Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

Whatever the public’s speculations about Alec’s and my behavior, I was too caught up in the genuinely hard work— harder work, oh much harder, than when I was in California running the vacuum, cleaning washrooms, scouring toilets, turning mattresses, making up beds; harder even than the hours I put in out in the Pacific rubbing my hands raw, raising blood, and doing without the benefit of appliances to entire wicky-ups what I’d been obliged to do to only a handful of guest rooms in the Los Angeles hotel — of our official engagement and ceremonial but backbreaking courtship to take all that much notice of what I knew to be vicious, baseless rumor, no matter what I, or Denise either, may have said to Alec when we confronted him. Perhaps Lawrence’s own phlegmatic response lulled me into an unrealistic appraisal of my danger. (Or perhaps — do you gather my meaning, Lord Sidney? — I had not yet come to appreciate the subtler, almost chemical properties, exchanges, and reactions of families.) So, much was lost on me. Though I’ll be frank, I didn’t blame myself then and don’t blame myself now.

Who would in my position? New to fame? I mean fame , my friends. And if, today, I can write myself off as a simple celebrity, in those days — I hadn’t realized until I put down that last phrase how very long ago they now seem though it can’t have been more than four or five months back that all this took place — I was an historical figure, a matrix for monarchy, the potential breeder of queens and kings. It’s no wonder I was under such close, if misdirected, scrutiny.

As I was saying.

New to fame. New, though at twenty-eight I was perhaps a few years past the right age for it, to a whirlwind tour— indeed, there were times when I actually thought of myself as living in a kind of montage — of social geography I’d seen depicted in films — bars of crayon light spelling the names of nightclubs in flashing pulses of neon like a kind of urban code; wheels spinning on roulette tables with colored chips on special numbers like canted stacks of denomination; dice on green baize; corks popping out of champagne bottles; dance halls and dance bands, the musicians sitting primly on chairs behind music stands whose vaguely scrolled shapes were like the fronts of sleighs; couples barely moving to slow, easy music from some universal time zone of romance; sleek cars on streets still shiny from recent rain— all the world that did too love a lover wrapped in creamy layers of early A.M. cliché—but never really believed existed.

Oddly, it was at these times I most had Larry to myself. It was as if the paparazzi had been bought off, or as if we’d somehow managed to give the Prince’s family the slip. Maybe this was only a professional courtesy — another tradition — paid to princes during certain of the more tender phases of their courtships. And odd, too, how strangely returned to myself I felt, and to a time when I was not yet the toast of Western and Mediterranean Europe, shy, almost defensive.

There was, for example, the incident at The Springfield, one of Britain’s, indeed the Continent’s, most important but — because of its relative inaccessibility and the steepness of the stakes risked there — least frequented gambling casinos. The Springfield is in Llanelli, an unattractive borough and port town of under twenty-five thousand in County Dyfed, South Wales. Lawrence, who wasn’t much of a gambler—“More Denise’s, Mary’s, and Alec’s line of country,” he’d said both times we’d been to London clubs, quickly adding that craps, cards, roulette, and offtrack betting were some of the nation’s principal industries and, as such, required his attention during our engagement, as, once we were married, our presence would be expected at foundries, coal mines, and shipyards; it was good, he said, for tourism — drove us down as much, or so I was told, to see his old boyhood chum, Macreed Dressel, the casino’s owner, as to show the flag.

In London, no matter I was no more gambler than Lawrence, I rather enjoyed the glamorous ambience of these places, enjoyed the exotic liquors they passed round, enjoyed the au courant fashions of the women, the striking black-tie presence of the men, was enchanted by the sourceless background of classical chamber music played by live, but hidden, musicians, so at odds with the ostensible activities in the big rooms, but so fitting, too, suggesting as it did an earlier age, some fastidious buck-and-wing of cotillions and quadrilles, of silk breeches and linen petticoats, great fortunes won and lost, love tragedies and suicides and young men killed in duels.

The Springfield, however, was a different story.

For one thing, after what Larry had told me about the club, about its being a kind of Lourdes or Mecca for people of serious fortunes, a place so remote it was almost as convenient to approach by ship as by rail or airplane, I had imagined a sort of Monte Carlo for the rich, even picturing those freaky, out-of-the-way palm trees you sometimes get in Great Britain here and there along this or that ocean current, my mind actually conjuring a ruined castle (brilliantly restored, of course), the chamber musicians of the London clubs augmented by a full-fledged orchestra, gaming tables like an incredible furniture, fine Oriental scrim displacing the ordinary baize beneath the dice, gracious suites where guests refreshed themselves after an evening’s play, magical fountains and gardens where wild animals, odorless, disported, their killing teeth and dangerous claws removed. …

In the event, of course, The Springfield was as plain as its name.

And stranger, too, than anything I had yet conceived under the spell of my touched, teched, chosen, prenuptial fairytale life.

It was as drab as anything else in that drab port town and, in lieu of the safe lions, gardens, and tigers of my overheated imagination, hadn’t even the advantage of a view of the sea. And rather than the cunningly restored castle I’d imagined, the structure itself was nothing more stately than both sides of an ordinary semidetached. Nor was there anywhere to be seen the extravagant, requisite fashions of the London clubs. Here, the men’s suits and ladies’ dresses could have been seen between five and seven P.M. on the station platforms, or staked out along the steep ascending and descending escalators, and in every car on the London Underground.

Here the unadorned men and prosaically clothed women — many more men than women — not only hadn’t arrived as couples but, one understood, if they recognized each other at all it was only what they had observed of one another’s habits at the gaming tables. One understood — and this was not my overheated imagination rekindled — that one was in the presence if not of disease then at least of obsession. The Springfield, like some sanitarium-in-reverse, was given over to the practice of gaming as sanitariums were once given over to a cure for tuberculosis, or, nowadays, to losing weight, say, or weaning people off drugs.

Macreed Dressel, Larry’s old pal (though it was never clear to me how Larry had met him, he proved so entirely strange I never pressed the Prince on the subject), was standing in the doorway when we arrived. Unlike anyone else I was to see there that evening, Mr. Dressel was got up, in a sort of costume like Rick’s in Casablanca, as if the white dinner jacket and the carnation in his lapel were meant to identify him as the owner/manager of the place.

“Larry!” he shouted as we stepped out of the car.

“How are you, Macreed?”

“Is this she? Oh, it is! It is indeed, but take my advice, my dear,” Dressel said while we were still several yards off, “what those photographers have done to you is actionable! Were I your solicitor I’d advise you to haul them up on charges! The most beautiful woman in Europe and they shoot you as if you were some common starlet!”