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?”