Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

It was all very well for me to be larky and thirsty while I still had a job. My employers were paying my health insurance, after all. But once I was without work I knew that I would have to find something for a — ha ha — rainy day.

I still had no reason to go home. Well, I’d fallen a. over t. for the climate, hadn’t I? That was when I first thought of Cape Henry and the Lothian Islands. In England even the King is on the National Health, even the Queen.

(Still another aside: I can’t shake the sense I have of Press Lord Sir Sidney reading over my shoulder as I write, and I’m beginning to feel if not my obligations to the readership, then at least Sir Sid’s sense of them for me, and I find that compelling and, in small ways, oddly touching and will, when there’s time or it seems fitting, henceforth alert my readers — or maybe only Sir Sidney himself — that they — he — may skip over the asides until I take up my “story” again, or “la Lulu’s Account,” or whatever they’re calling it these days on hoardings on the sides of buses. Anyway, you know what seems strange to me? The general, disparate, all-purpose exile that moves over the world. That piecemeal, bit-by-bit colonization of earth. People, for whatever reason, coming together on all sorts of foreign shores, washing up in the strangest places. The mysterious working out of the great queer plot of the planet. Different motives, mutual ends. Well, it finally accounts for the very idea of empire, doesn’t it?)

Whatever I may feel now it no longer seems unusual to me I hadn’t even known Jane or Marjorie back in Los Angeles. Indeed, when the three of us met at the beachcomber estate agency where we let that wicky-up, and not three or four days later one of us — I forget which — suggested we might pick up the odd pound or so if we put our backs into it and helped with the morning ablutions on other people’s shelters, I naturally assumed — as I later discovered we each did — that my two new friends were just more actresses marking time and waiting to be discovered. Which brings me back to that missing aloe and the first time I saw the Prince.

Well, it was those embargo, or quarantine, or meat-and- potato prohibitions of course, the flora-and-fauna rules, all the high-priority, low-level laws of jealous international agreement and stickler decree by which nations claim they not only protect themselves but insinuate the superiority of their Nature over your Nature. Showing the flag, grandstanding the public on the cheap— all that subject population, all those abiders. And getting, Prince Larry, grand photo ops out of it, too, making the most of his signature gesture. Though I swear to you, I’d forgotten all that, had been away from England almost two years by then. Out of sight, out of mind. One forgets. Though I suppose the things one forgets are always perched somewhere near the tippy tip of one’s head, because when I saw him there posed in the aloe shop, quit of his equerry and all his retainers, I remembered at once of course. This was the one who made a point of buying off the local economy all those ceremonial wreaths he’s charged with laying on all those public buildings, natural monuments, and great men’s graves. And maybe that’s why those ordinances came into being in the first place— because whoever made up kings figured it might come in handy one day, that someday this prince would come. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the ruling class is nothing if not clever.

And he was handsome. I remembered from my life in England that he was handsome, but now he was possessed of an almost surfeit of beauty, and of an age when he was at its (or he of its) very peak. Like special fruit that has come into its season. Don’t mistake me, this is no mournful occasion, the sad affair of a moment, some here today, gone tomorrow mayfly condition. I’m not speaking of God’s or humanity’s fairy tales, the ephemeral, too delicate arrangements of nature and myth. Yet there was a kind of hapless nostalgia to him, some secret knowledge. I do not think I noticed this then. How could I have done, I was a different person then. So I didn’t notice it; I only remember it. I don’t even know if the Prince was aware of it. I believe rather not. As I say, I allow him what I allow myself. Some secret knowledge, the long-term profit of the heart. Yet something, something. Got up, it might have been, in his very swagger, the peculiar, put-everyone-at-ease pomp of his self-consciousness. He was at once breezy and shy with a crowd that, knowing his habits, had gathered early in the morning or stayed up all night (some of them) in Cape Henry’s discrete shopping district on the westermost island of the long Lothian Islands chain. An anomaly, one of those freaks not so much of geography as of naming and settling. Those fifty or so nautical miles off Santa Catalina would be an example. The counterpart American village of Avalon hard by on California’s southwest coast would. Just a thirty- minute ride as the ferry floats.

Sad as Spring’s first perfection, the trees never so beautiful again as they were in the prime joyous days of their first being though they had weeks, months, seasons, even half a year yet to green. Nor ever so ripe as in those first close- cropped days of their initial blooming.

So I saw him but didn’t recognize him, don’t you know.

The prince waved at me. Not the elbow, elbow, wrist wrist wrist of majesty gone easy on itself, the accustomed, practiced pacing of what had already been a long reign, but something more awkward, more attractive than that — a matter, a question of image. And, though I was surprised, I could hardly have been aware of my awareness. “Good god,” I remember thinking, “was that a prince?” Not “Was that the Prince?” Caught short, clued-in finally only by the royal retainers pretending to try to keep up. If the Prince knew it was only some dog-and-pony show he didn’t let on. Only later, in the town square (and mall and tourist trap) did I recognize him, don’t you know.

Though I’d known he was coming of course. As did Jane, as did Marjorie. We’d even discussed our plans to go see him. Allegiant, interested, dutied, patriotic’d. (Curious, too. We forgot because we were new on the island and caught up in our individual rebeginnings.) In the square the Prince picked up his pace, as the retainers, seeming genuinely to try now, did theirs, though knowing in their accustomed souls they could never keep up but that somehow they had an obligation if not to the realm then at least to their corps, to some tradition of equerries, retainers, and handlers, knowing it would cost them nothing to be loyal, that this Prince would have his way with them no matter what they did, so that even if they did let up their merely shown-flag haste would lose out anyway to the real power of his insouciant, sincere deferentials and bluff, awkward bearing. The crowd not crowding him but fallen back as if he were some battle prince out of history, not boarding or clamoring him as if he were a rock-and-roll star, his fans not standing tiptoe, just standing back, behind the velvet ropes, not in retreat, fallen back even from me, so the Prince, seeing what was what, turned to one of us, to me in this instance, and spoke up. “Oh,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry. How inexcusably rude of me. I was just going into this shop.” “Go in, Your Highness,” I said, and, courtly as could be, nice as pie, His Highness singals, “After you.” Of course I defer. As does the Prince. As then do I. Until, in a kind of shock, the crowd signals, “Well, if it’s what His Highness wants …” So I go in. And Larry turns to the people in the road and signals “After all of you.” And passes them through like someone taking tickets. Like an usher. Like a cop directing traffic or a coach waving a runner in from third. And then goes through himself. Leaving the others behind like people lined up for the second show. Leaving the show-biz retinue behind too.