Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

He saw that it had no toilet and would have called Madame but he saw that it had no phone either.

Some Foundation, Miller thought, some big fucking deal Foundation! Some big goddamned honor having them approve my project! Had to pay my own damn airfare! And some Madame Celli while we’re at it! Big linguist! Some witty, charming command of the English fucking language she must have! Doesn’t even know “freshen up” is the idiom for having to take a piss! Yeah, well. She even said that about needing my toilet articles out of my valise. Yeah, well, he thought, that’s probably the idiom around here for go piss in your suitcase.

But really, he thought, a month? A month in Arles?

He shouldn’t have listened to her, Miller thought, he should have rented a car.

And he was sore. Well, disappointed. No, he thought, sore. Sore and disappointed. If it had been beautiful. Or in important mountains instead of a sort of clearing among distant minor hills. Or on the sea instead of better than twenty-five miles away from it. What was it? From first impressions, and Miller was one who put a lot of stock in first impressions, it seemed to him to be a kind of gussied-up country market town with a faint suggestion — its long stone railroad trestle that traced one edge of the town like a sooty rampart, its several dubious hotels, bars, and workingmen’s restaurants, the gloomy bus station and cluster of motorcycle agencies, bicycle-repair shops, and, everywhere, on the sides of buildings, on kiosks and hoardings, on obsolete confetti of dated posters for departed circuses, stock-car races, wrestling matches; even the small municipal park with its benchloads of provocative, heavily made-up teenagers in micros and minis, their clumsily leathered attendants who looked more like their pimps than their boyfriends — of light, vaguely compromised industry. What was it? Well, frankly, at first blush, it might almost have been an older, downsized, more rural sort of Indianapolis.

This was his impression anyway and, though he’d keep an open mind (Miller hadn’t many illusions about himself and pretty much had his own number— a fellow of only slightly better-than-average luck and intelligence, an over- achiever actually, who had pretty much gone the distance on what were, after all, rather thin gifts, even his famous “selection” more a tribute to his connected Indianapolis pals and colleagues who’d vouched for him, written him his letters of recommendation, than to the brilliance of his project), he knew it was going to be a long month. (Unless it was to be one of those bonding deals — boy meets girl, or fate, or somesuch under disagreeable circumstances and, by degrees, through the thick and thin of stuff, ultimately comes to embrace or understand what he’d hitherto scorned).

Still, Miller, though he’d finally discovered the common toilet and shower (a tiny room on the ground floor just to the right of the stairway that he’d mistaken for a closet), felt he’d every right to be uncomfortable. He was not a good traveler, had no genius for its stresses, for dealing with the money, the alien bath fixtures, the foreign menus that turned meals into a kind of blindman’s buff; all the obligations one was under in another country, to drink the local wines, buy the local laces and silks and blown glass, honor- bound not to miss anything, to feel what the travel guides told him to feel, to see all the points of interest, but fearful of being suckered in taxis and hotels and never understanding how the natives managed. Missing nuance, sacrificing ease and the great comfort of knowing one’s place.

This room, for example, which (though he’d seen and admired the painting at the Art Institute in Chicago perhaps a half-dozen times) he still didn’t really recognize (and so, for that matter, didn’t experience even the least sense of déjà vu) as Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles and which, even after the reality of where he was staying was confirmed, he still wouldn’t entirely believe, attributing the undeniable correspondences between the room and its furnishings to some sort of knockoff, a trick on the tourists. (Which wasn’t logical, Russell would argue, Miller being a guest of the Foundation. What could possibly be in it for them? Where was the profit?)

But (speaking of foreign travel, tourists, even Van Gogh would have been a tourist here, wouldn’t he?) this room.

Miller’s first impression of it was of a utilitarian, monastic-like setting. It reminded him of rooms in pensions, bed- and-breakfasts, no mod cons provided, not even a radio or simple windup alarm clock. He knew without sitting on them that the narrow bed would be much too soft, the stiff, rush-bottom chairs way too hard. (Nothing, he suspected, would be just right for this particular Goldilocks in the room’s close quarters.) Though he felt — oddly — that one might spend one last fell binge of boyhood here in the narrow orange bed and rush chairs along these powder blue, shaving-mirror-hung walls of the utile. The basin and pitcher, majolica jug, military brush, drinking glass, and apothecary bottles clear as gin, a soft summer equipment lined up as if for inspection on the crowded washstand on the red-tiled, vaguely oilcloth-looking floor, poor Goodwill stuff, nitty-rubbed-gritty YMCA effects, weathered, faintly flyblown and pastoral, the narrow strips of pegged wood for towels, jeans, a T-shirt, a cap, all the plain, casual ready-to- wear of hard use. A few pictures were carelessly tacked to or dangled from the room’s wash walls. A boy’s room, indeed. A room, Miller saw, of a counselor at a summer camp, or of minor cadre, a corporal say, in an army barracks. Miller saw himself becalmed there, doing the doldrums in study’s stock-still Sargasso seas.

He went to one of the room’s big shuttered windows. Through a southern exposure, flattened against the town’s low hill, Arles seemed to rise like an illusion of a much larger city. Out the window on the eastern wall he looked down on oleander bushes, shrub chestnuts, and yews, a lone cypress in the tiny courtyard of the small yellow house.

A boy’s room. He could already picture himself noiselessly masturbating beneath the scarlet cover on the rumpled sheets and pillowslips yellow as lemons or margarine on the too-soft bed.

Someone knocked at the door. Miller’s first thought was that Madame Celli had dispatched a servant to bring his things from the main building across the Place. When he opened the door, cracking it like a safe (it was still stuck from the heat, he had to pull up, give it a sharp twist and tug, applying, he didn’t know how, the sort of “English” only a person accustomed to opening it this way might know, a leverage impossible to describe to a second party, a user’s leverage, an owner’s), he saw that the person across from him was no servant but a well-formed, immaculate little man (the word “chap” occurred), vaguely knickered, white-shirted, and argyled, like someone got up in old-time golfing garb.

“Hi there,” said the man in Miller’s doorway, “I’m Paul Hartshine. Kaska told me you’d be in. Saw you dribbling out of coach class in Marseilles this morning. Tried to catch your eye, but you were bottled up in Douane and I had to catch le train grand vitesse.”

Miller had never seen the man in his life but reasoned that Hartshine was a fellow Fellow scheduled to arrive in Arles the same day as himself. He’d evidently taken the fast train down while Miller had bumped along on the bus. And what was that about his dribbling out of coach class, a shot? And the remark about Douane. (Douane was the word for Customs. He recalled it from a vocabulary list.)

“Kaska?”

“Kaska Celli,” Paul Hartshine said.

“Certain Indianapolis friends of mine especially warned me against the fast train,” Miller said.