Free Van Gogh's Room at Arles by Stanley Elkin

stammered reluctancies. (“I hope I’m not calling you at a bad time, Professor, that I’m not interrupting your and Mrs. Schiff’s dinner or anything. I hate bothering you at home like this, sir.”) But bad enough anyway. Because you had to be on your toes when the phone rang. You had to see to it that the TV was inaudible, had to fumble for the Mute button on the remote control, or turn down the volume on the radio, make certain the silence the kid heard at his end of the line was the pure, unadulterated noise of interruption, the sound of difficult, significant books being read, the quiet of a busted, damaged concentration.
    Of course Schiff’s being crippled excused him from a lot of that crap. He didn’t get to campus often enough to use campus mail, he no longer kept regular office hours, people tended to steer clear of him in the corridors, he never went near a stairway, and no longer did choreography in the fast- closing stream of things at the door, don’t ask him. So he could have called. Technically. It was the message that would have compromised his dignity. Announcing at damn near midnight that their—well, his, his now that Claire had blown him off—party would have to be canceled. And not only damn near midnight, but, by the time he’d reached all of them, damn near one o’clock, too, later, the very A.M. of the very P.M. of the party in question. Still, he could have called. Technically. Even, technically, his message notwithstanding. Though then the embarrassment would be on the other foot. He’d be the one breaking the peace, breaking into the peace, calling at a bad time and interrupting God-knew- what, bothering their lovemaking perhaps, disturbing their youth. His own stammered hesitations and uneasiness barely audible over the unturned-down volume of hi-fi and boom box. (“Professor Schiff here. Schiff. SCHIFF!”)
    What time was it now? Twelve one-niner. (Again thirteen? This was beyond high odds. This was into fate.)
    Still protective of his dignity, he thought, fuck it, picked up the phone and asked Information for the telephone number of Molly Kohm.
    Miss Kohm (though this was unclear, she could well have been married; older than his other students, in, he judged, her early forties, and got up always in the costumes, the cloaks, boots, skirts, and dresses of ladies, he imagined, on symphony, museum, and various other arts boards; and something too dramatic, even a little hysterical, about her dark makeup, its etched or engraved character, almost as if it were not makeup at all but a sort of tattoo, a kind of stenciled quality to her enduring tan, something about Miss—or Mrs.—Kohm that suggested, well, weekends spent elsewhere, her passport in her purse as surely as her car keys, coins for tolls; something—he admitted this though she was not his type—vaguely exciting about her, her intelligence grounded—if that was the word—in intimacy and some mysticism of the far, as though—he had no other way of putting this— Schiff was the geographer but she was the traveler) picked up on the very first ring. And, when he identified himself (hemming and hawing, beating about the bush, shuffling with the best of them), pretending—he assumed pretending—she’d been expecting his call.
    “Oh,” she said, “you poor man, I was going to call you.”
    “You were?”
    “Well, when I heard what your not-so-better-half had done to you … And on the eve of your party! Outrageous! People ought to know that some of the most significant damage one can do to others is to force them to change their plans at the last minute. Too too rude, I think. To treat other persons’ lives as though they were subject to alterations like something off-the-rack. Barbaric!”
    “Then why didn’t you?”
    “Why didn’t I—?”
    “Call me,” he asked her.
    “I thought Dickerson would take care of it. Dickerson was supposed to take care of it. That’s what we arranged at any rate.”
    “We? You and