Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (11 page)

“Of course, Bruce also talked about beach boardwalks.”

“Well,” Isabella said, springing back to life. “It wouldn’t be my first choice, but you know what I always say: ‘The Boss
will not let us down.’ I hear Oceanside is delightful this time of year. I’ll ask Secrest to make arrangements—once she gets
her head out of the loo.”

(Secrest and the kennel chief were expecting their first child, a blessed event so late in life, but it was proving to be
a difficult pregnancy.)

Isabella jumped up and was gone before Geoffrey could finish saying he thought that sounded like a great plan. Mae replayed
the conversation over and over in her mind and asked herself many things that I’m sure you can imagine and also asked herself
who was really giving the advice.

Isabella directly questioned Geoffrey’s advice only once that I know of. He had suggested she wear a snakeskin suit to a ceremony
marking the opening of parliament. This advice would have been suspect enough, even if it had not been gleaned from the lyrics
of one of Springsteen’s seedier songs, an early work about street life in America called “The E Street Shuffle.”

The song is populated with a greasy lot of characters—boy prophets, teenage tramps, a riot squad, a man-child, and someone
called “Power Thirteen.” Not saints, I’m guessing, and probably not the smartest dressers either.

Isabella apparently guessed the same. “Snakeskin?” she said, in a higher voice than usual. “An entire suit?” She wrinkled
her nose, rubbed her hands along her arms as if imagining the feel of such a thing. She cringed. “I can see, perhaps, a nice
pair of shoes.”

She looked at Secrest and Mae. Secrest shrugged skeptically. Mae just looked away.

“Or maybe a handbag,” Isabella offered.

Geoffrey smiled patiently but did not change his advice.

Mae knew Geoffrey had long nursed an inexplicable fondness for “The E Street Shuffle,” a mysterious jumble of words and clichéd
nicknames. Mae considered the song positively nonsensical and finally broke the awkward silence by saying so. But Geoffrey
relayed Springsteen’s own published explanation that “The Shuffle” was a dance with no set steps—the dance created by people
shuffling through life.

Needless to say, this insight, while interesting, did not really convert any of the three women to the merits of snakeskin
and did not, truth be told, even elevate the song in their eyes. Isabella, Secrest, and even Mae were not the sort to be sympathetic
about that sort of thing. Each was a firm believer in picking up your feet and walking properly. “I fail to see,” Isabella
said, “how shuffling could help anyone!”

But even in the face of this dubious counsel, she ultimately did not really argue. She simply looked at Geoffrey for a long
time, then sighed. “I’ll talk to my designer,” she said.

That is how Isabella came to parade before the assembled legislators of Bisbania in a dignified cream business suit with a
striking rattlesnake skin collar that was tastefully set off with a matching belt, shoes, and handbag. It was not her most
celebrated look. It was not featured in splashy photo books about Isabella’s style and it was not mass-produced by the “designers”
who specialize in rushing cheap knockoffs into European department stores. But it was, at least, not a complete embarrassment.
Most of Bisbania never even knew she wore the thing. After all, when was the last time
you
watched a parliamentary ceremony?

Geoffrey never confronted Isabella about her rather loose interpretation of his recommendation. At least, he never did that
I know of. But I have often suspected they had conversations that did not get back to me.

Geoffrey’s final advice to Isabella was interpreted with similar flexibility. Isabella, weeping and wailing, called Geoffrey
home early from a family vacation to help her decide what to wear to the investiture ball, the event during which Princess
Gene’s coming-of-age would be celebrated and she would be officially named Her Royal Highness the Princess of South Main Street.

“I was going to wear that stunning red gown by the designer Burlle,” Isabella said, sniffling a little in a message she left
on Geoffrey’s phone. “You know, the one with all the beading and the train. But now it turns out that Genia’s wearing red.
I can’t look like I’m trying to show up my own sister-in-law. But the queen is wearing orchid, and Rafie hates me in yellow,
and the king threatened to remodel our kitchen again if I show up at another event in black. I’m at a complete loss.”

She dispatched Geoffrey to search the Boss’s lyrics for advice. He spent the afternoon with his headphones on and ended the
day by humming the song “Tougher Than the Rest,” in which the love interest wears blue. Secrest, recently returned from a
twelve-week maternity leave that had failed to soften her up one bit, was certain that Isabella would positively blanch at
this advice. Isabella had long sniped about navy as being the boring default color choice of overly sensible royal women who
usually desire the slimming effects of dark colors but invariably lack the courage to buck Bisbanian tradition and wear black.

Isabella did not blink at all. Instead, she summoned her bodyguard and had him drive her to Bisbania’s trendiest designer
that very afternoon. That is how Princess Iphigenia was outdone at her own investiture ball by her sister-in-law in a quickly
designed but dazzling peacock-blue gown.

Isabella’s choice of peacock blue is another bit of crucial evidence in understanding Mae’s questions about Geoffrey’s advice.
Peacock blue is barely even blue. “Why’d you wear green?” Geoffrey was overheard asking Isabella.

She just laughed and dragged her hand over his cheek. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s peacock blue.”

“Ah, yes,” Geoffrey said, “when you step out into the light there, I can see what you’re talking about.”

But whatever its color, and whether it was selected because of Geoffrey’s shrewd advice or Isabella’s own fashion sense, it
did look breathtaking in the famous photo of Isabella twirling on the dance floor with the president of the United States,
her elegant wispy scarf floating behind her.

If you look carefully at the photo of Isabella and the president dancing, you can see Princess Genia, freshly returned from
the Canadian school where she’d gotten a degree in Internet publishing. She is sitting forlornly and wondering why exactly
she had requested that Isabella not wear red.

(Oh, all right, it’s not obvious from the photo that she is thinking that, but come on, what else would she be thinking?)

That is the famous photo from that night. But another photo taken that night has been largely forgotten, because its significance
is understood by few and its place in history is less obvious.

In that photo, which I love and loathe, which repels and attracts me, which I stare at and grow sickened by, Isabella is dancing
with an unknown castle mechanic. His hand is resting on her slim back, just below the plunging back line of that stunning
“blue” dress. Isabella looks like she is happy and safe and very comfortable, and the car mechanic looks proud and pained
and like he senses danger.

In the background is Raphael, who, to the untrained eye, looks merely distracted, as if he is staring off into space. But
that is how you read Raphael’s expression when you know that he is a prince, the heir apparent to the throne, and when you
think the man in the foreground is just a car mechanic. But knowing what you know now, I think you can understand why I read
more into Raphael’s expression, why I see a certain rigid irritation, a cold resentment, a tired worry. Am I imagining it?
I don’t know, and certainly no one else does.

For as you must remember, the story of Princess Isabella’s life changed rather dramatically on the morning following Princess
Iphigenia’s investiture ball. That is the reason the photograph of Isabella, the apparent future queen, dancing with the young
U.S. president in front of the relatively dowdy Princess Iphigenia, became so poignant. Everyone in the world knows the momentous
event that happened to the royal family the next morning.

Just a few hours after those lovely ballroom photos were taken, hours after Isabella had seemed to make peacock blue the next
hot color, a lowly royal mechanic, Geoffrey Whitehall-Wright, died when the single-engine plane he was piloting plunged into
the stormy, icy waters of the predawn Bisbania Sea. Such a sudden, violent, unexpected death of a trusted, albeit low-ranking,
castle aide is exactly the sort of thing that tabloids feed on, compose conspiracy theories about, and make up long backstories
for.

But Geoffrey’s death got little attention, because the world’s eye was turned that stormy morning to a more important matter.
For, as you must realize, His Royal Highness the Prince of Gallagher, the man known everywhere as Prince Raphael, the heir
to the Bisbanian throne, was Geoffrey’s passenger.

I
never did get back to Jimmy Bennett, did I? I’m getting old, you know. I sometimes lose threads of conversations. I go off
on tangents. I ramble and wander. Then, several pages later, I realize I just left you wondering about the elusive Mr. Bennett,
while a saucy, big-boned, husky-voiced detective roamed the streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin, looking for an unhappy Yale graduate.
I can’t do that, can I?

I told myself I would not fall into the traditional trappings of royal biographies in this account of Isabella’s life. Those
books—“those damn books,” as Secrest always referred to them—are all predictable enough. They draw a picture of royal life
in which the reigning monarch always desired the throne—longed for it with an aching, pathetic intensity and schemed for it
to a degree both embarrassing and indecent. Or else he or she never really cared to be the monarch; it simply didn’t make
much difference one way or another.

The purpose of such books is always to buck conventional wisdom, by showing that the royal subject was either completely underappreciated
or entirely overrated. The conventions of the genre demand that every prince and princess, every king and queen, be terribly
put upon by the bullies who make up the castle help, a group of universally out-of-touch and stubbornly overformal advisers
who insist on doing everything exactly wrong. To be able to enjoy a royal biography, you must be able to believe that crowned
rulers, with their inherited titles and inherited wealth, with their lives of constant indulgence and ever present help, are
always more in touch with the common people than the castle workers who clean the royal toilets, cook the regal meals, and
study questions of protocol and politics for a living.

So, hemmed in by this stifling state of affairs, the royals (at least the ones who merit books about their lives) are forced
to turn for advice to all sorts of unlikely sources, tarot-card readers or dream interpreters or, you know, Rasputin. And
often, like the wives of presidents and prime ministers, they enjoy an occasional enema. You don’t understand it. I don’t
understand it. No normal person understands it. But apparently, if you wore a crown and ate a lot of dreadful chicken dinners,
you, too, would enjoy regular colonic irrigation. Such is the beauty regimen of the glamorous.

The narrators tell all this in, depending on their agenda, either a sympathetic, apologetic tone or a scolding, disapproving
voice, and it turns out that the narrators themselves are always terribly crucial to every turn of events, which usually spin
on seemingly mundane details. Did the princess’s staff cook mistakenly use a cream sauce when the lactose-intolerant prime
minister came to lunch? That, then, must surely explain why hemlines went down that year and why the economy collapsed soon
after. Oh, if the cook had only listened to the narrator, the whole thing would have been avoided!

The exception to all of this, I suppose, are the biographies of the Russian royals, who were mostly slaughtered in the Russian
Revolution, except for the ones who, according to the books about them, miraculously escaped but tragically could not prove
their identities. I guess if you’ve got a story filled with people who may or may not be dead, you don’t need to dwell as
much on problems with luncheon menus. Although I’m pretty sure I once read a biography that claimed the czarina received frequent
enemas from Rasputin and was terribly embarrassed by an overcooked leg of lamb at a state dinner. Also, supposedly, she was
a man. Those books play by different rules.

And I will, too. Not by the Russian rules. But by different rules than those generally applied to contemporary royal biographies.
Nevertheless, I suppose I ought to follow some of the basic conventions of good storytelling. So if I start to tell you about
Jimmy Bennett, then I eventually ought to get back to him and put that part of the story to rest—not that an old narrator
like me likes to use phrases such as “put to rest,” bringing to mind, as it does, all sorts of ugly end-of-life musings.

Secrest was, as I said, in charge of the search for Jimmy Bennett, and she talked to the detective almost every week, though
she milked these conversations into daily reports for Isabella. I happen to know that Secrest was very concerned about the
whole situation. She wasn’t sure exactly what Isabella hoped to accomplish. Secrest didn’t know, at least not yet, about Isabella
and Geoffrey’s kiss, and so she wasn’t sure what danger Jimmy Bennett presented to Isabella. The only theory she could come
up with was the obvious one. She thought that Bennett himself was an old love interest of some degree or another. And given
that it was Ethelbald Candeloro’s column that had set Isabella off, Secrest feared he was a love interest of the leather-clad,
motorcycle-riding variety. This, she reasoned, could not be good.

If the detective found him, Isabella had authorized only minimal action. The detective was supposed to watch him, complete
a report, and keep her distance while Isabella considered the options. But from where Secrest sat, there were no good options.
If Bennett was the long-haired boyfriend—Secrest constantly assured herself that there was no need to imagine words like “lover”—contacting
the former classmate would only serve as the confirmation that Ethelbald Candeloro might be waiting on.