Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  “It seems we must pay a hundred pence on the pound to the tick,” he told the fellow. “Organise it for me, would you? There’s a lad. Oh, and take this for me, Colin, I’m assisting the girl.”

  He handed the wreath over to his equerry.

  He relieved me of the aloe plant and, exposing my raw, rubbed hands, said, “Oh, your poor hands.” He broke off a leaf and squeezed out its white juices. Laying the plant down, he rubbed the stuff across my palms and the back of my hands. He spread it up and down my fingers. It was as sticky as sperm.

  “You’re not a tourist then,” he said, chatting me up like any young man any young girl.

  I saw what was up, I knew what was what. “This isn’t some droit du seigneur thing, is it, Your Peerage?”

  “I hate that,” said the Prince.

  “What do you hate?”

  “All those awful ‘Your This’ and ‘Your That’ jokes. Calling me ‘Highness,’ calling me ‘Wilshire.’ ‘M’lud.’ Calling me ‘Sire.’ Calling me ‘Peerage.’ Having a prince on. She was right, though, that dreadful woman. I am ‘symbolic-like,’ I have no real power. It’s almost the start of the next century. People have had it with Royals. They’re starting to agitate for reforms. We can’t say we blame them.”

  He suddenly seemed boyish, he suddenly seemed shy.

  “Say, you’re not one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes, are you?”

  “What if I were?”

  “Well, I should be very sorry to know it, My Lord Grace,” I said, teasing him.

  (Flirting! I was actually flirting! Not only for the first time in years, but with someone whose power, symbolic or not, was as real to me, or to my outraged class-conscious blood, as it might have been not so many centuries before when he could have shut me up in the tower, or had me beheaded, or made me his strumpet. Am I getting warm, Sir Sid?)

  “Lawrence! My name is Lawrence, and if someone doesn’t call me by it soon, I shall go over the wall!”

  “‘Up the wall,’” I corrected.

  “Over it, by God bl--dy f---ing he-l! Over it!”

  “Oh, Prince,” I said, by which I meant speak to me, make yourself clear, help me to understand.

  “Well you would do,” he said as if reading my mind, “if you spent any only three days filling the appointments on the Court Calendar. Any only three? Any only two. One!

  “I’m young. Not yet thirty. It isn’t that I’m bored— though I’m bored—so much as exhausted. And these tours are the worst. I put on a good show, I give them a run for their money. Well, you saw! It would kill a normal man, what I do. I’m like a trained athlete. But there’s just so much even a trained athlete can take. During the Season I put in a half hour at a Ball, then rush on to the next. And the next. And the next. I mingle and mingle and mingle. And always with some aide-de-camp or plenipotentiary two decades older than myself at my ear and whispering the names of those I must greet as if they were state secrets. What I need is someone at the other ear giving me the names of all those plenipotentiaries and aides-de-camp. Well, you saw. I called him ‘Colin.’ My equerry. That wasn’t Colin. Colin is heavier.

  “But these tours are exhausting. They take it out of one.

  “Hither’d in America forty miles in a motorcade to watch two innings of a ballgame, and yon’d to take one course at a banquet.

  “And all the time working out our rehearsed idiosyncrasies. Well, you saw. One young prince was famous for trying to perfect a steam-powered perambulator most of his adult years. And there was another, this royal was owed a permanent crown for a back tooth. When she died the monarch who succeeded her insisted the work be completed by the dentist. I understand the poor man had to pry the dead queen’s jaws open in order to replace the temporary with the permanent crown. He delayed his mother’s burial for thirty-five hours until the dentist who’d been working on her could make good on the crown.”

  “How mean, how awful for the dentist.”

  “Not really. The fellow got a ‘By Appointment to HBM’ plaque out of it and the new king earned a reputation for being frugal.

  “So you see. It isn’t so easy being in my position.”

  “There’s lots have it worse.”

  “Are there? Do they? Oh, I hope so!”

  Sunday, January 19, 1992

  How We Got Engaged

  “Lord Mayor Miniver, My Lord and Lady Lewes. Anthony Fitz-Sunday, Right Honorable MP from the Lothian Chain. Miss Bristol, honored guests, loyal subjects, and welcome friends. We would be remiss if we did not take the opportunity today to tell you how very, very glad it makes us feel to be home. Even though till this morning we had never set foot on your beautiful island, Cape Henry, or, indeed, as much as glimpsed the Lothians on the horizon like so many gray serpents at the bottom of a spyglass.

  “We were ‘too young’ to accompany His Royal Highness, our father, when he visited these islands with Her Royal Highness, our mother, in the sixties, or to accompany them on their second tour when they returned in the seventies, by which time we were engaged in our training at the Royal Naval Colleges at Dartmouth and Greenwich. For the reason we did not come with them on His and Her Royal Highnesses’ yacht on its famous round-the-world cruise in the sixties was not, as the story that was put out at the time had it, that we were ‘too young,’ but that, even at five, when most children that age have already become jaded by the roundabout and demand to be taken on thrill rides at Battersea Park that might put off men and women four and five times older, we had not yet found our sea legs. Now it will not do, of course, for a future King of England not to find his sea legs. After all, what is it they say—‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves …’?

  “But our theme is coming home, pride, gladness, the almost physical release one feels in finding oneself in the bosom of one’s kind, within, as it were, all the warming fires of consanguine blood, all the …

  “Pardon us. We are no metaphysical prince and the last thing on our mind today is speculation, let alone attempting to fit such speculation to a lofty rhetoric. Henceforth, we shall endeavor to banish from our speech that which as merely Prince we had only arrogated anyway—— the royal, we mean, pronoun, and address you properly, with ‘I,’ with ‘me,’ with ‘my’ …”

  And I, though I was close enough to him to have heard his words—in a front-row seat, actually—even without benefit of the various microphones on the lectern before him that fed the words into the public-address and other equipment, one mike, I guessed, for radio, one for TV, another perhaps for the local archives, and still one more for the high-resolution Minicam machinery used by the crew that traveled with him in order to prepare a documentary on

  Lawrence for French TV—— all the time thinking: Miss

  Bristol? Miss Bristol?, and parsing the eloquent syntax of the name’s placement between the Right Honorable MP from the Lothian chain and all those loyal subjects, honored guests, and welcome friends.

  “… and because I do not feel symbolic here in what is neither protectorate nor commonwealth, republic nor state, hegemony nor league nor loose association. Not confederation or jurisdiction, not even this, well, not Canada, with— Their Majesty’s faces on the money or no—all its pretensions to home rule, but only, quite simply, this honest-to-God home, a place which actually has its own MP—— this vestige and outpost, this geographical quirk, like an outbuilding, say, as accessory as Northern Ireland or Wales. …”

  Thinking, Miss Bristol, Miss Bristol?

  “… where I am not just passive witness, watching the ritual dances, accepting the flowers, the grayish leis of rotting bones and teeth, hearing the tuneless, gibberish chants to the arrhythmic, asyndeton claps on human skin and heads like the pat-down hand search of someone suspicious picked out of a line filing through Customs. But home, at home, taking my ease, feeling at ease, and laying this wreath at the tomb of Captain Spears-Henry out of ordinary common courtesy, not ceremoniously, but rather like a guest bringing a bottle of table wine
to his hostess at a dinner party.”

  Thinking, wondering, trying to translate the priorities—— after the Lord Mayor and nobs and hons, but before the gentry, all those captains of all that cottage industry which was the reason the town existed at all; before the spouses; before the Anglophiles over from California and up from Mexico for the day. Miss Bristol? Miss Bristol?

  “Yet I would not have you think Cape Henry is just another stopover on my voyage. Indeed not. For me it will forever have its associations, even its historic associations, even—dare I express it?—its romantic ones. For it is here, in this lovely place, that I have the pleasure and honor of announcing my engagement and of introducing my fiancée to you.

  “Miss Bristol? Louise, darling, would you please join me on the rostrum? Our friends so very much want to meet you.”

  For a moment nothing happened at all. Then there was this pure reflex noise of reaction, almost, I should imagine, like the sound on a battlefield when flashes of light are followed by the pop of shells—— some inside-out physics of sound and light. One could hear the motor-driven cameras, this buzz of photography as everyone in the crowd turned and snapped pictures of everyone else, clicking off random, indiscriminate images, shaving their odds, wasting their film, hoping that if they just took enough pictures the chance of taking the right one and of catching the pleased Louise, whoever she might be, would be just that much more enhanced. Even the French camera crew wheeled, recklessly aiming their Minicams. It was the din of farce.

  The press could not buy up all of them. There must still be, in private collections, at least fifty photographs and a dozen videos of my at-first-startled, then bewildered, and finally annoyed, face.

  Louise was not in the least pleased.

  “Come up, come up,” commanded the Prince and, when I did not move, actually started to clap his hands, leading the applause, exactly as if he were an entertainer in a club trying to embarrass a member of the audience into coming up on stage with him.

  I was not pleased, I was not embarrassed. If anything, it was out of some vestigial patriotism I joined him. I swear to you, loyalty was what first got me into this fix.

  I let him take my hand. I let him hold me. I let him kiss me in public. I kissed him back. I swear to you, it was out of duty I did it, this old atavistic, juvenile echo of my first impressions of the Crown, of God and Country.

  In the same fashion I stood passively by as he explained to our countrymen the history of crossover blood, of kings and commoners. In the same fashion still, I held my tongue while the s-- of a b---- went on about what a boon it was for the imperial stock to indulge such marriages. I think I was visibly shaken only when he announced that he had obtained his parents’ prior consent to make this engagement.

  (All right, Sid, he’d comforted me. Are you satisfied? Those spermy juices of my aloe plant on my palms and fingers. What, did you think I was stone? I’m not stone, I wasn’t stone. Are you stone, are your readers? Why, then, do they turn these pages? So I’m not stone. Nor any pedestaled female woven of ivory by some Pygmalion. You men. Though I’ll say this for him—— he comforted me. H-- 1, even if he wasn’t Pygmalion, he could have been some perfect prince of massage!

  (Why did you give me that check? No one’s perfect. My failed and tragic love affair, remember? That sent me packing from England off to the States to put some distance between my heart and its circumstances? For what I thought would be only six months, but which in the event …?

  (All right, Sid, we’d d--- the ---d! W-’- done the deed, I say. There, are you satisfied?

  (But it didn’t have to be fifty thousand pounds now, did it? It didn’t even have to be the Prince. All it had to be was a woman, any woman. Any woman owning up. Any woman owning up to what she put there and then what he put there. Whatever it was that sent me packing in the first place. Whoever it was. Or whatever it was I did with whoever it was I did it with during my hiatus, or exile, or expatriation, or whatever you want to call it, in the States. Because I’m not stone. You don’t pay a stone fifty thousand pounds just to know who’s thrown what where. I’m telling you. You men!)

  Fortunately, I’d dressed for the occasion (even though I didn’t know what the occasion was going to be, even though I didn’t know I was the occasion I was dressing for), and had on a flowery silk print dress, with a stylish but oh- so-proper hemline, with matching high-heeled shoes and a large, wide-brimmed straw hat. I fancy I seemed rather like a prince’s fiancée and would have looked at home at Ascot, under a tent at Henley for the boat race, or at any royal garden party, but was as overdressed for this lot—because outpost or not, home or not, even England or not, it was still the provinces—of tourists, day trippers, and holiday makers, in their blue jeans, sportswear, and bathing costumes, as the Prince himself in his bespoke suits, custom ties, and handkerchiefs, and all his never-to-be-broken-in, throwaway shoes, might have seemed before a band of Fiji Islanders performing their ceremonial fire dances, or rain- making, or sacrificial bloodlettings or somesuch, and that he’d been at such rhetorical pains to distinguish them from just moments before. (And I’ll tell you this, Sir Sid; one of the downsides of being a prince, or his fiancée either, is that you’re never quite comfortable in the clothes you wear. And between the fittings and all those public appearances one’s always making, you hardly have time to breathe, or—pardon my French—find a spare moment to go to the W.C. Larry was quite right when he complained about his boredom and exhaustion. He was quite right when he said that about his being like a trained athlete. These people must shower three and four times a day. In all their untried, first- time-out boots, waders, and brand-spanking-new fishing gear, cunningly worked creels and the packed seaweed that lines them as if for fresh fish flown in daily to world-class restaurants. Athletes indeed. Like artists’ models or film stars trained in the arts of standing still, posing, their muscles as glib as bird dogs’, hounds’. Speaking for myself, I know I became this like trained—pardon my French—bladder athlete during my reign as his Princess manqué. Pardon my French.)

  All right, Sid. I know. I still haven’t earned it. A tuppence of toilet humor don’t make a dent in fifty thousand pounds.

  We went back to the wicky-up.

  “Now I know what all that aloe is for. You weave wicky- ups, don’t you?”

  “How would you know about something like that?”

  “Oh, I’ve been around,” he said.

  “You?”

  “I bivouacked in plenty of places like this when I set up for a sailor. It wasn’t all Dartmouth and Greenwich at Dartmouth and Greenwich. The Royal Navy was never any respecter of persons. The British Empire depends on its Fleet even if it ain’t the British Empire anymore. I may as well have been a cabin boy as a prince for all the difference it made to my warrant officers. So, sure, I’ve woven plenty of walls from these sharp, saw-toothed fronds. We called it ‘sewing houses.’”

  “That’s what we call it!”

  “We?”

  “My roommates and me. Jane and Marjorie. I think they’re actresses.”

  “So, certainly. I’ve swept up many a peck of sand in my time, and taken what comfort I could from what aloe I could get whenever I could get it. Of course,” he said, “it isn’t supposed to be as important for a man to have smooth, creamy hands as it is for a woman, Louise.”

  He took both my hands and held them in one big, smooth palm.

  “Yech,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “I was just thinking about all the times I beachcombed sandfruit for breakfast, and how it gave me the runs.”

  I withdrew my hands.

  “What?” he said. “What?”

  “It gives Jane the runs, too,” I told him coolly.

  “Look,” said the Prince, “didn’t you just ask whether I was one of those Let’s-Trade-Places sort of princes? Well, I am, Louise.”

  “A commoner in every port, is it?”

  “No,” he sa
id, taking back my hands and pressing them to his lips. “What, are you kidding me, Louise,” he muttered his demurrers, looking up, “you know me better than that.” He took me in his athlete’s arms. It was thrilling, Sid, thrilling. Well, he was handsome. And all those months in the States living one’s life like a more-or-less nun. And him with all his dark good looks. I tell you I felt like a nurse in a novel.

  So, what with this and what with that, we were soon enough rolling round down on the sandy floor of the wicky-up enjoying a bit of the old leg-over, so given up to passion I didn’t realize what happened when we crashed into the hotel bellman’s cart Jane and Marjorie and I used to hang up our clothes and was all we had for wardrobe or even for furniture in that tiny hut, spilling the clothes, tumbling the coats and shifts and dresses and gowns down from where they hung on the rack, Prince Lawrence so excited and lusty I could almost believe his earnest demurrers of just three or four minutes before.

  (Was I naïve, Sid? Who’s to say? Anyway, I don’t think so, for what was the morning line on this prince while his two younger brothers and two younger sisters were off sowing their wild oats and getting their names in the papers, making it into the gossip columns with their famous scrapes and muddles that had always the faint air about them of throwbacks to different, gayer times—— like ne’er-do-wells running with a fast crowd, and fortunes lost gambling; careless Sloane Rangers sent down from Cambridge or Oxford, or come away with dubious seconds and thirds; his siblings excused or explained away or even written off by their place in the birth order? Only that, baby-boomer prince or no baby-boomer prince, in the curious reign of the peculiarly marked incumbency of these particular sovereigns he was conscientious, notable for the advantage he took of photo ops—and why not with his beauty?—and for his solicitous gestures, his polished idiosyncrasies and special relationships with all his inferiors—well, I was an example, wasn’t I?—and that he might be too good to be true, right down to the impression he gave of having just stepped out of a trailer on locale somewhere, of being this, well, film star got up as a prince, not a hair out of place, all perfected and rested while a stand-in stood on his mark taking the heat for him while the crew got ready, setting the lights, fussing the sound, till they sent a gofer to the trailer to fetch him— “Five minutes please, Prince”—and he stepped out, majestic and grand as you please, his jacket and tie and collar as perfectly in place as they’d be on some little girl’s cutout of a jacket and tie and collar that she tabs on a doll that she’s punched from a book.)