Van Gogh's Room at Arles (31 page)

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 supposed 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!)

“Miller, please,” Hartshine said, “what’s wrong? Is something wrong?”

“No. Why?”

“You seem uncomfortable. You’re making these disagreeable faces.”

“I’m hungry. I’m a bear when I’m hungry. I mean, how about you? Ain’t you anxious to grab up your clubs and get back to the greens?”

“Hold on. Lunch is coming.”

“I mean on top of the drink, on top of the jet lag, on top of the anger.”

But now the waiter was shaking Miller’s napkin out for him and, without so much as grazing him, cast it across his lap in a gesture like a sort of fly fisherman. Miller watched the linen settle gently on his trousers and, on top of the drink on top of the jet lag on top of the anger on top of the hunger on top of the hallucination (which he mustn’t mention to Hartshine), was suddenly as content as he could remember ever having been in his life. The waiter’s attentions wrapped him in a kind of cotton wool and he felt, well, like the privileged movers and shakers at the other tables. If things had been otherwise with him, he considered, if a few more balls had taken the right bounces, or a few more calls gone his way, why, he would have been as well served in self as the best of them. Life was a game of inches.

He heard the waiter tell them in French that but that “because Madame Celli had become invisible in the laundry two horses must begin to be.” Miller politely added his thanks four thousand times over to Hartshine’s own and sat stiffly back as the man dealt out three plates of appetizers in front of the three place settings.

He wasn’t born yesterday. He knew
calamari
meant squid. He had even watched with a certain queasy sort of fascination as a sophisticated pal ordered and ate them once in the dining room of the Indianapolis Sheraton. That he didn’t choose to do more than introduce one of its ten purply, clawlike, little baby arms past his lips had less to do with its rubbery texture or its faintly, he suspected, forbidden taste, than with its jet black, gelatinous coating.

He removed the thing from his mouth and held it out by its small caudal beak. A few drops of dark fluid spilled on the toast point on which it was served.

“This would be what, its like ink then?” he remarked to his dinner companion.

“Oh, look,” Hartshine said, “that one still has its suckers.”

“I’m not big on the delicacies.”

Though he quite liked his quenelles of pike, he had first to wipe off their thick, spiked whipped cream.

And didn’t more than
sip
the bouillabaisse. Hartshine agreed, offering his opinion that while the stock was too bland, Miller really ought to try to spear up some of the lovely rascasse. He must be careful with the spines however, some were poisonous. Miller was. He laid down his soup spoon and fish fork. And was content to watch Hartshine spear great hunks of gray fish out of his soup. In their thick, piebald, mottled rinds they reminded him of the dark cancerous creatures behind aquarium glass. The sweetbreads smeared in anchovy sauce seemed sharp, foreign and, to Miller’s soured appetite, had the powdered, pasty, runny taste of eyes. Conscious of the waiter watching him, Miller didn’t dare push them away. But burned his tongue on hard bits of spice and herbs laced into the bread like a kind of weed gravel. There were poached pears bloodstained by red wine. There was a sour
digestif.
There was bitter coffee.

Kaska (having evidently settled the problem of the two horses was no longer invisible in the laundry) had joined them again, rematerialized at their table. “Here,” she said, “what’s this? Is something wrong with your food? Clémence reports you have merely played with it, that you haven’t touched a thing.”

Now this got Miller’s goat. (On top of the drink, on top of the jet lag, on top of the anger, on top of the hallucination and hunger.) He felt he had to defend himself, get things straight.

“Madame,” he said, “it is true that I am only from Indianapolis. It is true that I teach at Booth Tarkington Community College. It is true this is my first trip to Europe. But I was born and raised in an Indiana town not more than an hour’s drive from Chicago, that toddling town, city of the broad shoulders, hog butcher to the world, home to Al Capone and many another who with one cross look could scare the merde out of you. A place, I mean, of much seriousness and, for your information, my mother raised me better than that. She taught me that if I didn’t like what was set on my plate I was to keep it to myself. Ask Hartshine if I made a fuss. Because I didn’t. I never said a word, did I, Paul?”

She said he looked tired, she said it was probably the jet lag, the new country, the strange food. She suggested that perhaps he ought to lie down in the room for a few hours, that later she could prepare a tray for him and bring it over to the yellow house.

“Gosh,” Miller said, “but my project.”

She said he had five weeks, his project could wait, that no one really got any work done the first day.

His bed turned down, his yellow pillows fluffed, the shutters on the windows angled to adjust the sun, he was installed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles like a painting.

Madame Celli took away his water pitcher and returned it full. She set it down beside him on the rush chair. “I’ll put your drinking glass where you’ll be able to reach it. Will you be all right?”

“Really,” he said, “I’m fine. Much too much is being made of my indisposition. It’s probably the jet lag, the new country, the strange food. All I need is to lie down for a few hours.”

Madame Celli looked at Hartshine. Hartshine looked at Miller. “That’s the ticket,” Hartshine said.

“No harm done,” said Miller, “no real damage. Unless—— ”

“What?”

“Oh. Well. Nothing. Never Mind.”

“No,” coaxed Hatshine, “what?”

“What I asked before. I really never did say anything, did I?”

“When? What? Complain about the food you mean? No.”

“Did I make a scene? Did I shout out loud for the waiter!”

“No,” said Hartshine, “of course not.”

“Well, all right then,” Miller said, “then I was only hallucinating. I thought I might be. No one seemed to be paying any attention. Of course, with that crowd, what would you expect? They just carry on dum de dum, la de da, ooh la la, with their usual business. Nothing gets to them, nothing. A fella from Indianapolis would have to have a Sherpa and a Saint Bernard if he wanted to scale
their
ivory towers. He couldn’t just do it with a cry for the waiter! Those guys don’t hear the regular ranges. And who can blame them, guys like them? No, they’ve their priorities. My
God,
they do! Where to set the minute hand on the Doomsday clock, or fix the borders in the New Geography. Handling the headlines, worrying the world! It was a good thing it was only a hallucination I had. God forbid I was starving, God forbid I really needed a waiter in those conditions. Because you want to know something? What I actually cried out in that hallucination was noise from the soul, the ordinary screeches and lub dubs of my Hoosier heart. Oh my.”