Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

(The gothic, girly inclinations, Sid, that do me every damn time!)

Not once feeling anger, no matter I’d teased and quibbled with him, at the Prince’s disdain for our Cookham ways, so much as a heightened sexual desire. So that, despite Daddy’s carryings-on and the fuss he made, his almost maniacal blather as he poured sherry into each of our glasses, giving in some exaggerated chivalric parody not just my mother the wine before he offered any to the Successor, the Prince, Duke of Wilshire, future King of all the Englands, but to me as well, probably saving the Prince till last not just out of manners but so he could pay him the steadiest attention. Meanwhile, as I say, keeping up this incredible monologue about French antique furniture, at one time actually raising his glass in a toast to the Royal Collection!

“To your rooms, Sir!” proclaimed my mad father. “To the seventy-three excellent fauteuils, forty-one vintage ber- gères, and thirty-five folding pliants in your family’s palaces. To all the capital chaises in Wilshire House. To the master chairmakers: to each extraordinary Boulard, Cresson (I sat in one once!), and Gourdin. To your luxurious Jacobs, Senés, and Tilliards on the important Savonnerie carpets. To all the cylindrical, tabouret stools like so many upholstered drums, and all the beautiful banquettes along Balmoral’s, Buckingham’s, and Windsor’s walls. A toast to all cunning, exquisite finishing touch— your splendid accessories, the fire screens, gilt candlesticks, Imari bowls, Houdon marbles, and soft-paste porcelains. Your snuffboxes studded with gemstones like pimientos in olives. Clocks, chenets, bras-de-lumières, silver chandeliers, Kändler birds, girandole centerpieces.”

“‘These are a few of my favorite things,’” the Prince remarked darkly, wryly, but if Father even heard him, let alone understood him, he gave no indication. Me, he had me jumping!

Meanwhile, Dad continued his absurd toast, rattling off names like Caffiéri, Duplessis, Saint-Germain, Gouthière, Meissonnier, Thomire. I was not his daughter for nothing. I hadn’t heard him carry on in years, but the names of these classic metalworkers had been familiar to me since we’d first moved to Cookham when I was twelve and my father had taken up the eccentric conversation of the natives.

He was into the heavier pieces now, going on about commodes, chests of drawers, consoles, escritoires, Beneman’s famous games table where Marie Antoinette lost so much money one night that Louis XVI abandoned his plans to add another wing on the palace at Versailles and thus, through inadvertence and his wife’s bad luck at cards, put back the revolution and delayed his own beheading by perhaps three years.

He proposed toasts to the great cabinetmakers represented in the Collection— to Carlin and Canabas and Cressent, to Dubois and Leleu and Riesener.

I don’t know, maybe he was nervous. Maybe everyone in Cookham is nervous and they talk this way to cover it up.

He got round to the beds, the parquetry cradles in the nursery, the tall, sculpted, fabled four-posters in the King’s chambers, the Queen’s, the Princes’ and Princesses’, reeling off their inventory numbers in the Journal du Garde-Meuble. He toasted their dozen gorgeous canapés.

“How I should enjoy to spend a night in such a bed! A night? A nap! What dreams! I would exchange a year’s reality for the visions that might visit me in such circumstances!”

“Really?” said Lawrence. “Me, I’m a seafaring prince, I sleep in me ’ammock.”

Oh, he was wicked; oh, he was cruel!

Father looked as if he’d been slapped. Indeed, a red mark appeared to rise like a welt on his cheek just as if that were the place the Prince had stung him. Mother, who’d been quiet, who’d not once mentioned her garden or her work with Oxfam, who’d hardly moved, who’d hardly moved even as she curtsied when I introduced her to the son of a b-tch, and, in a way, whose silence and lockjaw paralysis of being was even more fawning than poor Father’s helpless logorrhea, quite suddenly appeared to slouch, to crouch, to squeeze in upon herself almost as if she’d been that tweedy, string-of-pearls neighbor effaced behind the closed French windows, muffling not hilarity but a horror so complete it might have been its counterfeit.

Had the Prince been scornful I would have broken our engagement then and there, I swear I would. I would have demanded he leave our house, that he quit Cookham forever. But he reversed himself, was all charm and a noblesse oblige you could eat off of. He papered over his rudeness with a joke and a compliment to my father’s astonishing knowledge of the holdings. “You certainly know your onions, sir,” he told him, and promised to conduct them on a guided tour of the palaces any time Dad thought was convenient. He would send, he said, a car for them.

“An estate car,” Father joked. “I’m in the trade.”

“Of course,” Lawrence said. “In Richmond. Louise told me.”

I detected no scorn on the Prince’s face, though I knew his heart.

Still, I could barely distinguish my anger from my pure let-fly lust. Indeed, they seemed to feed on each other. (Which just goes to show you, don’t it, Sir Sid, that you can take the girl out of the country, send her to California, have her go for an au pair, or a housekeeper in a hotel, and even, when the really hard times come, for a sewer of houses, till her hands run with blisters, blood, and aloe; spring her, I mean, from all dependence and parasitical, female juniority; from all, I mean, the pretty, petty echelons of servitudinal, wide-eyed love, to the point where her arms and back run with muscle, but — WHOOSH! BAM! POWIE! — let one dark put- down or one sharp look be cast in her direction — provided, of course, it’s the right direction — and she’ll mewl like a lass in a story. As if California never happened, as if she never turned a mattress or ever swept sand.) What can I tell you, he had me jumping.

We were on the pretty upholstered bench in our large lounge. (Not even Father would have called it a bergère. Not even Cookham would have called it the library.) Mother explained it was Sheila’s day off and went to prepare tea. I reached for the Prince’s hands and took them in my own. I brought them down into my lap. I put this gentle pressure on them. I shifted position ever so slightly. And leaned my weight into the Prince. Pressing myself against his haunch. Imperceptibly, I parted my thighs and began swaying from side to side. I flexed my buttocks, I arched my back. Beneath my dress my body rose perhaps a fraction of a fraction of an inch above the bench. I relaxed and, settling my weight, started all over again. I shifted, I swayed, I flexed, I arched, I rose.

I came up against the Prince’s hands. By displacements so gradual they were almost infinitesimal, we exchanged momenta. He began to bounce my body like a ball.

As I’ve already told you, what can I tell you, he had me jumping. Push had come to shove. Aiee, aiee. I didn’t care where I was. I didn’t know where I was.

Poor Father.

I say “poor father,” but I couldn’t have said then, as I can’t say with certainty now, whether he even knew what was going on. “Ever so slightly,” I’ve said, “imperceptibly.” I’ve said “displacements so gradual” and “almost infinitesimal,” and implied that moment of inertia when we transferred momentum. So maybe he hadn’t seen anything really. (It was moldly old damp Cookham, after all. It was a gray Sunday autumn afternoon in Cookham. The lights hadn’t been turned on yet. It was dim in the lounge.) So maybe he hadn’t seen anything. (And me hoping the water would never boil and get transformed into tea, wanting to spare at least one of them, you see. Look, we honor our fathers and our mothers. For a time, for a time we do. Then for a time, when the blood sings, while it rushes like wind through the terrible chambers and glands of our change and necessity, we don’t. Or can’t. Then, when we can again, we do again.)