Van Gogh's Room at Arles (33 page)

And woke next morning refreshed but somehow with no more urge to get up and take on the prospect of a new day than when he had first lain down.

“I’m not a malingerer,” he told Hartshine, who had missed him at breakfast and had brought coffee, a brioche, a croissant, butter, some pony pots of jam, and a glass of juice over to Miller’s room from the night café.

Today Hartshine had chosen a nautical costume—— white flared trousers and a wide-necked top of thick, alternating bands of black and white stripes. He looked vaguely like a gondolier.

“No, of course not,” Paul Hartshine said. “We just haven’t gotten our sea legs yet.”

“What’s this juice?”

“It’s orange juice.”

“Why’s it red?”

“It’s made from blood oranges.”

“Figures,” Miller said. Then, “I’m not, I’m
not
a malingerer.”

“Are you really so very ill then? Kaska Celli is quite concerned.”

“No,” Miller said, “I’m not so
very
ill. I’m not ill at all.”

“She’s concerned.”

“Now that makes me sore. It really does. She’s the one that said I looked tired, that I ought to lie down. She diagnosed jet lag, the new country, the strange food. This isn’t bad,” he said, “though I prefer my orange juice yellow.” He set down his glass. “She told me nobody gets much done the first day. I mean that really pisses me off. Ain’t she the housemother here? I mean, my God, Hartshine, she must see malaise like mine two dozen times a year. Did she
say
I’m malingering?”

“No. This is a big opportunity. She thinks you should make the most of your time.”

“I’ve got five weeks to make the most of my time. Nobody gets much done the first few days. Everyone goes at their own pace here. Like I suppose I’m the only one who didn’t make it down to breakfast this morning. I suppose she takes attendance. I suppose she calls roll.”

“Of course not.”

“There you go then,” Miller said.

“You
were
the only one who didn’t make it down to breakfast. Well, Stanley Gassett wasn’t there. Nan Hoffmann wasn’t. Lesley Getler.”

“Did I meet them?”

“You met Stanley. I believe you met Getler. Nan Hoffmann came in after we were already seated, I think.”

“Well there you go then,” Miller said again. “They don’t sound any more reliable than I do.”

“They didn’t come down because they’re making the most of their time. I heard Gassett banging away at his typewriter practically all night. Getler, too. Gassett’s next door to me. Getler’s working with him on the same project. They were still going at it when I went down to breakfast.”

“They kept you up all night? That’s terrible. Why didn’t you say something? Or bang on the wall? No one should be allowed to interfere with another man’s sleep.”

“They didn’t bother me. I was working myself.”

“It was your first day,” Miller said. “No one gets much done his first day.”

“Oh,” Hartshine said, “I didn’t get
much
done. I knocked off after a few hours.”

“Now what does that mean? That people will steal a march on me if I don’t watch out? Are you assigned to me or something? Are you breaking me in? Is this the buddy system?”

“No,” said Hartshine. “Nothing like that.”

“Well,” Miller said, “you can go back and tell her I’m settling in, getting the feel of things, getting the feel of Van Gogh’s room. Because she’s right. It is a big opportunity. Maybe, for me, even an historic one. God knows I’ll probably never have anything like such an opportunity again. Hell, I don’t know if I should even be flattered. Probably not. Maybe it’s luck of the draw. Or maybe they pick the son of a bitch least likely to make it out of Indianapolis. I mean,
I
don’t know. Maybe the Foundation matches up a Fellow’s character and personality and prospects with where it decides to put him to bed. Maybe they debrief you when your five weeks are up, see if smothering you in the ambience of genius has any effect on the quality of your work. I’m in Van Gogh’s room, man! I’m in Van Gogh’s room in Van Gogh’s house in Arles! You know the obligation that puts me under, the responsibility? You don’t have to be an art historian. It’s one of the world’s best-known paintings.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Miller said. “When I first saw this place it really didn’t mean all that much to me. Well, I was tired. I didn’t take it all in. As a matter of fact, I was a little steamed they hadn’t put me up in the main building. That I was so far from the action. Not only that I didn’t even have a toilet but that there wasn’t even a toilet on my floor. That I had to go downstairs I wanted to use the facilities. You know what the place looked like to me? A bed- and-breakfast. I saw but didn’t really take in the bottles on . the nightstand, the cane-bottom chairs, the basin and pitcher. I mean I’ve known the painting it was based on for years, but when I saw the actual room there wasn’t even this like shock of recognition.

“Only slowly, only gradually did it come over me.
I’m
using his things. I shave in his mirror, I drink from his jug. The miracle of that unpainted fourth wall that you pointed out? I sat on his piano bench against the fourth wall and contemplated his floor and bed and washstand and chairs and bottles and mirror and drinking glass and brown woodden pegs on the brown wooden strip on his blue walls. Who knew it was all so beautiful? I whacked off in his sheets.”

“This is what you want me to go back and tell her?” Paul Hartshine said.

Miller, feeling heat (who couldn’t detect a blush, who was effectively color-blind to the broad palette of the psychological hues in others), looked down in confusion. Was it possible Hartshine had guessed it was Kaska of whom he’d been thinking? Could he know that Miller (who wouldn’t have vouched for the sailorman’s romantic biases) had once considered him, and perhaps still did, a rival for the earth babe’s attentions?

“No,” Miller said. “Tell her, tell her I’ll be coming down to the night café for supper.”

And was as good as his word. (As was Rita as hers. Within moments of being seated—the night café reconfigured for the evening meal, the green baize-covered tables removed from along the walls and pushed together to make one grand table in the center of the room where the pool table stands in the painting, with what could have been the full company of all the Foundation’s Fellowship surrounding him on the vaguely ice-cream-parlorish chairs—Georges presented Miller with a whopping gorgeous great omelette, cunningly folded in and over itself like a man’s yellow pocket handkerchief. It was delicious.)

“There you are, Miller,” Paul Hartshine said, sitting down beside him, having come in five or so minutes after Miller. “How do you like this? Isn’t this grand?”

“What did they do with the billiard table?” he asked for the second time in two days, not so much as a wise guy this time around but as the interested scholar. And, when Paul Hartshine shrugged, he caught at the sleeve of a passing waiter, Clémence, the one he’d been rude to in his hallucination the previous day.

“Monsieur?”

“Didn’t there used to be a billiard table in here?” he asked. From what Miller could make out from what the man told him, the table was cold eggs tonight but wouldn’t be seen forever again until tomorrow.

Miller nodded, thanked him in French four thousand times over, and hoped it wouldn’t rain.

It was amazing, he thought. Had the night café been restored or what? It was astonishing what a good job they had done. The big, bulbous, overhead gas lamps were electric now, of course, but somehow they had managed to replicate the precise illusion of waves of light that spin about the lamps in Van Gogh’s painting like an aura. Unless, he thought, there was operative in Arles (or for those who came after him—like Miller, Miller thought—some mysterious persistence of vision, this optical trick of the Provençal light—even after the sun had gone down—that bent it and raised, even pushed, waves off solid objects like mirages burning in a desert), or operative for those who lived in his room anyway, or ate where he had eaten, this great participatory idea of things. Ain’t I, he asked himself, seeing things through
his
eyes now? Ain’t I beginning to, well,
render
the ordinary, even commonplace effects of the daily—— its beds and chairs and tables and towels?

It was a little scary, really. He wondered if he dare look up at the starry night for fear of discovering there flaring, burning balls in the sky, or ever fix his gaze again upon even the most innocent tree trunk lest it eerily bend and twist itself out of his glance. He’d accepted Georges’s drinks, and even allowed him to refill his glass, but knew he wasn’t drunk. Not on Georges’s innocuous aperitifs.

He shook himself and concentrated his attentions on his eggs and toast and tea, on peeling his apple with his butter knife. Kaska Celli observing his performance from where she sat in regal charge at the head of the table. And capturing too, he felt, the wondering, even admiring glances of three or four of his fellow Fellows, guys, he shouldn’t wonder, who’d thought, till they witnessed his display of the dessert carver’s art, they had his number, had put him down as just another bimbo from down on the farm, alien to the sophisticated European skills of skinning fruit. Hah! Miller thought, basking. And took up a pear and proceeded to remove its pelt. And then a fruit—he supposed a fruit—he didn’t recognize and wouldn’t eat when he uncovered its black flesh. Still basking though. Fit to bust, as a matter of fact, if someone didn’t ask him soon where he’d learned to handle fruit like that. Till seeing no one would he just up and volunteered.

“The truth is,” he said forcefully into the crossfire of conversation, monologue, dialogue, discussion, and argument going on about him, “I never peeled a piece of fruit in my life. I live in Indiana. How different can it be from whittling?”

Even Miller had to admit that those who’d heard him—though he’d barely made a dent in the din—looked at him benignly enough, even benevolently, even, it seemed, interestedly, expectantly, as though they waited for him to expand on his theme. Miller was appalled, filled with snobbish, sudden disdain for his own boorishness. Still his little audience looked to him for clarification.

“Oh, never mind,” he said, frightened, realizing as soon as he said it that it was true, “I’m drunk.” (He’d been right though. It hadn’t been the aperitifs so much as the sack of duty-free hootch at which he’d been sucking away—and which was almost gone—in his room for close on two days now.)

“But you make a good point,” said a man several place settings off. “I suspect the convention of taking a knife to an apple or orange has less to do with dining etiquette than with the hard practices of the old hunter/gatherers. Just the residuals of some ancient exploratory hygienics. Slitting open their prey with their flint to trim the diseased parts. Then, by analogy, paring their fruits and vegetables as well. A sort of stone-age quality control. Look before you eat, that kind of thing. You make a good point. I agree with you.”

“Who
are
you?” Miller asked.

“I’m Russell,” Russell said, a tall, cheery-looking man with a rather large head who’d arrived in Arles just the day after Hartshine and Miller.

Then, as Miller was about to respond, Madame Celli tapped on her water glass with a spoon. All conversation, monologue, dialogue, discussion, and argument dropped off at once. It was, he thought, exactly as if a cease-fire, not so much called for as demanded by an authority with whom it would have been foolish to dispute, had gone into effect. Miller felt this surge of immense, nutty pride that the very woman whose image he’d invoked the night before when he’d intimately handled himself should command such respect and fear. It was as if his instinct and taste had been underwritten by all the moral and intellectual authority of the Foundation itself. It was as if he’d been seen with the belle of the ball.

“I rise,” Kaska said, “ladies and gentlemen, to inform you that tonight, after supper, there is to be an entertainment in the music room. All are welcome. So as soon as you have finished your coffee please.”

She did not resume her seat and, appearing to give a signal—it could have been the way she touched at her mouth with a corner of her napkin, it could have been the way, still standing, she laid her napkin alongside her cup, or her transitory smile—drew Clémence, Georges, and a waiter he didn’t know yet in from the perimeters of the room to stand behind the Fellows’ backs. Their presence seemed official, deputized, as if they had the power to enforce Kaska Celli’s subtle coffee curfews and, indeed, most of the Fellows set their cups down without even bothering to finish them, and got up from the table.

Again, Miller felt a sense of pride in her powers, the sexual choice he’d made the previous night, a sort of ghostly, loony possessiveness.

Miller rose with the others as they moved off to the music room. He fell into step beside Russell.

“What do you suppose happened to the billiard table?” he asked for want of anything better to say.

“In all likelihood the felt must have torn,” Russell said. “Or worn out. And the night café was a low bar, don’t forget. There was probably a brawl. Someone must have been hit very hard, landed too heavily on the table, and broken the slate.”

“Yeah,” Miller said, “that’s what I was thinking too.”

What he was really thinking was, It’s only five weeks. I’ll live on croissants. I’ll live on rich cheeses and pâtés and crackers. I’ll live on fresh-baked bread that I’ll cover with great heaping dollops of butter. I’ll live on delicious omelettes. I’ll live on delicious omelettes and pare my strawberries and raisins and apricots with a butter knife like a caveman. He has the largest head I’ve ever seen, he was thinking. He must wear a size nine-and-a-half hat.

The music room—there was a grand piano, there was a state-of-the-art CD player—was the single place in Arles Miller had seen that didn’t look like an impressionist painting. It was a commodious, thoroughly modern, even modernistic, room with a pair of deep rectilinear sofas and big boxy chairs covered in light gray muslin. Great glass-topped tables in dark, matte-metal frames stood on matching brushed-metal legs in front of the sofas and, in smaller versions, beside each chair. Near the white bookshelves were two crushed—almost imploded—charcoal leather pillow chairs like soft fortresses or marshmallow thrones. Another chair, like a leather-and-steel cat’s cradle, was positioned near the piano. There were cunning chrome lamps, museum-quality ashtrays, all appointments edge-of-the-field doodad and inspired house-dower, an ecology of lifestyle. It was as if the whole room has been designed by the art director of a major motion picture. Miller loved it.