Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“What about it?”

“Well, we were thinking.”

“Alec and me.”

“Me too. It was my idea.”

“It was Robin’s idea.”

“But it’s your wedding.”

“We’d have to clear it with you first.”

“Absolutely.”

“Of course.”

“No question about it.”

“We’d never go behind your back.”

“He’ll never go for it.”

“Oh, Anne, we don’t know that.”

“He’ll never go for it. You’ll see.”

“This isn’t a secure phone.”

“Would it be all right, do you think, if we wore, well, jeans, to the wedding?”

“Jeans? To a Royal Wedding? In Westminster Abbey?”

“I told you he wouldn’t go for it.”

“Well, not jeans, or not jeans exactly. Regular morning coats and top hats for the boys, actually.”

“And gorgeous gowns for the ladies. With these ravishing big hats and really swell veils.”

“Just cut like jeans.”

“From stone-washed denim.”

“Oh, it would be such fun! The Sloane Rangers would just die!”

“Hello, Denise.”

“Hi, Louise,” she said, and I had this image of Britain’s Royal Family stuffed into Alec’s Quantra like so many circus clowns. If George and Charlotte, preparatory to standing down, had not been off on what they must surely have thought of — the Nöel Coward King, his Nöel Coward Queen — as their final farewell world tour — after our initial meeting, and with the exception of a few subsequent appearances with them at the house of this or that duke or marquess or earl, I seldom saw them — taking their last curtain calls in Tonga and Singapore, Belfast, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth ports of call, I could comfortably have thought of them back there with the rest of the zanies.

“You’re wasting your time,” Anne said, “he’ll never go for it.”

“Not so fast. Give him a chance. Let him think about it.”

“No,” Larry said. “I don’t want to think about it. It’s out of the question.”

“You see? What did I tell you?”

“You never know, he could have said yes.”

“The child is father to the man,” his cousin said.

Larry rang off.

“What did she mean, Larry?”

“What did he mean?”

“What did who mean?”

“What did he mean are you still sore?”

“Robin?”

“What did he mean?”

I didn’t want to quarrel with him. So I made something up. I don’t even remember now what it was. Just some harmless white lie I passed off. To keep the peace. (Probably I picked up on the word “sore.” Because that was mostly how we spoke to one another in those days— in all love’s thrust-and-parry, in all its stichomythic Ping-Pong tropes of engagement. Each hanging on the other’s words as if love were some syntax of Germanic delay. Because this wasn’t as it had always been with me, Sir Sid. Accustomed as I was to arias, soliloquies, lectures, speeches, promises.) Let’s say I said, “I don’t know, Larry, you know how Robin is. He probably thought he offended me.”

“Did he?”

“Well, yes, I suppose he probably did.”

“He drinks too much. He isn’t kind when he’s drunk. He forgets who he is.”

“He forgets what he is.”

“Hmn. “Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”

I always thought of Prince Robin as the pie-faced one, of his strange, vaguely rubbery features at once sullen and cheerful like the pressed pug nose and big puffed eyes on a victim of Down’s syndrome. He reminded me rather of that actor Charles Laughton.

Two or so years ago, when I first saw California, I remember how very surprised I was that it looked exactly how I thought it would look, and seemed, it seemed, just how I thought it would seem. This wasn’t déjà vu or any mystic sense of Tightness; the sense, I mean, that California was some fate I’d been preparing for. Often it’s nothing more than, oh, the availability of the world through all the telecommunication satellites that are constantly orbiting it, sucking up and spewing out geography across incredible distances so that nothing, not its poles, or rain forests, or the deepest trenches in its oceans, is unfamiliar to us. It is, I think, some salient hallmark stamped in perception and stuck in the blood. In the event, my years in America had largely cut me off from the hype from home, yet I knew before knowing him what Robin was like. He was a type, but we are all of us types. How could we be in the same rooms with each other if this weren’t so? We should want bars between us, the protection of cages. Robin is Robin, neither mischievous like Alec nor playful like Denise, and of course he has none of Mary’s sweetness or Larry’s sense of responsibility. What can I say? I wanted bars between us, the protection of cages.

(What can they do to me? They don’t go to court. A few years ago an intruder was caught in Charlotte’s bedroom, sitting on her bed, watching her sleep. He was dragged off by bobbies. They searched him for weapons, asked him a few questions, and then released him. What can they do to me, Sid? I signed on to tell all and haven’t told all. — Not yet, and they know it, so what can they do? What can they do to me, I hold all the cards. What he is, our Robin, is evil.)

This was before any of that stuff found its way into the papers. So, playing on “sore,” I made something up. The Prince hadn’t a clue. No one had said a word about tattoos.

Prince Robin had taken me aside.

“Have you spoken,” he whispered, “with the Royal Peerager?”

I mentioned the time I’d seen him in the King, his father’s, palace.

“Yes,” Robin said, “he told me about that. He’ll be in touch with you. He has some things to impart. After you’ve seen him, I should very much like it if you would get back to me.”

Well, I thought, this was a mystery, but it’s often in the nature of people with whom one is uncomfortable that they say enigmatic, baffling things.

The Royal Peerager approached me at a charity ball and asked me to dance. I looked over at Larry, who was engaged in conversation with a fellow I recognized (without ever having met him) as one of his cohorts in earnest resolution. I turned back to Royal Peerager and shrugged my assent. Believe me when I tell you I’d quite forgotten Prince Robin’s puzzling statement regarding any further encounter with, in Queen Charlotte’s words, one of that “sweet assortment of jolly incumbents” who defined and so helped preserve many of the arcane rituals in our land (as one is first alarmed by, and then dismisses, the dark, abrupt remarks and elusive hints of certain — what can they do to me, their hands are tied — passive aggressives), so that I was all the more taken aback when, while we were still dancing, he began to recite, neither in conspiratorial tones nor stage whispers, in perfectly normal conversational accents, protected, I guess he would have thought, by the plain, preemptive music of the orchestra, this strange report:

“Though they may have seen its representation a thousand times, most of the people in this realm haven’t the foggiest when it comes to the coat of arms of their own Royal Family. It could as well be Braille as heraldry for all they make of it. I say this not to disparage so much as to congratulate ourselves, for in the main it’s as well that our subjects should not too much understand the devices and emblazonments, mottoes, bends, and color schemes of their genealogical betters. It’s all right with us they haven’t mastered leeks and lilies, fess and mantling; nor can parse achievement, hatchment, or do any of the revealing, reductive mathematicals — quartering, dimidiation — of descent. They can’t tell crest from ’scutcheon, some of them, or tabard from surcoat. They’ve never learned the difference between five bears rampant and six lions crouching, nor can they decline the symbolism of twenty martlets perched on gold.