Stanley Elkin: Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Is she with you, Harry?”

“Jack, I swear on my life she isn’t.”

“Yeah, all right, it’s a four-hour plane ride to Portland. Is she on her way?”

“Honor bright, Jack, I’m telling you that as of this minute I have absolutely no idea where she is.”

So, Schiff thought, she’s run off to play out her life with her old sweetheart.

“Okay, Harry. Hang tough. Stonewall me. Just you remember. I’m a helpless old cripple with a degenerative neurological disease who has to be strapped into the chair when he goes down the stairs on his Stair-Glide.”

“Oh, Jack,” Harry said.

“Oh, Harry,” said Jack, and hung up.

It wasn’t that satisfactory but at least now he knew where he stood. (Well, he thought, stood.) What he’d told his wife had been true. He couldn’t afford to be single. Not at the rate his exacerbations had been coming. Only a little over a year ago he’d still been able to manage on a cane, he’d still been able to drive. He’d owned a walker — a gift from the Society — but hadn’t even taken it out of its box. Now they had to tote him around in a wheelchair he hadn’t enough strength in his left arm to propel by himself. Now he had to go up and down stairs in contraptions on tracks— Schiff’s little choo-choo. Now he couldn’t stand in the shower, there were grab bars on the sides of his handicap toilet, a bath bench in his tub, he had to sit to pee, and couldn’t always pull the beltless, elastic-waistband pants he wore all the way up his hips and over his ass. (Now, for the same reason, he didn’t even wear underwear.) There were ramps at both the front and rear of the house. And every other month now there was some elaborate new piece of home health equipment in the house. Indeed, where once it had been a sort of soft entertainment for him to go into the malls and department stores, now it had become a treat to drop into one of the health supply shops and scope the prosthetics. On his wish list was the sort of motorized wheelchair you’d see paraplegics tear around in, a van with a hydraulic lift in which to put it, and one of those big easy chairs that raised you to a standing position. Also, although in his case it was still a little premature to think about just yet, he had his eye on this swell new electronic hospital bed. He found himself following ads for used hospital beds in the Society’s newsletter. (“Don’t kid yourself,” he told colleagues, “it takes dough to be crippled and still have a lifestyle.”)

You could be crippled or you could be single. Schiff, though he made a pretty good living at the university— Check, he reminded himself, the savings and money-market accounts, see if she cleaned you out before she split— didn’t know anyone who could afford to be both. Oh, maybe if you went into a home maybe, but unless you had only three or four years to live that was prohibitive, too. (Wasn’t everything up front? Didn’t you have to sign your life savings over to those guys? He should have known this stuff, but give him a break, until this morning he hadn’t even known his wife would be running out on him.) And, though he’d never actually been in one, he didn’t think he’d like the way it would smell in the corridors.

So he was checking his options. Still working his new situation, he meant, still, he meant, thinking about the blows he would be taking in his comfort, he found his mind drifting back to that wish list. He found himself idly thinking about the skeepskin whoosies crips draped over the furniture and across their wheelchairs and sheets to help prevent lesions and bedsores. It was astonishing what one of those babies could go for in a wicked world. (It varied actually. They came in different grades, like wool rugs, fur coats, or diamonds. Lambskin was the most expensive, then ewes, then adult males, but it wasn’t that simple. There were categories within even these categories, and certain kinds of sheep — castrated fully-grown males were an example — could sometimes be more expensive than even the finest virgin lambskin. Once you really got into it, it was a waste, a waste and a shame, thought Schiff, to be crippled- up in such an interesting place as the world.) Oh well, he thought, if he really needed them he could afford all the sheepskins he wanted. Sheepskin deprival wasn’t his problem. His wish list wasn’t. He had been drifting, he had been thinking idly. With Claire gone his problem was the real and present danger he was in, his problem was singleness and emergency.

He picked up his cordless phone and called Information. (Another thing he didn’t understand about his wife. Since his disease had been first diagnosed, even, that is, when he was relatively asymptomatic, he’d asked the telephone company, and with a supporting letter from his neurologist received, for its free Unlimited Information Privilege. For years now he hadn’t cracked a phone book. Claire had telephone numbers written down in a small, worn black spiral notebook she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. When she wanted the number of a plumber, say, or the man who serviced their air conditioners, she’d go all the way downstairs for it rather than call Information. Recently, it was the cause of some of their biggest fights. “Ask Information,” Schiff offered expansively, almost like a host pressing food or drink on a guest. “The number’s in my book,” she’d say. “Why not ask Information? It’s free.” “I’ve got the number downstairs. Information has better things to do.” “It’s their job, for Christ’s sake. What do you think the hell else they have to do?” “That’s all right, I don’t mind.” “I mind,” Schiff would say, and he’d be shouting now. “Why?” he’d yell after her. “This is some passive-aggressive thing, isn’t it? Sure,” he’d shout, “ this is some lousy passive-aggressive thing on your part. Just your way of showing me who the cripple is in this outfit!” Sometimes, out of spite and with Claire as witness, checking what was playing at all the movie houses, when the feature was scheduled to begin, he’d rack up a dozen or so calls to Information at a time. Or patiently explain to her, “You know, Claire, the Information operators don’t actually look anything up. It isn’t as if they were ruining their eyes over the tiny print in the telephone directory. It’s all computers nowadays. They just punch in an approximate spelling and the number comes up on the screen.” “It’s wasteful,” Claire might say. “It’s free.” “It’s a drain on the electricity, it’s wasteful.” “You clip goddamn coupons for shampoos and breakfast cereals and shit we wouldn’t even eat unless you got fifteen or twenty cents off the price of the goddamn box! That’s wasteful! Do you know what they charge for a call to Information? Forty-five cents, that’s what! Forty-five cents! They’re ripping you off I’ll tell you the truth, Claire, I feel sorry for people who aren’t handicapped today, I really do. I probably save us a dollar eighty cents a day. You know what that comes to over the course of a year? Practically six hundred fifty dollars a year! Go buy yourself a designer dress, Claire, go get yourself a nice warm coat.” “Big man!” “Big fucking passive aggressive!”)

“S.O.S. Corporation,” a woman said when the number rang through. “How may we help you?”

“I’ve seen your ads on TV and I’d like to speak to one of your sales representatives,” Schiff said.

“Bill isn’t busy just now. I’ll put you through to Bill.”

“I’m disabled,” Schiff told Bill. “My wife of thirty-six years skipped out on me today to be with an old boyfriend in the Pacific Northwest and left me high and dry and all alone in the house, pretty much a prisoner in it, in fact. Claire left me the car, and I have my handicap plates — my ‘vanity plates,’ I call them, with their stick-figure, big- wheeler wheelchairs like a kid’s toy — but I haven’t driven in over a year and don’t even know whether I still can.”