Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Which?” I asked.

“Why, of fun, dear. I should have thought Lawrence would have told you.”

“Aye,” said the King, rubbing his hands together, his sham discomfort at having been found out already forgotten. “Tell the children about the party you’ve arranged in their honor, Charlotte. Have you et?” he asked enthusiastically.

“Well, Prince Alec will be here,” she said, “and I think Princess Denise blah blah blah and, oh yes, I’ve invited the sweetest assortment of jolly incumbents in some of the most arcane of our traditional offices to meet you.”

“Invited, Charlotte?”

“Well, commanded. Did I say invited? I thought I’d said commanded.”

(I tell you, Sid, it doesn’t get out. You’d never recognize them in the streets for all that their portraits are on the stamps and the money, couldn’t guess at their improbable behavior, or at any of the broad farce of our slapstick Royals. I swear to you, Sid, all they care for is to be off by themselves— more ethnic than Africans, more tribal than cousins.)

Odd as it may seem, that sweet assortment of jolly incumbents Charlotte referred to, and who I implied constituted their inner circle, weren’t necessarily blooded, though all, at least in some political or vaguely gangsterly sense, were connected. Most of them held public office. Don’t mistake me. Not one of them could pick up a telephone and have someone killed. If Their Majesties’ powers were symbolic, their own were less real. Whereas monarchical power hadn’t always been so ceremonial — though even today, this late in history’s game, there are absolute monarchs who don’t have to trouble to pick up a phone, they can kill you themselves — theirs had always been ceremonial and smelled of basic, blatant ineffectuality, of the merely traditional and picturesque, like Swiss Guards standing outside the Vatican at an uptight attention posing for tourists and protecting, in a time of car-bombing, plastique-throwing terrorists and kamikazes, some other age’s pope in only their fourteenth- century caps, billowy shirts, and silly pantaloons, with only their pike staffs.

(Am I a keen observer of the passing parade, or am I a keen observer of the passing parade? I can almost hear you taking on about those fifty thousand pounds again. “Get on with it, get on with it,” you’re saying. But I throw the op-ed stuff in gratis. You didn’t bargain for that when I signed on, did you, Sid, that true confessions has its themes too?)

Yet even at that, even on the most traditional and ineffectual level, what almost all these offices had in common was death’s oblique symbolism.

There was the London Royal Intentioner, whose duty it was to greet every parade of warriors returning to the city from the front, glorious and victorious — and abject, too, what with all those riderless horses and muffled drums and black, mournful, crepe-draped artillery pieces and other death-decked-out matériel — to discover their intentions, whether they were peaceful toward the Crown. I have it by report that he simply took the commander’s word for it, on the principle that he would not have been a commander if he had not first been a gentleman. I say I have it by report because I didn’t get to ask the Royal Intentioner himself. He canceled at the last minute. He told the King he was too busy to come to the party. It gave both Their Majesties a laugh.

Which seemed, really, to be the point of the party.

“They’re court jesters, aren’t they?” I asked the Prince. “I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? They’re court jesters.”

“Ask someone else,” the Prince said coolly.

“All right, I will.”

And did. I was a little tight. George was feeding me drinks now, volunteering to refill my glass every time I took three or four swallows from it or set it down for a minute.

“There’s a good girl,” said the King as if I were a child sick in nursery and he was holding out a spoon of my medicine.

“Goodness me,” I said, “you’re plying me with drink, aren’t you, Dad?”

“Call me, George, sweet thing,” said His Royal Highness.

I admit it, it’s a turn-on to be plied by a king. As Lord Acton might have said, “Power seduces and absolute power seduces absolutely.”

(Well, you know my track record, don’t you, Sid? C.f. All that about the Prince and his beauty.)

Though I acknowledge he never touched me. He didn’t even pinch me again. Our Sovereign was on his most sovereignly behavior. The kingdom was in good hands, if its Princess manqué wasn’t. Perhaps it was Charlotte’s presence, or the Prince’s sour mien, or it could be the King no longer found me attractive tipsy, or maybe he was bored with causing scenes, though that’s a bit hard to credit.

“These people are like court jesters, aren’t they, George?”

“Ask someone else,” the King said, breaking off, and then, practically phoning in his performance, flatly, “Ah you’re worldly. She’s worldly, Lawrence. Excellent choice, lad. Excellent good.”

And did. Still tipsy and even a little turned on by the room itself, by my situation (the former Louise Bristol, recently exiled to America with just enough to live on for about six months but beginning to feel the pinch as the time wore on and then, later, this au pair girl in her late twenties and, further on down the road, a maker of beds in the Housekeeping Department of a Los Angeles hotel and, later still, a down-on-her-luck, pushing-thirty beachcomber and sewer-of-houses and sandsweepstress, but currently fianceé to Lawrence Mayfair of the House of Mayfair and, not then knowing myself manqué, future Princess of England), sat down beside a stocky, almost preternaturally rosy-cheeked, jolly-seeming man of about fifty or so.

“Are you a court jester too?” I said, prepared by now to be told to ask someone else.

I would like my readers to know I know I was rude, brazen even, and that it will not do to dismiss this, to write it off to the fact that I was drunk. Ignorance of the— Well, you know. Nor do I plead my low tolerance for alcohol or put down to drought and holes in the ozone layers the extent of my thirst. Not much that brought on my troubles in this account was of my own doing but I openly acknowledge that which was.

As sometimes occurs in narrative what happens next is not always what is expected. The somewhat cherubic, rosy- cheeked, jolly-seeming man did not send me away. If he had, chances are I wouldn’t have left. His very avuncularity intensified my feelings of euphoria. I was not only brazen now but mildly randy, flirtatious, teasing, lightly touching his arm, deliberately brushing against him where we sat together on a sofa, my voice raised but not hysteric; acting out, strutting my stuff with the rest of the players in the room. I do not put it down to drink, I do not. I was tipsy as a gambler on a roll, mood-swung, high on luck, the boost in my fortunes.

“I am Selector of Ropes,” he answered simply, and it was as if he’d chastised me, so struck was I by the depth of his underacting. “Henry VIII was not an unfeeling man. He invented the position.”

“I never heard of your office,” I mentioned conversationally. “What is it you do?”

“I am not your straight man,” he said.

“Truly,” I told him. “I don’t know. I’m only asking.”

“We look at hemp.”

“Yes?” I said.

“We look for finer and finer rope. Softer silk.”

“Why?”

“Henry was not unfeeling. He had no stomach for beheading his women.”

“Why did he do it then?”

He looked toward King George.

“Go on,” the King said softly. “Tell her, Selector.” The room was already quiet. Now it was still. You could hear a pin drop.

(Mark this, Sir Sidney. Mark your marked manqué.)