Van Gogh's Room at Arles (38 page)

“Hey!” Miller said. “Hey you!”

Without moving his face, the Zouave’s eyes seemed to follow Miller, to find and fix him, exactly as they would in a portrait, so that, in a way, it was almost as if Miller were the sitter, the subject, and the Zouave the one free and loose in the gallery. Maurice, in place, stolid, narrowed his eyes, oddly red, almost phosphorent, like something dangerous and defiant and shining in a jungle.

Miller wanted the intruders out of there. What the hell? The way the wiseguy had just marched in and taken over the place? Who the hell? Félix Rey had promised him? Promised him? Examines me in the fucking hall and
promised
him? Who the hell, what the hell? He wanted these Scrooge’s ghosts the hell out of there.

Miller started toward the demob’d legionnaire.

“Monsieur Miller Mister!” Félix Rey cried out suddenly. Miller, startled, pulled up short, his first thought not Watch it, he has a gun, but Careful, he has a knife! “Si’l vous plaît, Miller, please,” the doctor said, and Miller, turning, saw that Rey was holding a camera, that he was taking a picture, aiming the camera at the fierce, posing Zouave.

Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, his heart hammering at him in ways familiar to him only from his heavy, bad- blooded performances in the pickup handball and basketball games in the Indianapolis gyms, Miller felt a kind of fury that Rey and Maurice seemed not only indifferent to but totally unaware of his presence, that he had become irrelevant not merely as a man but—his flushed skin, his racing pulse, his pounding heart—as a patient. And, what was even more important, as the proper tenant of this room as they made their fanatical snapshots of each other.

They left only when they were out of film.

He woke the next day remembering that there was something he had to do. When he saw them he asked the maids— neither spoke English—for
un packette, la petite packette—he
did not know the French for “box”—and made clipped, angular gestures with his hands. He gestured wrapping paper, he gestured string. To Miller’s total surprise the box, paper, and string, in
precisely
the proportions he’d stipulated, were waiting for him on his bed when he returned after lunch to Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Miller went to the drawer in which he had been keeping it and, carefully folding Hartshine’s big bow tie, placed it in the box, wrapped it in the paper, and tied it with the string. He printed Paul Hartshine’s name neatly across the front of the discrete little package and took it to the desk at the inn.

“Please see that Mr. Hartshine gets this,” he told Rita (with whom he was still so miffed he was absolutely unable to invent a convincing enough scenario to which he could jerk off). “I think it’s his ear.”

Having completed his errand, he felt a curious, off-center, but unsatisfactory and incomplete sense of relief.

In the days following he wanted to try to explain his feelings about Arles. Surely among all these infinity specialists, why-the-chicken-crossed-the-road investigators, and big- bad-wolf revisionists, along with all the other heavy hitters (one of the Fellows was writing a psychological biography of God), there must be
someone
who could explain why Miller was having such a heavy time of it here, why he was experiencing all this complicated shit, a big, raw-boned, straw-in-the-mouth, normally merry-go-lucky like himself.

Then, as sometimes occurs in the short range for the short range, an opportunity arose as he was leaving the night café one evening. Russell had fallen into step beside him.

“How are you?” Russell said. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, but whenever I had my chances you were either in the music room apparently locked up in your thoughts or I’ve been too busy with my own. Would
this
be a good time?”

“Oh yes,” Miller said, and he and Russell walked out of the inn, crossed the square together, and entered the small yellow house. Russell followed him up the stairs to the room.

He invited Russell to sit and went to the chest of drawers where he kept the not inconsiderable stash of booze that he had put together from the time of his day trips around Arles. “There’s some gin left,” he said, “and a little scotch and vodka, and here’s a bottle of one of those poofy apéritifs that Georges serves us. What’s your pleasure?”

“Well, I don’t really drink,” Russell said, “but I see that you do, so I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Miller looked at him to see if this was a shot. Russell gazed benignly back at him and winked.

“I’m having,” Miller said, “I’m having all of it, this sort of alcohol cassoulet.” He poured off about four inches of gin, scotch, vodka, and liqueur into the pitcher in the basin on the washstand, swirled it around, and filled first Russell’s water tumbler and then his own. He held out his glass. “To
him!”
Miller offered.

“To him,” said Russell mildly, and raised his glass too.

“It’s not because this is my first trip to Europe or anything,” Miller said. “I mean what’s that? That’s just geography. Geography’s no big deal.”

“No,” Russell said, “it isn’t.”

“I don’t even think it’s because I’m in over my head. I mean over my head’s geography too,” he giggled. So I
ain’t
the fastest gun in western civilization. Who cares about that? I don’t care about that.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I don’t.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “There’s plenty around who aren’t a whole bunch faster than me if you want to know. Because the last
I
heard a taste for squid ink over your noodles isn’t necessarily a sign of a state of grace. That’s all right, Russell,” he said, “you’re a good sport. You don’t have to finish it if it tastes too much like piss. Set it down, I don’t mind.”

“I told you,” Russell said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

“That’s good,” Miller admitted, “that’s a good thing. You cultivate your palate. You educate your taste. You live and you learn. That’s good. Because between you me and the lamppost my palate was cultivated years back. Shit, Russell, after chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, it’s
all
wog food to me. Wait a minute, let me get rid of this.” He poured the rest of his drink into the basin in which the pitcher was standing. “It’s pretty foul,” Miller said, “I have to admit it. Who am I trying to impress? Can I give you something else?”

“I’m fine,” Russell said. He’d already finished over half his glass. He seemed unaffected.

While Miller, the drinker in the outfit, who’d barely managed to get down more than a few sips, was unable to stop talking. It wasn’t, he thought, a matter of in vino veritas (or scotcho or vodko) so much as the fact of company. “I had this visit,” he blurted. “I think something’s up between Rey and the fierce Zouave.”

The really astonishing thing as far as Miller was concerned was that he didn’t have to explain his terms. No more than he’d had to elucidate whom he’d meant when he’d raised his glass to
him.
It was one thing to come on all abnegant modesty and disclaimer, boasting (as it were) his ignorance and submissive second fiddlehood, but another altogether to get up into the very face of genius. It didn’t make one humble (and wasn’t Russell, right here and right now, showing him—albeit merely by Russell being Russell, by forsaking agenda, by what he did with poor Miller’s gag drink—what it was like in actual real time to educate one’s taste, to live and to learn?), it quite made one breathless with despair. It was rather like watching synapses spark and blossom in a visible brain. It was all right, as he’d said, not to be the fastest gun in western civilization, but for only so long as no legitimate claimant to the title was around. It was something like that, he wanted to tell Russell, that put him off about this whole Van Gogh’s-room-at-Arles thing, but, when he tried, it came out snarled, garbled, artlessly done. It came out—— gossip.

“I mean,” Miller went on helplessly, “they were taking each other’s
pictures,
for Christ’s sake. Snap. Snap snap. Setting the goddamn thingumabob on the camera and dashing across the room so they could be together for the photograph. They’d have posed on the bed if I wasn’t here. Their forebears and great-greats sat for their fucking portraits for him! Some fierce Zouave
that
guy must be,” Miller said. “I bet they kicked his old ass out of the Foreign Legion!”

“Don’t get so upset. It interferes with your work.”

“Oh yeah,” Miller said, “my work.”

“The whole deal is only five weeks,” Russell said sweetly, “it will all be over soon.”

“You should have seen them,” Miller said. “Compared to something like that, diddling myself is small potatoes.”

He’d shocked Russell but was sober enough to see that it wasn’t propriety or fastidiousness he had sinned against, it was decorum. And felt such a thrill of rage that he lashed out at his guest. “So what’s all this winking then? What’s
that
all about?”

“I’m sorry,” Russell said softly, “I have a tic.”

Oh my, thought Miller in his cups, now I’ve hurt his feelings. Russell, he saw, for all his credentials and lustrous, curricula-vitae’d life (this year, for example, he was not only Distinguished University Professor at the University of Bologna, they’d made him Chair of their philosophy department), would be unused to the aggressive, bluff roughneckery of someone like Miller. Why, to someone like Russell, Miller, Miller thought, probably represented the racketeer class, or, a step or so up or down, maybe the life force. My God, he thought, we? Ain’t that a kick in the ass? When it was the life force, or something so like it he didn’t even know a name for it—geography? squid ink on the noodles?—that gave him the heebie-jeebies in the first place.

But give the devil his due. He owed Russell an apology. He’d try to be more specific.

“You don’t want to get too near the light,” Miller told him. “You get too near the light you burn up. Rey and Maurice are examples. They never got over light proximity, they never got over the presumed heroism and idiosyncrasy of their circumstances. You should’ve seen them. Maurice is this little guy. He could have been a preemie. You don’t get a neck and arms like that unless you work at it. The son of a bitch must have bench-pressed a million pounds in his time. He had to have spent half his life in gyms. And Dr. Rey? You think mustaches like that grow on trees? And you can’t tell me determinism made him go for a doctor. It was determination. They started out, or rather somebody started out for them, as simple flukes of art. They bought into all that. They ain’t mountebanks. Hell, Russell, they’re not even clowns. Clowns on velvet, that’s another story, but chiefly they came too near the light is all.” He was breathing heavily now. He was in a damn state. He was in such a sweating, breathless, stupid damn state he almost felt someone ought to take
his
stupid damn picture.

Is
that
specific enough for you? he wondered. Is
that
enough of an apology?

Miller didn’t notice until it had already passed that he’d had his birthday. One morning he woke up and realized he’d been thirty-seven years old for about a week. A person who’d always been as conscious of his age as others of their weight or appearance, it struck him as extraordinary, strange, and fantastic that he’d failed to observe the occasion. The word wasn’t casually chosen. Birthdays for Miller were, quite literally, red-letter days, occasions. Nor did it matter if others made no fuss over him. He wasn’t looking for a fuss. He wasn’t looking for cards or telegrams or presents or special treats. He didn’t hang around waiting for long-distance phone calls. He didn’t take the day off. He didn’t
celebrate
his birthdays so much as pay attention to them, sit up and take notice, all eyes and all ears. Turning thirty-seven after being thirty-six was as qualitatively different to Miller as turning ten after being nine. Only now, having missed turning thirty-seven, he’d never really know, would he, and that was just one more mark Miller could set down next to Arles. It was as if he’d failed to take note of the change of season, like finding oneself in winter without passing through summer.

He’d begun to work on his project after his meeting with

Russell but that had little to do with the reason he’d missed his birthday. Indeed, rather than its giving him pleasure to be at last engaged on the work that had been the ostensible reason for his presence at Arles, he found his labors as dispiriting as he had found the burden of sharing Van Gogh’s environment and sleeping in Van Gogh’s bed and going about his business in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. He wasn’t inspired, he’d made no resolutions, turned over no new leaf. Simply, one morning he came across the piece of paper he’d slipped into the pocket of his pants that day in the music room when he’d voluntarily come out of Coventry and written down the union-movement guy’s remark about the high priority community colleges gave to language labs, and Ms. Neil-Cheshi’s not inaccurate observation that of all educational institutions, junior colleges seemed determined to make the most efficient use of their physical plants. He punched these thoughts into the laptop PC and turned them over and over in his mind.

Time didn’t pass in the blink of an eye. He didn’t fall into a rapture. This was his research. The comments became the basic building blocks of his paper, not its inspiration so much as the sandy irritant slipped into an oyster that might, over time, accrue into a pearl. Joylessly he developed an outline, joylessly he revised and expanded it. Tediously he pushed his thin thesis, padding it almost to the breaking point. Listlessly he began to write, affectlessly to realize that he might actually produce enough material in the days he had left in Van Gogh’s room at Arles to make it back to Indianapolis undisgraced. Distractedly he invented sources, quotes, footnotes, taking no pleasure in the fact of the fraud he was perpetrating, or in his certainty it was all so very bloodless that it would probably go undetected—if it ever was—for years after he’d been made Full Professor, and that since he had no intention to publish, by the time he was discovered—if he was—they’d do nothing about it.

And this was the way Miller stuck it out, getting through almost his last days in Arles until almost the time he had to do his final laundry, return the unused portion of his roundtrip ticket to the bus company, and buy a ride to Marseilles on
le train grand vitesse
(he’d learned
something
in Europe, it hadn’t been a
total
loss), get ready, that is, to do those last things people do when they’re ready to break camp. (And with just that increment of sadness and regret that descends like a curtain whenever one experience, no matter how negative or disagreeable it may have been, is about to pass over into another—— the woe of endings, the death of death.) So that, in a way, he was too busy or just too anxious to work on his project and he abandoned it as abruptly as it was begun.