Van Gogh's Room at Arles (39 page)

Which left him, after the day’s small chores (settling accounts with Rita at the inn’s front desk—the astonishing hundred-twenty-seven-dollar phone bill she said he owed because of the three relatively brief calls she’d put through to Indianapolis to his pals in lieu of the promised postcards he’d failed to send, the letters he’d been unable to write; the thirty-five due for a group photograph of the Fellows she’d taken and said she’d send on to America after it was developed; the forty-four she told him was still outstanding for odds and ends—— the two hundred-and-six-buck grand total, which once he paid would square him with France with just enough left over to tip Georges, the waiters and housekeepers, and leave him with a few dollars for some cheap souvenirs and maybe a carton of duty-free Gaulois to take with him back on the airplane), with a little time to actually socialize.

Rita stood up one night at the end of the evening meal, lightly tapped her water glass with a knife, and made an announcement. Madame Celli had left Arles to be with her son and his family who would be arriving in Paris the following morning from Canada. It was her son’s holidays and Madame was going to travel with him, his wife, and their two young children to Ngozitnlabad where they were to join a tour that would take them to islands all along the East Coast of Africa. Miller, who hadn’t known of Madame Celli’s son, or of the son’s wife, or that they had children, or that Madame C. was a grandmother, was shocked. Birthday or no birthday he was still a young man and he felt a little betrayed, a little done in, worked over, roughed up. All that passion and reverie, he thought wincing, spent on a grandmère.

Rita, who’d evidently been left to mind the Foundation, went on to say that since there were so many new Fellows in the group (it was true; until she mentioned it Miller hadn’t noticed how many faces were unfamiliar to him) this might be a good time for the new people to familiarize themselves with the region. For their touring comfort her brother-in-law had put new seats and installed a brand-new air-conditioning unit in his bus. She said she would be posting sign-up sheets on the bulletin board near the front desk for a trip to Les Alyscamps, L’Allée des Sarcophages, and the Roman amphitheater. Miller would pass. (Brooding, he was saddened that one of Europe’s finest factotums could make such a bold-faced pitch, sent into deep mourning by the cycles that kept on coming and kept on coming, and thought, This is where I came in, and wondered where one was supposed to go and what one was supposed to do to meet the suitable girls.) For those who were interested, she said, they would be running a special trip out to the asylum at Saint-Rémy where Vincent Van Gogh had been committed, along with a side trip to Auvers where he shot himself not long after he was discharged. Miller, minding his pennies, minding his mind, decided to pass on that one too. And on the boat trip down the Rhône delta, and the outdoor market near the medieval church (with its crypt and painted, arranged skulls like so many heads of lettuce in a produce bin) where one might occasionally pick up genuine Roman artifacts at bargain prices. They should keep their eyes on her, she said. If an authentic piece of real value should turn up in the stalls she would pick it up, handle it, and pretend to dicker with the seller before replacing it. That would be their signal, she said, that they weren’t being gulled. Just don’t, she warned, tell anyone about their little arrangement or she and her brother-in-law could get into real trouble.

I came
that
close to spilling my seed over this one! Miller thought ruefully.

But despite himself felt a sudden stirring, some attraction he felt to the rough leather of the woman’s character, and lo and behold he was nursing an extraordinary tight hard-on right there in the night café.

He signed up for Les Alyscamps and L’Alleé des Sarcophages and the Roman amphitheater. He signed up for Saint-Rémy and the side trip to Auvers. (He sat as close to her as he could in the newly seated, newly air-conditioned bus and pressed tips into her hands for her splendidly educational commentaries.) He signed up for the boat trip down the Rhône delta and returned to Arles that evening exhausted from the air and the heavy Provençal sun (and from getting out of the little launch with Rita and the others and stooping most of the day examining the murky waters as they tramped barefoot along the river’s muddy bank searching out the rare reeds that grew there and which Rita cleaned and filed down and then sold in individual packets of a dozen to professional oboists all over the world, asking her again and again, “Is this one, is this?” and managing to bump against her, or even pretend to lose his footing in the insignificant current). He even signed up for the tour of the outdoor market where Rita was a shill, dutifully browsing the stalls for the faux relics (thrice faux: first when they were manufactured, twice when they were wholesaled to the trade and, finally, when Rita, the beautiful factotum-cum-desk clerk, cum-tour guide, cum-this and cum-that, performed her vicious gypsy triage over the toy SPQRs stamped into the hilts, helmets, and masonry of the little sections of viaduct manqué) but (still minding his pennies though he had lost his mind) making no purchases.

He was her best customer. And wooed her as an old- timey, love-struck young mooncalf might once have sent unsigned flowers or been in attendance at every performance his heart’s ingenue ever gave, lost whole-hog for the run of the show. He was, this Miller was, some tied-tongue, stage- door Johnny of an admirer.

But, at night, back in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, he still could not manage to put her into any of his imagination’s beds. It would have been like trying to bring himself off to some image of Leda, say, or Venus, or any other superstar of myth. (Because he couldn’t stop thinking of her as of some woman actually
painted
by Van Gogh, but something turned and awful in her beauty, hardened, slumped and stupored as a strumpet in the night café, thickened and stupid and mean as a peasant in the landscapes he always shared with her now on their outings. Though why this should have bothered him he couldn’t have said, and perhaps even Russell couldn’t have told him.)

There were only four days left.

Some of the Fellows—all the scholars who’d been in Arles when he and Paul Hartshine arrived had packed up and gone; piecemeal, or in little clumps of two or three, they had dropped off; Miller was part of the establishment now; no one but Rita, Russell, and Hartshine were left who had witnessed the disaster in the music room—decided to take a day trip to Cannes.

They brought their idea to Rita, proposing to engage the brother-in-law’s bus. Well, but Cannes was not really her territory, she told them. She wasn’t that familiar with Cannes, Cannes was for tourists, not academics. Cannes was crowded this time of year, she couldn’t guarantee them special deals in the better restaurants. She was sure her brother-in-law was not licensed for Cannes, that there’d be special fees for parking his big, upgraded bus with its brand-new seats and special air-conditioning unit.

She’s a genius, Miller thought. She’s more than a great European factotum, she’s a world-class piece of work. And wanted to rip out her heart and, simultaneously, devour her with kisses. But, with the others, dutifully ponied up all the vigorish, add-ons, and excise taxes she extorted, Miller thinking, There go the tips for the maids, there go the ones for the waiters, there goes Georges’s tip, there go the duty- free Gaulois.

When the brother-in-law pulled up in front of the inn at Number 30 Lamartine on the morning of the day trip to Cannes, in addition to Miller, Russell, and Paul Hartshine (who hadn’t spoken to him since the afternoon he’d passed his remark in the music room), some of the Fellows who boarded the bus were Sir Ehrnst Riglin, a history historian at Uppsala University, Jesus Hans, the revolutionary political statistician for third-world countries, Samuels Kleist, a vernacular architect in his late sixties, Yalom and Inga Basset, pop psychiatrists, and Robert and Heidi Lear.

With the exception of Russell and Hartshine, who averted his eyes whenever Miller looked his way, he knew none of them very well. For all that they’d spent entire days together on the recent flurry of excursions since Kaska Celli had run off to be with her grandchildren, and for all his decision to kick back and socialize, and for all their apparent friendliness, their reputations got in his way. (It
was
their reputations, only that. He’d seen photographs of Kleist’s queer structures, the strange, almost pueblo-like tiers of caves built into the sides of New Mexico’s red cliffs, and was convinced that the buildings were silly, uninhabitable, virtually inaccessible to mailmen, milkmen, the man who reads the meter. Only their reputations. For though he’d no clear notion of what someone in the history of history field did, it was the fact that Sir Ehrnst had been knighted for it that scared him off. Nor had he read the Bassets’ books. He’d heard them on their morning call-in talk show mediating the lunacies, counseling the killers, abusers, swingers, cheaters, and incestors, sometimes homing at least a little in on even his own small shames. It was the fact of their famous voices, however, that held him at arm’s length.)

Of Robert and Heidi Lear he knew nothing at all, not even their disciplines (or whether they worked in tandem). What he had against
them
was that of all the people with whom he’d come into contact at Arles, Robert Lear was the only Fellow he actively disliked. This went back to an incident he’d observed in the music room. There’d been a bridge game one evening. Miller didn’t play bridge, of course, hadn’t enough knowledge of its rules even to kibitz. One of the other players—he couldn’t remember his name, the man was gone now—had asked Robert, aside from Miller the room’s only other smoker, if he might borrow one of his cigarettes. Robert had visibly hesitated.

“It’s not your brand,” Robert said.

“Oh,” said the guy, “that’s all right. I’ve run out. I’ve just had dinner. I’d smoke anything.”

Robert hesitated again, frowned, and then finally, reluctantly, retrieved a cigarette from what seemed to Miller like a full pack and pushed it a little way across the table toward the bridge player. In about an hour the man asked if he could borrow a second cigarette. Robert frowned, scowled, openly sighed, and shook one from what now looked to be a considerably diminished pack.

What Miller held against Heidi was that she was married to Robert.

On the night before he was to leave, the bridge player appeared in the music room. He was holding a carton of cigarettes. They were Robert Lear’s brand. He brought it to the chair in which Lear was sitting and handed the carton to him. “Smoke them all in one place, why don’t you?” he said and left the room.

Miller was scandalized. As much as he disliked Lear, he was astonished that anyone could be rude to someone who’d received the Foundation’s blessing and been invited to Arles. Indeed, though he was still shy, reserved, and even guarded with everyone else, he made at least a little effort, in spite of the fact that the Lears didn’t seem to welcome or even notice it, to be forthcoming with them.

It was Heidi Lear, in fact, who seemed to have invented the scheme for their trip to Cannes. Miller learned of this only on the bus that morning.

The trip was designed, at least in part, to be a sort of shopping expedition. Although Miller, Russell, and Hartshine would miss it, the Fellows were going to do a play reading the following week—in French —of
The Misanthrope.
Heidi had approached Rita to see if it was possible to procure the amphitheater one afternoon for their little production. Rita thought the idea of a play reading a good one and came up almost immediately with an even more ambitious proposal. Why not, she suggested, have the reading at night in the amphitheater? Why not invite the townspeople of Arles, why not take advantage of the stadium’s lights and sound system? She thought she could arrange it so the entire evening wouldn’t cost them more than, oh, fifty dollars a person.

They jumped at it. They jumped, too, at Heidi Lear’s additional embellishments. She thought the actors should be in costume. Oh, nothing elaborate of course. It was too late for anything
fine,
but Heidi had been associated for just years and years with socio-theatrics. That was her field, socio-theatrics—— theatrical therapies for prisoners, old people in homes, the dying in hospices, as well as individuals who found themselves temporarily thrown together in groups like the one the Foundation had assembled in Arles. It was how she’d met Robert (whose field it turned out was the inventorying of eighteenth-century houses). She was, at least according to Robert Lear (whose testimony in his wife’s behalf was the first indication of generosity Miller had seen in him), this genius of the make-do and at-hand. A wizard of odds and ends.

Thus the shopping expedition to Cannes. For props and stuffs and materials. For the building blocks of all impromptu improvisation and inspired, makeshift arrangement. They would hit up the hotels, the special booths and shops a town like Cannes with its annual film festival and concomitant obligations to make the sets and adjust to the needs of some eleventh-hour show business would be sure to have.

On the trip out that morning the coach was abuzz with plans for the upcoming show. Even Rita was excited, and Paul Hartshine (who was wearing his big print bow tie) had practically made up his mind to change his reservations and stay on at a hotel in Arles until after the performance. Russell said he would have stayed on too but that Bologna was paying him $200,000 for the year, and he was, at least putatively, Departmental Chair. Also, he’d already been away five weeks from a sinecure essentially carved out for him. They were nice people. He oughtn’t, he thought, take advantage, he mustn’t, he felt, hurt their feelings. Much as he might want to hang around and take in their
Misanthrope
leaving was the honorable thing to do.

“Two hundred thousand?” Miller said.

Russell looked at the scenery.

Miller was astonished at how excited they were. Him too. It seemed odd that he, of all of them the most frivolous, the one with probably the least good reason to be there, should be the one under the greatest obligation to leave, to go home to what was only Booth Tarkington Community College in what was only Indianapolis in what was merely the State of Indiana, to get down to work at last on what was plainly the flimsiest of projects.