Van Gogh's Room at Arles (12 page)

“We’re on break,” said Miss Moffett.

Schiff, oddly unconcerned, thought, She’s drunk, and wondered when that had happened, suspecting he’d dozed off, suspecting they’d heard him snore, greedily scoop great gobs of air into his nose, pass gas, probably giggling about their old political geography teacher (who’d turned out to have a behind, habits), not only crippled, but reduced, too, and was impatient for the party to begin, knew it had, and already yearned for the time when they’d all clear out and he could go back to bed. And realized (having taken this all in, his brief snooze, their surreptitious drinking and, glancing once more at the remains of lunch, at the beer cans scattered about the landfill starting up—which was a sort of furniture, too, wasn’t it? perhaps some final furniture, some ultimate piece—in what was his hall, his dining and living rooms) the farce question about Daylight Saving’s geopolitical reasons had been merely his failed, reflexive, face-saving opening salvo, like dropping the checkered flag, say, not only after the gentlemen had already started their engines but had already completed their first several laps. It was out of his hands. Officially or not, the annual class party had begun!

Changing his mind, accepting Joe Disch’s beer, and abruptly all over them with a riff of gag questions. “Why have ocean currents been the casus belli of most civil wars?” “Explain how prevailing winds determine national borders.” “Discuss the concept of the island. How is it a macrocosm of the tribe but a microcosm of the family?” “How do the animals indigenous to a nation determine the character of that nation’s underlying political structure?” “What’s the difference between a ‘region’ in a first-world country like Italy and a third-world country like Paraguay?” “How is it that the so-called ‘hot-bloodeď peoples have had fewer revolutions than their more northerly neighbors?” “Speculate on the reasons for the
inverse
ratio between the beauty of a nation’s flag and its contributions to the fields of art, music, and poetry.” “If individuality, rather than community, accounts for most of the world’s great inventions and economic progress, why is it that countries with the greatest populations tend to be the most backward in their cultural and economic development?”

“Mr. Lipsey? Miss Moffett? Mr. Disch?

“Ms. Kohm? Mr. Hughes? Miss Simmons? Mr. Wilkins? Mr. Tysver? Miss Carter? Miss Freistadt? You, Dickerson? You, Bautz?”

Because these others (without, he noticed, their two or three spouses in tow—— was this, he wondered, out of deference to him, or were all marriages foundered on the rocks?) had begun to drift in while Schiff was still in the nervous throes of his rap. Because he missed Claire and hoped and, despite himself, almost believed she would relent, reverse herself and, using her incredible sense of timing for good, still show up to save him, and because on one, the most furious, level of his forced, inspired hospitality, he was playing (for all that he knew better) for time, for some impossible dispensation, as though, could he but keep coming up with his loopy diversionaries, he might never have to answer to the still (for him) more alarming demands of serious social obligation. Soon, he quite feared, he might be telling them everything, conducting his guests on the grand tour around the posted neighborhoods and dark, off-limits districts of his heart.

“Tell me would you if you will all the ways the counterclockwise movements of water going down a drain in the southern hemisphere may account for the greater number of languages and dialects spoken below the equator.”

They stared at him.

“Anyone?

“No? No one? Well, I should do some checking if I were you, you degree candidates, for that’s a question that’s almost certain to turn up on your prelims. Really, people, if you haven’t got the basics down, I don’t know how you hope to be political geographers. Do you think others in the political sciences are as unfamiliar with their areas of concentration as you seem to be—— the political biologists, the political chemists, the political comp. lit. majors?

“Well,” Schiff said, apparently relenting, “let the wild rumpus begin. Miss Simmons,” he told the somewhat surprised-looking woman who had separated herself from the graduate students and was approaching the wheelchair to which he had transferred and in which he was now sitting, “how
nice
to see you! How
good
of you to come!”

“I brought you your key back.”

“Listen,” he said, lowering his voice, “can you stay? We give this party for my students. I may have told you. I’m caught short here. Claire’s left me. I’m caught short here, I could really use the buffer. You’d be doing me a favor. Really. Please don’t go, please stay. It’d be swell if you would. You don’t know how much more comfortable I’d feel.”

“I came with your key. I haven’t even been home yet. I’m not dressed for a party.”

“Well, of course she’ll stay. How do you do, dear? I’m Molly Kohm. I’m very pleased to meet you. How interesting our professor is, what astonishing resources he has! Practically a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair (even a somewhat older paraplegic), yet here he is dispensing keys to his home as if there were no tomorrow and neither one of you had ever even heard of an actuarial table. My goodness, how fast one may get about in a wheelchair! I hadn’t realized! Oh, and you mustn’t even think of returning that key. Don’t take it back, Professor. It was a misunderstanding. These things happen, they’re worked out every day. And night.”

“This is Jenny Simmons,” Schiff said. “Miss Simmons was a student of mine.”

“A student. Really, a student. Oh, now I
am
jealous, I quite actually
am!
Professor, you rascal, if only I’d known. I might have made a play for you myself. I might have,” she told Miss Simmons. “And I wouldn’t be threatening him with the return of his keys,” she added huskily. She bent down in front of Schiff’s chair and, resting her hand across the inside of his thigh, almost absent-mindedly, began stroking it. “Oh good,” she said, “there’s evidently still some feeling down there.” Schiff caught slight gusts of conditioned, alcoholic essence coming from her, pleasant, agreeable (despite her obvious drunkenness) as the gentle drafts and enticing steams one smells outside a steakhouse. Also, he saw up past her crouching, silk-stocking’d knees and along her own flexed thighs high into the dark of her skirt where they joined like perspective in a painting.

Ms. Kohm suddenly seemed as oddly capable as a witch, an impression enhanced by her pitch, shiny hair, the bright, thin streaks of white silver that crackled through it like some personal storm of the head. A dramatic purple-and- black-checked cape hung about her shoulders and over a dark tank top. She wore no brassiere, and Schiff saw the hard points of her nipples rising from what he momentarily conceived of as rings of soft, purple, lava-like slabs, imagining their faintly brackish taste in his mouth like the flavor of struck matches.

Giving him a soft, dismissive pat on the knee, she rose effortless as a yogi from the deep squatting position she had held before him like some patronizing tribute. (As if he’d been a child, say, to whose level she’d lowered herself—— or the cripple he was. And Schiff, as though Ms. Kohm, come to him almost like some Dickensian specter, had an abrupt image of himself through women’s eyes. Why, he was like somebody behind and over whose head life was conducted, arrangements made, a kid traveling alone, say, or someone handicapped—well, hell, he thought, I
am
someone handicapped—whose needs were negotiated indirectly, guided past metal detectors in airports for a hand- check as if he were absent, a party in the third person, as though his earlier impression of having left life were true as far as it went, only reversed, life floating about a foot or so above him. Schiff some doll-like object present less in spirit than in sheer, brutal deadweight, his feet there to be stockinged and shod, his arms to be helped into the sleeves of his jackets, whatever was left over,
say
his spirit, to be lulled and comforted, regarded, even loved, admired as a piece of art might be admired, something not responsible for itself, diligently plied into being, as anything worked on hard enough or worried over long enough had to be turned into an object worthy of the effort, like silverware polished down to its highlights. This was how women saw him. For it was only women—he had left life—who dealt with him these days. It was how Miss Simmons, who had gone out of her way to bring him his key, saw him, how Ms. Kohm, who single-handed had refused to let his party go into the record books with an asterisk this year, did. Finally, it was how Claire must have seen him up until the time she discovered that enough was enough and refused to take one more minute of him, and left him, on the day of her incredible sense of timing, on the eve of his party, to deal with the women who would deal with him. Well, you know what? Saving Claire’s absence, he didn’t much mind, was willing as ever to throw himself on their—on women’s—mercies like a log on a fire.)

She turned around and made a signal to her helpers. (The rest of the students, he meant.) Without a word, Miss Carter appeared with a big galvanized pail. The pail was new, shiny, the sort of pail one associates with mops and wringers, with dark, greasy water. (Oh, shit, he thought, suddenly remembering the eggs, surely exploded by now, he’d dropped into the rusty water that morning.) It was filled to the brim with salad. With great leaves of lettuce, violently torn from what must have been eight or nine heads. There were long shards of cucumber and zucchini. There were whole rings of sweet onion like small quoits. There were jagged slices of tomato and, here and there, dollops of red, tomatoey pulp like a sort of jam. Sprinkled throughout were raisins like the droppings of rodents. Mr. Tysver carried an open butter tub of oil-and-vinegar dressing, already mixed, and Miss Freistadt and Mr. Wilkins each swung three or four large cartons of pasta like Chinese takeout from their thin metal handles like a sort of Jack and Jill. Bautz brought bread and Dickerson paper plates, white plastic cutlery, a box of salt, tins of colored seasonings, napkins. Each appeared before Ms. Kohm with his or her offering.

“Does this go in the kitchen, Molly?” asked Miss Carter of the galvanized pail.

“Put it down here. We’ll be eating soon, why make two trips?” She was pointing at the carpet.

“Hey, wait a minute,” objected Schiff from his wheelchair.

But she had already set down her burden on the living- room carpet.

“Hey,” said Schiff. “Hey.”

No one listened to him. Many seemed drunk. Schiff turned to Ms. Kohm. “Hey,” he said, “hey.”

An awful picnic of the awful graduate student food began to blossom on the carpet beneath him. Pieces of lettuce and cucumber and zucchini spilled over the pail or fell from heaps stacked too high on the paper plates and lay on Schiff’s beige carpet as if they grew there in actual nature. Bright bits of tomato, red onion, and pasta spotted the carpet like flowers. They’ve turned the place into a damn garden, Schiff thought bitterly. You could dig for worms in here. Miss Simmons, bless her heart, seemed as appalled as Schiff, and made no move to leave. Between trips to the salad bar on his floor for refreshment, Disch, Lipsey, and Moffett spelled each other as bartenders, offered mixed drinks from the remarkable bag where they had set up shop. Schiff, who didn’t think he saw that many takers, couldn’t account for the astonishing level of intoxication in the room. This crowd was
high!
Either they were already three sheets to the wind when they came in, or something about being in his house had unsettled them, roused them he meant, sprung them he meant, from the general graduate- student monasticism and hole-and-corner roughhouse of their days. Something about being in their mid-to-late twenties and still under the vows of delayed gratification, their lives unbegun. It was the old story of the total shit- house Schiff had complained of earlier, of posters and prints, of canvas chairs and incense, cement-block bookcases and all the make-do improvisation of their lives. Sprung from that. Grown-up for a day! Not Ms. Kohm. He excepted Ms. Kohm. Ms. Kohm was their ringleader, their unmoved mover, something thwarted in Ms. Kohm, something about Ms. Kohm profoundly unchecked and envious, infiltrated and into deep cover.

Only then did he understand what he had noted earlier—— that there were no spouses here, not even his own. So sprung from spouses, too, from mewling babes, even from baby-sitters they couldn’t afford to pay and so had— another improvisation—to trade off with, time-sharing each other’s kids as if they lived in a commune. It was how Claire, high on a whiff of the other guy’s air, must have felt. Only God forbid that Claire was in some other old gent’s place finger-painting with pasta on the rugs.

Whether they knew it or not, whether they meant to or not, they were looking for trouble. In some weird, incomprehensible way, understood neither by him nor themselves, they had entered into some odd conspiracy with him. Drawn, it could be (though pushed by Ms. Kohm) by his handicap, by his own low troubles.

Somebody came by and offered him a plate of food, of the handled salad drenched in dressing, of the cold, pasted, stuck-together pasta. Which he refused like someone gently shaking off a sign. As much out of his own stuck-together dignity as from any failure of hunger. Though he was hungry. Could have done right now with some of the terrific foods he and Claire used to put out—— the turkey and roasts, the pâtés and swell cheeses. (As much, perhaps, out of some need to wow them into respect as to satisfy the inner man.)

He accepted a poor plate of church supper from Miss Simmons, the plastic cutlery wrapped in what he now saw were cocktail napkins.

“Join me?” he said.

“Well,” Miss Simmons said hesitantly.

“No really,” he said, “make up a plate of rabbit food for yourself and rough it with me, why don’t you?”

“Well,” she said again.

“Afraid of ruining your appetite?”

It was difficult for him to eat in the wheelchair. He had lost considerable muscle mass in his hips, whatever it was that kept one upright, and he bobbed, weaved, swayed, lunged and lost his balance whenever he tried to fork food from the thin, fragile, wet paper plates and bring it to his mouth. He was spilling salad all over himself, on his lap, down the front of his shirt. There were salad-dressing stains on both shirt cuffs, high up his sleeves. “Can’t tempt you, eh?” he said, and this struck him as very funny, starting what might have been an out-of-control, almost hysterical laugh, but quickly turned into a helpless series of snorts. “No,” he managed, “can’t seem (snort) to (snort) tempt (snort, snort)
you!”
Long, extended snort. Snorting through. Snorting while his heart was breaking.