Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

It had been a thorough, even arduous, examination. “Is something wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” Miller asked nervously. “I’m no hypochondriac, doc, but I have to admit, ever since my arrival I’ve been a bit off my feed.” It was so. Whatever else, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Miller generally enjoyed good health. Almost thirty-seven, he was still active in sports, still played a good, hard-driving pickup basketball game with the students in the BTCC gym, or handball at the Indianapolis Y. Unlike many others younger than himself he detected no loss of spring in his step under the boards, and was, despite his liquor and cigarettes, still a strong jumper, and an aggressive, even combative, player. He usually drew more fouls than any other player on his team. (Indeed, he had a small reputation as something of a bad sport, and had always vaguely equated this as a sign of stamina and good physical health.) And on the lively YMCA handball courts he was as quick as ever, his aces and killers as devastating as they had ever been. “What’s wrong with me,” he asked again, “am I ill?” And felt, who’d been unable to pick up any of the steams and busted light waves pouring off the solid objects in his darkened room, his alarmed features anxiously arrange themselves on his face.

“Mais not, Mister Monsieur. I am just remarking what strange fabulousness is it that the physical qualities of so differents citizenships should such often present liberté, égalité, fraternité, the European as well as the Berber, the Berber as much as the Japanese, the man as the woman, a Mexican like an American like a Jewish gentleman like a Turk. Palpation and respiration and the rate of the heart are demonstrations. The Zulu and Eskimo are both at normal at centigrade thirty-six degrees.

“There is nothing needed for further testing, Monsieur Sir. Of wounds to your body there are none presenting. Nor pathologies neither. I have not need to take your blood, I have not need to collect your urines. If there are damages it is in your spirit you are weakly.”

“My spirit?”

“Oui.”

“My spirit?”

“Non non. Do not alarm. It will see you out the night.”

“The night. Terrific. That gives me, what, seven hours?”

“And more. How long is your arrangement at Arles?”

“Five weeks. This is my second day.”

“Mister Monsieur is an artist?”

“I teach at a junior college in Indiana.”

“But Mister Monsieur’s soul suffers?”

Miller stared at the odd-looking physician with his queer, Oriental, triangular face. He fixed on the man’s fiery left ear, his dagger’s-point beard, the sprawling flourish of his mustache like elaborate handwriting above his almost feminine lips. It was almost all he could do to keep himself from laughing at its foolish excesses. “Yes,” he admitted quietly, “it sure does.”

Then Dr. Félix Rey looked about the room, taking in his surroundings for apparently the first time.

“This is where he live.”

“Yes,” Miller said.

“Yes,” said Dr. Rey, “I have been here. Oh, many years since. But not much since the Foundation have kept it for Fellows. Well,” he said shyly, “for a group photograph once. Of the Club of the Portraits of Descendants of People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh. Here, may I present? My pleasure, my pleasure.”

He produced a second postcard from somewhere in his suit and extended it toward terminally cracked-spirit, soul- weakened Miller, a blurry black-and-white photograph of people as vaguely familiar to Miller as Dr. Félix Rey had been. In it, ranged about Van Gogh’s room at Arles, which somehow disappeared, was absorbed, swallowed up by their relentless, insistent, novelty presence as some historical place (where a famous general had died of his wounds, say, or the room where an important document had been signed or great book written) might be by the presence of tourists, were the peasant Patience Escalier, Joseph, Berceuse, Armand and Camille Roulin, Madame Ginoux (who herself bore a striking resemblance — they could have been sisters— to Kaska Celli), Rey himself, and the fierce Zouave. Six of the eight were crowded onto the room’s two chairs and along the side of Van Gogh’s bed. The other two, the postman Roulin with his salt-and-pepper, broad shaggy beard so layered with hair it was impossible to make out his neck or determine whether he wore a tie, or even if his shirt was buttoned, and the dashing soldier boy, surprisingly slight but with a large head and a powerful neck, posed for their picture in what was left of the room, in a small clearing on the tiled floor. It reminded Miller of some remarkable class photograph. (Good heavens, he thought, this might have been taken at one of the English-as-a-second-language courses back at Booth Tarkington.)

“We have not changed a day. It is as if the time stood still.”

“Indeed,” said Miller.

“I am a physician, Roulin is a postesman. Even the young lad is demob’d from the Foreign Legion.”

“And the peasant, Patience Escalier, is he still a peasant?”

“He is! It is a thing wondrous how that man wizardized us with his masterpieces left and right. It is beyond my poor proofs and scientifics. Art has its mysteriousness, eh, sir mister? We eat its dusts.”

Miller, though it struck him as an odd observation even at the moment he made it to himself, noticed that he was totally without appetite. Not even the burning, sour, transformed taste of his supper, still in his mouth from the bile he’d brought up when Dr. Rey had him cough, left him with even the most remote urge to clear it, neutralize it with a sip of water, the relief of gum. He guessed, too, that he’d had enough of Dr. Félix Rey.

Though he had complete, almost surprising, faith in Rey as a doctor, he understood that there’d been no reason to draw his blood, he understood that a sample of his pee would have revealed nothing of interest, and though Miller was as taken with his peculiar distinction (his residency in Van Gogh’s room at Arles) as the physician’s mad notion that in painting his great-great-grandfather, Van Gogh had somehow laid a spell on the great-great-grandson and fixed his fate forever. This, Miller realized, was probably not good medicine and he would have been content to bid the doctor goodnight and been permitted to turn the young man’s diagnosis (that he was weakly in spirit) and prognosis (that it would likely see him out his sojourn in Arles) over in his mind.

Then he noticed the muzzy class photo Félix Rey had given him and which he’d briefly examined and set down on the washstand. “You’ll want this,” he said and made to return it to the physician.

“Non non non. I insist not, Mr. Miller. It is yours to keep it. It is but a cheap trinket. The club makes them up.”

“Well,” he said, shifting, “thank you.” Miller, whose health, until Arles, had been so good he’d not had enough contact with doctors to understand that it was they rather than their patients who sent such signals, nevertheless hoped Rey had picked up enough English from the rubrics on his postcards — on this one, too, everything was in four languages — to guess by such shifts that their meeting was over.

As it happens he had.

Félix Rey rose from the rush-bottom chair beside Miller’s bed. “I shall see in on you again, Sir Mister Monsieur.”

“You don’t think you’d better leave me something to help me sleep?”

“What, pills?”

“Well sure, pills if you think that’s what I need.”

“An injection? Powders and sedatives?”

“You’re the doctor,” Miller said.

Félix Rey looked at him. “Did you know, Monsieur Mister, that it was to this chamber your neighbor called my great-great-grandfather on the night of the blood from the knife on his ear?”