The trip was designed, at least in part, to be a sort of shopping expedition. Although Miller, Russell, and Hartshine would miss it, the Fellows were going to do a play reading the following week — in French — of The Misanthrope. Heidi had approached Rita to see if it was possible to procure the amphitheater one afternoon for their little production. Rita thought the idea of a play reading a good one and came up almost immediately with an even more ambitious proposal. Why not, she suggested, have the reading at night in the amphitheater? Why not invite the townspeople of Arles, why not take advantage of the stadium’s lights and sound system? She thought she could arrange it so the entire evening wouldn’t cost them more than, oh, fifty dollars a person.
They jumped at it. They jumped, too, at Heidi Lear’s additional embellishments. She thought the actors should be in costume. Oh, nothing elaborate of course. It was too late for anything fine, but Heidi had been associated for just years and years with socio-theatrics. That was her field, socio-theatrics— theatrical therapies for prisoners, old people in homes, the dying in hospices, as well as individuals who found themselves temporarily thrown together in groups like the one the Foundation had assembled in Arles. It was how she’d met Robert (whose field it turned out was the inventorying of eighteenth-century houses). She was, at least according to Robert Lear (whose testimony in his wife’s behalf was the first indication of generosity Miller had seen in him), this genius of the make-do and at-hand. A wizard of odds and ends.
Thus the shopping expedition to Cannes. For props and stuffs and materials. For the building blocks of all impromptu improvisation and inspired, makeshift arrangement. They would hit up the hotels, the special booths and shops a town like Cannes with its annual film festival and concomitant obligations to make the sets and adjust to the needs of some eleventh-hour show business would be sure to have.
On the trip out that morning the coach was abuzz with plans for the upcoming show. Even Rita was excited, and Paul Hartshine (who was wearing his big print bow tie) had practically made up his mind to change his reservations and stay on at a hotel in Arles until after the performance. Russell said he would have stayed on too but that Bologna was paying him $200,000 for the year, and he was, at least putatively, Departmental Chair. Also, he’d already been away five weeks from a sinecure essentially carved out for him. They were nice people. He oughtn’t, he thought, take advantage, he mustn’t, he felt, hurt their feelings. Much as he might want to hang around and take in their Misanthrope leaving was the honorable thing to do.
“Two hundred thousand?” Miller said.
Russell looked at the scenery.
Miller was astonished at how excited they were. Him too. It seemed odd that he, of all of them the most frivolous, the one with probably the least good reason to be there, should be the one under the greatest obligation to leave, to go home to what was only Booth Tarkington Community College in what was only Indianapolis in what was merely the State of Indiana, to get down to work at last on what was plainly the flimsiest of projects.
It astonished him too how all this (about the real purpose of the trip to Cannes; about the Lears, Heidi’s talents, Robert’s devotion; about Hartshine’s decision to stay on; Rita’s genuine enthusiasm; Russell’s salary) came out on the bus. Other things too. Something ad hoc and original and abandoned in all of them, their lives made suddenly available, opened up like responses to the sunshine laws or the rules of discovery. Sir Ehrnst, for example, the history of history man from Uppsala, admitted that he never read his students’ papers. He distributed grades solely on the basis of his first impressions of how they dressed, if they wore glasses, whether they looked scholarly, how he expected they would strike a class of their own graduate students, sometimes on nothing more than how they smelled— their colognes, their aftershaves and toilet waters, whether they seemed cloying. And old Samuels Kleist, whose wife was feeling too ill to make the trip with them to Cannes (and who, though he knew of her existence, Miller had never seen because she remained, to hear Kleist tell it, who, indeed, fetched her her breakfasts — bran muffins, an orange, tea— her lunches and suppers), was in love, had not one but two mistresses installed in a pair of his cliff dwellings back in New Mexico, and was on his way to Cannes to buy presents for both ladies. Though he had no idea, he gushed, what either of them wanted from France, no notion, God help him, of their sizes. Both drank wine, loved wine. If he could find a specially designed label with a pretty view of the beach at Cannes, the great architect said, a half-dozen bottles like that might be the very thing. He never touched the stuff himself, he said. Neither did his wife. Where could he hide them so they wouldn’t be discovered? He asked for suggestions.
“Ship them,” Inga Basset suggested, “have them shipped.”
“That’s so impersonal,” Samuels Kleist said.
“Get them head scarves,” Sir Ehrnst Riglin said. “You can line a head scarf inside your trouser cuff or stuff it up the sleeve of your jacket.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Kleist said.
And Yalom and Inga Basset, the drive-time psychiatrists, were openly contemptuous of the creatures who called them for help, contemptuous, even scurrilous, about psychiatry itself.
“It’s a crock,” Yalom Basset said.
“It’s gas in your pants,” said Inga, a slim, fit-looking woman in her forties, handsome and rakish in a Borsalino hat, a cigarillo in her lips, one eye squint shut against its smoke like the face of an experienced card player.
“It leaves wind,” her husband put in.
“It clouds men’s minds,” Inga said.
Committing voluntary truth against themselves like people turning state’s evidence. All of them, all, all abandoned and vulnerable as so many summer houses in the winter.
Jesus Hans, statistics advisor to the third world, running his mouth at the back of the bus.
“I’m from Cali. They know you’re Colombian they want to dance you, they want love songs and good moves, that you give them dips. Famine girls from the horn of Africa.
“I give old Kleist due. Hey, two mistresses? He worries about gifts because he’s an ancient, sentimental guy from the old school.
“I have two sweet daughters, a wonderful wife who fucks like a mink. Better than my girlfriends even. She holds no candles to that Rita though.”
Not Miller, Miller thought. Count Miller out, Miller thought. Keep your mystery, thought stunned Miller. Hold on tight to your famous poker-puss heart. Don’t give them a thing, not a thing. I gave at the office, Miller thought. I gave and gave out in the music room. Don’t, Miller thought. Don’t tell them you jerk off to ghosts and grandmas.
And held his tongue all the way to Cannes.
Which was still France, still Europe, only no longer Van Gogh’s Europe.
The brother-in-law drove the big bus right up to what must have been one of the newest, grandest hotels in town. He opened the doors, waited until his passengers descended, then descended himself and casually tossed his bus keys to a broad, magnificent doorman, splendidly attired in what vaguely reminded Miller of the Zouave’s uniform in Van Gogh’s painting. The doorman handed the keys to a young man who was actually going to valet-park the damn bus, for God’s sake. Somehow this seemed the strangest, most extravagant thing Miller had ever seen.
“We’ll cross the boulevard,” Rita said. “There’s the most marvelous café right on the beach. We’ll have a coffee there, freshen up in their facilities, and decide what we must do.”
The air was ferociously bright. Hot and clear and bright. Miller felt the lack of sunglasses. As palpably as he might have felt the absence of an umbrella in a rainstorm.