Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

I’m not in it for the money. I’m not. I want it told is all. But because Larry is Larry — and I don’t blame him, I really don’t, I still believe he loves me, I really do — and the Royal Family is the Royal Family, there was just no way of getting it done unless I took Town Crier’s fifty thousand pounds sterling and did it myself.

And though I’d never acknowledge I owe the public a thing — what, after the way I’ve been depicted in the papers, on the telly and the oh-so-civilized BBC 3 even? — it may almost be my patriotic duty to let it know some of the real circumstances by which it is ruled. La Lulu, indeed!

“Oh yeah,” you’re saying, “for God and Country, for England and St. George.” “Hell hath no fury,” you’re saying, “like a woman scorned.” “Or tattood!” you’re saying.

We met, as everyone knows, in Cape Henry, on the westermost of the Lothian Islands, fifty or so nautical miles from Santa Catalina Island and the village of Avalon, themselves about a thirty-minute ferry ride from Los Angeles and the southwest coast of California.

Whatever you might have read in the press to the contrary, I was not at that time in any way connected with the Ministry of Tourism; I did not sell coral or exotic flowers to day trippers from the States — ridiculous on the face of it since the United States government has strict rules preventing anyone from bringing any sort of flora or fauna into the country — or work behind the counter in the souvenir or duty-free shops at the airport. I did not sing with the band at the hotel. I had been made, like several of my countrymen at that time, redundant, and was sharing expenses and living the life of a sort of glorified beachcomber with two other girls in a discounted, low-season, already two-a-penny shelter more wicky-up than guest cottage or even hut with its rough, frond-covered frame, and dry, thick, still sharpish- edged grasses, which my cut hands too well knew to their sorrow and that sometimes in the mornings after a particularly issueless — even out there on the Pacific it was still just as much a drought as ever it was on the California mainland — but powerful blow of the previous night, we actually had to reweave back into the semblance of a wall. Often we’d pick up the odd fifty pence “sewing houses”—as we named our queer profession — for some of the older or less resourceful of our beachcomber colleagues, or shaking out mats, or sweeping up sand. Beachcombers, indeed.

“Oh, damn,” I told Marjorie on the early morning of the day of Prince Larry’s visit, “I’ve gone and cut my hands. I see I shall have to go into a different trade. Have you seen the aloe?”

“There is no aloe, Louise,” Marjorie said.

“How can there not be aloe? Living as we do, where we do, there has to be aloe.”

“We are quite out of aloe, Louise.”

“Impossible. I saw it myself it can’t have been but two days ago.”

“You are not the only party who sews houses in this house, Louise. You are not the only one with stigmata.”

“My fault, Louise, dear,” said Jane. “I was down for the aloe run. I’m afraid I forgot. If you wait, I’ll go after I beachcomb myself some sandfruit for my breakfast.”

“Sandfruit gives you the runs. Why do you eat it?”

“I quite enjoy the runs, Louise.”

Now to this point the public knows nothing of this. My friends Jane and Marjorie swept aside by history, their own stories lost if not to time then to time’s blatant disregard of a proper attention to detail, which I, as a public figure so- called, begin to suspect happens with the stories of most of history’s cohorts, so apparently caught up and transfixed by the shine of celebrity and notoriety. But actually such trashing of individuals and their particulars is as much evasive action (like piling up sunblock on one’s skin at the beach, say; just so much more posting of guards, just so many more lookouts, the fiddle of yeomanry our national sin) as ever it is the logic of a true humility. Well, it’s never the logic of a true humility, and what I think, what I think, really, is that like sodomy, like buggery, our notion of subjectivity, of submitting — submitting? volunteering! — to be the subjects of kings and queens has to do with wanting to disappear, with building up heroes to draw the lightning. Limelight was ever a distraction to time’s healthy, childlike fear of limelight. (This is fun, you know? Limelight has its compensations, hey, Sir Sid?)

So to this point, the public, for all the attention it’s paid us, knows absolutely nothing. Jane and Marjorie not only out of the picture but never in it to begin with. (No, I’m not making this up. Not any of it. I’m English as the next bimbo. There’s still all those official secrets acts and libel laws. Why would I stick my neck out? Yet I hardly flatter myself I think I’ve earned any of those fifty thousand pounds yet.)

That drought you read about? You don’t know the half. (Is that to be my theme here?) It played California hell, put half the state out of work, and not just the agricultural illegals up out of Mexico. Trained dental technicians let go. What, you think not? All that water running all day, all that rinse and spit? Shipping clerks and gift wrappers in the best department stores laid off because of the water shortage or forced to quit because they couldn’t work up enough moisture to lick one more label or stick on another fancy seal. Going on the dole for parched tongues and chapped lips. Or my own case.

I left England because of a tragic love affair (which since it has nothing to do with my involvement with Larry I’m under no obligation at this point to discuss with my public, so-called) and came to the States not to emigrate but in order to put some time and distance between my heart and its circumstances. It had been my intention to be gone no more than six months, but as the old saying has it, man proposes and God disposes and, in the half year I’d given to it, nothing had been resolved. Even back then, in the early days of the drought, it was still easy enough to find a job in Los Angeles. You know some of my background. You know that while I had something of an independent income it was never near big enough I could afford to live abroad indefinitely without finding means to supplement it. Also, it’s good for people to be gainfully employed. It makes life that much more interesting.

So I went for an au pair girl. My English accent was all the character I ever needed. I offered to show my passport but they wouldn’t even look. It didn’t make any difference to these people. Almost every au pair in Beverly Hills was an American actress hoping to catch on at a studio. They could all walk the walk and talk the talk. A reason I wasn’t found out when my photographs started to appear in the papers, I think, is that if they remembered me at all, the people of the house must have thought they recognized me from the industry. Besides, it didn’t last all that long. For a great democratic show a lot of these people began to lay off their “nannies” and “au pairs” even before the drought started to bite. They gave us bonuses and apologized that they had to dismiss us because we’d become “just one more thirst that had to be quenched.” And continued to quench the remaining household thirsts with the same bottled mineral water they’d been using all along. Restaurants were still hiring on, but it didn’t need any Greenwich Mean Time celestial clock watchers to see that the hostesses they employed were just more actresses and that when the time came they’d let these go just as quick as all the rest of those other nanny-cum-film stars. (And the time came and they did. Even the less expensive restaurants were selling bottled water by the glass then. The difference was that very few people believed it wasn’t tap water they were actually paying for. Oh, I know, I know. I really do. This sounds like satire and the States sound much like England and, in some ways, it is and they are. And I still can’t even get the punctuation right. Can’t or won’t. Preferring much that’s American to that which is British. Putting my full stops inside the quotes, for example. Choosing the Yankee zed in “civilization” to the s in its chiefly Brit VAR, as they say in Webster’s. Dropping my e out of “judgement.” Slipped between the cracks of two different worlds. And if that’s one of the reasons the royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry— and, in an odd way, it is — it’s the least of them.) Suffice it to say, however, I didn’t even bother to apply. And set up instead for an ordinary housekeeper’s job making up beds in a hotel. What I never expected was the unwillingness of people from parts of the country unaffected by drought to endure even for one or two days whatever insignificant parch they might have been put through in the one two days it would have taken them to do their business. When the drought really became serious the girls with the English accents were the first ones to be cut.