The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  We ended up in Kenwood Park after senior prom, just the two of us, at two in the morning, her in a gown Mom had sewn from patterns, me in a leased tuxedo foaming at the chest with flamenco ruffles. (Years later, I actually joined a hipster-flamenco group in Hungary, during my years of wandering. We used the hideous photos of that prom night for ironic publicity.)

  It is odd, I know, to think of episodes where she was in pain as the ultimate evidence of our closeness, but there it is. There is something unbearably sweet in memories of her coming to me—and me alone—to open her heart.

  The park at that late hour in May would have been very dark, and in its stretches of wood one could, briefly, for the space of a few yards, imagine oneself in a forest, far from city lights or the twentieth century. My night’s thrills had been surreptitious—stolen kisses with other boys’ dates, pecking at the weak-willed girls of the herd, playing and luring with the darker shades of my father’s reputation (“I don’t want to talk about, I just can’t” being, at eighteen, powerful love poetry). And when the night of heightened sensitivity and thin skin and cruel games had passed, it left me happy, holding my sobbing twin’s hand, my arm around her shoulders, draped by my borrowed tux jacket, in a tiny forest, leaning against trees and smoking, carving inanities in the bark.

  Her sorrow was proof and vindication to my muddled adolescent mind: she was suffering because she could not find a soulmate in anyone else but me, and when she suffered, she wanted to be with no one else but me. I fear to write this down, but now it is too late: the evaporation of jealousy is as pleasurable an emotion as any I know; it is a release as profound and shuddering as any physical sensation. It is the erasure of fear, the removal of worry, the shimmering tingle once danger—for which your body has tensed—is past. It is not the arrival of permanent courage or trust; jealousy is tidal, and it flows and ebbs forever, and acceptance that it will return is part of the pleasure while it recedes. There is no happy ending, but nor is there eternal pain. Something is still going to happen, so the timing of the dropping of a curtain is largely arbitrary, which is why Shakespeare’s endings are so often the weakest parts of his plays. (Someone is getting married or everyone is dead; time to go home now and get on with your own lives. The Tragedy of Arthur is no different.)

  Dana sobbed so hard she fell to her knees on the grass, and I gathered her up in my arms. “She’s not worth this,” I said.

  “Then who is worth this? Why not her?” replied love’s logic.

  “You’ll find one. You’ll probably find a hundred. It’s just—you’re just—they’re just not ready for you yet.” All the limp consolations one hopes will prop up the shaking, desperate, miserable. “You are,” I reminded her, “kind and loving and funny and talented and beautiful. That’s a pretty good deal.”

  “How many did you kiss tonight?”

  “Depends on how we’re counting.”

  “Just tell me not Amy.”

  “Not Amy. Not my type at all.”

  “You don’t have a type. You’re an angry omnivore. Just not Amy.”

  “I have a type. I just haven’t met a girl who fits it yet.”

  This stretch of 93 percent accurately remembered conversation is embarrassing. If I was ever such a Don Juan as I was claiming (or wished to be, or pretended to be), it was to a certain extent a reaction to my father’s fraudulent claims to womanizing prowess. “Do you think he had all those ‘lady friends’?” I asked Dana when she came up to visit me one fall weekend, freshman year of college.

  “Are you joking?” She had transformed herself in her first six weeks at Brown into a ferocious-looking lesbo-pug.

  “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

  “No. Probably he just told you different things.” According to her, according to him, he had lived a perfectly monastic existence, in his cells and out, a devoted husband after the fact, a courtly lover, perfectly content to be perpetually separated from his soul’s most blessed love, the lost Mary.

  Neither was true, Dana pointed out to me. He was just exceedingly lonely since the moment he had—in a burst of self-punishment, aware of his complete failure as a husband—sacrificed his sincere and natural hope for a normal marriage and love, setting Mom free to be with solid, dull Sil. That great act accomplished with a straight face, and rewarded with unlimited child visitation, the curtain should have fallen on a redemptive comical tragedy. Instead, my father lived on, not in Act V at all but in an interminable Act III, claiming to me that he was a swinger and to Dana that he was happy to love Mom at a distance. The truth was isolation and a lot of work—some legal, most otherwise—with an increasing preoccupation with making or finding (or stealing) a large amount of money, which, he had decided, would make up for all his previous failings. This desire led him back to prison—a brutally long sentence on his fourth conviction—but didn’t abandon him there.

  “I have made a series of rather fundamental mistakes,” he told me when I visited him during spring break my junior year in college, 1985. “But I’m on to something big now, I think.”

  “That’s nice. How are you, Dad?”

  “Gently used. Slightly foxed. Warmly inscribed.”

  He was that day very sentimental, even mawkish for my collegiate tastes; during that period I fancied myself to be above a long list of emotions. “Sil took you to a lot of Twins games? When you were a kid?” he asked.

  “Yeah, quite a few. He’s a statistics machine, you know.”

  “Taught you how to play, too? Had a catch with you in the evenings?”

  “I suppose so, yeah.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “When?”

  “When you’d play catch.”

  “We did that for ten years. I’m going to a game with him this week.”

  “Yeah. But as an example. Please.”

  “I don’t know. We usually talked about baseball, I guess. That’s what Sil and I have in common. And a fondness for Mom.”

  “I have that, too,” said the oldish man in his orange jumpsuit.

  “I know.”

  “But really no feel for baseball.”

  “I liked that ball you gave me,” I lied about the forged Rod Carew baseball I’d thrown away, eager to call the infield fly rule on this sentimental chat.

  “I was lucky to get it. I knew he was your hero.”

  I am trying—and failing, I fear—to restore dialogue from twenty-five years ago, to be honest enough for a memoir and fair to my father (and my younger self) and still make it clear why this moment is worth memorializing:

  “I wrote a play,” I announced. “It’s being put on. Not Mainstage, but the black box.”

  “No kidding? What’s it about?”

  “Apartheid. The human cost of institutional racism. The urgent need for the university to divest from South African money. Greed.”

  “Very impressive,” he mumbled, but I could tell it wasn’t interesting him, that his momentary thrill of learning that I had written a play was already extinguished, that my writing was not of the sort to produce wonder, that my intentions for a socially engaged theater were somehow wrong. “Where’s the magic, though? I mean, does it make your hair stand up?”

  He managed not to mention Shakespeare. I had learned enough about prison visits by 1985 to know that you always left on a good note or else regret could crush you until the next time, and so I said goodbye politely enough, although I was in a righteous anger. It was not just blind fury but that rarer kind where you have the icy adrenaline pleasure of knowing you’re right. I drove, alone, back to Mom’s house, fuming at his self-centered sentimentality over his maybe having missed some of my childhood and his obvious lack of interest in me right now. After he’d spent most of my childhood in jail, now I was not magical enough? “Fuck his magic,” I shouted in the empty car. “Fuck His Magic” became a song by the Fairy Rings, and I still have a cassette of them playing it at Brown’s Spring Fling.

  But making the leap from antipathy to
apathy is not something you can achieve just by wishing.

  I flew back to Harvard and my great triumph as a playwright. Dana took the train up for opening night. Since freshman year, she had transformed herself again and again, leaving behind her bull-dykery for punk rock and had now become a flower child, a retro pose that fit her least well of all her looks so far. She wore a woolen Latin American serape and had semi-dreadlocked hair. She saw my reaction to her hippiedom and, with a shrug, acknowledged it would soon pass.

  “I didn’t know you could be so passionate about the suffering of others,” she said, hugging me backstage at the theater, a black cube with a single black curtain and a set of four chairs—two black, two white—on a chessboard floor. “You are going to score a lot of taffeta being this noble. But can you keep it up? Or does apartheid awareness evaporate with orgasm?”

  It was certainly deflating, though she wasn’t being cruel; she just saw through my affectations as quickly as I saw through hers. I wished I could have prevented myself from laughing, but her voice was a tickle, and I couldn’t, when faced with Dana, hold myself in a pose.

  She came with me to the Drama Club party that night, where I pompously accepted pompous toasts and we all congratulated ourselves for striking a blow for freedom in South Africa. Dana drank with us, smiled at me in a way that invalidated all the nonsense, not smug but desmuggifying, and I truly didn’t mind. “I love that sweater,” she enthused to the girl who played Winnie Mandela. Her gaydar had improved exponentially since high school.

  “Seriously,” I asked despite myself, several hours later, back in my dorm, Dana stretched out on the common room’s futon couch. “Did you like any of it?”

  “The play?” she sighed, behind closed eyes.

  “The play, yes.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t soften the blow. Just tell me.”

  “It wasn’t like a play. It was like … like a tender for bids on your penis. Please don’t waste your talent writing things to meet girls.” I liked the mention of my “talent” as though it were a fact. That was more than enough. I thought she’d fallen asleep until she added, “You know you don’t give a rat’s furry pink ass about South Africa. You as much as said so in every line of that play.”

  None of this angered me in the slightest, while my father’s fainter uninterest had brutalized me. Dana was right, and I loved her. I spread a blanket over her, tucked her in, my best and wisest and never-wrong critic.

  10

  AS A GIRL, Dana was, like Dad, an author lover. It mattered to her to know about the person who had written the stories, books, and plays she loved. Shakespeare, for example—a man about whom a very small number of things are known—was her friend. She felt grateful to him for what he had made for her to enjoy. I have some of the letters she wrote to our father, describing her feelings as she read each play. Here’s part of one dated March 29, 1974, so she was not quite ten years old:

  You know what I thought? In Love’s Labour’s Lost, everyone in court is so mean to the bad actors when they put on their show. It’s a very cruel scene, don’t you think? Well, guess what I discovered? The next play he wrote after LLL was Midsummer, and in that one he has bad actors again, and the court watches again, and the play is really bad again, but this time everyone in the royal audience is really nice. Did you ever notice this? I think I might be first and I think have a theory. After LLL somebody in the real court probably said to him, “We’re a good audience to you, Mr. William Shakespeare, so don’t make fun of us. Show us being nice to actors.” And he did! Don’t forget it’s Arthur’s birthday next month. Hint … hint … hint … give up? Yes, and mine! And Shakespeare, too, but you knew. First me, then Artie and Will—10 and 410, if you’re counting. I would get Will something after reading LLL. I love that play. Is it one of your favorites, too? It’s one of mine now, and he deserved a big reward from the queen. I hope she gave him a diamond or something for that one. I am making something so cool for Artie. I know you can make him something, too. How about a license plate? I am joking. I hope that’s funny. Silvius is taking him to a Twins game, I know. And Mom is taking me to the Lincoln Del with three girls of my choice. Have you ever heard of Love’s Labour’s Won? They know it existed and it’s by him but they can’t find it now. I would like to find it and read it and not tell anyone about it, so it’s just between me and Will. I’d share it with you, of course. Please continue to be good, so we can see you, okay? Please? Promise? [He did pretty well: it was three years before his next imprisonment.] “Sir! I love you more than word can wield the matter! You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I love as much as child e’er loved.” Dana.

  My sister’s girlishly precise handwriting (better than mine even now), in pink ink, fills four pages of lined notebook paper on this occasion. The pages still cling to one another at the twisted spade ends where each sheet was from its spiral binder ripped, and here and there my father nursed the creases with Scotch tape, now as yellow as watered Scotch. I asked myself, as I read this and other ones not long ago, biting my lips and grinding my exhausted eyes to jelly with the heels of my hands, if it was possible that my father forged this letter. I didn’t recall writing any letters to him, though I did find in his bundles two short, businesslike documents assuring him of my warm birthday wishes to him. But this! Here is Dana as a girl: precociously literate, naturally and profoundly loving, Lear-quoting, funny, insightful, looking out for me.

  I remembered, thanks to reading this, the details of my tenth birthday. Dana built me a model baseball field, cardboard and artificial grass (from an Easter basket), painted, all in scale to some tiny Twins figurines she had bought with her allowance. It must have taken her hours and days to build it, hours in secrecy away from me in Mom and Sil’s modest house, and since there was so little such time in those days, she must have been thinking of me and working for me for nearly all of April. In tiny letters on the back of the jersey of the figure up to bat she had painted PHILLIPS and the number 29 (Rod Carew’s number).

  Silvius was not yet Mom’s husband then but her boyfriend, a stocky and balding fellow whose remaining, not-yet-fatted-over muscles impressed me a great deal. He did indeed take me to Met Stadium to see a Twins game for my birthday, though not until April 28, when the Twins beat the Milwaukee Brewers, even though Carew disappointed, going either 1-for-4 or 0-for-4, I believe. I have my ticket stub still, now that I am older than that stocky, balding fellow was and my own hair has thinned to the point where it looks as if I’ve had a not very convincing plug job on a much balder head. My mother bought me a boxed paperback set of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which has moved with me from home to home, across oceans, for thirty-six years now and is held together by yellowing tape of its own. And my father presented me with a 1974 Topps-brand baseball card, in mint condition, in a protective plastic sleeve, with Hall of Fame–quality career statistics, of the Twins’ second baseman: me. My chubby young face sits comfortably on a man’s body in full swing, and visible just behind my blurring bat, a sign held up by a front-row fan: GO, ARTIE!

  It was the finest birthday of my life, and I hold out no hope of ever topping it in whatever years remain.

  From hate to love to apathy and back again. Therapists and I have schemed and attacked the locked box that contains the answer to the question, “Why did I hate my father for so many years?” Armed with intricate lock-picking tools, we passed aggregate months poking at my psyche, jabbing at its impenetrable front (not a lock at all, only a crafty and detailed trompe l’oeil), searching it for a spring, finally whacking it with the hammer of antidepressants, dunking it in the acid of hypnosis. Still, it keeps its sepulchral secret.

  I loved my father, of course, but I did finally have to admit that I hated him. His arrests when I was a boy were evidence first of police conspiracy and harassment, unfairness against my daddy; but later they proved his disregard for us, for me, his apparent preference for prison over my company. In parallel, there was my love for him and my adm
iration for his work and for his theory that, as a doctor makes the world healthier or a lawyer makes it more precise, he made the world more wondrous. This belief must have had—the shrinks and I are in concord about this—some effect on my becoming a novelist. That and my total lack of skill at baseball. (Somehow sensing this, an online reviewer of one of my novels wrote, “Phillips swings for the fences but manages only to wedge his bat up his own ass.”)

  Protective of my mother, whom he failed, and jealous of his love for Dana and vice versa, I would gladly dress myself in noble garb now and claim (or just memoir-manipulatively imply) that I hated him for what he did to them, how miserable Dana was every time he was taken from her. I could make a case.

  We were fifteen when he was sentenced to prison yet again. It was a brutal sentence—ten years—for what I must admit now doesn’t seem like that dreadful a crime. And yet I would have had him executed for it when I was fifteen. It could not have been more disgusting to me. Even now, when I am almost as old as he was then, I find myself as embarrassed as a teenager to write down the details. He was a worker of wonders! He expanded the world’s possibilities! He was a wizard! He was teaching me to be just the same as him! I wanted to be him! Well, he got ten years (and served seven) for a grubby little tax dodge. How measly was this wondrous expansion of the universe? His partner in wonders, Chuck Glassow, owned a chain of mid-market grocery stores and had, for many years, been successfully claiming reduced revenues for tax purposes by gathering up newspaper coupons that hadn’t actually been used in his store. Unsatisfied by the tax relief he had won with this game, he had my father print fake coupons with higher discounts and for products that didn’t actually have coupons, further reducing the store’s apparent revenue and tax liability. That was it. The marvel of it all. Glassow got five and was out in two, and Dana only ever admitted being angry at him, never at Dad. But I took it as a betrayal—of us, of the ideals and philosophy he taught us—and my anger scoured my insides, burned my love for him out of me, ablated my heart’s interior walls.