Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

He must actually have dozed, for when he opened his eyes again everyone but Ms. Kohm was gone from his room. Only the lamp beside his bed was on.

Molly Kohm was sitting sidesaddle on his bed at about the level of his chest, her hip just pressing comfortably against his arm.

“Shh,” she said, “hush,” though he had uttered no sound. “I just wanted to thank you for the lovely evening.”

“You’re welcome. No problem,” Schiff said hoarsely.

“Shh,” she said. “No, really,” she said, “thanks very much.”

“Hey,” Schiff said, wondering if he dare lift a finger, “I didn’t lift a finger. It was all the PGPC’s doing.”

“The PGPC is dissolved now,” she said. “They say that once the Macy’s Day or Rose Bowl parade is over, the people who put it together are back at it again the very next morning, preparing for next year. Don’t you believe it.”

“I don’t,” Schiff said. “I never did.”

“Well,” she said, “are you going to be all right?”

“Oh, sure,”he said.

“Your wife never called?”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t know where she is. She could be in Seattle. She could be anywhere.”

He was gathering courage, putting together a sort of schoolkiďs nerve he hadn’t used in years. All that stuff yesterday about Miss Simmons had been wishful thinking, pure pipe dream, idle fantasy. At no time had she perched on the edge of his bed, been this close to him, her haunch brushing his arm, mere inches from his hand, his cupped palm. Yes, Schiff thought, I’m going to touch her. I’m going to reach over and hold her.

And was just shifting his weight when he heard a great, joined barrage of laughter from downstairs. His students. He thought they’d left. Had even taken this into account before he’d decided to make his move. And not only that, but what’s more, had even believed that their departure — he could picture them, their fingers at their lips, shushing each other, up on point, on tiptoe again, in exaggerate, conspired, sneak-thief pantomine — may even have been a sort of deliberate ante-upping, building the story, the Disch, Lipsey, Freistadt version, leaving Ms. Kohm alone with him on his bed as though making off with the metaphorical silver. So, already enlisted in the farce, caught up in it, he was doubly disappointed, once for his ruined moves, once more for the shortfall of legend.

He heard their wild laughter again, helpless as a fit of coughing.

“What’s that?” he asked her. “What are they up to?”

“They’re young,” Ms. Kohm said, rising, “they’re having fun. Weren’t you ever young?”

“Sure,” Schiff said. “I was young. I think I was young.”

“Well there you are.”

“They sound drunk. They sound out of control.”

“What are you worried about?”

“Jesus,” he said, “they already broke the damn Stair- Glide. There’s every kind of pasta, oil-and-vinegar, spilled wine, and lettuce stain you can think of on my carpets and furniture. The Disposall’s stopped up like a toilet, and you tell me the PGPC is shut down for the duration. What do you mean what am I worried about?”

“All right,” said Ms. Kohm.

“All right? All right? My Stair-Glide is busted! Look around you, this bedroom, the other rooms on this floor— these are my borders, lady, this is my political geography!”

“Take it easy,” she said. “Do you want to have a stroke? That’s just the way people bring them on. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”

“No,” Schiff said, “I don’t want to have a stroke.”

“Because I didn’t realize you were so upset. No. Say no more about it. I can take a hit. All of us can. We’ll just clear out.”

“You can take a hit?”

“What?”

“You said you can take a hit.”

“No I didn’t. Did I? I meant a hint. I can take a hint. Did I really say hit? Well, no matter. Ta,” she said. “Ta ta.” She blew her professor a kiss from the doorway.

He heard her going downstairs, heard her roust the rest of the students. So they still had a leader, a spaced-out one, but a leader.

He heard them leave, in a few moments heard their two or three cars start up, heard them drive off.

What he hadn’t heard, he suddenly realized, was the door close behind them. And sure enough, in just about the time it takes weather to travel from a door left open on the first floor, up the stairs, and into a fellow’s bedroom, he felt a draft.

But it would be all right. He knew what he could do, and reached inside his shirt and felt for his pendant, his magical S.O.S. jewelry, found its special, emergency button, and pressed it.

While he was waiting, it occurred to him that once they got here he could offer them fifty dollars or so and ask if, so long as they were already there, would they mind straightening up for him downstairs?

In the distance he heard a siren. It mightn’t be for him, of course. It was a weekend night, there were plenty of emergencies to go around.

And then it came to him, the message he’d have put on that answering machine. “You have reached 727-4312,” he would have said. “I can’t come to the phone right now. I’ve fallen.”

Sunday, January 12, 1992

How We Met

I shouldn’t have thought I’d have gone public like this. Well, to begin with, there’s the question of our musty old laws, isn’t there? Oh, solicitors have gone all over it with their fine-tooth combs to see that the paper’s in the clear. I never referred to myself as “La Lulu,” and neither did Lawrence, Crown Patriciate, Duke of Wilshire, nor any other of their royal lord and lady highnesses and mightinesses. Nor all the king’s soldiers, nor all the king’s men. There’s no such person. That was chiefly an invention of the press; a legal fiction.

For a supposedly free country the press in this land is fair gagged and hobbled by all its Official Secrets Acts with their preemptive seditionaries and thorny libel laws like so many unexploded mines and bombs lying about the landscape. Self-serving, anti-blasphemy law’s what it is, establishment gossip insurance. Hence, if you want to know, the reason so-called checkbook journalism got invented right here in Fleet Street. To cover, if one’s a press lord, pardon me, one’s derrière. Because no one believes this stuff. “For entertainment purposes only,” as they say in the Horoscopes. It’s my humble opinion a lot of the buggery fascination in this country comes right out of that tradition, the tradition, I mean, of being all caught up in this or that condition of contingency, laying out advance positions, fortifications. Larry himself told me not even the old Roman legions made more of a thing of putting out guards, that the Brits invented lookout men so-called, and that the principle of the alibi has its roots in English common law. What I’m saying is that your sodomy had its origins in simple sport and getting round the rules as much as ever it did in pleasure— in seeing, I mean, just how much one can get away with. Oh yeah, it’s all a game. I have my theories, and one of my humble own pet ones is that the very ideas of Monarchy and Blood and Class come right out of that same tradition.

But I can almost see Sir Sidney reading my copy over my shoulder and complaining to his editors about what in bl-dy, infinite h-ll do I think they’re paying me for, certainly not my theories, and why don’t I get on with all the nasty bits? In due time, Sir Sid, in due time. I just want it understood that no matter what you or anyone else thinks, I’m not in this for the money. If the investigative reporters on the Sunday Times team wanted to write up my story they could have had it for nothing. But of course they wouldn’t dare. It’s the paper of record. People might believe it.