Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  “Do let go of her for a moment, George,” said his wife, “so I may give her a whiskey. Have we such a thing as ice? Make yourself helpful, my darling, just would you? The poor thing has come all the way from the States and is almost certainly in need of ice.”

  “There is no ice,” the King pronounced solemnly.

  “My husband informs me that there is no ice. We were all a bit nervous that the ice would have gone off so of course it seems that it has. I do apologize. I am so very ashamed. But please don’t think too ill of our people, there are some quite civilized patches here and there in the Kingdom. Larry, you shall have to show your young friend—Louise, isn’t it?— that she’s not to judge by us, that not everyone does these blue, druidy things at the solstice. Of course you don’t have to drink that if it’s too despicable, dear. Should you not rather have one of those sweet, poofy drinks that don’t absolutely require ice—Louise, isn’t it?”

  “I’m fine, Ma’m. Yes, Ma’am, Louise.”

  “Charlotte, dear, or as it seems you’re to be my daughter-in-law, Mother, or Mummy either if that’s more comfortable for you. We don’t stand on ceremonies here. Larry will have told you that, I expect. Ceremonies are such a bore, finally. They so throw one off one’s fun. But Americans would know that, wouldn’t they?”

  “I’m not American, Ma’am, I’m British.”

  “Charlotte,” she drawled, “or Mother, or Mummy.” Then, glancing pointedly toward the King but without skipping a beat, went on. “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” she said. “In that case, nothing that’s happened this evening and nothing that happens shall leave the premises.” Though she was talking to me her eyes never broke contact with the King’s which, incredibly, seemed to dodge and to dart, to shy and startle and evade, but which despite all he could do to escape her accusing examination had locked onto his own nervous squinny as effectively as some deadly, heat-seeking missile fixing an enemy in its laserly sights. King George tugged at his ascot, ran a finger about an apparently tight collar. It was, on both their parts, the hammy King’s, the sophisticated lady’s, the most remarkable acting I’d seen that evening.

  “Speaking of which,” she said.

  “Which?” I asked in all innocence.

  (Because the minds of these people don’t ever bother with transition. It isn’t anything owing to contempt, Sid, for others or even for ordinary sequitur, some lack of respect for logic and all the connected dots of aligned synapse—— the half hour at one Ball, the fifteen minutes at the next. The single course that’s taken at this banquet and cup of coffee and bite of dessert that’s taken at the next. The two innings’ worth of witness at a ballgame, say. The rush of all that nextness, I mean, all that press of a Royal’s business Lawrence spoke of before seducing me. Because their minds are always racing, Sid, always jumping ahead of themselves, from one thing to the other, not only their power symbolic but their presence, too—— their here-today-gone-today, spread-too-thin essence.)

  “Which?” I asked.

  “Why, of fun, dear. I should have thought Lawrence would have told you.”

  “Aye,” said the King, rubbing his hands together, his sham discomfort at having been found out already forgotten. “Tell the children about the party you’ve arranged in their honor, Charlotte. Have you et?” he asked enthusiastically.

  “Well, Prince Alec will be here,” she said, “and I think Princess Denise blah blah blah and, oh yes, I’ve invited the sweetest assortment of jolly incumbents in some of the most arcane of our traditional offices to meet you.”

  “Invited, Charlotte?”

  “Well, commanded. Did I say invited? I thought I’d said commanded.”

  (I tell you, Sid, it doesn’t get out. You’d never recognize them in the streets for all that their portraits are on the stamps and the money, couldn’t guess at their improbable behavior, or at any of the broad farce of our slapstick Royals. I swear to you, Sid, all they care for is to be off by themselves—— more ethnic than Africans, more tribal than cousins.)

  Odd as it may seem, that sweet assortment of jolly incumbents Charlotte referred to, and who I implied constituted their inner circle, weren’t necessarily blooded, though all, at least in some political or vaguely gangsterly sense, were connected. Most of them held public office. Don’t mistake me. Not one of them could pick up a telephone and have someone killed. If Their Majesties’ powers were symbolic, their own were less real. Whereas monarchical power hadn’t always been so ceremonial—though even today, this late in history’s game, there are absolute monarchs who don’t have to trouble to pick up a phone, they can kill you themselves—theirs had always been ceremonial and smelled of basic, blatant ineffectuality, of the merely traditional and picturesque, like Swiss Guards standing outside the Vatican at an uptight attention posing for tourists and protecting, in a time of car-bombing, plastique-throwing terrorists and kamikazes, some other age’s pope in only their fourteenth- century caps, billowy shirts, and silly pantaloons, with only their pike staffs.

  (Am I a keen observer of the passing parade, or am I a keen observer of the passing parade? I can almost hear you taking on about those fifty thousand pounds again. “Get on with it, get on with it,” you’re saying. But I throw the op-ed stuff in gratis. You didn’t bargain for that when I signed on, did you, Sid, that true confessions has its themes too?)

  Yet even at that, even on the most traditional and ineffectual level, what almost all these offices had in common was death’s oblique symbolism.

  There was the London Royal Intentioner, whose duty it was to greet every parade of warriors returning to the city from the front, glorious and victorious—and abject, too, what with all those riderless horses and muffled drums and black, mournful, crepe-draped artillery pieces and other death-decked-out matériel—to discover their intentions, whether they were peaceful toward the Crown. I have it by report that he simply took the commander’s word for it, on the principle that he would not have been a commander if he had not first been a gentleman. I say I have it by report because I didn’t get to ask the Royal Intentioner himself. He canceled at the last minute. He told the King he was too busy to come to the party. It gave both Their Majesties a laugh.

  Which seemed, really, to be the point of the party.

  “They’re court jesters, aren’t they?” I asked the Prince. “I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? They’re court jesters.”

  “Ask someone else,” the Prince said coolly.

  “All right, I will.”

  And did. I was a little tight. George was feeding me drinks now, volunteering to refill my glass every time I took three or four swallows from it or set it down for a minute.

  “There’s a good girl,” said the King as if I were a child sick in nursery and he was holding out a spoon of my medicine.

  “Goodness me,” I said, “you’re plying me with drink, aren’t you, Dad?”

  “Call me, George, sweet thing,” said His Royal Highness.

  I admit it, it’s a turn-on to be plied by a king. As Lord Acton might have said, “Power seduces and absolute power seduces absolutely.”

  (Well, you know my track record, don’t you, Sid? C.f. All that about the Prince and his beauty.)

  Though I acknowledge he never touched me. He didn’t even pinch me again. Our Sovereign was on his most sovereignly behavior. The kingdom was in good hands, if its Princess manqué wasn’t. Perhaps it was Charlotte’s presence, or the Prince’s sour mien, or it could be the King no longer found me attractive tipsy, or maybe he was bored with causing scenes, though that’s a bit hard to credit.

  “These people are like court jesters, aren’t they, George?”

  “Ask someone else,” the King said, breaking off, and then, practically phoning in his performance, flatly, “Ah you’re worldly. She’s worldly, Lawrence. Excellent choice, lad. Excellent good.”

  And did. Still tipsy and even a little turned on by the room itself, by my situation (the former Louise Bristol, recentl
y exiled to America with just enough to live on for about six months but beginning to feel the pinch as the time wore on and then, later, this au pair girl in her late twenties and, further on down the road, a maker of beds in the Housekeeping Department of a Los Angeles hotel and, later still, a down-on-her-luck, pushing-thirty beachcomber and sewer-of-houses and sandsweepstress, but currently fianceé to Lawrence Mayfair of the House of Mayfair and, not then knowing myself manqué, future Princess of England), sat down beside a stocky, almost preternaturally rosy-cheeked, jolly-seeming man of about fifty or so.

  “Are you a court jester too?” I said, prepared by now to be told to ask someone else.

  I would like my readers to know I know I was rude, brazen even, and that it will not do to dismiss this, to write it off to the fact that I was drunk. Ignorance of the—— Well, you know. Nor do I plead my low tolerance for alcohol or put down to drought and holes in the ozone layers the extent of my thirst. Not much that brought on my troubles in this account was of my own doing but I openly acknowledge that which was.

  As sometimes occurs in narrative what happens next is not always what is expected. The somewhat cherubic, rosy- cheeked, jolly-seeming man did not send me away. If he had, chances are I wouldn’t have left. His very avuncularity intensified my feelings of euphoria. I was not only brazen now but mildly randy, flirtatious, teasing, lightly touching his arm, deliberately brushing against him where we sat together on a sofa, my voice raised but not hysteric; acting out, strutting my stuff with the rest of the players in the room. I do not put it down to drink, I do not. I was tipsy as a gambler on a roll, mood-swung, high on luck, the boost in my fortunes.

  “I am Selector of Ropes,” he answered simply, and it was as if he’d chastised me, so struck was I by the depth of his underacting. “Henry VIII was not an unfeeling man. He invented the position.”

  “I never heard of your office,” I mentioned conversationally. “What is it you do?”

  “I am not your straight man,” he said.

  “Truly,” I told him. “I don’t know. I’m only asking.”

  “We look at hemp.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “We look for finer and finer rope. Softer silk.”

  “Why?”

  “Henry was not unfeeling. He had no stomach for beheading his women.”

  “Why did he do it then?”

  He looked toward King George.

  “Go on,” the King said softly. “Tell her, Selector.” The room was already quiet. Now it was still. You could hear a pin drop.

  (Mark this, Sir Sidney. Mark your marked manqué.)

  “He’d already broken with one tradition when he withdrew from Rome,” the man said, still restrained but rushing now, doing with rapid pacing what before he had done with calm, “why would he want to break with another one?”

  Then, suddenly, he pulled another technique from his quiver, assumed yet another style, closer to what the King’s had been when the Prince and I first came in, gesticulating wildly, playing for laughs.

  “He was ahead of his time, don’t you know. Oh yes. Didn’t ’alf ‘old with axes, ’e didn’t. Not ’im. Not ’enry. Haxes was sharp and wulgar. All that spilled blood? That were Royal blood!” And stage whispered, “’e anticipated hinterregnums, rewolutions— — ’e hanticipated ’angings!

  “Oh yes, one of my predecessors introduced the Windsor knot to make it a bit more comfortable around the royal neck of one of them Tudors or Stuarts or Windsors or May- fairs. Just in the event, don’t you know!” he said, the last sentence delivered as if it were some famous, uproarious tag line. And sure enough the King was red-faced, almost hacking up his laughter. Even Charlotte was grinning.

  There were other jolly incumbents. One came up to me, bubbling with inside information, tricks of the trade.

  “You know those royal orders monarchs sometimes wear? Those broad, colorful bands of cloth that pass down diagonally over a king’s or queen’s right shoulder like the supporting straps on Sam Browne belts? Well, if the color scheme isn’t carefully coordinated or the order clashes too severely with the rest of the costume, it could throw off the entire occasion. That’s why our kings and queens have always had art directors.”

  “You’re the royal art director?”

  “No, I’m in a related field. Monarchical medallions can be very heavy. Well, they aren’t shields made out of tin, are they? Often they’re heavy enough to tear a fabric apart, so the fabric has to be reinforced to support patches to fix to the cloth of ceremonial gear—your designer dresses, your gowns and robes and uniforms—to support the weight of those medallions. That’s what I do, I’m Royal Fashion Engineer.”

  And another who said he was Royal Taster and credited his astonishing slimness to the fact that he had to keep his palate clear in order to distinguish among the flavors of the various poisons that had, over the years, been used in attempted regicides. He felt, he said, he owed it to his sovereign to partake, at most, of one or two spoonfuls of royal soup, a bite of meat, a sip of wine, a nibble of bread. I was reminded of Lawrence working his symbolic presence during the Season’s Balls and dinners and, now I noticed it, of Their Majesties’ own trim, fit figures.

  “Ahh,” I said, “that explains it. They owe them to their diminished dinners.”

  Royal Taster smiled. “Just so,” he said, exactly as if he knew to what I referred.

  Royal Peerager spoke to me. He told me, rather too pointedly, I thought, that it was his job to watch out for pretenders. The Mayfairs, he said, could be traced back to Lear and Macbeth.

  He would have gone on—I was interested enough despite a fear of the silly starting to take hold in me—but just then some new personage, burdened by several parcels, burst upon the scene.

  “There you are!” King George said.

  “And high time, I would have thought,” Charlotte scolded. “You knew I especially wanted you to meet your brother’s new fiancée.”

  “As if ever he had an old one, Mother dear,” said Princess Denise.

  (For that’s who it was, another ingenue for what might turn out to be—I hadn’t met Princess Mary yet—an entire company of ingenues. She’d changed in the two years or better since I’d last been in England. I suppose her picture had been in the papers plenty of times but the truth is I had enough on my mind in those days not to have noticed. Well, not actually the truth, Sid. What the truth actually is is that I consciously tried to avoid what was going on at home, to the point that I wouldn’t even go to an English film or watch Masterpiece Theater on the telly—which I’d started to call TV—and had stopped drinking tea. So the last thing I needed was to keep up with the British fascination with the prurient goings-on of its more hereditary characters, pushing aside as much as I could of the silly gossip that surrounds one—surrounds? embraces—in both countries like climate. Maybe America was the wrong place to go. Perhaps I should have chosen somewhere less civilized, some hot, plague-ridden African place, where I might have comforted dying children and futilely brushed away flies from their faces that the children themselves were too weak to brush off and probably didn’t even notice for all that the flies crawled across the huge, swollen surfaces of the very eyes they didn’t even seem capable of shutting. So why would I? What did I need it, Sir Sid?)

  I hardly recognized her, though how much could a seventeen-year-old girl, now a twenty-year-old young woman, have changed in two years? There was something slightly askew and off-plumb about her appearance, and as soon as she burst into speech as she’d burst into the room (as one is said to “burst into song,” from a standing position as it were—— like some instantaneous, transitionless transformation or sea change or jump cut in the pictures), I thought I knew what it was. It was as if she’d undergone some powerful, personal Damascene rearrangement—— a persona inversion of the seventeen-year-old, almost womanly creature I vaguely remembered from photographs I’d seen in the papers over two years before into the twentyish, pretty, oh- so-girlish young th
ing before me—before me? practically all over me—now.

  Although she was got up as a sort of latter-day flapper— fringe swayed at the bottom of her too-short skirt like the fringed, beaded dividers that separated backrooms in the décor of thirites-era movies, or plays set somewhere in the Orient, from the low taverns and bars on the ground floors of whorehouses, places where sailors are shanghai’d or slipped Mickey Finns—with dark, wide eyes immensely open and sketched in with eyebrow pencil, and her red, fire- engine mouth had been painted into a pout at once as cynical and cute as someone about to cry, this flapper- cum-ingenue seemed hyperactive as a kid at a slumber party.

  “Why, Larry, she’s adorable! You’re adorable, Louise! Isn’t she adorable, Father? Isn’t she adorable, Mother? You’ll make just the most brilliant Princess, Louise. No wonder even an old pooh like Larry lost his heart. Well, I should think so. Here, sweetheart, here are some things I bought you. (That’s why I was late, Charlotte dear. So there!) I just guessed at your sizes, but don’t fret if nothing fits. We won’t even bother to return it, we’ll just give the stuff away to our servants or those absolutely smashing Mounted Horse Guards in Whitehall to offer to Oxfam. Then we can go shopping for all new things!”

  As she spoke she produced one exotic garment after another from her various boxes and bundles. I recognized the names of boutiques all along the Kings Road, some so chic I’d supposed they’d shut up shop years ago. I couldn’t have told you the function of some of this garb or, had the Princess not held a few of the pieces against me, have identified more than the general area of the body they were supposed to cover. Of the material of which they were made I could have told you nothing, only that much of it must have been experimental.