, dear? I’m Molly Kohm. I’m very pleased to meet you. How interesting our professor is, what astonishing resources he has! Practically a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair (even a somewhat older paraplegic), yet here he is dispensing keys to his home as if there were no tomorrow and neither one of you had ever even heard of an actuarial table. My goodness, how fast one may get about in a wheelchair! I hadn’t realized! Oh, and you mustn’t even think of returning that key. Don’t take it back, Professor. It was a misunderstanding. These things happen, they’re worked out every day. And night.”

“This is Jenny Simmons,” Schiff said. “Miss Simmons was a student of mine.”

“A student. Really, a student. Oh, now I am jealous, I quite actually am! Professor, you rascal, if only I’d known. I might have made a play for you myself. I might have,” she told Miss Simmons. “And I wouldn’t be threatening him with the return of his keys,” she added huskily. She bent down in front of Schiff’s chair and, resting her hand across the inside of his thigh, almost absent-mindedly, began stroking it. “Oh good,” she said, “there’s evidently still some feeling down there.” Schiff caught slight gusts of conditioned, alcoholic essence coming from her, pleasant, agreeable (despite her obvious drunkenness) as the gentle drafts and enticing steams one smells outside a steakhouse. Also, he saw up past her crouching, silk-stocking’d knees and along her own flexed thighs high into the dark of her skirt where they joined like perspective in a painting.

Ms. Kohm suddenly seemed as oddly capable as a witch, an impression enhanced by her pitch, shiny hair, the bright, thin streaks of white silver that crackled through it like some personal storm of the head. A dramatic purple-and- black-checked cape hung about her shoulders and over a dark tank top. She wore no brassiere, and Schiff saw the hard points of her nipples rising from what he momentarily conceived of as rings of soft, purple, lava-like slabs, imagining their faintly brackish taste in his mouth like the flavor of struck matches.

Giving him a soft, dismissive pat on the knee, she rose effortless as a yogi from the deep squatting position she had held before him like some patronizing tribute. (As if he’d been a child, say, to whose level she’d lowered herself— or the cripple he was. And Schiff, as though Ms. Kohm, come to him almost like some Dickensian specter, had an abrupt image of himself through women’s eyes. Why, he was like somebody behind and over whose head life was conducted, arrangements made, a kid traveling alone, say, or someone handicapped — well, hell, he thought, I am someone handicapped — whose needs were negotiated indirectly, guided past metal detectors in airports for a hand- check as if he were absent, a party in the third person, as though his earlier impression of having left life were true as far as it went, only reversed, life floating about a foot or so above him. Schiff some doll-like object present less in spirit than in sheer, brutal deadweight, his feet there to be stockinged and shod, his arms to be helped into the sleeves of his jackets, whatever was left over, say his spirit, to be lulled and comforted, regarded, even loved, admired as a piece of art might be admired, something not responsible for itself, diligently plied into being, as anything worked on hard enough or worried over long enough had to be turned into an object worthy of the effort, like silverware polished down to its highlights. This was how women saw him. For it was only women — he had left life — who dealt with him these days. It was how Miss Simmons, who had gone out of her way to bring him his key, saw him, how Ms. Kohm, who single-handed had refused to let his party go into the record books with an asterisk this year, did. Finally, it was how Claire must have seen him up until the time she discovered that enough was enough and refused to take one more minute of him, and left him, on the day of her incredible sense of timing, on the eve of his party, to deal with the women who would deal with him. Well, you know what? Saving Claire’s absence, he didn’t much mind, was willing as ever to throw himself on their — on women’s — mercies like a log on a fire.)