The past is full of blame: "The Room-Service Waiter" by Tom Crewe

First, a terribly reductive summary of the story: 

Charles Bisset was a young man working at the Le Meurice Hotel in the 1920s when the by-then renowned artist Chaim Soutine hired him to pose for a painting. Charles wore his room-service waiter outfit while Soutine painted, and the artist eventually created the work below, which has the same name as this short story.

I did not know who Soutine was before this short story. A lot of his paintings are apparently like this.

The story takes place more than two decades after Soutine's death and about four decades after the panting was first made. There's an exhibition celebrating Soutine's work going on in Paris, and the curator dug up Charles and other of Soutine's models for interviews in order to add some interest for viewers. Charles realizes while thinking about his modeling sessions with the painter and everything else that's happened in his life that he hasn't made good use of his time. By the end of the story, he's had a microcatharsis that leads him to take a small step to live his life better, and he reaches out to his ex-wife. 

A critical moment leading to the catharsis

It's often unfair to summarize a story so much, but here, I don't think I'm actually doing a great deal of violence to it. Some stories like to hide their truths, but "The Room-Service Waiter" is happy to let you see what it is serving up, and it isn't any the worse for that. It's a classic "life not lived" story, much in the same way that Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Last Days of P" was. Far from being weak for putting its heart in the open for all to see the same way Charles' private moments are on display for the public at the exhibition, this is a strength. It's a good story and none the worse for having been told before. 

If its thematic heart is relatively simple, that doesn't mean that deciphering what led Charles to his mini-transformation is. In some ways, it looks as though it's the typical route from self-assured pride to the humility that precedes wisdom. Charles, thinking back on what he was like during his days at the hotel when he'd been Soutine's muse, recalls that he'd "taken pride" in the hotel. When Charles sees other paintings at the exhibition, he observes that they all look "smart and pleased with themselves," just as he had. If we look at Charles' whole life at this point, we can see it as a long, slow movement from the self-gratified waiter, happy with himself for convincing the prettiest girl at the hotel to marry him, to the now humbled older man crying while looking at the great painter's portrait of him, resolving to make better use of his life.

But what led to this change? For much of the exhibition, Charles is showing the same self-satisfied tendency that has defined his life up to that point. He eats it up when audiences gather to hear him talk about his time with Soutine. He's happy that everyone can still recognize him as the man from the photo in spite of all the time that's passed, vain about how he's kept his hair and his looks. He's a little bit mean to one of the other models from the hotel who is at the exhibition, a man called Alexandre who was the inspiration behind "The Bellboy," below.  

Charles pinches Alexandre's fat and criticizes him for having let himself go. He points out that, unlike himself, it's impossible to see the young man from the portrait in the old man. Alexandre doesn't defend himself or take offense. He's self-effacing, stating that he likes looking at the photo and being reminded of "when he had a neck." He says kind words to Charles, telling him that all the younger lads had admired Charles for his good looks. 

Charles never gets around to returning Alexandre's kindness. His last words we see to Alexandre are criticizing him again for getting fat. Alexandre replies with his most self-deprecating statement of all: "I have disappointed myself. It is hard to explain--" 

Soon after this, we see Charles crying openly in front of his painting, then telling the curator who found him that the exhibition has "utterly changed" his life, and then he goes home to write the letter to his ex-wife. The letter includes the words "I'm sorry," so we have to believe that at least some small amount of self-examination and metanoia has taken place. 

The narrative doesn't spell out for us how his inner transformation has taken place. It doesn't say, for example, that "Charles thought that Alexandre was right, and that he also had disappointed himself, and he should start immediately to make amends." We have to read into what Charles has said, done, and thought to guess at where the transformation has taken place. 

While Charles never stops acting condescendingly toward Alexandre, we have to assume, since Alexandre's words about disappointing himself immediately precede Charles's self-proclaimed change of life, that the words have sunk in on some level. Charles has recently remembered that Soutine used to tell himself "Bravo!" at the closing of each painting session, apparently congratulating himself for his work, and Charles has started imitating the behavior. This imitation is like that of a "valet to a famous man, repeating his master's little phrases in the dusty corners of his own life." That is, Charles may not be a great man of history like Soutine, but he can take some little snippet of Soutine's behavior and use it to improve his own life. Charles' repetition of "Bravo" is the final line of the story. Charles has also soaked up some influence from Alexandre in a similar, osmosis-type of way.  

Perhaps Charles isn't always aware of his own moments of change. He repeats phrases without realizing that repetition is altering the way he thinks. We can, I suppose, repent without always knowing we're repenting. In fact, those moments might be the more profound and lasting moments of change. It seems that this is what has happened with his interaction with Alexandre. Although he never stops mocking Alexandre, Charles nonetheless appears to have internalized something from his humble way of looking at the past and used it to make a change for the better. 

Quasi-ekphrasis

Normally, the terms "ekphrasis" and its adjectival form "ekphrastic" are used for works of literature that focus rather narrowly on a work of visual art. William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is probably the best-known example of ekphrastic literature to most non-literary folks. An ekphrastic poem will have a narrator in a museum, say, who looks at a painting, describes it in some way, and then offers a meditation on it. 

If a work of art is a key underlying element in a work of literature, that doesn't make that literature ekphrastic. For example, the novel Girl with the Pearl Earring isn't ekphrasis. It's literature inspired by art. 

"The Room-Service Waiter" might deserve to be called quasi-ekphrastic. It doesn't go to great lengths to describe (the word "ekphrasis" is related to the Greek word for "describe") the works that inspired the story, but it is an extended mediation on the meaning of one of those works. It provides one way of thinking about Soutine's portraits, which is sort of a good way to think about any portraits: they are time suspended, which offers us a chance to consider the way in which we might think the moment we are in will last forever, but it doesn't. All art is a memento mori, and all art calls us to consider how best to spend our time on Earth. Charles may not, as Monty Python's street critic often proclaimed, know much about art, but he seems to have gotten the gist of what his master was saying, even without much knowing how he was saying it.  

A closing digression

I found the opening lines of the story difficult to read. Rather than draw me in, I kept re-reading the lines to try to understand who "they" was and who "him" was. The second time through, it was easy to read, of course, but I believe the narrative does something kind of unusual in its opening lines. The first sentence reads: "They found him where he had always been, living quietly on the rue Fournier." The "they" here is Monsieru Dupont and, it seems, other, unnamed people in charge of the show who decided to try to find Charles. The "him" is Charles. The first paragraph continues that "the man sitting across from Charles was a curator..." So the first sentence is about how they found him, making me think it's going to be from the point of view of the "they" who went looking for him, but then sentences three switches to Charles' POV. Which meant I didn't trust myself to understand who the "He" leading sentence four was. I figured it out eventually, and other than those first lines, there's nothing difficult to understand about the story, which leads me to wonder why it does this POV switcharoo right off the bat.