The Frog Prince (3 page)

Something about the ritual of lowering a steel coffin into a concrete grave liner really creeps me out. I’d feel much better just chucking a shroud-covered corpse into a hole in the ground. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that. I read a few months ago about a “green cemetery” back east where embalming and gravestones were verboten, and grave markers had to be made of materials that would “return to the natural landscape within one hundred years.” The choices of coffins were pine or …pine. The idea was to return one’s body to nature as quickly as possible, to become a part of the trees, flowers, and animals of the forest. The thought of being reincarnated as a maple tree, and thereby reducing the chances of saying stupid things to zero, has a strange appeal.

I’m imagining my family’s reaction when I tell them that I plan to forego the family graveyard in Colorado to become an Ent somewhere in Virginia, when Kat nudges me with her elbow and looks to her left. I follow her gaze. Two rows ahead of us a smiling Prince Roman Karl Franz Joseph Max Heinrich Ignatius Habsburg von Lorraine winks at us and turns away. My response resembles the newborn startle reflex. I have enough self-control to keep my arms from swinging out to the sides, but my legs are a different story. My high heels dig into the grass and push simultaneously, and if it wasn’t for Kat grabbing me by the shoulder I would have gone ass over teakettle into the goose shit.

Roger Duke materializes by the coffin to shake hands and offer false sympathy to my Great Uncle Morris and other relatives in the front row. Now I can’t seem to take my eyes off the gold that seems to sag from every one of his appendages. The price of gold being what it is, I consider whether or not I could take Roger Duke down, perhaps after the crowd has dissipated and he’s on his way back to the hearse. I think I could convince Prince Roman to hold him for me.

With pleasant thoughts like this running through my head, I don’t even notice that the graveside service is over until Kat stands up. A baritone voice behind me is unmistakable: “You two ready to leave?”

Kat looks behind her at Roman, then over at me. “Hey, Roman,” she says. “Uh, I’ve gotta get home and feed my Tadpole.” Roman doesn’t even blink at this strange reply, so he must know that Kat isn’t talking about a pet amphibian but is referring to her eight-year-old son, Thaddeus, a.k.a. Tad, a.k.a. Tadpole. “I gave Leigh a ride here, would you mind taking her home?”

“Absolutely,” says Roman with that delicious, crooked smile.

I’m checking his grill for signs of the famous Habsburg jaw, such as a jutting under-bite or a string of drool hanging from his mouth, when I notice that he has a deep dimple in his right cheek. I mean, I think I could get my index finger in there down to the second knuckle. I decide right then and there that I want to lick his face.

“Should we go get some dinner?” he says to me.

I’ve had thirty years of practice running social scripts, so I am able to locate the potential answer to the “shall we have breakfast/lunch/dinner” question in my database without missing a beat. My choices are:

1. Sure thing

2. I’m afraid I already have plans

3. I don’t want to touch your penis, and I never, ever want to see you naked.

I choose the first, and just to flaunt my conversational abilities I daringly add, “What did you have in mind?”

“Have any objections to organic food?”

“That sounds great.” But it’s not great. I am now officially out of things to say, and it sounds like I’ll be grazing on some gross vegetarian spread for the next hour. I look over at Kat, who avoids meeting my eyes.

“Alright, well I’ll see you guys later!” she says with a wave, and then she’s gone—my only hope for a functional third in a conversational
ménage a trios
.

I am in the middle of making a pact with myself to respond to anything he says to me in monosyllabic grunts when he holds out his hand. I stare at it, unsure if we need to go through the whole business of shaking hands again, when he turns it palm-up. “Thought I’d help you get out of here on those stilts alive…before you get my other foot.” I put my hand on top of his, and he leads me back across the minefield of goose offal to the street.

I breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of his car, a Toyota Prius. While I figured a horse-drawn carriage would seem pretentious even for faux-royalty, I was expecting something more along the lines of a Beemer or some Euro-trash Mercedes.

Roman pulls open the passenger door, and I realize too late that I will now be stuck with him in an enclosed space for at least ten minutes trying to think of clever things to say.

“That suit looks really great on you,” he says. This catches me totally off-guard. I usually forget what I look like until someone brings it up, causing me to get flustered and say something dumb like, “It sure does.”

“Thank you,” I mumble quickly as he snaps the door shut, and scramble to think of topics for small-talk while he walks around to the other side.

A series of unsuitable questions flits through my head:
So why did you waste your time in law school if you weren’t going to take the bar and become an attorney
?
Have you ever suffered from any type of severe jaw or orthodontic problem? Why would a royal –“almost” or otherwise –come to Denver over L.A. or New York City (or London or Paris for that matter)? I see you drive a Prius and eat organic food
…
are we going to hug some trees after dinner
?
I’m sure Christine and Earl have told you all about me
…
does royalty like to amuse itself by dating freaky women
?

Roman slides into the driver’s seat while I try my best not to look like a teenager on a first date. I steal a glance at him and realize that he has traded in his Nirvana tribute clothing from yesterday for a button-up shirt and tie. As if reading my mind he says, “I wanted to apologize about yesterday. I shouldn’t have spoken that way about your aunt. I feel terrible about it and just wanted to say that I’m sorry.”

My brain is spinning its wheels, and finally spits out this gem: “She tried to look her best.” Oh, lord. I almost cover my mouth with both hands like the X on a hot cross bun.

Roman chuckles as he stabs a button on the dashboard. “You really make me laugh, you know that?” I’m not sure if he means this in a circus side-show kind of way. Then he turns to me, those blue, blue eyes of his suddenly serious. “I thought she looked very nice. It was great to see your whole family there to support your great uncle. And I’ve never been assaulted in a funeral home before,” he adds, grinning, “so thanks for that.”

The car must be “on” somehow, because he’s turned his attention to the street and all of a sudden we start moving in almost total silence. I’ve always been able to rely on the hum of an engine to mask my conversational deficiencies, so the silence is most definitely not welcome.

“I met your grandfather and your great uncle after you left,” Roman continues, “and I apologized for how I was dressed.”

My brain recreates this interesting encounter, and I hone in on one aspect of the tableau to comment on. Before I say it aloud, I run it through a quick Creep Factor check; it comes back with a score of zero so I’m cleared for take-off. “Yeah, next time you’ll have to wear a powder blue polyester suit from the 1970s so you can blend in a little better.”

He chuckles. “Normally I would have a witty follow-up to that, but as a rule I try not to make fun of World War II veterans who stormed the beach at Normandy.”

I’m feeling pleased that he actually chatted with my family enough to glean this bit of information when Roman’s hand hovers over the power button on the stereo. “What kind of music do you like?”

I think of what to tell him and then realize that it doesn’t matter. Whatever he was listening to before I got into the car will tell me if his musical taste will be a deal-breaker for us. Men always go out of their way to play the music you like (to your starry-eyed delight), but as soon as you’ve rolled around naked for awhile and the glow of the new relationship wears off you’ll spend the next two or three years being subjected to unbearable country songs with lyrics like “her teeth was stained, but her heart was pure.”

“I have pretty eclectic taste in music,” I say, keeping my response purposely vague. He pushes the power button and to my great relief the car is flooded with the sounds of alternative rock from a local independent station.

“Like what?” he says as the car accelerates from a stop light on a trajectory more or less heading towards downtown Denver.

I take a deep breath and blurt out the truth. “I’m a cult follower of Tori Amos, but I also like alt rock, rap-core, adult contemporary, classical music from the Classical and Romantic periods, and mid-nineteenth century Appalachian gospel.”

He doesn’t answer, too involved in cutting off a hulking SUV in the opposite lane. The car comes to a stop at the next light, and I’m beginning to think that the Appalachian gospel music is going to be the deal-breaker
for him
. “Appalachian gospel?” he says, his right eyebrow arching towards his hairline in disbelief. “Is that, like, John Denver?”

“No, that’s hillbilly folk,” I say.

Roman laughs as he turns onto Colorado Boulevard. His perpetual cheerfulness is catching, and I find that my mood is only slightly dampened by the gluten-free spaghetti and bark pasta that will undoubtedly be my dinner.

Chapter Three

The Mercury Café is one of those places that’s way too cool for me. For starters it’s definitely one of those “word-of-mouth” locales. Unless you just stole a car and need it stripped for parts—no questions asked—or you’re looking forward to checking “get mugged” off your bucket list, there’s no way the average Denver area resident would ever just stumble on this place. I quickly take in the restaurant’s light blue-painted brick, and the murals covering the outside walls. Painted in midnight blue to the left of the doorway is a moon with carefully drawn eyebrows and collagen-injected lips. On the right side is a stern-looking sun. The whole tableau makes me want to sit down on the sidewalk and weave a daisy chain.

Roman opens the creaky wooden door to reveal a vestibule with wire racks filled with trendy newspapers, and an arched doorway covered with a heavy red velvet curtain split down the middle. While he paws the fabric to find the opening, I look around at advertisements taped to the wall.
Poetry slam this Friday! Bassist needed for neo-punk band!
One of them—
Learn to hula!
—makes me giggle. Roman looks back and I point to the ad. “Can you get kazoo lessons here too?” I whisper.

He laughs and pulls aside the curtain for me. I step into the impossibly small main part of the café. Ropes of red Christmas lights are strung across the ceiling. Everything is worn, dark wood—the tables, the bar, the church pew benches by the door. I’m taking in the Buddha, Vishnu, and elephant ceramic lamps affixed to the walls at three of the nearby tables when a dreadlocked conehead bears down on us. "Two for dinner?" he says.

I clench my jaw just to be sure my mouth isn’t hanging open at the sight of the twisted ropes of hair coiled into a long, thick point. The base of this massive hair tower is wrapped haphazardly with some sort of blue rag. A spicy smell drifts off the guy, and I’m not sure if garlic, petuli, or B.O. dominates.

Thankfully Roman steps in to retrieve the situation. "Two for dinner," he confirms, holding up a couple of fingers. The host grabs some stray menus off a nearby table and leads the way. I motion for Roman to walk ahead of me, with the logic that the piquant odor cloud will have dissipated slightly before I walk through it.

"This okay for you guys?" says the human narwhal, showing us to a small table in the corner next to a wall covered with painted roses.

"It’s great, thanks," says Roman.

I move to sit in the opposite chair, when I realize that Roman is still standing. I glance at the tabletop to see if something offensive has caused him to reconsider the table–free range bugs or tofu remains–but it appears spotless. Then I realize that he's pulled a chair back a few feet and is waiting for me to sit in it.

To be fair to me, I’ve never had a chair pulled out for me so I’m not really sure what to do. Do I drop my ass onto the chair and then scoot it out of his hands and under the table? Sort of hover my butt over the seat and let him scoop me up like a front loader? Dump my trunk like dead-weight and force him to push the chair in like a bricklayer pushing a loaded wheelbarrow?

Being the commoner that I am, I launch my body in the general direction of the offered chair, like a competition junky playing one-man musical chairs. Once I’m seated he simply walks to his own chair, settles in, and snaps the cloth napkin across his lap. "So," he says, picking up the menu, "are you a carnivore or an herbivore?"

I'm still pretty rattled from the whole chair chivalry thing, and before I can stop myself a basically true (but completely illogical) response blows out of my mouth. "Well, technically I'm a carnivore because I do like meat occasionally, but meat isn’t very good for you so I've been eating a lot of beans and fish lately. Of course fish
is
meat…that's why it's the Chicken of the Sea, but ethically I'm opposed to corporate farms and keeping animals stuffed in pens. But at the same time, our human ancestors were always meat eaters, at least since
Homo erectus
. And I know I couldn't kill an animal myself if there were plants available to eat unless I had to kill an animal to feed my children if they were starving. Except I don't have kids."

I heard once that you can’t cry and drink cold water at the same time. At this point the hostess has stepped up to the table with glasses of ice water, one of which I immediately snatch off the tray in her hand. Guzzling the cold water temporarily staves off any full-blown sobbing, and gives me the strength to see how Roman has taken this particular piece of verbal diarrhea. He's leaning far back in his chair, smiling broadly at me across the table.