Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Certainly I’m the Royal Commoner. I am and no other. What do you mean, anyway? You’re not a queen yet, you’re not even a princess. Not yet you’re not. You’ve a lot to learn, Miss Bristol. You have to take my instructions. You think Royals don’t get tattooed? It was a ransom thing. It was in case of Moors and Saracens. So they’d know what they had if princes and princesses, kings and queens, fell into the wrong hands. It was for their own protection. It’s for your own protection, Miss Bristol. Tell her, Prince. Ain’t I right? If I’m lying I’m dying.”

I turned toward Robin. “Show me yours, then,” I challenged.

“Oh, I’m not tattooed.”

“Well, there you are,” I said.

“Where am I? I’m not the King, I’m not his Successor!”

“Please!” said the one who was supposed to be the Royal Commoner impatiently. “The both of you!”

I must say I was more than a little surprised to hear him speak out so boldly to someone who, however far down the line of succession he may have been, was, after all, a prince. Perhaps that’s why what he said next had some claim on me.

“Because it wasn’t me who made the rules. I wasn’t there whenever it was whoever it was said whatever it was had to be had to be. I’ve no say-so in the grand affairs that command history, the long by-and-large of incremental, ad hoc necessity, that piecemeal tinker and rising to social or biologic occasions that are all solutions, adaptations, and evolution ever are. I never seeded the oyster with sand. I was ever too small fry to cause an effect, I mean. What have I to do with the world? It’s the curious meddle, stitch, and thick of things that gets things done. I’m just Royal Commoner, is all. My God, Prince, Miss Bristol, you don’t even know my name. But when a living, breathing oxymoron of a man raised up to oral tradition and the learning of the law comes up and says to you that a tattoo isn’t just, or even primarily, for the pomp and primp and privilege of sailormen in Southampton’s or Marseille’s or New York’s low parlors, why maybe you ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Catherine the Great was too tattooed! Cher is! And what is a tattoo, anyway? Semiotics, all those ultimate passwords of the flesh. Mother riffs, John-Loves-Mary ones, all those scratched affidavits, skin’s deepest language. Flags, semaphore, and the body’s loyalist bunting!”

Oh, how that man could talk!

I’m half hypnotized before he’s done and don’t even see him signal Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo to come forward. I don’t see her open the bag she carries her tools in, don’t see her dip the needle into the pot of green dye, or feel her wash me down with alcohol along the back of my left leg where the knee bends, or rub the topical anesthetic into my skin. I don’t see the thin rubber gloves she’s wearing to keep from catching a dose of AIDS off me in case a drop of my blood leaks into the pores of her skin. Royal Commoner’s still talking away about a mile a minute. You’d think I was his troops at Agincourt and he was King Henry V rallying me, maybe jollying me along so I’d let Mrs. Pfyfe-Philo plant another one on the back of my right leg when she was done with the left. He was right, it is painless. I don’t even feel the damn needle when it starts to go in and out, in and out, like she was some seamstress and the sensitive skin in the back of my knee was no more sentient than cloth.

No. What brought me out of it at last was what had put me into it. I’m listening to this smooth talker and suddenly it occurs that, oral tradition or no oral tradition, something would have had to slip through the cracks. This guy was improvising. He was giving too many reasons. Somewhere in the gloom Robin was smirking.

So, no matter I risked tearing the back of my leg to pieces, I pulled away. I examined myself. It was too dark to see, but later, in the light, I saw that all she’d managed to do was circumscribe the topmost arc in the highest leaf of the shamrock.

(I’d put him off with a quibble. Punning on “sore,” admitting when Larry pressed me that, yes, Robin probably had offended me. Still, strictly speaking, I hadn’t lied to him. I wasn’t sore, just a little numb there where I’d taken the topical. And he had offended me. And, anyway, loophole and sophistry have ever been the mainstays of statesmen, providing them comfort and security, the sense they have to have of their own invulnerability, or they’d never get anything done. “None of woman born,” the witches tell Macbeth that other distant cousin of the Mayfair clan, and “… until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come. …” And what about the stuff the Oracle fed Oedipus? Softsoap about killing his father and getting it on with his ma, so that all he thought he ever had to do to beat his fate was just get out of town? That’s in the tradition, too, for people so sold on tradition. And, anyway, for all I know maybe I was actually supposed to get that coat-of-arms tattoo. Wouldn’t that be something? I mean wouldn’t that really be something, Sir Sid, if it weren’t a hoax and all I have to show — didn’t I give back the clothes? didn’t I give back the jewels and Denise’s fun furs? — for my brief encounter with the Royals was just this tiny bit of a circle stitched to the back of my knee like a piece of green thread?)

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

And lost in our individual thoughts — mine, now I’d stopped thinking about what happened in Greenwich, were of Larry, big and gorgeous in the driver’s seat, larger than life and more fit in his clothing (tweed now in the comfortable, abrupt autumn weather, tweed and cavalry twill and the softest oxford) than a man in a catalogue — we drove on in the crestless Jag to my parents’ house in Cookham-upon- Thames. Who knows what Lawrence was thinking of? The money this whole business had cost the Crown, perhaps, what a Prince’s love drew down from a dynasty’s treasure, of positions even more compromising than any I — horny in smoky fall’s apple ambience, the polished leather promise and poignant feel of its vaguely grainy fabrics — could ever have hoped to put him in, now he’d given his word to the world we were engaged.

I’m not being unfair to him, though none of this had occurred to me then, of course. How could it have done? I was in love, I thought I was to be his Princess. I guess I was just this romantic old silly. Tra la la, fa la la, hey nonny.

I had to hand it to Larry, I really did. With his Prince’s breeding and his almost cartographer’s knowledge of the lay of his lands, and his truly vast, dead-on sense of good husbandry, he had a sort of perfect pitch for his holdings, for all his rents and levies, and not only for his, but for the next lord’s over, too, and the next lord’s after that one, and for the next’s and the next’s and next’s, ad infinitum, filling up the shires and counties and districts and ridings of the kingdom with some genius for property, some blood-driven instinct for the fixed boundaries, qualities, and intrinsics of possession till all England was drawn in on the fine map of his understanding.

He knew the annual rainfalls, the crops and industries and roads and forests, had a feel for its weathers, its wildlife, the fish in its rivers, the birds in its trees.

Cookham is a river village, almost a suburban wetlands. It is, in the best sense, unspoiled, quaint, almost precious. I cannot say how, but Lawrence even knew how to dress for the occasion of its suburban Sunday circumstances, his twills and tweeds, though he was Prince, perfectly, carefully, considerately matched — I found this touching; it made me more anxious than ever to bed him — to their own, the twills, tweeds, and oxfords of their aspiring squires’ middle-class hearts. I hadn’t seen it before, but when we stepped out of the car Lawrence was even wearing one of those soft wool visored caps that are part of the uniform, and that one sees everywhere in the country.