Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Russell wanted to know if he could buy Miller a farewell drink.

“What? No. Of course not,” Miller objected, openly resentful but helpless, and realizing even as he spoke to them how his protests must have sounded, how transparent his franc doling must seem to them.

“Gosh,” Russell said, “they’ve brought the bus round. I think I’ll go to the gents before we have to board. You, Hartshine? No, you went just before Miller showed up, didn’t you? Miller? No? Be right with you then.”

When Russell left, Miller sat awkwardly before Hartshine. He had no idea what to say to him. However difficult it was to keep from spilling the magic beans he’d picked up that afternoon at the tea dance (and which would have served to patch over not only the terrible silence between them but their awful breach as well), he was determined to say nothing about it. It wasn’t his honor that was at stake. Miller didn’t care a damn for his honor. It wasn’t even that his silence now could do anything to abate the devastating disclosures — and the cloud he’d since lived under — he’d made in the music room. Nor had Miller any illusions he was protecting anyone. This particular cat would be out of the bag before the evening was out. The brother-in-law would see to that. He’d tell Rita what they’d seen as soon as it was convenient.

No, what Miller did now (or did not do) he did for Van Gogh, for Van Gogh and the privilege of Arles. He did it, he meant (or did not do it), because he could not do it justice, because in his mouth the immense, incredible, stunning thing he’d seen would have been reduced to mere gossip.

He stared at Hartshine.

“You think Bologna really pays him two hundred grand?” he said at last.

“Why do you ask me this?” Harshine said. “You think because I’m Jewish I have an interest in such questions? I’m a scholar!”

“Go fuck yourself, Hartshine,” Miller said. “Go fuck yourself and kiss my Hoosier ass,” he said.

He got up from the table and went to board the bus. He passed the brother-in-law without a glance, picked up the carton of fruits and vegetables the man had set down on an aisle seat, moved it to the window seat, and sat in the aisle seat himself. With his eyes almost shut and pretending to sleep, with his eyes almost shut so all he could see shoot past his window were objects drained of definition and color in an illusion of speed, he managed to ride all the way back to Arles without saying a word to anyone.

Late on the night before Miller left Arles, someone rapped on his door. He straightened up and looked from where he was stooped over his things, packing the last of them into the suitcase open on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. He thought twice before answering the uncivilized knock, a sound so persistent it didn’t seem to have had any beginning. He looked toward the noise and wondered who could be making it. Russell had already left town and was almost certainly in Bologna by now. He didn’t think it could be Hartshine, seeking some rough reconciliation.

“Yes?” he said finally. “Yes?”

“Ah,” said Félix Rey on the other side of the door, “the good professor is in. We have not lost him.”

“I’m packing,” Miller said. “My train leaves first thing in the morning. It’s very late, I haven’t finished packing.”

“We will help you, Professor Monsieur. With three of us it will go by in a dream.”

“It’s awfully late,” Miller said. “I’m dog-tired.”

He hadn’t actually identified himself yet, Miller was thinking. If I can just hang tough until the man goes away and pretend not to know who it is, Miller was thinking, it can’t, on some technical level at least, be considered rudeness.

But at that point the physician not only resumed his knocking, he also formally announced himself.

“It’s your médecin, Monsieur Professor American. It’s Dr. Félix Rey and a friend.”

“All right,” Miller said at last, giving in. He opened the door.

“What?” Miller said. “What?”

The physician was drunk, his prominent ears, redder even than he remembered, were flush, filled with blood. His clothes were disheveled, and even his brushcut hair and handlebar mustache seemed mussed, his plucked eyebrows. His full, fat Kewpie doll lips were slack. He was giggling.

Coming into the room Félix Rey extended his hand in greeting, but when Miller put out his own to shake it the doctor brushed it away and took Miller’s wrist as if feeling for a pulse. He mimed shining an imaginary penlight into Miller’s eyes and ears. He leaned into Miller’s chest and, cupping his ear, pretended to listen to his heart. Miller, who had the private drinker’s disdain for acts of public drunkenness, twisted away from him, causing Rey to stumble. It wasn’t until she laughed that Miller was aware that there was a woman in the room.

“May I,” said the doctor, “have the honor to represent to the American Mister Monsieur my very good friend, L’Arlésienne— the incomparable and very beautiful Madame

Ginoux.”

She was the woman in the black-and-white photograph on the postcard Félix Rey had given him (the one who so resembled Kaska Celli), the woman whose image he had once called upon in one of his masturbatory flights. Almost as if she might have been conscious of this, Miller looked down.

“I am so very happy, sir,” Madame Ginoux said. “The doctor has spoke.”

“It’s good to meet you,” Miller said.

Then the woman did an odd thing. Bending her left arm at the elbow she lightly pressed the knuckles of her pale hand alongside her face in a sort of pensive salute. Miller identified the gesture at once. It was exactly as Van Gogh has posed her antecedent in his portrait more than a hundred years earlier. Madame Ginoux had the same long, wide nose as the woman in the portrait, the same blue eyes and black, black hair (so black, thought Miller, she had to have worked thick dark dyes into it) as Vincent’s model, and had gone so far as to affect her nineteenth-century costume right down to an almost identical white tulle jabot that she’d attached down the front of her full Prussian-blue dress. She had painted in almost punk-red eyelids and etched sharply defined lips above her wide, flat mouth.

Madame Ginoux, L’Arlésienne, was a hooker or his name wasn’t Miller, Miller thought.

“It was good of you to stop by,” he told the doctor. “Gee,” he said, “my time here’s passed by so quickly. I hadn’t realized. You think you’ve all the time in the world. That’s always a mistake. First thing you know you’re trying to pack so you can get some sleep and still get up and make an early train that will get you to Marseilles in time to check your bags through to America and clear Douane and get to the duty-free before your plane takes off without you and leaves you all high and dry in a foreign country with nothing to do but hang around the airport for another twenty- four hours looking at the newspapers and trying to figure out from the photograph what the story is about. So thanks for helping me out when I passed out that time, and for the postcard, and for introducing me to your friends. Goodnight, Dr. Rey. Goodnight and goodbye. It was a pleasure to meet you, Madame Ginoux. The doctor has spoke.”

He had practically pushed them out of the room. He didn’t know what this was all about. He didn’t at all understand Félix Rey’s motives or the meaning of all their disguises, the complicated costume party and tableaux vivants of their shutdown lives, but whatever it was he knew it could not be wholesome, Yet whose life is, Miller wondered, and where do I get off? And without knowing what he was up to quite suddenly relented. He would hear the man out. He would promise nothing but he would hear him out. That was the least he could do.