Van Gogh's Room at Arles (32 page)

“I like the way this man opens up with relative strangers,” Paul Hartshine said. “I like how he gets up in your face.”

Madame Celli said, “Let the poor man rest. I’m afraid we’re exhausting him.”

“No you’re not,” Miller said, “you’re not exhausting me. I’m glad of the company. Truly.”

He was. Madame Celli was earthy. Not, he supposed, his usual type, but a real babe. Older than him certainly—— forty, a year or so more maybe. Not matronly though. Anything but, as a matter of fact. How could he put it? Well,
European.
Probably she had hair under her arms. Probably her legs were not clean-shaven. (She wore dark stockings, he couldn’t tell.) Possibly her teeth were bad. Possibly she wore no underwear. The broadness of her perfume might have covered certain feral odors, scents—— stirring messages from her glands and guts and organs. (Bidets would dissolve beneath her acids and grimes.) Hair plugged up her nipples. She was as foreign as the forbidden flavors and fluids of his calamari, the queer sweets and salts of all his difficult delicacies. (This odd, inexplicable concupiscence. On top of the drink on top of the jet lag on top of the anger on top of the hallucination on top of the hunger.) Sullenly, Miller recalled his pique at the memory of Madame’s modest flirtation with Hartshine at lunch that afternoon. Would the fellow hang about all day? Reversing himself, Miller announced impatiently, “I’m better, I’m better. I’m tired is all. I need to get some sleep.” Then, almost as if it were a threat, “I better get some sleep.”

“The time!” the babe spoke up suddenly. “Monsieur Hartshine, have you forgotten the time? You will have missed your bus if we do not leave off. They will be going to the Alyscamps without you. Show me your ticket. Yes, that is just the one Rita sold you this morning. Run, you must hurry if you would catch your coach! Please, Paul,” she warned, “under no circumstances should you go to your room for your camera! The camera is of no importance whatever, it is insignificant. There will be plenty of other opportunities for the camera. I vow you that. But for now entirely disregard it. And anyway Rita has many beautiful views of the Alyscamps, both wallet size and eight- by-ten, which you may purchase at the Fellows’ official discount.
Run,
there is no time! Run and scamper! It would be too tragic if the coach should leave without you!”

Now I’m in for it, Miller thought. Now I am. What will this savage woman do to me? My condition, he thought. He wasn’t up to any rough stuff. The jet lag, et cetera. On top of on top of. On top of Old Smoky. He closed his eyes and waited for the wild rumpus to begin.

When he opened them again in the strange country Hartshine and Madame Celli were nowhere to be seen of course.

Rita was the assistant in Madame Celli’s office. She put through long-distance calls for the Fellows, she sold them stamps, exchanged money, cashed their checks. She took their wash to the launderette for them if they were desperate or particularly helpless, arranged for the odd emergency trip to the doctor or dentist and, through a brother-in-law who owned a bus, organized tours and day trips for the group. Speaking into a microphone in one of her several languages, she went along on these and provided a running commentary as their tour guide. Frequently, if the brother- in-law was unavailable, she drove the bus herself.

She was a bright, cheerful, pretty girl in her early twenties, supremely efficient, energetic, and, according to Russell, who knew about such things, was already regarded as one of the finest factotums in all of Europe. It was she, in fact, rather than Kaska, who prepared Miller’s tray and brought it that evening to the yellow house.

He hadn’t had anything acceptable in his stomach since before landing in Paris—could it have been only that morning?—and was beginning to feel hungry, though he was relieved to see that all the girl had brought him to eat was bread and butter, consommé, tea, and some fresh fruit. If she kept him company while he ate, he said, she could take the tray back, she wouldn’t have to make two trips. It really hit the spot, he told her. After the rich, heavy meal of that afternoon, he told her, it was really delicious. Really. (It was Rita who informed him that the French took their big meal at lunch. If he wanted, she said, from now on he could have his consommé, bread and butter, fruit salad, and tea in the afternoons. Perhaps, she suggested, Monsieur might enjoy a nice cheese with that, a pleasant pâté, nothing too harsh. She would tell Chef. He could have omelettes for his suppers. Miller jumped at the chance. “You must think I’m a real wuss,” he said, thinking perhaps she might not know the word. “Neither wuss nor wimp,” she reassured him. “The taste bud is not a secondary sex characteristic.”)

He asked about the afternoon tour, if he’d missed much, and was surprised when she replied that he had actually, yes. They had gone to Les Alyscamps, she said, and walked between the tall trees the length of L’Allée des Sarscophages beside the rows of limestone coffins where eighty generations were buried. What she told him did not seem delivered, a piece of her patter (though it occurred to Miller that of course it must be), but came out of her mouth almost conversationally. She described how Arlésienne wedding guests would leave the church directly after the ceremony, come out to L’Allée des Sarcophages and, sitting on the coffin lids, make a picnic of champagne and éclairs. Quite coincidentally, she said, such a picnic had occurred just that afternoon, he’d missed that.

“How extraordinary,” Miller said. “Champagne and éclairs.”

“Oh,” Rita said, “it’s to do with the life cycle. The sweetness and sorrow newlyweds must expect.”

“No,” Miller said, “I meant the combination.”

Had she flinched? It seemed to him, who had never really been able to read faces, who had seldom detected even a blush, or seen someone blanch, or understood the widely touted, famous signals of the eyes, that he saw
something
happen in her head, some faint temblor of hurt and shock. (Miller too well guessed at its epicenter.) Because, he thought, earlier I’d been an asshole, and then (on top of on top of, etc.) went a little crazy, lay down for a few hours, woke up refreshed, managed to get something in my belly, and am now restored to being an asshole again. At least a fool. This is a nice girl, why should I cut myself off at the pass?

So he played it straight. Straighter. Got them back on the tour bus again, hurriedly asked her where else they had gone, what else they had seen. She answered mechanically at first, then (for she
was
a good sort or at the very least every bit the superb factotum she was cracked up to be) resumed the casual, conversational pace of her previous remarks.

From Les Alyscamps they’d climbed the hill to the Roman amphitheater. It was probably built in the first century, was a hundred thirty-six by one hundred seven meters, which was, let’s see, maybe four hundred and twenty-eight, no, four hundred forty-six by three hundred fifty-one feet in Miller’s money. It seated twenty thousand spectators. In the middle ages it had been turned into a fortress, which gradually became an actual town with around two hundred houses and a couple of chapels. The stones for its transformation had come from the amphitheater itself. Over the years the little village dissolved into a ruin, but excavation was undertaken in the nineteenth century—eighteen twenty-something, she thought—and the amphitheater was restored. It was really too bad he hadn’t felt well enough to join the group today, she said. They’d climbed to the top of one of the three remaining watch towers to get an idea of the sheer massiveness of the arena. It had been very clear this afternoon. Their height had provided them with grand views. They’d been able to see all of Arles of course, but there’d been good views, too, of the Rhône, and of the Alpilles in the distance, and of Montmajour Abbey at the end of Arles Plain. Well perhaps another time. Yes, come to think of it, if they could get the bus, there were plans to go out to Montmajour Abbey tomorrow.

“When do they work?” asked Miller. “Oh,” Rita said, “everyone goes at their own pace here.” “It’s a little like being on an ocean voyage.” “I have never been on an ocean voyage. I do not go at my own pace. I go at the pace of the others.”

“Then that’s your pace,” Miller, landlocked in Indianapolis, who hadn’t ever been on an ocean voyage either but who’d that very afternoon, beneath his napkin, momentarily felt himself benignly wrapped in the narcotic of his waiter’s attentions and suspected the pleasures of deck chairs, of being held fast in tightly tucked blankets, and who now, this evening, tonight, in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, contentedly surrendered himself to the barbery buzz of Rita’s sweet voice, dreamily said. And who knew (Miller) that though he was rested now, restored to sanity, that his hallucination had been merely a hallucination, that the last thing in the world he wanted, the very
last
thing, was to get on a bus to go out with the others to Montmajour Abbey, whatever that was. That rested or not, restored or not, Miller could wait until it came out in an eight-by-ten. “Well, you know,” he added, “perhaps I should stay in just a bit longer. I don’t think I’m up quite yet for anything as rigorous as a tour. I may be coming down with something. I still feel a little funny. A little, I don’t know, disoriented and strange. It could be the mistral.”

“The mistral blows in the winter,” Rita said. “I’ll call a doctor if you don’t feel better. But really,” she said, “the best thing for your sort of malaise is not to give in to it. You should get up. You shouldn’t lie about. You should try to make it down to breakfast. You must try to get out more. Make some friends while you’re here. Monsieur Hartshine seems quite nice. He is very enthusiastic. He will get on nicely. Already, on the tour, I could see he is very popular with the other Fellows. He could introduce you, he could help you make your way. In any event, it is not a good thing to depend on trays and bland diets. I promised I would speak to Chef, and I will. That is no trouble. But it would be much better for you if you made some effort to adjust to the food. It isn’t good for you to lie about all alone in the yellow house.”

It was a lot to take in. Harder than the details and dimensions she’d been feeding him about Arles’s historic buildings and monuments and parks, the grand tour as it might have been told to a blind man—— gently and patiently and with just enough consideration to make it appear as if she were rehearsing all this to him personally, even intimately. Now that it had
become
intimate—even personal—Miller was furious. He might have lashed out at any point in her lecture—— at her assumptions about what she called his malaise, about his social life, at any of her cheeky aspersions about his personality, even about her betrayal of his appetite. What he chose, however ludicrously (he was that furious), was what was nearest to hand.

“I am
not
alone in this house. There are three other rooms!”

“They are to be painted. No Fellows have been assigned to them. You are quite by yourself here.” She turned to go.

“How many spectators did you say that amphitheater held?” he called after her as she went down the stairs “Thirty thousand? Twenty? Hah!
The Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis accommodates more than three times that many!”

He thought he could hear his voice reverberating through what he supposed must have been the vacated, partially emptied-out, painter-prepared rooms. It sounded as hollow to him as his uncarpeted, unfurnished rage. But
God,
he was mad! Reason not the need and vice versa.

And was still going strong—to wit: why, the very idea! the nerve of that bitch! just who in hell
—— nobody
talks to—— if she thinks—— two can play at
that
game! if she thinks, if she thinks—factotum, shmacktotum,
abada
figaro,
abada
figaro, figaro
la,
figoro
la!
because nobody can talk to me like that and still expect a good tip!—when suddenly the sound of his reproach just fell silent, just quit, fell dead away, every last damn reverberation collapsed in on itself like light down the toilet of a black hole, and he realized how far he was from back home again in Indiana and the glossy municipal comforts of Booth Tarkington Community College, where he not only had colleagues with whom he broke bread and ate lunch in the school cafeteria (to which not one of them had ever had to adjust), but his very own assigned space in the orderly, patrolled, tow- away-zoned faculty parking lot. His mood easing, eased through anger, melancholy, memory, and nostalgia, sloping away, declining downward like a grammatical form, and resolved at last to poor pure awareness.

Now am I alone, Miller thought, and sighed, and realized, appreciated, and for the first time since he’d been there recognized, not just where he’d come from, but where he had arrived. Miller in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Miller in Miller’s room in Arles. And thought that whoever made the room assignments (Kaska Celli undoubtedly, Madame Low Down and Dirty) must certainly know her man. He not only meant himself, he meant Van Gogh, too.

Neither was in his element in Arles. They were about the same age. Both were bachelors. Both had been repudiated by the Establishment. Van Gogh never sold a painting while he lived and, what, you think Booth Tarkington Community College was the first place Miller applied or sent his curriculum vitae? He’d asked for a hundred jobs. It wasn’t even the first place in Indiana. It wasn’t even the first place in
Indianapolis!
Also, Vincent was a little nutsy too.

The day hadn’t gone well for him, he’d been through a lot, he was tired, wrung out, tomorrow was another day. He made out the light. Though his fury had subsided he was still on edge. He got into their bed. He said his prayers. He pulled the drawstring of his pajamas. The secret of a long- lasting relationship, he told God, was never to go to bed angry. Rita was younger, and more beautiful, but her words had stung him. He was still too hurt. So he fixed on the older woman, on Kaska and, slowly bringing her into focus, the hair on her unshaved legs, beneath her arms, on the black, full bush that hung on the pantieless body under her skirt, and conjuring the stirring gale-force smells that rose off her flesh like all the molten perfumes of earth, Miller, coming, groaning, sighing, forgave the world and slept.