Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“What,” Miller said, “because I asked you for something to help me sleep?”

“Does Mister have a gun?”

“If I had a gun do you think they’d have let me through airport security?”

“Knifes?”

“Please.”

“Ropes and poisons?”

“If I had any of that stuff what would I need with a sleeping pill?” Miller asked reasonably.

“Please,” said the doctor, “raise no hand against yourself. I know your position. You’ve nothing to fear from your position.”

“My position?”

“Your position, your bloom, your hale and your hardy. Your soul is a little sprained. It’s nothing. We see it all the time. If you like, I can ask them to alter your accommodations. It would be nothing.”

“My room? You mean my room? I like my accommodations, my accommodations suit me right down to the ground!” Miller shot back angrily, furiously really.

“Please? Suit you right down to the ground? Rest. Please Mister. I will see in on you.”

He was a country doctor, Miller reminded himself after Félix Rey had left. He was nothing but a country doctor. And a self-proclaimed curiosity. (Miller put him down as probably the president of that Sons of Van Gogh’s Subjects, or whatever it was, that he so liked going on about.) The Foundation probably called on him more for his language skills than for his medical ones.

What, Miller’s soul was sprained? He needed a doctor to tell him this? Ask the man who owns one! was all Miller had to say about it. And then the silly sod wouldn’t even leave him with a lousy sleeping pill to take a little of the edge off his god-awful wakefulness. What had he told him? Raise no hand against himself? This was his considered medical opinion? Well, thought Miller, we’ll just see about that! And then, to ease a little of that soul sprain and lift a little of the edge off that god-awful wakefulness, Miller, calling up images of Kaska Celli, got a wrong number, got Madame Ginoux instead (but who looked so like her) and, imagining the round, competent arms beneath the heavy sleeves of her thick black dress, raised a hand against himself and whacked off.

Gradually he lost track of the days, of the time he had been in Arles. On some days (though he couldn’t and wouldn’t have said whether the condition of his spirit and soul — how did hospitals put it? — was satisfactory or serious or critical) he went down to breakfast or even had the kitchen make up a box lunch for him to take with him on his ambles through Arles. One afternoon he walked by himself out to the olive orchard that Van Gogh had once painted and had his bread and cheese and bottle of wine and then settled down to sleep under the pale pink blossoms of its slender trees. (Where he dreamed of a wedding couple making a picnic of champagne and éclairs on the limestone coffins alongside the tall trees in Les Alyscamps where Rita had taken the Fellows on his first day in Arles. The groom was the peasant Patience Escalier, and his bride was Berceuse Roulin. They fed and toasted each other while Miller wept for the sweetness and sorrows of life. He wept into their champagne and wept over their éclairs, and when he woke up in the olive orchard he had a salty taste in his mouth, which even the last of his wine would not loosen.) Another time, without in the least knowing where he was headed, he found himself at the Arles-Bouc Canal where he came upon the Dutch-looking drawbridge of Van Gogh’s famous painting, vaguely resembling one of da Vinci’s sketches of a military device, some water catapult, say. Other times, however, he slept in, and couldn’t, at the end of the day, have said whether his spirit and soul were the better or worse for their lack of wear.

What he’d told his doctor (this is how he thought of Félix Rey, though it had been more than a week since he’d seen him) was true. His room at Arles suited him right down to the ground. He did no work on his project and his laptop PC remained unopened even to write the letters he had promised his pals back in Indianapolis. If he’d been able to bring himself to write any letters at all in that room they would have been to Theo, but Miller had no brother, let alone any Theo, and the idea of spilling the beans about himself to anyone else struck him, even after his performance in the music room, as an absurdity, even an act of hubris. (The one time he did turn on the laptop all he did was doodle, making odd designs and even faces out of the period, exclamation point, pound, asterisk, paragraph, section symbol, ampersand, dollar, slash, percentage, left and right bracket, single and double quote, plus, minus, cedilla, diacritical, tilde, hyphen, underscore, and other signs he did not know the name for on his keyboard. Alas, Miller thought as he turned off his PC, I’m no Van Gogh.)

On the whole, however, if only to avoid the Fellows’ questions, he usually chose to be away from Number 2 Lamartine Place more often than he chose to be in it.

So he would find himself — the weather had been amazing — outdoors, sometimes taking a bus to the edge of town and then striking off on his own. Or, if the bus went to some small village nearby, getting off there and then striking off. Once he rode all the way out to Saintes-Maries-de- la-Mer, about twenty-five miles from the city. When he stepped down from the bus and out into the dusty street (more a lane than a street) he had the sense of having been there before. Perhaps he had passed through on the coach during the long ride from Marseilles to Arles his first day in France. This might have been one of those places he’d been momentarily jolted awake and that had left him with his few rough impressions of that journey. But the name of the village was familiar, too. Surely he wouldn’t have retained that as well. While he was looking at the row of peculiar but quite beautiful cottages with their layers of tiered, dyed thatch like actual crops of roofs contoured into the architecture, and their whitewashed sides like thick stucco brushstrokes, it occurred to Miller that he had seen this street before. Not on the bus but in one of Vincent’s paintings. Then a wind blew up, filling his nose with the strong smell of brine. Of course! thought Miller, cuffing his head, suddenly recalling one of those first weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school. La plume de ma tante! It’s like riding a fucking bicycle! Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer! Nothing was wasted in life. Those vocabulary lists! He knew his French would come in handy one day. “Mer” means sea! Then, facing the wind, tracing the source of that brine, turning this way and that, going up one lane and down another, he came at last to a clearing from which he could see the Mediterranean and where there, on the beach, lined up it seemed to Miller almost exactly as they had been lined up in Van Gogh’s painting of the scene, were four pretty little fishing boats, one red, one green, and two blue, their anchors struck into the sand. Their owners were nowhere about. Indeed, except for one shining white gull, the only other signs of life were four other boats diminished in the distance in the Gulf of Lions.

He was not, Miller understood, a man given to epiphanies. Who, him? With his soured soul and sick spirit? Him, Miller, the man from Indy who — get his dumb aria and parlor-game melodramatics in the damn music room out of your head — had not once during all the times this or that had been “familiar” to him in this queer foreign country, not — count ’em — once ever put down to déjà vu or anything faintly psychological any of his creepy encounters and strange doings. Yet he had his epiphany now. It was this. All his rambles and maunderings of the last few days, all of them, why it was like being on a scavenger hunt! That’s it, that’s right, thought Miller, a scavenger hunt for Van Gogh’s sketches and watercolors and oils, this was what his half-ass project came to, this was what the meaning of his off-again, on-again raids into Arles and its countryside had turned out to be!