Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  That drought you read about? You don’t know the half. (Is that to be my theme here?) It played California hell, put half the state out of work, and not just the agricultural illegals up out of Mexico. Trained dental technicians let go. What, you think not? All that water running all day, all that rinse and spit? Shipping clerks and gift wrappers in the best department stores laid off because of the water shortage or forced to quit because they couldn’t work up enough moisture to lick one more label or stick on another fancy seal. Going on the dole for parched tongues and chapped lips. Or my own case.

  I left England because of a tragic love affair (which since it has nothing to do with my involvement with Larry I’m under no obligation at this point to discuss with my public, so-called) and came to the States not to emigrate but in order to put some time and distance between my heart and its circumstances. It had been my intention to be gone no more than six months, but as the old saying has it, man proposes and God disposes and, in the half year I’d given to it, nothing had been resolved. Even back then, in the early days of the drought, it was still easy enough to find a job in Los Angeles. You know some of my background. You know that while I had something of an independent income it was never near big enough I could afford to live abroad indefinitely without finding means to supplement it. Also, it’s good for people to be gainfully employed. It makes life that much more interesting.

  So I went for an au pair girl. My English accent was all the character I ever needed. I offered to show my passport but they wouldn’t even look. It didn’t make any difference to these people. Almost every au pair in Beverly Hills was an American actress hoping to catch on at a studio. They could all walk the walk and talk the talk. A reason I wasn’t found out when my photographs started to appear in the papers, I think, is that if they remembered me at all, the people of the house must have thought they recognized me from the industry. Besides, it didn’t last all that long. For a great democratic show a lot of these people began to lay off their “nannies” and “au pairs” even before the drought started to bite. They gave us bonuses and apologized that they had to dismiss us because we’d become “just one more thirst that had to be quenched.” And continued to quench the remaining household thirsts with the same bottled mineral water they’d been using all along. Restaurants were still hiring on, but it didn’t need any Greenwich Mean Time celestial clock watchers to see that the hostesses they employed were just more actresses and that when the time came they’d let these go just as quick as all the rest of those other nanny-cum-film stars. (And the time came and they did. Even the less expensive restaurants were selling bottled water by the glass then. The difference was that very few people believed it wasn’t tap water they were actually paying for. Oh, I know, I know. I really do. This sounds like satire and the States sound much like England and, in some ways, it is and they are. And I still can’t even get the punctuation right. Can’t or won’t. Preferring much that’s American to that which is British. Putting my full stops inside the quotes, for example. Choosing the Yankee zed in “civilization” to the s in its chiefly Brit VAR, as they say in Webster’s. Dropping my e out of “judgement.” Slipped between the cracks of two different worlds. And if that’s one of the reasons the royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry— and, in an odd way, it is—it’s the least of them.) Suffice it to say, however, I didn’t even bother to apply. And set up instead for an ordinary housekeeper’s job making up beds in a hotel. What I never expected was the unwillingness of people from parts of the country unaffected by drought to endure even for one or two days whatever insignificant parch they might have been put through in the one two days it would have taken them to do their business. When the drought really became serious the girls with the English accents were the first ones to be cut.

  It was all very well for me to be larky and thirsty while I still had a job. My employers were paying my health insurance, after all. But once I was without work I knew that I would have to find something for a—ha ha—rainy day.

  I still had no reason to go home. Well, I’d fallen a. over t. for the climate, hadn’t I? That was when I first thought of Cape Henry and the Lothian Islands. In England even the King is on the National Health, even the Queen.

  (Still another aside: I can’t shake the sense I have of Press Lord Sir Sidney reading over my shoulder as I write, and I’m beginning to feel if not my obligations to the readership, then at least Sir Sid’s sense of them for me, and I find that compelling and, in small ways, oddly touching and will, when there’s time or it seems fitting, henceforth alert my readers —or maybe only Sir Sidney himself—that they—he—may skip over the asides until I take up my “story” again, or “la Lulu’s Account,” or whatever they’re calling it these days on hoardings on the sides of buses. Anyway, you know what seems strange to me? The general, disparate, all-purpose exile that moves over the world. That piecemeal, bit-by-bit colonization of earth. People, for whatever reason, coming together on all sorts of foreign shores, washing up in the strangest places. The mysterious working out of the great queer plot of the planet. Different motives, mutual ends. Well, it finally accounts for the very idea of empire, doesn’t it?)

  Whatever I may feel now it no longer seems unusual to me I hadn’t even known Jane or Marjorie back in Los Angeles. Indeed, when the three of us met at the beachcomber estate agency where we let that wicky-up, and not three or four days later one of us—I forget which—suggested we might pick up the odd pound or so if we put our backs into it and helped with the morning ablutions on other people’s shelters, I naturally assumed—as I later discovered we each did—that my two new friends were just more actresses marking time and waiting to be discovered. Which brings me back to that missing aloe and the first time I saw the Prince.

  Well, it was those embargo, or quarantine, or meat-and- potato prohibitions of course, the flora-and-fauna rules, all the high-priority, low-level laws of jealous international agreement and stickler decree by which nations claim they not only protect themselves but insinuate the superiority of their Nature over your Nature. Showing the flag, grandstanding the public on the cheap—— all that subject population, all those abiders. And getting, Prince Larry, grand photo ops out of it, too, making the most of his signature gesture. Though I swear to you, I’d forgotten all that, had been away from England almost two years by then. Out of sight, out of mind. One forgets. Though I suppose the things one forgets are always perched somewhere near the tippy tip of one’s head, because when I saw him there posed in the aloe shop, quit of his equerry and all his retainers, I remembered at once of course. This was the one who made a point of buying off the local economy all those ceremonial wreaths he’s charged with laying on all those public buildings, natural monuments, and great men’s graves. And maybe that’s why those ordinances came into being in the first place—— because whoever made up kings figured it might come in handy one day, that someday this prince would come. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the ruling class is nothing if not clever.

  And he was handsome. I remembered from my life in England that he was handsome, but now he was possessed of an almost surfeit of beauty, and of an age when he was at its (or he of its) very peak. Like special fruit that has come into its season. Don’t mistake me, this is no mournful occasion, the sad affair of a moment, some here today, gone tomorrow mayfly condition. I’m not speaking of God’s or humanity’s fairy tales, the ephemeral, too delicate arrangements of nature and myth. Yet there was a kind of hapless nostalgia to him, some secret knowledge. I do not think I noticed this then. How could I have done, I was a different person then. So I didn’t notice it; I only remember it. I don’t even know if the Prince was aware of it. I believe rather not. As I say, I allow him what I allow myself. Some secret knowledge, the long-term profit of the heart. Yet something, something. Got up, it might have been, in his very swagger, the peculiar, put-everyone-at-ease pomp of his self-consciousness. He was at once breezy and shy with a crowd that, knowing his habits, had gathered ea
rly in the morning or stayed up all night (some of them) in Cape Henry’s discrete shopping district on the westermost island of the long Lothian Islands chain. An anomaly, one of those freaks not so much of geography as of naming and settling. Those fifty or so nautical miles off Santa Catalina would be an example. The counterpart American village of Avalon hard by on California’s southwest coast would. Just a thirty- minute ride as the ferry floats.

  Sad as Spring’s first perfection, the trees never so beautiful again as they were in the prime joyous days of their first being though they had weeks, months, seasons, even half a year yet to green. Nor ever so ripe as in those first close- cropped days of their initial blooming.

  So I saw him but didn’t recognize him, don’t you know.

  The prince waved at me. Not the elbow, elbow, wrist wrist wrist of majesty gone easy on itself, the accustomed, practiced pacing of what had already been a long reign, but something more awkward, more attractive than that—a matter, a question of image. And, though I was surprised, I could hardly have been aware of my awareness. “Good god,” I remember thinking, “was that a prince?” Not “Was that the Prince?” Caught short, clued-in finally only by the royal retainers pretending to try to keep up. If the Prince knew it was only some dog-and-pony show he didn’t let on. Only later, in the town square (and mall and tourist trap) did I recognize him, don’t you know.

  Though I’d known he was coming of course. As did Jane, as did Marjorie. We’d even discussed our plans to go see him. Allegiant, interested, dutied, patriotic’d. (Curious, too. We forgot because we were new on the island and caught up in our individual rebeginnings.) In the square the Prince picked up his pace, as the retainers, seeming genuinely to try now, did theirs, though knowing in their accustomed souls they could never keep up but that somehow they had an obligation if not to the realm then at least to their corps, to some tradition of equerries, retainers, and handlers, knowing it would cost them nothing to be loyal, that this Prince would have his way with them no matter what they did, so that even if they did let up their merely shown-flag haste would lose out anyway to the real power of his insouciant, sincere deferentials and bluff, awkward bearing. The crowd not crowding him but fallen back as if he were some battle prince out of history, not boarding or clamoring him as if he were a rock-and-roll star, his fans not standing tiptoe, just standing back, behind the velvet ropes, not in retreat, fallen back even from me, so the Prince, seeing what was what, turned to one of us, to me in this instance, and spoke up. “Oh,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry. How inexcusably rude of me. I was just going into this shop.” “Go in, Your Highness,” I said, and, courtly as could be, nice as pie, His Highness singals, “After you.” Of course I defer. As does the Prince. As then do I. Until, in a kind of shock, the crowd signals, “Well, if it’s what His Highness wants …” So I go in. And Larry turns to the people in the road and signals “After all of you.” And passes them through like someone taking tickets. Like an usher. Like a cop directing traffic or a coach waving a runner in from third. And then goes through himself. Leaving the others behind like people lined up for the second show. Leaving the show-biz retinue behind too.

  And this occurred—— that I might have been the only non-show-biz type left in the shop, my Prince’s lone remaining bona fide witness, a fiddle if not of yeomanry then of just that much more hero-building effacement, more historic gull to the historic shill of all those drawers of the lightning; behind the elaborate lines and colorful smoke screen of all that cadre of lookouts and posted guards—— that this was just for my benefit, that I was as necessary a part of the process as the Prince himself; that all that was left in the aloe shop now were myself and the show-biz tourists got up in the lamb’s cloth of what was merely that much more retinue—— that even the wreath-and-aloe saleslady was a show-biz wreath-and-aloe saleslady. (But conflicted, too, don’t you know. Mindful that perhaps I’d been in the States too long. Where they take their drawers of the lightning even more seriously than we do in England, and almost every other person in the crowd—not counting the armed chaps on the roofs and in all the windows or the reporters who ask some of the toughest questions at the press conference—is Secret Service, SWAT, or CIA.) And, My, I’m thinking in the tropes of a paranoia turned inside out, all this attention. For little me? Why, thank you, kind sirs and mesdames, and thank you, kind Sir. Self-conscious as the recipient of a singing telegram, don’t you know, or a guest of honor, or someone not used to it at her very first Command Performance.

  I may have been blushing; I was probably blushing. Whereupon the most remarkable thing.

  He dismissed them.

  In that same efficient semaphore with which he’d passed them through. At the same time, seeing me with my banknotes in my hand, signaling me to remain behind, and freezing the show-biz wreath-and-aloe lady in her place. One look, one look did it, one all-inclusive gesture—this complicated syntax of self-assured silence. So that when the shop had cleared and he finally spoke to her, I was the only one left to hear.

  “I’m looking,” says the Prince, “for a wreath. Do you do wreaths?”

  “Oh yes, Your Highness, but we’re such a small village. The resident population can’t be but four or five thousand at most, though closer to four, I should think.”

  “Yes?” goes His Highness.

  “Just enough commissionaires to open the doors at the taxi rank, just enough porters to handle the cobble and trim of the holiday makers, just enough publicans and innkeepers, barmaids, tapsters, and potboys. Just enough ostlers. Just enough chars. Just enough buskers to sink in the streets and play their guitars outside the cinema.”

  “So?” says the Successor.

  “Just enough drivers to drive the red double-decker buses and just enough Pakis to collect your fare and hand you your change. Just enough unarmed bobbies to answer questions about directions and make sure the pubs close after last call. Just enough Tommies. Just enough of the King’s Home Guard Cavalry to stand in the sentry boxes under their bearskin busbies and challenge the tourists to provoke reactions for snapshots. Just enough men to change the guard outside the Governor’s Palace. And just enough people to pick up the post from the kiosks for day trippers to send home just for the sake of the canceled stamp.”

  “I don’t make out …” says the Heir Apparent.

  “Just enough cockney accents; just enough Liverpudlian, Yorkshire, Welsh. Just enough Scots, Sir; just enough Lincolnshire. (Though we both know, don’t we, Sire, how clannish East Englanders are and how they pretty much keep to themselves.) Just enough C of E rectors to offer up mass and call out the number of the hymn from the Book of Common Prayer. Just enough choristers …”

  “… your meaning.”

  “Well, it’s not as if we had a proper cemetery, is it, Highness?” says his subject-apparent.

  “Madam?”

  “Well, we’re an outpost of Empire, aren’t we, Prince? Closer to the States than Bermuda, we are. We drive on the left side of the road here, we do, and quainter we are than bowlers and bumbershoots. We’re an enterprise, we are.”

  “I’m not sure …”

  “You’re not sure? You’re sure.”

  “Is this the way, madam, you address your future King?”

  “Well, you’re not my King yet, you know. And really, M’lud, when push comes to shove you haven’t any real power. You can’t shut me up in the Tower or have me beheaded, can you? I mean, you’re all symbolic-like, aren’t you?

  “It’s the bargains you come for. You came for a price on the flowers. It’s your way and it’s charming, and you’re quite famous for it, but do you know what I give for a wreathing? The labor alone? The cost of all that coiling and twisting and interweaving? We’re not, as I say, a big population—three or four thousand at most, but closer to three, I should think. And no more graveyard to speak of than what fits in back of a church. And the artisans died out. And most of the personnel on this tight little fun fair of an island, this picturesque the
me park of an empire—those not gone to bush—posted back to Britain before they’re fifty. And it isn’t as if we’re equipped to lay out holiday makers, so I have to bring in extra hands, don’t I? Navvies and erks and night porters. Factoti. So I’m dead sorry, Wilshire, my wreaths have to be pricey.”

  “I’m still looking,” he says to me, “you go ahead.”

  “Some aloe, please,” I tell the woman and give over my banknote while at the same time I try to hide my cut, chafed and burning hands.

  “It’s ready,” she says, “but wasn’t it Jane’s turn, or Marjorie’s?”

  “Jane quite forgot, I’m afraid,” I said.

  “No, please,” said the Prince. “Wait and I’ll help you with that.”

  In the end he didn’t bargain with her, he didn’t even seem angry. He let her rude remarks pass like the great gentleman he was. “I’ll take that one,” he said, and pointed to a large, leafy wreath interlaced with long ropes of bright yellow flowers.

  “Yes,” said the awful woman, “it’s the only one we have, isn’t it?”

  “If you know so much about my ways,” said the Prince, “then you know I never carry money. Indeed, I hardly ever look at it. My personal equerry will take care of you.” He turned to me. “Give me that,” he said. Well, I was confused. The aloe plant was rather big, and he was already carrying his great heavy wreath. I half thought he meant to steal it from me.

  His equerry was waiting outside. All the others had gone. Not even a bobby was to be seen in that queer, translated, odd English street. No cars were there, no red double-deck buses with their extraordinarily high route numbers—I already knew there were only two routes in that tiny town and that while they took you past different points of interest, both ended up discharging their passengers at the same spot—and now the place, except for the shops on the High Street—the greengrocers, the Boots, the W. H. Smith, the Marks and Spencer, and various others—the hire purchase and estate agents and removal companies and cafes and fish- and-chips, the offtrack betting, the theatre and the cinema, et cetera—seemed not so much deserted as abandoned, evacuated even. In the distance I could just make out a residential area—— a block of flats, an occasional thatched roof, one or two County Council-looking structures.