Van Gogh's Room at Arles (14 page)

“They’ll calm down,” Miss Simmons said.

“Is that banister swaying, you think?”

But they
had
calmed down, their argument, if that’s what it was, now declined to a simple discussion. Schiff, his own rage building, could even make out what some of them were saying. Moffett, Dickerson, Carter, and Tysver knew of other parties that might still be going on. Wilkins and Bautz wanted to go dancing. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other to Disch and Freistadt, to Kohm and Lipsey. Whatever the rest of them decided, they said.

“Oh no,”
Schiff exploded, “
oh no you don’t!”

They looked down, startled.

“Nobody move! Stay right where you are!”
he ordered.

They stared at him, taking in his outburst, it seemed to Schiff, with something of a mild, patronizing amusement. Oh, he thought, I tickle you, do I? Well, he thought, I may be down, but I ain’t out. Who’s the political geographer here, anyway? he thought. And, gathering himself where he sat in the wheelchair, sized up the situation on his jammed, peninsulary stairway.

Four wanted to go to parties. But from what he could make out, they were different parties. At least two, possibly three. Counting his own, the party they were already at, there might conceivably be four. Bautz and Wilkins wanted to go dancing. Taking the most conservative view of it (four people choosing between two different parties, two individuals who preferred to go dancing) meant there were six people holding positions on three options. Disch, Freistadt, Kohm, and Lipsey were undecided, which meant that all that was needed to capture the swing vote was just two of these.

Schiff thought carefully.

Not fifteen minutes before, Ms. Kohm had been in clear, unchallenged charge. She’d assigned them turns on his Stair-Glide, had granted permission to various students to ride Schiff’s chair while various other students sat on their laps. If she’d lost command, it was to the situation she’d surrendered it, the breakdown of Schiff’s Stair-Glide. To the general panic and disarray that followed in the wake of that event, the terrifying, momentary, anarchic tableau they made on his stairway. No one had moved to take her place. Indeed, all that had happened was that various new alternatives had been proposed. It was entirely possible the group still didn’t know it was leaderless.

Schiff, the crippled but wily political geographer, knew what he had to do.

He addressed Ms. Kohm as if it were status quo ante.

“I’m sorry, Molly,” Schiff said calmly, choosing his words carefully, “but this is where I put my foot down. I have to pull rank on you, I’m afraid. First off, I don’t trust that stairway. Second, you’ve broken my Stair-Glide.”
(Molly,
he chose.
My
Stair-Glide. Two
I’ms
, three
Is
, he chose.)

“Come down from it now, please. One at a time. Calmly, calmly. No need to panic. That’s right, that’s right. As a matter of fact, you might even try to pick it up a little. All right,” he said when most were down off the stairway and bunched about his wheelchair in the hall. “Well, Molly,” he chose, “if you get your people to do the salad and pasta, I’d no longer have any reason to hold all your grades hostage to fortune,” he chose.

Molly Kohm shrugged as if the game were up. Low man on the stairway, she came down a step and into Schiff’s hall. “Come on you guys,” she said to the other students as Schiff turned his head and beamed up at Miss Simmons. The rest dutifully followed. They went with her into the living room. Without bothering about anyone else’s, she found the paper plate she’d been eating off, leaned down, scooped it up, and walked with it past Schiff toward his kitchen. Apparently she hadn’t noticed the cherry tomatoes that rolled off the plate when she stooped to scoop it up.

Meanwhile her classmates, only a litle more ambitious than their leader, stumbled through Schiff’s living room, grabbing up handfuls of lettuce and clumps of pasta, picking over Schiff’s rug like drunken field hands.

“Fuck this,” Disch said, took his jacket, still wet from the rain, up off the dining-room table where he’d left it when he’d come in, shrugged into it, and walked out the door.

“Yeah,” said Lipsey, “fuck this all right,” and followed Disch out.

“Invited to a party,” mumbled Miss Freistadt, “don’t have to take this shit,” and she left too.

He’d lost three of the undecideds.

“Hey, what about me,” asked worried Schiff, trying to stanch the flow, “how am I supposed to get up those stairs?”

“Hold it!”
Ms. Kohm boomed. “Hold it, he’s right!” Schiff looked gratefully up at her. “Somebody get that pail!”

“The pail, the pail! It was as if her priorities lagged three or so beats behind Schiff’s own. Or no. Had leapfrogged his priorities altogether. Hopscotched them. Or no. Were on an entirely different plane. Or no. Were not priorities any longer at all. Not priorities, not even choices. Neither picks nor preferences. Completely off any even platonic idea of a ballot and, now in the hands of his lone remaining undecided, catapulted into the range of fitful caprice. So she’d called for her bucket. Next it might be for her fiddlers three.

“I’ll get it for you, Ms. Kohm,” said Miss Carter.

“Push me, push me,” he snapped in Miss Simmons’s direction. Lazily, she wheeled his chair in and out of the first-floor rooms. “No no,” he said, “after Miss Carter. She’s gone into the kitchen.”

She had. She was standing beside Ms. Kohm, to whom she had handed her pail, at the sink. Where she was emptying the remains of the salad. Pouring salad into the sink from the pail. Mindful of her fingers, pushing salad carefully into the sink, down into the rubberized maw of the garbage Disposall. Force-feeding the garbage Disposall. Taking leftover pasta and salad from the paper plates handed on to her in a sort of crazy bucket brigade by a chain of migrant student workers and adding these scraps into the now unwilling, refractory machine, grinding and grinding down, growling and choking, coughing up lettuce, spitting zucchini over mounds of red, regurgitant pasta.

“Please stop, it’s breaking,” requested Schiff. “Please?” he offered. “No, really,” he said, “it’s all right. You don’t have to bother, I’ll get it. She won’t stop,” Schiff complained to Miss Simmons.

“Those other guys were right,” said Miss Simmons. “Fuck this,” she said, and she walked out on him, too.

“All right,” spoke Schiff from his now pusherless chair, hoping to catch someone’s attention, “see what you’ve done? Miss Simmons is gone. The strong-looking one walked out. See what you’ve done? Who’ll get me upstairs? How will I manage? What’s going to happen to me?” he appealed to them. And where, he wondered, did his own intoxication come from? Why, from woe, he thought. Woe was its source, and he was as helpless to stanch it as he’d been to keep Lipsey and the others from leaving. Helplessly he continued to ask his rhetorical questions. “Why do bad things happen to good people? Or vice versa?” he asked. “If one knew going in that this was how a pretty fair country Ping-Pong player was going to end up, would one even have bothered? What are the odds, would you say, of my ever getting your respect back after putting you through an evening like this? All right,” he said, addressing Ms. Kohm, “I’ve got one for you. If Claire’s not in Seattle, where is she you think?”

But Ms. Kohm was still at her blind ablutions, bent over the kitchen sink, her arms plunged into the extaordinary pile of salad, lifting strands of it toward her face and examining them as if there were something inherent in the salad itself that prevented the Disposall from handling it. “Nope,” she pronounced, “she won’t go down. Say,” she said, turning to Schiff, “what are we thinking of here anyway? This stuff is still fresh, You could live off it for a week. Let’s get it into the fridge.” No one but Schiff seemed to be listening to her, though, so she set an example. She took up an armful of the stuff and started with it toward the refrigerator. “Someone get that door for me, will you,” she said, “my arms are full.”

“No, really,” Schiff said, “you don’t have to bother. Not on my account. Tomorrow I’m making these arrangements with Meals-on-Wheels.”

But by this time she’d managed to work the door open. Unceremoniously, she dumped her green burden onto a shelf in Schiff’s refrigerator. “There,” said Ms. Kohm, “it’s on one of the lower shelves. See, I’ve made it handicap accessible for you.”

“Right,” said Schiff. “You’re in compliance. Now I won’t have to take you to court.”

And idly wondered not only why he hadn’t thrown them out of his house, but why he hadn’t called the cops, why even now, abandoned in the dead center of his kitchen as the others began to drift back into his living and dining rooms, into his hall, back up onto his stairway, which they’d taken over, had gravitated toward like some playground for the able-bodied, in the wheelchair he hadn’t strength enough to guide, or move by himself, so that he had begun to think of it as of a riderless horse on some sad state occasion, and of himself as a witness to his own lugubrious funeral, why even now, terrified as he was, as frightened (not of them, not of his students, who wouldn’t harm him, who wouldn’t throw him down the stairs, but had only meant to ride out the storm of his mad display, and who were still high, it could be, on sheer proximity, not, as he’d first thought, on something reprieved in him, in his life, on something, well, matriculate in the stepping-stone progression of his—
their—
curricula-loaded being, close, pledged as they were, to vocation, calling, some academic plane of the almost religious, some devoted, tenure-sustained existence of the pleasantly civilized, of books and ideas, redeemed from their monasticism and lifted into a realm of sheer pure reward and perk and blessing, the goodish furniture, the respectable house, the solid neighborhood, but to its opposite; knocked for more of a loop by the debit side of his ledger: his physical deficits, all the more visible in the privacy of that respectable house in the solid neighborhood on the goodish furniture, most of which he couldn’t even use, than ever they were in mere public; by his not-only-absent, but positively run-off, whereabouts-unknown wife, fleeing him, could be, for all she was worth) of the long-term exigencies as he was of the short, tipsy on woe, fuddled on fear, why even now he couldn’t bring himself to urge them to leave, signaling the end of the evening with all the politically correct semaphores available to an internationally wised-up guy like himself, all the recognized, honored peremptories, a stretch, a yawn, an extension of arms, of reversed, interlocked fingers. Though he
knew
why, of course, understood that it was because he did not want to be left alone, was willing to accept on behalf of his house all the risks that letting them stay in it for even a little while exposed it to. Those risks, he understood, which were only the cost of doing business. (Which was why, he supposed, cumulatively, belatedly, he felt so abandoned now that Lipsey, Freistadt, Simmons, and Disch had ditched him.) It was his funeral. Where was everybody?

“Hey? Hey? Hey?” he called, taking the roll.
“Hey!”
he yelled, calling the class to attention as they dribbled back in.

(All, all
of them pie-eyed on woe’s potent, astronomical proof, sozzled on the neat punch of grief.)

“Listen,” Schiff said, “maybe you’re right. Maybe it ain’t such a hot idea to take me upstairs. What with the Stair- Glide out and all. I mean, suppose there’s a fire? You people smoked up a storm. I mean,
look
at those ashtrays. God only knows what could still be burning, smoldering in there, what might even yet only be waiting on oxygen, drafts, sparks, the rain to subside, whatever it takes for conditions to ripen, ignition, combustion, the balloon to go up. Maybe if you just stretched me out down here on the couch. On the other hand, if there
were
a fire, why, down here’s where it’d probably start, wouldn’t it? Oh,
I
don’t know, when you get to be my age, when you have to live the way I have to live, why, it’s sixteen of one, thirty-seven of the other, isn’t it?

“Well, just listen to me. Is this what I sound like? Do I always come on with all this self-pity? Talk about party poopers. And the irony is, it’s my own party I’m pooping. I’m worn out and old. What do you expect? Hey, there I go again. Listen, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m overtired, maybe that’s why I’m so cranky. Give me the benefit of the doubt, will you?

“I
know,” he said. “While we still have the numbers. Let’s go back to plan A. Take me upstairs? Put me to bed?”

So a few of them gradually came forward. Little Miss Moffett. Tysver. Mr. Dickerson. Mr. Bautz. Only Kohm and Wilkins hung back.

But he didn’t like the way they were handling him. They started to pull him from his wheelchair but, inexpert as friends enlisted to help move another friend into a new apartment, had no clear idea of what they were doing. They
jostled
his old ass. Miss Moffett, who held him under his left arm, was way too small. She was only getting in Mr. Tysver’s way. No one was supporting him at the middle and, since they were too close to each other to begin with, part of his body tended to bump along the ground rather like a rolled-up carpet, say, new, tied-up and still in its paper, that was being carried from one point to another.

He was almost too alarmed to complain, but managed, despite a sort of vertiginous fright, to get out a warning. “No,” he said, “this ain’t going to happen.”

“He’s right,” said Ms. Kohm, who had apparently been studying the situation. “Get him back into his wheelchair.”

Which might not, he was thinking, be such a hot suggestion because it would involve a sort of customized fitting, a proper folding and, at the same time, working him into an upright position, rather, he supposed, like maneuvering one of those heavy dummies they use to test-crash automobiles, into the driver’s seat. He shut his eyes. Perhaps they were better at erasing mistakes than at making them. In any event, he was back in the chair in no time at all.

“Now wheel him into the hallway,” Ms. Kohm said. “What’s the point of trying to carry him there? This is the kitchen. The stairs are in the hall. What could you have been thinking of?”