Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  Gradually he lost track of the days, of the time he had been in Arles. On some days (though he couldn’t and wouldn’t have said whether the condition of his spirit and soul—how did hospitals put it?—was satisfactory or serious or critical) he went down to breakfast or even had the kitchen make up a box lunch for him to take with him on his ambles through Arles. One afternoon he walked by himself out to the olive orchard that Van Gogh had once painted and had his bread and cheese and bottle of wine and then settled down to sleep under the pale pink blossoms of its slender trees. (Where he dreamed of a wedding couple making a picnic of champagne and éclairs on the limestone coffins alongside the tall trees in Les Alyscamps where Rita had taken the Fellows on his first day in Arles. The groom was the peasant Patience Escalier, and his bride was Berceuse Roulin. They fed and toasted each other while Miller wept for the sweetness and sorrows of life. He wept into their champagne and wept over their éclairs, and when he woke up in the olive orchard he had a salty taste in his mouth, which even the last of his wine would not loosen.) Another time, without in the least knowing where he was headed, he found himself at the Arles-Bouc Canal where he came upon the Dutch-looking drawbridge of Van Gogh’s famous painting, vaguely resembling one of da Vinci’s sketches of a military device, some water catapult, say. Other times, however, he slept in, and couldn’t, at the end of the day, have said whether his spirit and soul were the better or worse for their lack of wear.

  What he’d told his doctor (this is how he thought of Félix Rey, though it had been more than a week since he’d seen him) was true. His room at Arles suited him right down to the ground. He did no work on his project and his laptop PC remained unopened even to write the letters he had promised his pals back in Indianapolis. If he’d been able to bring himself to write any letters at all in that room they would have been to Theo, but Miller had no brother, let alone any Theo, and the idea of spilling the beans about himself to anyone else struck him, even after his performance in the music room, as an absurdity, even an act of hubris. (The one time he did turn on the laptop all he did was doodle, making odd designs and even faces out of the period, exclamation point, pound, asterisk, paragraph, section symbol, ampersand, dollar, slash, percentage, left and right bracket, single and double quote, plus, minus, cedilla, diacritical, tilde, hyphen, underscore, and other signs he did not know the name for on his keyboard. Alas, Miller thought as he turned off his PC, I’m no Van Gogh.)

  On the whole, however, if only to avoid the Fellows’ questions, he usually chose to be away from Number 2 Lamartine Place more often than he chose to be in it.

  So he would find himself—the weather had been amazing—outdoors, sometimes taking a bus to the edge of town and then striking off on his own. Or, if the bus went to some small village nearby, getting off there and then striking off. Once he rode all the way out to Saintes-Maries-de- la-Mer, about twenty-five miles from the city. When he stepped down from the bus and out into the dusty street (more a lane than a street) he had the sense of having been there before. Perhaps he had passed through on the coach during the long ride from Marseilles to Arles his first day in France. This might have been one of those places he’d been momentarily jolted awake and that had left him with his few rough impressions of that journey. But the name of the village was familiar, too. Surely he wouldn’t have retained that as well. While he was looking at the row of peculiar but quite beautiful cottages with their layers of tiered, dyed thatch like actual crops of roofs contoured into the architecture, and their whitewashed sides like thick stucco brushstrokes, it occurred to Miller that he had seen this street before. Not on the bus but in one of Vincent’s paintings. Then a wind blew up, filling his nose with the strong smell of brine. Of course! thought Miller, cuffing his head, suddenly recalling one of those first weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school. La plume de ma tante! It’s like riding a fucking bicycle! Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer! Nothing was wasted in life. Those vocabulary lists! He knew his French would come in handy one day. “Mer” means sea! Then, facing the wind, tracing the source of that brine, turning this way and that, going up one lane and down another, he came at last to a clearing from which he could see the Mediterranean and where there, on the beach, lined up it seemed to Miller almost exactly as they had been lined up in Van Gogh’s painting of the scene, were four pretty little fishing boats, one red, one green, and two blue, their anchors struck into the sand. Their owners were nowhere about. Indeed, except for one shining white gull, the only other signs of life were four other boats diminished in the distance in the Gulf of Lions.

  He was not, Miller understood, a man given to epiphanies. Who, him? With his soured soul and sick spirit? Him, Miller, the man from Indy who—get his dumb aria and parlor-game melodramatics in the damn music room out of your head—had not once during all the times this or that had been “familiar” to him in this queer foreign country, not—count ’em—once ever put down to déjà vu or anything faintly psychological any of his creepy encounters and strange doings. Yet he had his epiphany now. It was this. All his rambles and maunderings of the last few days, all of them, why it was like being on a scavenger hunt! That’s it, that’s right, thought Miller, a scavenger hunt for Van Gogh’s sketches and watercolors and oils, this was what his half-ass project came to, this was what the meaning of his off-again, on-again raids into Arles and its countryside had turned out to be!

  He was in Arles at the entrance to the public garden. A man stood with his legs planted so far apart that they might almost have been kicked into position by police. The man was reading a newspaper with the upper half of his body while darkly clothed men and women sat isolated on benches in the attitude of mourners taking time out from their grief along the sidelines of a community nature in the community air. Van Gogh had painted just such a scene. Miller turned away and would not look.

  He was approaching at street level the broad, bluish stone steps of the Trinquetaille Bridge, an iron pedestrian bridge across the Rhône. He recognized the bridge as the subject of one of Van Gogh’s paintings. He would not look.

  On another occasion he found himself walking south along the Avenue de Montmajour. At almost the last moment he looked up to see that he was about to step under the railroad-bridge underpass a few blocks up from Van Gogh’s room at Arles in the yellow house at Lamartine Place. Van Gogh had done two views—an oil and a sketch— of the underpass. Rather than go past the site, he turned about and went the long way round to his room.

  He would not look, he would not look. He would not look at the Provence farmhouse the color of mustard with its haystacks high as a house, or at its low pink stone walls and gateposts. Nor glance at the isolated cypresses rising in the distance behind it like high green flames.

  He would not look at the wheat fields set out before him like so many landscapes. He would not look at the sheaves, at the clouds, at the low outbuildings.

  He saw a sower, a youth of seventeen or eighteen wearing a hat like a cloth pith helmet, a great bag of seeds attached to him like a paperboy’s sack, and striding forthrightly through the fields like someone on a brisk walk. Crows hovered above the seeds and a little way back of the sower. He wouldn’t look.

  There were immense, brilliant sunflowers. He would not look at the sunflowers. He avoided gazing at them as he would have avoided staring into the sun itself.

  And so, in this way, Miller was at last driven back to Van Gogh’s room at Aries. Which, unless the bed were unmade—he rumpled it in the morning after a housekeeper had made it up—or he had rearranged the washstand and chairs, he would not look at and could not stay in.

  He spent time in the music room, seeking it out because it was one of the few places around Lamartine Place Van Gogh had not painted.

  People came by—the music room was a public space, open to all the Fellows—and always saw him there. He listened to CDs. He read The International Herald Tribune. He browsed American magazines as out of date as the copies in barbershops and dentists’ wait
ing rooms back home. After a while he just sat, changing every once in a while from this chair to that or switching to one or another of the room’s sofas to create at least the illusion that he was not simply vegetating.

  People respected his privacy even more than he did, but because he was too shy (or too much at a loss for something to say to them) to initiate conversation, he waited for someone to speak to him first, waited for a signal. A simple gesture of the hand, a nod in his direction would have done, just some preemptive eye contact would have, but no one, perhaps because their memory of his behavior in this room was still too fresh, ever offered it.

  His feelings for his situation, that he was outgunned in this country, outsmarted, outmanned, overwhelmed, overcome, did not make him anxious to return to his room, however. Yet there was no question of his quitting Arles, or even France, and returning early to America. For one thing, he had neither the funds for gallivanting about Europe (and even if he had, what guarantees were there that there would not be sights in any of those other places that wouldn’t pull him up just as short as they had done here?) nor the nerve to admit to his Indianapolis pals that he couldn’t go the distance. And, frankly, there was an even more practical reason he could not quit Arles. His job, at least the possibility of his being promoted to Full Professor, may very well have been on the line. Miller had no reputation as a scholar. He hadn’t published so much as a textbook. He wasn’t, he thought, a bad teacher, but the fact was that his classes didn’t always make and when that happened and (always at the last minute) he was pulled out of a section and assigned to teach a different course altogether, there wasn’t always enough time for him to bring himself up to speed and, well, naturally the teaching suffered. His fellowship in Arles had been a feather not only in his cap but in Booth Tarkington’s, too, and if he were to throw up his hands and go back to Indianapolis now, his tail between his legs, before the full five weeks were up, he could kiss his advancement goodbye. (Because there actually was a record. And there was actually a place on it where black marks could be set down against you on it.) Admittedly, there were many people his age who weren’t full professors. Most, probably. He wasn’t necessarily even in competition with them. (Community colleges weren’t bad places to teach. It was pretty laidback, really. So it wasn’t as if Miller were in any particular rush or something. The idea of a thirty-six-year-old—thirty- seven by the time he’d be in Indianapolis again—Associate Professor—or even a forty- or forty-one-year-old one— wasn’t particularly bothersome.) It was the thought of still being locked into his present rank when he was in his fifties that got to him, of becoming this school crossing guard of a professor. So it was out of the question that he abandon Arles. He didn’t even have to produce the monograph. All he really had to do was just give them some evidence—it really was laidback, it really was—that he was still working on it, that it was in the works.

  It may have been all this thinking about time (the weeks left to him in Arles, the years ahead of him when he would pull himself up hand over hand from one rank to achieve another) that led him to notice that there sometimes appeared in the music room persons he hadn’t seen there before. Only then did it occur to him that for some of the Fellows at least rotation had already happened. (He hadn’t seen that crippled political geographer around lately, he hadn’t seen Myra Gynt, the composer from the University of Michigan.) Rather than panic at the thought that he’d lost track of time—he knew he’d lost track of time—or let it bother him much that possibly weeks had gone by without his doing any work on his project, he took a sort of encouragement from the idea that these might be people who hadn’t witnessed his debacle in the music room, who may not, in fact, even have heard of it.

  So he climbed down from his high horse, broke radio silence, and greeted these strangers before waiting for them to make the first move. He asked what they thought about the place, he asked how they were adapting, it was some place wasn’t it, he asked where they were from, he asked about the projects they were working on.

  And they, in turn, asked where he was from, and he told them Indiana (which was true enough), and asked about his project, and he said (which was true enough) that, oh, he was trying to put a study together about the image of the American community college among academics from the more prestigious think tanks and universities.

  “Hmn,” said Lou Rangerer, a trade-union historian from Cornell, “don’t they do rather a lot with closed-circuit TV? And language labs? It seems to me they have all these language labs. They set students up in dozens of little cubicles in front of interactive computers where they let them work at their own pace.”

  “Language labs, yes, that’s good. Language labs. Work at their own pace,” Miller said, making a note, and checking the spelling with him of Rangerer’s last name.

  “I don’t know,” said Barbara Neil-Cheshi from the Wharton School, “aren’t they open all hours? Don’t they make a fetish of utilizing their plant around the clock all year long?”

  Miller thanked her and made a note.

  “You know what this sounds like?” Ms. Neil-Cheshi said. “Market research.”

  “No no,” said Miller, “this is more open-ended than market research. In market research they always ask specific questions. I’m here in Arles looking for impressions. I particularly stipulated that when I filed my grant application. No no. Nothing like this has ever been done.” He folded the scrap of paper on which he had recorded their remarks and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He gave back her pencil. “It’s almost time for lunch,” he said, and left the music room.

  Entering the night café a little before the others he sat down at one of the small, vacant, green baize-covered tables along a red wall. He finished his drink and held up. his empty glass until one of the waiters took it from him and returned with a full one. He spotted Paul Hartshine but looked away quickly. He came over anyway.

  “May I?” Hartshine said.

  “Sure,” Miller said. “Long time no see.”

  “Now, Miller,” Hartshine said, “you know that’s not true. We’ve seen one another in the music room practically every day. You’ve cut me quite dead. I take no offense because you treat everyone in this manner.”

  Hartshine, dapper as ever, was wearing a huge bow tie. His silk suit pants were almost like tights and his jacket flared up in back as if he were mooning the room. Miller had an urge to beat him up, at least to pick a fight. (He was drinking too much. Two or three of these apéritifs put him away these days. On top of on top of on top of on top of.) He considered what he might tell Hartshine. It was a toss- up between a remark about the way he dressed and the way he spoke. He was about to go with the clothes thing when suddenly he changed his mind and pulled out all the stops.

  “Hartshine,” he said as if it were some problematic wine he rolled about in his mouth experimentally. “Hartshine, Hartshine. What is that, Jewish?”

  Hartshine was shocked, stunned. He looked as if Miller had pulled a knife on him. He seemed terrified. This passed and a murderous anger moved across his face like weather. As Miller watched, Hartshine slowly lifted his right hand away from his lap, brought it level with the table and, raising it further, reached out and brought it to rest on the lapel of Miller’s jacket.

  Miller leaned far back in his chair. “Hey,” he said. “What? What?”

  Then Hartshine did an amazing thing. Removing his hand from the lapel he jerked it back toward his own throat and, rooting with his fingers under his big bow tie seized one end of the tie and tugged at it until the big floppy affair came undone. He pulled it through the collar of his shirt like a magic trick and set it down on his empty plate. Hartshine got up from the table wordlessly and crossed the night café to another table. Before anyone saw, Miller tried to cover the tie with his hand. Then, almost as if he were scratching the plate, he proceeded to palm Hartshine’s bow tie. He watched its elaborate print disappear into his fist, then, first looking about nonchalantly, stuffed it deep into the pocket of h
is pants.

  After his lunch (which he ate even less of than usual) Miller had no desire to return to the music room and he went back to Number 2 Lamartine. Dr. Félix Rey was standing to the side of the stairs in the tiny ground-floor hallway addressing a small, rough-looking fellow in rapid French, one of the painters perhaps, who, his back to Miller, stooped down over the stairs, tying his shoe. Rey seemed angry, even quarrelsome, but spotting Miller abruptly broke off. “Ah,” said the doctor, “the Mister Monsieur. My friend plus myself have been waiting on you. Show him, Maurice!” Almost militarily the man removed his foot from the step and snapped to a kind of attention. “Eh?” said the doctor. “Eh, eh?” He was talking to Miller. “Eh?” he said again. “Hmn?” It was as if he were offering the Hoosier a piece of merchandise he’d been at some lengths to procure and now sought, as though Miller were a connoisseur or (he suddenly recalled the phrase of an unlikely Indianapolis pal, a broker) “made a market” in the commodity, corroboration of its worth or of the doctor’s judgment.

  Miller neutrally shrugged.

  “Well,” Dr. Rey said, “let’s have a look at you, will we?” and abruptly came toward him. Miller, momentarily flashing on Paul Hartshine’s strange, bold movement in the night café and conscious of the bow tie, undone in his pocket, instinctively backed away. The doctor reached out for his wrist, which, at a loss, Miller reluctantly surrendered. “Pulse normal,” he said, turning it over, examining his hands. “Tch tch tch. Monsieur tastes his nails. Color superb,” he said and touched the edge of his hand to Miller’s face. “Skin quite dry.” Miller looked at him. “Non non non non non. Skin quite dry is an excellent circumstance. I should say you are out of the woods,” Rey said. Then he turned to the mean-looking guy and seemed to relate in French (his tone calmer than when Miller had entered the house) everything he had just been telling his patient. (Miller caught “Tch tch tch.” He caught “Non non non non non.”)