Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“I’ll get it for you, Ms. Kohm,” said Miss Carter.

“Push me, push me,” he snapped in Miss Simmons’s direction. Lazily, she wheeled his chair in and out of the first-floor rooms. “No no,” he said, “after Miss Carter. She’s gone into the kitchen.”

She had. She was standing beside Ms. Kohm, to whom she had handed her pail, at the sink. Where she was emptying the remains of the salad. Pouring salad into the sink from the pail. Mindful of her fingers, pushing salad carefully into the sink, down into the rubberized maw of the garbage Disposall. Force-feeding the garbage Disposall. Taking leftover pasta and salad from the paper plates handed on to her in a sort of crazy bucket brigade by a chain of migrant student workers and adding these scraps into the now unwilling, refractory machine, grinding and grinding down, growling and choking, coughing up lettuce, spitting zucchini over mounds of red, regurgitant pasta.

“Please stop, it’s breaking,” requested Schiff. “Please?” he offered. “No, really,” he said, “it’s all right. You don’t have to bother, I’ll get it. She won’t stop,” Schiff complained to Miss Simmons.

“Those other guys were right,” said Miss Simmons. “Fuck this,” she said, and she walked out on him, too.

“All right,” spoke Schiff from his now pusherless chair, hoping to catch someone’s attention, “see what you’ve done? Miss Simmons is gone. The strong-looking one walked out. See what you’ve done? Who’ll get me upstairs? How will I manage? What’s going to happen to me?” he appealed to them. And where, he wondered, did his own intoxication come from? Why, from woe, he thought. Woe was its source, and he was as helpless to stanch it as he’d been to keep Lipsey and the others from leaving. Helplessly he continued to ask his rhetorical questions. “Why do bad things happen to good people? Or vice versa?” he asked. “If one knew going in that this was how a pretty fair country Ping-Pong player was going to end up, would one even have bothered? What are the odds, would you say, of my ever getting your respect back after putting you through an evening like this? All right,” he said, addressing Ms. Kohm, “I’ve got one for you. If Claire’s not in Seattle, where is she you think?”

But Ms. Kohm was still at her blind ablutions, bent over the kitchen sink, her arms plunged into the extaordinary pile of salad, lifting strands of it toward her face and examining them as if there were something inherent in the salad itself that prevented the Disposall from handling it. “Nope,” she pronounced, “she won’t go down. Say,” she said, turning to Schiff, “what are we thinking of here anyway? This stuff is still fresh, You could live off it for a week. Let’s get it into the fridge.” No one but Schiff seemed to be listening to her, though, so she set an example. She took up an armful of the stuff and started with it toward the refrigerator. “Someone get that door for me, will you,” she said, “my arms are full.”

“No, really,” Schiff said, “you don’t have to bother. Not on my account. Tomorrow I’m making these arrangements with Meals-on-Wheels.”

But by this time she’d managed to work the door open. Unceremoniously, she dumped her green burden onto a shelf in Schiff’s refrigerator. “There,” said Ms. Kohm, “it’s on one of the lower shelves. See, I’ve made it handicap accessible for you.”

“Right,” said Schiff. “You’re in compliance. Now I won’t have to take you to court.”

And idly wondered not only why he hadn’t thrown them out of his house, but why he hadn’t called the cops, why even now, abandoned in the dead center of his kitchen as the others began to drift back into his living and dining rooms, into his hall, back up onto his stairway, which they’d taken over, had gravitated toward like some playground for the able-bodied, in the wheelchair he hadn’t strength enough to guide, or move by himself, so that he had begun to think of it as of a riderless horse on some sad state occasion, and of himself as a witness to his own lugubrious funeral, why even now, terrified as he was, as frightened (not of them, not of his students, who wouldn’t harm him, who wouldn’t throw him down the stairs, but had only meant to ride out the storm of his mad display, and who were still high, it could be, on sheer proximity, not, as he’d first thought, on something reprieved in him, in his life, on something, well, matriculate in the stepping-stone progression of his— their— curricula-loaded being, close, pledged as they were, to vocation, calling, some academic plane of the almost religious, some devoted, tenure-sustained existence of the pleasantly civilized, of books and ideas, redeemed from their monasticism and lifted into a realm of sheer pure reward and perk and blessing, the goodish furniture, the respectable house, the solid neighborhood, but to its opposite; knocked for more of a loop by the debit side of his ledger: his physical deficits, all the more visible in the privacy of that respectable house in the solid neighborhood on the goodish furniture, most of which he couldn’t even use, than ever they were in mere public; by his not-only-absent, but positively run-off, whereabouts-unknown wife, fleeing him, could be, for all she was worth) of the long-term exigencies as he was of the short, tipsy on woe, fuddled on fear, why even now he couldn’t bring himself to urge them to leave, signaling the end of the evening with all the politically correct semaphores available to an internationally wised-up guy like himself, all the recognized, honored peremptories, a stretch, a yawn, an extension of arms, of reversed, interlocked fingers. Though he knew why, of course, understood that it was because he did not want to be left alone, was willing to accept on behalf of his house all the risks that letting them stay in it for even a little while exposed it to. Those risks, he understood, which were only the cost of doing business. (Which was why, he supposed, cumulatively, belatedly, he felt so abandoned now that Lipsey, Freistadt, Simmons, and Disch had ditched him.) It was his funeral. Where was everybody?

“Hey? Hey? Hey?” he called, taking the roll. “Hey!” he yelled, calling the class to attention as they dribbled back in.

(All, all of them pie-eyed on woe’s potent, astronomical proof, sozzled on the neat punch of grief.)

“Listen,” Schiff said, “maybe you’re right. Maybe it ain’t such a hot idea to take me upstairs. What with the Stair- Glide out and all. I mean, suppose there’s a fire? You people smoked up a storm. I mean, look at those ashtrays. God only knows what could still be burning, smoldering in there, what might even yet only be waiting on oxygen, drafts, sparks, the rain to subside, whatever it takes for conditions to ripen, ignition, combustion, the balloon to go up. Maybe if you just stretched me out down here on the couch. On the other hand, if there were a fire, why, down here’s where it’d probably start, wouldn’t it? Oh, I don’t know, when you get to be my age, when you have to live the way I have to live, why, it’s sixteen of one, thirty-seven of the other, isn’t it?

“Well, just listen to me. Is this what I sound like? Do I always come on with all this self-pity? Talk about party poopers. And the irony is, it’s my own party I’m pooping. I’m worn out and old. What do you expect? Hey, there I go again. Listen, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m overtired, maybe that’s why I’m so cranky. Give me the benefit of the doubt, will you?

“I know,” he said. “While we still have the numbers. Let’s go back to plan A. Take me upstairs? Put me to bed?”

So a few of them gradually came forward. Little Miss Moffett. Tysver. Mr. Dickerson. Mr. Bautz. Only Kohm and Wilkins hung back.