Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Of Robert and Heidi Lear he knew nothing at all, not even their disciplines (or whether they worked in tandem). What he had against them was that of all the people with whom he’d come into contact at Arles, Robert Lear was the only Fellow he actively disliked. This went back to an incident he’d observed in the music room. There’d been a bridge game one evening. Miller didn’t play bridge, of course, hadn’t enough knowledge of its rules even to kibitz. One of the other players — he couldn’t remember his name, the man was gone now — had asked Robert, aside from Miller the room’s only other smoker, if he might borrow one of his cigarettes. Robert had visibly hesitated.

“It’s not your brand,” Robert said.

“Oh,” said the guy, “that’s all right. I’ve run out. I’ve just had dinner. I’d smoke anything.”

Robert hesitated again, frowned, and then finally, reluctantly, retrieved a cigarette from what seemed to Miller like a full pack and pushed it a little way across the table toward the bridge player. In about an hour the man asked if he could borrow a second cigarette. Robert frowned, scowled, openly sighed, and shook one from what now looked to be a considerably diminished pack.

What Miller held against Heidi was that she was married to Robert.

On the night before he was to leave, the bridge player appeared in the music room. He was holding a carton of cigarettes. They were Robert Lear’s brand. He brought it to the chair in which Lear was sitting and handed the carton to him. “Smoke them all in one place, why don’t you?” he said and left the room.

Miller was scandalized. As much as he disliked Lear, he was astonished that anyone could be rude to someone who’d received the Foundation’s blessing and been invited to Arles. Indeed, though he was still shy, reserved, and even guarded with everyone else, he made at least a little effort, in spite of the fact that the Lears didn’t seem to welcome or even notice it, to be forthcoming with them.

It was Heidi Lear, in fact, who seemed to have invented the scheme for their trip to Cannes. Miller learned of this only on the bus that morning.

The trip was designed, at least in part, to be a sort of shopping expedition. Although Miller, Russell, and Hartshine would miss it, the Fellows were going to do a play reading the following week — in French — of The Misanthrope. Heidi had approached Rita to see if it was possible to procure the amphitheater one afternoon for their little production. Rita thought the idea of a play reading a good one and came up almost immediately with an even more ambitious proposal. Why not, she suggested, have the reading at night in the amphitheater? Why not invite the townspeople of Arles, why not take advantage of the stadium’s lights and sound system? She thought she could arrange it so the entire evening wouldn’t cost them more than, oh, fifty dollars a person.

They jumped at it. They jumped, too, at Heidi Lear’s additional embellishments. She thought the actors should be in costume. Oh, nothing elaborate of course. It was too late for anything fine, but Heidi had been associated for just years and years with socio-theatrics. That was her field, socio-theatrics— theatrical therapies for prisoners, old people in homes, the dying in hospices, as well as individuals who found themselves temporarily thrown together in groups like the one the Foundation had assembled in Arles. It was how she’d met Robert (whose field it turned out was the inventorying of eighteenth-century houses). She was, at least according to Robert Lear (whose testimony in his wife’s behalf was the first indication of generosity Miller had seen in him), this genius of the make-do and at-hand. A wizard of odds and ends.

Thus the shopping expedition to Cannes. For props and stuffs and materials. For the building blocks of all impromptu improvisation and inspired, makeshift arrangement. They would hit up the hotels, the special booths and shops a town like Cannes with its annual film festival and concomitant obligations to make the sets and adjust to the needs of some eleventh-hour show business would be sure to have.

On the trip out that morning the coach was abuzz with plans for the upcoming show. Even Rita was excited, and Paul Hartshine (who was wearing his big print bow tie) had practically made up his mind to change his reservations and stay on at a hotel in Arles until after the performance. Russell said he would have stayed on too but that Bologna was paying him $200,000 for the year, and he was, at least putatively, Departmental Chair. Also, he’d already been away five weeks from a sinecure essentially carved out for him. They were nice people. He oughtn’t, he thought, take advantage, he mustn’t, he felt, hurt their feelings. Much as he might want to hang around and take in their Misanthrope leaving was the honorable thing to do.

“Two hundred thousand?” Miller said.

Russell looked at the scenery.

Miller was astonished at how excited they were. Him too. It seemed odd that he, of all of them the most frivolous, the one with probably the least good reason to be there, should be the one under the greatest obligation to leave, to go home to what was only Booth Tarkington Community College in what was only Indianapolis in what was merely the State of Indiana, to get down to work at last on what was plainly the flimsiest of projects.

It astonished him too how all this (about the real purpose of the trip to Cannes; about the Lears, Heidi’s talents, Robert’s devotion; about Hartshine’s decision to stay on; Rita’s genuine enthusiasm; Russell’s salary) came out on the bus. Other things too. Something ad hoc and original and abandoned in all of them, their lives made suddenly available, opened up like responses to the sunshine laws or the rules of discovery. Sir Ehrnst, for example, the history of history man from Uppsala, admitted that he never read his students’ papers. He distributed grades solely on the basis of his first impressions of how they dressed, if they wore glasses, whether they looked scholarly, how he expected they would strike a class of their own graduate students, sometimes on nothing more than how they smelled— their colognes, their aftershaves and toilet waters, whether they seemed cloying. And old Samuels Kleist, whose wife was feeling too ill to make the trip with them to Cannes (and who, though he knew of her existence, Miller had never seen because she remained, to hear Kleist tell it, who, indeed, fetched her her breakfasts — bran muffins, an orange, tea— her lunches and suppers), was in love, had not one but two mistresses installed in a pair of his cliff dwellings back in New Mexico, and was on his way to Cannes to buy presents for both ladies. Though he had no idea, he gushed, what either of them wanted from France, no notion, God help him, of their sizes. Both drank wine, loved wine. If he could find a specially designed label with a pretty view of the beach at Cannes, the great architect said, a half-dozen bottles like that might be the very thing. He never touched the stuff himself, he said. Neither did his wife. Where could he hide them so they wouldn’t be discovered? He asked for suggestions.

“Ship them,” Inga Basset suggested, “have them shipped.”

“That’s so impersonal,” Samuels Kleist said.

“Get them head scarves,” Sir Ehrnst Riglin said. “You can line a head scarf inside your trouser cuff or stuff it up the sleeve of your jacket.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Kleist said.

And Yalom and Inga Basset, the drive-time psychiatrists, were openly contemptuous of the creatures who called them for help, contemptuous, even scurrilous, about psychiatry itself.

“It’s a crock,” Yalom Basset said.

“It’s gas in your pants,” said Inga, a slim, fit-looking woman in her forties, handsome and rakish in a Borsalino hat, a cigarillo in her lips, one eye squint shut against its smoke like the face of an experienced card player.