Then, as sometimes occurs in the short range for the short range, an opportunity arose as he was leaving the night café one evening. Russell had fallen into step beside him.
“How are you?” Russell said. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, but whenever I had my chances you were either in the music room apparently locked up in your thoughts or I’ve been too busy with my own. Would this be a good time?”
“Oh yes,” Miller said, and he and Russell walked out of the inn, crossed the square together, and entered the small yellow house. Russell followed him up the stairs to the room.
He invited Russell to sit and went to the chest of drawers where he kept the not inconsiderable stash of booze that he had put together from the time of his day trips around Arles. “There’s some gin left,” he said, “and a little scotch and vodka, and here’s a bottle of one of those poofy apéritifs that Georges serves us. What’s your pleasure?”
“Well, I don’t really drink,” Russell said, “but I see that you do, so I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Miller looked at him to see if this was a shot. Russell gazed benignly back at him and winked.
“I’m having,” Miller said, “I’m having all of it, this sort of alcohol cassoulet.” He poured off about four inches of gin, scotch, vodka, and liqueur into the pitcher in the basin on the washstand, swirled it around, and filled first Russell’s water tumbler and then his own. He held out his glass. “To him!” Miller offered.
“To him,” said Russell mildly, and raised his glass too.
“It’s not because this is my first trip to Europe or anything,” Miller said. “I mean what’s that? That’s just geography. Geography’s no big deal.”
“No,” Russell said, “it isn’t.”
“I don’t even think it’s because I’m in over my head. I mean over my head’s geography too,” he giggled. So I ain’t the fastest gun in western civilization. Who cares about that? I don’t care about that.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I don’t.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “There’s plenty around who aren’t a whole bunch faster than me if you want to know. Because the last I heard a taste for squid ink over your noodles isn’t necessarily a sign of a state of grace. That’s all right, Russell,” he said, “you’re a good sport. You don’t have to finish it if it tastes too much like piss. Set it down, I don’t mind.”
“I told you,” Russell said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”
“That’s good,” Miller admitted, “that’s a good thing. You cultivate your palate. You educate your taste. You live and you learn. That’s good. Because between you me and the lamppost my palate was cultivated years back. Shit, Russell, after chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, it’s all wog food to me. Wait a minute, let me get rid of this.” He poured the rest of his drink into the basin in which the pitcher was standing. “It’s pretty foul,” Miller said, “I have to admit it. Who am I trying to impress? Can I give you something else?”
“I’m fine,” Russell said. He’d already finished over half his glass. He seemed unaffected.
While Miller, the drinker in the outfit, who’d barely managed to get down more than a few sips, was unable to stop talking. It wasn’t, he thought, a matter of in vino veritas (or scotcho or vodko) so much as the fact of company. “I had this visit,” he blurted. “I think something’s up between Rey and the fierce Zouave.”
The really astonishing thing as far as Miller was concerned was that he didn’t have to explain his terms. No more than he’d had to elucidate whom he’d meant when he’d raised his glass to him. It was one thing to come on all abnegant modesty and disclaimer, boasting (as it were) his ignorance and submissive second fiddlehood, but another altogether to get up into the very face of genius. It didn’t make one humble (and wasn’t Russell, right here and right now, showing him — albeit merely by Russell being Russell, by forsaking agenda, by what he did with poor Miller’s gag drink — what it was like in actual real time to educate one’s taste, to live and to learn?), it quite made one breathless with despair. It was rather like watching synapses spark and blossom in a visible brain. It was all right, as he’d said, not to be the fastest gun in western civilization, but for only so long as no legitimate claimant to the title was around. It was something like that, he wanted to tell Russell, that put him off about this whole Van Gogh’s-room-at-Arles thing, but, when he tried, it came out snarled, garbled, artlessly done. It came out— gossip.
“I mean,” Miller went on helplessly, “they were taking each other’s pictures, for Christ’s sake. Snap. Snap snap. Setting the goddamn thingumabob on the camera and dashing across the room so they could be together for the photograph. They’d have posed on the bed if I wasn’t here. Their forebears and great-greats sat for their fucking portraits for him! Some fierce Zouave that guy must be,” Miller said. “I bet they kicked his old ass out of the Foreign Legion!”
“Don’t get so upset. It interferes with your work.”
“Oh yeah,” Miller said, “my work.”
“The whole deal is only five weeks,” Russell said sweetly, “it will all be over soon.”
“You should have seen them,” Miller said. “Compared to something like that, diddling myself is small potatoes.”
He’d shocked Russell but was sober enough to see that it wasn’t propriety or fastidiousness he had sinned against, it was decorum. And felt such a thrill of rage that he lashed out at his guest. “So what’s all this winking then? What’s that all about?”
“I’m sorry,” Russell said softly, “I have a tic.”
Oh my, thought Miller in his cups, now I’ve hurt his feelings. Russell, he saw, for all his credentials and lustrous, curricula-vitae’d life (this year, for example, he was not only Distinguished University Professor at the University of Bologna, they’d made him Chair of their philosophy department), would be unused to the aggressive, bluff roughneckery of someone like Miller. Why, to someone like Russell, Miller, Miller thought, probably represented the racketeer class, or, a step or so up or down, maybe the life force. My God, he thought, we? Ain’t that a kick in the ass? When it was the life force, or something so like it he didn’t even know a name for it — geography? squid ink on the noodles? — that gave him the heebie-jeebies in the first place.
But give the devil his due. He owed Russell an apology. He’d try to be more specific.
“You don’t want to get too near the light,” Miller told him. “You get too near the light you burn up. Rey and Maurice are examples. They never got over light proximity, they never got over the presumed heroism and idiosyncrasy of their circumstances. You should’ve seen them. Maurice is this little guy. He could have been a preemie. You don’t get a neck and arms like that unless you work at it. The son of a bitch must have bench-pressed a million pounds in his time. He had to have spent half his life in gyms. And Dr. Rey? You think mustaches like that grow on trees? And you can’t tell me determinism made him go for a doctor. It was determination. They started out, or rather somebody started out for them, as simple flukes of art. They bought into all that. They ain’t mountebanks. Hell, Russell, they’re not even clowns. Clowns on velvet, that’s another story, but chiefly they came too near the light is all.” He was breathing heavily now. He was in a damn state. He was in such a sweating, breathless, stupid damn state he almost felt someone ought to take his stupid damn picture.