Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“The absolute truth?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I’m not any ostrich,” I said. “I don’t shut my eyes and imagine the world anyplace else than it already is.”

“I’m no more ostrich than you are, Louise,” Lawrence said. “I know you weren’t a virgin when I met you. You’re a grown woman, for God’s sake. You’d been to California. You’d worked as an au pair. You lived on a beach in a tourist attraction and had a great tan. You think it bothers me you weren’t a virgin? It doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. You’re a commoner, you’re not to the manner born. You’re not held to the same standards. One supposed you could have been fantasizing.”

“What, making up a man, you mean?”

“Yes,” Lawrence said.

“I had the Prince of England on top of me. Why would I make up a man?”

“Oh, Louise,” he said, and kissed me on my eyes again.

But I saw that he had mistaken me, or that I had misled him. Like him, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

“It was another man, actually,” I said.

“What, a man in the States? Not your employer?” he said. “The one that engaged you, whose child was entrusted to you?”

“No,” I said, “certainly not.”

“Oh, Louise,” he said, “ not when you were in the hotel! Not for some man in the hotel where you worked turning mattresses and changing sheets? Like any common, comely chambermaid?”

He was grinning from ear to ear.

“I was perfectly faithful when I was in America,” I told him evenly.

“Ah,” said the Prince, “I was right. On that beach then.”

“No,” I said, “not on the beach. Not ever in exile.”

“In exile,” he said.

“For almost two years I had an affair with Kinmonth- Schaire, the newspaper publisher. I was never, in the conventional or continental sense of the term, his ‘mistress.’ He did not ‘keep me,’ he did not ‘provide’ for me. He did not even have a key to my flat. We were ‘lovers’ in the ordinary star-crossed ways of our times. He was twenty-seven years my senior, and married. At the time he was only penciled- in for his OBE. We knew that even the faintest whiff of scandal would have put the kibosh on that quick as you can say Jack Robinson. Plus, he had a daughter my age engaged to be married to a fellow a class-and-a-half up from her own, and a wife who was both delicate and busy with preparations for their daughter’s wedding.

“What can I tell you; we were star-crossed; our timing was off, our cusps and zodiacal signs. Our houses were in the wrong neighborhoods.

“He gave me the money and asked me would I lie low in the States for six months. In three he’d have his OBE, he told me; in four his daughter would be safely married; in five he’d tell his wife about me and ask for a divorce, and in six it would be both safe and seemly for me to come back from America.

“And do you know something? He was right on the money, and as good as his word, he really was. He became Sir Sidney Kinmonth-Schaire, OBE. The daughter married, and he told his wife about us and asked for the divorce. And do you know what? Do you know what she did? The delicate wife? Can you guess?”

Lawrence looked at me.

“She laughed at him. She laughed and petted him and gave him a kiss on his eyes and said he was a fool, dear, and supposed that she must be one, too, but she’d have to forgive him because when push came to shove she guessed that that was the only choice left fools, because didn’t one fool deserve the other, and if he could just manage to let her know next time he felt himself going off the deep end they could put their fool heads together and come up with a way out of their muddle that might just save everyone embarrassment. She didn’t see any way round it, she said; he’d probably just have to eat the few thousand pounds it had cost him to put me up in America for those six months, she said.”

“OBE?” Larry said.

“Order of the British Empire.”

“OBE?” Larry said.

“L ar-ry ,” I said.

“I never minded you weren’t a virgin,” he said. “It didn’t bother me to think of you sowing your wild oats with a fellow your age on a blanket set out on a beach in Cape Henry; nor even your doing it with some businessman type, a commercial traveler, say, someone in town for a sales conference, the two of you making steamy love in the Los Angeles hotel where you served as a housekeeper, thrashing about on the very bed in the very room you’d have to make up yourself when the two of you had finished. I minded none of this, Louise.

“But an OBE?

“I’m not small-minded, Louise. I could have overlooked it if the fellow in question had merely been one of my subjects. It wouldn’t have mattered to me he had seen you naked, had seen you in your throes!

“But an OBE? An OBE? An OBE is practically peerage, the next best thing anyway. Never mind the title is honorary, symbolic. An OBE has certain privileges. Ask Royal Peerager. An OBE? one might have to look him in the eye each year on the afternoon of the King’s Birthday Party under the canvas tent, or out on the lawn at Buckingham Palace.

“I’m not small-minded. I’m not.

“Oh, Louise,” he cried out, “ what have you done, what have you done? Oh, Louise, what have you done? What you have done, Louise,” he cried out, “ what you have done!”

I hope I can explain this next part. I said “he cried out.” He did. I mean it was a cry. It was fury and outrage and despair, the sound of a magnificent, powerful beast, new to pain, angered, stymied in a trap. A mortal noise so terribly affronted it was almost dignified!

Father, that soft, deferent, obeisant man, came running; Mother barely a step behind him. They burst into what— how can I put this? — now something historical had occurred there, had ceased to be my room.

“What,” my father, confused, blind to my nudity, blinded by the Prince’s, said, “what? What? What? What?”

“Get out!” Lawrence screamed. “The both of you! Get out, get out!”

“Don’t you shout at my parents,” I said, “don’t you dare. Never mind what he says,” I told my father, who had already begun to back out of the room. “His powers are only symbolic,” I told him.

“Well, of course,” Father shuddered, “all real power is,” and closed the door behind them as they left.

People have only heard rumors. Up till now no one really knows what was in the message Larry wired the Noël Coward King and his Noël Coward Queen on board their Royal Yacht on what was supposed to have been their final world tour as reigning monarchs. Well, ‘Sparks,’ of course, I suppose he’d had to have known. There’s always some ‘Sparks’ or other on duty when these important, eyes-only Ems telegrams go through, but apart from him, no one. I myself didn’t understand how one minute I could be engaged to a prince in what was to have been, in light of King George’s and Queen Charlotte’s mutual, simultaneous abdications, perhaps the most colorful, elaborate ceremony in the history of the realm, and the next minute, bam, the clock had struck midnight, and, all sudden widdershins, Cinderella was just another pretty face.

Larry told me. I didn’t ask. I don’t even think I wanted to know as much as he wanted to tell me, as though he were dying for me to find out just how clever he was, throwing his cleverness around like a drunken sailor.

“Three little words,” he said. “Three little words and you were done for, Louise. You know what they were? You know what I said in that telegram I sent?”

“What did you say in that telegram you sent, Larry?” I asked like his straight man.