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