Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Van Gogh’s Room at Arles

When the Foundation sent him there, Miller had absolutely no idea that he was to be put up in Van Gogh’s room in the small yellow house at Arles. Indeed, he’d no idea that the room still existed, or the house, or, for that matter, even the hotel across the street that it was part of.

Madame Celli simply handed the key over to him on the morning of his arrival. No special fuss or flourish or ceremony. The key itself, which couldn’t possibly have been the original, was attached to a short chain, itself attached to a heavy iron ball about the size of a plum. The number 22 was stamped both on the key and on the ball along with, in French (a language that Miller didn’t have but whose vocabulary lists he’d memorized through the first few weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school, la plume de ma tante), on the ball, a tiny metal legend (he made out “boîte aux lettres”) to the effect, Miller supposed, that if whoever found it dropped it into a post box, the postage would be guaranteed.

It was this key, almost as much as the fact of the room itself, that afterwards was so stunning to Miller, the offhand way of it, the stolid fact of the ball and chain from which it depended like a key to a room in a second- or third-class railway hotel where travelers who were too weary, or too ill, or who could simply go no farther, might stop for the night.

This was a peculiarly apt description of his own condition the day he got there, exhausted as he was from the long series of flights and layovers. Indianapolis to Kennedy, Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle to Marseilles, and then the three-hour ride by motorcoach from Marseilles to Arles. Though this was the most spectacular leg of the journey (Indianapolis pals had specifically recommended the slower bus as opposed to the much faster train) because of the dramatic views it provided of Mediterranean fishing villages, the lavender vineyards of the Languedoc region, and the queer, boiling iridescence of the waters in the Gulf of Lions, from certain angles and in certain light like a great voile oil spill, Miller had registered almost none of it, only a few blunted impressions whenever the bus or the oppressive incrementality of his own soiled, staggered mileage jolted him awkwardly awake for a few moments.

So unceremonious, so unpropitious even, was Miller’s reception, he was actually touched when Madame Celli agreed to allow him to leave his things — the big suitcase, his hanging garment bag, the plastic sack of duty-free liquor, film, and cigarettes purchased at Kennedy with almost the last of his American money— another tip from the knowledgeable Indianapolis crowd: that he’d get a more favorable rate if he exchanged his dollars for francs at some one-or two-teller bank, or even at one of those cash vending machines, while he was still at the airport — in the lobby with her while he went off to find his lodgings at Number 2 Lamartine Place across the square from the old hotel that seemed to be the Foundation’s main building in Arles. He’d come back for them after he freshened up, he assured her, an efficient enough, even agreeable-seeming woman, but one whom Miller had sized up as essentially uninterested in the various jet-lagged-out states of the Fellows the Foundation kept feeding her all the year round, one or two at a time, for month-long stays at twice-a-week intervals.

These perceptions had been established long before he’d ever actually laid eyes on her, for it was Madame Celli with whom he’d been in correspondence since he was first informed that his fellowship had been granted. Well, correspondence. On his part thoughtful, practical letters asking thoughtful, practical questions— the weather one could expect in April, what forwarding address he should leave for his friends, the advisability of renting a car, if there was a dress code. And, on hers, in a charming, unexpected, quite witty English, only the salutation written in ink at the top, form letters, hospitable, boilerplate responses to inquiries he had no doubt she could reproduce in Spanish, or French, or Italian, or German, or in almost every EC language any of those one or two staggered, twice-weekly arriving birds of a month’s passage might throw at her. Which only added insult to the injury of Miller’s fatigue and took a little of the shine off his having been selected or, if not exactly selected, then at least approved by the Foundation. Which, too, was why he was so touched by Madame’s routine boilerplate courtesy to his simple request that she permit him to leave his things in the lobby while he lumbered off without having to lug along the additional burden of thirty or so pounds of cumbersome luggage. It seemed a sort of relenting. She was, after all, mistress here, empowered, he didn’t in the least doubt, by the Foundation with all the authority of a ship’s captain, say, at once hostess, concierge, enforcer, and housemother. It was she, after all, who had assigned him to an outbuilding rather than to a room in what he had already come to think of as the administration building.

Scraping favor, he asked, in as close an approximation to French as he could muster, just where, exactly, he was headed.

“Vous voulez dire, monsieur?”

It wasn’t the first time he had failed to make himself understood.

“I guess none of you people has had the benefit of the first term-and-a-half of freshman-year French,” Miller said, and repeated his question in English.

Madame led him outside and pointed out the yellow house to him.

But if Monsieur was to freshen up wouldn’t he be needing some of his toilet articles out of his valise?

“It’s a done deal. I’ve got it covered,” Monsieur said and, feeling like a fool, but unwilling to go back into the lobby with her or to squat down over his suitcase rummaging through its contents while she watched, held up his laptop word processor.

There were only four rooms. Number 22 was to the left at the top of a flight of red brick steps at the rear of the small ground-floor hallway, and the key, it turned out, was just to his room, not to the house itself. The house could not be locked and, indeed, the other three rooms were either entirely or partially open to the gaze of anyone — Miller, for example — who cared to look in. In fact, it was only the door to Miller’s room, warped, stuck shut in the Provençal heat, that was closed at all.

He saw that it had no toilet and would have called Madame but he saw that it had no phone either.

Some Foundation, Miller thought, some big fucking deal Foundation! Some big goddamned honor having them approve my project! Had to pay my own damn airfare! And some Madame Celli while we’re at it! Big linguist! Some witty, charming command of the English fucking language she must have! Doesn’t even know “freshen up” is the idiom for having to take a piss! Yeah, well. She even said that about needing my toilet articles out of my valise. Yeah, well, he thought, that’s probably the idiom around here for go piss in your suitcase.

But really, he thought, a month? A month in Arles?

He shouldn’t have listened to her, Miller thought, he should have rented a car.

And he was sore. Well, disappointed. No, he thought, sore. Sore and disappointed. If it had been beautiful. Or in important mountains instead of a sort of clearing among distant minor hills. Or on the sea instead of better than twenty-five miles away from it. What was it? From first impressions, and Miller was one who put a lot of stock in first impressions, it seemed to him to be a kind of gussied-up country market town with a faint suggestion — its long stone railroad trestle that traced one edge of the town like a sooty rampart, its several dubious hotels, bars, and workingmen’s restaurants, the gloomy bus station and cluster of motorcycle agencies, bicycle-repair shops, and, everywhere, on the sides of buildings, on kiosks and hoardings, on obsolete confetti of dated posters for departed circuses, stock-car races, wrestling matches; even the small municipal park with its benchloads of provocative, heavily made-up teenagers in micros and minis, their clumsily leathered attendants who looked more like their pimps than their boyfriends — of light, vaguely compromised industry. What was it? Well, frankly, at first blush, it might almost have been an older, downsized, more rural sort of Indianapolis.

This was his impression anyway and, though he’d keep an open mind (Miller hadn’t many illusions about himself and pretty much had his own number— a fellow of only slightly better-than-average luck and intelligence, an over- achiever actually, who had pretty much gone the distance on what were, after all, rather thin gifts, even his famous “selection” more a tribute to his connected Indianapolis pals and colleagues who’d vouched for him, written him his letters of recommendation, than to the brilliance of his project), he knew it was going to be a long month. (Unless it was to be one of those bonding deals — boy meets girl, or fate, or somesuch under disagreeable circumstances and, by degrees, through the thick and thin of stuff, ultimately comes to embrace or understand what he’d hitherto scorned).

Still, Miller, though he’d finally discovered the common toilet and shower (a tiny room on the ground floor just to the right of the stairway that he’d mistaken for a closet), felt he’d every right to be uncomfortable. He was not a good traveler, had no genius for its stresses, for dealing with the money, the alien bath fixtures, the foreign menus that turned meals into a kind of blindman’s buff; all the obligations one was under in another country, to drink the local wines, buy the local laces and silks and blown glass, honor- bound not to miss anything, to feel what the travel guides told him to feel, to see all the points of interest, but fearful of being suckered in taxis and hotels and never understanding how the natives managed. Missing nuance, sacrificing ease and the great comfort of knowing one’s place.

This room, for example, which (though he’d seen and admired the painting at the Art Institute in Chicago perhaps a half-dozen times) he still didn’t really recognize (and so, for that matter, didn’t experience even the least sense of déjà vu) as Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles and which, even after the reality of where he was staying was confirmed, he still wouldn’t entirely believe, attributing the undeniable correspondences between the room and its furnishings to some sort of knockoff, a trick on the tourists. (Which wasn’t logical, Russell would argue, Miller being a guest of the Foundation. What could possibly be in it for them? Where was the profit?)

But (speaking of foreign travel, tourists, even Van Gogh would have been a tourist here, wouldn’t he?) this room.

Miller’s first impression of it was of a utilitarian, monastic-like setting. It reminded him of rooms in pensions, bed- and-breakfasts, no mod cons provided, not even a radio or simple windup alarm clock. He knew without sitting on them that the narrow bed would be much too soft, the stiff, rush-bottom chairs way too hard. (Nothing, he suspected, would be just right for this particular Goldilocks in the room’s close quarters.) Though he felt — oddly — that one might spend one last fell binge of boyhood here in the narrow orange bed and rush chairs along these powder blue, shaving-mirror-hung walls of the utile. The basin and pitcher, majolica jug, military brush, drinking glass, and apothecary bottles clear as gin, a soft summer equipment lined up as if for inspection on the crowded washstand on the red-tiled, vaguely oilcloth-looking floor, poor Goodwill stuff, nitty-rubbed-gritty YMCA effects, weathered, faintly flyblown and pastoral, the narrow strips of pegged wood for towels, jeans, a T-shirt, a cap, all the plain, casual ready-to- wear of hard use. A few pictures were carelessly tacked to or dangled from the room’s wash walls. A boy’s room, indeed. A room, Miller saw, of a counselor at a summer camp, or of minor cadre, a corporal say, in an army barracks. Miller saw himself becalmed there, doing the doldrums in study’s stock-still Sargasso seas.

He went to one of the room’s big shuttered windows. Through a southern exposure, flattened against the town’s low hill, Arles seemed to rise like an illusion of a much larger city. Out the window on the eastern wall he looked down on oleander bushes, shrub chestnuts, and yews, a lone cypress in the tiny courtyard of the small yellow house.

A boy’s room. He could already picture himself noiselessly masturbating beneath the scarlet cover on the rumpled sheets and pillowslips yellow as lemons or margarine on the too-soft bed.

Someone knocked at the door. Miller’s first thought was that Madame Celli had dispatched a servant to bring his things from the main building across the Place. When he opened the door, cracking it like a safe (it was still stuck from the heat, he had to pull up, give it a sharp twist and tug, applying, he didn’t know how, the sort of “English” only a person accustomed to opening it this way might know, a leverage impossible to describe to a second party, a user’s leverage, an owner’s), he saw that the person across from him was no servant but a well-formed, immaculate little man (the word “chap” occurred), vaguely knickered, white-shirted, and argyled, like someone got up in old-time golfing garb.

“Hi there,” said the man in Miller’s doorway, “I’m Paul Hartshine. Kaska told me you’d be in. Saw you dribbling out of coach class in Marseilles this morning. Tried to catch your eye, but you were bottled up in Douane and I had to catch le train grand vitesse.”

Miller had never seen the man in his life but reasoned that Hartshine was a fellow Fellow scheduled to arrive in Arles the same day as himself. He’d evidently taken the fast train down while Miller had bumped along on the bus. And what was that about his dribbling out of coach class, a shot? And the remark about Douane. (Douane was the word for Customs. He recalled it from a vocabulary list.)

“Kaska?”

“Kaska Celli,” Paul Hartshine said.

“Certain Indianapolis friends of mine especially warned me against the fast train,” Miller said.

“Oh?” said Hartshine.

Miller didn’t want to get into it. He felt like an asshole.

“Are you a downstairs neighbor then?”

“Me? No, no, I’m at Number 30 Lamartine.” The man grinned at him, and it occurred to Miller that it may have been because Miller was quite literally blocking the doorway, filling it up — Miller was large, shaggily formed, almost a head taller than the fastidiously built little guy over whom he seemed to loom like a sort of ponderous weather — that Hartshine, sensing the absurdity of Miller’s protective, defensive stance, found him amusing. (As he would, overheated, exhausted from his travels, burdened by his bulging garment bag, and clutching his ridiculous sack of duty-free prizes like flowers taken from a vase on a table at a wedding dinner, have been found amusing, as, he supposed, anyone in coach class might have seemed amusing to anyone in first, or anyone still hung up in Customs might appear at least a little silly to someone already waved through, or, when all else was stripped away and you were down to final things, the one on the bus was a laughingstock to the one on the train!)

Before Miller could move out of the way, however, Paul Hartshine was bobbing and weaving, impatiently trying to see around him and into the room as if, it could almost have been, Miller were some quasi-functionary, an observer of the technicalities, and Hartshine a reporter, say, there on behalf of the public.

The man had him pegged as one kind of asshole, so Miller stepped back and Hartshine poured through his defenses, talking away at a mile a minute.

“Look at that, will you?” he cried out to Miller. “I can’t believe it. I’d never have guessed! Would you? Did you ever see anything like it? Well, this, this is a find! I’d never have guessed, I tell you! Well, one couldn’t have, could one? The fourth wall! Just look. Just look there! Everything that didn’t get painted on the room’s fourth wall!

“Look at that chest of drawers! Well, you can see why he chose not to have painted that. It’s entirely too grand for the room. I bet its proper place in the room was where that rush-bottom chair stands now. Next to the door. He must have rearranged it to make the room appear more rustic than it actually was.”

“It’s rustic,” Miller said, thinking of his long, uncomfortable flight in coach, of the rough ride from Marseilles on the bus, of having actually to sit in one of those chairs, “it’s plenty rustic.” But if Hartshine heard him he gave no indication.

“Cunning,” Hartshine said, “absolutely cunning! Wasn’t he the old slyboots?

“And isn’t that a piano bench? He must have had it from the bar. Doesn’t he remark in a letter to Theo somewhere that there was a piano bench in the room, that sometimes, as an exercise for his back — it is damp in Arles — he sat on it to paint?”

He meant Van Gogh. It was Hartshine’s reference to Theo that finally made him recognize where he was. In reality, without “rendering,” the room could have been just another bed-and-breakfast. Now, Miller thought, what with Hartshine’s relentless gushing, it was rather like living behind a velvet rope in a museum. He hoped he wasn’t on the tour.

“Oh, I almost forgot! Kaska told me to tell you, if you’re sufficiently freshened up by now, lunch is in fifteen minutes. There’s no formal seating chart except at dinner but you’d better hurry if you expect to get a decent table. Sit with me, I’ll introduce you round. I should think the other scholars will have already taken their drinks on the terrace, but if you’re very quick perhaps Georges will make you one to take to your table with you. I’ll ask him.”

“I’ll ask him myself,” Miller said, determined to take his time and wondering at Hartshine’s power to drive him ever deeper into asshole territory. When he was good and ready he’d cross the street by himself

In the end, however, Miller hastily spit-combed his hair before the shaving mirror above Van Gogh’s washstand, and hustled the lollygagging Hartshine, still examining the contents of the bedroom at Arles as if he were preparing an inventory, out the door.

Hartshine introduced Miller to Georges, who got him his drink even though the bar was already closed.

They entered what Miller was given to understand was the night café.

“You know the painting?” Hartshine said out of the side of his mouth.

“What did they do with the billiard table?” Miller said out of the side of his own.

Miller, in tow with Hartshine, was walked past all the green baize-covered tables set against the high red walls in the big square room. It felt rather like a promenade. The fop, pausing at each table, had a word with each pair, trio, or quartet of diners, and introduced Miller. He met, in turn, though little of this registered, Professor Roland de Schulte, Paul and Marilyn Ames, Farrell and June Jones, an Ivan someone, a chess master from the Kara-Kalpak Republic, a South African black man named John Samuels Peterboro, and a female composer from the University of Michigan named Myra Gynt. Hartshine introduced Miller to Lesley Getler and his wife, Patricia, married, chaired sociologists, one from the University of Leiden and the other from the University of Basle in Switzerland. There was Arthur Barber, a mathematician from the University of Chicago, and perhaps a dozen others whose names passed through Miller like a dose of salts. Well, everyone’s did, really. Along with their disciplines, and the institutions where they held their chairs. He had never met so many high-powered academics in his life. The entire Ivy League must have been represented in that room. (Hartshine himself was from the University of Pennsylvania.) And even though he couldn’t have told you a moment after he’d met them — it was exactly like arriving late at a party and being introduced to all the guests at once — who any of these people were, Miller was dazzled, filled with a sense of giddiness and elation. He recognized the names of people whose important, newsworthy op-ed columns he thought he had read in the Times. Certain faces were vaguely familiar to him from television news shows during times of national and international crises, think tankers with gossip and expertise whose opinions were sought. He was very close to calling on the sort of Dutch courage one feels in the first stages of drunkenness. Thus, when during his goofy circumambulation of the room the Oxfords, Harvards, Princetons, Cambridges, Columbias, and Berkeleys were introduced to him, along with the Göteborgs, Sorbonnes, Uppsalas, and Heidelbergs (where the Student Prince matriculated), he experienced divided, contrary impulses: to stand taller, this urge to stretch himself toward the full height of his respectability; and a mild outrage like a low-grade fever. A war between super ego and id. He was, for example, torn between asking someone he was almost certain he’d seen discussing the Arab-Israeli question during several segments on MacNeil-Lehrer whether one was paid for such appearances or, since it was public television, it was done pro bono. He was tempted, too, to nudge some Harvard shit in the ribs, wink, and tell him yeah, he thought he’d heard of the place.

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.”

“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.

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.

Georges had wheeled in a portable bar cart and Miller, sunk deep in one of the big muslin chairs, was just getting comfortable with a large scotch-and-soda and enjoying the harsh, smoked-licorice taste of his duty-free Gaulois when a woman Miller hadn’t noticed before stood up. Miller thought she was about to play the piano for them when, inexplicably, in his lap-robed, civilized circumstances, he suddenly started to cry. (Because if they could just see me now, he thought. Because just look at me, he thought, the kid from Indy. Because, he thought, this is the life. Listening to high-class lieder, art songs, words in languages he wouldn’t understand set to melodies he probably wouldn’t be able to follow. This is, this is the life, thought Miller in Arles, his stock-still ego laced with awe, no hero but a dilettante of idyll. Because if they could, if they only could. See him now.) And was about to snuff out his cigarette for the singer’s sweet sake when abruptly, without even moving toward the piano, the woman began to speak.

She said her name was Anita Smynea and that she taught theological psychiatry at the London School of Economics. (Miller figured it was an elective.) Her project in Arles, she said, would be to put together the raw data for a monograph she was preparing on a psychological profile of the saints and martyrs.

Miller listened fascinated as she reeled off evidence for her conclusion that the downside of their spirituality and devoutness was a zealotry even more off-putting and unpleasant than their self-rightousness.

“Oh, come now, really,” one of the Fellows said, “off- putting? Unpleasant?”

“Are you serious?” Ms. Smynea said. “Those people couldn’t get past the lowliest reservations clerk at Heathrow, let alone a metal detector!”

A man who identified himself as a political geographer spoke next, addressing the group in the music room from a wheelchair. He discussed his theories about why world-class cities were almost never found on mountaintops. From what Miller understood of his ideas it had less to do with the mechanical difficulties involved in hauling material up their steep, perilous slopes than with some notion about “Man’s innate fear of the sky and of exposure to most astronomical phenomena.” Further arguing that the concept of shelter had as much to do with physical contact and sexual enterprise as it did with a need to protect oneself from the elements, he advanced the theory that from a child’s security blanket on up the chain of architecture to the floor, the ceiling, the room, the apartment and neighborhood, one had before one the very type of the Platonic idea of “comfort.” Thus, cities, mimicking lovemaking, were constitutionally “horizontal” rather than “vertical,” and did not get built on the tops of mountains.

Miller, floundering, foundering, losing track, dropping behind, dropping out, was overcome with sadness. His interest, which was still high, availeth not. Unconsciously, he looked toward Russell for a sign of corroborative impatience. Russell was contemplative and serene inside his huge head.

It was someone else entirely who grew fitful, lost patience. “What is the point, please?” Paul Hartshine (now, for dinner, in a dinner jacket) demanded irritably.

“I’m a political geographer,” said the cripple. “The point, of course, is that because of the synergy between the fear of sky-nakedness and sexual guilt there can be no such thing as a ‘shining city on a hill.’”

“Denver!” Hartshine challenged.

“Denver is foothills.”

A scholar from Hebrew University spoke about slang in the sacred texts.

Myra Gynt, a composer from the University of Michigan, explained how it was her intention to set the lyrics of various Broadway showstoppers to the more formal music of the twelve-tone scale— serial composition, she called it. Miller watched closely as Ms. Gynt adjusted the piano bench and, inclining her neck first right, then left, repeatedly pressed certain keys at the high and low ends of the keyboard and played two chords to either side of its center. She was averaging, she said, testing to see if the piano was tuned. Her mouth turned sourly down at the corners, and though Miller could hear nothing wrong, she professed profound dissatisfaction with the instrument.

Miller sat back, luxuriating in the high-mindedness of his colleagues, taking pleasure in the word, the privileged, lofty fellowship of the communal it radiated, their joint fraternal, sororal mutuality of mission, dedicate, pledged to service history, as if there were something vaguely legislative about scholarship, the life of mind; at once neutral and senatorian in some wise old Roman way; there to learn, to sift, to consider, and then to choose. He’d been in the business maybe eleven years, but until that moment in France he had denied something noble and honorable in himself and hadn’t realized what he should all along have taken for granted— the collegiality of their enterprise, the professional courtesy one life owed another. He looked toward Russell, toward Hartshine, even toward the lame political geographer in the wheelchair, and smiled, certain that the look on his face at that moment matched Russell’s own almost godlike benignity.

When Myra Gynt began to sing (he hadn’t been wrong, the lyric she’d chosen to transpose into her queer, discordant, cryptic, rigorous new music was “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and was just as difficult for him to follow as he’d anticipated the lieder would be), he felt a flush of pleasure. If they could, he thought, bearing up under what he was certain was good for him, ready at that moment, if a dish of them had been passed round, to chew on the rubbery arms of the squid, to lick from his fingers its black, bilelike ink, if they only could. See him now.

And still luxuriated in his cozy aura of well-being and pride when the famous Roland de Schulte of Harvard, modest and humble as the day was long (“Some of you may have seen articles in a few of the scientific journals about work being done in the pharmacological field to study a variety of marine pathogens”), a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize in chemistry if the FDA ever got off its ass and approved any of a number of Professor de Schulte’s promising homeopathic preparations from sick sea creatures— sharks that were HIV positive, tubercular whales, cancerous eels, arteriosclerotic plaice. (Miller knew it sounded ridiculous, even satiric. But what did he know? What? Any idiot could follow the line of least resistance and laugh at what seemed farfetched to the touch and spirit. Any fool could send up what he didn’t love or understand. Myra Gynt’s atonal music; Professor Smynea’s psychological profiles of the saints and martyrs; Schiff’s, the geographer’s, wild analogies about cities and making love. The Hebrew University guy’s thesis about Biblical slang, how the tetragrammaton itself was merely coy, even facetious, coinage for all the not-to-be- pronounced names of God.

And was still luxuriating, calm and at peace with himself as a man in his tub, only less passive than that, beaming, sending these messages of actual, active goodwill, this sort of silly facial semaphore of the heartfelts and placables, while Farrell Jones held forth regarding his conclusions about the parallels between the mood swings of manic-depressives and babies, and Dr. Arthur Barber, Distinguished University Professor in Theoretical Mathematics at the University of Chicago, speaking in formulas, in signs and symbols, explained the implications of his research not only into the philosophic impossibility of the infinite number but of the high probability that a dozen could not exist in nature.

Miller was only gradually aware of this stamped rictus across his face, like a lingering sensation that he still wore a hat after he’d already removed it. The professor had lost him. Miller had lost his euphoria. And there was Miller, Miller thought, wooden, leaden, left behind, heavy as gravity and choking on a mouthful of his own stifled yawns as someone infectious conscientiously trying to hold in his germs. He tried to rekindle his attention but it had turned cold and gone out. If there’d been a mirror for him to look into he was certain he’d have appeared red-eyed, rumpled, in need of a shave.

Then the most peculiar thing.

Without meaning to, he caught Russell’s eye.

Russell, watching Miller, even openly staring at him, distinctly mouthed, “He forgot to carry his two,” and winked.

Miller, taken by surprise, embarrassed, shy as a schoolgirl, looked down at his feet. He felt himself redden, he felt himself grin. Fearful of looking up, he remained, head bent over the room’s rich brown carpeting as if he were examining it for imperfections. His grin oddly fitting once the Getlers, the mutually chaired, married sociologists from Leiden and Basle, were into their turn. The term, Miller felt, not ill-considered since their area of expertise was the morphology of jokes and riddles. Miller was lost anyway. He understood them, those in English anyway, but had difficulty seeing the sociological implications the Getlers saw in them. Why does a chicken cross the road was, it seemed (despite slight variations in the answer), an almost universal riddle. Only in the most impenetrable New Guinea jungles and stone-age Amazonian rain forests where no roads existed, and arctic tundra and ice floes where no chickens did, was the riddle unknown. Frame of reference. Miller could dig that. What he couldn’t understand was why so much depended on delivery.

What, he wondered, am I doing here?

Which, remarkably, was exactly what Russell asked him at that very moment. Tentatively, almost experimentally, Miller looked up from his post where he was inspecting the carpet. Russell, smiling, threw him and held a long, at least two-beat wink.

“What,” Miller said, flustered, “are you talking to me?”

“Yes,” Russell said, “why don’t you tell the Fellows about your project?”

“You,” Miller shot back almost hostilely.

“My project? Oh,” said Russell, blowing it off, “just to think about things.”

Miller’s heart sank.

“What things?” he challenged. Because he was at a loss. Because he was cornered. Because he didn’t know what else to say. Because he’d have given anything to be back safe in bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles at that moment. Because maybe he’d known even before he’d started to lose his phony well-being as he failed to keep pace with, or track of, the elevated star turns of the evening’s show-and-tellers and had begun to expect to be called on himself (who even in Indianapolis in front of some of the better students at the community college had attacks of self-doubt, and sometimes couldn’t help keeping the outright abject gratitude off his face during a night out on the town with his hometown betters— reversing himself now, undoing his idle, informal invocation of their witness, his half-holy if-they-could- see-me-nows, suddenly suspecting that they could, that they actually could, the canny, cunning, knowing bastards, that they’d probably set him up!).

Russell talking now, breezily reeling off a list, possibly extempore, of various things he’d been thinking of the less than twenty-four hours he’d been in Arles, Miller only now tuning in, losing maybe two-thirds of what the huge- browed, immense-headed man had been saying.

“… that if the holes in the ozone are real and the climates rearrange themselves, the temperate zone, pushing ever more northerly, sooner or later the prevailing culture will be the culture of the Laplanders, of the Inuits and Aleuts. How counterfeiting impacts upon inflation and, concomitantly, what the preponderant counterfeit currency— Deutsche marks, yen, francs, or dollars — along with its denominations can tell us about the true nature of the global economy at any given time. I mean to give some thought to how the endangerment and ultimate extinction of a particular species will affect fairy tales. How long will it be before Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, or The Three Little Pigs become obsolete? This would be a way of determining the half-life of the oral tradition.

“You?” Russell asked kindly.

The worst thing, Miller thought, isn’t that the ball’s in my court. No, he thought, not so much frightened as sick at heart (that same sick sinking heart of but moments before, which, as if it had fallen overboard, now felt itself to be turning over in some slow, twisting free-fall, snagged on the contrary currents of the thick, salted buoyance in the death-dark sea, and thinking as he parsed all this: oh, boy, am I in trouble!), the worst thing is that Russell could probably have gone on. And also that the ball was in his court.

“Oh, I have a project,” Miller said finally. “I had to have a project or the Foundation wouldn’t have let me come. As a matter of fact, I’m depending on some of you to work with me on this. I was going to leave notes with Rita to put in your boxes. I simply haven’t had time.”

He thought he sounded reasonable. Not as razzle-dazzle as Russell certainly, nor as grand as the riddles, jokes, and infinity professors or some of those other guys, but reasonable. Clear. Talking like someone conducting a meeting, say. A sort of administrator, someone orienting the troops, telling them where they could get their letterhead, pencils, supplies. A kind of Rita himself actually, or even a Madame Kaska Celli. He even thought that so far, at least after all the dense, high-intensity talk they’d had to listen to this evening, his manner of speaking might actually come as a sort of relief, put folks at their ease. Why the hell not? It put him at his. He even felt his heart had stopped sinking.

“I,” Miller said, “like you, am pleased and honored to be here. Certainly as pleased and clearly more honored. Well, I have no books, you see. Well, in community colleges, the sort of place I teach but scholars like yourselves wouldn’t give the time of day and, quite frankly, don’t have any reasons to think about much, where we consider ourselves lucky if our budgets can afford just to keep some of your seminal books amongst the library’s holdings, and where we still manage to hold our heads up even if all we can work out is to connect up with some interlibrary-loan deal with a like-minded and similarly ground-down institution which might just possibly arrange to get one of your titles into the course instructor’s hands sometime before the term is over, let alone the student’s, it really isn’t such a high priority to publish.

“Well,” Miller said, “I don’t mean to sound so negative. It isn’t as if the community-college system doesn’t serve its purpose in society. Admittedly, we’re pretty much a bootstrap operation, but you’d be surprised how many of our kids graduate and then go on to earn real good degrees from our nation’s most impressive four-year institutions, some of them. And even go on to apply to graduate school. I don’t have the exact statistics in front of me right now, but I’ve read how almost half the nation’s CPAs, tax accountants, franchisees, licensed real-estate brokers, and insurance salesmen have attended a community college sometime during the course of their academic careers.”

He had their attention. They looked at him with that same aggressive kindness they’d shown when Hartshine had taken him right up to their tables to introduce him the day before. They looked at him, that is, almost hospitably, as if he were somehow their dubious guest. And Miller felt the same mild, useless, almost humble outrage. Think tankers, he thought, fucking op-eders. Holding his tongue at the same time that he wielded it. Like, say, Iago. And threw himself on their mercies as if he were daring them to drop him.

“Even so,” said Miller, continuing, his heart no longer sinking he saw because it had already hit bottom, had come apart like any other settled, foundership, “I won’t kid you, it ain’t all roses and chocolates in our kind of operation. A considerable part of our student population is inner-city, and a whole lot more is, to put the kindest construction on it, well, vocational. Plus we get a host of boat people, and economic refugees, and English-as-a-second-language types. And a whole bunch of folks straight off the killing fields. And, well, a lot of what we do could be considered remedial— glorified and not- so- glorified high school.

“So I guess you can see what a personal privilege it is for me to come in from the cold and be here among you for the next five weeks. I’ve listened tonight with great interest to many of your provocative, trailblazing insights and ideas, and let me tell you up front and just as frankly as I can that when I wasn’t scratching my head I was catching my breath. I mean it. Who am I to butter you up? I mean it. Who am I to brownnose some of the greatest theoreticians and most famous hypothesists in their chosen fields? Where would I get off, a simple time server like me who’s never been practically anywhere? I mean it.”

He did. He really did. Who knew to the penny the exact amount of true awe and real viciousness he’d spent on them. He meant it, he meant it all. And knew, too, when enough was enough, that he better wind it up soon, was perhaps even now lecturing against the bell, but who had never appeared before a class like this before and, more than likely, never would again. But who loved his windiness. Who loved the sheer flourish, complicated as a monogram on a handkerchief, of his drawn-out speechifying, and who even at Booth Tarkington Community College, before the night school and boat people crowded in the two sections of the first, and pair of the second, and single section of the third course he taught — the five courses, the three preparations — loved above all the possibilities open to him in teaching, above love of learning, the possibility of doing good, of touching a life here, changing another there, the pure rock- bottom thrill, by sufferance here in Arles and the authority vested in him back at good old BTCC, of beating about the bush!

But who understood he was going too far, pushing against the envelope of even their compromised, condescendent patience. And who, in their shoes, would be shuffling his feet by now. (Though but twenty or so minutes before, in his own, he’d kept them still enough, his gaze locked in on the few square feet of scrutinized carpet, chased there by Russell’s defiant wink.) Really, Miller thought, they were quite remarkable. For folks with so much on their minds, quite remarkable. They did even less shifting about in their seats than Miller’s fender straighteners, hair stylists, data processors, communications majors, Central Americans, Cambodians, other assorted third worlders and drug dealers back home. Then again, according to Rita’s testimony, these Fellows walked the paths beneath tall trees, climbed the hills, were sightseers by nature, viewfinders. Perhaps, to them, he was just another pretty sight, quaint as those champagne-and-éclair picnickers, a piece of the life cycle, the sweetness and sorrow. Well, he thought, I’ll show them! I’ll knock off the humility, sacrifice the sweet windiness, close down the tap dance, and just bring it on home!

But just couldn’t quite. Since he’d failed to let them in on something, a matter of some delicacy.

He cleared his throat. (This, it occurred, was rather like a singer vocalizing, a pianist’s tuneless scales.)

“Well,” he said, “you can imagine. You can just imagine. I don’t have to draw you any pictures or put too fine a point on it. Everything boils down to self-esteem. Those poor kids. I can’t tell you how my heart goes out to them. I just can’t tell you. Because the fact of the matter is they’ve no illusions. I have statistics. I bet two-thirds of you are on your second or third marriages. It’s not my place to pry and I won’t ask for a show of hands but I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t at least two people within the sound of my voice who’ve been married four times. At least four times. And that a lot of your romances were with students, and that they began, innocently enough, with some really sensational insight you dropped on them in one of your lectures, or in class discussion, or when they came around during office hours to discuss their term papers. Sure, you have the insights, they have the legs.

“Well that doesn’t happen in a community college. There’s no hanky-panky. If they run into us at the library they know it’s not the Bodleian or the Widener, or see us climb into our cars in the parking lot they know full well it ain’t Harvard Yard. What I’m saying, there’s no stars in their eyes. To this day I’m single and not one of my students ever came on to me. They’ve no self-esteem,” Miller said. “Or maybe that’s backwards. The point is you don’t get points for anything that comes out of Cliff’s Notes or Masterplots.”

Someone raised his hand.

Uh oh, he thought, worried, recalling Hartshine’s challenge to the crippled political geographer, the hard time Anita Smynea had been given by one of the Fellows, even Russell’s private mockery of Arthur Barber, the infinity maven who’d forgotten to carry his two. “Yes,” Miller said, “is there a question?”

“What’s your project?” he asked politely.

“I’m trying,” he said, “to get some idea of the image of the community college in the eyes of establishment academia.” Then he fell out of his deep muslin chair and fainted.

When, moments later, he came to on the carpet (his tie had been loosened, his collar undone; establishment academia, giving him air, had moved back a floor lamp, his chair, cleared a broad avenue for him, and now stood patiently on either side of the room exactly like people quietly observing an accident from the curb), Russell, Miller’s wrist in his hand, was on one knee beside him. He was grinning so widely someone might just have brought him good news and holding a wink so steadily Miller thought for a moment he looked like someone engaged in an odd athletic event, like seeing how long he could go before taking a breath, say.

Miller, embarrassed, said “Where am I, where am I? Wherever in the world am I?” just to get Russell to open his eye.

“Dr. Rey is on call,” a girl said. “I sent for him.”

“Rita? Is that you, Rita?”

They put Miller to bed in Van Gogh’s room in Arles, and though he heard them go down the stairs and leave the yellow house he had the impression that they’d left someone behind to stand guard in the hall. Perhaps Russell, perhaps Hartshine or Rita, or even the one who’d asked him the question in the music room. Fear and anxiety — he’d never passed out before — had left him half conscious during the press of their urgent rush with him across the square to Number 2 Lamartine Place. It seemed important to Miller to learn who’d been chosen to stay with him, but he thought it better to discover the identity of whoever it was posted outside his door by listening to the nature of the silence, or whatever was done to disturb it, made by the person keeping the vigil, than to demand it outright. He closed his eyes so he might better concentrate on the problem. Never had his senses been sharper. He tried to judge his guardian’s sex and size by the creak of the weight made on the flooring, to see if he could reconstruct the nature of the clothing — its fabric, even its color — by the quality of the sound — its rustle or rub — made when it was brushed by a hand. And opened his eyes. To see could he detect some clue in the breathing or make out in the darkness some gloomy giveaway thickness or layer of shadow that might reveal the character of its source. There was nothing. He received no impressions, heard nothing, felt no pulsations shaken loose from the brusque agitations and invisible jitters and shivers of whatever body rested against the wall outside his room. He saw nothing. And so he closed them again and went to sleep.

Only to look when he waked, not so much refreshed or even rested as startlingly wakeful, directly into the very odd face of someone gazing down at him. The face was somehow as disturbingly familiar as it was strange.

“Oh,” said the man, “I am penitent to startle you. You must are the ill American monsieur, Mr. Miller.”

“Am I ill?” Miller asked, for he realized even before he took in the man’s old-fashioned black bag he must be the doctor.

“This is something we will shall be deciding together. Dr. Félix Rey, Mister Monsieur.”

“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.”

“Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.”

“You do,” Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!”

“Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey.

It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they were young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or — six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.

Miller kept shifting his glance from the picture postcard to the great-great-grandson. For all the flawlessness of their unquestioned resemblance it seemed a bit stagy, as though one of them were cross-dressing, say, or as if some feature on one of their faces — the beard, the plucked eyebrows — had been cultivated for a specific effect, accented as a nose or a hairline in a caricature.

“It is very remarkable, is it not, Mister Monsieur? Do I state the case amiss? One might summarize that Vincent was so geniused that he fixed the gene pool forever with his picture brush. But you will see from your eyes. There live in Arles to this day descendants from the peasant Patience Escalier; the postesman Joseph Roulin and his femme, Berceuse, their sons, Armand and Camille; and of Madame Ginoux and of even the fierce Zouave.”

Handing back the “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey,” Miller wondered if the physician had picked up his English in much the same sort of way Miller had picked up his French, studying rubrics on the backs of postcards as he had memorized vocabulary lists, Yet there was something about Dr. Rey’s speech Miller, admittedly no student of languages, didn’t quite buy. His accent, measured against the accents of Frenchmen in films, seemed wrong. It wasn’t so much uncultivated as uncluttered by their smoky, theatrical rumble and heavy breathiness. It seemed to Miller that even the man’s syntax was off by four or five hundred miles, as though it belonged at least that much further up the Mediterranean coast.

Now Rey listened to Miller’s heart, tuned in on his lungs, took the measures of his pressure and pulse and temperature. He examined Miller’s ears, ran light into Miller’s eyes, palpated Miller’s belly, dug his fingers painfully deep into Miller’s groin. He had Miller gag three strained ahhs under a rough wooden tongue depressor. He had him sit along the side of the bed and tested his reflexes with a little hammer. He took his pressure a second time, removed the stethoscope again from where he had stuffed it into a jacket pocket and asked Miller if he minded submitting to a second examination of his chest. He breathed on the little black disc at the bottom of the stethoscope, warming it the way one might move breath across one’s lenses before rubbing them clean with a tissue. Nothing the doctor had yet done so alarmed Miller as this little gesture of solicitude. Then he had Miller cough. Hard. Harder please, s’il vous plaît. Press, Miller interpreted freely, the pedal to the metal.

And Miller, accommodating, coughed with such force that he brought up the reduced, soured biles of the gorgeous great omelette, toast, tea, peeled fruit, and apéritifs of his delicious dinner. Félix Rey gave him a handful of toilet paper, which he removed from his doctor’s satchel.

It had been a thorough, even arduous, examination. “Is something wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” Miller asked nervously. “I’m no hypochondriac, doc, but I have to admit, ever since my arrival I’ve been a bit off my feed.” It was so. Whatever else, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Miller generally enjoyed good health. Almost thirty-seven, he was still active in sports, still played a good, hard-driving pickup basketball game with the students in the BTCC gym, or handball at the Indianapolis Y. Unlike many others younger than himself he detected no loss of spring in his step under the boards, and was, despite his liquor and cigarettes, still a strong jumper, and an aggressive, even combative, player. He usually drew more fouls than any other player on his team. (Indeed, he had a small reputation as something of a bad sport, and had always vaguely equated this as a sign of stamina and good physical health.) And on the lively YMCA handball courts he was as quick as ever, his aces and killers as devastating as they had ever been. “What’s wrong with me,” he asked again, “am I ill?” And felt, who’d been unable to pick up any of the steams and busted light waves pouring off the solid objects in his darkened room, his alarmed features anxiously arrange themselves on his face.

“Mais not, Mister Monsieur. I am just remarking what strange fabulousness is it that the physical qualities of so differents citizenships should such often present liberté, égalité, fraternité, the European as well as the Berber, the Berber as much as the Japanese, the man as the woman, a Mexican like an American like a Jewish gentleman like a Turk. Palpation and respiration and the rate of the heart are demonstrations. The Zulu and Eskimo are both at normal at centigrade thirty-six degrees.

“There is nothing needed for further testing, Monsieur Sir. Of wounds to your body there are none presenting. Nor pathologies neither. I have not need to take your blood, I have not need to collect your urines. If there are damages it is in your spirit you are weakly.”

“My spirit?”

“Oui.”

“My spirit?”

“Non non. Do not alarm. It will see you out the night.”

“The night. Terrific. That gives me, what, seven hours?”

“And more. How long is your arrangement at Arles?”

“Five weeks. This is my second day.”

“Mister Monsieur is an artist?”

“I teach at a junior college in Indiana.”

“But Mister Monsieur’s soul suffers?”

Miller stared at the odd-looking physician with his queer, Oriental, triangular face. He fixed on the man’s fiery left ear, his dagger’s-point beard, the sprawling flourish of his mustache like elaborate handwriting above his almost feminine lips. It was almost all he could do to keep himself from laughing at its foolish excesses. “Yes,” he admitted quietly, “it sure does.”

Then Dr. Félix Rey looked about the room, taking in his surroundings for apparently the first time.

“This is where he live.”

“Yes,” Miller said.

“Yes,” said Dr. Rey, “I have been here. Oh, many years since. But not much since the Foundation have kept it for Fellows. Well,” he said shyly, “for a group photograph once. Of the Club of the Portraits of Descendants of People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh. Here, may I present? My pleasure, my pleasure.”

He produced a second postcard from somewhere in his suit and extended it toward terminally cracked-spirit, soul- weakened Miller, a blurry black-and-white photograph of people as vaguely familiar to Miller as Dr. Félix Rey had been. In it, ranged about Van Gogh’s room at Arles, which somehow disappeared, was absorbed, swallowed up by their relentless, insistent, novelty presence as some historical place (where a famous general had died of his wounds, say, or the room where an important document had been signed or great book written) might be by the presence of tourists, were the peasant Patience Escalier, Joseph, Berceuse, Armand and Camille Roulin, Madame Ginoux (who herself bore a striking resemblance — they could have been sisters— to Kaska Celli), Rey himself, and the fierce Zouave. Six of the eight were crowded onto the room’s two chairs and along the side of Van Gogh’s bed. The other two, the postman Roulin with his salt-and-pepper, broad shaggy beard so layered with hair it was impossible to make out his neck or determine whether he wore a tie, or even if his shirt was buttoned, and the dashing soldier boy, surprisingly slight but with a large head and a powerful neck, posed for their picture in what was left of the room, in a small clearing on the tiled floor. It reminded Miller of some remarkable class photograph. (Good heavens, he thought, this might have been taken at one of the English-as-a-second-language courses back at Booth Tarkington.)

“We have not changed a day. It is as if the time stood still.”

“Indeed,” said Miller.

“I am a physician, Roulin is a postesman. Even the young lad is demob’d from the Foreign Legion.”

“And the peasant, Patience Escalier, is he still a peasant?”

“He is! It is a thing wondrous how that man wizardized us with his masterpieces left and right. It is beyond my poor proofs and scientifics. Art has its mysteriousness, eh, sir mister? We eat its dusts.”

Miller, though it struck him as an odd observation even at the moment he made it to himself, noticed that he was totally without appetite. Not even the burning, sour, transformed taste of his supper, still in his mouth from the bile he’d brought up when Dr. Rey had him cough, left him with even the most remote urge to clear it, neutralize it with a sip of water, the relief of gum. He guessed, too, that he’d had enough of Dr. Félix Rey.

Though he had complete, almost surprising, faith in Rey as a doctor, he understood that there’d been no reason to draw his blood, he understood that a sample of his pee would have revealed nothing of interest, and though Miller was as taken with his peculiar distinction (his residency in Van Gogh’s room at Arles) as the physician’s mad notion that in painting his great-great-grandfather, Van Gogh had somehow laid a spell on the great-great-grandson and fixed his fate forever. This, Miller realized, was probably not good medicine and he would have been content to bid the doctor goodnight and been permitted to turn the young man’s diagnosis (that he was weakly in spirit) and prognosis (that it would likely see him out his sojourn in Arles) over in his mind.

Then he noticed the muzzy class photo Félix Rey had given him and which he’d briefly examined and set down on the washstand. “You’ll want this,” he said and made to return it to the physician.

“Non non non. I insist not, Mr. Miller. It is yours to keep it. It is but a cheap trinket. The club makes them up.”

“Well,” he said, shifting, “thank you.” Miller, whose health, until Arles, had been so good he’d not had enough contact with doctors to understand that it was they rather than their patients who sent such signals, nevertheless hoped Rey had picked up enough English from the rubrics on his postcards — on this one, too, everything was in four languages — to guess by such shifts that their meeting was over.

As it happens he had.

Félix Rey rose from the rush-bottom chair beside Miller’s bed. “I shall see in on you again, Sir Mister Monsieur.”

“You don’t think you’d better leave me something to help me sleep?”

“What, pills?”

“Well sure, pills if you think that’s what I need.”

“An injection? Powders and sedatives?”

“You’re the doctor,” Miller said.

Félix Rey looked at him. “Did you know, Monsieur Mister, that it was to this chamber your neighbor called my great-great-grandfather on the night of the blood from the knife on his ear?”

“What,” Miller said, “because I asked you for something to help me sleep?”

“Does Mister have a gun?”

“If I had a gun do you think they’d have let me through airport security?”

“Knifes?”

“Please.”

“Ropes and poisons?”

“If I had any of that stuff what would I need with a sleeping pill?” Miller asked reasonably.

“Please,” said the doctor, “raise no hand against yourself. I know your position. You’ve nothing to fear from your position.”

“My position?”

“Your position, your bloom, your hale and your hardy. Your soul is a little sprained. It’s nothing. We see it all the time. If you like, I can ask them to alter your accommodations. It would be nothing.”

“My room? You mean my room? I like my accommodations, my accommodations suit me right down to the ground!” Miller shot back angrily, furiously really.

“Please? Suit you right down to the ground? Rest. Please Mister. I will see in on you.”

He was a country doctor, Miller reminded himself after Félix Rey had left. He was nothing but a country doctor. And a self-proclaimed curiosity. (Miller put him down as probably the president of that Sons of Van Gogh’s Subjects, or whatever it was, that he so liked going on about.) The Foundation probably called on him more for his language skills than for his medical ones.

What, Miller’s soul was sprained? He needed a doctor to tell him this? Ask the man who owns one! was all Miller had to say about it. And then the silly sod wouldn’t even leave him with a lousy sleeping pill to take a little of the edge off his god-awful wakefulness. What had he told him? Raise no hand against himself? This was his considered medical opinion? Well, thought Miller, we’ll just see about that! And then, to ease a little of that soul sprain and lift a little of the edge off that god-awful wakefulness, Miller, calling up images of Kaska Celli, got a wrong number, got Madame Ginoux instead (but who looked so like her) and, imagining the round, competent arms beneath the heavy sleeves of her thick black dress, raised a hand against himself and whacked off.

Gradually he lost track of the days, of the time he had been in Arles. On some days (though he couldn’t and wouldn’t have said whether the condition of his spirit and soul — how did hospitals put it? — was satisfactory or serious or critical) he went down to breakfast or even had the kitchen make up a box lunch for him to take with him on his ambles through Arles. One afternoon he walked by himself out to the olive orchard that Van Gogh had once painted and had his bread and cheese and bottle of wine and then settled down to sleep under the pale pink blossoms of its slender trees. (Where he dreamed of a wedding couple making a picnic of champagne and éclairs on the limestone coffins alongside the tall trees in Les Alyscamps where Rita had taken the Fellows on his first day in Arles. The groom was the peasant Patience Escalier, and his bride was Berceuse Roulin. They fed and toasted each other while Miller wept for the sweetness and sorrows of life. He wept into their champagne and wept over their éclairs, and when he woke up in the olive orchard he had a salty taste in his mouth, which even the last of his wine would not loosen.) Another time, without in the least knowing where he was headed, he found himself at the Arles-Bouc Canal where he came upon the Dutch-looking drawbridge of Van Gogh’s famous painting, vaguely resembling one of da Vinci’s sketches of a military device, some water catapult, say. Other times, however, he slept in, and couldn’t, at the end of the day, have said whether his spirit and soul were the better or worse for their lack of wear.

What he’d told his doctor (this is how he thought of Félix Rey, though it had been more than a week since he’d seen him) was true. His room at Arles suited him right down to the ground. He did no work on his project and his laptop PC remained unopened even to write the letters he had promised his pals back in Indianapolis. If he’d been able to bring himself to write any letters at all in that room they would have been to Theo, but Miller had no brother, let alone any Theo, and the idea of spilling the beans about himself to anyone else struck him, even after his performance in the music room, as an absurdity, even an act of hubris. (The one time he did turn on the laptop all he did was doodle, making odd designs and even faces out of the period, exclamation point, pound, asterisk, paragraph, section symbol, ampersand, dollar, slash, percentage, left and right bracket, single and double quote, plus, minus, cedilla, diacritical, tilde, hyphen, underscore, and other signs he did not know the name for on his keyboard. Alas, Miller thought as he turned off his PC, I’m no Van Gogh.)

On the whole, however, if only to avoid the Fellows’ questions, he usually chose to be away from Number 2 Lamartine Place more often than he chose to be in it.

So he would find himself — the weather had been amazing — outdoors, sometimes taking a bus to the edge of town and then striking off on his own. Or, if the bus went to some small village nearby, getting off there and then striking off. Once he rode all the way out to Saintes-Maries-de- la-Mer, about twenty-five miles from the city. When he stepped down from the bus and out into the dusty street (more a lane than a street) he had the sense of having been there before. Perhaps he had passed through on the coach during the long ride from Marseilles to Arles his first day in France. This might have been one of those places he’d been momentarily jolted awake and that had left him with his few rough impressions of that journey. But the name of the village was familiar, too. Surely he wouldn’t have retained that as well. While he was looking at the row of peculiar but quite beautiful cottages with their layers of tiered, dyed thatch like actual crops of roofs contoured into the architecture, and their whitewashed sides like thick stucco brushstrokes, it occurred to Miller that he had seen this street before. Not on the bus but in one of Vincent’s paintings. Then a wind blew up, filling his nose with the strong smell of brine. Of course! thought Miller, cuffing his head, suddenly recalling one of those first weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school. La plume de ma tante! It’s like riding a fucking bicycle! Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer! Nothing was wasted in life. Those vocabulary lists! He knew his French would come in handy one day. “Mer” means sea! Then, facing the wind, tracing the source of that brine, turning this way and that, going up one lane and down another, he came at last to a clearing from which he could see the Mediterranean and where there, on the beach, lined up it seemed to Miller almost exactly as they had been lined up in Van Gogh’s painting of the scene, were four pretty little fishing boats, one red, one green, and two blue, their anchors struck into the sand. Their owners were nowhere about. Indeed, except for one shining white gull, the only other signs of life were four other boats diminished in the distance in the Gulf of Lions.

He was not, Miller understood, a man given to epiphanies. Who, him? With his soured soul and sick spirit? Him, Miller, the man from Indy who — get his dumb aria and parlor-game melodramatics in the damn music room out of your head — had not once during all the times this or that had been “familiar” to him in this queer foreign country, not — count ’em — once ever put down to déjà vu or anything faintly psychological any of his creepy encounters and strange doings. Yet he had his epiphany now. It was this. All his rambles and maunderings of the last few days, all of them, why it was like being on a scavenger hunt! That’s it, that’s right, thought Miller, a scavenger hunt for Van Gogh’s sketches and watercolors and oils, this was what his half-ass project came to, this was what the meaning of his off-again, on-again raids into Arles and its countryside had turned out to be!

He was in Arles at the entrance to the public garden. A man stood with his legs planted so far apart that they might almost have been kicked into position by police. The man was reading a newspaper with the upper half of his body while darkly clothed men and women sat isolated on benches in the attitude of mourners taking time out from their grief along the sidelines of a community nature in the community air. Van Gogh had painted just such a scene. Miller turned away and would not look.

He was approaching at street level the broad, bluish stone steps of the Trinquetaille Bridge, an iron pedestrian bridge across the Rhône. He recognized the bridge as the subject of one of Van Gogh’s paintings. He would not look.

On another occasion he found himself walking south along the Avenue de Montmajour. At almost the last moment he looked up to see that he was about to step under the railroad-bridge underpass a few blocks up from Van Gogh’s room at Arles in the yellow house at Lamartine Place. Van Gogh had done two views — an oil and a sketch— of the underpass. Rather than go past the site, he turned about and went the long way round to his room.

He would not look, he would not look. He would not look at the Provence farmhouse the color of mustard with its haystacks high as a house, or at its low pink stone walls and gateposts. Nor glance at the isolated cypresses rising in the distance behind it like high green flames.

He would not look at the wheat fields set out before him like so many landscapes. He would not look at the sheaves, at the clouds, at the low outbuildings.

He saw a sower, a youth of seventeen or eighteen wearing a hat like a cloth pith helmet, a great bag of seeds attached to him like a paperboy’s sack, and striding forthrightly through the fields like someone on a brisk walk. Crows hovered above the seeds and a little way back of the sower. He wouldn’t look.

There were immense, brilliant sunflowers. He would not look at the sunflowers. He avoided gazing at them as he would have avoided staring into the sun itself.

And so, in this way, Miller was at last driven back to Van Gogh’s room at Aries. Which, unless the bed were unmade — he rumpled it in the morning after a housekeeper had made it up — or he had rearranged the washstand and chairs, he would not look at and could not stay in.

He spent time in the music room, seeking it out because it was one of the few places around Lamartine Place Van Gogh had not painted.

People came by — the music room was a public space, open to all the Fellows — and always saw him there. He listened to CDs. He read The International Herald Tribune. He browsed American magazines as out of date as the copies in barbershops and dentists’ waiting rooms back home. After a while he just sat, changing every once in a while from this chair to that or switching to one or another of the room’s sofas to create at least the illusion that he was not simply vegetating.

People respected his privacy even more than he did, but because he was too shy (or too much at a loss for something to say to them) to initiate conversation, he waited for someone to speak to him first, waited for a signal. A simple gesture of the hand, a nod in his direction would have done, just some preemptive eye contact would have, but no one, perhaps because their memory of his behavior in this room was still too fresh, ever offered it.

His feelings for his situation, that he was outgunned in this country, outsmarted, outmanned, overwhelmed, overcome, did not make him anxious to return to his room, however. Yet there was no question of his quitting Arles, or even France, and returning early to America. For one thing, he had neither the funds for gallivanting about Europe (and even if he had, what guarantees were there that there would not be sights in any of those other places that wouldn’t pull him up just as short as they had done here?) nor the nerve to admit to his Indianapolis pals that he couldn’t go the distance. And, frankly, there was an even more practical reason he could not quit Arles. His job, at least the possibility of his being promoted to Full Professor, may very well have been on the line. Miller had no reputation as a scholar. He hadn’t published so much as a textbook. He wasn’t, he thought, a bad teacher, but the fact was that his classes didn’t always make and when that happened and (always at the last minute) he was pulled out of a section and assigned to teach a different course altogether, there wasn’t always enough time for him to bring himself up to speed and, well, naturally the teaching suffered. His fellowship in Arles had been a feather not only in his cap but in Booth Tarkington’s, too, and if he were to throw up his hands and go back to Indianapolis now, his tail between his legs, before the full five weeks were up, he could kiss his advancement goodbye. (Because there actually was a record. And there was actually a place on it where black marks could be set down against you on it.) Admittedly, there were many people his age who weren’t full professors. Most, probably. He wasn’t necessarily even in competition with them. (Community colleges weren’t bad places to teach. It was pretty laidback, really. So it wasn’t as if Miller were in any particular rush or something. The idea of a thirty-six-year-old — thirty- seven by the time he’d be in Indianapolis again — Associate Professor — or even a forty- or forty-one-year-old one— wasn’t particularly bothersome.) It was the thought of still being locked into his present rank when he was in his fifties that got to him, of becoming this school crossing guard of a professor. So it was out of the question that he abandon Arles. He didn’t even have to produce the monograph. All he really had to do was just give them some evidence — it really was laidback, it really was — that he was still working on it, that it was in the works.

It may have been all this thinking about time (the weeks left to him in Arles, the years ahead of him when he would pull himself up hand over hand from one rank to achieve another) that led him to notice that there sometimes appeared in the music room persons he hadn’t seen there before. Only then did it occur to him that for some of the Fellows at least rotation had already happened. (He hadn’t seen that crippled political geographer around lately, he hadn’t seen Myra Gynt, the composer from the University of Michigan.) Rather than panic at the thought that he’d lost track of time — he knew he’d lost track of time — or let it bother him much that possibly weeks had gone by without his doing any work on his project, he took a sort of encouragement from the idea that these might be people who hadn’t witnessed his debacle in the music room, who may not, in fact, even have heard of it.

So he climbed down from his high horse, broke radio silence, and greeted these strangers before waiting for them to make the first move. He asked what they thought about the place, he asked how they were adapting, it was some place wasn’t it, he asked where they were from, he asked about the projects they were working on.

And they, in turn, asked where he was from, and he told them Indiana (which was true enough), and asked about his project, and he said (which was true enough) that, oh, he was trying to put a study together about the image of the American community college among academics from the more prestigious think tanks and universities.

“Hmn,” said Lou Rangerer, a trade-union historian from Cornell, “don’t they do rather a lot with closed-circuit TV? And language labs? It seems to me they have all these language labs. They set students up in dozens of little cubicles in front of interactive computers where they let them work at their own pace.”

“Language labs, yes, that’s good. Language labs. Work at their own pace,” Miller said, making a note, and checking the spelling with him of Rangerer’s last name.

“I don’t know,” said Barbara Neil-Cheshi from the Wharton School, “aren’t they open all hours? Don’t they make a fetish of utilizing their plant around the clock all year long?”

Miller thanked her and made a note.

“You know what this sounds like?” Ms. Neil-Cheshi said. “Market research.”

“No no,” said Miller, “this is more open-ended than market research. In market research they always ask specific questions. I’m here in Arles looking for impressions. I particularly stipulated that when I filed my grant application. No no. Nothing like this has ever been done.” He folded the scrap of paper on which he had recorded their remarks and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He gave back her pencil. “It’s almost time for lunch,” he said, and left the music room.

Entering the night café a little before the others he sat down at one of the small, vacant, green baize-covered tables along a red wall. He finished his drink and held up. his empty glass until one of the waiters took it from him and returned with a full one. He spotted Paul Hartshine but looked away quickly. He came over anyway.

“May I?” Hartshine said.

“Sure,” Miller said. “Long time no see.”

“Now, Miller,” Hartshine said, “you know that’s not true. We’ve seen one another in the music room practically every day. You’ve cut me quite dead. I take no offense because you treat everyone in this manner.”

Hartshine, dapper as ever, was wearing a huge bow tie. His silk suit pants were almost like tights and his jacket flared up in back as if he were mooning the room. Miller had an urge to beat him up, at least to pick a fight. (He was drinking too much. Two or three of these apéritifs put him away these days. On top of on top of on top of on top of.) He considered what he might tell Hartshine. It was a toss- up between a remark about the way he dressed and the way he spoke. He was about to go with the clothes thing when suddenly he changed his mind and pulled out all the stops.

“Hartshine,” he said as if it were some problematic wine he rolled about in his mouth experimentally. “Hartshine, Hartshine. What is that, Jewish?”

Hartshine was shocked, stunned. He looked as if Miller had pulled a knife on him. He seemed terrified. This passed and a murderous anger moved across his face like weather. As Miller watched, Hartshine slowly lifted his right hand away from his lap, brought it level with the table and, raising it further, reached out and brought it to rest on the lapel of Miller’s jacket.

Miller leaned far back in his chair. “Hey,” he said. “What? What?”

Then Hartshine did an amazing thing. Removing his hand from the lapel he jerked it back toward his own throat and, rooting with his fingers under his big bow tie seized one end of the tie and tugged at it until the big floppy affair came undone. He pulled it through the collar of his shirt like a magic trick and set it down on his empty plate. Hartshine got up from the table wordlessly and crossed the night café to another table. Before anyone saw, Miller tried to cover the tie with his hand. Then, almost as if he were scratching the plate, he proceeded to palm Hartshine’s bow tie. He watched its elaborate print disappear into his fist, then, first looking about nonchalantly, stuffed it deep into the pocket of his pants.

After his lunch (which he ate even less of than usual) Miller had no desire to return to the music room and he went back to Number 2 Lamartine. Dr. Félix Rey was standing to the side of the stairs in the tiny ground-floor hallway addressing a small, rough-looking fellow in rapid French, one of the painters perhaps, who, his back to Miller, stooped down over the stairs, tying his shoe. Rey seemed angry, even quarrelsome, but spotting Miller abruptly broke off. “Ah,” said the doctor, “the Mister Monsieur. My friend plus myself have been waiting on you. Show him, Maurice!” Almost militarily the man removed his foot from the step and snapped to a kind of attention. “Eh?” said the doctor. “Eh, eh?” He was talking to Miller. “Eh?” he said again. “Hmn?” It was as if he were offering the Hoosier a piece of merchandise he’d been at some lengths to procure and now sought, as though Miller were a connoisseur or (he suddenly recalled the phrase of an unlikely Indianapolis pal, a broker) “made a market” in the commodity, corroboration of its worth or of the doctor’s judgment.

Miller neutrally shrugged.

“Well,” Dr. Rey said, “let’s have a look at you, will we?” and abruptly came toward him. Miller, momentarily flashing on Paul Hartshine’s strange, bold movement in the night café and conscious of the bow tie, undone in his pocket, instinctively backed away. The doctor reached out for his wrist, which, at a loss, Miller reluctantly surrendered. “Pulse normal,” he said, turning it over, examining his hands. “Tch tch tch. Monsieur tastes his nails. Color superb,” he said and touched the edge of his hand to Miller’s face. “Skin quite dry.” Miller looked at him. “Non non non non non. Skin quite dry is an excellent circumstance. I should say you are out of the woods,” Rey said. Then he turned to the mean-looking guy and seemed to relate in French (his tone calmer than when Miller had entered the house) everything he had just been telling his patient. (Miller caught “Tch tch tch.” He caught “Non non non non non.”)

“Please,” Félix Rey said. He indicated the stairs with a gesture, at once proprietary and deferential. “I promised the Zouave he could see the room,” he whispered.

Of course, Miller thought. Maurice. The fierce Zouave. I didn’t recognize him out of uniform. And wondered, and not for first time, Why me? What am I doing here? Are you really out of the woods if the doctor has to examine you in a hallway? What is the meaning of life?

Leading the way, followed by the good doctor and with the fierce Zouave bringing up the rear, Miller climbed the steps to Van Gogh’s room at Arles and muscled open its stuck, Provençal-warped door. (Where he saw that the maids — they came in pairs now — had put the furniture back in its original position.)

Félix Rey looked at the ex-legionnaire and waited with the same air of deferent appraisal (and muttering some of the same sounds) with which he’d appealed to Miller some few minutes earlier. Both looked toward the scowling young tough, Miller surprised to find himself as expectant as the doctor, as anxious to have the room’s authenticity acknowledged as Rey (apparently) had been eager to have Miller vouch for the kid’s uncanny resemblance to Van Gogh’s untamed original.

The Zouave nodded and went to the rush-bottom chair closest to the bed, unceremoniously tore it from its place, set it down against a wall, and planted himself in it, his legs spread wide, one hand resting in his lap and the other along a thigh as unselfconsciously as if he were sitting on a toilet.

“Hey!” Miller said. “Hey you!”

Without moving his face, the Zouave’s eyes seemed to follow Miller, to find and fix him, exactly as they would in a portrait, so that, in a way, it was almost as if Miller were the sitter, the subject, and the Zouave the one free and loose in the gallery. Maurice, in place, stolid, narrowed his eyes, oddly red, almost phosphorent, like something dangerous and defiant and shining in a jungle.

Miller wanted the intruders out of there. What the hell? The way the wiseguy had just marched in and taken over the place? Who the hell? Félix Rey had promised him? Promised him? Examines me in the fucking hall and promised him? Who the hell, what the hell? He wanted these Scrooge’s ghosts the hell out of there.

Miller started toward the demob’d legionnaire.

“Monsieur Miller Mister!” Félix Rey cried out suddenly. Miller, startled, pulled up short, his first thought not Watch it, he has a gun, but Careful, he has a knife! “Si’l vous plaît, Miller, please,” the doctor said, and Miller, turning, saw that Rey was holding a camera, that he was taking a picture, aiming the camera at the fierce, posing Zouave.

Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, his heart hammering at him in ways familiar to him only from his heavy, bad- blooded performances in the pickup handball and basketball games in the Indianapolis gyms, Miller felt a kind of fury that Rey and Maurice seemed not only indifferent to but totally unaware of his presence, that he had become irrelevant not merely as a man but — his flushed skin, his racing pulse, his pounding heart — as a patient. And, what was even more important, as the proper tenant of this room as they made their fanatical snapshots of each other.

They left only when they were out of film.

He woke the next day remembering that there was something he had to do. When he saw them he asked the maids— neither spoke English — for un packette, la petite packette — he did not know the French for “box”—and made clipped, angular gestures with his hands. He gestured wrapping paper, he gestured string. To Miller’s total surprise the box, paper, and string, in precisely the proportions he’d stipulated, were waiting for him on his bed when he returned after lunch to Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Miller went to the drawer in which he had been keeping it and, carefully folding Hartshine’s big bow tie, placed it in the box, wrapped it in the paper, and tied it with the string. He printed Paul Hartshine’s name neatly across the front of the discrete little package and took it to the desk at the inn.

“Please see that Mr. Hartshine gets this,” he told Rita (with whom he was still so miffed he was absolutely unable to invent a convincing enough scenario to which he could jerk off). “I think it’s his ear.”

Having completed his errand, he felt a curious, off-center, but unsatisfactory and incomplete sense of relief.

In the days following he wanted to try to explain his feelings about Arles. Surely among all these infinity specialists, why-the-chicken-crossed-the-road investigators, and big- bad-wolf revisionists, along with all the other heavy hitters (one of the Fellows was writing a psychological biography of God), there must be someone who could explain why Miller was having such a heavy time of it here, why he was experiencing all this complicated shit, a big, raw-boned, straw-in-the-mouth, normally merry-go-lucky like himself.

Then, as sometimes occurs in the short range for the short range, an opportunity arose as he was leaving the night café one evening. Russell had fallen into step beside him.

“How are you?” Russell said. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, but whenever I had my chances you were either in the music room apparently locked up in your thoughts or I’ve been too busy with my own. Would this be a good time?”

“Oh yes,” Miller said, and he and Russell walked out of the inn, crossed the square together, and entered the small yellow house. Russell followed him up the stairs to the room.

He invited Russell to sit and went to the chest of drawers where he kept the not inconsiderable stash of booze that he had put together from the time of his day trips around Arles. “There’s some gin left,” he said, “and a little scotch and vodka, and here’s a bottle of one of those poofy apéritifs that Georges serves us. What’s your pleasure?”

“Well, I don’t really drink,” Russell said, “but I see that you do, so I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Miller looked at him to see if this was a shot. Russell gazed benignly back at him and winked.

“I’m having,” Miller said, “I’m having all of it, this sort of alcohol cassoulet.” He poured off about four inches of gin, scotch, vodka, and liqueur into the pitcher in the basin on the washstand, swirled it around, and filled first Russell’s water tumbler and then his own. He held out his glass. “To him!” Miller offered.

“To him,” said Russell mildly, and raised his glass too.

“It’s not because this is my first trip to Europe or anything,” Miller said. “I mean what’s that? That’s just geography. Geography’s no big deal.”

“No,” Russell said, “it isn’t.”

“I don’t even think it’s because I’m in over my head. I mean over my head’s geography too,” he giggled. So I ain’t the fastest gun in western civilization. Who cares about that? I don’t care about that.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I don’t.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “There’s plenty around who aren’t a whole bunch faster than me if you want to know. Because the last I heard a taste for squid ink over your noodles isn’t necessarily a sign of a state of grace. That’s all right, Russell,” he said, “you’re a good sport. You don’t have to finish it if it tastes too much like piss. Set it down, I don’t mind.”

“I told you,” Russell said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

“That’s good,” Miller admitted, “that’s a good thing. You cultivate your palate. You educate your taste. You live and you learn. That’s good. Because between you me and the lamppost my palate was cultivated years back. Shit, Russell, after chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, it’s all wog food to me. Wait a minute, let me get rid of this.” He poured the rest of his drink into the basin in which the pitcher was standing. “It’s pretty foul,” Miller said, “I have to admit it. Who am I trying to impress? Can I give you something else?”

“I’m fine,” Russell said. He’d already finished over half his glass. He seemed unaffected.

While Miller, the drinker in the outfit, who’d barely managed to get down more than a few sips, was unable to stop talking. It wasn’t, he thought, a matter of in vino veritas (or scotcho or vodko) so much as the fact of company. “I had this visit,” he blurted. “I think something’s up between Rey and the fierce Zouave.”

The really astonishing thing as far as Miller was concerned was that he didn’t have to explain his terms. No more than he’d had to elucidate whom he’d meant when he’d raised his glass to him. It was one thing to come on all abnegant modesty and disclaimer, boasting (as it were) his ignorance and submissive second fiddlehood, but another altogether to get up into the very face of genius. It didn’t make one humble (and wasn’t Russell, right here and right now, showing him — albeit merely by Russell being Russell, by forsaking agenda, by what he did with poor Miller’s gag drink — what it was like in actual real time to educate one’s taste, to live and to learn?), it quite made one breathless with despair. It was rather like watching synapses spark and blossom in a visible brain. It was all right, as he’d said, not to be the fastest gun in western civilization, but for only so long as no legitimate claimant to the title was around. It was something like that, he wanted to tell Russell, that put him off about this whole Van Gogh’s-room-at-Arles thing, but, when he tried, it came out snarled, garbled, artlessly done. It came out— gossip.

“I mean,” Miller went on helplessly, “they were taking each other’s pictures, for Christ’s sake. Snap. Snap snap. Setting the goddamn thingumabob on the camera and dashing across the room so they could be together for the photograph. They’d have posed on the bed if I wasn’t here. Their forebears and great-greats sat for their fucking portraits for him! Some fierce Zouave that guy must be,” Miller said. “I bet they kicked his old ass out of the Foreign Legion!”

“Don’t get so upset. It interferes with your work.”

“Oh yeah,” Miller said, “my work.”

“The whole deal is only five weeks,” Russell said sweetly, “it will all be over soon.”

“You should have seen them,” Miller said. “Compared to something like that, diddling myself is small potatoes.”

He’d shocked Russell but was sober enough to see that it wasn’t propriety or fastidiousness he had sinned against, it was decorum. And felt such a thrill of rage that he lashed out at his guest. “So what’s all this winking then? What’s that all about?”

“I’m sorry,” Russell said softly, “I have a tic.”

Oh my, thought Miller in his cups, now I’ve hurt his feelings. Russell, he saw, for all his credentials and lustrous, curricula-vitae’d life (this year, for example, he was not only Distinguished University Professor at the University of Bologna, they’d made him Chair of their philosophy department), would be unused to the aggressive, bluff roughneckery of someone like Miller. Why, to someone like Russell, Miller, Miller thought, probably represented the racketeer class, or, a step or so up or down, maybe the life force. My God, he thought, we? Ain’t that a kick in the ass? When it was the life force, or something so like it he didn’t even know a name for it — geography? squid ink on the noodles? — that gave him the heebie-jeebies in the first place.

But give the devil his due. He owed Russell an apology. He’d try to be more specific.

“You don’t want to get too near the light,” Miller told him. “You get too near the light you burn up. Rey and Maurice are examples. They never got over light proximity, they never got over the presumed heroism and idiosyncrasy of their circumstances. You should’ve seen them. Maurice is this little guy. He could have been a preemie. You don’t get a neck and arms like that unless you work at it. The son of a bitch must have bench-pressed a million pounds in his time. He had to have spent half his life in gyms. And Dr. Rey? You think mustaches like that grow on trees? And you can’t tell me determinism made him go for a doctor. It was determination. They started out, or rather somebody started out for them, as simple flukes of art. They bought into all that. They ain’t mountebanks. Hell, Russell, they’re not even clowns. Clowns on velvet, that’s another story, but chiefly they came too near the light is all.” He was breathing heavily now. He was in a damn state. He was in such a sweating, breathless, stupid damn state he almost felt someone ought to take his stupid damn picture.

Is that specific enough for you? he wondered. Is that enough of an apology?

Miller didn’t notice until it had already passed that he’d had his birthday. One morning he woke up and realized he’d been thirty-seven years old for about a week. A person who’d always been as conscious of his age as others of their weight or appearance, it struck him as extraordinary, strange, and fantastic that he’d failed to observe the occasion. The word wasn’t casually chosen. Birthdays for Miller were, quite literally, red-letter days, occasions. Nor did it matter if others made no fuss over him. He wasn’t looking for a fuss. He wasn’t looking for cards or telegrams or presents or special treats. He didn’t hang around waiting for long-distance phone calls. He didn’t take the day off. He didn’t celebrate his birthdays so much as pay attention to them, sit up and take notice, all eyes and all ears. Turning thirty-seven after being thirty-six was as qualitatively different to Miller as turning ten after being nine. Only now, having missed turning thirty-seven, he’d never really know, would he, and that was just one more mark Miller could set down next to Arles. It was as if he’d failed to take note of the change of season, like finding oneself in winter without passing through summer.

He’d begun to work on his project after his meeting with

Russell but that had little to do with the reason he’d missed his birthday. Indeed, rather than its giving him pleasure to be at last engaged on the work that had been the ostensible reason for his presence at Arles, he found his labors as dispiriting as he had found the burden of sharing Van Gogh’s environment and sleeping in Van Gogh’s bed and going about his business in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. He wasn’t inspired, he’d made no resolutions, turned over no new leaf. Simply, one morning he came across the piece of paper he’d slipped into the pocket of his pants that day in the music room when he’d voluntarily come out of Coventry and written down the union-movement guy’s remark about the high priority community colleges gave to language labs, and Ms. Neil-Cheshi’s not inaccurate observation that of all educational institutions, junior colleges seemed determined to make the most efficient use of their physical plants. He punched these thoughts into the laptop PC and turned them over and over in his mind.

Time didn’t pass in the blink of an eye. He didn’t fall into a rapture. This was his research. The comments became the basic building blocks of his paper, not its inspiration so much as the sandy irritant slipped into an oyster that might, over time, accrue into a pearl. Joylessly he developed an outline, joylessly he revised and expanded it. Tediously he pushed his thin thesis, padding it almost to the breaking point. Listlessly he began to write, affectlessly to realize that he might actually produce enough material in the days he had left in Van Gogh’s room at Arles to make it back to Indianapolis undisgraced. Distractedly he invented sources, quotes, footnotes, taking no pleasure in the fact of the fraud he was perpetrating, or in his certainty it was all so very bloodless that it would probably go undetected — if it ever was — for years after he’d been made Full Professor, and that since he had no intention to publish, by the time he was discovered — if he was — they’d do nothing about it.

And this was the way Miller stuck it out, getting through almost his last days in Arles until almost the time he had to do his final laundry, return the unused portion of his roundtrip ticket to the bus company, and buy a ride to Marseilles on le train grand vitesse (he’d learned something in Europe, it hadn’t been a total loss), get ready, that is, to do those last things people do when they’re ready to break camp. (And with just that increment of sadness and regret that descends like a curtain whenever one experience, no matter how negative or disagreeable it may have been, is about to pass over into another— the woe of endings, the death of death.) So that, in a way, he was too busy or just too anxious to work on his project and he abandoned it as abruptly as it was begun.

Which left him, after the day’s small chores (settling accounts with Rita at the inn’s front desk — the astonishing hundred-twenty-seven-dollar phone bill she said he owed because of the three relatively brief calls she’d put through to Indianapolis to his pals in lieu of the promised postcards he’d failed to send, the letters he’d been unable to write; the thirty-five due for a group photograph of the Fellows she’d taken and said she’d send on to America after it was developed; the forty-four she told him was still outstanding for odds and ends— the two hundred-and-six-buck grand total, which once he paid would square him with France with just enough left over to tip Georges, the waiters and housekeepers, and leave him with a few dollars for some cheap souvenirs and maybe a carton of duty-free Gaulois to take with him back on the airplane), with a little time to actually socialize.

Rita stood up one night at the end of the evening meal, lightly tapped her water glass with a knife, and made an announcement. Madame Celli had left Arles to be with her son and his family who would be arriving in Paris the following morning from Canada. It was her son’s holidays and Madame was going to travel with him, his wife, and their two young children to Ngozitnlabad where they were to join a tour that would take them to islands all along the East Coast of Africa. Miller, who hadn’t known of Madame Celli’s son, or of the son’s wife, or that they had children, or that Madame C. was a grandmother, was shocked. Birthday or no birthday he was still a young man and he felt a little betrayed, a little done in, worked over, roughed up. All that passion and reverie, he thought wincing, spent on a grandmère.

Rita, who’d evidently been left to mind the Foundation, went on to say that since there were so many new Fellows in the group (it was true; until she mentioned it Miller hadn’t noticed how many faces were unfamiliar to him) this might be a good time for the new people to familiarize themselves with the region. For their touring comfort her brother-in-law had put new seats and installed a brand-new air-conditioning unit in his bus. She said she would be posting sign-up sheets on the bulletin board near the front desk for a trip to Les Alyscamps, L’Allée des Sarcophages, and the Roman amphitheater. Miller would pass. (Brooding, he was saddened that one of Europe’s finest factotums could make such a bold-faced pitch, sent into deep mourning by the cycles that kept on coming and kept on coming, and thought, This is where I came in, and wondered where one was supposed to go and what one was supposed to do to meet the suitable girls.) For those who were interested, she said, they would be running a special trip out to the asylum at Saint-Rémy where Vincent Van Gogh had been committed, along with a side trip to Auvers where he shot himself not long after he was discharged. Miller, minding his pennies, minding his mind, decided to pass on that one too. And on the boat trip down the Rhône delta, and the outdoor market near the medieval church (with its crypt and painted, arranged skulls like so many heads of lettuce in a produce bin) where one might occasionally pick up genuine Roman artifacts at bargain prices. They should keep their eyes on her, she said. If an authentic piece of real value should turn up in the stalls she would pick it up, handle it, and pretend to dicker with the seller before replacing it. That would be their signal, she said, that they weren’t being gulled. Just don’t, she warned, tell anyone about their little arrangement or she and her brother-in-law could get into real trouble.

I came that close to spilling my seed over this one! Miller thought ruefully.

But despite himself felt a sudden stirring, some attraction he felt to the rough leather of the woman’s character, and lo and behold he was nursing an extraordinary tight hard-on right there in the night café.

He signed up for Les Alyscamps and L’Alleé des Sarcophages and the Roman amphitheater. He signed up for Saint-Rémy and the side trip to Auvers. (He sat as close to her as he could in the newly seated, newly air-conditioned bus and pressed tips into her hands for her splendidly educational commentaries.) He signed up for the boat trip down the Rhône delta and returned to Arles that evening exhausted from the air and the heavy Provençal sun (and from getting out of the little launch with Rita and the others and stooping most of the day examining the murky waters as they tramped barefoot along the river’s muddy bank searching out the rare reeds that grew there and which Rita cleaned and filed down and then sold in individual packets of a dozen to professional oboists all over the world, asking her again and again, “Is this one, is this?” and managing to bump against her, or even pretend to lose his footing in the insignificant current). He even signed up for the tour of the outdoor market where Rita was a shill, dutifully browsing the stalls for the faux relics (thrice faux: first when they were manufactured, twice when they were wholesaled to the trade and, finally, when Rita, the beautiful factotum-cum-desk clerk, cum-tour guide, cum-this and cum-that, performed her vicious gypsy triage over the toy SPQRs stamped into the hilts, helmets, and masonry of the little sections of viaduct manqué) but (still minding his pennies though he had lost his mind) making no purchases.

He was her best customer. And wooed her as an old- timey, love-struck young mooncalf might once have sent unsigned flowers or been in attendance at every performance his heart’s ingenue ever gave, lost whole-hog for the run of the show. He was, this Miller was, some tied-tongue, stage- door Johnny of an admirer.

But, at night, back in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, he still could not manage to put her into any of his imagination’s beds. It would have been like trying to bring himself off to some image of Leda, say, or Venus, or any other superstar of myth. (Because he couldn’t stop thinking of her as of some woman actually painted by Van Gogh, but something turned and awful in her beauty, hardened, slumped and stupored as a strumpet in the night café, thickened and stupid and mean as a peasant in the landscapes he always shared with her now on their outings. Though why this should have bothered him he couldn’t have said, and perhaps even Russell couldn’t have told him.)

There were only four days left.

Some of the Fellows — all the scholars who’d been in Arles when he and Paul Hartshine arrived had packed up and gone; piecemeal, or in little clumps of two or three, they had dropped off; Miller was part of the establishment now; no one but Rita, Russell, and Hartshine were left who had witnessed the disaster in the music room — decided to take a day trip to Cannes.

They brought their idea to Rita, proposing to engage the brother-in-law’s bus. Well, but Cannes was not really her territory, she told them. She wasn’t that familiar with Cannes, Cannes was for tourists, not academics. Cannes was crowded this time of year, she couldn’t guarantee them special deals in the better restaurants. She was sure her brother-in-law was not licensed for Cannes, that there’d be special fees for parking his big, upgraded bus with its brand-new seats and special air-conditioning unit.

She’s a genius, Miller thought. She’s more than a great European factotum, she’s a world-class piece of work. And wanted to rip out her heart and, simultaneously, devour her with kisses. But, with the others, dutifully ponied up all the vigorish, add-ons, and excise taxes she extorted, Miller thinking, There go the tips for the maids, there go the ones for the waiters, there goes Georges’s tip, there go the duty- free Gaulois.

When the brother-in-law pulled up in front of the inn at Number 30 Lamartine on the morning of the day trip to Cannes, in addition to Miller, Russell, and Paul Hartshine (who hadn’t spoken to him since the afternoon he’d passed his remark in the music room), some of the Fellows who boarded the bus were Sir Ehrnst Riglin, a history historian at Uppsala University, Jesus Hans, the revolutionary political statistician for third-world countries, Samuels Kleist, a vernacular architect in his late sixties, Yalom and Inga Basset, pop psychiatrists, and Robert and Heidi Lear.

With the exception of Russell and Hartshine, who averted his eyes whenever Miller looked his way, he knew none of them very well. For all that they’d spent entire days together on the recent flurry of excursions since Kaska Celli had run off to be with her grandchildren, and for all his decision to kick back and socialize, and for all their apparent friendliness, their reputations got in his way. (It was their reputations, only that. He’d seen photographs of Kleist’s queer structures, the strange, almost pueblo-like tiers of caves built into the sides of New Mexico’s red cliffs, and was convinced that the buildings were silly, uninhabitable, virtually inaccessible to mailmen, milkmen, the man who reads the meter. Only their reputations. For though he’d no clear notion of what someone in the history of history field did, it was the fact that Sir Ehrnst had been knighted for it that scared him off. Nor had he read the Bassets’ books. He’d heard them on their morning call-in talk show mediating the lunacies, counseling the killers, abusers, swingers, cheaters, and incestors, sometimes homing at least a little in on even his own small shames. It was the fact of their famous voices, however, that held him at arm’s length.)

Of Robert and Heidi Lear he knew nothing at all, not even their disciplines (or whether they worked in tandem). What he had against them was that of all the people with whom he’d come into contact at Arles, Robert Lear was the only Fellow he actively disliked. This went back to an incident he’d observed in the music room. There’d been a bridge game one evening. Miller didn’t play bridge, of course, hadn’t enough knowledge of its rules even to kibitz. One of the other players — he couldn’t remember his name, the man was gone now — had asked Robert, aside from Miller the room’s only other smoker, if he might borrow one of his cigarettes. Robert had visibly hesitated.

“It’s not your brand,” Robert said.

“Oh,” said the guy, “that’s all right. I’ve run out. I’ve just had dinner. I’d smoke anything.”

Robert hesitated again, frowned, and then finally, reluctantly, retrieved a cigarette from what seemed to Miller like a full pack and pushed it a little way across the table toward the bridge player. In about an hour the man asked if he could borrow a second cigarette. Robert frowned, scowled, openly sighed, and shook one from what now looked to be a considerably diminished pack.

What Miller held against Heidi was that she was married to Robert.

On the night before he was to leave, the bridge player appeared in the music room. He was holding a carton of cigarettes. They were Robert Lear’s brand. He brought it to the chair in which Lear was sitting and handed the carton to him. “Smoke them all in one place, why don’t you?” he said and left the room.

Miller was scandalized. As much as he disliked Lear, he was astonished that anyone could be rude to someone who’d received the Foundation’s blessing and been invited to Arles. Indeed, though he was still shy, reserved, and even guarded with everyone else, he made at least a little effort, in spite of the fact that the Lears didn’t seem to welcome or even notice it, to be forthcoming with them.

It was Heidi Lear, in fact, who seemed to have invented the scheme for their trip to Cannes. Miller learned of this only on the bus that morning.

The trip was designed, at least in part, to be a sort of shopping expedition. Although Miller, Russell, and Hartshine would miss it, the Fellows were going to do a play reading the following week — in French — of The Misanthrope. Heidi had approached Rita to see if it was possible to procure the amphitheater one afternoon for their little production. Rita thought the idea of a play reading a good one and came up almost immediately with an even more ambitious proposal. Why not, she suggested, have the reading at night in the amphitheater? Why not invite the townspeople of Arles, why not take advantage of the stadium’s lights and sound system? She thought she could arrange it so the entire evening wouldn’t cost them more than, oh, fifty dollars a person.

They jumped at it. They jumped, too, at Heidi Lear’s additional embellishments. She thought the actors should be in costume. Oh, nothing elaborate of course. It was too late for anything fine, but Heidi had been associated for just years and years with socio-theatrics. That was her field, socio-theatrics— theatrical therapies for prisoners, old people in homes, the dying in hospices, as well as individuals who found themselves temporarily thrown together in groups like the one the Foundation had assembled in Arles. It was how she’d met Robert (whose field it turned out was the inventorying of eighteenth-century houses). She was, at least according to Robert Lear (whose testimony in his wife’s behalf was the first indication of generosity Miller had seen in him), this genius of the make-do and at-hand. A wizard of odds and ends.

Thus the shopping expedition to Cannes. For props and stuffs and materials. For the building blocks of all impromptu improvisation and inspired, makeshift arrangement. They would hit up the hotels, the special booths and shops a town like Cannes with its annual film festival and concomitant obligations to make the sets and adjust to the needs of some eleventh-hour show business would be sure to have.

On the trip out that morning the coach was abuzz with plans for the upcoming show. Even Rita was excited, and Paul Hartshine (who was wearing his big print bow tie) had practically made up his mind to change his reservations and stay on at a hotel in Arles until after the performance. Russell said he would have stayed on too but that Bologna was paying him $200,000 for the year, and he was, at least putatively, Departmental Chair. Also, he’d already been away five weeks from a sinecure essentially carved out for him. They were nice people. He oughtn’t, he thought, take advantage, he mustn’t, he felt, hurt their feelings. Much as he might want to hang around and take in their Misanthrope leaving was the honorable thing to do.

“Two hundred thousand?” Miller said.

Russell looked at the scenery.

Miller was astonished at how excited they were. Him too. It seemed odd that he, of all of them the most frivolous, the one with probably the least good reason to be there, should be the one under the greatest obligation to leave, to go home to what was only Booth Tarkington Community College in what was only Indianapolis in what was merely the State of Indiana, to get down to work at last on what was plainly the flimsiest of projects.

It astonished him too how all this (about the real purpose of the trip to Cannes; about the Lears, Heidi’s talents, Robert’s devotion; about Hartshine’s decision to stay on; Rita’s genuine enthusiasm; Russell’s salary) came out on the bus. Other things too. Something ad hoc and original and abandoned in all of them, their lives made suddenly available, opened up like responses to the sunshine laws or the rules of discovery. Sir Ehrnst, for example, the history of history man from Uppsala, admitted that he never read his students’ papers. He distributed grades solely on the basis of his first impressions of how they dressed, if they wore glasses, whether they looked scholarly, how he expected they would strike a class of their own graduate students, sometimes on nothing more than how they smelled— their colognes, their aftershaves and toilet waters, whether they seemed cloying. And old Samuels Kleist, whose wife was feeling too ill to make the trip with them to Cannes (and who, though he knew of her existence, Miller had never seen because she remained, to hear Kleist tell it, who, indeed, fetched her her breakfasts — bran muffins, an orange, tea— her lunches and suppers), was in love, had not one but two mistresses installed in a pair of his cliff dwellings back in New Mexico, and was on his way to Cannes to buy presents for both ladies. Though he had no idea, he gushed, what either of them wanted from France, no notion, God help him, of their sizes. Both drank wine, loved wine. If he could find a specially designed label with a pretty view of the beach at Cannes, the great architect said, a half-dozen bottles like that might be the very thing. He never touched the stuff himself, he said. Neither did his wife. Where could he hide them so they wouldn’t be discovered? He asked for suggestions.

“Ship them,” Inga Basset suggested, “have them shipped.”

“That’s so impersonal,” Samuels Kleist said.

“Get them head scarves,” Sir Ehrnst Riglin said. “You can line a head scarf inside your trouser cuff or stuff it up the sleeve of your jacket.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Kleist said.

And Yalom and Inga Basset, the drive-time psychiatrists, were openly contemptuous of the creatures who called them for help, contemptuous, even scurrilous, about psychiatry itself.

“It’s a crock,” Yalom Basset said.

“It’s gas in your pants,” said Inga, a slim, fit-looking woman in her forties, handsome and rakish in a Borsalino hat, a cigarillo in her lips, one eye squint shut against its smoke like the face of an experienced card player.

“It leaves wind,” her husband put in.

“It clouds men’s minds,” Inga said.

Committing voluntary truth against themselves like people turning state’s evidence. All of them, all, all abandoned and vulnerable as so many summer houses in the winter.

Jesus Hans, statistics advisor to the third world, running his mouth at the back of the bus.

“I’m from Cali. They know you’re Colombian they want to dance you, they want love songs and good moves, that you give them dips. Famine girls from the horn of Africa.

“I give old Kleist due. Hey, two mistresses? He worries about gifts because he’s an ancient, sentimental guy from the old school.

“I have two sweet daughters, a wonderful wife who fucks like a mink. Better than my girlfriends even. She holds no candles to that Rita though.”

Not Miller, Miller thought. Count Miller out, Miller thought. Keep your mystery, thought stunned Miller. Hold on tight to your famous poker-puss heart. Don’t give them a thing, not a thing. I gave at the office, Miller thought. I gave and gave out in the music room. Don’t, Miller thought. Don’t tell them you jerk off to ghosts and grandmas.

And held his tongue all the way to Cannes.

Which was still France, still Europe, only no longer Van Gogh’s Europe.

The brother-in-law drove the big bus right up to what must have been one of the newest, grandest hotels in town. He opened the doors, waited until his passengers descended, then descended himself and casually tossed his bus keys to a broad, magnificent doorman, splendidly attired in what vaguely reminded Miller of the Zouave’s uniform in Van Gogh’s painting. The doorman handed the keys to a young man who was actually going to valet-park the damn bus, for God’s sake. Somehow this seemed the strangest, most extravagant thing Miller had ever seen.

“We’ll cross the boulevard,” Rita said. “There’s the most marvelous café right on the beach. We’ll have a coffee there, freshen up in their facilities, and decide what we must do.”

The air was ferociously bright. Hot and clear and bright. Miller felt the lack of sunglasses. As palpably as he might have felt the absence of an umbrella in a rainstorm.

White yachts rode at anchor. Barebreasted, girls swam out from the beach and climbed rope ladders hanging down over the sides like a kind of nautical laundry. They boarded the yachts like dream pirates. A hundred feet off, women lay supine, topless in the powdery sand, their breasts sexlessly flattened against their chests.

Salads, fruits, parfaits of bright ice creams. Careful clusters of color on black wrought-iron tables in the beach café. Miller greedily studied his menu. He demanded that Russell translate everything for him. He loved being in an outdoor café on a beach in Cannes. He didn’t want to ruin it by choosing the wrong food. At last he made his decision.

The waiter brought him long cold spears of kelly-green asparagus topped with two perfectly fried eggs. There was the best iced coffee he had ever tasted. For dessert he had a peeled pear that had been sliced and reassembled into a sort of fruit fan. It was spread out on a plate buttered with a dark chocolate sauce.

“That was wonderful,” Miller said.

“It looked wonderful,” Inga Basset said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t order it,” Samuels Kleist said.

Her brother-in-law lazily hung an arm across Rita’s shoulders. Jesus winked at the bus driver.

While they waited for each other to finish their lunches, the members of the Misanthrope cast gossiped about some of the absent actors. They agreed that Derek Philips was much too serious and that Meyers Herman tended to mumble his words. They wondered how he’d ever manage to be heard in the huge amphitheater.

“He’s musch too shy,” Sir Ehrnst Riglin said.

“Yet he has the best accent,” said Yalom Basset. “Don’t you think so, Rita?”

“He has a good accent,” Rita said.

“But if he can’t be heard?” Sir Ehrnst said.

“You’re forgetting about the sound system Rita’s organizing for us,” Heidi Lear said.

Miller wasn’t sorry he’d be missing their performance though he was upset that Hartshine might be staying behind to see it. Meanwhile, while they carried on about Meyers Herman’s accent (he hadn’t met the man, he didn’t even recognize the name), Miller listened to someone at the next table who spoke a sort of agitated, gossip-column English in which people planed about the globe, trained from one country to the next, and cabbed through its cities. Idly, he wondered what happened to such people in accidents, whether they were ambulanced to hospitals down whose halls they were gurneyed to operating rooms. The fellow to whom the first man was speaking said “ecomony” for economy and pronounced the b in debt.

Such people were comic and, however idiosyncratic, types. Miller wasn’t amused by them. He was, he thought, a type himself. So, for all their honors and dramatic three- quarter and full-column entries in Who’s Who, were the Fellows. And momentarily flashed on Van Gogh’s vacant, heartbreaking room at Arles.

They had finished lunch and were parsing the bill. Miller owed the most, and, after he paid, saw that he was down to his last twenty dollars in francs. He had forty dollars more in traveler’s checks. Even if he watched his money carefully he realized he probably wouldn’t have enough left over to rent headphones to watch the movie on the flight back.

And now they discussed the groups into which they would break up so as to make the most of their time. Heidi, Robert, and the Bassets would do the rounds of shops, booths, and hotels to see what they could find for the costumes. Jesus Hans invited Rita to a hotel he knew of that gave, he said, a splendid late-afternoon tea dance, but Heidi wanted her with her on the shopping expedition. Jesus shrugged and said no problem-o, he’d go by himself. Despite Samuels Kleist’s surprising confessions to them on the bus, he told the group — how this worked wasn’t clear to Miller — it would be both a betrayal of his wife and his mistresses should he permit them to be in on the actual purchase of the mistresses’ gifts. Sir Ehrnst Riglin had made arrangements to meet with three members of the Swedish Royal Family who happened to be in town that week. Russell and Hartshine decided to take in the flick that was touted to win the palme d’or at the festival that year. Russell invited Miller to come with, but Miller, doling francs, said it was too nice a day to spend inside a theater and told them to go on, he thought he’d just take in the sights. Everyone agreed to meet back at the hotel by seven. That gave them just over four hours.

Miller watched as Rita and the nine Fellows struck out in their various directions, watched until they disappeared, and then, wordlessly started to walk alongside the brother- in-law.

They strolled for a bit on the wide white sidewalk that ran parallel to the beach. Everywhere around them, on towels and blankets, on flimsy canvas beach chairs or sitting in the sand, men and women gave themselves up to the sun, offering, venturing, compromising, accommodating, and finally surrendering almost their entire bodies to the forces of this charged place, only, it seemed to Miller, reserving to themselves a sort of ultimate modesty of wall-like indifference, somehow bolder — certainly more heartless — than Miller’s or the brother-in-law’s prurient but furtive sightseeing. It was like a contest of wills for which neither Miller nor the brother-in-law either (no matter he’d so ostentatiously draped his arm about his sister-in-law’s shoulders) had much stomach. They were humiliated by the seminude bodies of the women and embarrassed by the lewd assertion of the men’s genitalia inside their bikinis, and Miller was not surprised when his companion abruptly broke off and crossed the boulevard at an oblique angle to the gawking, slow-moving traffic.

Miller continued beside the man as he moved at a brisk pace through important districts of the city.

They came to the port and stared at the great yachts, little smaller than small cruise ships some of them. The brother- in-law pointed to individual yachts and called the names of their globally rich owners, powerful fortune celebrities. Sometimes he would repeat the name. Miller nodded appreciatively with a look of great understanding, as though Rita’s kinsman had delivered himself of some sober, clever gloss. He seemed to wait until he was certain Miller had taken it all in and then coughed his readiness to resume their tour. Miller smiled agreeably and they renewed their inspection of the city.

They made their way to the flower market, which now, in the late afternoon, was apparently experiencing a second wind as proprietors of the various stalls — each putting forward a featured variety — began to grant heavy discounts on great bunches of flowers.

The brother-in-law pushed roses on Miller, tulips and mums and daisies and carnations. He handed him dahlias and sprays of orchids.

“No no,” Miller said, returning them, doling francs but protesting, “what would I do with them? I go back in three days.”

His guide told Miller but my God, man, flowers of without the sun march in only fourteen years, this is certainly truly isn’t it? and pressed another bouquet on him. Miller handed the new bouquet back to the brother-in-law, who then gave him another new bouquet which Miller again returned. They looked like jugglers.

The fellow shrugged and (Miller had lost track by now of where they were in relation to their starting point) they continued walking.

This is the arrondissement of tomatoes and apples, said Rita’s relative.

They seemed to be in the heart of the produce district. As in the flower market, business had pretty much wound down for the day. The few people still picking over the somewhat faded fruits and declining vegetables were older, less chic than anyone Miller had yet seen in Cannes, and seemed to deal with the merchants from a position of strength, beggars who could afford to be choosers, hard bargainers who openly scoffed at the men who, even as their trucks backed up to haul off the unsold produce, countered all offers with proposals of their own, as indiscriminately, almost high-handedly, they continued to sweep their unsold merchandise into crates and cardboard boxes probably intended to hold distinct varieties (let alone classes) of produce. It was apples and oranges, thought Miller. Potatoes and cauliflowers. And smelled this faint mash of garden liquor, fermented earth chowder.

Just as one of the merchants was about to load a last carton of mixed fruits and vegetables onto the tailgate of his truck the brother-in-law spoke up.

Make halt! he declared. Please! he implored. If the mister demanded to steal the fruits of without the sun march, he thought he, but a poor miserable, could give for the most grand strawberries and others, say, many many thousands of francs.

It’s good, the merchant agreed, and gave over the carton to Rita’s bus-driving relation. Who, in turn, handed the fellow maybe four dollars American.

For the soups of my spouse, the brother-in-law said, and they were out of there.

They saw the district where chefs came for their meats in the early morning before the sun had risen, and a place near the docks where fishermen brought their catch to market. They even went into a church, not an old church but a large modern one, built after the war, no earlier than the late sixties probably, but by this time the bus driver was beginning to tire from carrying the not inconsiderable carton of day- old fruits and vegetables and he suggested that they arrest for a whiskey.

They stepped into a hotel.

They were looking for the bar when they heard music, a romantic, companionable melody of the easy-listening variety, and they made for its source.

They found a table in the almost empty bar and sat down. On a narrow stage in back an orchestra was playing and, beneath it, three couples moved across a polished, circular dance floor, which might comfortably have accommodated perhaps five or six times that number. Somehow, there being so few dancers gave the place an air (like so much of Cannes: the flower stalls and produce kiosks where commerce was winding down for the day, the moored, empty fishing boats by the docks and shutdown meat and fish markets, even the big and graceless church) of having been used up, some vaguely off-season sense of things, the dancing couples clutching each other out there on the floor not so much licentious — beyond licentious — as anachronistic, caught between day and night, in desperate, now-or-never, off-joint time.

Miller thinking as he drank his drink: How mysterious, something mysterious here.

Which is just when the brother-in-law nudged him, laying into him conspiratorially, even intimately (which Miller was certain he wouldn’t have tried with any of the other Fellows) with his elbow.

Attention beyond, he said. Attention beyond, attention beyond.

Miller looked at the bus driver, noticing for the first time that Rita’s relation bore, though he was at least thirty years younger, a striking resemblance to Van Gogh’s portrait of the peasant Patience Escalier. Both looked more Mexican than French.

“Non non, Monsieur,” he hissed, “la-bas, la-bas,” pointed toward the dance floor.

Miller looked where he pointed.

Jesus Hans, wearing her Borsalino, was dancing with Inga Basset, his hands loosely cupping the psychiatrist’s rear end as though he held it in a kind of sling.

Inga’s thigh was planted in Jesus’s crotch and he rocked in place, slowly rising against it to the beat of the easy listening.

The scene was stunning to Miller, incredible, immense. Even the logistics were stunning. How had Hans gotten her away from Basset? How, if the idea to hook up with Jesus had been Inga’s, had she known where the tea dance would be?

The band finished its set. There wasn’t time to ponder the big questions. Neither Miller nor the driver wished to be discovered in their discovery and, without a sign passing between them, both rose at once to quit the bar and get the hell out of the hotel. Miller even picked up the brother-in- law’s carton for him, handing it over only after the man had found his bearings and Miller knew that they were well on their way back to the rendezvous at the hotel where Rita’s brother-in-law had given the keys to the bus (Rita’s bus! Miller suddenly realized) to the doorman.

They were about forty minutes early.

Miller spotted Russell and Hartshine at a table in the outdoor café. Indicating he was going over to meet them he gestured that the driver was welcome to join him, but the fellow declined, pointing from his watch to the carton.

The fruit is getting late, he explained to Miller. The apples of the ground were falling fast and it was necessary for some of the vegetables to make the bus.

Miller nodded and crossed the boulevard.

“How was your show?” he asked Hartshine and Russell. “What about it, boys? Was it worthwhile?” What he wanted most was to tell his colleagues what he and Rita’s brother- in-law had seen in the hotel.

Hartshine, without even looking at him, touched the points of his shirt collar. He appeared to straighten his bow tie.

Miller repeated what he’d said when he’d told Russell it was too nice to spend the day cooped up in a movie. He said that he and the driver had decided to go on this walking tour of Cannes.

“That guy,” Miller said. “He knows this town like the back of his hand that guy.” He told them about the stalls in the flower and produce markets. He told them about the yachts and the district where the chefs came to inspect the fish and meats they would be preparing for their restaurants. What he was dying to tell them was about Jesus Hans and Inga Basset. He wanted to tell them about the thigh Inga had thrust between Jesus Hans’s legs and the way Jesus held Inga’s ass as he dry-humped her to the accompaniment of some soft show tune. What stopped him, he realized, was that he’d be going back to Indiana soon and he understood how very complicated it was to speak one’s mind or make overtures into mysteries at the last minute.

Russell wanted to know if he could buy Miller a farewell drink.

“What? No. Of course not,” Miller objected, openly resentful but helpless, and realizing even as he spoke to them how his protests must have sounded, how transparent his franc doling must seem to them.

“Gosh,” Russell said, “they’ve brought the bus round. I think I’ll go to the gents before we have to board. You, Hartshine? No, you went just before Miller showed up, didn’t you? Miller? No? Be right with you then.”

When Russell left, Miller sat awkwardly before Hartshine. He had no idea what to say to him. However difficult it was to keep from spilling the magic beans he’d picked up that afternoon at the tea dance (and which would have served to patch over not only the terrible silence between them but their awful breach as well), he was determined to say nothing about it. It wasn’t his honor that was at stake. Miller didn’t care a damn for his honor. It wasn’t even that his silence now could do anything to abate the devastating disclosures — and the cloud he’d since lived under — he’d made in the music room. Nor had Miller any illusions he was protecting anyone. This particular cat would be out of the bag before the evening was out. The brother-in-law would see to that. He’d tell Rita what they’d seen as soon as it was convenient.

No, what Miller did now (or did not do) he did for Van Gogh, for Van Gogh and the privilege of Arles. He did it, he meant (or did not do it), because he could not do it justice, because in his mouth the immense, incredible, stunning thing he’d seen would have been reduced to mere gossip.

He stared at Hartshine.

“You think Bologna really pays him two hundred grand?” he said at last.

“Why do you ask me this?” Harshine said. “You think because I’m Jewish I have an interest in such questions? I’m a scholar!”

“Go fuck yourself, Hartshine,” Miller said. “Go fuck yourself and kiss my Hoosier ass,” he said.

He got up from the table and went to board the bus. He passed the brother-in-law without a glance, picked up the carton of fruits and vegetables the man had set down on an aisle seat, moved it to the window seat, and sat in the aisle seat himself. With his eyes almost shut and pretending to sleep, with his eyes almost shut so all he could see shoot past his window were objects drained of definition and color in an illusion of speed, he managed to ride all the way back to Arles without saying a word to anyone.

Late on the night before Miller left Arles, someone rapped on his door. He straightened up and looked from where he was stooped over his things, packing the last of them into the suitcase open on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. He thought twice before answering the uncivilized knock, a sound so persistent it didn’t seem to have had any beginning. He looked toward the noise and wondered who could be making it. Russell had already left town and was almost certainly in Bologna by now. He didn’t think it could be Hartshine, seeking some rough reconciliation.

“Yes?” he said finally. “Yes?”

“Ah,” said Félix Rey on the other side of the door, “the good professor is in. We have not lost him.”

“I’m packing,” Miller said. “My train leaves first thing in the morning. It’s very late, I haven’t finished packing.”

“We will help you, Professor Monsieur. With three of us it will go by in a dream.”

“It’s awfully late,” Miller said. “I’m dog-tired.”

He hadn’t actually identified himself yet, Miller was thinking. If I can just hang tough until the man goes away and pretend not to know who it is, Miller was thinking, it can’t, on some technical level at least, be considered rudeness.

But at that point the physician not only resumed his knocking, he also formally announced himself.

“It’s your médecin, Monsieur Professor American. It’s Dr. Félix Rey and a friend.”

“All right,” Miller said at last, giving in. He opened the door.

“What?” Miller said. “What?”

The physician was drunk, his prominent ears, redder even than he remembered, were flush, filled with blood. His clothes were disheveled, and even his brushcut hair and handlebar mustache seemed mussed, his plucked eyebrows. His full, fat Kewpie doll lips were slack. He was giggling.

Coming into the room Félix Rey extended his hand in greeting, but when Miller put out his own to shake it the doctor brushed it away and took Miller’s wrist as if feeling for a pulse. He mimed shining an imaginary penlight into Miller’s eyes and ears. He leaned into Miller’s chest and, cupping his ear, pretended to listen to his heart. Miller, who had the private drinker’s disdain for acts of public drunkenness, twisted away from him, causing Rey to stumble. It wasn’t until she laughed that Miller was aware that there was a woman in the room.

“May I,” said the doctor, “have the honor to represent to the American Mister Monsieur my very good friend, L’Arlésienne— the incomparable and very beautiful Madame

Ginoux.”

She was the woman in the black-and-white photograph on the postcard Félix Rey had given him (the one who so resembled Kaska Celli), the woman whose image he had once called upon in one of his masturbatory flights. Almost as if she might have been conscious of this, Miller looked down.

“I am so very happy, sir,” Madame Ginoux said. “The doctor has spoke.”

“It’s good to meet you,” Miller said.

Then the woman did an odd thing. Bending her left arm at the elbow she lightly pressed the knuckles of her pale hand alongside her face in a sort of pensive salute. Miller identified the gesture at once. It was exactly as Van Gogh has posed her antecedent in his portrait more than a hundred years earlier. Madame Ginoux had the same long, wide nose as the woman in the portrait, the same blue eyes and black, black hair (so black, thought Miller, she had to have worked thick dark dyes into it) as Vincent’s model, and had gone so far as to affect her nineteenth-century costume right down to an almost identical white tulle jabot that she’d attached down the front of her full Prussian-blue dress. She had painted in almost punk-red eyelids and etched sharply defined lips above her wide, flat mouth.

Madame Ginoux, L’Arlésienne, was a hooker or his name wasn’t Miller, Miller thought.

“It was good of you to stop by,” he told the doctor. “Gee,” he said, “my time here’s passed by so quickly. I hadn’t realized. You think you’ve all the time in the world. That’s always a mistake. First thing you know you’re trying to pack so you can get some sleep and still get up and make an early train that will get you to Marseilles in time to check your bags through to America and clear Douane and get to the duty-free before your plane takes off without you and leaves you all high and dry in a foreign country with nothing to do but hang around the airport for another twenty- four hours looking at the newspapers and trying to figure out from the photograph what the story is about. So thanks for helping me out when I passed out that time, and for the postcard, and for introducing me to your friends. Goodnight, Dr. Rey. Goodnight and goodbye. It was a pleasure to meet you, Madame Ginoux. The doctor has spoke.”

He had practically pushed them out of the room. He didn’t know what this was all about. He didn’t at all understand Félix Rey’s motives or the meaning of all their disguises, the complicated costume party and tableaux vivants of their shutdown lives, but whatever it was he knew it could not be wholesome, Yet whose life is, Miller wondered, and where do I get off? And without knowing what he was up to quite suddenly relented. He would hear the man out. He would promise nothing but he would hear him out. That was the least he could do.

“What?” Miller asked. “What do you want?”

“To have the lend of your key,” Félix Rey said.

“My key? What key?”

“To here,” said Rey, “the key to here.” He waved his arm about.

“But it isn’t my key,” Miller said. “It belongs to the Foundation. I have to return it.”

“The lend,” Rey said, “the lend. I will have it duplicated. Before the sun has arose I will bring it back. You shall have it in your hand before you start back for Indy. I will guarantee for this, Monsieur Sir.” He looked closely at Miller. “I shall leave — ooh la la — L’Arlésienne behind as my pledge. Is this agreeable, Madame Ginoux?”

“Très agreeable.”

“But why?” Miller asked.

“Have I not said you of our little group? Have I not very here speak of the Club of the Portraits of the Descendants of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh? You have seen for your eyes on the group photograph. On there is the peasant, Patience Escalier. On there are the Roulins— Joseph, Berceuse, Armand, and Camille. On there is the Zouave whom you have know. And the incomparable Madame Ginoux. As well as your humble servant, myself, Félix Rey. Here is the venue of the portraitees. For this is the key needed.”

“Nonsense,” Miller said, “go to the public garden, why don’t you?”

“In winter in the public garden the mistral blows through. It could kill the peasant, old Patience Escalier.”

“Go in summer to Les Alyscamps,” Miller said. “Meet by the Trinquetaille Bridge.”

“Monsieur, here is only the proper venue. You know it, I know it,” the doctor said with some dignity. And then, with none at all, he said once again that he’d leave Madame Ginoux as his pledge.

“I’m sorry,” said Miller and, to his surprise, he genuinely was. “Come,” he said, “I’ll go downstairs with you.”

That night he couldn’t sleep. He laid out his clothes for the morning, stripped down, and got into the bed, but within minutes, realizing that he didn’t even desire sleep, he got out of bed again and put on the clothes in which he’d be traveling back to America. It wasn’t that he was not drowsy— nor so very wide awake. It was rather a question of how interesting it had all been, how very interesting it still was. It wasn’t a question of happiness. Happiness (or unhappiness either) was not part of the equation. A lot of it had to do with being abroad, but he still didn’t mean geography. He’d been abroad in the sense of some surrounding or enveloping substance, abroad, he meant, in conditions. The way men were abroad, say, in airplanes, or in submarines fathoms, leagues, beneath the surface of the sea. On this last night in Arles he was just too interested to sleep.

He made the bed he had so briefly untidied. He fluffed the yellow pillow slips, turned down the yellow top sheet over the red blanket, and then tucked the blanket tight about the mattress. He brought his parcels and PC, suitcase, and garment bag over by the piano bench in front of the fourth wall and sat down to study the room from the very place where Van Gogh must have been when he painted it. He’d done this before, of course. He remembered telling Hartshine about it: But he’d never studied it at night before, in the light given off by the room’s puny overhead bulb. The color values were so very different. It was not at all like looking at a bad reproduction. It was more like looking at an entirely different painting, a work of genius, and immensely interesting.

Then, toward dawn, but while it was still dark out — if anything he was more wide awake than ever — Miller decided to turn off the light. Low as the light had been, his eyes still had to adjust to this new black dark. What he saw now, the almost colorless configuration of shapes and masses, made a different and still stranger picture and, as dawn came and the light turned milky, and then, as the sun rose higher and the room experienced its gradual yellowing, it seemed almost to go through a process of queer simultaneity, of aging and renewal at once.

It was time to go. He had to cross the square to Number 30, drop off his key (without, he hoped, having to see Rita, or Hartshine, or, for that matter, anyone he knew), and then wait out in front of the inn for the taxi he’d arranged to pick him up to take him to the train station. He looked around Van Gogh’s room at Arles one last time and took up his things to bring them down with him.

There, in the hallway, he was able to see the still unpainted rooms and, just for a second, rendering them with his own poor unrendering eyes, Miller imagined he could see paintings on all the blank, colorless walls of Van Gogh’s yellow house— the gorgeous asparagus he’d eaten in Cannes topped with their two, perfectly made eggs, his marvelous iced coffee the brown-black color of roots and bears. But rendering, too, the canceled flowers and the unsold fruit; the men and women dancing in the hotel, Inga Basset’s thigh insinuated between Jesus Hans’s legs; the brother-in-law with his carton of spoiling produce. Rendering everything unrendered, all the still lifes and unpainted masterpieces of Cannes — what shot by his all-but-shut eyelids on the bus and, spilling over onto the unpainted fourth wall of Van Gogh’s room at Arles, the ghost Rey, and the ghost Zouave, and the ghost Ginoux, and all the other ghosts, the beautiful ruin of the world he couldn’t quite catch, like everything else he couldn’t quite catch, everything untranslated and left unsyntaxed in his inadequate French, the guts, the soul, the brains and eyes, all the inner extremities and other moving parts of vision, of vision.