Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

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.