Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Miller started toward the demob’d legionnaire.

“Monsieur Miller Mister!” Félix Rey cried out suddenly. Miller, startled, pulled up short, his first thought not Watch it, he has a gun, but Careful, he has a knife! “Si’l vous plaît, Miller, please,” the doctor said, and Miller, turning, saw that Rey was holding a camera, that he was taking a picture, aiming the camera at the fierce, posing Zouave.

Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, his heart hammering at him in ways familiar to him only from his heavy, bad- blooded performances in the pickup handball and basketball games in the Indianapolis gyms, Miller felt a kind of fury that Rey and Maurice seemed not only indifferent to but totally unaware of his presence, that he had become irrelevant not merely as a man but — his flushed skin, his racing pulse, his pounding heart — as a patient. And, what was even more important, as the proper tenant of this room as they made their fanatical snapshots of each other.

They left only when they were out of film.

He woke the next day remembering that there was something he had to do. When he saw them he asked the maids— neither spoke English — for un packette, la petite packette — he did not know the French for “box”—and made clipped, angular gestures with his hands. He gestured wrapping paper, he gestured string. To Miller’s total surprise the box, paper, and string, in precisely the proportions he’d stipulated, were waiting for him on his bed when he returned after lunch to Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Miller went to the drawer in which he had been keeping it and, carefully folding Hartshine’s big bow tie, placed it in the box, wrapped it in the paper, and tied it with the string. He printed Paul Hartshine’s name neatly across the front of the discrete little package and took it to the desk at the inn.

“Please see that Mr. Hartshine gets this,” he told Rita (with whom he was still so miffed he was absolutely unable to invent a convincing enough scenario to which he could jerk off). “I think it’s his ear.”

Having completed his errand, he felt a curious, off-center, but unsatisfactory and incomplete sense of relief.

In the days following he wanted to try to explain his feelings about Arles. Surely among all these infinity specialists, why-the-chicken-crossed-the-road investigators, and big- bad-wolf revisionists, along with all the other heavy hitters (one of the Fellows was writing a psychological biography of God), there must be someone who could explain why Miller was having such a heavy time of it here, why he was experiencing all this complicated shit, a big, raw-boned, straw-in-the-mouth, normally merry-go-lucky like himself.

Then, as sometimes occurs in the short range for the short range, an opportunity arose as he was leaving the night café one evening. Russell had fallen into step beside him.

“How are you?” Russell said. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, but whenever I had my chances you were either in the music room apparently locked up in your thoughts or I’ve been too busy with my own. Would this be a good time?”

“Oh yes,” Miller said, and he and Russell walked out of the inn, crossed the square together, and entered the small yellow house. Russell followed him up the stairs to the room.

He invited Russell to sit and went to the chest of drawers where he kept the not inconsiderable stash of booze that he had put together from the time of his day trips around Arles. “There’s some gin left,” he said, “and a little scotch and vodka, and here’s a bottle of one of those poofy apéritifs that Georges serves us. What’s your pleasure?”

“Well, I don’t really drink,” Russell said, “but I see that you do, so I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Miller looked at him to see if this was a shot. Russell gazed benignly back at him and winked.

“I’m having,” Miller said, “I’m having all of it, this sort of alcohol cassoulet.” He poured off about four inches of gin, scotch, vodka, and liqueur into the pitcher in the basin on the washstand, swirled it around, and filled first Russell’s water tumbler and then his own. He held out his glass. “To him!” Miller offered.

“To him,” said Russell mildly, and raised his glass too.

“It’s not because this is my first trip to Europe or anything,” Miller said. “I mean what’s that? That’s just geography. Geography’s no big deal.”

“No,” Russell said, “it isn’t.”

“I don’t even think it’s because I’m in over my head. I mean over my head’s geography too,” he giggled. So I ain’t the fastest gun in western civilization. Who cares about that? I don’t care about that.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I don’t.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “There’s plenty around who aren’t a whole bunch faster than me if you want to know. Because the last I heard a taste for squid ink over your noodles isn’t necessarily a sign of a state of grace. That’s all right, Russell,” he said, “you’re a good sport. You don’t have to finish it if it tastes too much like piss. Set it down, I don’t mind.”

“I told you,” Russell said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

“That’s good,” Miller admitted, “that’s a good thing. You cultivate your palate. You educate your taste. You live and you learn. That’s good. Because between you me and the lamppost my palate was cultivated years back. Shit, Russell, after chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, it’s all wog food to me. Wait a minute, let me get rid of this.” He poured the rest of his drink into the basin in which the pitcher was standing. “It’s pretty foul,” Miller said, “I have to admit it. Who am I trying to impress? Can I give you something else?”

“I’m fine,” Russell said. He’d already finished over half his glass. He seemed unaffected.

While Miller, the drinker in the outfit, who’d barely managed to get down more than a few sips, was unable to stop talking. It wasn’t, he thought, a matter of in vino veritas (or scotcho or vodko) so much as the fact of company. “I had this visit,” he blurted. “I think something’s up between Rey and the fierce Zouave.”

The really astonishing thing as far as Miller was concerned was that he didn’t have to explain his terms. No more than he’d had to elucidate whom he’d meant when he’d raised his glass to him. It was one thing to come on all abnegant modesty and disclaimer, boasting (as it were) his ignorance and submissive second fiddlehood, but another altogether to get up into the very face of genius. It didn’t make one humble (and wasn’t Russell, right here and right now, showing him — albeit merely by Russell being Russell, by forsaking agenda, by what he did with poor Miller’s gag drink — what it was like in actual real time to educate one’s taste, to live and to learn?), it quite made one breathless with despair. It was rather like watching synapses spark and blossom in a visible brain. It was all right, as he’d said, not to be the fastest gun in western civilization, but for only so long as no legitimate claimant to the title was around. It was something like that, he wanted to tell Russell, that put him off about this whole Van Gogh’s-room-at-Arles thing, but, when he tried, it came out snarled, garbled, artlessly done. It came out— gossip.

“I mean,” Miller went on helplessly, “they were taking each other’s pictures, for Christ’s sake. Snap. Snap snap. Setting the goddamn thingumabob on the camera and dashing across the room so they could be together for the photograph. They’d have posed on the bed if I wasn’t here. Their forebears and great-greats sat for their fucking portraits for him! Some fierce Zouave that guy must be,” Miller said. “I bet they kicked his old ass out of the Foreign Legion!”