Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

So maybe it was just the awkward silence that launched Dad into speech.

“Do you know, Sir,” he said, “something that’s always bothered me, something I took the trouble to look up in the library but couldn’t manage to pin down. Well, I’m a bit uncertain about a title is what it comes down to is all. If the living mother of a queen is referred to as the Queen Mother, well, once you and Louise are married, after the coronation I mean, well, would Mrs. Bristol be the King Mother-in- Law? Would one be the King Father-in-Law? It’s only a point of order, of course. It isn’t important. I’m only just asking.”

“What? What?” said the Prince, who was breathing heavily now.

“Well,” Father said, “it’s simply a matter of— ”

“I don’t know,” said the Prince. “I don’t know, I’m not sure, I shall have to find out. Look,” Lawrence said, catching his breath, “we’ve had rather a long drive down from London. I find I’m suddenly quite tired. Perhaps it was all that talk of beds. I should so like to catch a nap. Is there a place one might lie down? Louise, you could show me. Please apologise to Mrs. Bristol for me, would you? I should quite like some tea, but after my nap.”

Sunday February 16, 1992

How Royals Found Me Unsuitable to Marry Their Larry

We were in what despite the intervening years, and (from the presence of the abandoned giraffes and tigers, monkeys and bears, somehow come down in the world, reduced to memento, simple stuffed souvenir) recognizably, too, was still my room (which even without any fine antique French furniture, could have been any schoolgirl’s, even a French one’s, in any epoch, who, come fresh to her menses was come fresh to virginity, too, since without their onset she couldn’t have known carnal desire, not carnal desire, that queer, obsessive magnetism of the skin and heart and head as much as of actual breasts or mysteriously furred-over sexual organs) on what was (never mind it wasn’t a rare four-poster and boasted no gorgeous canopy) still (fourteen or fifteen years after that alarming high tea with those two or three childhood friends) my bed, though it was scarcely longer or wider than a cot.

Because there must be something about the act of sex that is indifferent to space. How otherwise explain how two full- grown people — and one a prince with all that that suggests of dimension and line — could manage not only to lie down together on what the full-grown woman distinctly recalled having outgrown all by herself fourteen or fifteen years earlier when she was four or five inches shorter and weighed twenty or twenty-five pounds less, but thrash about on it too? And something in the act of sex indifferent to time as well. Or anyway oblivious of it, of anything but some overwhelming, all-inclusive Now. Because how else can one account for that seemingly magical obliteration or at least smudge of each intervening sequence from how we met to how we got engaged; through how I was received, and how he courted me, and how push came to shove, until almost the very day the Royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry (not to mention the half-dozen Sunday installments, January 12, 1992, to February 16, 1992, inclusive, in which I not only tell all but apparently lay bare the soul of the entire Kingdom)? I mean how else can it be both the morning after one of those somehow issueless, drought-inspired, all-night Pacific blows in the two-a-penny wicky-ups when we — Jane and Marjorie and I — swept up sand and shook out mats and rewove walls in my good old beachcombing salad days before I was ever an all-but-crowned Princess rolling about on the floor of a wicky-up in mutual, amorous lock- leg and lusty, heartfelt grabflesh with your Heir Apparent, the two of us g — sing the he-l out of each other, spreading one another’s but-cks, squeezing one another’s p-rts (and the Prince singing out at the top of his voice, too, so that I actually had to cover his mouth in order to restrain him, lay hands on him, on a Prince, lest the guests, many of whom were our employers, recall — Jane’s and Marjorie’s and mine — in the adjoining huts hear him, those who hadn’t already left for the Governor’s Palace to see if they might not still get a chair near the reviewing stand where he was scheduled to appear that afternoon with Lord Mayor Miniver, Lord and Lady Lewes and Anthony Fitz-Sunday, muffling his “Road to Mandalay” exuberance — and the Prince 1-cking the very palm over his mouth — sand in the high heels, aloe stains, patches of chlorophyll in the stockings and dresses on the frond-strewn floor of the unwinding wicky-up) one minute, and seven thousand something miles away and all that happened to us in between the next; push coming to shove, to pushing and pulling and thrusting and parrying, to all Love’s earth defying sexual acrobacy on that same astonishing, flexible, accommodate cot where fourteen or fifteen years previous I first came to my virginity due to the simple human fact of the onset of my monthlies?

And he was singing now, too. Anthems, sea chanteys, tunes to hornpipes: “Rule Britannia,” “Popeye the Sailor- man.” My astonished parents downstairs, staring up at the ceiling toward my room had to be; mother; my struck- dumb dad. Outraged, or humiliated, or even pleased as punch that Lawrence, Crown Prince of England, to whom, if all went well, he would one day be King Father-in-Law, might be up in her old room serenading and di-dl-ng his one-and-only daughter.

Which is when I opened my eyes. At the thought of my dad in the lounge. At the thought of me mum holding tea. I opened my eyes. Outraged, humiliated. But still into it (the sex act an annihilator of character, too, indifferent not only to time and space but also to circumstance), horny withal, I mean.

To see Lawrence watching me.

“Your eyes are open,” he said.

“Yes.”

It was his hang-up. All that old business about his inability to make even n-mber one in front of his mates at the Academy, his Prince’s shame in having to — art and s-it and pi-s like other men, the reason he nursed his own v-gin-t-, his Prince’s aversion to ever having to show his throes. It was probably the reason he’d resisted making love to me since that day in the wicky-up.

I was suddenly fearful. Though I soon enough saw I needn’t have been. Because maybe if you hide your throes long enough you forget you ever have them. Maybe all throes, even the most humble, lowly throes of the body, like having to cough, say, or sneeze, happen in what you think is a vacuum, in some almost unpopulated world of princes and kings. Because he never saw my outrage, didn’t even notice my humiliation. Only — I was still horny, recall — the remains of my pleasure.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I’m looking at my Prince,” I said, Mother and Dad already forgotten.

“Why did you open your eyes?” he said.

“You opened yours first.”

“I wanted to see if love disfigured you.”

“Does it?”

He kissed me on my eyes. I loved him more than ever then. More than when I couldn’t read him, all those times he merely had me jumping. More than the time in Llanelli, in Wales, when he did the bravest, noblest, most generous thing I’d ever seen done, and had not so much lost as traded however many thousands of pounds it was, to Macreed Dressel at the Springfield.

But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. I guess no one can.

“You never opened them in Cape Henry,” he said.

“Oh, la,” I said with whatever modesty I have, “Cape Henry. I didn’t know you very well in Cape Henry.”

“What was it, Louise?” Prince Lawrence said, “You can tell me.”

“L ar-ry ,” I said.

“No, really,” he said, “we’re to be married. Surely a princess may speak her mind to a prince. I supposed you were making the world go away. Please?” he said.