Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

When Myra Gynt began to sing (he hadn’t been wrong, the lyric she’d chosen to transpose into her queer, discordant, cryptic, rigorous new music was “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and was just as difficult for him to follow as he’d anticipated the lieder would be), he felt a flush of pleasure. If they could, he thought, bearing up under what he was certain was good for him, ready at that moment, if a dish of them had been passed round, to chew on the rubbery arms of the squid, to lick from his fingers its black, bilelike ink, if they only could. See him now.

And still luxuriated in his cozy aura of well-being and pride when the famous Roland de Schulte of Harvard, modest and humble as the day was long (“Some of you may have seen articles in a few of the scientific journals about work being done in the pharmacological field to study a variety of marine pathogens”), a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize in chemistry if the FDA ever got off its ass and approved any of a number of Professor de Schulte’s promising homeopathic preparations from sick sea creatures— sharks that were HIV positive, tubercular whales, cancerous eels, arteriosclerotic plaice. (Miller knew it sounded ridiculous, even satiric. But what did he know? What? Any idiot could follow the line of least resistance and laugh at what seemed farfetched to the touch and spirit. Any fool could send up what he didn’t love or understand. Myra Gynt’s atonal music; Professor Smynea’s psychological profiles of the saints and martyrs; Schiff’s, the geographer’s, wild analogies about cities and making love. The Hebrew University guy’s thesis about Biblical slang, how the tetragrammaton itself was merely coy, even facetious, coinage for all the not-to-be- pronounced names of God.

And was still luxuriating, calm and at peace with himself as a man in his tub, only less passive than that, beaming, sending these messages of actual, active goodwill, this sort of silly facial semaphore of the heartfelts and placables, while Farrell Jones held forth regarding his conclusions about the parallels between the mood swings of manic-depressives and babies, and Dr. Arthur Barber, Distinguished University Professor in Theoretical Mathematics at the University of Chicago, speaking in formulas, in signs and symbols, explained the implications of his research not only into the philosophic impossibility of the infinite number but of the high probability that a dozen could not exist in nature.

Miller was only gradually aware of this stamped rictus across his face, like a lingering sensation that he still wore a hat after he’d already removed it. The professor had lost him. Miller had lost his euphoria. And there was Miller, Miller thought, wooden, leaden, left behind, heavy as gravity and choking on a mouthful of his own stifled yawns as someone infectious conscientiously trying to hold in his germs. He tried to rekindle his attention but it had turned cold and gone out. If there’d been a mirror for him to look into he was certain he’d have appeared red-eyed, rumpled, in need of a shave.

Then the most peculiar thing.

Without meaning to, he caught Russell’s eye.

Russell, watching Miller, even openly staring at him, distinctly mouthed, “He forgot to carry his two,” and winked.

Miller, taken by surprise, embarrassed, shy as a schoolgirl, looked down at his feet. He felt himself redden, he felt himself grin. Fearful of looking up, he remained, head bent over the room’s rich brown carpeting as if he were examining it for imperfections. His grin oddly fitting once the Getlers, the mutually chaired, married sociologists from Leiden and Basle, were into their turn. The term, Miller felt, not ill-considered since their area of expertise was the morphology of jokes and riddles. Miller was lost anyway. He understood them, those in English anyway, but had difficulty seeing the sociological implications the Getlers saw in them. Why does a chicken cross the road was, it seemed (despite slight variations in the answer), an almost universal riddle. Only in the most impenetrable New Guinea jungles and stone-age Amazonian rain forests where no roads existed, and arctic tundra and ice floes where no chickens did, was the riddle unknown. Frame of reference. Miller could dig that. What he couldn’t understand was why so much depended on delivery.

What, he wondered, am I doing here?

Which, remarkably, was exactly what Russell asked him at that very moment. Tentatively, almost experimentally, Miller looked up from his post where he was inspecting the carpet. Russell, smiling, threw him and held a long, at least two-beat wink.

“What,” Miller said, flustered, “are you talking to me?”

“Yes,” Russell said, “why don’t you tell the Fellows about your project?”

“You,” Miller shot back almost hostilely.

“My project? Oh,” said Russell, blowing it off, “just to think about things.”

Miller’s heart sank.

“What things?” he challenged. Because he was at a loss. Because he was cornered. Because he didn’t know what else to say. Because he’d have given anything to be back safe in bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles at that moment. Because maybe he’d known even before he’d started to lose his phony well-being as he failed to keep pace with, or track of, the elevated star turns of the evening’s show-and-tellers and had begun to expect to be called on himself (who even in Indianapolis in front of some of the better students at the community college had attacks of self-doubt, and sometimes couldn’t help keeping the outright abject gratitude off his face during a night out on the town with his hometown betters— reversing himself now, undoing his idle, informal invocation of their witness, his half-holy if-they-could- see-me-nows, suddenly suspecting that they could, that they actually could, the canny, cunning, knowing bastards, that they’d probably set him up!).

Russell talking now, breezily reeling off a list, possibly extempore, of various things he’d been thinking of the less than twenty-four hours he’d been in Arles, Miller only now tuning in, losing maybe two-thirds of what the huge- browed, immense-headed man had been saying.

“… that if the holes in the ozone are real and the climates rearrange themselves, the temperate zone, pushing ever more northerly, sooner or later the prevailing culture will be the culture of the Laplanders, of the Inuits and Aleuts. How counterfeiting impacts upon inflation and, concomitantly, what the preponderant counterfeit currency— Deutsche marks, yen, francs, or dollars — along with its denominations can tell us about the true nature of the global economy at any given time. I mean to give some thought to how the endangerment and ultimate extinction of a particular species will affect fairy tales. How long will it be before Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, or The Three Little Pigs become obsolete? This would be a way of determining the half-life of the oral tradition.

“You?” Russell asked kindly.

The worst thing, Miller thought, isn’t that the ball’s in my court. No, he thought, not so much frightened as sick at heart (that same sick sinking heart of but moments before, which, as if it had fallen overboard, now felt itself to be turning over in some slow, twisting free-fall, snagged on the contrary currents of the thick, salted buoyance in the death-dark sea, and thinking as he parsed all this: oh, boy, am I in trouble!), the worst thing is that Russell could probably have gone on. And also that the ball was in his court.

“Oh, I have a project,” Miller said finally. “I had to have a project or the Foundation wouldn’t have let me come. As a matter of fact, I’m depending on some of you to work with me on this. I was going to leave notes with Rita to put in your boxes. I simply haven’t had time.”