The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  Can I not blame anyone else, even a little? Perhaps my mother would be willing to bear a tiny share on her old shoulders. Why, yes, I see it now: During the peculiar wake/shivah that Dana had designed, my mother grew annoyed by some of Sil’s distant, too close cousins and asked me to take her for some fresh air. She moved quickly out the door and down the street, and I had to pick up the pace to keep up with her. She set off for the path around Lake of the Isles and we silently motored along for nearly half the lake before her energy (or anger) sputtered.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “That’s a funny question. I just buried a husband.” We now walked slowly, arm in arm, me supporting her balsa-wood body, the bikers and roller skaters blurring by on both sides, the cocker spaniels in their Cuban-bandleader pants, the skyline of downtown Minneapolis across the lake, as self-contained as a snow globe.

  “He loved you.”

  “He did,” she said as if there were no arguing with that. “And he held up his end of the bargain. Probably better than I did. He loved me all the way to the end. Treated me well. Supported me. ‘Not wealth, Mary. I don’t think I’ll be able to do wealth. But we’ll be okay.’ ”

  “You do a pretty good impression of him.”

  “Suppose. Well, there’s not much to master, is the truth.” I let that lie, and soon enough she exhaled and her tone changed back. “He gave me everything he promised. Everything he had.”

  “He did.”

  “It would be pretty awful to say it wasn’t enough.”

  “I don’t know. It depends who you said it to.”

  “He was steady-state, Sil was. That was how he loved, too. He opened with undying love and, sure enough, it didn’t die. Until he did.”

  “That’s beautiful. Love like that. People dream of that.”

  “Do they? Do you?”

  “I don’t remember right now, but I’m sure I have. I never heard you complain about him at all.”

  “No. How could I? Can I? Can you say it was a mistake? It wasn’t. Odd: I had two good choices and got to have them both. Can’t really complain.”

  I finally bit: “You seem good and ready to complain.”

  “Can you complain while we’re sitting shivah, or whatever that thing is back there?” She pulled over to a bench under a linden tree and let the wheels and paws and running shoes flow past us. A snail, like an ornate, restless 2, crept across the back of the bench. My mother picked it up and carried it to some moss out of harm’s way. She sat back down and looked at the canoes on the rack across from us, and she started to talk. “For thirty-five years, almost—this October is thirty-five—thirty-five years he told me in word and deed that I was lovable. And so that’s what I thought I was. He was like a mild drug. As long as I was near him, it was enough, and it didn’t wear off, and I didn’t think I wanted for anything but his humble offerings. But it was so humble. I was so far above him and he was so lucky to have me. Flattery, but sincere. And I loved him. I did. I do. I just—Arthur, can I wonder a little? Your father. I count my blessings I got out when I did and stayed away how I did, and Sil was there to give me something smooth and different and better and save me and I was so far above him and … Honestly. Honestly? God damn it.” I flinched, then laughed at my overreaction, but I had never in all my life heard the slightest obscenity smirch her lips, no matter how badly Dana and I had ever behaved. “God damn it. A little less awe of me and a little more effort to astonish me—to make me think I was the lucky one? Would that have killed him? But to sit there and say, ‘Gosh, I’m a lucky man to have you put up with my low-grade self.’ He never made me feel like I had better watch my step or I’d lose him. God damn it.” She really liked how that felt now. “I could do no wrong in his eyes. What’s wrong with someone like that?”

  “That he loved you so much?”

  “No, that, that, that, that I was just a great idea, and he, he was such a, was so, was such a—” And my mom was crying against me. “And then he up and dies first.”

  Here’s the thing about Shakespeare: at the end of the comedies comes the wedding, the circle of life, the dance, the love that will lead to family and birth and life and then some unknown end. But there isn’t this: that after the marriage and dance, after the decades together, after the funeral, there is the woman, grown old and thoughtful and angry at herself for being angry at him, after everyone knows that everyone did their best, but who sits under the medlar tree and tries to say, “That was a bore” (God damn it). “I took the easy way, and I regret it.” If Dana and Harold Bloom are right, if we’re all just walking figments of Shakespeare’s imagination, then where in the canon is my mom, who could not quite say the truth about what she’d lived, that Sil’s love was not enough, that kindness and best efforts were not enough?

  “Am I an ingrate? A shrew?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t really feel like one. I just know that’s the word for people who talk like this in this situation. Not even cold in the earth.”

  “You can talk however you want to me.” If I later heard her words as a warning against living too little, risking too little, loving too little, playing it safe, well, one crime I will not cop to is ignoring motherly advice.

  I didn’t know yet that her words were being banked, in some part of my cunning mind, converted to useful currency. I thought I was just being a good, understanding adult and son. But she spoke of regrets, and I recalled Jana’s farewell address to me earlier that week, and I later saw the maternal regret as deeply wise license. She later said exactly the opposite to Dana (“Thank God for Sil. I got what I needed, I owe him everything, and I am so blessed”), demonstrating a mental flexibility that is evidence of wisdom or empathy or Alzheimer’s. Her conversation with me may just have been steam releasing, only a piece of her.

  We walked back home, to the remnants of the remarkable event Dana had organized with help from some theater friends. When Mom and I walked in, the afternoon had progressed to one of Sil’s cousins singing Sinatra on the karaoke machine Dana had rented while martinis were being shaken up by a catering bartender in a Twins uniform with MAUER written on the back.

  And then I saw her.

  Desire was instantaneous, that species of desire that feels like something rarer than mere lust but that no twenty-first-century grown-up can dare call by its proper name: “love at first sight.” The body stirs, but above the waist. The mind stirs, and insists something significant is happening, casts you into some pastoral scene, some favorite film, some recurrent dream where everyone used to be faceless, like wooden cutouts waiting for tourists. My urges were celestial, not yet sexual: I wanted to touch her face, to put the tips of my fingers against her cheek, to trace the groove between lip and nose. The beach at sunset, the path of skin that ran from her shoulder up to the tender intersection where jaw, ear, and neck meet and merge: dreary anatomical words, neck, skin, ear, nose. They fail.

  I didn’t know who she was yet. She knew me before I knew her. “You’re Dana’s twin,” the stranger said as I zombie-staggered toward her.

  “No one has ever recognized us like that. We don’t really look alike.”

  “You can say that if you want,” she answered with a smile, and I began cataloguing all that I would give up for this woman. “But that doesn’t make it true. I’m—” She spoke her name, and all was confounded. I have to give her a name now, for textual convenience: something ancient that evokes the Levant, spiced, golden dark. “—Petra.”

  I had her hand, and I let it drop as if I’d hurt myself. I echoed awhile: “Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, my sister’s, my sister’s—”

  “Your sister’s,” she confirmed, laughing.

  (A pretty good line from a rough critic: “Reading Arthur Phillips’ dialogue is like poring over the minutes of a stammerers’ convention.”)

  “I’m so sorry about Sil. I met him a few times. A gentleman, and actually a sweetheart.”

  “Thank you. He was. How’s the dog?”

&
nbsp; Dana and Petra had just bought a dog together, a male beagle they’d named Maria, as Dana had dreamt of doing for years, a very specific fantasy of very specific domesticity. Dana had been in high school when she first imagined living with a woman and co-owning a dog. She’d read Twelfth Night and heard in Sir Toby’s praise of his girlfriend, Maria, all the evidence she needed to know Shakespeare’s favorite breed:

  SIR ANDREW Before me, she’s a good wench.

  SIR TOBY She’s a beagle, true-bred.

  And so Dana decided that someday she would have a beagle, and she and her beloved would name it Maria. She had waited more than thirty years for this woman who, in a second or two, had stormed and colonized my imagination from across a crowded wake.

  “How’s the dog?” I asked.

  “Not just any dog: Maria.”

  “Maria. Ay, she’s a beagle.”

  “True-bred,” agreed the woman so foully out of reach, so criminally denied me. “Dana was crazy picky. We had to interview breeders. Very much Gay Parent Overcompensation Disorder. Finally, she asks this guy in Wisconsin, ‘How are your beagles?’ and he says, ‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, and their heads are hung with ears that sweep away the morning dew.’ ”

  “ ‘Crook-kneed and dewlapped like Thessalian bulls’?”

  “You know the guy?”

  “I know my sister.”

  23

  MY FATHER HAD A LITTLE LESS than two months remaining on his sentence. I suppose I would have flown to Minneapolis for his release if I hadn’t already been there to mark the end of Sil’s term, but I’m not certain of it. This period was the closest I ever came to my ideal of indifference to him, true-dyed, in the blood, not just feigned with conviction. I was due in Prague, should have been hurrying back to see what remained of my marriage, or what remained of my desire to save my marriage, to see who was still angry, who was offering apologies or planning departures. But I could find no desire to return. I sank into my hotel bed in Minneapolis and felt at home. I spent almost all of every day with my sister. I watched her record a radio ad, which reminded me of Dad’s vocal prowess when he used to read to us. I watched her study martial arts under the unblinking eyes of a slate-faced sensei. We cooked and ate long wine-rich dinners at her apartment. I played with her dog in Loring Park. I couldn’t help but notice we were almost always in the company of her love.

  I visited Dad August 3, two weeks after Sil died, ready to try on the unnatural role of son, wanting to hear his plans for what was certain to be a short and thoroughly depressing last chapter of life, arming myself with as much protective covering as I could strap over my heart.

  But I spent the drive down to Faribault recalling details of Petra’s face, laughing aloud at how she looked dressed as a man and how her hands felt on my back as she clasped my filled bra for the “Bend It ’til It Breaks” party hosted by Dana’s theater friends. “When you cross-dress, you’re every bit as alluring as Bugs Bunny,” she said. By the time I was passing through the various layers of security in visitor parking, I had a vast store of generosity for Dad bubbling up in me. I decided to see him through to the end as any man deserved, as his best efforts would have merited. One of us would do the right thing for the other. I planned to rent him an apartment, set up an allowance, find him a job teaching art at a senior center. I would expect nothing in return, not a glance, not a chat.

  I waited in the newly rechristened Family Hall, which now served food: a bunch of withered, whiskered pre-raisins clung exhausted to their stems. For ten minutes I waited and thought of past visits and imagined Petra sitting next to me and what I would say to her about this room and what she would say to me about the man it had made me. And then they led him in. And I didn’t recognize him.

  He was, magically, nearly eighty years old. He had been a time-lapse father, but this last leap, especially after Sil’s death, was horrific. A rickety man aswim in an orange jumpsuit, a visible skull, mottled lizard’s wattle from chin to top button, he teetered a little when I said, “Dad?” in the wrong tone of voice, and he lowered himself by hand into the chair across from me, across that same Formica long since infected as the carrier of loneliness, regret, and shame. All that had grown (or at least not shrunk) were his eyebrows, now as lush and thick as prizewinning mustaches, irresistible to the eye, bricks of silvery turf.

  I’d seen him during a book tour only a few years earlier, but he had aged far more than that, and indifference again began to slough off me, molten Kevlar. Worse than the visible changes—the weight loss, the hanging skin, the hair that was sparse where it had been full and vice versa—was his way of talking. “I have an idea, something I’ve worked on a little, been sitting on, more accurately” were his first words to me in years.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  And then he said, “Arthur, thank you for coming. It is good to see you.” He nodded awhile, his thoughts unraveling. “I have an idea.” He went back to where he’d started. “Something I’ve worked on a little.”

  “Sil died,” I said.

  That seemed to take the wind out of him. He nodded and looked at his speckled hands. “Gentle Silvius. Yes. Your sister wrote about that. He was a good fellow. And he did right. He took good care of her.”

  “He did.”

  “Which was my job.”

  “Yes.”

  That stopped us both. We waited, both sensing that this conversation wasn’t going to be what either of us had planned or even grown accustomed to over Formica tabletops past. But then he began his prepared remarks again, like an inexperienced tour guide trying not to be thrown off by questions: “I’ve been sitting on it, more accurately. It will be something nice for your mother. And your matched princes of Bohemia, too. It will be good for everyone. This idea. I’ve been waiting a long time, trying to wait as long as possible, without waiting too long.”

  This seemed to take a lot of energy to explain. He flagged and I hurried to fill the gap, to pick up what I thought he was saying: “Dad, I know. Me, too. I’ve waited too long, too. I’ve left so much for too long.”

  This disappointed him: “Yes, but.” It took no time at all to see that he knew I was heading toward some emotional outpouring and wanted me to stop, and so I stopped myself, but that was okay, even funny. I would not make the mistake of expecting too much of him. I could feel myself re-arming, and he said, “I’m not trying to be rude. I—you’re a famous writer.”

  “Not that famous.”

  “But you’ve written all these books,” he insisted with a look of despair, almost panic, as if my thoughtless act of reflexive modesty had not only persuaded him but also presented a problem. “You still have a publisher, right?”

  “Yeah, I do. I was just saying that I—”

  “I’m not trying to be rude. I know how you must feel. I’m old. But that’s the point. I made it. And so now you and I—we are going to do something together, okay? I have been waiting. Something great. I need you. You’re the only one I can do this with. You’re a famous writer. That’s a great thing you’ve done. I am so proud, you know. I don’t know who to tell how proud I am. And I haven’t told you. You make wonders, Arthur.”

  It is difficult to overstate the effect of these astonishing words, the flood that washed away all my indifference, that proved how shallowly that dye had ever stained me. My home life was in tatters, my judgment was askew, and now I was hearing this impossible revelation from an ancient, broken man who bore some relation to my so disappointing father and my distorted childhood, suddenly hearing the words I’d been waiting to hear for decades, being told now, of all the days of my life, that I had somehow measured up to the best of him: I was sobbing, coughing, as I never had in any family visit since I was a kid.

  “Thank you. Dad, thank you.”

  “But listen.” He was sitting up a little straighter, having absorbed something from me. “So this idea. Now I have to. I want your help. I can’t without you. I have to. This is for your mother. Do you have another bo
ok in the works? Are you writing? Now?”

  I told him that my fourth novel (which featured an idealized affection between the protagonist—an adman—and his father) had been published that April, but that I was since then dry for ideas. I had, unusually for me, no outlines, no notes, no flirtatious offers from coy muses. I probably drooped a little when I admitted this. “I have a lot going on at home,” I sighed. “Jana and I—I don’t know. And when I get stressed, I can’t write. I need to be relaxed, to know I’m … safe—that’s really the word for it. I need the right conditions, and now it’s just really not right.”

  “Are you pulling my leg?” he asked very seriously.

  “Yes. No.”

  “Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis during an outbreak of the bubonic plague. That must have been stressful.” I just nodded. “Well.” He regretted that turn of conversation. “You’re right, though. Times are different. And you need the right conditions. You’re a great artist. I wouldn’t know how. But this is for the best. You taking a break. You need a project to sink your teeth into. What are you now, forty-five? And your reputation? You’re a figure in the literary world, right? You still have a publisher?” he repeated, troublingly.

  “Yes, Dad, I have a publisher.”

  “Are they a good publisher? Reputable?”

  “Yes.” I laughed and dried my eyes. “Random House is a reputable publisher.”

  “I did pretty badly by you and Dana. And your mother. I thank providence for Sil, you know. I really do. I am—I failed in every way.”

  “No, Dad, no.” I took the bait.

  And he set the hook: “Don’t interrupt or I’ll lose my train of thought. It’s a problem in here.” But he was speaking with more focus and energy than he had been. “You spend a long time with your silent thoughts, and they get set off on the wrong track, from a shout or a clanging door, or an electrical short circuit, what is it called, a switching, neurons … synapse … so to beat that, you start to talk out loud, to keep track of things, and then you get a reputation—old, muttering man. And then when there is someone to converse with, those are skills that rust over, you know. I’m glad you’re here. I’m so glad. There isn’t much time.” And he stopped talking, seemed aware that he’d roamed afield.