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 He browsed American magazines as out of date as the copies in barbershops and dentists’ waiting rooms back home.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?”