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.