Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (10 page)

It was Geoffrey who helped Isabella summon the courage to publicly align herself with the efforts to remove the stigma from
what was, in those unenlightened times, called “streetwalkers’ stress.” “Whatcha ’fraid of, Belle?” he’d ask. “Being too kind
to the downtrodden?”

And it was Geoffrey who found that perfect Springsteen line, the one about ascending into a beautiful dawn and meeting a loved
one further down life’s highway, that allowed Isabella to so memorably finish her elegy at the televised funeral of the Native
American priest turned pop star who had so captured the fancy of the young before dying in a horrible Jacuzzi malfunction.

Geoffrey’s form of flirtatious persuasion was a miracle to watch.

“I don’t know,” Isabella would say in that vaguely whiny voice she would use when she grew tired. “I don’t think the people
really care how I exercise as long as I don’t get all flabby.”

Geoffrey would agree, but then he would soar into a beautiful, rambling, seemingly pointless, and yet so pointed monologue.
Yes, it was true, he’d say. The sort of exercise she took up didn’t matter. After all, she couldn’t be a fabulous, trendsetting
fairy-tale princess in every possible way. If she was fabulous and trendsetting and fairy-tale in
many
ways, that ought to be enough. So if she was still using a snowboarding simulator when the hottest actresses, the most gorgeous
models, and even the dear Princess Gene—who, he would note, had been dubbed Lean Gene recently by the tabloids—had taken up
the NASA-inspired bodybuilding program known as Astrofit, that was just fine. “You’ve got it all over them, Belle,” he’d say,
not noticing the way Rafie would bristle at the nickname. (The prince would, often enough, visibly shudder, even if he did
not actually look up from what he was reading, usually a dry textbook about the effect of mouth cancers on locution or some
other aspect of human speech.)

“You don’t have to worry,” Geoffrey would continue, eyes locked with the princess. “You’re all right.”

Isabella would purr at the compliments and then set out to ensure that he was correct, taking up the more advanced Astrofit
Pro before the week was up.

Aside from the shuddering, Raphael mostly appeared not to notice the conversations, although he seemed somewhat deliberate
in his not noticing. But Mae would sometimes raise her eyebrows or roll her eyes or let her mouth hang open a little. She
would stare at Geoffrey in a quizzical way, and she was curious about whether he was consciously manipulating the princess.
After conversations like the Astrofit one, and even on the more important matters, like whether the royal family should comment
on the prime minister’s embarrassing goat scandal, Mae would sometimes try to ferret out Geoffrey’s real thoughts. But she
did not get far. He would utter the same sort of vague observations to her.

Mae noticed this especially after Geoffrey advised Isabella on how the royal family should handle the funeral of Lady Carissa,
the queen’s sister who had been essentially disowned by the family after the called-off engagement many years earlier. Lady
Carissa had, in fact, been so well hidden by the royal family after her horrible sweatpants-in-public phase that the newspaper
obituaries felt obligated to point out that she had still been alive before recently dying.

After Isabella consulted Geoffrey, Mae asked her husband point-blank what he thought the princess should do. Geoffrey did
not answer her directly. Instead, he mused about one of Springsteen’s less respected albums. “I was tuning in to
Lucky Town
yesterday,” Geoffrey said. “Man, the critics did not do that CD justice.”

He paused, looked out the window. “It was awesome. So real, you know, so wild. Like that dude knew how to talk about class.
He spoke for us working stiffs and got rich speaking for us. That’s insane, and he knew it. He’s got that great line about
how funny it is for a billionaire to wear a poor guy’s shirt.”

I suppose you have no idea what Geoffrey was talking about. Mae didn’t either, though she probably had an advantage over many
of you in that she had at least heard the album—about a thousand times on one long drive to Euro Disney alone.

But she later learned that based on this “observation” from Geoffrey, Isabella advised Rafie, and Rafie advised the king,
and the king made his case to his wife, and the royal family decided to treat the funeral of the long-ignored Carissa as if
it were that of a long-suffering and loyal royal servant. She would be a royal woman in a poor woman’s ceremony—and perhaps
in a poor woman’s blouse, for all anyone knew. The funerals of servants are not considered public events.

This way of handling the funeral, Rafie noted while pitching it to his father, would give the occasion a quiet dignity and
an understated majesty but would not raise too many uncomfortable questions about why there were more pictures of the royal
family taken with Lady Carissa’s casket than had ever been taken of the royal family and Lady Carissa.

The king, oblivious to the tortured history of this advice, took to it immediately and thought it was the soundest suggestion
he had heard in a long time. He remarked to the queen, who had been tearfully meeting with her tailor to create a suitably
mournful suit for the funeral, that their son had grown into a wise man and, using the cliché that Bisbanian royals always
used about a worthy prospective heir, said, “Rafie will keep the throne warm.”

So everyone who knew enough to have an opinion thought that Rafie’s idea about how to handle the funeral was perfect. Except
that it was really Isabella’s idea. And except that she would have claimed to Rafie that it was Geoffrey’s idea. But Mae,
the only other person to actually discuss the plan with Geoffrey, and who knew him as well as anyone, was not at all convinced
that Geoffrey had anything so concrete in mind when he rambled about rich pretenders and poor shirts.

Still, it wasn’t as if he had talked about the lack of satisfying programming on commercial television or the plight of war
veterans. He had, for whatever reason, chosen a Springsteen lyric that could, with some effort and creativity, be applied
to the situation.

So Mae did not know what to think. Sometimes she thought that her sweet husband was really just a handy mechanic who made
bland observations that seemed “wise” only to the extent that Isabella projected her own wisdom into them. But other times
Mae thought her husband was crafty and conniving and that he was playing the princess as if she were his puppet. Mae was never
sure which she would prefer him to be.

She was at even more of a loss about Isabella. Did the princess not see the way that Geoffrey was, intentionally or unintentionally,
manipulating her? Did she not question his merit as an adviser? Did she not think his constant turning to Springsteen lyrics
a bit, well,
odd
?

Apparently, she did not.

For when Geoffrey used the Springsteen song “Cover Me” to suggest that Isabella start wearing summer gloves, Isabella promptly
headed for the nation’s fanciest accessory store and purchased every glove they had in stock, which was not many, because
summer gloves had been out of fashion for most of the past century. Then she called all the nation’s top designers—and truth
be told, a few French ones that the royal family did not care to publicly do business with—and asked for custom-made gloves.

She wore these gloves to luncheons, on shopping excursions, and while making hospital rounds, delighting the photographers
by peeling them off finger by finger before shaking hands with the patients. Of course, you know what happened. It brought
gloves back from the grave, setting off an unparalleled fashion frenzy that—aided by the increasing worry about UV rays—has
not died down yet, all these decades later. Gloves reemerged as a European classic, suddenly becoming a symbol of continental
femininity and grace. At first the gloves stopped right at the wrist, but they gradually got longer and longer, reaching to
the elbow and beyond even for daytime wear, though old-timers like, well, like the queen, would roll their eyes and sniff
and snort and mutter something about strippers.

There is, after all, no way to stop a trend once it’s started. Old glove companies, which had grown resigned to relying on
scarves, belts, and lowbrow dickeys for their livelihood, were in demand again, pulling out old patterns and retraining seamstresses
on the fine art of finger seams.

Geoffrey’s role as the princess’s somewhat questionable adviser fits into a long tradition. Royal women and presidential wives
are always being accused of such nonsense. The czar’s wife had Rasputin, and virtually all the powerful women who came after
her were supposedly using tarot-card readers or psychics. But it never worked out for any of them.

So, no matter how vapid Geoffrey’s advice appeared on the surface, you must give him this: It worked for Isabella. Certainly
no other famous advisee made so much out of so little as did the Princess of Gallagher, who became an international icon and
fashion setter with nothing more than perfectly ordinary looks and the crown of a tiny, out-of-the- way country with a few
big horse races, a long fig season, and a reputation for making unreliable but attractive automobiles. No wonder Isabella
thought Springsteen lyrics, as filtered through Geoffrey, worked just fine.

If you ever wondered why Isabella and Raphael gave up the tropical vacations that were typical of the royal family, now you
know. Springsteen, a New Jersey boy, did not sing much about palm trees. That is why the prince and princess, in the last
months of their public life together, were so often seen walking down the aging boardwalks of Bisbania’s touristy cold-water
beach neighborhoods, where the royal couple delighted locals and the paparazzi by buying cotton candy, climbing into rusty
carnival rides, and taking turns trying to win stuffed animals for each other. Geoffrey called these their
Greetings from Asbury Park
vacations, a reference to Springsteen’s first album. The queen called them “pure insanity.”

“Does the heir to the throne really need to be hanging upside down?” she would ask. “In public? On something called the Psychedelic
Monster, no less?”

Whatever you called the vacations, they were brilliant public relations. The contrast between these low-budget and low-maintenance
trips of the Gallaghers and the yachting vacations of the less popular members of the royal family could not have been more
stark.

While Isabella had embraced this idea and insisted to Rafie that it was Geoffrey’s stern advice, Mae could not help notice
that when the princess had first consulted Geoffrey about vacations, he had actually mentioned another album entirely.

The subject had come up during a lighthearted, casual conversation that the mechanic and the princess shared while sitting
on the garage patio, their feet irreverently propped up on a rather amateurish bust of Michelangelo while they sipped what
they claimed was iced nonalcoholic raspberry cider but which Mae thought smelled of whiskey. (Her assessment, however, is
suspect because she made it from several feet away and from the other side of a partially opened sliding glass door, while
she was working on a steamy romance about, of all things, a missionary from Alaska.)

“If we don’t come up with something, Geoff, it’s another fortnight on the yacht for me,” Isabella said. “It’s simply excruciating.
The queen arranges nightly domino tournaments.” She sighed and leaned back to examine her carefully manicured pink-painted
big toe, which she positioned just below the right eyebrow of Michelangelo. She squinted at it and called out, “Pinkeye!”

Geoffrey and she both laughed at that in a slaphappy, giddy, or perhaps slightly drunk way.

Geoffrey was normally rather protective of the bust, which the castle had accepted from an Italian count while under the mistaken
belief that it was a sculpture
by
Michelangelo, rather than a sculpture
of
him.

The bust was actually the work of the count’s daughter—if you can correctly describe a project undertaken in art therapy sessions
as “work.” When the queen realized the mistake, she ordered the sculpture hidden from her sight forever, an awkward order
given that she had signed a legal agreement with the count promising to “prominently display” the bust “for now and as long
as King Philippe and his heirs fill the throne.”

The castle advisers solved the problem by placing the bust on Geoffrey’s patio, a decision that was explained to the count
in a flowery letter that continually referred to Michelangelo as the “first great mechanic” and described the slab of concrete
off Geoffrey’s office as the Garden of Engineering.

Geoffrey loved that, loved talking about “the garden,” and always got angry if visitors leaned on Michelangelo’s likeness
or otherwise showed disrespect. But now he put his own big, hairy, calloused toe over the other eye and said, “Corn eye!”
He and Isabella both laughed some more, until she leaned her head over on his shoulder and looked up at him in a pleading
way.

“Help me, Geoff,” Isabella said with exaggerated drama. “I know you’d never want to vacation with the in-laws.”

A cloud passed over her face then, and she glanced quickly at Mae, sat up straight, and pulled away from Geoffrey. “Nothing
personal,” the princess said, smiling weakly to her confidant’s wife. “Any in-laws, I mean—even when they’re honest farm folk
like your family.” She looked at Geoffrey, lowered her voice a little, and continued as if she had never uttered the aside
to Mae. “It’s inhumane.”

That was when Geoffrey began musing about the Springsteen album
Nebraska
, which was named after a large and empty American state and which can only be described as a dark and grim collection of
tales about unlucky characters who are forever poking dead dogs, chasing outlaw brothers, and using maps as napkins after
eating greasy fried food.

Isabella’s giddy mood grew more and more somber, and she stared at Geoffrey as he prattled on. She bit her lip and looked
for all the world like she was developing a renewed appreciation for her mother-in-law’s domino tournaments on the yacht.
Then, finally, Geoffrey’s monologue ambled up to a point, which was this: