Van Gogh's Room at Arles (10 page)

“I’ll take care of that for you,” said the paramedic who’d examined him.

“Would you?” Schiff said.

“No problem.”

When the man brought it back, empty and odorless, Schiff wondered if he should tip them, then thought of the fines they’d have demanded of him, of all the ways he’d opened himself up to the possibility of bankruptcy by signing their papers. Not one cent for tribute, he decided; then, as they were leaving, called after them. “If you see Bill,” he said, “tell him hi for me.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Miss Simmons said, startling him. He’d forgotten they were still linked up.

“Do you know what I forgot?” Schiff said, realizing he had to pee again and taking advantage of the empty urinal.

“What?”

“To ask for my key back.”

“Gee,” she said, “I had it duplicated. I forgot to get it back to you.”

“That puts us about even then.”

“Oh?”

“Sure,” he said, “my playing with the button, your forgetting my key.”

“I guess maybe it does,” she said.

“Except for one thing,” Schiff said.

“What’s that?”

“My key,” he said, “I need it, I have to have it back today.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m filling in on the switchboard today. I can hardly send out another ambulance. I suppose I could bring it by after I’m off, but that’s not until six. Can you wait that long?”

“Hey,” Schiff said, “no problem.”

Checkmate! thought wily old Schiff. Gin! Name of the game! the crippled-up old political-geographer gentleman thought, planting his flags for Spain, for France. Well, he thought, for Farce, at least, Schiff’s own true motherland with its slapstick lakes and Punch and Judy rivers, its burlesque deserts and vaudeville plains, with its minstrel peninsulas and cabaret hills, its music-hall mountains and its dumb-show shores, all its charade forests, all its low-comedy lowlands.

His body not only ravaged—well, he was sixty, or near enough, closing in on retirement, closing in on death, personal wear-and-tear coming with his jokey territory—but savaged now, too, effectively gut shot, brought low, lower than good taste permitted, a dispensated man, on Information’s arm, on some general sufferance—there were federal laws now protecting him like some endangered species—his ass not only covered but sanctioned, like some loony or fool whose culture would not permit itself to raise a hand against him. These were the perks of Farce, the privileges of citizenship, like coins sprinkled to street mimes.

Not, thought Schiff, unearned or had cheap. For even before he’d so openly lived in Farce, even, he meant, when, like some dual-citizen’d child who could declare his allegiance in ripened time, Schiff had had his tendencies; marked by a weird boldness, some not fully thought-out bravery, blind, or anyway indifferent, to consequence, a very inversion of the cautious, look-before-you-leap models of whom he boasted, and whom, at least theoretically, on paperly, boosted, all those coded, once-burned-twice-shy gimps and wary worrywarts whose nine months of toilet training had, in spite of everything, been wasted on them, a crack in their anality and something let-loose and litterbug struck into their souls like a brand. You might as well hand him a pistol and put a single bullet into its chamber like the buck you slip into a gift wallet.

Luring Miss Simmons—Jenny—to the party without even
moving
the finger Ms. Kohm herself had promised him he’d never have to lift. Here’s, he mentally toasted himself, to dangerous Jackie Schiff, the Have-It-Both-Ways Kid.

Hi! You’ve reached 727-4312, the home of Professor Jack Schiff. I’m sorry, caller, but I’m not in just now. Please wait for the beep and leave a message. This block is protected by armed vigilantes. I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it isn’t, but the house just might be booby-trapped. Why take chances?

Because a certain part of him couldn’t afford to admit thoughts toward the down side of things. And even as he thought this—maybe it was the word “afford” that triggered the idea—
this
occurred: that he’d been a damn fool to call those banks yesterday, that he’d wasted his time. (Oh, his
time,
thought the damn fool.) That having been married to him all those years, Claire was incapable of great train robberies, of major or minor larcenies, that walking out on him was one thing but stiffing him another. She was, finally, incapable of caper. She hadn’t disturbed the money in their accounts because that’s how she continued to think of them—— as “their” accounts, the fiduciary aspect of their relationship intact. Because, because—and this made him furious—they would both be working off the same accounts! Drawing down off the same funds like a couple of old-timey teenagers in the malt shop sipping their soda from the same glass through two separate straws. And why he was furious was that she’d turned over the accounting to him, that he was the one left behind to balance their checking. (All right, granted, her canceled checks would give him, if not her address, then at least some general idea of what she was up to and where she was up to it at.) So this was what his cripple’s code came down to—— that he stay out of it; not just that he must avoid doing things twice, but that he must never do them even once if he could help it. Being disabled had made him lazy, his incentive shot, a sort of welfare drag. It was his fate, he saw, to depend—how he’d plaintively pointed out the pisser to the paramedic—on everyone’s mercies. That it had become his job, duty, his life, like some old zayde worrying Torah in shul, to lie in his bed and worry his character.
(Flash!
he thought.
I’m disabled and can’t come to the phone right now, I can’t come to the phone, I can’t come!)

Enough! Enough and enough!

He moved off the bed, as demanding of himself as a physical therapist. Thinking: Tonight’s the party. People are coming, students, maybe two or three spouses, Jenny Simmons is dropping off the key to the house. Thinking for the first time since God knew when:
Not
thinking, Push, Step, Pull, or
I think I can, I think I can,
or doing any of his other play-by-plays and routines. Merely hauling his ass like any other severely disabled human being; merely minding his business, his heart too full of its sorrows to pay much attention to anything
but
his business, to his problems and their solution. Hey, he thinks, this is serious; perhaps he should call it off, put his foot down, get back to Ms. Kohm, tell her he’s made up his mind about it once and for all,
this
party’s canceled, ask could she get word to the others, tell them he’s sorry, hand them some blah blah about maybe later when he was feeling better, maybe once he knew where he stood, maybe, as it were, next year—— Or no, forget that, just tell them it’s off. Besides, he sees through his window how dark it is out, how rotten it looks, how it’s probably going to Sturm und Drang buckets, how he wouldn’t want it on his conscience, couldn’t stand it in fact, if a student of his,
any
young person, liquor- or weather-impaired, should be hurt in an accident in the rain, sideswiped dead in the slick, slippery streets on the way to or fro any party of his. How he’d never forgive himself, who’d been there and back, if he were even merely the glancing, proximate cause of—never
mind
actually killing him or her—putting a person in his educational charge into a cast or brace for so much as a week or even a day, an hour, even a minute. He was sorry, he’d tell her, it was just the way he was. I am what I am. He is what he is. And if that was the bedrock bottom line of why Mrs. Professor S. left Mr. Professor S., well then, so be it, the leopard couldn’t change its spots or the doggie its growl. One was stuck with oneself. The world had too few competent political geographers as it was, he’d be darned if he helped contribute to the further diminution of talent in his field.

Somehow he showered.

Somehow, dispensing with the services of both wife and valet, he dressed.

Somehow, the cook run off to join the circus, the navy, see the world, take Europe by storm, he managed breakfast. Two handfuls of dry cereal, some grape jelly spooned into his mouth from a jar, a few sips of half-and-half from an open carton. Even preparing future meals for himself by holding a carton of eggs carefully in his lap and propelling himself across the smooth linoleum toward the gas stove by alternately hunkering his upper torso, then suddenly pressing himself hard against the back of the wheelchair so that he seemed to move by a kind of peristaltic action, rather like a gigantic inch worm. It was slow work, and exhausting, but when he reached the stove he laid down his dozen eggs gently as possible into a large, high pot a little less than half filled with water left there to soak a sort of rusty crust of Claire’s days-old tomato sauce from the pot’s insides. He set the flame very low.

And somehow, awfully tired now and the butler nowhere in sight, he managed to get back to the second floor and, fully dressed, settle into his unmade bed. From which he would have put through his call to Ms. Kohm on the spot had not he first turned on the television and, quickly reviewing the thirty-or-so network and cable channels available in his city, taken up his remote-control wand and recorded the finals of the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit competition on ESPN.

Schiff had long ago discovered the mildly erotic possibilities of the Pause button on his VCR, the flagrantly concupiscent ones inherent in slo-mo and super slo-mo. Certain music videos played back in the super slo-mo mode made Schiff, for all his physical deficits, ardent as something in rut, and caused him to participate in a sort of endless, extended foreplay, the images on the screen grainy as the thrown, close-up pouts and moues of received pornography, his own responses as real in their way as the perspiratory, steamy efforts of the actual. He did not so much play with as handle himself, fondle himself, his eyes on the television screen, on the practically time-lapse movements of the girls, muscles barely visible to the naked eye pronounced, vivid and fluid as avatars in dreams in the delicate, strobographic revelations before him, so that what he saw was a sort of palpable anatomical demonstration, some nudity beneath nudity, going on under the flesh, oily, somehow slow and forbidden as an exhibition of mandatory poses of female field slaves on an auction block.

But could not quite bring himself off, this all-but sixty- year-old man, only sensation available to him, love’s mood music, his hand finally falling away from himself, satisfaction locked up tight inside him like a kind of sexual arthritis.

And might have called Ms. Kohm then and there had not something warned him not to be too precipitate (he knew what it was, that weird boldness and devil-may-care indifference to consequence of the cautious), not to cut off (whatever the hell he meant by that) his chances (maybe only to preserve for as long as he could the last faint, surviving buzz of sexual vibration lengthening in frequency in him like a neurologist’s tuning fork held against the skin). Hanging on, he meant. Hoping, that is, to be saved by the bell. Which, believe it or not, he literally was. His doorbell rang just as he was about to give in and call Ms. Kohm. Once he managed to get into the Stair-Glide, ride downstairs and open the door, it turned out that the PGPC’s subcommittee on decorations was standing on his doorstep in all its rigged and prompted patience under the light rain, which just that moment had begun to fall.

“Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths,” Schiff welcomed, breezy as a man half his age and many times more healthy.

For presumedly bluff volunteers—Schiff thought of “neighbors” in films come to raise a barn or bring in a harvest—there was something rather hangdog and shamed in their bearing.

Schiff, a stiff and somewhat formal grown-up better than twice their age who called them “Miss,” who called them “Mister,” supposed them in on their professor’s domestic secrets, supposed himself (one of those—he supposed they supposed—hotshot, crisis celebs, a consultant in times of national stress to movers and shakers with means at their disposal—their bombs and high-tech devices—quite literally to move and shake the very political geography that had hitherto been merest contingency, simple textbook, blackboard example, his finger—their professor’s—on the planet’s pulses, its variously scant or bumper crops, its stores of mineral, vegetable, animal, and marine wealth—currents where the advantageous fish hung—an advisor—he supposed they supposed—to presidents, kings, and others of the ilk, who could determine a vital interest simply by naming it, pronouncing it, pointing to it chalktalk fashion on a map, virtually talking the hotspots into being) fallen in their youthful, fickle estimation, emotional, skittish as a stock exchange. So no wonder they seemed so nervous around him. His wife had left him, he stood as exposed as a flasher. His wife had left him, and now they perceived Professor S. as one who evidently—and oh so feebly—pulled his pants up over his uncovered ass one damaged leg at a time; a man, in the absence of crisis, not only
like
any other—his wife had walked, had taxicabbed out on him—but maybe even more so. He was revealed to them here on his—the political geographer’s and erstwhile hotshot, crisis celeb’s—very turf as one more defective, pathetic, poor misbegotten schlepp.

Ms. Kohm must have turned them. Ms. Kohm must have been running them. Ms. Kohm, who, if he was the political geographer, must surely have been (with all the coordinates, inside info and morning line she put out on him) the political geographer’s geographer. Who’d told Schiff they took care of their own, but really meant
she
did, and had organized committees and subcommittees like this one on a moment’s notice. Apparently she had named him a sudden, inexplicable vital interest. Why? Had she set her cap for him? What was this all about anyway? How had he—the defective, misbegotten schlepp—managed to become a target of opportunity, anyone’s eligible man?

Leaning on his walker and reciting at them like a moron, “Come in, come in, you’ll catch your deaths. Let’s have your coats.” Which, had they given them to him, would surely have knocked him down.

“Will it be all right,” Mary Moffett said, “if we put these up now? They’re for the party tonight.”