She said her name was Anita Smynea and that she taught theological psychiatry at the London School of Economics. (Miller figured it was an elective.) Her project in Arles, she said, would be to put together the raw data for a monograph she was preparing on a psychological profile of the saints and martyrs.
Miller listened fascinated as she reeled off evidence for her conclusion that the downside of their spirituality and devoutness was a zealotry even more off-putting and unpleasant than their self-rightousness.
“Oh, come now, really,” one of the Fellows said, “off- putting? Unpleasant?”
“Are you serious?” Ms. Smynea said. “Those people couldn’t get past the lowliest reservations clerk at Heathrow, let alone a metal detector!”
A man who identified himself as a political geographer spoke next, addressing the group in the music room from a wheelchair. He discussed his theories about why world-class cities were almost never found on mountaintops. From what Miller understood of his ideas it had less to do with the mechanical difficulties involved in hauling material up their steep, perilous slopes than with some notion about “Man’s innate fear of the sky and of exposure to most astronomical phenomena.” Further arguing that the concept of shelter had as much to do with physical contact and sexual enterprise as it did with a need to protect oneself from the elements, he advanced the theory that from a child’s security blanket on up the chain of architecture to the floor, the ceiling, the room, the apartment and neighborhood, one had before one the very type of the Platonic idea of “comfort.” Thus, cities, mimicking lovemaking, were constitutionally “horizontal” rather than “vertical,” and did not get built on the tops of mountains.
Miller, floundering, foundering, losing track, dropping behind, dropping out, was overcome with sadness. His interest, which was still high, availeth not. Unconsciously, he looked toward Russell for a sign of corroborative impatience. Russell was contemplative and serene inside his huge head.
It was someone else entirely who grew fitful, lost patience. “What is the point, please?” Paul Hartshine (now, for dinner, in a dinner jacket) demanded irritably.
“I’m a political geographer,” said the cripple. “The point, of course, is that because of the synergy between the fear of sky-nakedness and sexual guilt there can be no such thing as a ‘shining city on a hill.’”
“Denver!” Hartshine challenged.
“Denver is foothills.”
A scholar from Hebrew University spoke about slang in the sacred texts.
Myra Gynt, a composer from the University of Michigan, explained how it was her intention to set the lyrics of various Broadway showstoppers to the more formal music of the twelve-tone scale—— serial composition, she called it. Miller watched closely as Ms. Gynt adjusted the piano bench and, inclining her neck first right, then left, repeatedly pressed certain keys at the high and low ends of the keyboard and played two chords to either side of its center. She was averaging, she said, testing to see if the piano was tuned. Her mouth turned sourly down at the corners, and though Miller could hear nothing wrong, she professed profound dissatisfaction with the instrument.
Miller sat back, luxuriating in the high-mindedness of his colleagues, taking pleasure in the word, the privileged, lofty fellowship of the communal it radiated, their joint fraternal, sororal mutuality of mission, dedicate, pledged to service history, as if there were something vaguely legislative about scholarship, the life of mind; at once neutral and senatorian in some wise old Roman way; there to learn, to sift, to consider, and then to choose. He’d been in the business maybe eleven years, but until that moment in France he had denied something noble and honorable in himself and hadn’t realized what he should all along have taken for granted—— the collegiality of their enterprise, the professional courtesy one life owed another. He looked toward Russell, toward Hartshine, even toward the lame political geographer in the wheelchair, and smiled, certain that the look on his face at that moment matched Russell’s own almost godlike benignity.
When Myra Gynt began to sing (he hadn’t been wrong, the lyric she’d chosen to transpose into her queer, discordant, cryptic, rigorous new music was “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and was just as difficult for him to follow as he’d anticipated the lieder would be), he felt a flush of pleasure. If they could, he thought, bearing up under what he was certain was good for him, ready at that moment, if a dish of them had been passed round, to chew on the rubbery arms of the squid, to lick from his fingers its black, bilelike ink, if they only could. See him now.
And still luxuriated in his cozy aura of well-being and pride when the famous Roland de Schulte of Harvard, modest and humble as the day was long (“Some of you may have seen articles in a few of the scientific journals about work being done in the pharmacological field to study a variety of marine pathogens”), a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize in chemistry if the FDA ever got off its ass and approved any of a number of Professor de Schulte’s promising homeopathic preparations from sick sea creatures—— sharks that were HIV positive, tubercular whales, cancerous eels, arteriosclerotic plaice. (Miller knew it sounded ridiculous, even satiric. But what did he know? What? Any idiot could follow the line of least resistance and laugh at what seemed farfetched to the touch and spirit. Any fool could send up what he didn’t love or understand. Myra Gynt’s atonal music; Professor Smynea’s psychological profiles of the saints and martyrs; Schiff’s, the geographer’s, wild analogies about cities and making love. The Hebrew University guy’s thesis about Biblical slang, how the tetragrammaton itself was merely coy, even facetious, coinage for all the not-to-be- pronounced names of God.
And was still luxuriating, calm and at peace with himself as a man in his tub, only less passive than that, beaming, sending these messages of actual, active goodwill, this sort of silly facial semaphore of the heartfelts and placables, while Farrell Jones held forth regarding his conclusions about the parallels between the mood swings of manic-depressives and babies, and Dr. Arthur Barber, Distinguished University Professor in Theoretical Mathematics at the University of Chicago, speaking in formulas, in signs and symbols, explained the implications of his research not only into the philosophic impossibility of the infinite number but of the high probability that a dozen could not exist in nature.
Miller was only gradually aware of this stamped rictus across his face, like a lingering sensation that he still wore a hat after he’d already removed it. The professor had lost him. Miller had lost his euphoria. And there was Miller, Miller thought, wooden, leaden, left behind, heavy as gravity and choking on a mouthful of his own stifled yawns as someone infectious conscientiously trying to hold in his germs. He tried to rekindle his attention but it had turned cold and gone out. If there’d been a mirror for him to look into he was certain he’d have appeared red-eyed, rumpled, in need of a shave.
Then the most peculiar thing.
Without meaning to, he caught Russell’s eye.
Russell, watching Miller, even openly staring at him, distinctly mouthed, “He forgot to carry his two,” and winked.
Miller, taken by surprise, embarrassed, shy as a schoolgirl, looked down at his feet. He felt himself redden, he felt himself grin. Fearful of looking up, he remained, head bent over the room’s rich brown carpeting as if he were examining it for imperfections. His grin oddly fitting once the Getlers, the mutually chaired, married sociologists from Leiden and Basle, were into their turn. The term, Miller felt, not ill-considered since their area of expertise was the morphology of jokes and riddles. Miller was lost anyway. He understood them, those in English anyway, but had difficulty seeing the sociological implications the Getlers saw in them. Why does a chicken cross the road was, it seemed (despite slight variations in the answer), an almost universal riddle. Only in the most impenetrable New Guinea jungles and stone-age Amazonian rain forests where no roads existed, and arctic tundra and ice floes where no chickens did, was the riddle unknown. Frame of reference. Miller could dig that. What he couldn’t understand w
as why so much depended on delivery.
What, he wondered, am I doing here?
Which, remarkably, was exactly what Russell asked him at that very moment. Tentatively, almost experimentally, Miller looked up from his post where he was inspecting the carpet. Russell, smiling, threw him and held a long, at least two-beat wink.
“What,” Miller said, flustered, “are you talking to me?”
“Yes,” Russell said, “why don’t you tell the Fellows about your project?”
“You,” Miller shot back almost hostilely.
“My project? Oh,” said Russell, blowing it off, “just to think about things.”
Miller’s heart sank.
“What things?” he challenged. Because he was at a loss. Because he was cornered. Because he didn’t know what else to say. Because he’d have given anything to be back safe in bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles at that moment. Because maybe he’d known even before he’d started to lose his phony well-being as he failed to keep pace with, or track of, the elevated star turns of the evening’s show-and-tellers and had begun to expect to be called on himself (who even in Indianapolis in front of some of the better students at the community college had attacks of self-doubt, and sometimes couldn’t help keeping the outright abject gratitude off his face during a night out on the town with his hometown betters—— reversing himself now, undoing his idle, informal invocation of their witness, his half-holy if-they-could- see-me-nows, suddenly suspecting that they could, that they actually could, the canny, cunning, knowing bastards, that they’d probably set him up!).
Russell talking now, breezily reeling off a list, possibly extempore, of various things he’d been thinking of the less than twenty-four hours he’d been in Arles, Miller only now tuning in, losing maybe two-thirds of what the huge- browed, immense-headed man had been saying.
“… that if the holes in the ozone are real and the climates rearrange themselves, the temperate zone, pushing ever more northerly, sooner or later the prevailing culture will be the culture of the Laplanders, of the Inuits and Aleuts. How counterfeiting impacts upon inflation and, concomitantly, what the preponderant counterfeit currency— Deutsche marks, yen, francs, or dollars—along with its denominations can tell us about the true nature of the global economy at any given time. I mean to give some thought to how the endangerment and ultimate extinction of a particular species will affect fairy tales. How long will it be before Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, or The Three Little Pigs become obsolete? This would be a way of determining the half-life of the oral tradition.
“You?” Russell asked kindly.
The worst thing, Miller thought, isn’t that the ball’s in my court. No, he thought, not so much frightened as sick at heart (that same sick sinking heart of but moments before, which, as if it had fallen overboard, now felt itself to be turning over in some slow, twisting free-fall, snagged on the contrary currents of the thick, salted buoyance in the death-dark sea, and thinking as he parsed all this: oh, boy, am I in trouble!), the worst thing is that Russell could probably have gone on. And also that the ball was in his court.
“Oh, I have a project,” Miller said finally. “I had to have a project or the Foundation wouldn’t have let me come. As a matter of fact, I’m depending on some of you to work with me on this. I was going to leave notes with Rita to put in your boxes. I simply haven’t had time.”
He thought he sounded reasonable. Not as razzle-dazzle as Russell certainly, nor as grand as the riddles, jokes, and infinity professors or some of those other guys, but reasonable. Clear. Talking like someone conducting a meeting, say. A sort of administrator, someone orienting the troops, telling them where they could get their letterhead, pencils, supplies. A kind of Rita himself actually, or even a Madame Kaska Celli. He even thought that so far, at least after all the dense, high-intensity talk they’d had to listen to this evening, his manner of speaking might actually come as a sort of relief, put folks at their ease. Why the hell not? It put him at his. He even felt his heart had stopped sinking.
“I,” Miller said, “like you, am pleased and honored to be here. Certainly as pleased and clearly more honored. Well, I have no books, you see. Well, in community colleges, the sort of place I teach but scholars like yourselves wouldn’t give the time of day and, quite frankly, don’t have any reasons to think about much, where we consider ourselves lucky if our budgets can afford just to keep some of your seminal books amongst the library’s holdings, and where we still manage to hold our heads up even if all we can work out is to connect up with some interlibrary-loan deal with a like-minded and similarly ground-down institution which might just possibly arrange to get one of your titles into the course instructor’s hands sometime before the term is over, let alone the student’s, it really isn’t such a high priority to publish.
“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.
Van Gogh's Room at Arles Page 27