Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“I rise,” Kaska said, “ladies and gentlemen, to inform you that tonight, after supper, there is to be an entertainment in the music room. All are welcome. So as soon as you have finished your coffee please.”

She did not resume her seat and, appearing to give a signal — it could have been the way she touched at her mouth with a corner of her napkin, it could have been the way, still standing, she laid her napkin alongside her cup, or her transitory smile — drew Clémence, Georges, and a waiter he didn’t know yet in from the perimeters of the room to stand behind the Fellows’ backs. Their presence seemed official, deputized, as if they had the power to enforce Kaska Celli’s subtle coffee curfews and, indeed, most of the Fellows set their cups down without even bothering to finish them, and got up from the table.

Again, Miller felt a sense of pride in her powers, the sexual choice he’d made the previous night, a sort of ghostly, loony possessiveness.

Miller rose with the others as they moved off to the music room. He fell into step beside Russell.

“What do you suppose happened to the billiard table?” he asked for want of anything better to say.

“In all likelihood the felt must have torn,” Russell said. “Or worn out. And the night café was a low bar, don’t forget. There was probably a brawl. Someone must have been hit very hard, landed too heavily on the table, and broken the slate.”

“Yeah,” Miller said, “that’s what I was thinking too.”

What he was really thinking was, It’s only five weeks. I’ll live on croissants. I’ll live on rich cheeses and pâtés and crackers. I’ll live on fresh-baked bread that I’ll cover with great heaping dollops of butter. I’ll live on delicious omelettes. I’ll live on delicious omelettes and pare my strawberries and raisins and apricots with a butter knife like a caveman. He has the largest head I’ve ever seen, he was thinking. He must wear a size nine-and-a-half hat.

The music room — there was a grand piano, there was a state-of-the-art CD player — was the single place in Arles Miller had seen that didn’t look like an impressionist painting. It was a commodious, thoroughly modern, even modernistic, room with a pair of deep rectilinear sofas and big boxy chairs covered in light gray muslin. Great glass-topped tables in dark, matte-metal frames stood on matching brushed-metal legs in front of the sofas and, in smaller versions, beside each chair. Near the white bookshelves were two crushed — almost imploded — charcoal leather pillow chairs like soft fortresses or marshmallow thrones. Another chair, like a leather-and-steel cat’s cradle, was positioned near the piano. There were cunning chrome lamps, museum-quality ashtrays, all appointments edge-of-the-field doodad and inspired house-dower, an ecology of lifestyle. It was as if the whole room has been designed by the art director of a major motion picture. Miller loved it.

Georges had wheeled in a portable bar cart and Miller, sunk deep in one of the big muslin chairs, was just getting comfortable with a large scotch-and-soda and enjoying the harsh, smoked-licorice taste of his duty-free Gaulois when a woman Miller hadn’t noticed before stood up. Miller thought she was about to play the piano for them when, inexplicably, in his lap-robed, civilized circumstances, he suddenly started to cry. (Because if they could just see me now, he thought. Because just look at me, he thought, the kid from Indy. Because, he thought, this is the life. Listening to high-class lieder, art songs, words in languages he wouldn’t understand set to melodies he probably wouldn’t be able to follow. This is, this is the life, thought Miller in Arles, his stock-still ego laced with awe, no hero but a dilettante of idyll. Because if they could, if they only could. See him now.) And was about to snuff out his cigarette for the singer’s sweet sake when abruptly, without even moving toward the piano, the woman began to speak.

She said her name was Anita Smynea and that she taught theological psychiatry at the London School of Economics. (Miller figured it was an elective.) Her project in Arles, she said, would be to put together the raw data for a monograph she was preparing on a psychological profile of the saints and martyrs.

Miller listened fascinated as she reeled off evidence for her conclusion that the downside of their spirituality and devoutness was a zealotry even more off-putting and unpleasant than their self-rightousness.

“Oh, come now, really,” one of the Fellows said, “off- putting? Unpleasant?”

“Are you serious?” Ms. Smynea said. “Those people couldn’t get past the lowliest reservations clerk at Heathrow, let alone a metal detector!”

A man who identified himself as a political geographer spoke next, addressing the group in the music room from a wheelchair. He discussed his theories about why world-class cities were almost never found on mountaintops. From what Miller understood of his ideas it had less to do with the mechanical difficulties involved in hauling material up their steep, perilous slopes than with some notion about “Man’s innate fear of the sky and of exposure to most astronomical phenomena.” Further arguing that the concept of shelter had as much to do with physical contact and sexual enterprise as it did with a need to protect oneself from the elements, he advanced the theory that from a child’s security blanket on up the chain of architecture to the floor, the ceiling, the room, the apartment and neighborhood, one had before one the very type of the Platonic idea of “comfort.” Thus, cities, mimicking lovemaking, were constitutionally “horizontal” rather than “vertical,” and did not get built on the tops of mountains.

Miller, floundering, foundering, losing track, dropping behind, dropping out, was overcome with sadness. His interest, which was still high, availeth not. Unconsciously, he looked toward Russell for a sign of corroborative impatience. Russell was contemplative and serene inside his huge head.

It was someone else entirely who grew fitful, lost patience. “What is the point, please?” Paul Hartshine (now, for dinner, in a dinner jacket) demanded irritably.

“I’m a political geographer,” said the cripple. “The point, of course, is that because of the synergy between the fear of sky-nakedness and sexual guilt there can be no such thing as a ‘shining city on a hill.’”

“Denver!” Hartshine challenged.

“Denver is foothills.”

A scholar from Hebrew University spoke about slang in the sacred texts.

Myra Gynt, a composer from the University of Michigan, explained how it was her intention to set the lyrics of various Broadway showstoppers to the more formal music of the twelve-tone scale— serial composition, she called it. Miller watched closely as Ms. Gynt adjusted the piano bench and, inclining her neck first right, then left, repeatedly pressed certain keys at the high and low ends of the keyboard and played two chords to either side of its center. She was averaging, she said, testing to see if the piano was tuned. Her mouth turned sourly down at the corners, and though Miller could hear nothing wrong, she professed profound dissatisfaction with the instrument.

Miller sat back, luxuriating in the high-mindedness of his colleagues, taking pleasure in the word, the privileged, lofty fellowship of the communal it radiated, their joint fraternal, sororal mutuality of mission, dedicate, pledged to service history, as if there were something vaguely legislative about scholarship, the life of mind; at once neutral and senatorian in some wise old Roman way; there to learn, to sift, to consider, and then to choose. He’d been in the business maybe eleven years, but until that moment in France he had denied something noble and honorable in himself and hadn’t realized what he should all along have taken for granted— the collegiality of their enterprise, the professional courtesy one life owed another. He looked toward Russell, toward Hartshine, even toward the lame political geographer in the wheelchair, and smiled, certain that the look on his face at that moment matched Russell’s own almost godlike benignity.