Van Gogh's Room at Arles (26 page)

(What can they do to me? They don’t go to court. A few years ago an intruder was caught in Charlotte’s bedroom, sitting on her bed, watching her sleep. He was dragged off by bobbies. They searched him for weapons, asked him a few questions, and then released him. What can they do to me, Sid? I signed on to tell all and haven’t told all. — —Not yet, and they know it, so what can they do? What can they do to me, I hold all the cards. What he is, our Robin, is evil.)

This was before any of that stuff found its way into the papers. So, playing on “sore,” I made something up. The Prince hadn’t a clue. No one had said a word about tattoos.

Prince Robin had taken me aside.

“Have you spoken,” he whispered, “with the Royal Peerager?”

I mentioned the time I’d seen him in the King, his father’s, palace.

“Yes,” Robin said, “he told me about that. He’ll be in touch with you. He has some things to impart. After you’ve seen him, I should very much like it if you would get back to me.”

Well, I thought, this was a mystery, but it’s often in the nature of people with whom one is uncomfortable that they say enigmatic, baffling things.

The Royal Peerager approached me at a charity ball and asked me to dance. I looked over at Larry, who was engaged in conversation with a fellow I recognized (without ever having met him) as one of his cohorts in earnest resolution. I turned back to Royal Peerager and shrugged my assent. Believe me when I tell you I’d quite forgotten Prince Robin’s puzzling statement regarding any further encounter with, in Queen Charlotte’s words, one of that “sweet assortment of jolly incumbents” who defined and so helped preserve many of the arcane rituals in our land (as one is first alarmed by, and then dismisses, the dark, abrupt remarks and elusive hints of certain—what can they do to me, their hands are tied—passive aggressives), so that I was all the more taken aback when, while we were still dancing, he began to recite, neither in conspiratorial tones nor stage whispers, in perfectly normal conversational accents, protected, I guess he would have thought, by the plain, preemptive music of the orchestra,
this
strange report:

“Though they may have seen its representation a thousand times, most of the people in this realm haven’t the foggiest when it comes to the coat of arms of their own Royal Family. It could as well be Braille as heraldry for all they make of it. I say this not to disparage so much as to congratulate ourselves, for in the main it’s as well that our subjects should not too much understand the devices and emblazonments, mottoes, bends, and color schemes of their genealogical betters. It’s all right with us they haven’t mastered leeks and lilies, fess and mantling; nor can parse achievement, hatchment, or do any of the revealing, reductive mathematicals—quartering, dimidiation—of descent. They can’t tell crest from ’scutcheon, some of them, or tabard from surcoat. They’ve never learned the difference between five bears rampant and six lions crouching, nor can they decline the symbolism of twenty martlets perched on gold.

“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?”

“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.