Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Miller said. “When I first saw this place it really didn’t mean all that much to me. Well, I was tired. I didn’t take it all in. As a matter of fact, I was a little steamed they hadn’t put me up in the main building. That I was so far from the action. Not only that I didn’t even have a toilet but that there wasn’t even a toilet on my floor. That I had to go downstairs I wanted to use the facilities. You know what the place looked like to me? A bed- and-breakfast. I saw but didn’t really take in the bottles on. the nightstand, the cane-bottom chairs, the basin and pitcher. I mean I’ve known the painting it was based on for years, but when I saw the actual room there wasn’t even this like shock of recognition.

“Only slowly, only gradually did it come over me. I’m using his things. I shave in his mirror, I drink from his jug. The miracle of that unpainted fourth wall that you pointed out? I sat on his piano bench against the fourth wall and contemplated his floor and bed and washstand and chairs and bottles and mirror and drinking glass and brown woodden pegs on the brown wooden strip on his blue walls. Who knew it was all so beautiful? I whacked off in his sheets.”

“This is what you want me to go back and tell her?” Paul Hartshine said.

Miller, feeling heat (who couldn’t detect a blush, who was effectively color-blind to the broad palette of the psychological hues in others), looked down in confusion. Was it possible Hartshine had guessed it was Kaska of whom he’d been thinking? Could he know that Miller (who wouldn’t have vouched for the sailorman’s romantic biases) had once considered him, and perhaps still did, a rival for the earth babe’s attentions?

“No,” Miller said. “Tell her, tell her I’ll be coming down to the night café for supper.”

And was as good as his word. (As was Rita as hers. Within moments of being seated — the night café reconfigured for the evening meal, the green baize-covered tables removed from along the walls and pushed together to make one grand table in the center of the room where the pool table stands in the painting, with what could have been the full company of all the Foundation’s Fellowship surrounding him on the vaguely ice-cream-parlorish chairs — Georges presented Miller with a whopping gorgeous great omelette, cunningly folded in and over itself like a man’s yellow pocket handkerchief. It was delicious.)

“There you are, Miller,” Paul Hartshine said, sitting down beside him, having come in five or so minutes after Miller. “How do you like this? Isn’t this grand?”

“What did they do with the billiard table?” he asked for the second time in two days, not so much as a wise guy this time around but as the interested scholar. And, when Paul Hartshine shrugged, he caught at the sleeve of a passing waiter, Clémence, the one he’d been rude to in his hallucination the previous day.

“Monsieur?”

“Didn’t there used to be a billiard table in here?” he asked. From what Miller could make out from what the man told him, the table was cold eggs tonight but wouldn’t be seen forever again until tomorrow.

Miller nodded, thanked him in French four thousand times over, and hoped it wouldn’t rain.

It was amazing, he thought. Had the night café been restored or what? It was astonishing what a good job they had done. The big, bulbous, overhead gas lamps were electric now, of course, but somehow they had managed to replicate the precise illusion of waves of light that spin about the lamps in Van Gogh’s painting like an aura. Unless, he thought, there was operative in Arles (or for those who came after him — like Miller, Miller thought — some mysterious persistence of vision, this optical trick of the Provençal light — even after the sun had gone down — that bent it and raised, even pushed, waves off solid objects like mirages burning in a desert), or operative for those who lived in his room anyway, or ate where he had eaten, this great participatory idea of things. Ain’t I, he asked himself, seeing things through his eyes now? Ain’t I beginning to, well, render the ordinary, even commonplace effects of the daily— its beds and chairs and tables and towels?

It was a little scary, really. He wondered if he dare look up at the starry night for fear of discovering there flaring, burning balls in the sky, or ever fix his gaze again upon even the most innocent tree trunk lest it eerily bend and twist itself out of his glance. He’d accepted Georges’s drinks, and even allowed him to refill his glass, but knew he wasn’t drunk. Not on Georges’s innocuous aperitifs.

He shook himself and concentrated his attentions on his eggs and toast and tea, on peeling his apple with his butter knife. Kaska Celli observing his performance from where she sat in regal charge at the head of the table. And capturing too, he felt, the wondering, even admiring glances of three or four of his fellow Fellows, guys, he shouldn’t wonder, who’d thought, till they witnessed his display of the dessert carver’s art, they had his number, had put him down as just another bimbo from down on the farm, alien to the sophisticated European skills of skinning fruit. Hah! Miller thought, basking. And took up a pear and proceeded to remove its pelt. And then a fruit — he supposed a fruit — he didn’t recognize and wouldn’t eat when he uncovered its black flesh. Still basking though. Fit to bust, as a matter of fact, if someone didn’t ask him soon where he’d learned to handle fruit like that. Till seeing no one would he just up and volunteered.

“The truth is,” he said forcefully into the crossfire of conversation, monologue, dialogue, discussion, and argument going on about him, “I never peeled a piece of fruit in my life. I live in Indiana. How different can it be from whittling?”

Even Miller had to admit that those who’d heard him — though he’d barely made a dent in the din — looked at him benignly enough, even benevolently, even, it seemed, interestedly, expectantly, as though they waited for him to expand on his theme. Miller was appalled, filled with snobbish, sudden disdain for his own boorishness. Still his little audience looked to him for clarification.

“Oh, never mind,” he said, frightened, realizing as soon as he said it that it was true, “I’m drunk.” (He’d been right though. It hadn’t been the aperitifs so much as the sack of duty-free hootch at which he’d been sucking away — and which was almost gone — in his room for close on two days now.)

“But you make a good point,” said a man several place settings off. “I suspect the convention of taking a knife to an apple or orange has less to do with dining etiquette than with the hard practices of the old hunter/gatherers. Just the residuals of some ancient exploratory hygienics. Slitting open their prey with their flint to trim the diseased parts. Then, by analogy, paring their fruits and vegetables as well. A sort of stone-age quality control. Look before you eat, that kind of thing. You make a good point. I agree with you.”

“Who are you?” Miller asked.

“I’m Russell,” Russell said, a tall, cheery-looking man with a rather large head who’d arrived in Arles just the day after Hartshine and Miller.

Then, as Miller was about to respond, Madame Celli tapped on her water glass with a spoon. All conversation, monologue, dialogue, discussion, and argument dropped off at once. It was, he thought, exactly as if a cease-fire, not so much called for as demanded by an authority with whom it would have been foolish to dispute, had gone into effect. Miller felt this surge of immense, nutty pride that the very woman whose image he’d invoked the night before when he’d intimately handled himself should command such respect and fear. It was as if his instinct and taste had been underwritten by all the moral and intellectual authority of the Foundation itself. It was as if he’d been seen with the belle of the ball.