Van Gogh's Room at Arles (35 page)

“Well,” Miller said, “I don’t mean to sound so negative. It isn’t as if the community-college system doesn’t serve its purpose in society. Admittedly, we’re pretty much a bootstrap operation, but you’d be surprised how many of our kids graduate and then go on to earn real good degrees from our nation’s most impressive four-year institutions, some of them. And even go on to apply to graduate school. I don’t have the exact statistics in front of me right now, but I’ve read how almost half the nation’s CPAs, tax accountants, franchisees, licensed real-estate brokers, and insurance salesmen have attended a community college sometime during the course of their academic careers.”

He had their attention. They looked at him with that same aggressive kindness they’d shown when Hartshine had taken him right up to their tables to introduce him the day before. They looked at him, that is, almost hospitably, as if he were somehow their dubious guest. And Miller felt the same mild, useless, almost humble outrage.
Think tankers,
he thought,
fucking op-eders.
Holding his tongue at the same time that he wielded it. Like, say, Iago. And threw himself on their mercies as if he were daring them to drop him.

“Even so,” said Miller, continuing, his heart no longer sinking he saw because it had already hit bottom, had come apart like any other settled, foundership, “I won’t kid you, it ain’t all roses and chocolates in our kind of operation. A considerable part of our student population is inner-city, and a whole lot more is, to put the kindest construction on it, well, vocational. Plus we get a host of boat people, and economic refugees, and English-as-a-second-language types. And a whole bunch of folks straight off the killing fields. And, well, a lot of what we do could be considered remedial—— glorified and not- so- glorified high school.

“So I guess you can see what a personal privilege it is for me to come in from the cold and be here among you for the next five weeks. I’ve listened tonight with great interest to many of your provocative, trailblazing insights and ideas, and let me tell you up front and just as frankly as I can that when I wasn’t scratching my head I was catching my breath. I mean it. Who am I to butter
you
up? I mean it. Who am I to brownnose some of the greatest theoreticians and most famous hypothesists in their chosen fields? Where would
I
get off, a simple time server like me who’s never been practically anywhere? I mean it.”

He did. He really did. Who knew to the penny the exact amount of true awe and real viciousness he’d spent on them. He meant it, he meant it all. And knew, too, when enough was enough, that he better wind it up soon, was perhaps even now lecturing against the bell, but who had never appeared before a class like this before and, more than likely, never would again. But who
loved
his windiness. Who loved the sheer flourish, complicated as a monogram on a handkerchief, of his drawn-out speechifying, and who even at Booth Tarkington Community College, before the night school and boat people crowded in the two sections of the first, and pair of the second, and single section of the third course he taught—the five courses, the three preparations—loved above all the possibilities open to him in teaching, above love of learning, the possibility of doing good, of touching a life here, changing another there, the pure rock- bottom thrill, by sufferance here in Arles and the authority vested in him back at good old BTCC, of beating about the bush!

But who understood he was going too far, pushing against the envelope of even
their
compromised, condescendent patience. And who, in their shoes, would be shuffling his feet by now. (Though but twenty or so minutes before, in his own, he’d kept them still enough, his gaze locked in on the few square feet of scrutinized carpet, chased there by Russell’s defiant wink.) Really, Miller thought, they were quite remarkable. For folks with so much on their minds,
quite
remarkable. They did even less shifting about in their seats than Miller’s fender straighteners, hair stylists, data processors, communications majors, Central Americans, Cambodians, other assorted third worlders and drug dealers back home. Then again, according to Rita’s testimony, these Fellows walked the paths beneath tall trees, climbed the hills, were sightseers by nature, viewfinders. Perhaps, to them, he was just another pretty sight, quaint as those champagne-and-éclair picnickers, a piece of the life cycle, the sweetness and sorrow. Well, he thought, I’ll show
them!
I’ll knock off the humility, sacrifice the sweet windiness, close down the tap dance, and just bring it on home!

But just couldn’t quite. Since he’d failed to let them in on something, a matter of some delicacy.

He cleared his throat. (This, it occurred, was rather like a singer vocalizing, a pianist’s tuneless scales.)

“Well,” he said, “you can imagine. You can just imagine. I don’t have to draw you any pictures or put too fine a point on it. Everything boils down to self-esteem. Those poor kids. I can’t tell you how my heart goes out to them. I just can’t tell you. Because the fact of the matter is they’ve no illusions. I have statistics. I bet two-thirds of you are on your second or third marriages. It’s not my place to pry and I won’t ask for a show of hands but I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t at least two people within the sound of my voice who’ve been married four times. At
least
four times. And that a lot of your romances were with students, and that they began, innocently enough, with some really sensational insight you dropped on them in one of your lectures, or in class discussion, or when they came around during office hours to discuss their term papers. Sure, you have the insights, they have the legs.

“Well that doesn’t happen in a community college. There’s no hanky-panky. If they run into us at the library they know it’s not the Bodleian or the Widener, or see us climb into our cars in the parking lot they know full well it ain’t Harvard Yard. What I’m saying, there’s no stars in their eyes. To this day I’m single and not one of my students ever came on to me. They’ve no self-esteem,” Miller said. “Or maybe that’s backwards. The point is you don’t get points for anything that comes out of
Cliff’s Notes
or
Masterplots.”

Someone raised his hand.

Uh oh, he thought, worried, recalling Hartshine’s challenge to the crippled political geographer, the hard time Anita Smynea had been given by one of the Fellows, even Russell’s private mockery of Arthur Barber, the infinity maven who’d forgotten to carry his two. “Yes,” Miller said, “is there a question?”

“What’s your project?” he asked politely.

“I’m trying,” he said, “to get some idea of the image of the community college in the eyes of establishment academia.” Then he fell out of his deep muslin chair and fainted.

When, moments later, he came to on the carpet (his tie had been loosened, his collar undone; establishment academia, giving him air, had moved back a floor lamp, his chair, cleared a broad avenue for him, and now stood patiently on either side of the room exactly like people quietly observing an accident from the curb), Russell, Miller’s wrist in his hand, was on one knee beside him. He was grinning so widely someone might just have brought him good news and holding a wink so steadily Miller thought for a moment he looked like someone engaged in an odd athletic event, like seeing how long he could go before taking a breath, say.

Miller, embarrassed, said “Where am I, where am I? Wherever in the world am I?” just to get Russell to open his eye.

“Dr. Rey is on call,” a girl said. “I sent for him.”

“Rita? Is that you, Rita?”

They put Miller to bed in Van Gogh’s room in Arles, and though he heard them go down the stairs and leave the yellow house he had the impression that they’d left someone behind to stand guard in the hall. Perhaps Russell, perhaps Hartshine or Rita, or even the one who’d asked him the question in the music room. Fear and anxiety—he’d never passed out before—had left him half conscious during the press of their urgent rush with him across the square to Number 2 Lamartine Place. It seemed important to Miller to learn who’d been chosen to stay with him, but he thought it better to discover the identity of whoever it was posted outside his door by listening to the nature of the silence, or whatever was done to disturb it, made by the person keeping the vigil, than to demand it outright. He closed his eyes so he might better concentrate on the problem. Never had his senses been sharper. He tried to judge his guardian’s sex and size by the creak of the weight made on the flooring, to see if he could reconstruct the nature of the clothing—its fabric, even its color—by the quality of the sound—its rustle or rub—made when it was brushed by a hand. And opened his eyes. To see could he detect some clue in the breathing or make out in the darkness some gloomy giveaway thickness or layer of shadow that might reveal the character of its source. There was nothing. He received no impressions, heard nothing, felt no pulsations shaken loose from the brusque agitations and invisible jitters and shivers of whatever body rested against the wall outside his room. He
saw
nothing. And so he closed them again and went to sleep.

Only to look when he waked, not so much refreshed or even rested as startlingly wakeful, directly into the very odd face of someone gazing down at him. The face was somehow as disturbingly familiar as it was strange.

“Oh,” said the man, “I am penitent to startle you. You must are the ill American monsieur, Mr. Miller.”

“Am I ill?” Miller asked, for he realized even before he took in the man’s old-fashioned black bag he must be the doctor.

“This is something we will shall be deciding together. Dr. Félix Rey, Mister Monsieur.”

“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.”

“Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.”

“You
do,”
Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!”

“Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey.

It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they
were
young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or -six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.

Miller kept shifting his glance from the picture postcard to the great-great-grandson. For all the flawlessness of their unquestioned resemblance it seemed a bit stagy, as though one of them were cross-dressing, say, or as if some feature on one of their faces—the beard, the plucked eyebrows—had been cultivated for a specific effect, accented as a nose or a hairline in a caricature.

“It is very remarkable, is it not, Mister Monsieur? Do I state the case amiss? One might summarize that Vincent was so geniused that he fixed the gene pool forever with his picture brush. But you will see from your eyes. There live in Arles to this day descendants from the peasant Patience Escalier; the postesman Joseph Roulin and his femme, Berceuse, their sons, Armand and Camille; and of Madame Ginoux and of even the fierce Zouave.”

Handing back the “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey,” Miller wondered if the physician had picked up his English in much the same sort of way Miller had picked up his French, studying rubrics on the backs of postcards as he had memorized vocabulary lists, Yet there was something about Dr. Rey’s speech Miller, admittedly no student of languages, didn’t quite buy. His accent, measured against the accents of Frenchmen in films, seemed wrong. It wasn’t so much uncultivated as uncluttered by their smoky, theatrical rumble and heavy breathiness. It seemed to Miller that even the man’s syntax was off by four or five hundred miles, as though it belonged at least that much further up the Mediterranean coast.

Now Rey listened to Miller’s heart, tuned in on his lungs, took the measures of his pressure and pulse and temperature. He examined Miller’s ears, ran light into Miller’s eyes, palpated Miller’s belly, dug his fingers painfully deep into Miller’s groin. He had Miller gag three strained
ahhs
under a rough wooden tongue depressor. He had him sit along the side of the bed and tested his reflexes with a little hammer. He took his pressure a second time, removed the stethoscope again from where he had stuffed it into a jacket pocket and asked Miller if he minded submitting to a second examination of his chest. He breathed on the little black disc at the bottom of the stethoscope, warming it the way one might move breath across one’s lenses before rubbing them clean with a tissue. Nothing the doctor had yet done so alarmed Miller as this little gesture of solicitude. Then he had Miller cough. Hard. Harder please, s’il vous plaît. Press, Miller interpreted freely, the pedal to the metal.

And Miller, accommodating, coughed with such force that he brought up the reduced, soured biles of the gorgeous great omelette, toast, tea, peeled fruit, and apéritifs of his delicious dinner. Félix Rey gave him a handful of toilet paper, which he removed from his doctor’s satchel.

It had been a thorough, even arduous, examination. “Is something wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” Miller asked nervously. “I’m no hypochondriac, doc, but I have to admit, ever since my arrival I’ve been a bit off my feed.” It was so. Whatever else, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Miller generally enjoyed good health. Almost thirty-seven, he was still active in sports, still played a good, hard-driving pickup basketball game with the students in the BTCC gym, or handball at the Indianapolis Y. Unlike many others younger than himself he detected no loss of spring in his step under the boards, and was, despite his liquor and cigarettes, still a strong jumper, and an aggressive, even combative, player. He usually drew more fouls than any other player on his team. (Indeed, he had a small reputation as something of a bad sport, and had always vaguely equated this as a sign of stamina and good physical health.) And on the lively YMCA handball courts he was as quick as ever, his aces and killers as devastating as they had ever been. “What’s wrong with me,” he asked again, “am I ill?” And felt, who’d been unable to pick up any of the steams and busted light waves pouring off the solid objects in his darkened room, his alarmed features anxiously arrange themselves on his face.