Van Gogh's Room at Arles (16 page)

I’m
not
in it for the money. I’m not. I want it told is all. But because Larry is Larry—and I don’t blame him, I really don’t, I still believe he loves me, I really do—and the Royal Family is the Royal Family, there was just no way of getting it done unless I took
Town Crier’s
fifty thousand pounds sterling and did it myself.

And though I’d never acknowledge I owe the public a thing—what, after the way
I’ve
been depicted in the papers, on the telly and the oh-so-civilized BBC 3 even?—it may almost be my patriotic duty to let it know some of the real circumstances by which it is ruled. La Lulu, indeed!

“Oh yeah,” you’re saying, “for God and Country, for England and St. George.” “Hell hath no fury,” you’re saying, “like a woman scorned.” “Or tattood!” you’re saying.

We met, as everyone knows, in Cape Henry, on the westermost of the Lothian Islands, fifty or so nautical miles from Santa Catalina Island and the village of Avalon, themselves about a thirty-minute ferry ride from Los Angeles and the southwest coast of California.

Whatever you might have read in the press to the contrary, I was not at that time in any way connected with the Ministry of Tourism; I did not sell coral or exotic flowers to day trippers from the States—ridiculous on the face of it since the United States government has strict rules preventing anyone from bringing any sort of flora or fauna into the country—or work behind the counter in the souvenir or duty-free shops at the airport. I did not sing with the band at the hotel. I had been made, like several of my countrymen at that time, redundant, and was sharing expenses and living the life of a sort of glorified beachcomber with two other girls in a discounted, low-season, already two-a-penny shelter more wicky-up than guest cottage or even hut with its rough, frond-covered frame, and dry, thick, still sharpish- edged grasses, which my cut hands too well knew to their sorrow and that sometimes in the mornings after a particularly issueless—even out there on the Pacific it was still just as much a drought as ever it was on the California mainland—but powerful blow of the previous night, we actually had to reweave back into the semblance of a wall. Often we’d pick up the odd fifty pence “sewing houses”—as we named our queer profession—for some of the older or less resourceful of our beachcomber colleagues, or shaking out mats, or sweeping up sand. Beachcombers, indeed.

“Oh, damn,” I told Marjorie on the early morning of the day of Prince Larry’s visit, “I’ve gone and cut my hands. I see I shall have to go into a different trade. Have you seen the aloe?”

“There is no aloe, Louise,” Marjorie said.

“How can there not be aloe? Living as we do, where we do, there has to be aloe.”

“We are quite out of aloe, Louise.”

“Impossible. I saw it myself it can’t have been but two days ago.”

“You are not the only party who sews houses in this house, Louise. You are not the only one with stigmata.”

“My fault, Louise, dear,” said Jane. “I was down for the aloe run. I’m afraid I forgot. If you wait, I’ll go after I beachcomb myself some sandfruit for my breakfast.”

“Sandfruit gives you the runs. Why do you eat it?”

“I quite enjoy the runs, Louise.”

Now to this point the public knows nothing of this. My friends Jane and Marjorie swept aside by history, their own stories lost if not to time then to time’s blatant disregard of a proper attention to detail, which I, as a public figure so- called, begin to suspect happens with the stories of most of history’s cohorts, so apparently caught up and transfixed by the shine of celebrity and notoriety. But actually such trashing of individuals and their particulars is as much evasive action (like piling up sunblock on one’s skin at the beach, say; just so much more posting of guards, just so many more lookouts, the fiddle of yeomanry our national sin) as ever it is the logic of a true humility. Well, it’s never the logic of a
true
humility, and what I think, what I think,
really,
is that like sodomy, like buggery, our notion of subjectivity, of submitting—submitting? volunteering!—to be the subjects of kings and queens has to do with
wanting
to disappear, with building up heroes to draw the lightning. Limelight was ever a distraction to time’s healthy, childlike fear of limelight. (This is fun, you know? Limelight has its compensations, hey, Sir Sid?)

So to this point, the public, for all the attention it’s paid us, knows absolutely nothing. Jane and Marjorie not only out of the picture but never in it to begin with. (No, I’m not making this up. Not any of it. I’m English as the next bimbo. There’s still all those official secrets acts and libel laws. Why would I stick my neck out? Yet I hardly flatter myself I think I’ve earned any of those fifty thousand pounds yet.)

That drought you read about? You don’t know the half. (Is that to be my theme here?) It played California hell, put half the state out of work, and not just the agricultural illegals up out of Mexico. Trained dental technicians let go. What, you think not? All that water running all day, all that rinse and spit? Shipping clerks and gift wrappers in the best department stores laid off because of the water shortage or forced to quit because they couldn’t work up enough moisture to lick one more label or stick on another fancy seal. Going on the dole for parched tongues and chapped lips. Or my own case.

I left England because of a tragic love affair (which since it has nothing to do with my involvement with Larry I’m under no obligation at this point to discuss with my public, so-called) and came to the States not to emigrate but in order to put some time and distance between my heart and its circumstances. It had been my intention to be gone no more than six months, but as the old saying has it, man proposes and God disposes and, in the half year I’d given to it, nothing had been resolved. Even back then, in the early days of the drought, it was still easy enough to find a job in Los Angeles. You know some of my background. You know that while I had something of an independent income it was never near big enough I could afford to live abroad indefinitely without finding means to supplement it. Also, it’s good for people to be gainfully employed. It makes life that much more interesting.

So I went for an au pair girl. My English accent was all the character I ever needed. I offered to show my passport but they wouldn’t even look. It didn’t make any difference to these people. Almost every au pair in Beverly Hills was an American actress hoping to catch on at a studio. They could all walk the walk and talk the talk. A reason I wasn’t found out when my photographs started to appear in the papers, I think, is that if they remembered me at all, the people of the house must have thought they recognized me from the industry. Besides, it didn’t last all that long. For a great democratic show a lot of these people began to lay off their “nannies” and “au pairs” even before the drought started to bite. They gave us bonuses and apologized that they had to dismiss us because we’d become “just one more thirst that had to be quenched.” And continued to quench the remaining household thirsts with the same bottled mineral water they’d been using all along. Restaurants were still hiring on, but it didn’t need any Greenwich Mean Time celestial clock watchers to see that the hostesses they employed were just more actresses and that when the time came they’d let these go just as quick as all the rest of those other nanny-cum-film stars. (And the time came and they did. Even the less expensive restaurants were selling bottled water by the glass then. The difference was that very few people believed it wasn’t tap water they were actually paying for. Oh, I know, I know. I really do. This sounds like satire and the States sound much like England and, in some ways, it is and they are. And I still can’t even get the punctuation right. Can’t or won’t. Preferring much that’s American to that which is British. Putting my full stops inside the quotes, for example. Choosing the Yankee
zed
in “civilization” to the
s
in its chiefly Brit
VAR
, as they say in
Webster’s.
Dropping my
e
out of “judgement.” Slipped between the cracks of two different worlds. And if that’s one of the reasons the royals found me unsuitable to marry their Larry— and, in an odd way, it is—it’s the least of them.) Suffice it to say, however, I didn’t even bother to apply. And set up instead for an ordinary housekeeper’s job making up beds in a hotel. What I never expected was the unwillingness of people from parts of the country unaffected by drought to endure even for one or two days whatever insignificant parch they might have been put through in the one two days it would have taken them to do their business. When the drought really became serious the girls with the English accents were the first ones to be cut.

It was all very well for me to be larky and thirsty while I still had a job. My employers were paying my health insurance, after all. But once I was without work I knew that I would have to find something for a—ha ha—rainy day.

I still had no reason to go home. Well, I’d fallen a. over t. for the climate, hadn’t I? That was when I first thought of Cape Henry and the Lothian Islands. In England even the King is on the National Health, even the Queen.

(Still another aside: I can’t shake the sense I have of Press Lord Sir Sidney reading over my shoulder as I write, and I’m beginning to feel if not my obligations to the readership, then at least Sir Sid’s sense of them for me, and I find that compelling and, in small ways, oddly touching and will, when there’s time or it seems fitting, henceforth alert my readers —or maybe only Sir Sidney himself—that they—he—may skip over the asides until I take up my “story” again, or “la Lulu’s Account,” or whatever they’re calling it these days on hoardings on the sides of buses. Anyway, you know what seems strange to me? The general, disparate, all-purpose exile that moves over the world. That piecemeal, bit-by-bit colonization of earth. People, for whatever reason, coming together on all sorts of foreign shores, washing up in the strangest places. The mysterious working out of the great queer plot of the planet. Different motives, mutual ends. Well, it finally accounts for the very idea of empire, doesn’t it?)

Whatever I may feel now it no longer seems unusual to me I hadn’t even known Jane or Marjorie back in Los Angeles. Indeed, when the three of us met at the beachcomber estate agency where we let that wicky-up, and not three or four days later one of us—I forget which—suggested we might pick up the odd pound or so if we put our backs into it and helped with the morning ablutions on other people’s shelters, I naturally assumed—as I later discovered we each did—that my two new friends were just more actresses marking time and waiting to be discovered. Which brings me back to that missing aloe and the first time I saw the Prince.

Well, it was those embargo, or quarantine, or meat-and- potato prohibitions of course, the flora-and-fauna rules, all the high-priority, low-level laws of jealous international agreement and stickler decree by which nations claim they not only protect themselves but insinuate the superiority of
their
Nature over
your
Nature. Showing the flag, grandstanding the public on the cheap—— all that subject population, all those abiders. And getting, Prince Larry, grand photo ops out of it, too, making the most of his signature gesture. Though I swear to you, I’d forgotten all that, had been away from England almost two years by then. Out of sight, out of mind. One forgets. Though I suppose the things one forgets are always perched somewhere near the tippy tip of one’s head, because when I saw him there posed in the aloe shop, quit of his equerry and all his retainers, I remembered at once of course. This was the one who made a point of buying off the local economy all those ceremonial wreaths he’s charged with laying on all those public buildings, natural monuments, and great men’s graves. And maybe that’s why those ordinances came into being in the first place—— because whoever made up kings figured it might come in handy one day, that someday
this
prince would come. Rome
wasn’t
built in a day, and the ruling class is nothing if not clever.

And he was handsome. I remembered from my life in England that he was handsome, but now he was possessed of an almost surfeit of beauty, and of an age when he was at its (or he of its) very peak. Like special fruit that has come into its season. Don’t mistake me, this is no mournful occasion, the sad affair of a moment, some here today, gone tomorrow mayfly condition. I’m not speaking of God’s or humanity’s fairy tales, the ephemeral, too delicate arrangements of nature and myth. Yet there was a kind of hapless nostalgia to him, some secret knowledge. I do not think I noticed this then. How could I have done, I was a different person then. So I didn’t notice it; I only remember it. I don’t even know if the Prince was aware of it. I believe rather not. As I say, I allow him what I allow myself. Some secret knowledge, the long-term profit of the heart. Yet something, something. Got up, it might have been, in his very swagger, the peculiar, put-everyone-at-ease pomp of his self-consciousness. He was at once breezy and shy with a crowd that, knowing his habits, had gathered early in the morning or stayed up all night (some of them) in Cape Henry’s discrete shopping district on the westermost island of the long Lothian Islands chain. An anomaly, one of those freaks not so much of geography as of naming and settling. Those fifty or so nautical miles off Santa Catalina would be an example. The counterpart American village of Avalon hard by on California’s southwest coast would. Just a thirty- minute ride as the ferry floats.

Sad as Spring’s first perfection, the trees never so beautiful again as they were in the prime joyous days of their first being though they had weeks, months, seasons, even half a year yet to green. Nor ever so ripe as in those first close- cropped days of their initial blooming.

So I saw him but didn’t recognize him, don’t you know.

The prince waved at me. Not the elbow, elbow, wrist wrist wrist of majesty gone easy on itself, the accustomed, practiced pacing of what had already been a long reign, but something more awkward, more attractive than that—a matter, a question of image. And, though I was surprised, I could hardly have been aware of my awareness. “Good god,” I remember thinking, “was that a prince?” Not “Was that the Prince?” Caught short, clued-in finally only by the royal retainers pretending to try to keep up. If the Prince knew it was only some dog-and-pony show he didn’t let on. Only later, in the town square
(and
mall
and
tourist trap) did I recognize him, don’t you know.