Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Someone raised his hand.

Uh oh, he thought, worried, recalling Hartshine’s challenge to the crippled political geographer, the hard time Anita Smynea had been given by one of the Fellows, even Russell’s private mockery of Arthur Barber, the infinity maven who’d forgotten to carry his two. “Yes,” Miller said, “is there a question?”

“What’s your project?” he asked politely.

“I’m trying,” he said, “to get some idea of the image of the community college in the eyes of establishment academia.” Then he fell out of his deep muslin chair and fainted.

When, moments later, he came to on the carpet (his tie had been loosened, his collar undone; establishment academia, giving him air, had moved back a floor lamp, his chair, cleared a broad avenue for him, and now stood patiently on either side of the room exactly like people quietly observing an accident from the curb), Russell, Miller’s wrist in his hand, was on one knee beside him. He was grinning so widely someone might just have brought him good news and holding a wink so steadily Miller thought for a moment he looked like someone engaged in an odd athletic event, like seeing how long he could go before taking a breath, say.

Miller, embarrassed, said “Where am I, where am I? Wherever in the world am I?” just to get Russell to open his eye.

“Dr. Rey is on call,” a girl said. “I sent for him.”

“Rita? Is that you, Rita?”

They put Miller to bed in Van Gogh’s room in Arles, and though he heard them go down the stairs and leave the yellow house he had the impression that they’d left someone behind to stand guard in the hall. Perhaps Russell, perhaps Hartshine or Rita, or even the one who’d asked him the question in the music room. Fear and anxiety — he’d never passed out before — had left him half conscious during the press of their urgent rush with him across the square to Number 2 Lamartine Place. It seemed important to Miller to learn who’d been chosen to stay with him, but he thought it better to discover the identity of whoever it was posted outside his door by listening to the nature of the silence, or whatever was done to disturb it, made by the person keeping the vigil, than to demand it outright. He closed his eyes so he might better concentrate on the problem. Never had his senses been sharper. He tried to judge his guardian’s sex and size by the creak of the weight made on the flooring, to see if he could reconstruct the nature of the clothing — its fabric, even its color — by the quality of the sound — its rustle or rub — made when it was brushed by a hand. And opened his eyes. To see could he detect some clue in the breathing or make out in the darkness some gloomy giveaway thickness or layer of shadow that might reveal the character of its source. There was nothing. He received no impressions, heard nothing, felt no pulsations shaken loose from the brusque agitations and invisible jitters and shivers of whatever body rested against the wall outside his room. He saw nothing. And so he closed them again and went to sleep.

Only to look when he waked, not so much refreshed or even rested as startlingly wakeful, directly into the very odd face of someone gazing down at him. The face was somehow as disturbingly familiar as it was strange.

“Oh,” said the man, “I am penitent to startle you. You must are the ill American monsieur, Mr. Miller.”

“Am I ill?” Miller asked, for he realized even before he took in the man’s old-fashioned black bag he must be the doctor.

“This is something we will shall be deciding together. Dr. Félix Rey, Mister Monsieur.”

“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.”

“Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.”

“You do,” Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!”

“Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey.

It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they were young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or — six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.

Miller kept shifting his glance from the picture postcard to the great-great-grandson. For all the flawlessness of their unquestioned resemblance it seemed a bit stagy, as though one of them were cross-dressing, say, or as if some feature on one of their faces — the beard, the plucked eyebrows — had been cultivated for a specific effect, accented as a nose or a hairline in a caricature.

“It is very remarkable, is it not, Mister Monsieur? Do I state the case amiss? One might summarize that Vincent was so geniused that he fixed the gene pool forever with his picture brush. But you will see from your eyes. There live in Arles to this day descendants from the peasant Patience Escalier; the postesman Joseph Roulin and his femme, Berceuse, their sons, Armand and Camille; and of Madame Ginoux and of even the fierce Zouave.”

Handing back the “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey,” Miller wondered if the physician had picked up his English in much the same sort of way Miller had picked up his French, studying rubrics on the backs of postcards as he had memorized vocabulary lists, Yet there was something about Dr. Rey’s speech Miller, admittedly no student of languages, didn’t quite buy. His accent, measured against the accents of Frenchmen in films, seemed wrong. It wasn’t so much uncultivated as uncluttered by their smoky, theatrical rumble and heavy breathiness. It seemed to Miller that even the man’s syntax was off by four or five hundred miles, as though it belonged at least that much further up the Mediterranean coast.

Now Rey listened to Miller’s heart, tuned in on his lungs, took the measures of his pressure and pulse and temperature. He examined Miller’s ears, ran light into Miller’s eyes, palpated Miller’s belly, dug his fingers painfully deep into Miller’s groin. He had Miller gag three strained ahhs under a rough wooden tongue depressor. He had him sit along the side of the bed and tested his reflexes with a little hammer. He took his pressure a second time, removed the stethoscope again from where he had stuffed it into a jacket pocket and asked Miller if he minded submitting to a second examination of his chest. He breathed on the little black disc at the bottom of the stethoscope, warming it the way one might move breath across one’s lenses before rubbing them clean with a tissue. Nothing the doctor had yet done so alarmed Miller as this little gesture of solicitude. Then he had Miller cough. Hard. Harder please, s’il vous plaît. Press, Miller interpreted freely, the pedal to the metal.

And Miller, accommodating, coughed with such force that he brought up the reduced, soured biles of the gorgeous great omelette, toast, tea, peeled fruit, and apéritifs of his delicious dinner. Félix Rey gave him a handful of toilet paper, which he removed from his doctor’s satchel.