Van Gogh's Room at Arles (29 page)

“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.

“
SHE’S HAD MISCARRIAGES
!”

They said they’d take me to court if these installments appeared.

They’re blowing smoke, of course. They don’t go to law like regular people, these people.

So they threaten me. But I’ll tell you something, Sid, I don’t think they can touch me. After all, as I keep on saying, I promised to tell all but I haven’t. Not all. Not yet. There’s at least two column inches I’m holding back against a rainy day.

Meanwhile, I don’t know, maybe next time they’ll get it right, do it better, wheel-and-deal the way people like them are supposed to wheel-and-deal. Have the King, what do you call it, issue a proclamation maybe. Send out this call for the most beautiful virgins in the land. Set them tasks. Winner takes Prince, takes Crown, takes all.

That’s about it, I guess. The only thing I don’t get is why you offered me money for my story. I mean what could possibly have been in it for
you,
Sir Sid? I mean it isn’t as if you come out smelling like a rose or something. For a time I put it down to your sweeps-week vision, your tabloid heart, but that can’t be all of it, I think. Perhaps you hold a few column inches of your own in reserve.

What could they be, I wonder? Pride? The thrill of cuckolding a king? Even if it’s only at some double remove, once for before Lawrence even knew me and the other for before he was ever a king.

Or those throes, perhaps, their veronican image, for the refractive, fun-house homeopathics of the thing, some hand-that-shook-the-hand-that-shook-the-hand apostolicity of love.

You men!

Van Gogh’s Room at Arles

When the Foundation sent him there, Miller had absolutely no idea that he was to be put up in Van Gogh’s room in the small yellow house at Arles. Indeed, he’d no idea that the room still existed, or the house, or, for that matter, even the hotel across the street that it was part of.

Madame Celli simply handed the key over to him on the morning of his arrival. No special fuss or flourish or ceremony. The key itself, which couldn’t possibly have been the original, was attached to a short chain, itself attached to a heavy iron ball about the size of a plum. The number 22 was stamped both on the key and on the ball along with, in French (a language that Miller didn’t have but whose vocabulary lists he’d memorized through the first few weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school,
la plume de ma tante),
on the ball, a tiny metal legend (he made out “
boîte aux lettres
”
)
to the effect, Miller supposed, that if whoever found it dropped it into a post box, the postage would be guaranteed.

It was this key, almost as much as the fact of the room itself, that afterwards was so stunning to Miller, the offhand way of it, the stolid fact of the ball and chain from which it depended like a key to a room in a second- or third-class railway hotel where travelers who were too weary, or too ill, or who could simply go no farther, might stop for the night.

This was a peculiarly apt description of his own condition the day he got there, exhausted as he was from the long series of flights and layovers. Indianapolis to Kennedy, Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle to Marseilles, and then the three-hour ride by motorcoach from Marseilles to Arles. Though this was the most spectacular leg of the journey (Indianapolis pals had specifically recommended the slower bus as opposed to the much faster train) because of the dramatic views it provided of Mediterranean fishing villages, the lavender vineyards of the Languedoc region, and the queer, boiling iridescence of the waters in the Gulf of Lions, from certain angles and in certain light like a great voile oil spill, Miller had registered almost none of it, only a few blunted impressions whenever the bus or the oppressive incrementality of his own soiled, staggered mileage jolted him awkwardly awake for a few moments.

So unceremonious, so unpropitious even, was Miller’s reception, he was actually touched when Madame Celli agreed to allow him to leave his things—the big suitcase, his hanging garment bag, the plastic sack of duty-free liquor, film, and cigarettes purchased at Kennedy with almost the last of his American money—— another tip from the knowledgeable Indianapolis crowd: that he’d get a more favorable rate if he exchanged his dollars for francs at some one-or two-teller bank, or even at one of those cash vending machines, while he was still at the airport—in the lobby with her while he went off to find his lodgings at Number 2 Lamartine Place across the square from the old hotel that seemed to be the Foundation’s main building in Arles. He’d come back for them after he freshened up, he assured her, an efficient enough, even agreeable-seeming woman, but one whom Miller had sized up as essentially uninterested in the various jet-lagged-out states of the Fellows the Foundation kept feeding her all the year round, one or two at a time, for month-long stays at twice-a-week intervals.

These perceptions had been established long before he’d ever actually laid eyes on her, for it was Madame Celli with whom he’d been in correspondence since he was first informed that his fellowship had been granted. Well, correspondence. On his part thoughtful, practical letters asking thoughtful, practical questions—— the weather one could expect in April, what forwarding address he should leave for his friends, the advisability of renting a car, if there was a dress code. And, on hers, in a charming, unexpected, quite witty English, only the salutation written in ink at the top, form letters, hospitable, boilerplate responses to inquiries he had no doubt she could reproduce in Spanish, or French, or Italian, or German, or in almost every EC language any of those one or two staggered, twice-weekly arriving birds of a month’s passage might throw at her. Which only added insult to the injury of Miller’s fatigue and took a little of the shine off his having been selected or, if not exactly selected, then at least approved by the Foundation. Which, too, was why he was so touched by Madame’s routine boilerplate courtesy to his simple request that she permit him to leave his things in the lobby while he lumbered off without having to lug along the additional burden of thirty or so pounds of cumbersome luggage. It seemed a sort of relenting. She was, after all, mistress here, empowered, he didn’t in the least doubt, by the Foundation with all the authority of a ship’s captain, say, at once hostess, concierge, enforcer, and housemother. It was she, after all, who had assigned him to an outbuilding rather than to a room in what he had already come to think of as the administration building.

Scraping favor, he asked, in as close an approximation to French as he could muster, just where, exactly, he was headed.

“Vous voulez dire, monsieur?”

It wasn’t the first time he had failed to make himself understood.

“I guess none of you people has had the benefit of the first term-and-a-half of freshman-year French,” Miller said, and repeated his question in English.

Madame led him outside and pointed out the yellow house to him.

But if Monsieur was to freshen up wouldn’t he be needing some of his toilet articles out of his valise?

“It’s a done deal. I’ve got it covered,” Monsieur said and, feeling like a fool, but unwilling to go back into the lobby with her or to squat down over his suitcase rummaging through its contents while she watched, held up his laptop word processor.