Stanley Elkin: Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“All I can say,” Schiff told Claire, “is you’ve got a hell of a sense of timing, a hell of a sense of timing. You’ve got a sense of timing on you like last year’s calendar.”

“Timing, Jack? Timing? Timing has nothing to do with it. Time maybe, that it’s run out. This has been coming for years.”

“You might have told a fella.”

“Oh, please,” Claire said.

“Oh yes, you might have prepared a chap.”

“I just did.”

“Given fair warning I mean. Not waited till the last minute.”

“Two weeks’ notice?”

“Ain’t that the law?”

“For the help.”

“You were the help, Claire.”

“Not anymore.”

“I can’t afford to be single.”

“Tough,” she said.

“Tough,” Schiff said. “Tough, yeah, that should do me.”

“All you ever think you have to do is throw yourself on the mercy of the court.”

“Well, ain’t mercy of the court the law too?”

“For juveniles and first offenders. You’re close to sixty.”

“So are you.”

“I don’t talk about ‘fair.’”

“Very refined, very grown-up. Come on, Claire, put down the suitcases.”

“No. The others are all packed. I’ll send UPS for them when I’m settled.”

“I won’t let the bastards in. The door to this house is barred to the sons of bitches.”

“Oh, Jack,” Claire said, “the things you say. Stand up to delivery people? You? Painters and repairmen? But you’re such a coward. The man who comes to read the meter terrifies you. Tradesmen do, the kid who brings the pizza.”

“Why are they blue collar? This is America, Claire.”

“Is that my cab?” She looked down out their bedroom window and waved.

“This is really going to happen?”

“It’s happened,” she said, leaned over the bed to kiss her husband on the check, and just upped and walked out the door on their thirty-six-year marriage.

“Wait, hey wait,” Schiff called after her, taking up his walker and moving toward the window. By the time he got around the bed Claire was already handing the driver two big valises. Schiff, bracing his hands on the sill, stood before the window in his shorty pajamas. “Excuse me,” he called to the man. “Sir? Excuse me?” The fellow shaded his eyes and looked up. “Where are you taking her?”

The driver, a young man in his twenties, looked at Claire, who shook her head. “Sorry,” he said, “destinations between a fare and her cabbie are privileged information.”

Schiff held up his walker. “But I’m a cripple, I’m handicapped,” he said. “I’m close to sixty.”

“Sorry,” the man said, shut the trunk in which he’d put Claire’s suitcases, and got into his cab.

“That,” Schiff called after the taxi, “was no fare, that was my wife.”

And thought, Her sense of timing, her wonderful, world- class, championship sense of timing. Leaving me like that. Just like that. Just get up and go. Just got up and gone. Don’t tell me she forgot tomorrow’s the party.

Schiff’s annual party for his graduate students, though by no means a tradition — Schiff, who was a professor of Political Geography, had started it up only two or three years ago when, during a fit like some cocktail made of equal parts of sentimentality and pique, he realized that though it was barely a few years until retirement he had had only a stunningly scant handful of students who ever wrote him once they were done with their studies, let alone any who might regard him as a friend — had become, at least in Schiff’s diminishing circles, one of the hottest tickets in town. Admittedly, it was not like Creer’s annual anti- Thanksgiving Day bash, or one of Beverly Yaeger’s famous feminist dos in honor of the defeat anywhere of a piece of anti-abortion legislation, but unlike the old manitou he could not claim Indian blood or, unlike Ms. Yaeger, even the menstrual stuff. Unlike any of his fabulous colleagues he was axless, out of it, their long loop of rage, degrees below the kindling point of their engagement. Outside all the beltways of attention and the committed heart. In point of fact so uncommitted that one of the next things he would do, once he struggled back to bed, would be to call his guests and explain that his wife had left him suddenly, the party was off.

They’d understand. He did none of the work for it himself, never had — my handicap, my handicap and footicap, he liked to say — and would simply set forth for them the now impossible logistics, freely giving Claire the credit for the splendid spread they put out— not one but three roasts, rare through dark medium, turkey, sliced cheeses like slivery glints of precious metals, pâtés riddled with gemmy olives and crumbs of spice, breads and pastries, cakes and ale. Put out and gave away, in doggy bags and Care packages, Schiff — who addressed them in class as “Mister,” as “Miss”—avuncularizing at them and propped up in the doorway forcing the uneaten food on his departing, liquored-up guests like some hearty, generous Fezziwig. Schiff’s all-worked-and-played-out Bob Cratchits, his pretty young Xmas Carols. It was a strain. It was more. Not just another side but a complete counterfeit of his character and, while he generally enjoyed the masquerade, he couldn’t help but wonder what his students made of his impersonation. Many sent thank-you notes, of course — a form Schiff regarded as condescending — but few ever actually mentioned the parties to him because the only other times they saw each other were in class, where it was business as usual, where the smoking lamp was never lit, and it was Mister and Miss all over again.

What he feared for was his dignity, protecting that like some old-timey maiden her virginity. The annual party, to Schiff’s way of thinking, was pure ceremony, obligatory as hair let down for Mardi Gras, candy and trinkets tossed from the float, insignificant gelt on the anything-goes occasions. But only, they would surely see, voluntarily obligatory, obligatory for as long as his mood was up for it. This was what the great advantage of his age came down to. Added to the other great advantage of his disenabling condition, Schiff practically had it made. A cheerful, outgoing older man might have genuinely enjoyed it. Bargains struck with the Indians for Manhattan, a kind of openhanded heartiness done strictly on spec. Even — he’s thinking about his rough bluff brusqueness with them — the flirting — the men as well as the women— Schiff’s sandpapery humours. (Well, it was in the nature of the profession to flirt, all profs engaged in some almost military hearts-and-minds thing.) Schiff would have enjoyed it. He had enjoyed it. In the days before he’d been struck down, when even at twenty- five, when even at forty and for a few years afterward, all this curmudgeon business had been merely a dodge, style posturing as temperament and all, he suspected (almost remembered) the customary mishmash of mush skin-deep beneath it. Because, again, the only thing that stood between him and his complete capitulation — he could not revert to what he had not really come from in the first place — to type, was that brittle dignity he had practically lain down his life for. Pretty ironic, he’d say, even in as ironic a world as this one, to have had stripped from him (and by mere pathology) the physical bulwark of his great protective formality and fastidiousness. (Completely toilet trained, according to family legend, at nine months.)

And now he has a choice to make: whether to wiggle- waggle on the walker (with no one in the house to help him should he fall) the thirty or so steps to the bathroom, or to scoot crabwise up along the side of his bed toward the nightstand, where he keeps his urinal, Credé his bladder by pressing up on it with his good hand, priming piss like water from a pump till it flowed, not in anything like a stream but in nickel-and-dime dribs and petty drabs from his stunted, retracted penis (now more like a stuck elevator button than a shaft). They tell him he must use his legs or lose them, but it’s his nickel, his dime — his, he means, energy, and he sidesaddles the bed, bouncing his fists and ass on the mattress in some awkward, primitive locomotion somewhere between riding a horse and potato-racing. Vaguely he feels like a fellow in a folk song, a sort of John Henry, or as if he is somehow driving actual stitches into the bedding and thinks, and not for the first time, that he ought to be an event in the Olympics.