Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  This room, for example, which (though he’d seen and admired the painting at the Art Institute in Chicago perhaps a half-dozen times) he still didn’t really recognize (and so, for that matter, didn’t experience even the least sense of déjà vu) as Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles and which, even after the reality of where he was staying was confirmed, he still wouldn’t entirely believe, attributing the undeniable correspondences between the room and its furnishings to some sort of knockoff, a trick on the tourists. (Which wasn’t logical, Russell would argue, Miller being a guest of the Foundation. What could possibly be in it for them? Where was the profit?)

  But (speaking of foreign travel, tourists, even Van Gogh would have been a tourist here, wouldn’t he?) this room.

  Miller’s first impression of it was of a utilitarian, monastic-like setting. It reminded him of rooms in pensions, bed- and-breakfasts, no mod cons provided, not even a radio or simple windup alarm clock. He knew without sitting on them that the narrow bed would be much too soft, the stiff, rush-bottom chairs way too hard. (Nothing, he suspected, would be just right for this particular Goldilocks in the room’s close quarters.) Though he felt—oddly—that one might spend one last fell binge of boyhood here in the narrow orange bed and rush chairs along these powder blue, shaving-mirror-hung walls of the utile. The basin and pitcher, majolica jug, military brush, drinking glass, and apothecary bottles clear as gin, a soft summer equipment lined up as if for inspection on the crowded washstand on the red-tiled, vaguely oilcloth-looking floor, poor Goodwill stuff, nitty-rubbed-gritty YMCA effects, weathered, faintly flyblown and pastoral, the narrow strips of pegged wood for towels, jeans, a T-shirt, a cap, all the plain, casual ready-to- wear of hard use. A few pictures were carelessly tacked to or dangled from the room’s wash walls. A boy’s room, indeed. A room, Miller saw, of a counselor at a summer camp, or of minor cadre, a corporal say, in an army barracks. Miller saw himself becalmed there, doing the doldrums in study’s stock-still Sargasso seas.

  He went to one of the room’s big shuttered windows. Through a southern exposure, flattened against the town’s low hill, Arles seemed to rise like an illusion of a much larger city. Out the window on the eastern wall he looked down on oleander bushes, shrub chestnuts, and yews, a lone cypress in the tiny courtyard of the small yellow house.

  A boy’s room. He could already picture himself noiselessly masturbating beneath the scarlet cover on the rumpled sheets and pillowslips yellow as lemons or margarine on the too-soft bed.

  Someone knocked at the door. Miller’s first thought was that Madame Celli had dispatched a servant to bring his things from the main building across the Place. When he opened the door, cracking it like a safe (it was still stuck from the heat, he had to pull up, give it a sharp twist and tug, applying, he didn’t know how, the sort of “English” only a person accustomed to opening it this way might know, a leverage impossible to describe to a second party, a user’s leverage, an owner’s), he saw that the person across from him was no servant but a well-formed, immaculate little man (the word “chap” occurred), vaguely knickered, white-shirted, and argyled, like someone got up in old-time golfing garb.

  “Hi there,” said the man in Miller’s doorway, “I’m Paul Hartshine. Kaska told me you’d be in. Saw you dribbling out of coach class in Marseilles this morning. Tried to catch your eye, but you were bottled up in Douane and I had to catch le train grand vitesse.”

  Miller had never seen the man in his life but reasoned that Hartshine was a fellow Fellow scheduled to arrive in Arles the same day as himself. He’d evidently taken the fast train down while Miller had bumped along on the bus. And what was that about his dribbling out of coach class, a shot? And the remark about Douane. (Douane was the word for Customs. He recalled it from a vocabulary list.)

  “Kaska?”

  “Kaska Celli,” Paul Hartshine said.

  “Certain Indianapolis friends of mine especially warned me against the fast train,” Miller said.

  “Oh?” said Hartshine.

  Miller didn’t want to get into it. He felt like an asshole.

  “Are you a downstairs neighbor then?”

  “Me? No, no, I’m at Number 30 Lamartine.” The man grinned at him, and it occurred to Miller that it may have been because Miller was quite literally blocking the doorway, filling it up—Miller was large, shaggily formed, almost a head taller than the fastidiously built little guy over whom he seemed to loom like a sort of ponderous weather—that Hartshine, sensing the absurdity of Miller’s protective, defensive stance, found him amusing. (As he would, overheated, exhausted from his travels, burdened by his bulging garment bag, and clutching his ridiculous sack of duty-free prizes like flowers taken from a vase on a table at a wedding dinner, have been found amusing, as, he supposed, anyone in coach class might have seemed amusing to anyone in first, or anyone still hung up in Customs might appear at least a little silly to someone already waved through, or, when all else was stripped away and you were down to final things, the one on the bus was a laughingstock to the one on the train!)

  Before Miller could move out of the way, however, Paul Hartshine was bobbing and weaving, impatiently trying to see around him and into the room as if, it could almost have been, Miller were some quasi-functionary, an observer of the technicalities, and Hartshine a reporter, say, there on behalf of the public.

  The man had him pegged as one kind of asshole, so Miller stepped back and Hartshine poured through his defenses, talking away at a mile a minute.

  “Look at that, will you?” he cried out to Miller. “I can’t believe it. I’d never have guessed! Would you? Did you ever see anything like it? Well, this, this is a find! I’d never have guessed, I tell you! Well, one couldn’t have, could one? The fourth wall! Just look. Just look there! Everything that didn’t get painted on the room’s fourth wall!

  “Look at that chest of drawers! Well, you can see why he chose not to have painted that. It’s entirely too grand for the room. I bet its proper place in the room was where that rush-bottom chair stands now. Next to the door. He must have rearranged it to make the room appear more rustic than it actually was.”

  “It’s rustic,” Miller said, thinking of his long, uncomfortable flight in coach, of the rough ride from Marseilles on the bus, of having actually to sit in one of those chairs, “it’s plenty rustic.” But if Hartshine heard him he gave no indication.

  “Cunning,” Hartshine said, “absolutely cunning! Wasn’t he the old slyboots?

  “And isn’t that a piano bench? He must have had it from the bar. Doesn’t he remark in a letter to Theo somewhere that there was a piano bench in the room, that sometimes, as an exercise for his back—it is damp in Arles—he sat on it to paint?”

  He meant Van Gogh. It was Hartshine’s reference to Theo that finally made him recognize where he was. In reality, without “rendering,” the room could have been just another bed-and-breakfast. Now, Miller thought, what with Hartshine’s relentless gushing, it was rather like living behind a velvet rope in a museum. He hoped he wasn’t on the tour.

  “Oh, I almost forgot! Kaska told me to tell you, if you’re sufficiently freshened up by now, lunch is in fifteen minutes. There’s no formal seating chart except at dinner but you’d better hurry if you expect to get a decent table. Sit with me, I’ll introduce you round. I should think the other scholars will have already taken their drinks on the terrace, but if you’re very quick perhaps Georges will make you one to take to your table with you. I’ll ask him.”

  “I’ll ask him myself,” Miller said, determined to take his time and wondering at Hartshine’s power to drive him ever deeper into asshole territory. When he was good and ready he’d cross the street by himself

  In the end, however, Miller hastily spit-combed his hair before the shaving mirror above Van Gogh’s washstand, and hustled the lollygagging Hartshine, still examining the contents of the bedroom at Arles as if he were preparing an inventory, out the door.

  Hartshine introduced Miller to
Georges, who got him his drink even though the bar was already closed.

  They entered what Miller was given to understand was the night café.

  “You know the painting?” Hartshine said out of the side of his mouth.

  “What did they do with the billiard table?” Miller said out of the side of his own.

  Miller, in tow with Hartshine, was walked past all the green baize-covered tables set against the high red walls in the big square room. It felt rather like a promenade. The fop, pausing at each table, had a word with each pair, trio, or quartet of diners, and introduced Miller. He met, in turn, though little of this registered, Professor Roland de Schulte, Paul and Marilyn Ames, Farrell and June Jones, an Ivan someone, a chess master from the Kara-Kalpak Republic, a South African black man named John Samuels Peterboro, and a female composer from the University of Michigan named Myra Gynt. Hartshine introduced Miller to Lesley Getler and his wife, Patricia, married, chaired sociologists, one from the University of Leiden and the other from the University of Basle in Switzerland. There was Arthur Barber, a mathematician from the University of Chicago, and perhaps a dozen others whose names passed through Miller like a dose of salts. Well, everyone’s did, really. Along with their disciplines, and the institutions where they held their chairs. He had never met so many high-powered academics in his life. The entire Ivy League must have been represented in that room. (Hartshine himself was from the University of Pennsylvania.) And even though he couldn’t have told you a moment after he’d met them—it was exactly like arriving late at a party and being introduced to all the guests at once—who any of these people were, Miller was dazzled, filled with a sense of giddiness and elation. He recognized the names of people whose important, newsworthy op-ed columns he thought he had read in the Times. Certain faces were vaguely familiar to him from television news shows during times of national and international crises, think tankers with gossip and expertise whose opinions were sought. He was very close to calling on the sort of Dutch courage one feels in the first stages of drunkenness. Thus, when during his goofy circumambulation of the room the Oxfords, Harvards, Princetons, Cambridges, Columbias, and Berkeleys were introduced to him, along with the Göteborgs, Sorbonnes, Uppsalas, and Heidelbergs (where the Student Prince matriculated), he experienced divided, contrary impulses: to stand taller, this urge to stretch himself toward the full height of his respectability; and a mild outrage like a low-grade fever. A war between super ego and id. He was, for example, torn between asking someone he was almost certain he’d seen discussing the Arab-Israeli question during several segments on MacNeil-Lehrer whether one was paid for such appearances or, since it was public television, it was done pro bono. He was tempted, too, to nudge some Harvard shit in the ribs, wink, and tell him yeah, he thought he’d heard of the place.

  Toed-in, all aww-shucks’d out, he’d let it ride, said nothing, stood unassumingly by as Paul Hartshine (who seemed to know all these people, who, according to his own testimony, like Miller himself, had only arrived that morning, a first-timer in Arles) introduced him to almost everyone gathered for lunch that afternoon in the night café.

  “This is Miller. They have him in Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles. You ought to see the place. Miller’s from Indianapolis. He teaches there at the Booth Tarkington Community College.”

  Everyone was very nice to him, they invited him to join them. They saw the drink Hartshine had talked Georges into giving him even though the bar was closed and suggested that he at least sit down with them while he finished it. They were very nice. They couldn’t have been nicer. Miller wanted to kill them.

  Hartshine, Miller suspecting that perhaps he knew this— why not, Miller thought, he seems to know everything else—hustled him off to the next table. They sat down at last with Kaska—— Madame Celli. Who, or so it seemed to Miller, flirted a bit with his peculiarly outfitted but well- tailored friend, and then, in what Miller could make out of her French, excused herself, having, she said, things to attend to in the birdhouse where smoke was falling off all the potatoes.

  “Boy,” Miller said to Hartshine when she’d left, “that fast train you took down?”

  “Yes?”

  “It really must have been fast! I mean you get around, don’t you? You already know everyone here.”

  “Well, you do too. I introduced you.”

  “The only name I remember is Georges’s,” Miller said glumly.

  “The servant’s?”

  “I’m in league with the servants.”

  Immediately he felt like an idiot. Well, he thought, almost immediately. It took time for his idiot synapses to be passed along their screwy connections. Cut that shit out, he warned himself. You’ve as much right to be here as any of the rest of these hotshots. Hadn’t the Foundation put him up in Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles? Little Hartshine had practically pissed his plus fours when he’d seen it. Look at that, will you? I can’t believe it, I’d never have guessed! Pinch me, I’m dreaming, why don’t you? Just look at that chest, just look at that chair! How rustically cunning, why don’t you! Prissy little faggot! In Indiana, in the old days, he might have taken a guy like that and committed, what did they call it, hate crimes, all over his faggoty little ass! And now look at him, breaking baguettes with the fella. Well, thought Miller, drowsy from his second glass of wine (on top of the drink, on top of his jet lag, which, if you’d asked him the day before yesterday or so, he’d have told you, as he might have told his widely traveled Indianapolis intimates, was nothing but a psychosomatic snow job; that time was time, an hour was an hour was an hour, what difference could it make to the body where you spent it? though he realized now, of course, there must be something to it, even if he’d yet to hear any explanation of the phenomenon—interesting, now it was happening to him; more interesting than anything, everything; than the historic bedroom in which they were putting him up, than the famous Provencal sun, or the countryside, or the vineyards, or all these chaired, op-ed, think-tanker, PBS media types put together—that made any sense), my my, feature that, Mme. Kaska + M. Hartshine. Why him? Why Paul? Why that little go-gettem go-gotcha? Miller overwhelmed, Miller drowning in his beer in his heart. (He could at that moment almost have been, Miller could, slumped in absinthe at lunchtime in the night café, one of the Old Master’s stupored-out lowlifes.)

  But time doesn’t stand still in a flashback or in the stream- of-consciousness, and Miller, pulled up short, noticed that the little guy was grinning, amused in a way that could only have been at Miller’s expense.

  “What?” said Miller.

  “Oh,” said Hartshine, “I was just thinking.”

  “What?” Miller said.

  “Well, it’s just that you were coming into the country.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This morning. In Marseilles. You were coming into the country, You don’t have to clear Customs when you come into the country. When you go back to America, that’s when you have to clear Customs!”

  “Yeah, well,” Miller said, “I looked dangerous to them.”

  “Oh? Dangerous?”

  “I fit their profile,” Miller said.

  “Please?” said Hartshine.

  “Look, it’s only my first trip, okay? I was in Montreal once, but I was never overseas before.”

  “Really?” Hartshine said. “Really? You’re kidding!”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are, you’re pulling my leg.”

  Miller watched the outrageously dressed man, now staring back examining Miller with almost as much astonishment and wonder as he’d lavished on that unpainted fourth wall in Van Gogh’s bedroom. Was he really such a freak? Hartshine continued to stare at him as if Miller were something between a sport of nature and an act of God. He would be thirty-seven his next birthday. (Which he’d celebrate in about three weeks and which just happened to coincide with his tenure in Arles.) Was it so surprising that someone his age should not have made a trip abroad before this? If pressed, he sup
posed he could tell them he’d had none of the advantages—— too old for Desert Storm, a hair too young for Nam. Then, too, when he was an undergraduate, there’d been no junior-year-abroad program at his university. (It had come up. The state legislature was unwilling to spring for its part of the liability insurance.) He hadn’t backpacked through Europe, nor worked his way across on a cargo steamer. His parents couldn’t afford to give him a summer abroad, and he’d never known the sort of people who might have set him up in some cushy job as intern in the overseas office. As a graduate student he’d had enough on his hands just trying to finish his doctoral dissertation. So, what with one thing and another, he’d slipped through the cracks of his generation, Miller had, and if it weren’t for his cockamamy project he might still be, well, back home again in Indiana.

  Still, it wasn’t as if he were this wonder of the world or something, and if Hartshine didn’t quit staring at him as if he were forty-two of the hundred neediest cases, with just that edge of sympathy, reassurance, and conspiracy curling around his expression like a wink (as if to say “My lips are sealed, your secret’s safe with me.”), Miller might just pop him one.

  Jesus, Miller thought, what’s with this violence crapola? I’m not a mean drunk. Hell no, I’m sweet. So cool it, he cautioned, behave yourself. No more anger. But where’s the damn waiter? Those other guys are on their fourteenth course already. I’m hungry! (On top of the drink, on top of the jet lag, on top of the anger!) Just fucking calm down, will you? Just fucking make allowances, just fucking when-in- Arles.

  “Waiter!” he exploded. “You, garçon! A little service. A little service over here!”

  “Miller, please,” Paul Hartshine said.

  Had this occurred? Had he actually said these things? He looked around the room. No one appeared to be paying any attention to him. They seemed as caught up in their discussions, building their solemn, elaborate, intellectual arguments, scoring their various points, as when he’d first come into the night café. Much less disturbed than Hartshine when Miller had acknowledged it was his first trip to Europe. He took this as a sign that the outburst had not really happened, and for this he was truly grateful. (Boy, he thought, am I in trouble!)