Playing the Palace

by Paul Rudnick

  “There. Much better. Media-ready.”

  As I said this, Prince Edgar was reaching toward my own hair, and I flinched.

  “I’m so sorry. I was just . . . you have very nice hair as well. But I had no right, I don’t know what came over me . . .”

  Our eyes locked and I couldn’t breathe and I wanted to die because my life was peaking, but on the other hand I couldn’t wait to see what might happen next.

  My phone pinged; I’d meant to silence it and now I was shoving my hand in my pocket to find it, which never looks graceful, but as I yanked the phone free, it rang.

  “Please, take it, it might be critical,” Edgar said, with genuine kindness.

  It was my sister, Abby, who’s about to get married and calls me thirty-eight times a day for monogrammed water bottle consultations and meltdown management, which I usually love doing, only now I told her, “Abbs? I can’t talk, can I call you in just a bit?”

  “But I just texted you,” Abby insisted, “and you didn’t text me back and I’m having an epic gift bag issue—”

  “Which we will totally discuss and examine in depth,” I assured her, “but right now—”

  Edgar was smiling at me, which almost made me drop my phone as Abby yelled, “WHAT? What are you doing that’s so important you can’t help me choose between miniature foil-wrapped chocolate champagne bottles and Lucite boxes of breath mints in my signature colors—”

  “I’m . . . I’m . . .” I sputtered, “I’m at work. I love you and I think you should go with both the bottles and the mints and think about temporary tattoos of the bride’s and groom’s faces but I have to go. I’m sorry!”

  I hung up and told Edgar, “My sister.”

  “Ah. I know the dilemma. I have a brother.”

  Oh my God. Oh my God. He wasn’t politely excusing himself or summoning a security guard. In fact, he kept going, asking, “Is it just the two of you?”

  “Yes. And I adore her, but sometimes she’s, you know, a lot.”

  “As is my brother.”

  “Can I tell you something?” I said, my event-savvy instincts returning. “The way you’re talking to me right now, it’s so easy and appealing, and that’s how you should give your speech. In fact, let’s not call it a speech at all. Just make it a conversation, and pretend the audience is just a batch of friends, hanging out in your . . . castle. And remember to smile. Because your smile, oh my God . . .”

  “What?” Prince Edgar asked. “What about my smile? I think it comes across as mechanical, like I’m pretending to be attentive and fulfill my duties while really I’m just activating a royal reflex or downloading my official mindless smile function. I hate my smile.”

  He hates his smile? Is he out of his mind? If I could smile like that, I’d spend all day looking in the mirror, smiling and sending myself selfies and begging for a date.

  “Your smile,” I said, firmly, “is your secret weapon. Because everyone probably expects you to be distant and formal, but when you smile . . . Okay, do it. Try it out. Let’s have a test drive. Smile at me.”

  “I will not! That’s absurd! First you make me fling myself about, and now this! I’d feel like a grinning idiot!” protested Prince Edgar. “Smiling has nothing to do with clean drinking water or resource management or climate change!”

  “You’re one hundred percent right,” I said. “But there are going to be Nobel Prize–winning scientists on this panel, only nobody will pay the slightest attention to them unless you’re here to introduce them and unless you smile.”

  “So you’re claiming that my smile, and my royal presence, are essential to the future of our planet? And our species? And all plant and animal life as we know it?”

  I was pretty sure he was joking, but his gaze was solemn, and he wasn’t giving anything away.

  “Yes,” I answered. “If you don’t smile, the global ecosphere is doomed.”

  He sighed manfully, as if he didn’t like it but knew what he had to do for world survival.

  He paused. He readied himself, like an Olympic athlete seconds before an event. He adjusted his stance, for maximum stability. He took a deep, preparatory breath. He smiled.

  I couldn’t speak. I was about to faint or embarrass myself in countless other ways. Because I wasn’t kidding: his smile didn’t just disarm people and make them abandon any preconceptions about the prince; right now his smile was making me want to grab him and kiss him, which was something I’d probably regret from my jail cell.

  “Let’s see your smile,” the prince demanded. “If you regard these facial expressions as so indispensable.”

  “My smile?” I said, trying to remember everything I’d eaten since the last time I’d brushed my teeth and whether my two teenage years of braces had been at all effective or if there was time for me to race out and have the invisible adult kind installed. Did I have a decent smile? Had Callum or anyone else ever complimented my smile? Was that left incisor still a tiny bit crooked? Should I purse my lips tightly and shake my head vigorously, no, uh-uh, sorry, I have a note from my orthodontist and I’m not smiling today?

  “Do it,” said Edgar, with what felt like sexual urgency.

  I looked at him and couldn’t help myself. I smiled, reluctantly at first and then unable to suppress a grin. It wasn’t my fault or my choice: Prince Edgar of England had commanded me to smile, it was a royal decree and he was smiling right back. We were like two happy toy soldiers, having come to life and marched off the shelf at midnight, about to salute each other and then tear off our uniforms and do so much more, which was an image I definitely needed to suppress, because it was insane and pornographic and not in my job description.

  “You have a perfectly admirable smile,” Edgar decided. “An excellent smile.”

  “Should I stop now?” I asked. “I’m starting to feel like a jack o’ lantern, or a frozen smiley face.”

  “Just one second more,” said Edgar. “So I can study your smile and duplicate it.”

  Without thinking, we moved toward each other, and then we both stopped smiling. Something more serious was going on, and we were breathing together. Now we were close enough that I could tell how great he smelled, with a hint of what was probably some heritage custom-blended fragrance, or maybe a clean-smelling soap hand-milled by a shop that had been supplying the royal family for centuries.

  “You smell marvelous,” Edgar murmured, but there wasn’t enough time for me to list my entire product regimen.

  Our lips were inches apart and Edgar’s hand was on my forearm and I was leaning toward him and just as we were about to kiss and cause the building to collapse, or at least set off every smoke detector in Midtown, the three sets of doors to the amphitheater burst open and a small army of security personnel, English and American, all of them speaking into earpieces, moved toward the stage, led by a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman in a dark suit with a subtly striped vest and a perfectly knotted necktie. His silver hair was not merely brushed but lacquered, or maybe threatened into place. He had the most rigid posture and immaculately polished shoes I’d ever seen. He looked like God’s butler.

  “Your Highness,” said this person, in the sort of crisp, irreproachable accent reserved for Mary Poppins, if she was an attorney general. “You can’t keep running off like that. No one knew where you were, and our team is now on high alert.”

  “I was rehearsing,” said Prince Edgar. “Carter, this is James Claverack, my chief of staff, factotum and devoted manservant.”

  I had the feeling that at least two of these titles were a private punch line, because James, whose facial expression didn’t change in the slightest, turned to Edgar and said, “For the last time: you are not Batman.”

  “And James, this is Carter Ogden, who’s responsible for this event and making everything look so glorious.”

  “So good to meet you, but we’re
about to begin,” said James, ignoring me entirely as he forcefully led Prince Edgar into a waiting area in the wings.

  Diplomats, members of the press and staff for the prince’s initiative were now filling the room and taking their seats as guards elbowed me off the stage. As I was being hustled down the center aisle, I craned my neck and caught a last glimpse of Edgar, who’d turned his head to find me. As James pulled him away, Edgar gestured helplessly, and then he was gone and I was shoved out into the hallway, where I asked myself, why was I starting to think of him as “Edgar”? And also: does he have a last name?

  CHAPTER 5

  So you actually met him and you touched each other’s hair and you both smiled and you almost kissed and now you’re both hopelessly in love forever,” decided Adam at our apartment that night.

  “It’s so beyond repulsive,” said Louise. “Royalty are an offensive anachronism. They have no power but they’re still not allowed to, like, criticize the status quo. They only exist to promote English tourism and sell those big shiny European magazines that ooze all over them. They’re human jewelry.”

  In college, where we’d met, Louise had studied economic theory and class dynamics, and I trusted her observations. She charts how the world functions, and how ugly some people’s motivations can be, but—Edgar had smelled so great. Which was not a defense I could make to Louise.

  “You’re thinking about him, right now, aren’t you?” she deduced. “Because you’re drooling.”

  “I am not! I just . . . maybe I’m having a ministroke.”

  “But isn’t that what love is?” Adam swooned. “If you get married, what title would you get? Would you be his Mister Prince or his Co-King or His Royal Sex Toy?”

  “You are asking for so much trouble,” Louise insisted. “Never get involved with somebody that uselessly rich.”

  “What about Arielle?” I asked, name-checking one of Louise’s exes, a wafty French girl who wore sheer blouses and long velvet skirts and turned out to be an ambassador’s daughter.

  “You were so nuts about her,” Adam agreed. “You even read the terrible poems she wrote and watched those videos where she talked to her shoes, and you didn’t make vomit noises.”

  “Shut up!” said Louise, who has a weakness for vague, winsome women who are late for everything and apologize by handing the other person a leaf they found. “Arielle was a huge mistake!” she swore. “I was on cold medication!”

  “But you loved her,” said Adam. “Just the way Carter loves Prince Edgar.”

  “Both of you, stop it right now,” I told them firmly. “Absolutely nothing happened and nothing ever will happen and no one loves anyone. It was just this deeply strange New York moment when you meet someone you could never meet anywhere else.”

  “It’s like going to Disney World and meeting someone wearing a huge rubber Prince Edgar head,” agreed Louise.

  “But weirder things have happened,” said Adam. “Royals fall in love with commoners all the time. And the fact that he’s openly gay is just, oh my God . . .”

  “Are you masturbating?” Louise asked him.

  “In my mind. Except it goes way beyond that—I mean, if this was a musical, Carter and Edgar would be in different places, like Carter would be here, and Edgar would be in his hotel suite on the hundred and fifty-eighth floor, gazing out at the lights of the city . . .”

  Adam’s currently seeing DuShawn, another dancer, and as foreplay, they sometimes perform the choreography from the love duets in Carousel or West Side Story and post it on YouTube, and now he was improvising a dance between Edgar and me.

  “And there’d be a dream ballet,” Adam announced, taking an invisible Edgar in his arms, “where they’d find each other and sing about the meaning of true love.”

  “And then they’d both go on Grindr and get some,” said Louise.

  I went to bed early because I was disconcerted and didn’t want to discuss Edgar. Meeting him already felt like a blip, like it might not have happened or maybe I’d had a glimpse of him and then let my imagination embroider everything, which is something I do all the time. I’ll see a guy window-shopping and he’ll become a pediatrician with a collie and we’ll restore a colonial farmhouse in Connecticut with an attached barn and adopt two kids until he cheats on me with a bearded male hipster nurse and I shoot them both in cold blood and a photo of me fills the front page of the New York Post with the headline:

  GAY KILLER SAYS, ‘HE HAD A MAN BUN.’

  And I imagine all this within ten seconds, by which time the original guy has been joined by his wife and toddler.

  Once I was in bed I told myself that I’d never think, let alone embroider, about Edgar ever again. Of course, vowing not to think about someone is the most surefire route to being up all night rolling out every conceivable outcome, from a transatlantic marriage in which I’d only wear my crown to work occasionally; to a furtive few weekends every year, after Edgar’s married a crown prince from another country but keeps texting that he only loves me; to Edgar abdicating and the two of us living off the grid in Madagascar, only my version of living off the grid always requires a marble bathroom with heated towel bars and a jetted tub along with access to American milk chocolate with almonds.

  In order to grab even an hour’s sleep I asked Ruth Ginsburg if she thought Edgar and I had any conceivable future. She replied, “Sweetheart, you had a momentary encounter with a prince, and if there’s one immutable law of the universe, it’s that princes don’t end up with associate event architects from New Jersey. The proof of this is that you’re under the covers in your Hell’s Kitchen bedroom making up a conversation with a photograph. But maybe the universe let you meet Prince Edgar to give you a nudge and remind you to get back out there. Are you even listening to me, or are you already watching porn on your laptop? Why do I even bother?”

  By the next morning I’d decided that my flirtation with Prince Edgar was officially an urban legend, like the alligators swarming the sewers or a one-bedroom apartment with lots of light renting for under a thousand dollars. Since it was Saturday, I went about the critical business of updating my photos and profile and downloading three new dating apps.

  I’d been off the market for years, although after our breakup, I found out that Callum had never deleted any of his profiles the whole time we were together. As revenge, when I took new pictures of myself in Central Park, I used an advanced form of Photoshop to rework my chin, then decided not to, since I didn’t want any guy I might meet to keep staring at my face, wondering, “Did it grow back?” My first profile drafts included the phrases “Bitter, angry and cheated on—how about coffee?”, “I used to believe in love but now I’d like to tell you at great length why I don’t” and “I met Prince Edgar, you have to believe me.” After deleting all of these I went with something generic: “Let’s see what happens.”

  * * *

  Over the next two weeks, I had combinations of Starbucks lattes, dinner-and-a-movie-neither-of-us-really-wanted-to-see and not-great-what-did-I-expect sex with the following people:

  • A Google product manager who was cute and sweet but slouched a lot and got very haughty about people who were still playing video games I’d never heard of.

  • A bearded social worker from Bushwick who does outreach in the foster care system and was such an incredible, selfless human being that I felt like the most superficial person who’d ever lived, especially when I heard myself being very opinionated about casting options for the movie of Wicked.

  • Two different lawyers who both liked spinning—or, as they called it, performance cycling—more than I’ve ever liked anything and who bragged about where they got to sit in spin class and how the hottest instructors knew their names.

  • An Orthodox Jewish guy who was very eager in bed but turned out to be married with seven children, yet didn’t think he was conflicted.

  My main problem wit
h all of these perfectly nice guys was that while I was with them I kept zoning out and superimposing Prince Edgar’s head, and his smile, onto their bodies. I also started doing this with my roommates and my relatives, to the point where I worried that someday I’d be found babbling in an abandoned building beside a limbless mannequin I called Your Highness.

  I was so lost that I let my guard down and consented to have a meal with Callum, and yes, I can hear billions of voices, as a sort of “Hallelujah” chorus, chanting, “Oh, honey,” “Really? You’re back for more?” and “Then you have no one to blame but yourself—I mean it.” But Callum had been texting me and sending me pictures from his arc on a Netflix limited series where he plays an Olympic swimmer suspected of killing his rivals with poisoned sports drinks and tarantulas in their Speedos. Callum had trained himself into even more phenomenal shape, and yes, there were shots of him naked in the locker room shower with the water streaming down his torso. So stop judging me.

  “You look great,” said Callum, sitting across from me at his favorite vegan café. As always, there was an aura about him, a golden, perfectly scruffed, shaggy blonde actor/model/bastard glow.

  “You too.”

  “Thank you for showing up. I wasn’t sure if you would, and I wasn’t going to blame you. I was a total shit.”

  I kept my guard up. Callum could hypnotize me, using his good looks, his low, raspy voice and his ability to act as if we were the only two people on Earth. Some wildly attractive people are snobs, making sure everyone else feels inferior. Callum was the opposite; he was a born seducer, making sure everyone adores him. If I’m being honest, that’s a huge part of why I fell so hard: I couldn’t believe that someone as hot, easygoing and seemingly untroubled could be interested in a person as nervous and awkward as me, someone who, before leaving the apartment, tries on so many sweaters that my hair becomes a static-electricity haystack.