Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Of course not,” Bill said. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”

“I forgot how to ride a bicycle,” Schiff said.

“We have to keep our chin up,” Bill said. “Hey,” he said,

“I’ve got to get back to the office. Jenny still has to do the installations so I’ll leave her here with you.”

“Sure,” Schiff said.

“Watch yourself now.”

“I will.”

“Don’t fall.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t know if Jenny could handle you,” Bill said. Schiff didn’t answer. “The service, though, the service is another story. Sometimes the service sends out women.”

Schiff had enough. “What is this?” he demanded. “What are you getting at? Just what are you hinting? Do you talk this way to all your customers?”

“Why are you so excited? Do you think it’s good for you to get so excited? I know your blood-pressure medications. I know what you have to put into your bloodstream to keep a lid on the stress. Do you think I’m against you? I’m not against you. Quite the contrary. I represent the service. Does the service stand to gain if its clients become upset with it? I know how highly you think of our advertising campaign but believe me, brother, what it finally boils down to is word-of-mouth. And, if you want to know, I wasn’t ‘hinting’ or ‘getting’ at anything. All I was referencing was man’s dependence on woman for her ability to nurture.”

“All right,” Schiff told him wearily.

“Sure,” Bill said, “that’s all there is to it. She helps him out with his motor movements. Large and small both.”

“Okay.”

“Ain’t a mother’s son of us don’t want to float around in the pool in his mama’s arms. Ain’t a joey alive don’t enjoy going for a ride in the mommy roo’s pouch. Security is the name of the game.”

Okeydokey already, Schiff thought.

“So I wasn’t suggesting anything kinky. Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the salesman said, took up the check in Schiff’s smashed handwriting, and left him in the house with Miss Simmons.

Who to this point, she told him, had only been seeing what had to be done, that now she could start to plant.

“To plant?”

“Your garden,” she said. “Lay out your seeds and bulbs for you. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a serviceman’s term in the industry.”

The professor nodded, surprised by the term “industry,” though once he thought about it, maybe not so surprised. Increasingly, he’d been noticing those ads on TV. It was some crisis of the infirm and elderly thing, high tech’s interim arrangement with the nursing-home interests, with Medicare, the aging demographics, the death-with-dignity folks. He explained this to Miss Simmons as she laid out her tools, set out the equipment she brought into Schiff’s home from the van.

“Oh, now,” Miss Simmons said.

“By which, thought Schiff, she meant to assuage him, ease him, allay his fears, cut him, he meant, from the herd of the infirm, aging and elderly, anyone struggling for a few last breaths of dignity. Because it was true what the salesman had said. Women were nurturers, even women like this one. Beneath her repair or maintenance man’s gray union suit, this person who worked in the basement down with the pipes, boilers, and boards of circuit breakers, was probably just another bleeding-heart nurturer and enabler.

And my God, Schiff thought, I wasn’t even fishing. Though maybe, he thought, all he ever did now was fish, his condition, his very appearance these days a fishing expedition, searching out reassurance like a guy on a treasure hunt. (Appalled by his letters of credit, his devastating carte blanche entree like some terminal kid’s on a trip to Disney World. Appalled, too, by what he must have done to Claire, who’d abandoned him, forcing her against her nature by the cumulative, oppressive weight of his need.) Shit, he thought, I am what I am, and asked a question that had been at least somewhere on his mind since she’d told him he’d been her professor.

“I’ve been trying to think,” Schiff said, “was I still on a cane when you were my student?”

“A cane?” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember any cane. No,” she said, “you walked like everyone else.”

“That had to be at least a dozen years ago.”

“I graduated it’ll be fifteen years this June.”

“You knew me when,” Schiff said.

“Oh, now,” Miss Simmons said.

“I knew you when,” he said.

Miss Simmons looked down at her wrenches and scissors and rolls of duct tape, at all the instruments he did not have names for. She appeared to blush, though women were clever, he thought. Blushing and downcast eyes could be a sort of nurturing, too. Outright flirting could. How could men trust a sex that lived so much by its inborns and instincts, that stood so firm by the agenda of its drives and temperament (anything for the cause), its goals and nature? Christ, he thought, they might just as well have been critters, low and furious on the biological scale as spawning salmon. (Giving another passing, glancing, bruising thought to what he must have done — his disease must have done — to his own wife’s damaged intrinsics and basics.) And, quite suddenly suspecting she may have thought he was coming on, momentarily panicked.

“Oh, no,” he said, finding his place again in the lecture she probably hadn’t even recognized was one, “I’m all for it. I believe it’s exactly the thing, quite the right way to go. I mean after the initial outlay it’s rather economical. And Bill is right, a sense of security is the name of the game.”

“Well,” she said, gathering up some pieces of equipment and rising, “this is going to take at least a couple of hours. I’m afraid I have to tie up your phones; you won’t be able to use them till I’m done. If there are any calls you have to make you ought to try to make them now. Otherwise…”

“What if someone was trying to reach me?”

“Well, they’d get a busy signal.”

“At least two hours, you said. No one talks on a phone two hours. They’d think something was wrong, that I’d had an accident. Well,” he said, “they could call the operator, I suppose, ask her to check to see if the line really was engaged.”

“That’s right,” Miss Simmons said.

“I think of all the contingencies,” Schiff somewhat apologetically said.

“I see you do.”

“Occupational hazard,” he said. “Plus it has something to do with my being a gimp.”

“Oh, now.”

“No, really,” he said, “I could give you a whole song and dance about the cripple’s code. But I’d bore you silly.”

“Oh, now.”

Schiff, who still had some character left, was becoming as tired of the game as Miss Simmons.

“Really,” he said, “two hours?”

“If I get started right now.”

“I take your point,” he said, and gallantly moved his arm as if signaling her to pass, to play through.

She excused herself and disappeared from his living room.

Well, thought Schiff, reminded of sudden furious electrical storms when he was a boy on vacation with his parents in the summer bungalow they had in the country, of great howling winds and plummeting temperatures and of wide shadows that spread from horizon to horizon and came down over the bright, burning afternoon like dark paint, this is cozy. He meant it. His legs and his telephones useless, he felt stranded, shut off, closed down, all the abrupt, unexpected holiday of emergency, of every chore suspended. (He could have lived, he recalled thinking, like this forever, and remembered his disappointment when the storm passed and the world resumed.)

Miss Simmons had returned. She was screwing some tiny piece of equipment into the handset of the extension in the living room.