Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“It leaves wind,” her husband put in.

“It clouds men’s minds,” Inga said.

Committing voluntary truth against themselves like people turning state’s evidence. All of them, all, all abandoned and vulnerable as so many summer houses in the winter.

Jesus Hans, statistics advisor to the third world, running his mouth at the back of the bus.

“I’m from Cali. They know you’re Colombian they want to dance you, they want love songs and good moves, that you give them dips. Famine girls from the horn of Africa.

“I give old Kleist due. Hey, two mistresses? He worries about gifts because he’s an ancient, sentimental guy from the old school.

“I have two sweet daughters, a wonderful wife who fucks like a mink. Better than my girlfriends even. She holds no candles to that Rita though.”

Not Miller, Miller thought. Count Miller out, Miller thought. Keep your mystery, thought stunned Miller. Hold on tight to your famous poker-puss heart. Don’t give them a thing, not a thing. I gave at the office, Miller thought. I gave and gave out in the music room. Don’t, Miller thought. Don’t tell them you jerk off to ghosts and grandmas.

And held his tongue all the way to Cannes.

Which was still France, still Europe, only no longer Van Gogh’s Europe.

The brother-in-law drove the big bus right up to what must have been one of the newest, grandest hotels in town. He opened the doors, waited until his passengers descended, then descended himself and casually tossed his bus keys to a broad, magnificent doorman, splendidly attired in what vaguely reminded Miller of the Zouave’s uniform in Van Gogh’s painting. The doorman handed the keys to a young man who was actually going to valet-park the damn bus, for God’s sake. Somehow this seemed the strangest, most extravagant thing Miller had ever seen.

“We’ll cross the boulevard,” Rita said. “There’s the most marvelous café right on the beach. We’ll have a coffee there, freshen up in their facilities, and decide what we must do.”

The air was ferociously bright. Hot and clear and bright. Miller felt the lack of sunglasses. As palpably as he might have felt the absence of an umbrella in a rainstorm.

White yachts rode at anchor. Barebreasted, girls swam out from the beach and climbed rope ladders hanging down over the sides like a kind of nautical laundry. They boarded the yachts like dream pirates. A hundred feet off, women lay supine, topless in the powdery sand, their breasts sexlessly flattened against their chests.

Salads, fruits, parfaits of bright ice creams. Careful clusters of color on black wrought-iron tables in the beach café. Miller greedily studied his menu. He demanded that Russell translate everything for him. He loved being in an outdoor café on a beach in Cannes. He didn’t want to ruin it by choosing the wrong food. At last he made his decision.

The waiter brought him long cold spears of kelly-green asparagus topped with two perfectly fried eggs. There was the best iced coffee he had ever tasted. For dessert he had a peeled pear that had been sliced and reassembled into a sort of fruit fan. It was spread out on a plate buttered with a dark chocolate sauce.

“That was wonderful,” Miller said.

“It looked wonderful,” Inga Basset said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t order it,” Samuels Kleist said.

Her brother-in-law lazily hung an arm across Rita’s shoulders. Jesus winked at the bus driver.

While they waited for each other to finish their lunches, the members of the Misanthrope cast gossiped about some of the absent actors. They agreed that Derek Philips was much too serious and that Meyers Herman tended to mumble his words. They wondered how he’d ever manage to be heard in the huge amphitheater.

“He’s musch too shy,” Sir Ehrnst Riglin said.

“Yet he has the best accent,” said Yalom Basset. “Don’t you think so, Rita?”

“He has a good accent,” Rita said.

“But if he can’t be heard?” Sir Ehrnst said.

“You’re forgetting about the sound system Rita’s organizing for us,” Heidi Lear said.

Miller wasn’t sorry he’d be missing their performance though he was upset that Hartshine might be staying behind to see it. Meanwhile, while they carried on about Meyers Herman’s accent (he hadn’t met the man, he didn’t even recognize the name), Miller listened to someone at the next table who spoke a sort of agitated, gossip-column English in which people planed about the globe, trained from one country to the next, and cabbed through its cities. Idly, he wondered what happened to such people in accidents, whether they were ambulanced to hospitals down whose halls they were gurneyed to operating rooms. The fellow to whom the first man was speaking said “ecomony” for economy and pronounced the b in debt.

Such people were comic and, however idiosyncratic, types. Miller wasn’t amused by them. He was, he thought, a type himself. So, for all their honors and dramatic three- quarter and full-column entries in Who’s Who, were the Fellows. And momentarily flashed on Van Gogh’s vacant, heartbreaking room at Arles.

They had finished lunch and were parsing the bill. Miller owed the most, and, after he paid, saw that he was down to his last twenty dollars in francs. He had forty dollars more in traveler’s checks. Even if he watched his money carefully he realized he probably wouldn’t have enough left over to rent headphones to watch the movie on the flight back.

And now they discussed the groups into which they would break up so as to make the most of their time. Heidi, Robert, and the Bassets would do the rounds of shops, booths, and hotels to see what they could find for the costumes. Jesus Hans invited Rita to a hotel he knew of that gave, he said, a splendid late-afternoon tea dance, but Heidi wanted her with her on the shopping expedition. Jesus shrugged and said no problem-o, he’d go by himself. Despite Samuels Kleist’s surprising confessions to them on the bus, he told the group — how this worked wasn’t clear to Miller — it would be both a betrayal of his wife and his mistresses should he permit them to be in on the actual purchase of the mistresses’ gifts. Sir Ehrnst Riglin had made arrangements to meet with three members of the Swedish Royal Family who happened to be in town that week. Russell and Hartshine decided to take in the flick that was touted to win the palme d’or at the festival that year. Russell invited Miller to come with, but Miller, doling francs, said it was too nice a day to spend inside a theater and told them to go on, he thought he’d just take in the sights. Everyone agreed to meet back at the hotel by seven. That gave them just over four hours.

Miller watched as Rita and the nine Fellows struck out in their various directions, watched until they disappeared, and then, wordlessly started to walk alongside the brother- in-law.

They strolled for a bit on the wide white sidewalk that ran parallel to the beach. Everywhere around them, on towels and blankets, on flimsy canvas beach chairs or sitting in the sand, men and women gave themselves up to the sun, offering, venturing, compromising, accommodating, and finally surrendering almost their entire bodies to the forces of this charged place, only, it seemed to Miller, reserving to themselves a sort of ultimate modesty of wall-like indifference, somehow bolder — certainly more heartless — than Miller’s or the brother-in-law’s prurient but furtive sightseeing. It was like a contest of wills for which neither Miller nor the brother-in-law either (no matter he’d so ostentatiously draped his arm about his sister-in-law’s shoulders) had much stomach. They were humiliated by the seminude bodies of the women and embarrassed by the lewd assertion of the men’s genitalia inside their bikinis, and Miller was not surprised when his companion abruptly broke off and crossed the boulevard at an oblique angle to the gawking, slow-moving traffic.