Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  “Who’s the tweedy type with the string of pearls? Do you know the gent with the plate-glass monocle? What is that creature? Are those really jodhpurs he’s wearing?”

  He meant Amanda Styles-Brody, he meant Winston Moores-Wrightman, he meant Charley Narl. I hadn’t seen them, but it could have been they. They were my parents’ nearest neighbors, but how, from this distance, could he possibly have known that Major Moores-Wrightman’s monocle was ordinary window glass? Were we, indeed, types and phonies? Were all Englishmen, or all peoples really, viewed from the height of a throne, so categorical? And might not even the behaviors of princes, of kings and empresses, from God’s point-of-view, seem at least a little ridiculous? Is He fond of a dirty joke, for example? “Look what we’ve here,” would He say, “the empress is having her period!”? Is there, I mean, something petty about even our physical requirements, something inimical in Nature to nature, not just our renewable need to eat and sleep and move our foods along the degrading alchemical chambers of their digestion, converting not only red, gross meat into excrement but even grains and greens? If so, then I was a goner myself, a laughingstock of the universe, what with the itchings and urgings of my physical nature, my rut now (growing stronger as we came closer to the actual rooms where puberty had happened to me one afternoon between the time I’d been “Mother” to two or three friends at high tea, and the hour the last girl had been picked up by one of her parents and taken home) nothing more than blood in league with this intellectual masochism inexplicably programmed into my romantic, muddy, through-a-glass-darkly, sucker- punch imagination and glass-jaw heart.

  (The gothic, girly inclinations, Sid, that do me every damn time!)

  Not once feeling anger, no matter I’d teased and quibbled with him, at the Prince’s disdain for our Cookham ways, so much as a heightened sexual desire. So that, despite Daddy’s carryings-on and the fuss he made, his almost maniacal blather as he poured sherry into each of our glasses, giving in some exaggerated chivalric parody not just my mother the wine before he offered any to the Successor, the Prince, Duke of Wilshire, future King of all the Englands, but to me as well, probably saving the Prince till last not just out of manners but so he could pay him the steadiest attention. Meanwhile, as I say, keeping up this incredible monologue about French antique furniture, at one time actually raising his glass in a toast to the Royal Collection!

  “To your rooms, Sir!” proclaimed my mad father. “To the seventy-three excellent fauteuils, forty-one vintage ber- gères, and thirty-five folding pliants in your family’s palaces. To all the capital chaises in Wilshire House. To the master chairmakers: to each extraordinary Boulard, Cresson (I sat in one once!), and Gourdin. To your luxurious Jacobs, Senés, and Tilliards on the important Savonnerie carpets. To all the cylindrical, tabouret stools like so many upholstered drums, and all the beautiful banquettes along Balmoral’s, Buckingham’s, and Windsor’s walls. A toast to all cunning, exquisite finishing touch—— your splendid accessories, the fire screens, gilt candlesticks, Imari bowls, Houdon marbles, and soft-paste porcelains. Your snuffboxes studded with gemstones like pimientos in olives. Clocks, chenets, bras-de-lumières, silver chandeliers, Kändler birds, girandole centerpieces.”

  “‘These are a few of my favorite things,’” the Prince remarked darkly, wryly, but if Father even heard him, let alone understood him, he gave no indication. Me, he had me jumping!

  Meanwhile, Dad continued his absurd toast, rattling off names like Caffiéri, Duplessis, Saint-Germain, Gouthière, Meissonnier, Thomire. I was not his daughter for nothing. I hadn’t heard him carry on in years, but the names of these classic metalworkers had been familiar to me since we’d first moved to Cookham when I was twelve and my father had taken up the eccentric conversation of the natives.

  He was into the heavier pieces now, going on about commodes, chests of drawers, consoles, escritoires, Beneman’s famous games table where Marie Antoinette lost so much money one night that Louis XVI abandoned his plans to add another wing on the palace at Versailles and thus, through inadvertence and his wife’s bad luck at cards, put back the revolution and delayed his own beheading by perhaps three years.

  He proposed toasts to the great cabinetmakers represented in the Collection—— to Carlin and Canabas and Cressent, to Dubois and Leleu and Riesener.

  I don’t know, maybe he was nervous. Maybe everyone in Cookham is nervous and they talk this way to cover it up.

  He got round to the beds, the parquetry cradles in the nursery, the tall, sculpted, fabled four-posters in the King’s chambers, the Queen’s, the Princes’ and Princesses’, reeling off their inventory numbers in the Journal du Garde-Meuble. He toasted their dozen gorgeous canapés.

  “How I should enjoy to spend a night in such a bed! A night? A nap! What dreams! I would exchange a year’s reality for the visions that might visit me in such circumstances!”

  “Really?” said Lawrence. “Me, I’m a seafaring prince, I sleep in me ’ammock.”

  Oh, he was wicked; oh, he was cruel!

  Father looked as if he’d been slapped. Indeed, a red mark appeared to rise like a welt on his cheek just as if that were the place the Prince had stung him. Mother, who’d been quiet, who’d not once mentioned her garden or her work with Oxfam, who’d hardly moved, who’d hardly moved even as she curtsied when I introduced her to the son of a b-tch, and, in a way, whose silence and lockjaw paralysis of being was even more fawning than poor Father’s helpless logorrhea, quite suddenly appeared to slouch, to crouch, to squeeze in upon herself almost as if she’d been that tweedy, string-of-pearls neighbor effaced behind the closed French windows, muffling not hilarity but a horror so complete it might have been its counterfeit.

  Had the Prince been scornful I would have broken our engagement then and there, I swear I would. I would have demanded he leave our house, that he quit Cookham forever. But he reversed himself, was all charm and a noblesse oblige you could eat off of. He papered over his rudeness with a joke and a compliment to my father’s astonishing knowledge of the holdings. “You certainly know your onions, sir,” he told him, and promised to conduct them on a guided tour of the palaces any time Dad thought was convenient. He would send, he said, a car for them.

  “An estate car,” Father joked. “I’m in the trade.”

  “Of course,” Lawrence said. “In Richmond. Louise told me.”

  I detected no scorn on the Prince’s face, though I knew his heart.

  Still, I could barely distinguish my anger from my pure let-fly lust. Indeed, they seemed to feed on each other. (Which just goes to show you, don’t it, Sir Sid, that you can take the girl out of the country, send her to California, have her go for an au pair, or a housekeeper in a hotel, and even, when the really hard times come, for a sewer of houses, till her hands run with blisters, blood, and aloe; spring her, I mean, from all dependence and parasitical, female juniority; from all, I mean, the pretty, petty echelons of servitudinal, wide-eyed love, to the point where her arms and back run with muscle, but—WHOOSH! BAM! POWIE!—let one dark put- down or one sharp look be cast in her direction—provided, of course, it’s the right direction—and she’ll mewl like a lass in a story. As if California never happened, as if she never turned a mattress or ever swept sand.) What can I tell you, he had me jumping.

  We were on the pretty upholstered bench in our large lounge. (Not even Father would have called it a bergère. Not even Cookham would have called it the library.) Mother explained it was Sheila’s day off and went to prepare tea. I reached for the Prince’s hands and took them in my own. I brought them down into my lap. I put this gentle pressure on them. I shifted position ever so slightly. And leaned my weight into the Prince. Pressing myself against his haunch. Imperceptibly, I parted my thighs and began swaying from side to side. I flexed my buttocks, I arched my back. Beneath my dress my body rose perhaps a fraction of a fraction of an inch above the bench. I relaxed and, settling my weight, started all over again. I shifted, I swayed, I flexed, I arche
d, I rose.

  I came up against the Prince’s hands. By displacements so gradual they were almost infinitesimal, we exchanged momenta. He began to bounce my body like a ball.

  As I’ve already told you, what can I tell you, he had me jumping. Push had come to shove. Aiee, aiee. I didn’t care where I was. I didn’t know where I was.

  Poor Father.

  I say “poor father,” but I couldn’t have said then, as I can’t say with certainty now, whether he even knew what was going on. “Ever so slightly,” I’ve said, “imperceptibly.” I’ve said “displacements so gradual” and “almost infinitesimal,” and implied that moment of inertia when we transferred momentum. So maybe he hadn’t seen anything really. (It was moldly old damp Cookham, after all. It was a gray Sunday autumn afternoon in Cookham. The lights hadn’t been turned on yet. It was dim in the lounge.) So maybe he hadn’t seen anything. (And me hoping the water would never boil and get transformed into tea, wanting to spare at least one of them, you see. Look, we honor our fathers and our mothers. For a time, for a time we do. Then for a time, when the blood sings, while it rushes like wind through the terrible chambers and glands of our change and necessity, we don’t. Or can’t. Then, when we can again, we do again.)

  So maybe it was just the awkward silence that launched Dad into speech.

  “Do you know, Sir,” he said, “something that’s always bothered me, something I took the trouble to look up in the library but couldn’t manage to pin down. Well, I’m a bit uncertain about a title is what it comes down to is all. If the living mother of a queen is referred to as the Queen Mother, well, once you and Louise are married, after the coronation I mean, well, would Mrs. Bristol be the King Mother-in- Law? Would one be the King Father-in-Law? It’s only a point of order, of course. It isn’t important. I’m only just asking.”

  “What? What?” said the Prince, who was breathing heavily now.

  “Well,” Father said, “it’s simply a matter of—— ”

  “I don’t know,” said the Prince. “I don’t know, I’m not sure, I shall have to find out. Look,” Lawrence said, catching his breath, “we’ve had rather a long drive down from London. I find I’m suddenly quite tired. Perhaps it was all that talk of beds. I should so like to catch a nap. Is there a place one might lie down? Louise, you could show me. Please apologise to Mrs. Bristol for me, would you? I should quite like some tea, but after my nap.”

  Sunday February 16, 1992

  How Royals Found Me Unsuitable to Marry Their Larry

  We were in what despite the intervening years, and (from the presence of the abandoned giraffes and tigers, monkeys and bears, somehow come down in the world, reduced to memento, simple stuffed souvenir) recognizably, too, was still my room (which even without any fine antique French furniture, could have been any schoolgirl’s, even a French one’s, in any epoch, who, come fresh to her menses was come fresh to virginity, too, since without their onset she couldn’t have known carnal desire, not carnal desire, that queer, obsessive magnetism of the skin and heart and head as much as of actual breasts or mysteriously furred-over sexual organs) on what was (never mind it wasn’t a rare four-poster and boasted no gorgeous canopy) still (fourteen or fifteen years after that alarming high tea with those two or three childhood friends) my bed, though it was scarcely longer or wider than a cot.

  Because there must be something about the act of sex that is indifferent to space. How otherwise explain how two full- grown people—and one a prince with all that that suggests of dimension and line—could manage not only to lie down together on what the full-grown woman distinctly recalled having outgrown all by herself fourteen or fifteen years earlier when she was four or five inches shorter and weighed twenty or twenty-five pounds less, but thrash about on it too? And something in the act of sex indifferent to time as well. Or anyway oblivious of it, of anything but some overwhelming, all-inclusive Now. Because how else can one account for that seemingly magical obliteration or at least smudge of each intervening sequence from how we met to how we got engaged; through how I was received, and how he courted me, and how push came to shove, until almost the very day the Royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry (not to mention the half-dozen Sunday installments, January 12, 1992, to February 16, 1992, inclusive, in which I not only tell all but apparently lay bare the soul of the entire Kingdom)? I mean how else can it be both the morning after one of those somehow issueless, drought-inspired, all-night Pacific blows in the two-a-penny wicky-ups when we—Jane and Marjorie and I—swept up sand and shook out mats and rewove walls in my good old beachcombing salad days before I was ever an all-but-crowned Princess rolling about on the floor of a wicky-up in mutual, amorous lock- leg and lusty, heartfelt grabflesh with your Heir Apparent, the two of us g—sing the he-l out of each other, spreading one another’s but--cks, squeezing one another’s p-rts (and the Prince singing out at the top of his voice, too, so that I actually had to cover his mouth in order to restrain him, lay hands on him, on a Prince, lest the guests, many of whom were our employers, recall—Jane’s and Marjorie’s and mine—in the adjoining huts hear him, those who hadn’t already left for the Governor’s Palace to see if they might not still get a chair near the reviewing stand where he was scheduled to appear that afternoon with Lord Mayor Miniver, Lord and Lady Lewes and Anthony Fitz-Sunday, muffling his “Road to Mandalay” exuberance—and the Prince 1-cking the very palm over his mouth—sand in the high heels, aloe stains, patches of chlorophyll in the stockings and dresses on the frond-strewn floor of the unwinding wicky-up) one minute, and seven thousand something miles away and all that happened to us in between the next; push coming to shove, to pushing and pulling and thrusting and parrying, to all Love’s earth defying sexual acrobacy on that same astonishing, flexible, accommodate cot where fourteen or fifteen years previous I first came to my virginity due to the simple human fact of the onset of my monthlies?

  And he was singing now, too. Anthems, sea chanteys, tunes to hornpipes: “Rule Britannia,” “Popeye the Sailor- man.” My astonished parents downstairs, staring up at the ceiling toward my room had to be; mother; my struck- dumb dad. Outraged, or humiliated, or even pleased as punch that Lawrence, Crown Prince of England, to whom, if all went well, he would one day be King Father-in-Law, might be up in her old room serenading and di--dl-ng his one-and-only daughter.

  Which is when I opened my eyes. At the thought of my dad in the lounge. At the thought of me mum holding tea. I opened my eyes. Outraged, humiliated. But still into it (the sex act an annihilator of character, too, indifferent not only to time and space but also to circumstance), horny withal, I mean.

  To see Lawrence watching me.

  “Your eyes are open,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  It was his hang-up. All that old business about his inability to make even n-mber one in front of his mates at the Academy, his Prince’s shame in having to -art and s-it and pi-s like other men, the reason he nursed his own v--gin-t-, his Prince’s aversion to ever having to show his throes. It was probably the reason he’d resisted making love to me since that day in the wicky-up.

  I was suddenly fearful. Though I soon enough saw I needn’t have been. Because maybe if you hide your throes long enough you forget you ever have them. Maybe all throes, even the most humble, lowly throes of the body, like having to cough, say, or sneeze, happen in what you think is a vacuum, in some almost unpopulated world of princes and kings. Because he never saw my outrage, didn’t even notice my humiliation. Only—I was still horny, recall—the remains of my pleasure.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “I’m looking at my Prince,” I said, Mother and Dad already forgotten.

  “Why did you open your eyes?” he said.

  “You opened yours first.”

  “I wanted to see if love disfigured you.”

  “Does it?”

  He kissed me on my eyes. I loved him more than ever then. More than when I couldn’t read him, all tho
se times he merely had me jumping. More than the time in Llanelli, in Wales, when he did the bravest, noblest, most generous thing I’d ever seen done, and had not so much lost as traded however many thousands of pounds it was, to Macreed Dressel at the Springfield.

  But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. I guess no one can.

  “You never opened them in Cape Henry,” he said.

  “Oh, la,” I said with whatever modesty I have, “Cape Henry. I didn’t know you very well in Cape Henry.”

  “What was it, Louise?” Prince Lawrence said, “You can tell me.”

  “Lar-ry,” I said.

  “No, really,” he said, “we’re to be married. Surely a princess may speak her mind to a prince. I supposed you were making the world go away. Please?” he said.

  “The absolute truth?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “I’m not any ostrich,” I said. “I don’t shut my eyes and imagine the world anyplace else than it already is.”

  “I’m no more ostrich than you are, Louise,” Lawrence said. “I know you weren’t a virgin when I met you. You’re a grown woman, for God’s sake. You’d been to California. You’d worked as an au pair. You lived on a beach in a tourist attraction and had a great tan. You think it bothers me you weren’t a virgin? It doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. You’re a commoner, you’re not to the manner born. You’re not held to the same standards. One supposed you could have been fantasizing.”