Van Gogh's Room at Arles by Stanley Elkin

Author:Stanley Elkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781564782809
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday, February 2, 1992

How He Courted Me

It wasn’t jealousy as you and I know it. Well, it wasn’t jealousy at all, really. No matter what you’ve read in the press, the truth is I was never attracted to Alec. I don’t really think he was attracted to me. I’m not telling any tales out of school if I remind the public that Prince Alec is not highly sexed, only heavily hormoned. His skin, if you look closely, is actually rather fair and only appears swarthy because of the dense stubble of five-o’clock shadow that covers it. I don’t know why he doesn’t grow a beard. Unless of course the vaguely tough-guy look on his handsome, somewhat disheveled face is something he deliberately cultivates. Like the dust-up (rather than car crash) it turns out he provoked on the evening of my first visit to the palace. Which is why, really, I was never attracted to Alec.

Well, put yourself in my place. Knowing, I mean, what I knew. About, I mean, that business of their never being brought up on charges. Mere Figureheads? Symbolic power? I should think not. No, they can’t take us into foreign wars and don’t even have all that much say-so in domestic matters. They couldn’t, I daresay, fix a ticket for anyone below the rank of a marquess. But forget about not being allowed to make laws or fix tickets. But not ever having to answer to anyone? Symbolic power? Power like theirs, the power, I mean, to run amok with impunity, is the most seductive and dangerous power there is. So so much, I say, for the pretty myth of their Figureheadhood!

Yet there’s no denying it. It is seductive. All that force, all that dash and fire, all that vim and verve. To wink at precept and live in some perpetual state of willful disregard the indulged, insouciant life is a temptation indeed. I was not tempted.

I am, I think at least as much a woman as Prince Alec is a man. Where he is testosteronagenous and aggressive, I am largely progesterogenic and nurturing. And I never forgot that Alec is a bully—is this libelous? let them go prove it— and that too much of his bravura is vouchsafed by his princely immunities. If he was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk, if his clothes were torn, what had he to lose in a dust-up? He’s on the National Health, his clothing allowance is seventy-five thousand pounds a year. You should see the other guy.

To his credit, Lawrence was not jealous. To mine, I never gave him reason to be.

(Sid, let them bring me up on charges. Let them just try! In this La Lulu-Tells-All enterprise we’re supposed to be engaged in here, let me remind them that I haven’t done, I haven’t told all, not yet I haven’t. Only what relates to me. And this isn’t blackmail. I haven’t asked for a penny of their money. I wouldn’t, I won’t. And if they try to put me under a gag order, I’ll just take my story somewhere else.

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