But downscale is not, in the scheme of things, so bad. It’s not as if she was going somewhere without good cider. So they poked fun with a sort of voyeuristic pity, but they deluded themselves into thinking that Isabella remained vaguely on the radar. Because of the football team and the attention it had brought to Green Bay, even the Ethelbalds of the world thought the city was a place quickly accessible by plane travel and adequately represented by the social arts. They did not realize, even when they looked at maps, that it rested on the southern tip of a vast and unpopulated region—a land of woods and vales where a celebrity princess and her not-really-dead husband could cavort for months, even visiting remote Native American gaming casinos in off hours without being spotted.
(The prince tried hard to love casinos as much as he loved horse racing, but he never quite succeeded. “It’s utterly random,” he would say incredulously to Isabella each time they ventured out for a night of slots. “There’s absolutely no handicapping involved at all.”)
If Isabella had announced that she was moving to an isolated Montana cabin, the tabloids of the world would have bought up the land around her and set up bureaus to keep an eye on her. But in Green Bay, they falsely assumed she was already under the eye of a vigorous and interested press, a gossipy batch of neighbors. The tabloid editors did not understand that the Green Bay press was trying to get the details of the football coach’s contract buyout, of the quarterback’s elbow surgery, and of the star linebacker’s felony charges. The tabloid editors did not realize the neighbors were busy shoveling their driveways and browsing through snowblower catalogs. Isabella wasn’t their primary concern.
So Isabella, having already pulled off one successful exile, pulled off another. She lived in hiding by appearing to live in the open. But I suppose I have gotten ahead of the story now. I should have stopped before this to tell you where Isabella had been in those two years she was gone. It explains so much, and it will become quite critical to the end of my story. I have a few secrets remaining, and the last one is the biggest, and it is my reason for writing this book.
Chapter 20
There was, in that time, a man named Jeb.
Not to sound all biblical about it, but those who know Jeb tend to speak of him in solemn, epic tones.
Jeb lived on a desert mountain that he often described as being near Nairobi, a desperate description that, for it was really near nothing. The bustling congestion of Nairobi was over three hundred miles away. Jeb liked it that way. He lived simply, without lightbulbs, running water, or any sort of worldly wealth.
Jeb had once been something of a radio celebrity in Mexico, hosting a fabulously successful polka hour under the name Juan El Baez. Despite published reports, he did not launch the surreal Mexican polka craze that was raging across the Americas at that time. In fact, he came rather late to the happy dance fad, which had gotten its start, strangely enough, in the Little Arabia neighborhood of Mexico City. (Mexico was apparently more cosmopolitan in those days than anyone on this side of the ocean imagined.)
But Jeb did a brilliant job of capitalizing on the trend, starting with his decision to include “El” as part of his radio name, a much appreciated nod to the Middle Eastern musicians who had essentially “invented” Mexican polka. He thought “El” sounded vaguely Arabic, but in a good old-fashioned Hispanic sort of way. Apparently, he was right. Because in many parts of the world, or at least in many parts of Mexico, polka fans to this day say that no one could introduce the “Fish Taco Polka” as well as the Chico Polka himself, Juan El.
Señor Baez was enough of a Mexican personality that his radical move to a life of chosen poverty should have made a splash in all the tabloids, women’s magazines, and news shows, the editors and producers of which excel at lumping unrelated tidbits into celebrity-trend stories that can then be blown all out of proportion. You know: This young actress cut her hair short; this hot pop star bought a smaller than expected mansion; and this radio personality sold all his belongings, moved to the Kenyan desert, and symbolically pared his name down to his three initials. “Simplicity,” the headlines would say, “is the next big thing.”
But Jeb’s career change was discussed in the media only obliquely and indirectly, for one unflattering reason: Everyone assumed he had lost his mind. His apparent break with reality came shortly after being dumped in a rather spectacular way by his girlfriend, the popular and quite attractive host of a Mexican cooking show. They had been a very public couple right up until the moment she announced, in a live television interview no less, that she was moving to L.A. to marry a man who became rich by investing in self-storage facilities.
Even the interviewer seemed taken aback and asked what had happened to her relationship with Juan El Baez. “Oh, him,” said the girlfriend with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Really, there’s no future in radio.”
Jeb mourned this rejection with a violent sort of grief. On one memorable occasion, he cursed during his show and said, shockingly, that he was sick of “perky polka poop.” He then broke into sobs as a sound engineer quickly faded to a commercial.
Producers of the show apologized immediately and announced that they were offering Baez some professional assistance in grief and anger counseling. Baez declined that generous offer, marching out of the station manager’s office in a dramatic way and driving straight to the airport, where he bought a ticket on the next plane out of town.
The plane happened to be going to Nairobi, and there you have it. The next thing you know, he was living in the desert, calling himself by a hillbilly name and mumbling about the evils of physical and emotional clutter. Junk mail stood as his enemy. Custom closet companies, with their false promises of organization, loomed as evil incarnate. (Perhaps you see where this is going.) Self-storage facilities were the work of the devil.
“There is no future,” he would say, “in finding more places to put your stuff. Happiness lies in getting rid of plunder.”
It was, I suppose, the right message for the right time, because citizens of the Western world truly were being plagued by an overabundance of paper products and unnecessary household items. Magazines wrote about fighting clutter in tones that suggested they were actually battling a deadly disease, and entire corporate empires were built on the notion that it’s okay to fill your closets with clothes you don’t wear, as long as you keep them in neatly labeled white plastic boxes.
In those brand-conscious, image-conscious days—when Isabella was still a young woman with a staff of people to manage her wardrobe—we were, as a culture, all about ever expanding square footage, bulging calendars, and excessively busy kitchen decor. (There existed a ghastly tendency to display in the kitchens of middle-class homes uninspired and unwieldy “collections” of chicken, cow, or pig figurines, often alongside a “coordinating” wallpaper border. Chickens? Cows? Pigs? As if anyone wants to be reminded of the barnyard while preparing food!)
That was the way of the world in those days. So Jeb’s thoughts, when posted on an anti-clutter website, hit a nerve. He spoke to people. He changed them.
A movement began, and that movement thrived. So we are now living in spare and enlightened times and have been for a few decades. Simplicity did become the next big thing. But whenever anyone writes about this change, it is Isabella, not Jeb, whom they use as their example. They point to her self-imposed exiles from Glassidy Castle and her eventual decision to dress mostly in desert hues. (Expensively designed and carefully tailored desert hues, for the most part, but still.) That’s why Isabella’s face graces the covers of all those “faces of the century” books that are coming out these days. She represents the “changing values of our times,” at least according to the editors, who invariably slap Isabella’s youthful face (they always use a photo from her youth) on the cover of an otherwise dreary collection of ponderous essays about important but ugly and badly dressed men.
I suspect they do this for cynical reasons (Isabella sells books). But they are partially right. Pe
ople have, on the whole, come to emulate Isabella’s solid colors, clean lines, uncluttered shelves, empty drawers. You could argue that it’s just fashion, subject to change as soon as the next magazines are out. But I think, I hope, that it is also a bit more than that. Maybe people truly have discovered, as Jeb did there in the desert, the peace that comes with living simply. They have cleaned out their collections, purged unused files, whittled down their wardrobes to a few simple, classic, well-made, and easily interchanged pieces. In the process, maybe, they have found a similar simplifying of their outlook. They have become less greedy and more gracious, less harried and more humble, less proud and more patient. The change is permanent. As it was for Isabella and Jeb and me.
Or maybe not. In a few years, we may be collecting cows again.
I don’t know. And I can assure you that Isabella does not, either. I love her like a sister, like an icon, like a friend. But she is not, I am telling you, a great thinker. This is a woman who needed the advice of Bruce Springsteen lyrics to pick out a ball gown. Thank goodness she was not in charge of national security.
Perhaps that is the nature of icons. They sum up their times so well not because they deliberately set out to do so, but because if there is any truth to the idea that epochs have moods, then some famous people living in that time are bound to match the mood. And the ones who do so the best are the ones who do so obliviously.
But Jeb, dear Jeb, was a great thinker, a careful and deliberate man. His philosophy of life may have been influenced by his broken heart and wounded pride, but it was not casual or oblivious. Soon after his thoughts were posted on the Web, he was being joined in the desert by a steady stream of lively converts, all of whom sold off their barnyard cookie jars, pared their names down to one syllable, lived on a simple diet of corn mash, and wore sackcloth. Usually, they would return home after a half-dozen years or so and become examples of peace to their neighbors and friends.
I suppose you’ve figured out by now that one of them stayed for just two years and returned to become an example of peace for the entire world. She came in with the longest name but was known by the least personal name of any of Jeb’s guests. Her Royal Highness the Princess of Gallagher, Isabella Cordage, was—during her time in the desert—known simply as Her.
Chapter 21
Isabella told me she couldn’t sleep her first night back from Africa. She felt so ill at ease being in the castle again. The bed was nice, that was true enough. When her head sank into the down pillow, she wondered for a moment if she had slept at all during the previous two years. She vowed then that she would never, ever go back to the desert.
But all the stuff? All the piles of decorative pillows and the canopy and the forty-eight original oil paintings that seemed to cover every inch of the room and the vase of twenty-four “whispery pink” tulips and an assortment of handy items on the bedside table, from the magnifying glass and the tissues, to the crystal pitcher of water and matching goblet, to the alarm clock and the manicure kit and Queen Regina’s recent autobiography, For the Sake of Country: One Woman’s Story.
Isabella reported, with uncharacteristic hyperbole, that she had looked around the room and “freaked out.”
That was, I suppose, my first sign that her years with Jeb had truly affected Isabella, had awakened in her a sincere desire to live simply, at least relatively.
Most of Jeb’s followers were skeptical of her. Perhaps the skepticism goes without saying. “She’s got a palace full of knickknacks waiting for her at home,” the others would whisper while collecting water from the well. “What did she give up?”
I, too, initially assumed Isabella’s interest in Jeb’s camp was purely practical. We were sophisticated women of the world, the princess and I. We weren’t fooled by Jeb. We knew his crusade to put self-storage companies out of business had nothing to do with the Zen-like peace of a minimalist lifestyle. And I suppose he knew that the princess and I wanted to live at his camp for reasons that had nothing to do with him.
Isabella needed a place to stay until the dust settled. A place without cameras or phones or people interested in selling stories to the tabloids and making lots of money. Jeb’s camp and Jeb’s followers, with their vows of poverty and lack of phone service, suited her purpose perfectly.
She did little during her first weeks at the camp to suggest that she was a true convert. Her usual royal reserve—the prized ability to hide any public displeasure and to feign interest and enthusiasm for any task—faltered in the desert. Perhaps if Geoffrey had not died during the attempt to fake Rafie’s death, Isabella would have pulled it off better. Perhaps she was distracted by grief. Whatever the reasons, she stumbled early on in the camp. Once she embarrassed herself at dinner by absentmindedly asking for salt (which Jeb considered an unnecessarily fancy spice). Twice, when making sandals, she caused a camp scandal by rejecting the gathered reeds for being the wrong shade to accompany the camp’s wool garments.
Not long after we arrived, the members of the camp sat around the fire and shared accounts of their newfound love of minimalism. Predictable stuff, really. One woman talked about how, in her old life, she had been chronically irritated and unhappy with her small kitchen, which provided inadequate storage for her souvenir mugs. “I wasted time longing for a bigger house, lusting after expensive kitchens in designer catalogs,” she said. “Why didn’t I just throw out some of those ugly mugs?”
Meanwhile, a man sobbed as he talked about how the pursuit of worldly wealth had taken him away from his kids. “I kept buying them toys,” he said. “I wish I’d just played with them.”
I was eyeing the crowd nervously. “I came here because the princess told me to,” didn’t seem to be the right answer.
Isabella’s turn came first. She stared silently into the fire for a moment. It had been only a few weeks since the crash. She was not yet herself again. “I had a lot back home,” she finally whispered. “Most of it was rather lovely. I enjoyed it.”
The others were shifting nervously. This was not the sort of thing you were supposed to say. Even I knew that, and I wasn’t myself yet, either.
“But I don’t deserve nice things,” she said. She shivered, nodded. “This is my penance.”
Her words did not go over well at all. Jeb’s followers didn’t believe in giving up things as self-punishment. They believed in giving up things because things were not worth having. The crowd mumbled, grumbled, harrumphed, and splintered into shocked and angry clusters after Isabella’s answer. People talked about it for weeks afterward.
“What’s she doing here?” they’d ask. Occasionally, some of the more hotheaded members of the camp would suggest that Jeb had been paid in some way to hide Isabella, and despite all his talk of giving up worldly belongings, he had a cell phone buried in his hut and a castle waiting for him somewhere. But I don’t think any of them believed that, not as the decades passed and Jeb stayed in the desert. As time wore on, they had to ask themselves this: If Jeb has a castle waiting for him, why doesn’t he go to it?
I confess I came to respect and admire Jeb, despite his tenuous hold on reality. I came to think of him as a good, even holy, man. I suppose it’s inevitable that if you spend years following a set of principles, even if you do so for cynical and self-serving reasons, something of the truth of those principles—assuming there is at least a modicum of truth—will rub off on you. Maybe Jeb found that the truth in his message—“less is more,” basically—somehow sanctified him as time wore on. Apparently, Isabella did, too.
Isabella eventually stopped talking about simplicity as punishment. I think she, like the woman at the campfire with the formerly crowded cupboard, actually came to enjoy a less cluttered life, one that could be supported without a castle staff. In Bisbania, for example, she had two full-time shoe clerks who maintained, repaired, and rotated her shoe collection. By the time she got to Green Bay, she was happy with one small closet full of shoes, which she supervised herself. “You wouldn’t believe how nice
it is,” she told me once, “to just walk in, grab some brown pumps, and be out the door.”
(A fine argument for neutral shoes, perhaps, but this is not as frightfully common as it sounds. Remember, please, that in Isabella’s case, brown always matched her outfit. It’s not as if she was throwing on some tan sandals with a burgundy print skirt and calling it “good enough.”)
In fact, after we left Kenya, Isabella refused to talk about the camp in anything other than fiercely nostalgic ways. She would not critically analyze Jeb’s message or his lifestyle. She never let on that she knew he was crazy as a loon. She utterly ignored my feeble attempts to make light of the difficult time we had there.
I would joke about the inability to engage in proper dental care. “A few more months, and our teeth would have looked like the royal dogs’,” I’d say.
I would joke about the lack of hot water and antiperspirant. “It was like living in the Dark Ages,” I’d say. “Or maybe France.”
I would expect an appreciative giggle but got nothing. Maybe a bored sigh. Then she would launch into a glowing monologue about the peace of the African desert or a sour complaint about the overabundance of collectibles that filled her own country and all of Europe and especially America. “There is,” she told me during one of our frequent phone conversations, “this utterly outrageous pony-print fad going on here.” (I was back in Bisbania, and Isabella seemed to enjoy regaling me with this sort of bemusing American atrocity.)
“I went shopping yesterday,” she said, “and there was a display in which an entire room was styled with pony print: sofa, rug, lamp shades.”
Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle Page 15