Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  The press was happy to give Isabella all the credit for this self-improvement fad. In one column, Ethelbald Candeloro called her “the princess who launched a thousand hobbies.”

  I was, in my own way, as surprised as Rafie was. All in all, Isabella had been a mopey and depressing presence during our time in Africa. But reuniting with Rafie seemed to do wonders for her mood. (Wearing more comfortable clothes probably didn’t hurt, either.) She really did hit her stride there in America. And she did it all without any advice from the Boss. (At least as far as I know, although I suppose she could have searched the lyrics herself in a pinch.)

  Maybe she was energized by the crowds that had greeted her while she was attending the king’s funeral and Iphigenia’s coronation events. Or perhaps her newfound energy came, simply, from eating again. I wondered sometimes if she was trying to fill up her new life, to make sure she didn’t waste a moment of the time that Geoffrey had died to give her. Or did her remarkable pursuit of broadened horizons reflect something darker than that? Was she trying hard to stay busy, too busy to think about what she had lost? Was she trying to fill an aching void?

  I don’t know. But I do know that her hobbies would have been her own little secret if not for the work of Joplin Hughes, a photographer of little experience and less reputation who arrived in Green Bay soon after Isabella did.

  Joplin possessed no historical perspective on the royal family and displayed no particular fondness for the princess. His interest was only in making a little money, just enough, perhaps, to pay off his student loans and invest in better photographic equipment.

  He ended up doing a good bit better than that, happily earning an upper-middle-class living in a lower-middle-class kind of town by documenting Isabella’s manic series of hobbies and her more ordinary exploits: trips to the grocery, that teary episode involving her futile efforts to chip away ice from her mailbox, the rather infamous outing in a shorter-in-back-than-she-realized “sandy-colored” miniskirt. The European tabloids snapped up those sorts of photos regularly and at a fair price, though thankfully not so fair as to attract more aggressive competitors.

  I say “thankfully” because Joplin’s lack of aggressive ambition is the only reason that his presence did not spell disaster for the princess and the not really dead prince who shared her home. Joplin was a singularly nonconfrontational, unquestioning type. He played by gentlemanly rules. If Isabella stepped out the front door, if she jogged on public pathways, if she dared enter a retail establishment, she would be photographed. But he never tried to get a glimpse of her interior courtyard. He was too lazy to note that she seemed to be buying at least twice as many groceries as a woman her size would eat. He did not waste time wondering about the shadowy figure whom he sometimes saw peering from an attic window. (“Probably a guard,” Joplin said to me once. “Or maybe a ghost. That pilot who killed her husband probably comes back to bug her now.”)

  In short, Joplin did not really care about Isabella. He didn’t care about the themes of her life, and he didn’t care about what she did or didn’t do, as long as she continued to look fabulous while she did it. Or close enough to fabulous that he could, with a little digital manipulation, help her along. (So if you were one of the millions of women who were driven to the gym by that sandy-colored-miniskirt photo, rest assured that while Isabella looked, in my humble opinion, perfectly presentable in that miniskirt, she did not look quite as wow as she did in the famous photo.)

  I don’t know if Isabella ever realized the help she was getting in this regard. She officially reacted to Joplin’s latest photographs with a bored “When will he go away?” sigh, but I often noticed a certain satisfaction in her voice. “Really, you know, he shouldn’t shoot me from behind so much,” she said during a phone chat not long after a rather attractive shot of her snowshoeing in a cute “mushroom-colored” ski suit that showed off all her assets and sparked one completely inappropriate headline.

  “It’s just so unnecessary,” Isabella said, trying to sound displeased. “It’s not like it’s hard to get me to turn around. A simple ‘Yoo-hoo, miss’ will usually do it. I’m quite approachable, you know. That’s always been written about me. ‘Very approachable.’ Ethelbald Candeloro said that in one of the first stories about me. The engagement story, wasn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer, but I was smiling. Apparently, despite her protestations to the contrary, she had missed the fawning attention of her old life while in Africa. At least that was my read on the situation. If an inappropriate but flattering headline could get her this worked up, she must be like the rest of us in our middle age, wondering occasionally if we are lovely, thankful to get a hint that we are.

  “I guess I shouldn’t complain,” she said, not seeming to notice my silence. “It’s a nice enough photo—not like that ghastly one they printed of Genia’s backside a few months ago. Do you think she works out at all anymore?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Hmmm.” She pretended to consider things for a moment. “Still, you’d think if this Joplin fellow is going to make so much money off me, he’d at least flag me down once, just to properly introduce himself.”

  But I was the only one of the two of us who really got to know Joplin.

  It was during that summer visit, which, as I said, was a little awkward from day one. I felt uncomfortable about having Milo around Isabella. And Rafie, too, for that matter. But the prince and princess seemed oblivious to my discomfort and took turns making over Milo in the extravagantly kind but distracted and vague way that childless couples so often display around children.

  “So she’s walking now,” Rafie said, as if this were remarkable for a three-year-old. “Look at her go! So sure on her feet! I’m sure she’ll become a football star.”

  “It’s called soccer here, dear,” Isabella replied. “And it’s a dreadful way to make a living, running around the world in badly tailored shorts. Milo wouldn’t stand for that at all. She has quite the sense of style, you know.” Isabella addressed that last comment to me, as if I would not have already noticed.

  “I saw Milo dressing a doll the other day,” she continued. “She put green and pink together in a way that would have knocked Candeloro dead. Simply stunning. And she’s bright, too. Have you seen the way she watches television?”

  I cringed and glanced at Rafie. I was afraid he would disapprove, despite his own growing interest in televised entertainment.

  Isabella didn’t notice my reaction. “Yesterday,” she went on, “Milo was watching that show—what’s it called? Blue’s Clues? Highly educational.” She turned to Rafie to add, “We should get something like that started in Bisbania.”

  There was a moment of stilted silence, as there always was when Isabella would accidentally suggest a royal pursuit for the couple, apparently having forgotten that Rafie was “dead” and she was no longer a princess.

  “Well, of course she’s bright,” Rafie said, breaking the silence. “How could she not be?”

  Another awkward silence. He had surely started to say, “Look at who her parents are.” Isn’t that what people say? But Milo’s parentage was not a subject any of the three of us wanted to broach as we sat together, each tortured by some guilty knowledge or proud suspicion. Or was it proud knowledge and guilty suspicion? Some of both, I suppose.

  “Aren’t you worried that Milo’s not talking enough?” I asked finally, changing the subject. But Rafie gave a dismissive wave and flipped on a game. His lack of interest in Milo’s language skills surprised me, given his obsession with speech development and given that the only active parental interest he had taken in his daughter was to insist that she learn the difficult official Bisbanian language, which was useless to anyone not in the nobility of that country.

  I thought she should have been speaking more and worried that studying that ugly consonant-heavy language was confusing the child, though the language experts I consulted said that was unlikely. Still, that summer she had coined the word �
��pleasably” in an apparent effort to use the Bisbanian adverbial form of the English word. It worried me so much that I called the pediatrician—I was, in retrospect, a bit of an anxious mother—but he said she was merely trying to reconcile the grammar rules of two languages and that she would work it out quickly. An assessment that Rafie, with his speech pathology experience, shared when pressed.

  Isabella, however, found it highly irritating. Like most modern Bisbanian royals, she had never cared for the old language. I’m sure she was puzzled by Rafie’s desire for Milo to learn the language and by my decision to honor that request. She became somewhat cranky about the whole issue. “Can’t she speak English?” she asked one day in an irritated way. (Milo had just called out, “Faster, pleasably,” as Isabella and I were taking turns pushing the gargantuan stroller around the neighborhood.)

  Isabella’s question annoyed me, needless to say. But I didn’t get to answer, because at that moment the photographer Joplin pulled up. The sight of him filled me with all the aggressive hostility that only motherhood could bring out in a normally unassuming person like myself. I was terrified that he would take and publish a photo of Milo, prompting the gossip columnists to start talking about how much the child recently spotted with the princess resembled the “late” prince.

  So, filled with righteous indignation, I marched right up to Joplin and knocked on the window of his sporty little car. “My daughter is only a child,” I said when he rolled down his window. “And she doesn’t need the likes of you taking her picture.” I thumped his camera with my thumb, prompting Isabella to gasp and look off into the distance in an embarrassed way. She had never seen me like this. Besides, she had long ago lost any sensitivity to the indignity of being photographed by strangers.

  “Snap the princess at the grocery,” I continued with a huff. “That’ll suit your purposes well enough.”

  Joplin stiffened and looked stunned. He had never, ever been accused of being overly zealous. In fact, editors were always saying the photos were not zoomed in enough and that he should work harder to get shots from inside Isabella’s home.

  Sensing the discomfort of both the princess and the photographer, I regretted starting off on such a confrontational note. But rather than admit my mistake, I launched in further, attempting in some sick way to justify what was an indefensible tone. “Just because you muck around in the scum,” I said, “doesn’t mean you have to drag children into the muck with you.”

  Joplin stared. Isabella coughed and let her eyes shift from the distant skyline to her own feet.

  I cleared my throat. Paused. I wanted to stop but somehow couldn’t. I said, “So back off.” And then pitifully added, “Uh, buster.”

  By this point, I realized that I had gone beyond all hope of redeeming myself and was relieved when Milo helped me out of the mess. “Mommy,” she called from the stroller, which I had left parked a few yards off. “Mommy, say ‘pleasably.’”

  I blushed finally. Isabella cringed. Joplin laughed.

  “Well, little lady,” he said. “That’s a good suggestion. That just might help her get what she wants.”

  And then, inexplicably, he asked me if I’d like to go get a beer, a question I had not heard in a good many years. It was not an invitation that anyone at the castle ever extended. (The royal family considered the beverage too German and preferred to stick with mixed drinks, although beer was sometimes discreetly served to foreign guests who expected it.) During my youth in America, the question was common enough but was usually not posed to married women. So I had not been asked out in this way since before I married Geoffrey. And that was arguably a lifetime ago and felt like longer still.

  So I blushed again and stammered that, well, uh, why not. (The obvious reasons why not—that I had just told the man off and called him a scum mucker and, perhaps worse, “buster”—did not immediately leap to mind.)

  Isabella and Rafie were enthusiastic babysitters, though astonished to have the opportunity.

  “A date?” Raphael said. He glanced at me, then Isabella. “With a commoner?”

  “I don’t know if it’s a date, exactly—” I began in a feeble manner.

  “Mae is a commoner, too, dear,” Isabella said, interrupting in a way that made me bristle, although she was only stating the obvious and I had not known what I was about to say anyway.

  But Isabella did not approve of the date, either.

  “I can’t imagine why he asked you out,” she said, watching me as I looked through one of her smaller closets for a suitable jacket to borrow. “He’s been taking pictures of my backside for months and never even introduced himself.”

  “You do have a husband,” I said in what I thought was a rather pointed way.

  “But this Joplin chap doesn’t know that,” Isabella said, missing my point. “He thinks my husband is dead.”

  (If you think this is a rather tacky complaint to make to the person whose husband really was dead, then I share your sentiment. But I didn’t let it bother me that night, giddy as I was with excitement.)

  I did so enjoy myself with Joplin, though he was easily fifteen years my junior. It reminded me, dare I say it, of that wonderful first interview with Geoffrey, the one that was supposed to be about family-owned businesses but ended up being all flirtatious giggles and sly asides. Joplin and I talked and laughed and gazed into each other’s eyes a bit. And the thing was that I never had one moment of awkward explanation or discomfort.

  Joplin did not ask me how I knew the princess or why I was visiting or how I came to have a daughter or if I’d ever been married before. No, no, no . . . We talked for hours but without ever asking the most fundamental questions of each other.

  We talked about the advances in photographic technology and about how bad tattoos look in pictures. We discussed the perils of poor posture. But he also indulged me in conversations about my own interests, allowing me to go on and on about how inaccurate it was for someone, say the author of my most recent review, to describe chick lit as a “failed genre.”

  “Failed? Failed?” I said, perhaps feeling a bit tipsy from the beer and figuring that after my speechifying at the park, I couldn’t scare him off anyway. “It sold more books than that reviewer ever sold, that’s for sure.” My Americanisms were slipping back in full force. “How many millions must you sell before you’re a successful genre!”

  Joplin, who was wearing a snug turtleneck that showed off his strong arms rather nicely, grinned and said I was right and, I do believe, called me “babe” a time or two.

  For the rest of that Green Bay visit, I took to smiling in what I fancied to be my most engaging way every time I ventured into public with Isabella, in case Joplin happened by with his camera. I confess with some regret that I would meet his eyes, and the two of us would exchange knowing, snide expressions whenever Isabella did something too, well, royal.

  For example, we both smirked when she used a handkerchief to flip the handle of a public drinking fountain. I put my hand over my mouth and let my eyes laugh meaningfully when she insisted on clutching her purse in her hand, meaning that she could not carry as many groceries as the commoners in her company—me, for example—who would sling their common purses over their common shoulders like common pack mules.

  It was cruel. I probably should have been ashamed. But Isabella was on my turf now. All those times she had exchanged glances with Iphigenia or Rafie or, most important, Geoffrey. I suppose I had never forgotten all those days at the castle when I was the amusing sidekick, the pitiful rube. I said Isabella had become my best friend. I claimed all that was behind us. But when Joplin came along, I jumped at the chance to catch the eyes of a man and share a joke at Isabella’s expense. I confess I enjoyed it.

  As far as I know, the only words that Isabella and her mythmaker, Joplin, ever exchanged were on the night of my second date with him. He picked me up at Isabella’s door. (Rafie was, obviously enough, hiding someplace in the recesses of the “cabin,” probably with a game o
n.) I was just about to formally introduce Joplin to the princess when Isabella interrupted.

  “Must you always run my photos next to those of Her Majesty?” she said somewhat abruptly. She did not specifically mention the hair issue, but I knew she had been fretful about being outdone by Iphigenia. The queen’s hair was being quietly styled in those days by the finest Parisian beauticians, who had fled to Bisbania when a shaving craze rocked France and nearly bankrupted them. Meanwhile, Isabella was forced to make do with a salon in the Green Bay Mall called “Tresses for Lesses.”

  “It’s not like I’m related to Genia anymore,” said Isabella.

  The photographer looked a bit amused. “I don’t really control where the photos are placed, Your Highness,” he said.

  “I suppose you don’t,” Isabella said, sighing in a dramatic way. “But perhaps you could explain to your editors,” she persisted. “It’s not like we’re sisters. We’re only former sisters-in-law, and I’m just a commoner again. You shouldn’t even call me ‘Your Highness.’”

  Joplin said, “I’ll pass along your concerns.” Then he paused—I’m not sure if it was a pause for effect or if he was merely struggling for a better term and failing—before adding, “Your Highness.”

  Isabella was clearly frustrated. She looked tired and wished us a good night as Milo clung to her leg, pointing in the direction of the indoor pool and crying out, “Pleasably.”

  As we walked out to the car, Joplin met my eyes, raised one brow, and winked. It melted my heart. I winked back.

  I think that is when my post-Geoffrey life truly began, the moment I exchanged winks with a younger man. Isabella and Rafie wanted me to stay as far from Joplin as possible, and I suppose they were right to want that. But at that moment, for the first time in a long, long time, I did not at all care what Isabella and Rafie wanted.