Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

(This isn’t rage, Sid, so don’t mistake me. It isn’t rage but merely the gentlest indication to my gentle readers to let them know how badly I feel to have lost out on so much, because if only a pipsqueak younger brother at a two or three times remove from the throne can have so much freedom and latitude, then how much more free and how much more wide would the latitude be for the bona fide royal- wedding-related bride of the out-and-out King! Sid, I mean, they’re not even licensed! All that hocus-pocus and rigmarole and long, winding trail and trial by blood descent they have to go through just in order to get to be considered to be in the just royal aristocratic running, and then they’re permitted to skip and finesse entirely the simple red tape of filling out a form to apply for a driver’s license! I mean, once in a while you can depose them, or maybe actually even kill them, but you can’t sue them for damages if you slip and fall on their walk if they haven’t shoveled their snow or they blindside you for life on the clearest day in the world when they drive home drunk from the pub where you’ve bought all their drinks!)

Denise, sighing, said, “Please, Mother. Mother, please don’t,” and shut the lid over the piano keys as if she’d finished the evening’s last set. “No use to fret, darling,” she said, and took up the Queen’s hands in her own. “Mustn’t be anxious. Alec’s all right. You’ll see. He’s much too fond of his life to give it up stupidly. There,” she said, “that’s better. You look so much better. Doesn’t she look so much better, Father?”

“A dainty dish to set before the King,” the King said.

“Oh,” she said, “you two!” And she might have been some cosseted Midlands farm wife dismissing a compliment and not the sophisticated lady of an hour or so earlier. She’d been smoking all evening but her long silver cigarette holder was nowhere to be seen. Denise for that matter had ceased to appear girlish, had as effectively suppressed that side of her personality as she had seemed to make the piano disappear by closing its lid. Only the King remained in character, and it occurred to me to wonder whether that wasn’t what differentiated him finally, that what made a king a king was the power of his concentration, that what may, as Denise put it, have started as an accident of birth wasn’t maintained by some absolute act of the will. How else account for the staying power of a reign, our image of kings — and queens too — as persons, whatever their age, continuing in their primes, long enough at any rate to put their stamp upon an era?

(I don’t want my readers to think I was that objective, already this journalist of a princess manqué taking notes, recording her impressions. Not a bit of it! I was swept up, I was plenty swept up. So swept up, in fact, I never took Lawrence up on his offer to run off to the Tower with him to have for engagement ring the Crown Jewel of my choice, but kept instead the fussy costume-jewelry ring I had bought for myself on the ground floor of a Los Angeles department store and had shown to the reporters back in Cape Henry. So I was swept up all right, plenty shook by these people, as much taken by them as any who pay their good money to read this stuff. Still, a girl will have her instincts, won’t she, Sir Sidney?)

Having pumped Charlotte up with her reassurances, Denise now made an effort to reinforce her original entrance, displaying her earlier, larkier pedigree. Turning back the clock, she mimed an excited, jumpy applause, impaling herself, whatever her reasons, on some sort of dismal, faked enthusiasm.

She seized on me as if I were someone from the audience pressed into service to assist her.

“Never mind, dear,” she assured me, “rudeness is just Alec’s way. It isn’t as if he means anything by it. It’s only his way of getting attention without actually having to try to kill anyone. His bark is way worse than his bite, though, once you get to know him, that is. It’s really too devastating he’s not here though. I shall never forgive him. No. I shall never forgive him. We’d planned to take you round Knightsbridge to show you to all our mates. Have you your card with you? Not to worry, we can have one made up in the morning. Did you know, incidentally, it was Alec’s idea to reintroduce the calling card back into society? If there’s nothing to do, sometimes we’ll both take up a bunch of them and drive out in my Jag to Croyden or Putney or Willesden Green and pop them through the postal slots of some of the ratepayers. Can you imagine the looks on their faces? Such fun!

“I know,” she said, “we can call on some of the cousins. We can call on Cousin Nancy, we can call on cousins Heide and Jeanne and Alice and Anne— Cousin Anne is in town, isn’t she, Lawrence? I say, Lawrence — oh look, he’s blushing — is Cousin Anne in town?”

“Leave off, will you, Denise!” my intended yelled at her.

“Pa,” she appealed, “make him stop. Show him who’s King.”

“The both of you stop.”

“Oh all right,” she said, “I won’t show you Nanc — I mean Anne.”

“Denise!”

“Anyway,” the Princess confided, “often — well, sometimes — Alec and I— Oh, speak of the devil.”

And, suddenly, someone who could, in accordance with all his advance notices, only have been Alec, blustered into the room. He was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk. His clothes were torn. Alec the Rude, glancing once about him, at Charlotte and George, at his sister Denise, at his brother Lawrence, the King-in-waiting who’d been off working the world and whom he couldn’t have seen in at least two months, looked in my direction, came toward me, bowed deeply, and kissed my hand loud as you please, quite solidly, and dead center on its costume-jewelry ring finger.

Sunday, February 2, 1992

How He Courted Me

It wasn’t jealousy as you and I know it. Well, it wasn’t jealousy at all, really. No matter what you’ve read in the press, the truth is I was never attracted to Alec. I don’t really think he was attracted to me. I’m not telling any tales out of school if I remind the public that Prince Alec is not highly sexed, only heavily hormoned. His skin, if you look closely, is actually rather fair and only appears swarthy because of the dense stubble of five-o’clock shadow that covers it. I don’t know why he doesn’t grow a beard. Unless of course the vaguely tough-guy look on his handsome, somewhat disheveled face is something he deliberately cultivates. Like the dust-up (rather than car crash) it turns out he provoked on the evening of my first visit to the palace. Which is why, really, I was never attracted to Alec.

Well, put yourself in my place. Knowing, I mean, what I knew. About, I mean, that business of their never being brought up on charges. Mere Figureheads? Symbolic power? I should think not. No, they can’t take us into foreign wars and don’t even have all that much say-so in domestic matters. They couldn’t, I daresay, fix a ticket for anyone below the rank of a marquess. But forget about not being allowed to make laws or fix tickets. But not ever having to answer to anyone? Symbolic power? Power like theirs, the power, I mean, to run amok with impunity, is the most seductive and dangerous power there is. So so much, I say, for the pretty myth of their Figureheadhood!

Yet there’s no denying it. It is seductive. All that force, all that dash and fire, all that vim and verve. To wink at precept and live in some perpetual state of willful disregard the indulged, insouciant life is a temptation indeed. I was not tempted.

I am, I think at least as much a woman as Prince Alec is a man. Where he is testosteronagenous and aggressive, I am largely progesterogenic and nurturing. And I never forgot that Alec is a bully — is this libelous? let them go prove it— and that too much of his bravura is vouchsafed by his princely immunities. If he was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk, if his clothes were torn, what had he to lose in a dust-up? He’s on the National Health, his clothing allowance is seventy-five thousand pounds a year. You should see the other guy.