Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“SHE’S HAD MISCARRIAGES!”

They said they’d take me to court if these installments appeared.

They’re blowing smoke, of course. They don’t go to law like regular people, these people.

So they threaten me. But I’ll tell you something, Sid, I don’t think they can touch me. After all, as I keep on saying, I promised to tell all but I haven’t. Not all. Not yet. There’s at least two column inches I’m holding back against a rainy day.

Meanwhile, I don’t know, maybe next time they’ll get it right, do it better, wheel-and-deal the way people like them are supposed to wheel-and-deal. Have the King, what do you call it, issue a proclamation maybe. Send out this call for the most beautiful virgins in the land. Set them tasks. Winner takes Prince, takes Crown, takes all.

That’s about it, I guess. The only thing I don’t get is why you offered me money for my story. I mean what could possibly have been in it for you, Sir Sid? I mean it isn’t as if you come out smelling like a rose or something. For a time I put it down to your sweeps-week vision, your tabloid heart, but that can’t be all of it, I think. Perhaps you hold a few column inches of your own in reserve.

What could they be, I wonder? Pride? The thrill of cuckolding a king? Even if it’s only at some double remove, once for before Lawrence even knew me and the other for before he was ever a king.

Or those throes, perhaps, their veronican image, for the refractive, fun-house homeopathics of the thing, some hand-that-shook-the-hand-that-shook-the-hand apostolicity of love.

You men!

When the Foundation sent him there, Miller had absolutely no idea that he was to be put up in Van Gogh’s room in the small yellow house at Arles. Indeed, he’d no idea that the room still existed, or the house, or, for that matter, even the hotel across the street that it was part of.

Madame Celli simply handed the key over to him on the morning of his arrival. No special fuss or flourish or ceremony. The key itself, which couldn’t possibly have been the original, was attached to a short chain, itself attached to a heavy iron ball about the size of a plum. The number 22 was stamped both on the key and on the ball along with, in French (a language that Miller didn’t have but whose vocabulary lists he’d memorized through the first few weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school, la plume de ma tante), on the ball, a tiny metal legend (he made out “ boîte aux lettres ” ) to the effect, Miller supposed, that if whoever found it dropped it into a post box, the postage would be guaranteed.

It was this key, almost as much as the fact of the room itself, that afterwards was so stunning to Miller, the offhand way of it, the stolid fact of the ball and chain from which it depended like a key to a room in a second- or third-class railway hotel where travelers who were too weary, or too ill, or who could simply go no farther, might stop for the night.

This was a peculiarly apt description of his own condition the day he got there, exhausted as he was from the long series of flights and layovers. Indianapolis to Kennedy, Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle to Marseilles, and then the three-hour ride by motorcoach from Marseilles to Arles. Though this was the most spectacular leg of the journey (Indianapolis pals had specifically recommended the slower bus as opposed to the much faster train) because of the dramatic views it provided of Mediterranean fishing villages, the lavender vineyards of the Languedoc region, and the queer, boiling iridescence of the waters in the Gulf of Lions, from certain angles and in certain light like a great voile oil spill, Miller had registered almost none of it, only a few blunted impressions whenever the bus or the oppressive incrementality of his own soiled, staggered mileage jolted him awkwardly awake for a few moments.

So unceremonious, so unpropitious even, was Miller’s reception, he was actually touched when Madame Celli agreed to allow him to leave his things — the big suitcase, his hanging garment bag, the plastic sack of duty-free liquor, film, and cigarettes purchased at Kennedy with almost the last of his American money— another tip from the knowledgeable Indianapolis crowd: that he’d get a more favorable rate if he exchanged his dollars for francs at some one-or two-teller bank, or even at one of those cash vending machines, while he was still at the airport — in the lobby with her while he went off to find his lodgings at Number 2 Lamartine Place across the square from the old hotel that seemed to be the Foundation’s main building in Arles. He’d come back for them after he freshened up, he assured her, an efficient enough, even agreeable-seeming woman, but one whom Miller had sized up as essentially uninterested in the various jet-lagged-out states of the Fellows the Foundation kept feeding her all the year round, one or two at a time, for month-long stays at twice-a-week intervals.

These perceptions had been established long before he’d ever actually laid eyes on her, for it was Madame Celli with whom he’d been in correspondence since he was first informed that his fellowship had been granted. Well, correspondence. On his part thoughtful, practical letters asking thoughtful, practical questions— the weather one could expect in April, what forwarding address he should leave for his friends, the advisability of renting a car, if there was a dress code. And, on hers, in a charming, unexpected, quite witty English, only the salutation written in ink at the top, form letters, hospitable, boilerplate responses to inquiries he had no doubt she could reproduce in Spanish, or French, or Italian, or German, or in almost every EC language any of those one or two staggered, twice-weekly arriving birds of a month’s passage might throw at her. Which only added insult to the injury of Miller’s fatigue and took a little of the shine off his having been selected or, if not exactly selected, then at least approved by the Foundation. Which, too, was why he was so touched by Madame’s routine boilerplate courtesy to his simple request that she permit him to leave his things in the lobby while he lumbered off without having to lug along the additional burden of thirty or so pounds of cumbersome luggage. It seemed a sort of relenting. She was, after all, mistress here, empowered, he didn’t in the least doubt, by the Foundation with all the authority of a ship’s captain, say, at once hostess, concierge, enforcer, and housemother. It was she, after all, who had assigned him to an outbuilding rather than to a room in what he had already come to think of as the administration building.

Scraping favor, he asked, in as close an approximation to French as he could muster, just where, exactly, he was headed.

“Vous voulez dire, monsieur?”

It wasn’t the first time he had failed to make himself understood.

“I guess none of you people has had the benefit of the first term-and-a-half of freshman-year French,” Miller said, and repeated his question in English.

Madame led him outside and pointed out the yellow house to him.

But if Monsieur was to freshen up wouldn’t he be needing some of his toilet articles out of his valise?

“It’s a done deal. I’ve got it covered,” Monsieur said and, feeling like a fool, but unwilling to go back into the lobby with her or to squat down over his suitcase rummaging through its contents while she watched, held up his laptop word processor.

There were only four rooms. Number 22 was to the left at the top of a flight of red brick steps at the rear of the small ground-floor hallway, and the key, it turned out, was just to his room, not to the house itself. The house could not be locked and, indeed, the other three rooms were either entirely or partially open to the gaze of anyone — Miller, for example — who cared to look in. In fact, it was only the door to Miller’s room, warped, stuck shut in the Provençal heat, that was closed at all.