Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  “Sure,” Schiff said. “If it’s locked, if the footrests are out of the way, if I push myself up on its arms.”

  “Go on,” she said, “do it. Dickerson and I will be at your side ready to grab you. Wilkins will take your feet.”

  He had his misgivings, of course, but then recalled Ms. Kohm’s flexed thighs when he’d looked up her dress as she’d crouched before him that evening and, rising, gave himself over to the group like some kid with Outward Bound on a confidence course. And was correct in his instincts. Effortlessly, it seemed, they started to carry him up the stairs. Tysver followed with his walker. “I used to be quite athletic myself,” he told them mindlessly. They didn’t bother to answer. They had work to do, proceeding to do it with all the silent efficiency of kidnappers, bank robbers.

  Then, to himself, chastised himself for what must surely have seemed to them such a silly, pointless remark. And, flinching, cursed his life, his rotten fate, as they took him the rest of the way up the stairs.

  Perhaps, he thought, this was the fate of a gasbag, a punishment for being an academic, for daring to undertake any analysis of the world, for not taking it, that is, for granted, but always to be looking for reasons behind the great gift horse that was life; though he didn’t truly believe this, believed deep down that pain was reason enough, its own excuse for being, that anything complicated as the machinery of existence had already built into it the flaws of its own annihilation. There was something redundant about the routine responses to pain, something tchotchkying up disaster, rather like calling in all those FAA inspectors to start their investigations after some big jet had gone down, hundreds dead, dozens unaccounted for. Why, it was simple, really, when all you needed to understand in the first place was that it was an airplane.

  It occurred to him that this might be a message worthy to leave on the answering machine he had put on his wish list. Though, really, he thought, he didn’t have much of a wish list left. Just, he supposed, that his plane hadn’t gone down.

  They were in his bedroom.

  They laid him down on his bed.

  “Phew,” said Miss Moffett, “what’s that smell?” Schiff had forgotten about the nightstand, the carafe of his pee. He shut his smarting eyes. “Wherever can it be coming from?” she said. “Oh,” she said.

  Crazily, he was glad Miss Simmons wasn’t here to witness this final humiliation. Even as he acknowledged the terrible casualties he’d sustained this evening, his tremendous loss, practically Oriental in its proportions, of face, he leaned on this frail, single plus—that there was someone who’d been there that evening who’d probably never know the full extent of his tumbled circumstances. Disch, Lipsey, and Freistadt he wrote off. They would be filled in soon enough by the others. (He could just imagine their version, the portrait they would serve up of him. “He lives like a farm animal. Really. Like a farm animal. Like something you could wring cheeses from, or whose fats are industrially rendered, or that you raise for its by-products, its stinking, organic mulch, the ripe, rife salvage of its bones and grease, its hair and hooves, the crap that goes in the cold cuts. All right, he’s a cripple. But not a very self-respecting one. Anyway, there are cripples and there are cripples, You should see where he lives. Or, no, where he keeps himself. Neither lair nor burrow, nor stall nor den, neither quite nest nor coop nor sty, though something of all of these. But off the beaten path, secret, out of the way, like those places beasts slink off to to die. Brr, it was creepy.”) But Miss Simmons, a stranger to them, was outside the orbit of their gossip. It was amazing, Schiff thought, the fig leaves one could, in extremis, pull about oneself for warmth and modesty. Like drawing a curtain between two beds in a hospital room and emptying one’s bowels into the bedpan, grunts, farts and all, separated not only from the party in the next bed, but from all his visitors as well. We live, he thought, by the frail myth of boundary.

  And was sustained, however flimsily, by just this sense of things as Ms. Kohm and the others, good neighbors now rather than guests, went about straightening his room, offering to change his sheets, to crack a window a few inches to let in a bit of air. Even little Miss Moffett, who without a word, now that she knew the source of the at-once sharp yet faintly sour ammoniac odor in the room, could see its dark, caramel-yellow reasons beneath its loosed lid, took up the urinal and emptied it in the toilet, rinsed it under the tap, brought it back to the room and returned it (smelling fresh now, even lightly, pleasantly scented, as though she’d washed it out, scrubbed it with cleanser) to the nightstand by his bed. No more put off by his sick man’s foul ways than she might have been by her own child’s sullied diapers. But of course, Schiff thought, they lived in the age of Candy Stripers, nurse’s aides, sponge bathers, administers of enemas, handlers of bedpans, masseuses of the comatose, volunteers at just about anyone’s bedside, heroines of vicious diseases, broken in by AIDS patients, for whom the body and its poisons were just more brittle frontier. Fallen flesh meant nothing to them, nothing. (Just try to pinch one though, or steal a kiss. Cops would be brought in. Calling all cars, calling all cars.)

  So they hovered, flitted about him, the alcoholic levels in their blood probably no lower now than they’d been at the height of their games on his stairway, or spreading out their picnic on his living-room floor. Whistling, giggling while they worked. Playing a sort of house with him now, a kind of family, even Bautz and Tysver, even Wilkins and Dickerson, the special care they took of him maybe even a game of deathbed, making sure as they fluffed up his pillows and smoothed down his sheets to keep their voices low, addressing each other in exaggerated whispers, cautious high sign. Two or three of them actually tiptoeing, so that, despite himself, he found he could not keep his eyes open, was succumbing to the lullaby of their oddly soothing movements.

  He must actually have dozed, for when he opened his eyes again everyone but Ms. Kohm was gone from his room. Only the lamp beside his bed was on.

  Molly Kohm was sitting sidesaddle on his bed at about the level of his chest, her hip just pressing comfortably against his arm.

  “Shh,” she said, “hush,” though he had uttered no sound. “I just wanted to thank you for the lovely evening.”

  “You’re welcome. No problem,” Schiff said hoarsely.

  “Shh,” she said. “No, really,” she said, “thanks very much.”

  “Hey,” Schiff said, wondering if he dare lift a finger, “I didn’t lift a finger. It was all the PGPC’s doing.”

  “The PGPC is dissolved now,” she said. “They say that once the Macy’s Day or Rose Bowl parade is over, the people who put it together are back at it again the very next morning, preparing for next year. Don’t you believe it.”

  “I don’t,” Schiff said. “I never did.”

  “Well,” she said, “are you going to be all right?”

  “Oh, sure,”he said.

  “Your wife never called?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t know where she is. She could be in Seattle. She could be anywhere.”

  He was gathering courage, putting together a sort of schoolkiďs nerve he hadn’t used in years. All that stuff yesterday about Miss Simmons had been wishful thinking, pure pipe dream, idle fantasy. At no time had she perched on the edge of his bed, been this close to him, her haunch brushing his arm, mere inches from his hand, his cupped palm. Yes, Schiff thought, I’m going to touch her. I’m going to reach over and hold her.

  And was just shifting his weight when he heard a great, joined barrage of laughter from downstairs. His students. He thought they’d left. Had even taken this into account before he’d decided to make his move. And not only that, but what’s more, had even believed that their departure—he could picture them, their fingers at their lips, shushing each other, up on point, on tiptoe again, in exaggerate, conspired, sneak-thief pantomine—may even have been a sort of deliberate ante-upping, building the story, the Disch, Lipsey, Freistadt version, leaving Ms. Kohm alone with him on his bed as though making off wi
th the metaphorical silver. So, already enlisted in the farce, caught up in it, he was doubly disappointed, once for his ruined moves, once more for the shortfall of legend.

  He heard their wild laughter again, helpless as a fit of coughing.

  “What’s that?” he asked her. “What are they up to?”

  “They’re young,” Ms. Kohm said, rising, “they’re having fun. Weren’t you ever young?”

  “Sure,” Schiff said. “I was young. I think I was young.”

  “Well there you are.”

  “They sound drunk. They sound out of control.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “Jesus,” he said, “they already broke the damn Stair- Glide. There’s every kind of pasta, oil-and-vinegar, spilled wine, and lettuce stain you can think of on my carpets and furniture. The Disposall’s stopped up like a toilet, and you tell me the PGPC is shut down for the duration. What do you mean what am I worried about?”

  “All right,” said Ms. Kohm.

  “All right? All right? My Stair-Glide is busted! Look around you, this bedroom, the other rooms on this floor—— these are my borders, lady, this is my political geography!”

  “Take it easy,” she said. “Do you want to have a stroke? That’s just the way people bring them on. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”

  “No,” Schiff said, “I don’t want to have a stroke.”

  “Because I didn’t realize you were so upset. No. Say no more about it. I can take a hit. All of us can. We’ll just clear out.”

  “You can take a hit?”

  “What?”

  “You said you can take a hit.”

  “No I didn’t. Did I? I meant a hint. I can take a hint. Did I really say hit? Well, no matter. Ta,” she said. “Ta ta.” She blew her professor a kiss from the doorway.

  He heard her going downstairs, heard her roust the rest of the students. So they still had a leader, a spaced-out one, but a leader.

  He heard them leave, in a few moments heard their two or three cars start up, heard them drive off.

  What he hadn’t heard, he suddenly realized, was the door close behind them. And sure enough, in just about the time it takes weather to travel from a door left open on the first floor, up the stairs, and into a fellow’s bedroom, he felt a draft.

  But it would be all right. He knew what he could do, and reached inside his shirt and felt for his pendant, his magical S.O.S. jewelry, found its special, emergency button, and pressed it.

  While he was waiting, it occurred to him that once they got here he could offer them fifty dollars or so and ask if, so long as they were already there, would they mind straightening up for him downstairs?

  In the distance he heard a siren. It mightn’t be for him, of course. It was a weekend night, there were plenty of emergencies to go around.

  And then it came to him, the message he’d have put on that answering machine. “You have reached 727-4312,” he would have said. “I can’t come to the phone right now. I’ve fallen.”

  Town Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué: “How Royals Found Me ‘Unsuitable’ to Marry Their Larry”

  Sunday, January 12, 1992

  How We Met

  I shouldn’t have thought I’d have gone public like this. Well, to begin with, there’s the question of our musty old laws, isn’t there? Oh, solicitors have gone all over it with their fine-tooth combs to see that the paper’s in the clear. I never referred to myself as “La Lulu,” and neither did Lawrence, Crown Patriciate, Duke of Wilshire, nor any other of their royal lord and lady highnesses and mightinesses. Nor all the king’s soldiers, nor all the king’s men. There’s no such person. That was chiefly an invention of the press; a legal fiction.

  For a supposedly free country the press in this land is fair gagged and hobbled by all its Official Secrets Acts with their preemptive seditionaries and thorny libel laws like so many unexploded mines and bombs lying about the landscape. Self-serving, anti-blasphemy law’s what it is, establishment gossip insurance. Hence, if you want to know, the reason so-called checkbook journalism got invented right here in Fleet Street. To cover, if one’s a press lord, pardon me, one’s derrière. Because no one believes this stuff. “For entertainment purposes only,” as they say in the Horoscopes. It’s my humble opinion a lot of the buggery fascination in this country comes right out of that tradition, the tradition, I mean, of being all caught up in this or that condition of contingency, laying out advance positions, fortifications. Larry himself told me not even the old Roman legions made more of a thing of putting out guards, that the Brits invented lookout men so-called, and that the principle of the alibi has its roots in English common law. What I’m saying is that your sodomy had its origins in simple sport and getting round the rules as much as ever it did in pleasure—— in seeing, I mean, just how much one can get away with. Oh yeah, it’s all a game. I have my theories, and one of my humble own pet ones is that the very ideas of Monarchy and Blood and Class come right out of that same tradition.

  But I can almost see Sir Sidney reading my copy over my shoulder and complaining to his editors about what in bl--dy, infinite h-ll do I think they’re paying me for, certainly not my theories, and why don’t I get on with all the nasty bits? In due time, Sir Sid, in due time. I just want it understood that no matter what you or anyone else thinks, I’m not in this for the money. If the investigative reporters on the Sunday Times team wanted to write up my story they could have had it for nothing. But of course they wouldn’t dare. It’s the paper of record. People might believe it.

  I’m not in it for the money. I’m not. I want it told is all. But because Larry is Larry—and I don’t blame him, I really don’t, I still believe he loves me, I really do—and the Royal Family is the Royal Family, there was just no way of getting it done unless I took Town Crier’s fifty thousand pounds sterling and did it myself.

  And though I’d never acknowledge I owe the public a thing—what, after the way I’ve been depicted in the papers, on the telly and the oh-so-civilized BBC 3 even?—it may almost be my patriotic duty to let it know some of the real circumstances by which it is ruled. La Lulu, indeed!

  “Oh yeah,” you’re saying, “for God and Country, for England and St. George.” “Hell hath no fury,” you’re saying, “like a woman scorned.” “Or tattood!” you’re saying.

  We met, as everyone knows, in Cape Henry, on the westermost of the Lothian Islands, fifty or so nautical miles from Santa Catalina Island and the village of Avalon, themselves about a thirty-minute ferry ride from Los Angeles and the southwest coast of California.

  Whatever you might have read in the press to the contrary, I was not at that time in any way connected with the Ministry of Tourism; I did not sell coral or exotic flowers to day trippers from the States—ridiculous on the face of it since the United States government has strict rules preventing anyone from bringing any sort of flora or fauna into the country—or work behind the counter in the souvenir or duty-free shops at the airport. I did not sing with the band at the hotel. I had been made, like several of my countrymen at that time, redundant, and was sharing expenses and living the life of a sort of glorified beachcomber with two other girls in a discounted, low-season, already two-a-penny shelter more wicky-up than guest cottage or even hut with its rough, frond-covered frame, and dry, thick, still sharpish- edged grasses, which my cut hands too well knew to their sorrow and that sometimes in the mornings after a particularly issueless—even out there on the Pacific it was still just as much a drought as ever it was on the California mainland—but powerful blow of the previous night, we actually had to reweave back into the semblance of a wall. Often we’d pick up the odd fifty pence “sewing houses”—as we named our queer profession—for some of the older or less resourceful of our beachcomber colleagues, or shaking out mats, or sweeping up sand. Beachcombers, indeed.

  “Oh, damn,” I told Marjorie on the early morning of the day of Prince Larry’s visit, “I’ve gone and cut my han
ds. I see I shall have to go into a different trade. Have you seen the aloe?”

  “There is no aloe, Louise,” Marjorie said.

  “How can there not be aloe? Living as we do, where we do, there has to be aloe.”

  “We are quite out of aloe, Louise.”

  “Impossible. I saw it myself it can’t have been but two days ago.”

  “You are not the only party who sews houses in this house, Louise. You are not the only one with stigmata.”

  “My fault, Louise, dear,” said Jane. “I was down for the aloe run. I’m afraid I forgot. If you wait, I’ll go after I beachcomb myself some sandfruit for my breakfast.”

  “Sandfruit gives you the runs. Why do you eat it?”

  “I quite enjoy the runs, Louise.”

  Now to this point the public knows nothing of this. My friends Jane and Marjorie swept aside by history, their own stories lost if not to time then to time’s blatant disregard of a proper attention to detail, which I, as a public figure so- called, begin to suspect happens with the stories of most of history’s cohorts, so apparently caught up and transfixed by the shine of celebrity and notoriety. But actually such trashing of individuals and their particulars is as much evasive action (like piling up sunblock on one’s skin at the beach, say; just so much more posting of guards, just so many more lookouts, the fiddle of yeomanry our national sin) as ever it is the logic of a true humility. Well, it’s never the logic of a true humility, and what I think, what I think, really, is that like sodomy, like buggery, our notion of subjectivity, of submitting—submitting? volunteering!—to be the subjects of kings and queens has to do with wanting to disappear, with building up heroes to draw the lightning. Limelight was ever a distraction to time’s healthy, childlike fear of limelight. (This is fun, you know? Limelight has its compensations, hey, Sir Sid?)

  So to this point, the public, for all the attention it’s paid us, knows absolutely nothing. Jane and Marjorie not only out of the picture but never in it to begin with. (No, I’m not making this up. Not any of it. I’m English as the next bimbo. There’s still all those official secrets acts and libel laws. Why would I stick my neck out? Yet I hardly flatter myself I think I’ve earned any of those fifty thousand pounds yet.)