Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Oh?” said Hartshine.

Miller didn’t want to get into it. He felt like an asshole.

“Are you a downstairs neighbor then?”

“Me? No, no, I’m at Number 30 Lamartine.” The man grinned at him, and it occurred to Miller that it may have been because Miller was quite literally blocking the doorway, filling it up — Miller was large, shaggily formed, almost a head taller than the fastidiously built little guy over whom he seemed to loom like a sort of ponderous weather — that Hartshine, sensing the absurdity of Miller’s protective, defensive stance, found him amusing. (As he would, overheated, exhausted from his travels, burdened by his bulging garment bag, and clutching his ridiculous sack of duty-free prizes like flowers taken from a vase on a table at a wedding dinner, have been found amusing, as, he supposed, anyone in coach class might have seemed amusing to anyone in first, or anyone still hung up in Customs might appear at least a little silly to someone already waved through, or, when all else was stripped away and you were down to final things, the one on the bus was a laughingstock to the one on the train!)

Before Miller could move out of the way, however, Paul Hartshine was bobbing and weaving, impatiently trying to see around him and into the room as if, it could almost have been, Miller were some quasi-functionary, an observer of the technicalities, and Hartshine a reporter, say, there on behalf of the public.

The man had him pegged as one kind of asshole, so Miller stepped back and Hartshine poured through his defenses, talking away at a mile a minute.

“Look at that, will you?” he cried out to Miller. “I can’t believe it. I’d never have guessed! Would you? Did you ever see anything like it? Well, this, this is a find! I’d never have guessed, I tell you! Well, one couldn’t have, could one? The fourth wall! Just look. Just look there! Everything that didn’t get painted on the room’s fourth wall!

“Look at that chest of drawers! Well, you can see why he chose not to have painted that. It’s entirely too grand for the room. I bet its proper place in the room was where that rush-bottom chair stands now. Next to the door. He must have rearranged it to make the room appear more rustic than it actually was.”

“It’s rustic,” Miller said, thinking of his long, uncomfortable flight in coach, of the rough ride from Marseilles on the bus, of having actually to sit in one of those chairs, “it’s plenty rustic.” But if Hartshine heard him he gave no indication.

“Cunning,” Hartshine said, “absolutely cunning! Wasn’t he the old slyboots?

“And isn’t that a piano bench? He must have had it from the bar. Doesn’t he remark in a letter to Theo somewhere that there was a piano bench in the room, that sometimes, as an exercise for his back — it is damp in Arles — he sat on it to paint?”

He meant Van Gogh. It was Hartshine’s reference to Theo that finally made him recognize where he was. In reality, without “rendering,” the room could have been just another bed-and-breakfast. Now, Miller thought, what with Hartshine’s relentless gushing, it was rather like living behind a velvet rope in a museum. He hoped he wasn’t on the tour.

“Oh, I almost forgot! Kaska told me to tell you, if you’re sufficiently freshened up by now, lunch is in fifteen minutes. There’s no formal seating chart except at dinner but you’d better hurry if you expect to get a decent table. Sit with me, I’ll introduce you round. I should think the other scholars will have already taken their drinks on the terrace, but if you’re very quick perhaps Georges will make you one to take to your table with you. I’ll ask him.”

“I’ll ask him myself,” Miller said, determined to take his time and wondering at Hartshine’s power to drive him ever deeper into asshole territory. When he was good and ready he’d cross the street by himself

In the end, however, Miller hastily spit-combed his hair before the shaving mirror above Van Gogh’s washstand, and hustled the lollygagging Hartshine, still examining the contents of the bedroom at Arles as if he were preparing an inventory, out the door.

Hartshine introduced Miller to Georges, who got him his drink even though the bar was already closed.

They entered what Miller was given to understand was the night café.

“You know the painting?” Hartshine said out of the side of his mouth.

“What did they do with the billiard table?” Miller said out of the side of his own.

Miller, in tow with Hartshine, was walked past all the green baize-covered tables set against the high red walls in the big square room. It felt rather like a promenade. The fop, pausing at each table, had a word with each pair, trio, or quartet of diners, and introduced Miller. He met, in turn, though little of this registered, Professor Roland de Schulte, Paul and Marilyn Ames, Farrell and June Jones, an Ivan someone, a chess master from the Kara-Kalpak Republic, a South African black man named John Samuels Peterboro, and a female composer from the University of Michigan named Myra Gynt. Hartshine introduced Miller to Lesley Getler and his wife, Patricia, married, chaired sociologists, one from the University of Leiden and the other from the University of Basle in Switzerland. There was Arthur Barber, a mathematician from the University of Chicago, and perhaps a dozen others whose names passed through Miller like a dose of salts. Well, everyone’s did, really. Along with their disciplines, and the institutions where they held their chairs. He had never met so many high-powered academics in his life. The entire Ivy League must have been represented in that room. (Hartshine himself was from the University of Pennsylvania.) And even though he couldn’t have told you a moment after he’d met them — it was exactly like arriving late at a party and being introduced to all the guests at once — who any of these people were, Miller was dazzled, filled with a sense of giddiness and elation. He recognized the names of people whose important, newsworthy op-ed columns he thought he had read in the Times. Certain faces were vaguely familiar to him from television news shows during times of national and international crises, think tankers with gossip and expertise whose opinions were sought. He was very close to calling on the sort of Dutch courage one feels in the first stages of drunkenness. Thus, when during his goofy circumambulation of the room the Oxfords, Harvards, Princetons, Cambridges, Columbias, and Berkeleys were introduced to him, along with the Göteborgs, Sorbonnes, Uppsalas, and Heidelbergs (where the Student Prince matriculated), he experienced divided, contrary impulses: to stand taller, this urge to stretch himself toward the full height of his respectability; and a mild outrage like a low-grade fever. A war between super ego and id. He was, for example, torn between asking someone he was almost certain he’d seen discussing the Arab-Israeli question during several segments on MacNeil-Lehrer whether one was paid for such appearances or, since it was public television, it was done pro bono. He was tempted, too, to nudge some Harvard shit in the ribs, wink, and tell him yeah, he thought he’d heard of the place.

Toed-in, all aww-shucks’d out, he’d let it ride, said nothing, stood unassumingly by as Paul Hartshine (who seemed to know all these people, who, according to his own testimony, like Miller himself, had only arrived that morning, a first-timer in Arles) introduced him to almost everyone gathered for lunch that afternoon in the night café.

“This is Miller. They have him in Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles. You ought to see the place. Miller’s from Indianapolis. He teaches there at the Booth Tarkington Community College.”