Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Don’t get so upset. It interferes with your work.”

“Oh yeah,” Miller said, “my work.”

“The whole deal is only five weeks,” Russell said sweetly, “it will all be over soon.”

“You should have seen them,” Miller said. “Compared to something like that, diddling myself is small potatoes.”

He’d shocked Russell but was sober enough to see that it wasn’t propriety or fastidiousness he had sinned against, it was decorum. And felt such a thrill of rage that he lashed out at his guest. “So what’s all this winking then? What’s that all about?”

“I’m sorry,” Russell said softly, “I have a tic.”

Oh my, thought Miller in his cups, now I’ve hurt his feelings. Russell, he saw, for all his credentials and lustrous, curricula-vitae’d life (this year, for example, he was not only Distinguished University Professor at the University of Bologna, they’d made him Chair of their philosophy department), would be unused to the aggressive, bluff roughneckery of someone like Miller. Why, to someone like Russell, Miller, Miller thought, probably represented the racketeer class, or, a step or so up or down, maybe the life force. My God, he thought, we? Ain’t that a kick in the ass? When it was the life force, or something so like it he didn’t even know a name for it — geography? squid ink on the noodles? — that gave him the heebie-jeebies in the first place.

But give the devil his due. He owed Russell an apology. He’d try to be more specific.

“You don’t want to get too near the light,” Miller told him. “You get too near the light you burn up. Rey and Maurice are examples. They never got over light proximity, they never got over the presumed heroism and idiosyncrasy of their circumstances. You should’ve seen them. Maurice is this little guy. He could have been a preemie. You don’t get a neck and arms like that unless you work at it. The son of a bitch must have bench-pressed a million pounds in his time. He had to have spent half his life in gyms. And Dr. Rey? You think mustaches like that grow on trees? And you can’t tell me determinism made him go for a doctor. It was determination. They started out, or rather somebody started out for them, as simple flukes of art. They bought into all that. They ain’t mountebanks. Hell, Russell, they’re not even clowns. Clowns on velvet, that’s another story, but chiefly they came too near the light is all.” He was breathing heavily now. He was in a damn state. He was in such a sweating, breathless, stupid damn state he almost felt someone ought to take his stupid damn picture.

Is that specific enough for you? he wondered. Is that enough of an apology?

Miller didn’t notice until it had already passed that he’d had his birthday. One morning he woke up and realized he’d been thirty-seven years old for about a week. A person who’d always been as conscious of his age as others of their weight or appearance, it struck him as extraordinary, strange, and fantastic that he’d failed to observe the occasion. The word wasn’t casually chosen. Birthdays for Miller were, quite literally, red-letter days, occasions. Nor did it matter if others made no fuss over him. He wasn’t looking for a fuss. He wasn’t looking for cards or telegrams or presents or special treats. He didn’t hang around waiting for long-distance phone calls. He didn’t take the day off. He didn’t celebrate his birthdays so much as pay attention to them, sit up and take notice, all eyes and all ears. Turning thirty-seven after being thirty-six was as qualitatively different to Miller as turning ten after being nine. Only now, having missed turning thirty-seven, he’d never really know, would he, and that was just one more mark Miller could set down next to Arles. It was as if he’d failed to take note of the change of season, like finding oneself in winter without passing through summer.

He’d begun to work on his project after his meeting with

Russell but that had little to do with the reason he’d missed his birthday. Indeed, rather than its giving him pleasure to be at last engaged on the work that had been the ostensible reason for his presence at Arles, he found his labors as dispiriting as he had found the burden of sharing Van Gogh’s environment and sleeping in Van Gogh’s bed and going about his business in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. He wasn’t inspired, he’d made no resolutions, turned over no new leaf. Simply, one morning he came across the piece of paper he’d slipped into the pocket of his pants that day in the music room when he’d voluntarily come out of Coventry and written down the union-movement guy’s remark about the high priority community colleges gave to language labs, and Ms. Neil-Cheshi’s not inaccurate observation that of all educational institutions, junior colleges seemed determined to make the most efficient use of their physical plants. He punched these thoughts into the laptop PC and turned them over and over in his mind.

Time didn’t pass in the blink of an eye. He didn’t fall into a rapture. This was his research. The comments became the basic building blocks of his paper, not its inspiration so much as the sandy irritant slipped into an oyster that might, over time, accrue into a pearl. Joylessly he developed an outline, joylessly he revised and expanded it. Tediously he pushed his thin thesis, padding it almost to the breaking point. Listlessly he began to write, affectlessly to realize that he might actually produce enough material in the days he had left in Van Gogh’s room at Arles to make it back to Indianapolis undisgraced. Distractedly he invented sources, quotes, footnotes, taking no pleasure in the fact of the fraud he was perpetrating, or in his certainty it was all so very bloodless that it would probably go undetected — if it ever was — for years after he’d been made Full Professor, and that since he had no intention to publish, by the time he was discovered — if he was — they’d do nothing about it.

And this was the way Miller stuck it out, getting through almost his last days in Arles until almost the time he had to do his final laundry, return the unused portion of his roundtrip ticket to the bus company, and buy a ride to Marseilles on le train grand vitesse (he’d learned something in Europe, it hadn’t been a total loss), get ready, that is, to do those last things people do when they’re ready to break camp. (And with just that increment of sadness and regret that descends like a curtain whenever one experience, no matter how negative or disagreeable it may have been, is about to pass over into another— the woe of endings, the death of death.) So that, in a way, he was too busy or just too anxious to work on his project and he abandoned it as abruptly as it was begun.

Which left him, after the day’s small chores (settling accounts with Rita at the inn’s front desk — the astonishing hundred-twenty-seven-dollar phone bill she said he owed because of the three relatively brief calls she’d put through to Indianapolis to his pals in lieu of the promised postcards he’d failed to send, the letters he’d been unable to write; the thirty-five due for a group photograph of the Fellows she’d taken and said she’d send on to America after it was developed; the forty-four she told him was still outstanding for odds and ends— the two hundred-and-six-buck grand total, which once he paid would square him with France with just enough left over to tip Georges, the waiters and housekeepers, and leave him with a few dollars for some cheap souvenirs and maybe a carton of duty-free Gaulois to take with him back on the airplane), with a little time to actually socialize.

Rita stood up one night at the end of the evening meal, lightly tapped her water glass with a knife, and made an announcement. Madame Celli had left Arles to be with her son and his family who would be arriving in Paris the following morning from Canada. It was her son’s holidays and Madame was going to travel with him, his wife, and their two young children to Ngozitnlabad where they were to join a tour that would take them to islands all along the East Coast of Africa. Miller, who hadn’t known of Madame Celli’s son, or of the son’s wife, or that they had children, or that Madame C. was a grandmother, was shocked. Birthday or no birthday he was still a young man and he felt a little betrayed, a little done in, worked over, roughed up. All that passion and reverie, he thought wincing, spent on a grandmère.