Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“On balance ’tis no detriment. Else let them loose to browse the privatest pages of our diaries or knock about in any castle’s well-kept closets. Freedom’s well and good for business, yet it’s better than not the general have not the keys to this partic’l’r kingdom, or even inclination to dent the knotty code of all our chesspiece, secret zoology, personnel, and architecture.

“Well played, Band Leader, well played indeed! Give us another!”

All the time I’m looking at him, don’t you know.

“Oh, listen,” he said. “Please do me the honor, my dear. This is one of my favorites.”

In fact it may have been one of his favorites. Whereas before he’d held me in the most casual way, like a brother dancing with his sister on Cabaret Night in the salon of a cruise ship, say, now Peerager drew me tightly to him. I think I was embarrassed. Larry and his friend were still in deep discussion.

“What,” I said, “what?”

He was at my ear. I needn’t have worried. This old smoothy was a smooth old smoothy. His voice laughed and chuckled as it spoke as if it were telling me dirty stories or giving me good gossip. Indeed, he even managed to shake his head and do something almost imperceptible with his eyes, closing them for a moment by way of a signal — No, no, don’t look now, but when you get a chance … — so that people seeing us must have thought we were talking about them and, offended, turned away.

Peerager said to me, “Hark! You’re to be his bride. Quarterly one and four: Argent, three eagles conjoined in fess gules. Quarterly two and three: Or, a King casting a knowing, sidelong glance displayed on a shamrock vert. Early in the seventeenth century the knowing glance was changed to a mask of tragedy. The tragic mask against the clover is a heraldric pun. The Mayfairs are descended from the Lears— née O’Leary — and are of Irish background.”

“What did he tell you?” Robin asked the next time I saw him.

“He thinks King Lear was a harp.”

“I’ll make an appointment for you with Royal Commoner!”

(Because what did I know, Sid? There are customs and protocols for everything, everything. Some historic, buried etiquettes of the anthropological— stunning arcana, Grimm’s laws, Great Vowel Shifts, the cryptic, hidden, hush-hush of a billion reasons. Why A precedes B, why zed follows Y; how it is condemned men get final cigarettes— and what they were offered before there was tobacco: fruit, a chance to hear their favorite song one last time, the opportunity to speak their last words. For everything. Why there’s music at weddings and funerals. Hadn’t I been there when that bevy of jolly incumbents came calling, that sweet assortment of royal intentioners and fashion engineers and selectors of ropes— all those messengers of the traditionals and ceremonials with their inexplicable explanations of the improbable arrangements of kings?

(So why wouldn’t I believe him when he told me I would have to see the Royal Commoner? I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but I hadn’t known there was a Royal Taster on the payroll either, had I? Then I saw him myself— the thin, bony guy who managed to live on a spoonful of this and a single bite of that and a mere sip of the other, keeping his mouth clean for the flavors of poisons he’d not only never yet tasted but would probably only recognize after the fact, and then just by how they differed from the ordinary taste of meat and sweets and bread and vegetables. So why shouldn’t there be a Royal Commoner, too? So far as I can see, there’s at least one of everything anyway. So why shouldn’t I believe that the office he held and the service he performed — to give instruction to commoners about to marry kings or queens or their immediate successors — maybe came up once, and never more than twice — and often never at all — during the entire course and tenure of one of these fellow’s careers?)

So that when I went down with Robin to Greenwich that time, it was with a certain sense of sedate obligation and almost spiritual — at least historical — resolve.

Not for one moment was I under the impression that I was taking holy orders or anything, but I have to admit there was certainly something solemn about the business, and I approached Royal Commoner’s dim figure in the dark old rooms in the ancient wooden chancery nervous as a convert coming for instruction to a priest. I couldn’t quite make it out — it was bright outside, my eyes had not adjusted to the gloom — but through an open door I thought I saw a vague form — it might have been female — hunched over the shape of what could have been a doctor’s fat black bag.

“Royal Commoner?” said the Prince.

“At your service, Prince Robin. And at yours, Miss Bristol.”

“You shall be brought to blood by matrimony,” Robin said quietly, “but you must do as he says.”

(How would I know? How would I, Sir Sidney? Haven’t I already said that there seems to be at least one of everything in this world? There are so many reasons and duties and traditions. For all I knew, maybe only the second brother of the future king could be the intermediary here. Maybe something of the sort was written into the tradition, as much a part of the customs and old deportments of humanity as the rule that brides and grooms aren’t to see each other on the day of the wedding until the ceremony.

(So how would I know, how would I, Sir Sid?

(Because we’re all of us anthropological. We are, we’re all of us anthropological. I don’t care how grounded a person may be, cosseted as a prince like Lawrence or Robin, made over like the only issue of oldest age, like Sarah’s child, Isaac, or hopeless as kids in welfare hotels, the sun comes down every night and there are fearsome things in the dark: smells and hints and clues and sounds of death and worse things after, the horrible, stacked loneliness of men, the abominable godawful odds against anyone’s not only ever managing to make it in the long run, but even so much as managing to just plain cope — the insomniac’s wakeful doubts and all the low blood sugar of the human race.

(So tell me, why wouldn’t there be anthropology, why wouldn’t there be ritual and faith and all the mumbo-jumbo of cultural reinforcement?)

“Of course she will, Prince Robin,” Royal Commoner said pleasantly, “why wouldn’t she? Do as I say?”

“Well,” said Robin, “it isn’t as if I actually spelled things out for her.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh my.”

“What?”

“Oh dear,” he said. “This is awkward, this is very awkward.”

“What?” I said again.

“For God’s sake, Louise, don’t make such a fuss. You too, Royal Commoner. It’s not painful or anything. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“No, of course it isn’t,” he said. “It’s not painful. There are topical anesthetics. Aren’t there topical anesthetics, Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo?”

“Even without them,” the woman said, for it was a woman I’d seen in the doorway, and she was carrying a doctor’s bag. “Well, the tattoo needles barely break the skin. It’s the powerful new dyes they have today that makes the marks.”

“Tattoo needles?”

“You told her nothing?”

“You’re the Royal Commoner, Royal Commoner.”

“Is this what you’re wanting then?” the woman asked me. She held up a cartoon with details from the coat of arms the Royal Peerager had described earlier — a gold mask of tragedy superimposed on a green shamrock.

“Catherine the Great was tattooed,” the Royal Commoner said.

“Catherine the Great already had noble blood.”

“Cher’s tattooed, some of the biggest stars.”

“Cher isn’t engaged to a prince. What is this? What are you handing me? You’re not the Royal Commoner, are you? There’s no such thing, is there?”