Stanley Elkin: Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“You mustn’t say that. You’re hardly a cripple,” the salesman said. “You know how to cope. I hope I cope half as well as you do if I’m ever handicapped.”

“Well,” said Schiff, “in any event. I wasn’t able to bring it with me when I came down. If someone could just get it for me?”

“No problem,” Bill said. “Your room is—?”

“First door on the left, top of the stairs.”

Which left him alone in the living room with Jenny. She seemed shy for someone who worked with Bill. Stuck for something to say, she grinned at him goofily. It occurred to him she was embarrassed by everything she already knew about him. Bold cop, shy cop. Schiff poked around, looking for something he could say to put her at ease.

“I had you for a professor,” Jenny told him.

Schiff felt himself flush, a stain of red discovery cross his features.

“I don’t blame her,” he blurted. “Not for a minute. She should have done it years ago. I would’ve. In her place I would’ve. No one owes anyone that kind of loyalty.”

Before either of them could recover Bill was back with Schiff’s phone. “There you go,” he said.

“Thank you,” Schiff said, “thanks.”

“No problem. It was just where you said. You give very good directions.”

Schiff waited impatiently while Bill explained what was going to happen, that he and Jenny were going to go over the house looking for the best spots to install their relays. He had his notes, he said, he just wanted to make sure they hadn’t overlooked anything. “For example,” Bill said, “I notice the house has a third floor.”

“I’m never up there.”

“Well, I know,” Bill said, “but can’t you conceive of a circumstance which might bring you up there?”

“There’s no Stair-Glide. I couldn’t get to the third floor if I wanted to.”

“What about the basement, what if something went wrong in the basement? If the furnace went out, or, God forbid, your storm drains clogged and you had severe water damage?”

“Same thing,” Schiff said, “no Stair-Glide.”

“Well, sure,” said Bill. “I’m not prying. That’s just the sort of thing the corporation has to find out about if it’s to render its services properly. Also, I’ll tell you something, we have to cover our behind. If something happened to a client in an area of the house we overlooked or failed to warn him he was vulnerable we could be looking at a pretty good lawsuit.”

“I consider myself warned,” Schiff said, getting a little cranky now, the charm of being sold to having worn off, and oppressed by all he had yet to do.

Bill chuckled. “Well, I know,” he said, “and I hope you don’t mind putting your signature to that when we close the deal.”

“I have to sign a consent form? Like you’re my surgeon? Like you’re operating on me?”

“It’s for both our protections,” Bill said in exactly the same tone of voice Schiff often used in class when he had to explain something. He turned to his partner. “What do you say, Jenny? We start down here?”

Shit, Schiff thought, fingering his bank statements, getting anxious now, feeling suddenly rushed, hurried, his oppression compounding into a sort of spiritual indigestion he could almost feel.

Now see, he told himself, that’s exactly what I meant about farce. He was furious he had to call the bank while S.O.S. was there, more outraged than by his condition itself, than by Claire’s leaving. It wasn’t fair. It was none of the corporation’s business that his wife might have plundered their accounts. It was that straw that breaks that camel’s back. He waited for them to clear out of the living room, which they went over, deliberate as sappers. Maybe she’d been his student when he still taught undergraduates. But that was just what he meant, too. It wasn’t just her odd garment that threw him off the scent. He simply didn’t know these people. His students, he meant. It wasn’t even only that they failed to keep in touch. They weren’t in touch to begin with. Many of his colleagues’ former students were like family. They had pictures of the people their students had married, of their kids. Also, it a little depressed Schiff to see one of his old students got up in coveralls, doing, he didn’t care how much electronics she probably knew, a sort of manual labor. It was a long way from political geography, from the high ground of pure theory, the strictly hands-off of scholarship and the sheer delicious luxury of an arcane discipline. Schiff knew professors of painting whose students had pictures hanging in museums, business profs with kids who were CEOs. It diminished already diminished old Schiff that he couldn’t think of a single one of his students who’d gone on in the field. He taught graduate students pursuing advanced degrees in history, in poli sci, and many of them had distinguished careers, but Schiff kept up, he knew the people in his field, hotshots in Washington think tanks many of them, high-ups in the CIA, consultants to or officials in the Census Bureau, advisers to Rand- McNally, the publishers of other important atlases, and couldn’t think of anyone who’d been in one of his classes who was a practicing political geographer. They were probably waiters, he thought, drivers in the taxicab trade very likely, or, like Miss Simmons here, got up like people you see when your airplane has landed, signaling jets to the gate.

They left the living room and moved through the rest of the first floor, going into the dining room, Schiff’s kitchen, his half bath, the small storage area at the rear of his house where the backdoor opened out onto the porch, the small in-ground pool.

Schiff waited until he heard their steps on the stairs. Then, cupping his hand over the speaker, he lowered his voice and asked Information for the bank’s phone number. Even as was doing so he saw it, plain as the nose, right there on the statement. It would have been too much trouble to tell the operator that never mind, forget it, he’d found it (never mind, forget it, more farce), so he waited for the little mechanical recitation to come on and dutifully checked it against the phone number on the statement.

Now that he could give them their account number (sotto voce, as sotto as he could make it and still be heard, so sotto, in fact, that he sounded suspicious even to himself), the bank was nice as pie. Too nice, you asked him. He could have been anyone. He was upset with them that they’d just hand out information like that. He even thought he recognized the voice, that it belonged to the religious zealot he’d spoken to earlier. Now here it was again, giving out inside info on him like there was no tomorrow. Taking his substance in vain. Which, even in his pique, he was pleased to learn Claire had made no inroads on. He called their other banks, the one where they did their checking, the one used for the trust-fund account.

Which couldn’t have been more cooperative, sir, pleased to provide him with that information, sir, yes sir, connected with an employee who might, Schiff felt, had he only asked for them, have called out the intimate weights and measures of anyone who’d ever done business with the bank, not only to the last penny but right down to the last overdraft, the last bounced check. Not only was money fungible, apparently an account number, any account number was too, or maybe just any five random digits, like figures on a Bingo card. He felt like a government agency. He felt like a car dealer, Jack Schiff Oldsmobile, say, calling for the lowdown on a would-be customer.

He probably wouldn’t have felt this way (or felt anything more than a little surprised) if just at that moment, the very moment when the bank’s teller, or clerk, or paid professional informer, was singing out Schiff’s bottom lines, bright, clear, and brassy as a belter on Broadway stopping the show, someone somewhere in the house hadn’t picked up an extension.