Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

She turned around and made a signal to her helpers. (The rest of the students, he meant.) Without a word, Miss Carter appeared with a big galvanized pail. The pail was new, shiny, the sort of pail one associates with mops and wringers, with dark, greasy water. (Oh, shit, he thought, suddenly remembering the eggs, surely exploded by now, he’d dropped into the rusty water that morning.) It was filled to the brim with salad. With great leaves of lettuce, violently torn from what must have been eight or nine heads. There were long shards of cucumber and zucchini. There were whole rings of sweet onion like small quoits. There were jagged slices of tomato and, here and there, dollops of red, tomatoey pulp like a sort of jam. Sprinkled throughout were raisins like the droppings of rodents. Mr. Tysver carried an open butter tub of oil-and-vinegar dressing, already mixed, and Miss Freistadt and Mr. Wilkins each swung three or four large cartons of pasta like Chinese takeout from their thin metal handles like a sort of Jack and Jill. Bautz brought bread and Dickerson paper plates, white plastic cutlery, a box of salt, tins of colored seasonings, napkins. Each appeared before Ms. Kohm with his or her offering.

“Does this go in the kitchen, Molly?” asked Miss Carter of the galvanized pail.

“Put it down here. We’ll be eating soon, why make two trips?” She was pointing at the carpet.

“Hey, wait a minute,” objected Schiff from his wheelchair.

But she had already set down her burden on the living- room carpet.

“Hey,” said Schiff. “Hey.”

No one listened to him. Many seemed drunk. Schiff turned to Ms. Kohm. “Hey,” he said, “hey.”

An awful picnic of the awful graduate student food began to blossom on the carpet beneath him. Pieces of lettuce and cucumber and zucchini spilled over the pail or fell from heaps stacked too high on the paper plates and lay on Schiff’s beige carpet as if they grew there in actual nature. Bright bits of tomato, red onion, and pasta spotted the carpet like flowers. They’ve turned the place into a damn garden, Schiff thought bitterly. You could dig for worms in here. Miss Simmons, bless her heart, seemed as appalled as Schiff, and made no move to leave. Between trips to the salad bar on his floor for refreshment, Disch, Lipsey, and Moffett spelled each other as bartenders, offered mixed drinks from the remarkable bag where they had set up shop. Schiff, who didn’t think he saw that many takers, couldn’t account for the astonishing level of intoxication in the room. This crowd was high! Either they were already three sheets to the wind when they came in, or something about being in his house had unsettled them, roused them he meant, sprung them he meant, from the general graduate- student monasticism and hole-and-corner roughhouse of their days. Something about being in their mid-to-late twenties and still under the vows of delayed gratification, their lives unbegun. It was the old story of the total shit- house Schiff had complained of earlier, of posters and prints, of canvas chairs and incense, cement-block bookcases and all the make-do improvisation of their lives. Sprung from that. Grown-up for a day! Not Ms. Kohm. He excepted Ms. Kohm. Ms. Kohm was their ringleader, their unmoved mover, something thwarted in Ms. Kohm, something about Ms. Kohm profoundly unchecked and envious, infiltrated and into deep cover.

Only then did he understand what he had noted earlier— that there were no spouses here, not even his own. So sprung from spouses, too, from mewling babes, even from baby-sitters they couldn’t afford to pay and so had— another improvisation — to trade off with, time-sharing each other’s kids as if they lived in a commune. It was how Claire, high on a whiff of the other guy’s air, must have felt. Only God forbid that Claire was in some other old gent’s place finger-painting with pasta on the rugs.

Whether they knew it or not, whether they meant to or not, they were looking for trouble. In some weird, incomprehensible way, understood neither by him nor themselves, they had entered into some odd conspiracy with him. Drawn, it could be (though pushed by Ms. Kohm) by his handicap, by his own low troubles.

Somebody came by and offered him a plate of food, of the handled salad drenched in dressing, of the cold, pasted, stuck-together pasta. Which he refused like someone gently shaking off a sign. As much out of his own stuck-together dignity as from any failure of hunger. Though he was hungry. Could have done right now with some of the terrific foods he and Claire used to put out— the turkey and roasts, the pâtés and swell cheeses. (As much, perhaps, out of some need to wow them into respect as to satisfy the inner man.)

He accepted a poor plate of church supper from Miss Simmons, the plastic cutlery wrapped in what he now saw were cocktail napkins.

“Join me?” he said.

“Well,” Miss Simmons said hesitantly.

“No really,” he said, “make up a plate of rabbit food for yourself and rough it with me, why don’t you?”

“Well,” she said again.

“Afraid of ruining your appetite?”

It was difficult for him to eat in the wheelchair. He had lost considerable muscle mass in his hips, whatever it was that kept one upright, and he bobbed, weaved, swayed, lunged and lost his balance whenever he tried to fork food from the thin, fragile, wet paper plates and bring it to his mouth. He was spilling salad all over himself, on his lap, down the front of his shirt. There were salad-dressing stains on both shirt cuffs, high up his sleeves. “Can’t tempt you, eh?” he said, and this struck him as very funny, starting what might have been an out-of-control, almost hysterical laugh, but quickly turned into a helpless series of snorts. “No,” he managed, “can’t seem (snort) to (snort) tempt (snort, snort) you!” Long, extended snort. Snorting through. Snorting while his heart was breaking.

“No,” he said when he was in control again, correcting himself, “not rabbit food. But look at the pail. Doesn’t it remind you of something?”

“Of what?”

“No, you’ll get it,” he said, still the teacher. “What does it remind you of? Where have you seen pails like it before? All that chopped-up green shit?”

“Where?”

“At the zoo! In cages at the zoo! In the gorilla house. Where the elephant roams, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “right.”

“Look at this place,” he said.

“Oh, it’ll be all right. No permanent damage has been done.”

“Look at this place. Look what I’ve allowed to happen. My wife would kill me.” He was quite sad. It was as if Claire were dead and his house were being reclaimed by nature.

To keep himself from falling forward again, or from slipping to the side, he hooked his left arm under the arm of the wheelchair and steadied himself, sitting in a sort of stolid, struggled balance. In this way, planted as somebody in a tug-of-war, he managed to feed himself some of the pasta and salad. But it was rigid work, he knew how stiff he looked.

It was as if she could read his mind.

“Would you like me to help you with that?” Miss Simmons volunteered.

Still hungry but pretending not to have heard her, Schiff set the plastic fork down on the paper plate. He took a cocktail napkin and tapped at the corners of his lips in mock satiety. Had he the ability to belch at will he might have fired off the better part of a twenty-one-gun salute in Miss Simmons’s direction. He patted his stomach in a round, broad dumbshow of yum-yum satisfaction. Miming full holiday dinners, a kind of exhaustion, a vow not to eat again for a week, to forgo feasts forever. With his faked belly applause and silent, phony tongue-in-tooth, chewy exaggeration, it was almost as if he were congratulating himself. He was conscious that his forearm was still hooked under the arm of his wheelchair, that he might even have appeared defiant the way he held on to his balance for dear life, protecting himself from all comers like a kid playing king-of- the-hill. He might almost have seemed to have been challenging someone to break his hold, to see if they could tip him over. It seemed an odd thought for an old fellow with an S.O.S. amulet under his shirt, around his neck. “I know you wouldn’t think it to look at me,” he told Miss Simmons, “but I actually used to be fairly athletic I won’t even say when I was a kid but back before I was stricken, while I was still a professor even, almost up until the time it might have begun to appear maybe a little unseemly for somebody my age to be scrambling around doing the run, jump, hit, and throw with fellows ten years younger than himself, almost as if he was trying to recapture his lost youth or something. That wasn’t the way of it,” he said. “I wasn’t even particularly competitive. Except in table tennis. I was good at table tennis. Oh, I wasn’t one of those guys who stand twenty feet back from the table, I’m not saying that, but I had a relatively exceptional slam. That’s why I preferred sandpaper over rubber paddles. To my way of thinking, a rubber paddle was for putting spin and English on the ball, to deceive your opponent to death, to turn Ping-Pong into a game of chess. For me it was always a physical, aggressive sport. With sandpaper you could hear all the bang-bang and take-that that the game was designed for. Whenever my opponents took up a rubber paddle I pretty much knew what I was in for— defense and stinking strategy. Some joker who’d just pretty much just stand there and let me wear myself out. I loved playing with the punchers and always pretty much resented the little judo and ju-jitsu guys who nickeled-and-dimed me and in the end usually beat my brains out. You think that’s odd in a fellow trained in the art of political geography? It probably is, but probably it was my way of letting off steam, of that final, futile satisfaction one must feel after he’s dropped the big one.