Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

The others had laid down their cards and were watching the Prince. It was very moving. My fiancé put all his chips on number twenty. Macreed spun the wheel. The steel ball settled in number five. It was very moving.

“You beat me?” the Prince said.

“Yes,” Dressel said, “it seems I have. Yes.”

“Good show, Macreed!” said the Prince. “Well played, old friend!”

All seven gamblers stared at him.

“We’ll be going back now,” Lawrence said, and took a check from his pocket, which I’d seen him make out earlier. He stuffed it into Macreed Dressel’s white dinner jacket. “Here,” he said, “for your trouble.”

It was very moving.

I’d never felt closer to him. He never said a word to Dressel about his brothers and sisters.

It’s been said that the life of a member of the Royal Family is as different from the life of a member of even the upper middle class as the life of a member of the upper middle class is from the life of a caveman.

I eat, I have clothes to wear, even in Cape Henry there was a place for me to go to sleep every night. But I have no money. Certainly they pamper me, they give me these clothes, they see to it I’m fed. They even seem fond of me. Still, the fact remains, I have no money. It would be unseemly of them to offer me any, it would be unseemly of me to take it, even walking-around money, even chump change. I have no money. By that measure alone — I’d never felt closer to him — we were separated by the greatest distances, the widest ways. So I did, I felt returned to myself. Can you understand what I’m trying to say?

Even two or three weeks after our visit to the club in Llanelli in Wales, it was still the montage, that blur, I mean, of love and courtship like a kind of tour. We felt (or I did) surrounded, protected by romance like some cloak of delighted (real or not, present or not), unseen onlookers — the forgiving interested, call them — whose psychic stand-ins Larry and I were, almost their representatives in some parliament of hearts, as emboldened by youth and looks and luck to get away with the outrageous, the murder of the daily, as someone genuinely funny, say, or as a pair of attractive, tired tipsies— dressed-up, black-tie, wee- small-hours types in the back of someone’s milk truck, clippety-clop, clippety-clop— so many of love’s and wooing’s vouchsafed antigens around us it seemed as if, though (the paparazzi called off, Larry’s parents, brother and sisters and cousins and all the peeraged rest of their high-placed pals on all their great stately estates given the slip) I had him to myself now, we were on some honeymoon before the honeymoon — but that’s what romance is, isn’t it? — a high holiday of mutual regard. It would have been impossible even to imagine a lovers’ quarrel. We’d have had to have drummed one up— one of us take offense at the color of the other’s clothes, or argue whether this or that restaurant deserved a third star.

We went to the theater and never told them in advance we were coming. We didn’t ask for the royal box, or even dress circle (Larry wore off-the-rack clothes for the first time in his life), but chose the upper circle or took out-of-the-way seats deep in the Gods where we could hold hands. When we were recognized in restaurants — it was surprising how seldom we were — we refused the best tables and Larry tipped the maître d’ to find us something toward the back, near where the staff took its cigarette breaks, or waitresses traded their shifts with one another because they had dates, or their kids were sick, or blokes were coming to have a look at the spare room. Or sought out third- and fourth-world restaurants, restaurants from countries that hadn’t been completely charted yet, and sampled exotic meats killed in the Amazon rain forest, and exchanged spoonfuls of each other’s soups made from rare Indonesian and African birds, or puzzled how deeply into the rinds of seals and sea otters it was wise to eat and tried to figure out what to do with the beautiful phosphorescent skins and soft bones of tropical fish. And went to motion-picture houses where we stood on line with everyone else when the show was changing and, once inside, stared at ourselves in the newsreels as if we were other people, or laughed about Alec’s genius for omnipresence. And, if the feature was a romantic comedy, we watched it, completely absorbed, as forgiving of the slapdash principals as if we were those unseen onlookers, the forgiving interested, and the characters we forgave were ourselves.

It was like dating. Well, it was dating. It was dating exactly. The Prince confessed he’d never had so much fun and admitted that, yes, maybe he was a trading-places sort of prince after all— just this poor Prince looking for a pauper.

(Sid, we were on the same wavelengths. I felt returned to myself and so, to hear him tell it, did Larry.)

And it was still the montage the night Larry took me in his crestless, unmarked Jag on a remarkable drive around London.

We crossed the Thames near where the original London Bridge once stood.

“It must have been quite gorgeous, London Bridge.”

“Hmn, yes,” Larry said, “and profitable. Our family once had the rents from it.”

“The rents? From London Bridge?”

“Many of the most fashionable homes in the city were built on it, some of the best shops, the smartest stalls. Well,” he said, “location is everything.”

“It’s possible for people to own bridges?”

“It’s possible for kings and queens to own bridges. Kings and queens may own anything, Louise. We could lay claim to the rents and rates on the entire London Underground if we wanted. On the Green, Blue, and Red Lines. On any of them. On the Number Thirty-nine and Seventy-four busses.”

“Oh, lay claim,” I said.

“There’s the rub,” he said.

We rode on in silence for a while. It was a beautiful evening. I let down my electric window. This time of night, the air was almost balmy. I relax in a car, and Larry was an excellent driver.

“Take Lord Nelson’s monument there, for example,” the Prince said.

We were in Trafalgar Square.

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s ours, it belongs to us. Just imagine what would happen if we asserted our rights, though, tried pulling him down. The people wouldn’t stand for it.”

“Why would you want to pull down Admiral Nelson’s monument?”

“I don’t. I’m a sailorman myself, I admire Nelson. It’s the principle.”

We passed the National Portrait Gallery. Larry told me that belonged to them too.

“What, the National Portrait Gallery?”

“It’s practically the family album, Louise.”

“I suppose,” I said, “looked at that way.”

And went on, up Piccadilly to Piccadilly Circus and around the Statue of Eros — also in the family — and out to the British Museum — though they let others use it, also in the family, all, all in the family — and doubled back, past their parks and past their palaces, and on to where the Bank of England stood, and Larry stopped the car and turned off the engine and leaned across my knees and reached out to the polished-wood glove compartment where he kept a pack of cigarettes and took one cigarette from the pack and lit it before returning the pack to the glove compartment where it would stay for the week or so before he wanted another one.

“That’s yours too, I suppose?” I pointed to the bank. “The Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street?”

“The difficulty with theories about the divine right of kings,” he said, “is that not many people are religious these days. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. All that stands between us and the barbarians at the gates is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Louise.”