Van Gogh's Room at Arles by Stanley Elkin

been down then, too. (Perhaps that’s what had put him in mind.)
    “Oh,” she said, “I forgot about your cordless. I’ll have to put an adapter in that, too.”
    He handed it over.
    “These,” said Miss Simmons, “are a son of a bitch.”
    “Oh, now,” Schiff said.
    She grinned. Schiff didn’t remember her but thought she must have been a good student.
    “Is everything hooked up yet?” he asked when she gave back his phone.
    “Almost. Maybe another half hour.”
    Because of course there were calls he had to make. (As a cripple, he lived like a bookie.) The listmaker had not forgotten his situation, the necessary stations of his crip’s paced cross. Had not forgotten the party for his students that had still to be called off. Had not forgotten the probable roasts and hams, turkeys and pâtés, and could easily imagine the possible meaty haunches—goats’, stags’, and rams’—ticking their timed shelf life in Claire’s party-stocked refrigerator even now; the spoiling berries, oxidizing melon balls, and splinters of crystallized ice creams forming even as he thought of them, as they went on his lists; the sweet, separating, stratified milks and creamy desserts turning, going off, the freezer-burned breads tanning cancerous in the kitchen. Because (now it occurred) it wasn’t the banks he’d needed to call, it was all the little food boutiques, awning’d purveyors of powerhouse cheeses, of tinned smoked delicacies, oysters and fruits de mer (squid and tiny, fetal octopi, lavender as varicose veins), as if fed-up Claire, working their only recently annual party like a serial killer, had taken it into her angry old head that even getting even wasn’t enough, that only vengeance and wrath would serve.
    “Jesus!” oathed Schiff, sniffing violently, taking rapid, shallow gusts of air into his hyperventilate nostrils, slapping his head, clipping it with the heel of his hand like a self- inflicted personal foul. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
    “What,” Miss Simmons asked, “what is it? What’s wrong?”
    And, believe it or not, it was suddenly revealed to Schiff that it was no mere accident that Jenny Simmons had been a former student of his, that she’d been—yes, he knew how he sounded, he knew just how he sounded——like Creer, like Beverly Yeager, bowed beneath the weight of their mad, customized agendas—sent like the closing couplet in some fabulous poetic justice to save them. Jenny d’Arc. If all that “Oh, now” had been genuine nurturing and not just conventional courtesy, let her nurture him now or forever hold her peace.
    “I was thinking,” he said. “I haven’t had anything in my stomach all day. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
    “Really?” she said. “You haven’t eaten all day?”
    “It puts me off my feed,” Schiff said, “when my wife walks out on me.”
    “You’ve got to eat.”
    “I know,” Schiff said.
    “Shall I make you a sandwich?”
    “Jeez,” Schiff said, “that’d be putting you to a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it? I’m going to have to get connected up with one of those Meals-on-Wheels deals or something.”
    “Well, but I could make you a sandwich.”
    “I am hungry,” admitted Schiff.
    “I’ll just make you a sandwich. What would you like?”
    “Gosh, anything. I think Claire may have left some stuff in the refrigerator.”
    “Coming right up,” she said.
    “And if anything suits your fancy …” Schiff said, breaking off.
    She was back within minutes. There, on a plate on a tray, was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the bread perfectly toasted, its crusts almost surgically removed. There was a tall glass of innocent-seeming milk.
    “Peanut butter and jelly?” Schiff said.
    “Don’t you like peanut butter and jelly? I thought everyone did. You haven’t eaten all day and it’s easy to digest.”
    “No no,” Schiff said, “this is fine. It’s just I had this craving for some of that gourmet shit my wife left in the