“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.