Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  Sunday, February 9, 1992

  How Push Came to Shove

  Because we hadn’t made love since that time on the island. Not even on the yacht coming home. Not in the palace, not in the castle, not in any of the great houses we visited. For all their false walls and secret passageways, their concealed staircases and special, complicated hidey-hole arrangements, their ancient comic architecture of tryst and farce (Lawrence was a serious student of architecture and claimed that the first adulterers, at least those bold enough to commit their adulteries under the very roofs they shared with their spouses, must have been aristocrats, because only aristocrats could have absorbed the high structural costs of weekend affairs and one-night stands; he felt that rather than a mark against the highborn, all their hanky-pank had its plus side; discretion, he said, was essentially an aristocratic idea), for all the opportunity such places provided for assignation, he never once came to me in any of them. He never once came to me anywhere.

  “It’s because you’re so high-profile, isn’t it? We have to be careful.”

  We were in the unmarked, crestless Jag again.

  “I’m not afraid of the people in this kingdom. These people are my people. Why should I fear them?”

  “Look,” I said, “if you’re at all unsure, if you want to back out of this …”

  “Don’t be silly, Louise. I love you. Don’t you know that?”

  “I think you love me.”

  “I do love you. Almost from the time of our encounter in Cape Henry.”

  “You were all over me in Cape Henry.”

  I’d intended my remark as a rebuke. He hadn’t understood me.

  “Oh,” he said, “taking the aloe plant from you, that was just chivalry. And when I saw the cuts on your hands, when you explained how you got them, that was just admiration for your bravery, the sympathy endurance earns one in a difficult world. But when you teased me”—here his voice dipped—“when we made love”—and here climbed back up again to higher ground—“and I saw how you handled yourself with the press when I sprung our engagement on you, and I realized how stunningly regal you so inherently are, that, my dear Louise, that was love!”

  It was a pretty speech and, worthy or not of his noblesse oblige-obliged condescensions, brave or not, regal or not, like many women, I’m a sucker for pretty speeches, but that wasn’t what stirred me. If he had me jumping—he did, he did—it was the old business of my simple human illiteracy again, the even bigger sucker I am for men I can’t quite make out. (How brave or regal can I really be? There are gothic romance novels in my dumb-blond heart. I’m a throwback, Sid, a traitor to my liberated sisters.) For, even if I had not had the good evidence of his sexual aloofness, I would, a moment later, have had the even better evidence of his cloudy motives.

  “Anyway, Louise what do you think this courtship is all about? This shouldn’t be a factor, yet it is, and more on my part, I think, than on Father’s or Mother’s, but do you know how much money it’s cost the Crown? Why in petrol alone! In nightclubs and restaurants and theater tickets!” (In our montage, like the cold chickens, salads, cheeses, caviars, and chilled champagnes laid out on a lawn on the splendid napery from those stocked, magnificent picnic hampers.) “But cost is the least of it; more important is the fact that I’ve given the world my word (let alone the nation) that we’re engaged. And we’re entering the final phases now. Guest lists are being prepared. Our appointment calendars are being synchronized with their appointment calendars. Heads of state have been notified. Such-and-such a president from so-and-so a superpower; such-and-so a chieftain from so-and-such a third- or fourth-world country. Contracts have been let out on bid for all those commemorative soupspoons and keychains——all that licensed Royal tchotchke and whatnot, which, cared for, or merely held onto long enough and passed from one generation to the next, might one day actually become the valuable museum-quality, self- appreciating marvels of historic artifact they’re cracked up to be.

  “You must trust me, Louise, this is a very delicate time. Hath not a prince eyes? Hath not a prince hands? I feel what you feel, but preparations for the Royal Wedding proceed apace and aplomb. We can’t afford to place ourselves in compromising positions just now.”

  “Oh,” I said, dismissively, “compromising positions. Fa la la, tra la la.”

  Just then the car phone sounded its rapid sets of twin, paired, ringing gutturals, a noise peculiar to the British telephone system that always startles me, reminds me, no matter how often I hear it, of the signal for emergencies in the engine rooms of ships.

  “Yes?”

  “Larry, Alec. I rang up your Bentley and tried you in the Land Rover, but no one was home. Where are you headed? Is Louise with you? Give me your coordinates, I bet I beat you there, vroom, vroom.”

  “What do you want, Alec? This phone isn’t secure.”

  “Mary and Robin are with me, Cousin Anne is.”

  “How are you, darling?”

  From the way he reddened each time her name was mentioned, I’d long ago realized Anne must have been one of the cousins my intended had fondled and whose frocks he’d looked up as a child.

  “Hello, Anne,” he said, “I should have thought you’d know better than to get into a car with my brother.”

  “Well, you never take me anywhere.”

  “She’s teasing you, Prince,” Alec said. “She’s told me of just incredible places you’ve been together.”

  “Traffic is quite serious today,” said Larry. “This phone is not secure,” he hissed. “I’m ringing off.”

  “No no, wait,” Alec said. “It’s about your wedding. Hallo? Louise? It’s about your wedding.”

  “Hello Alec.”

  “Hello Louise.”

  “Hello Mary.”

  “Are you still sore?”

  “Hello Robin. No, no, I’m not at all actually.”

  “I didn’t mean any harm. I was drunk.” He paused. “I was drunk as a lord!” he said, and laughed heartily at his obscure little joke.

  “What do you mean it’s about the wedding?” Larry broke in.

  “Why the Royal Wedding. Your wedding.” Mary was my favorite among Larry’s siblings. Indeed, she’s the only one with whom I’m still in touch. I say this without much fear of jeopardizing her situation since she’s always been pretty open about our friendship, treating me kindly in the press, the only one of them, in fact, to have stood up for me and gone on record that she never thought I was “working” the Prince. Mary certainly doesn’t need my endorsement. Probably it would go better for her if I kept quiet about it, but in my view loyalty begets loyalty—though wasn’t it, in fact, loyalty to my idea of the Crown that allowed all this to have gone so far in the first place?—and, for whatever it’s worth, I think, though it’s untrained, Mary has quite a nice voice and, except for the fact that rap might not be the material to which her sweet little instrument is best suited, I see no reason, though she’s a Princess, she shouldn’t make a perfectly decent career in show business.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, we were thinking.”

  “Alec and me.”

  “Me too. It was my idea.”

  “It was Robin’s idea.”

  “But it’s your wedding.”

  “We’d have to clear it with you first.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Of course.”

  “No question about it.”

  “We’d never go behind your back.”

  “He’ll never go for it.”

  “Oh, Anne, we don’t know that.”

  “He’ll never go for it. You’ll see.”

  “This isn’t a secure phone.”

  “Would it be all right, do you think, if we wore, well, jeans, to the wedding?”

  “Jeans? To a Royal Wedding? In Westminster Abbey?”

  “I told you he wouldn’t go for it.”

  “Well, not jeans, or not jeans exactly. Regular morning coats and top hats for the boys, actual
ly.”

  “And gorgeous gowns for the ladies. With these ravishing big hats and really swell veils.”

  “Just cut like jeans.”

  “From stone-washed denim.”

  “Oh, it would be such fun! The Sloane Rangers would just die!”

  “Hello, Denise.”

  “Hi, Louise,” she said, and I had this image of Britain’s Royal Family stuffed into Alec’s Quantra like so many circus clowns. If George and Charlotte, preparatory to standing down, had not been off on what they must surely have thought of—the Nöel Coward King, his Nöel Coward Queen—as their final farewell world tour—after our initial meeting, and with the exception of a few subsequent appearances with them at the house of this or that duke or marquess or earl, I seldom saw them—taking their last curtain calls in Tonga and Singapore, Belfast, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth ports of call, I could comfortably have thought of them back there with the rest of the zanies.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Anne said, “he’ll never go for it.”

  “Not so fast. Give him a chance. Let him think about it.”

  “No,” Larry said. “I don’t want to think about it. It’s out of the question.”

  “You see? What did I tell you?”

  “You never know, he could have said yes.”

  “The child is father to the man,” his cousin said.

  Larry rang off.

  “What did she mean, Larry?”

  “What did he mean?”

  “What did who mean?”

  “What did he mean are you still sore?”

  “Robin?”

  “What did he mean?”

  I didn’t want to quarrel with him. So I made something up. I don’t even remember now what it was. Just some harmless white lie I passed off. To keep the peace. (Probably I picked up on the word “sore.” Because that was mostly how we spoke to one another in those days—— in all love’s thrust-and-parry, in all its stichomythic Ping-Pong tropes of engagement. Each hanging on the other’s words as if love were some syntax of Germanic delay. Because this wasn’t as it had always been with me, Sir Sid. Accustomed as I was to arias, soliloquies, lectures, speeches, promises.) Let’s say I said, “I don’t know, Larry, you know how Robin is. He probably thought he offended me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose he probably did.”

  “He drinks too much. He isn’t kind when he’s drunk. He forgets who he is.”

  “He forgets what he is.”

  “Hmn. “Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”

  I always thought of Prince Robin as the pie-faced one, of his strange, vaguely rubbery features at once sullen and cheerful like the pressed pug nose and big puffed eyes on a victim of Down’s syndrome. He reminded me rather of that actor Charles Laughton.

  Two or so years ago, when I first saw California, I remember how very surprised I was that it looked exactly how I thought it would look, and seemed, it seemed, just how I thought it would seem. This wasn’t déjà vu or any mystic sense of Tightness; the sense, I mean, that California was some fate I’d been preparing for. Often it’s nothing more than, oh, the availability of the world through all the telecommunication satellites that are constantly orbiting it, sucking up and spewing out geography across incredible distances so that nothing, not its poles, or rain forests, or the deepest trenches in its oceans, is unfamiliar to us. It is, I think, some salient hallmark stamped in perception and stuck in the blood. In the event, my years in America had largely cut me off from the hype from home, yet I knew before knowing him what Robin was like. He was a type, but we are all of us types. How could we be in the same rooms with each other if this weren’t so? We should want bars between us, the protection of cages. Robin is Robin, neither mischievous like Alec nor playful like Denise, and of course he has none of Mary’s sweetness or Larry’s sense of responsibility. What can I say? I wanted bars between us, the protection of cages.

  (What can they do to me? They don’t go to court. A few years ago an intruder was caught in Charlotte’s bedroom, sitting on her bed, watching her sleep. He was dragged off by bobbies. They searched him for weapons, asked him a few questions, and then released him. What can they do to me, Sid? I signed on to tell all and haven’t told all. — —Not yet, and they know it, so what can they do? What can they do to me, I hold all the cards. What he is, our Robin, is evil.)

  This was before any of that stuff found its way into the papers. So, playing on “sore,” I made something up. The Prince hadn’t a clue. No one had said a word about tattoos.

  Prince Robin had taken me aside.

  “Have you spoken,” he whispered, “with the Royal Peerager?”

  I mentioned the time I’d seen him in the King, his father’s, palace.

  “Yes,” Robin said, “he told me about that. He’ll be in touch with you. He has some things to impart. After you’ve seen him, I should very much like it if you would get back to me.”

  Well, I thought, this was a mystery, but it’s often in the nature of people with whom one is uncomfortable that they say enigmatic, baffling things.

  The Royal Peerager approached me at a charity ball and asked me to dance. I looked over at Larry, who was engaged in conversation with a fellow I recognized (without ever having met him) as one of his cohorts in earnest resolution. I turned back to Royal Peerager and shrugged my assent. Believe me when I tell you I’d quite forgotten Prince Robin’s puzzling statement regarding any further encounter with, in Queen Charlotte’s words, one of that “sweet assortment of jolly incumbents” who defined and so helped preserve many of the arcane rituals in our land (as one is first alarmed by, and then dismisses, the dark, abrupt remarks and elusive hints of certain—what can they do to me, their hands are tied—passive aggressives), so that I was all the more taken aback when, while we were still dancing, he began to recite, neither in conspiratorial tones nor stage whispers, in perfectly normal conversational accents, protected, I guess he would have thought, by the plain, preemptive music of the orchestra, this strange report:

  “Though they may have seen its representation a thousand times, most of the people in this realm haven’t the foggiest when it comes to the coat of arms of their own Royal Family. It could as well be Braille as heraldry for all they make of it. I say this not to disparage so much as to congratulate ourselves, for in the main it’s as well that our subjects should not too much understand the devices and emblazonments, mottoes, bends, and color schemes of their genealogical betters. It’s all right with us they haven’t mastered leeks and lilies, fess and mantling; nor can parse achievement, hatchment, or do any of the revealing, reductive mathematicals—quartering, dimidiation—of descent. They can’t tell crest from ’scutcheon, some of them, or tabard from surcoat. They’ve never learned the difference between five bears rampant and six lions crouching, nor can they decline the symbolism of twenty martlets perched on gold.

  “On balance ’tis no detriment. Else let them loose to browse the privatest pages of our diaries or knock about in any castle’s well-kept closets. Freedom’s well and good for business, yet it’s better than not the general have not the keys to this partic’l’r kingdom, or even inclination to dent the knotty code of all our chesspiece, secret zoology, personnel, and architecture.

  “Well played, Band Leader, well played indeed! Give us another!”

  All the time I’m looking at him, don’t you know.

  “Oh, listen,” he said. “Please do me the honor, my dear. This is one of my favorites.”

  In fact it may have been one of his favorites. Whereas before he’d held me in the most casual way, like a brother dancing with his sister on Cabaret Night in the salon of a cruise ship, say, now Peerager drew me tightly to him. I think I was embarrassed. Larry and his friend were still in deep discussion.

  “What,” I said, “what?”

  He was at my ear. I needn’t have worried. This old smoothy was a smooth old smoothy. His voice laughed and chuckled as it sp
oke as if it were telling me dirty stories or giving me good gossip. Indeed, he even managed to shake his head and do something almost imperceptible with his eyes, closing them for a moment by way of a signal—No, no, don’t look now, but when you get a chance …—so that people seeing us must have thought we were talking about them and, offended, turned away.

  Peerager said to me, “Hark! You’re to be his bride. Quarterly one and four: Argent, three eagles conjoined in fess gules. Quarterly two and three: Or, a King casting a knowing, sidelong glance displayed on a shamrock vert. Early in the seventeenth century the knowing glance was changed to a mask of tragedy. The tragic mask against the clover is a heraldric pun. The Mayfairs are descended from the Lears— née O’Leary—and are of Irish background.”

  “What did he tell you?” Robin asked the next time I saw him.

  “He thinks King Lear was a harp.”

  “I’ll make an appointment for you with Royal Commoner!”

  (Because what did I know, Sid? There are customs and protocols for everything, everything. Some historic, buried etiquettes of the anthropological—— stunning arcana, Grimm’s laws, Great Vowel Shifts, the cryptic, hidden, hush-hush of a billion reasons. Why A precedes B, why zed follows Y; how it is condemned men get final cigarettes— and what they were offered before there was tobacco: fruit, a chance to hear their favorite song one last time, the opportunity to speak their last words. For everything. Why there’s music at weddings and funerals. Hadn’t I been there when that bevy of jolly incumbents came calling, that sweet assortment of royal intentioners and fashion engineers and selectors of ropes—— all those messengers of the traditionals and ceremonials with their inexplicable explanations of the improbable arrangements of kings?

  (So why wouldn’t I believe him when he told me I would have to see the Royal Commoner? I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but I hadn’t known there was a Royal Taster on the payroll either, had I? Then I saw him myself—— the thin, bony guy who managed to live on a spoonful of this and a single bite of that and a mere sip of the other, keeping his mouth clean for the flavors of poisons he’d not only never yet tasted but would probably only recognize after the fact, and then just by how they differed from the ordinary taste of meat and sweets and bread and vegetables. So why shouldn’t there be a Royal Commoner, too? So far as I can see, there’s at least one of everything anyway. So why shouldn’t I believe that the office he held and the service he performed—to give instruction to commoners about to marry kings or queens or their immediate successors—maybe came up once, and never more than twice—and often never at all—during the entire course and tenure of one of these fellow’s careers?)