Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (19 page)

If the queen, if the world, had any idea how modestly Isabella had lived and dressed while she was away—I don’t know that
they ever could have understood it. I’m not sure
I
understood it, and I was living right there with her almost the whole time, sleeping on the same dirt floors and forgoing
manicures just like she was.

So it was understandable that, after all the princess had gone through, she was upset when the location of her new home was
reported before the construction was complete and before Raphael was settled into his basement bunker. He had planned to hole
up there for several months, long enough so that his flannel-shirt-wearing persona would have softened a bit in the contractors’
minds and would not seem suggestive of the famously dead Bisbanian prince—not even after they learned that the famously widowed
Bisbanian princess was “buying” the place and moving in.

Instead, Ethelbald Candeloro’s scoop spread around the world before Isabella could relay a warning to her husband. A news
bulletin about her move came over Green Bay radio at perhaps the worst possible moment. Raphael was standing in the cabin’s
dining hall, a bit too regally, he thought later, complaining to the electrician about a glare from the secondary chandeliers.
The radio announcer launched into the news bulletin, and the electrician turned toward the radio, seeming to listen carefully.
The prince gulped but rallied gamely. He said “dang” and “golly” and then allowed that perhaps if the princess was looking
for a new home in the area, she would “take this mess of a place off my hands.”

“Assuming,” the prince added with a snort, “she doesn’t mind bad lighting.” He then retreated quickly.

It was a close call, and Isabella was not happy at all when she later heard about it. Actually, she wasn’t happy about a lot
of things when she arrived in Green Bay. I don’t mean to imply that she was not appropriately ecstatic to be back with her
husband. They were, by all accounts, silly lovebirds in their first few weeks back together. (And when I say “all” accounts,
I mean his account and her account, because for the first time in their lives, there was no one else present to watch them.)
Rafie fussed over her constantly, urging her to gain back some of the weight she had lost and defying every royal sensibility
there is by lovingly brushing her hair. Meanwhile, Isabella doted on her husband in unimaginably common ways, ironing his
shirts, no less, and attempting to perfect a spaghetti-sauce recipe he found in a magazine.

Despite her happiness at being with Rafie, she thought he had made some questionable decisions in planning their new home.
For example, there were no electrical outlets in Isabella’s makeup and grooming room, forcing her to run an extension cord
into the nearby closet. “Just when I was looking forward to an electric toothbrush and a regular blow-dry,” she said.

Worse still, he had chosen, at the suggestion of the construction workers, a Packers color scheme, a look that required various
green and gold combinations, none of them particularly pleasing. (In some parts of the world, the city of Green Bay is celebrated—mostly
by the color-blind, I fear—for its support of the Packers, a legendary team in American football.) The unfortunate palette
was carried into even the mum garden, which was inconveniently placed near the screened-in breakfast area. Have I mentioned
that Bisbania mums are somewhat odiferous?

“Really, darling, what were you thinking,” Isabella would say in a regular teasing refrain that grew somewhat less good-natured
over the years. “We can’t even have cider and toast out here, much less a full fig-pancake breakfast. I’m sure we’d become
quite ill.”

The whole castle made Isabella ill, truth be told. (I mean, obviously. Green and gold?) During the two years of what the press
was by then calling her “mysterious first exile,” the princess had developed some rather Spartan sensibilities. Don’t get
me wrong. Isabella was definitely ready to return to normal nail maintenance, pressed clothing, and brushed silk. Still, the
huge Green Bay home and its garish color scheme made her uncomfortable in a way she could not have predicted before the crash.

Isabella was, however, smart enough to see the reality of her situation. She wanted to be with Rafie. To live with him again
required a home so large and well equipped and self-contained that he could hide there for weeks or months or years at a time
without leaving. Furthermore, it needed to be well off the beaten path of the worldly and wise and smack dab in the middle
of the incurious and dull. Green Bay, she came to see, was perfect.

Oh dear. The Green Bay Chamber of Commerce will no doubt swamp me with complaint letters. But I assure you I mean no offense.
I suppose it would be disingenuous to say that I mean the “incurious and dull,” remark as a compliment. But when I say “incurious
and dull,” I mean a very specific quality, an outlook born out of honest self-satisfaction. Green Bay is a place that is happily
content with itself.

A city with a less content populace would have been deeply suspicious of the princess’s decision to live within it and would
have picked and pried and nagged at her. But it made perfect sense to average Green Bay residents that a beloved princess
would choose their city as her home. After all, hadn’t their own great-great-grandfathers made the same choice? They had.
And had any of their ancestors in the subsequent generations seen any reason to leave? They had not.

Those big cities with all their urban charms had less free parking, more crime, and fewer professional athletes per capita.
If the most famous and photographed woman in the world wanted to move to their city, Green Bay’s reaction was: “What took
her so long?”

Ethelbald Candeloro’s scoop may have caught Rafie and Isabella unprepared, but it ended up making no difference. The workers
who built Rafie and Isabella’s new home never questioned the identity of the flannel-shirted man who planned the building
that the princess moved into. What were they supposed to question, really? Were they supposed to think he was the prince?
The prince was dead. Everyone knew that. Besides, that guy was clearly from Vermont.

Incurious, dull, bad with accents.

I stand by my assessment.

Green Bay had one last thing going for it as far as Isabella was concerned: the city’s year-round devotion to the Packers.
It wasn’t that the princess cared much about sports. She rarely took in even a real football game and certainly had no interest
in the bastardized version that Americans play. Still, she appreciated that Green Bay’s success in football not only served
to distract the local populace but also significantly distorted the world’s perception of the place. Oh sure, royal commentators
the world over wrote stories about Green Bay’s lack of urban charms, but truthfully, no one—not even Ethelbald Candeloro—thought
it was as atrocious as the pundits let on. They thought it was dreadful compared to New York or London or Paris. Well, maybe
not dreadful compared to Paris, which Bisbanians detested along with the rest of France. But dreadful compared to anyplace
you would actually imagine the princess living. Green Bay seemed, simply, too downscale.

But downscale is not, in the scheme of things, so bad. It’s not as if she was going somewhere without good cider. So they
poked fun with a sort of voyeuristic pity, but they deluded themselves into thinking that Isabella remained vaguely on the
radar. Because of the football team and the attention it had brought to Green Bay, even the Ethelbalds of the world thought
the city was a place quickly accessible by plane travel and adequately represented by the social arts. They did not realize,
even when they looked at maps, that it rested on the southern tip of a vast and unpopulated region—a land of woods and vales
where a celebrity princess and her not-really-dead husband could cavort for months, even visiting remote Native American gaming
casinos in off hours without being spotted.

(The prince tried hard to love casinos as much as he loved horse racing, but he never quite succeeded. “It’s utterly random,”
he would say incredulously to Isabella each time they ventured out for a night of slots. “There’s absolutely no handicapping
involved at all.”)

If Isabella had announced that she was moving to an isolated Montana cabin, the tabloids of the world would have bought up
the land around her and set up bureaus to keep an eye on her. But in Green Bay, they falsely assumed she was already under
the eye of a vigorous and interested press, a gossipy batch of neighbors. The tabloid editors did not understand that the
Green Bay press was trying to get the details of the football coach’s contract buyout, of the quarterback’s elbow surgery,
and of the star linebacker’s felony charges. The tabloid editors did not realize the neighbors were busy shoveling their driveways
and browsing through snowblower catalogs. Isabella wasn’t their primary concern.

So Isabella, having already pulled off one successful exile, pulled off another. She lived in hiding by appearing to live
in the open. But I suppose I have gotten ahead of the story now. I should have stopped before this to tell you where Isabella
had been in those two years she was gone. It explains so much, and it will become quite critical to the end of my story. I
have a few secrets remaining, and the last one is the biggest, and it is my reason for writing this book.

T
here was, in that time, a man named Jeb.

Not to sound all biblical about it, but those who know Jeb tend to speak of him in solemn, epic tones.

Jeb lived on a desert mountain that he often described as being near Nairobi, a desperate description that, for it was really
near nothing. The bustling congestion of Nairobi was over three hundred miles away. Jeb liked it that way. He lived simply,
without lightbulbs, running water, or any sort of worldly wealth.

Jeb had once been something of a radio celebrity in Mexico, hosting a fabulously successful polka hour under the name Juan
El Baez. Despite published reports, he did not launch the surreal Mexican polka craze that was raging across the Americas
at that time. In fact, he came rather late to the happy dance fad, which had gotten its start, strangely enough, in the Little
Arabia neighborhood of Mexico City. (Mexico was apparently more cosmopolitan in those days than anyone on this side of the
ocean imagined.)

But Jeb did a brilliant job of capitalizing on the trend, starting with his decision to include “El” as part of his radio
name, a much appreciated nod to the Middle Eastern musicians who had essentially “invented” Mexican polka. He thought “El”
sounded vaguely Arabic, but in a good old-fashioned Hispanic sort of way. Apparently, he was right. Because in many parts
of the world, or at least in many parts of Mexico, polka fans to this day say that no one could introduce the “Fish Taco Polka”
as well as the Chico Polka himself, Juan El.

Señor Baez was enough of a Mexican personality that his radical move to a life of chosen poverty should have made a splash
in all the tabloids, women’s magazines, and news shows, the editors and producers of which excel at lumping unrelated tidbits
into celebrity-trend stories that can then be blown all out of proportion. You know: This young actress cut her hair short;
this hot pop star bought a smaller than expected mansion; and this radio personality sold all his belongings, moved to the
Kenyan desert, and symbolically pared his name down to his three initials. “Simplicity,” the headlines would say, “is the
next big thing.”

But Jeb’s career change was discussed in the media only obliquely and indirectly, for one unflattering reason: Everyone assumed
he had lost his mind. His apparent break with reality came shortly after being dumped in a rather spectacular way by his girlfriend,
the popular and quite attractive host of a Mexican cooking show. They had been a very public couple right up until the moment
she announced, in a live television interview no less, that she was moving to L.A. to marry a man who became rich by investing
in self-storage facilities.

Even the interviewer seemed taken aback and asked what had happened to her relationship with Juan El Baez. “Oh, him,” said
the girlfriend with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Really, there’s no future in radio.”

Jeb mourned this rejection with a violent sort of grief. On one memorable occasion, he cursed during his show and said, shockingly,
that he was sick of “perky polka poop.” He then broke into sobs as a sound engineer quickly faded to a commercial.

Producers of the show apologized immediately and announced that they were offering Baez some professional assistance in grief
and anger counseling. Baez declined that generous offer, marching out of the station manager’s office in a dramatic way and
driving straight to the airport, where he bought a ticket on the next plane out of town.

The plane happened to be going to Nairobi, and there you have it. The next thing you know, he was living in the desert, calling
himself by a hillbilly name and mumbling about the evils of physical and emotional clutter. Junk mail stood as his enemy.
Custom closet companies, with their false promises of organization, loomed as evil incarnate. (Perhaps you see where this
is going.) Self-storage facilities were the work of the devil.

“There is no future,” he would say, “in finding more places to put your stuff. Happiness lies in getting rid of plunder.”

It was, I suppose, the right message for the right time, because citizens of the Western world truly were being plagued by
an overabundance of paper products and unnecessary household items. Magazines wrote about fighting clutter in tones that suggested
they were actually battling a deadly disease, and entire corporate empires were built on the notion that it’s okay to fill
your closets with clothes you don’t wear, as long as you keep them in neatly labeled white plastic boxes.

In those brand-conscious, image-conscious days—when Isabella was still a young woman with a staff of people to manage her
wardrobe—we were, as a culture, all about ever expanding square footage, bulging calendars, and excessively busy kitchen decor.
(There existed a ghastly tendency to display in the kitchens of middle-class homes uninspired and unwieldy “collections” of
chicken, cow, or pig figurines, often alongside a “coordinating” wallpaper border. Chickens? Cows? Pigs? As if anyone wants
to be reminded of the barnyard while preparing food!)