Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Ripe?” I said.

“They too,” he said. “All of us.”

“Meaning?”

“They signaled their eagerness to abdicate. They’re ready to step down. It came in over the wireless. ‘Sparks’ passed on the message.”

“What are they like, your family?”

“Well, you know about my cousins.”

“Not your cousins. Your mum and your dad.”

“The sibs get their names in the papers.”

“You get your name in the papers.”

“The columns,” he said disapprovingly. “But you know that of course.”

“I’ve been in the States two years. They have their own distractions and preoccupations in the States.”

“Oh right,” he said. (You see, Sir Sidney? How our affair was proceeding? How at once whirlwind and old hat it must have seemed to the both of us? It didn’t seem possible to me it was still the same day. Larry had probably already forgotten those two years in the States I had told him about. We were like some old married couple. We couldn’t remember each other’s sizes.) “I love them. It’s not that,” he said. “It’s not even that they’re bad. They’re lively, they’ve very good hearts. But I’ll tell you the truth, Louise, they’re not fit children for the sons and daughters of royalty. I blame the parents.”

“You blame the parents?”

“Our crowd has a saying: ‘It starts in the castle.’”

He had me jumping. I couldn’t read him clearly. Now some girls will tell you the first thing they look for in a man is a nice smile, or a sense of humor; or they look at his hands, his teeth— if he keeps them clean. His nails, his hair. Or see can they tell if he’s vulnerable, say. Something physical, something spiritual, six of one, half dozen of the other. But the very first thing that catches my attention about a man is whether or not I can read him clearly. If he’s mysterious, inscrutable. Well, it’s in the tradition. In my tradition. He had me jumping. I felt like a nurse again, Sid.

“They’re irresponsible, Louise. If we weren’t merely symbolic, what I’m saying would be treasonous.”

“They signaled they’re ready to abdicate, you said. Step down, let you take over. You’re the conscientious one.”

“Make me Regent before my time, you mean.”

“You’re twenty-nine.”

“Damn it, Louise, it’s not even their fault.”

“What’s not? Whose fault? I don’t follow. I’m not reading you clearly.”

“Alec’s, Robin’s, Mary’s, Denise’s. It’s not their fault. It’s George’s, our father’s fault. It’s Charlotte’s, our mother’s. Who introduced them? Who taught them to run with a fast crowd, rattle about in all that loose company? Who do you think leaked their names to the columns? Who lazied them down from University? Who coaxed them away with those dubious seconds and thirds? Two years ago? They weren’t like that two years ago. How could you know?”

Sunday, January 26, 1992

How I Was Received

Of course we were expected. They knew we were coming. They must have been waiting. They must have prepared the whole thing.

They looked like sovereigns out of Noël Coward. He might have been the actor/manager of his own touring theatrical troupe, she his principal player— sixty if she was a day, yet still called on to do ingenue parts, sophisticated ladies.

Because it’s amazing how much can be kept from the public, how there’s spin on the spin control, these now-you- see-it, now-you-don’t arrangements.

There Their Majesties were, two conflagrant figures, Himself in a red silk dressing gown and seated on an honest- to-god throne with a yellow ring of gleamless crown perched light and rakish on the top of his head like the wavy concatenations on a suspension bridge or the points on the crown of some picture-card king; Herself in a gilt chair a few feet off to her husband’s side and chugalugging smoke through a long silver cigarette holder.

He didn’t even look like the King. Because this was the stuff that didn’t get into the papers. I was certain I was the only one not of their inner circle ever to see such a sight. There were what seemed like ancient props from the repertoire lying about— scepters and orbs out of Shakespearean history plays. Indeed, it looked more like the greenroom of a theater in the provinces than like a room in a proper palace.

“M ’ boy!” the King said, pushing down from his throne, spry for a man his age, embracing his son. “Welcome! Welcome!

“And is this your young lady? And welcome to you, m’dear! I must say I admire your taste,” he told the boy as he deftly let go his arms around Lawrence, placed one hand on my shoulder, touched my rear end with the other and, shielding us from the Prince’s view, pinched me. Alarmed, I said nothing, merely, in a nervous attempt to brush it off, curtsied in His Majesty’s direction where I was met by his palm cunningly there to catch my curtsy and which he pressed smartly against my breast. “Ah,” said the King, hamming it up, projecting, stopping the show, “You’re worldly! She’s worldly, Lawrence. Excellent choice, lad, excellent! Good! I don’t much care for priggishness in a man, and quite despise it in a gel!”

“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.)