The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  There was real help he could now offer (when he wasn’t sleeping, which was sometimes fifteen hours a day): the professors were coming, and somebody had to keep a close eye on them.

  As we were not going to let our billion-dollar pamphlet leave our sight, scholars either had to invite me and the book to their campus, or they could visit us on Lake Street. They were allowed as much time as they wanted with the quarto; they could take notes. They could not photograph more than four pages; they could not take the play out of the room.

  My father or I would sit, reading on the couch or listening to my iPod—which device quite impressed my dad—and though some of the scholars grumbled about the restrictions (and I caught one with a pocket scanner when I came out of the bathroom), most viewed the situation as a common enough challenge of their field, and just being allowed to read the play thrilled most of them almost to giggling. They were a funny bunch, about what you would expect Shakespeare scholars to be. Some of them I quite like, and I am sorry to have dragged them into this; I hereby apologize, not for the last time.

  “He’s quite dishy, isn’t he?” Petra said late one October afternoon of David Crystal, the world’s leading expert in Shakespearean linguistics, who flew in from Wales to study The Tragedy of Arthur in my living room.

  Petra and I were sharing a bottle of wine and then starting a second in the kitchen while my father slept and Dana was at rehearsal. Across the room, by the big windows, Professor Crystal had the play open on the glass table in front of him, his laptop displaying the online OED. He would occasionally laugh aloud or grunt or exclaim, “Well, look at that!” while he read, and seemed quite oblivious to Petra and me getting drunk and punchy across the bar in the kitchen, our hands brushing now and again, my imagination piloting us far into the future.

  She left to pick up Dana, and I stayed as the sun set early, still a little drunk, watching this engrossed and happy linguist grow happier and more engrossed by the blue glow of his laptop lexicon, while I sank into melancholy, as the wine wore off, and Petra had been away from me and with my sister for minutes, then hours, and I was left with her lipstick on a wine glass, which I masochisto-moronically held on to while replaying and reconsidering the four moments in which the skin of her hand touched or nearly touched my own. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” I couldn’t help asking Professor Crystal, twice because he didn’t look up the first time.

  “Sorry? Who?”

  Which sounds better? (A) I am of melancholy temperament, enlivened now and then by bursts of high or hot spirit, never long-lived, or (B) I’ve been on antidepressants, antianxiety meds, and a Whitman’s Sampler of other mood stabilizers on and off since I was twenty-four, with uneven success.

  I like the sound of (A) better, too. Oddly, even after diagnosis, medication, and improvement, I still had the sticky reputation within my family of being unnecessarily morose, something of a drama queen. Dana, despite our twinned similarities and her more concentrated formula of the same psychic chemistry, often seemed the sturdier of us two, living off an extra dollop of serotonin served up with that second X chromosome, happiness guacamole on a celery stick. This impression of her may have resulted because her highs were higher than mine. Her lows were lower, too, but they were offset by everyone’s lingering memory of the peaks. That said, she was always more nervous about the pharmacology, frequently mourning the medicated murder of her edge, the melting of her mildly manic pole.

  I was sitting on the couch, foolishly having diluted my own limited serotonin in shiraz, squeezing my temples to wring out a few more drops, shaking my skull for how close I had stood to Petra, how impossible the situation was I had allowed to develop. And, also, I festered in envy at the easy happiness of this bearded, spectacled genius Welshman across from me. I watched him read by the light of the single lamp, hunched over, reflected in the deepening black of the window, and he never looked up at me in the murk, not until my dreaming father cried out from the bedroom, “No, those are my hands!”

  Professor Crystal noticed me then. He took off his glasses, since he couldn’t see me anyhow in my shadows, and he rubbed his eyes. “Well, it’s a lovely piece of creativity. It certainly pops like him at many moments. Guenhera and the nurse is lovely. Not ’97, though. No later than 1595, if it is him, perhaps much earlier, in fact. Mightn’t be him on his own. Probably a collaboration, especially if it is before ’93. He rarely flew solo back then.”

  “But is it him? Will you authenticate it?”

  “I need more time with it. All the language is right. But I need more time.” He considered me. “You know, if you had to say, what is the king’s tragic flaw?”

  “He has bipolar disorder,” I said.

  “Ha! I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but yes. That is precisely it. Remarkable. They would have called him excessively humorous, unregulated, perhaps even unfit to rule because of his unfortunate birth. An Elizabethan audience might have seen him as doomed because of that misconception, and everything he does would be seen as futile, a prideful struggle against God’s will. Still, the playwright makes him sympathetic, gives him some strengths. But no, he isn’t a hero that you root for, is he? Except for him to settle down a bit, find some wisdom. Gloucester is right, in the speech about the passions of monarchs. Another failed king on the Elizabethan stage. Do you have to be anywhere? I should very much like to read it again. Will your wife be back soon?”

  I cherished his misunderstanding, lovingly nurtured its growth into a fully realized fantasy with another drink, and granted my guest as long as he wished. Eventually my father emerged from the black hallway, not yet reaccustomed to turning on lights when it was dark. “Mmph. Who have we here?” I introduced the two men, and Dana called, telling me it was urgent that I come to the theater right away.

  “Petra didn’t turn up? She left hours ago.”

  “Please come.”

  I left the ex-con in charge of the world-famous linguist and my billion dollars, and I drove badly from Uptown to the Warehouse District, where Dana was shivering on the loading-dock stairs under the stage door.

  She jumped up and tried to open the passenger door before I’d even stopped. “Thank you. Drive. Thank you for this. I did a bad thing. Please drive.”

  “Home?”

  “No, no, no, no. No. Let me think.”

  “Okay. What happened?”

  “Will you please let me fucking think?”

  Here are the facts in a straight line, which is not, by a long shot, how I heard this story: under the pressure of the approaching opening night, Dana had decided that her performance was “still not coming together,” and she decided that this was because she was muddled and fuzzed by her own Zoloft-Wellbutrin proportions, and that enduring a little anxiety and depression was a small risk if it meant she could access more “honesty” for her performance, a little more “buzz of life,” and so she had lately started fiddling with the dosages, a common enough event in her life, my life, the life of every mildly depressed person who relies upon and resents these drugs. And, as always happens, it’s a trial-and-error process, this self-examination, self-prescription, and self-monitoring, except that it is only trial and error and more trial and more error and error and spiraling, reactive error.

  But this time she felt she had balanced it just right, and her dress rehearsal this evening had been exactly it, and she was so excited—“admittedly overexcited”—backstage after the run-through—bubbly to the point of boiling—that she had hugged the actor who plays her lover, Palamon, and then grabbed his face and “planted one on him,” and then he, probably having had some feelings of his own swelling over the weeks of rehearsal, kissed her back, which she, “for some reason, just went for. It wasn’t about him at all, or about the kiss as like a kiss qua kiss, or, or, or desire, it wasn’t that, although it probably looked like that, and I can imagine that he felt something like that, and I have to say sorry to him, too, but more it was just this thing, admittedly the stupidest thing, it
was just me sort of keeping it going, not wanting it to be over, I think because of the run-through, and it was more like I was celebrating, not me kissing Tom, certainly, or even, or even Emilia kissing Palamon, it was more like actress was kissing theater or something, or muse, or, or, or, and, and, and Petra saw me.”

  Petra stood and watched an extremely passionate, deeply sexual moment between her girlfriend and a strange man, entirely unjustified by the play, in an otherwise empty fluorescent-lit hallway between dressing rooms. And after the predictable scene that quickly flew out of control, Petra left the theater and drove off and positioned herself strictly straight-to-voicemail.

  “Go back to Lyndale,” Dana said. “Left. Left! LEFT!” She directed me to a florist, and I idled while she ran in and out, then guided me to another florist eight blocks up, and I idled while she ran in and out again, this time with flowers. “You have to do something,” she said in a tone as if I had made a mistake and owed her a display of masterful repair work. “Sorry. I don’t mean it like that,” she self-corrected at once. “The sound isn’t matching my point, if you know what I mean.” I did.

  I demanded her promise that she would immediately go back to her last doctor-approved dosage. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t say her performance was at risk, nothing. She just nodded.

  I drove her to Dad’s, introduced her to Professor Crystal, who was still contentedly taking notes at the table while Dad sat on the couch in the dark, ensuring that the kindly scholar didn’t make a break for it with our quarto. “All the rhymes rhyme in original pronunciation,” the smiling Welshman said cryptically. “That’s good,” he added when he saw my confusion.

  And then, following Dana’s orders to the letter, I drove alone to her apartment, carrying a pot of pansies, with clear and even scripted instructions to explain how meaningless the kiss was, how important Petra was to Dana, how Dana would do anything to make it right. I was drilled to recite from Arthur. “Tell her: And I would pass my hours of peace with her, / Empillowed on her breast before my ship.” But I was never any good at memorization, so I let that go as soon as I was back in the car.

  “You,” Petra said when she opened the door. “All right.”

  “These are supposed to help,” I gasped, suddenly voiceless, my body unevenly hydrated, my throat driest of all, and I handed her the pansies. She closed her eyes and pressed the odorless flowers against her face until they bent. Some even broke, and she let them rub against her eyelids and nose and cheeks. She opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “They might.”

  I joined her on the couch, and Maria immediately parked on my lap. Petra poured me some of the wine she’d already begun. Something jazzy and modal and Middle Eastern was on the stereo.

  “She’s sorry,” I started. “It didn’t mean anything and really, truly wasn’t what it looked like. You’re everything to her. She’ll do anything to—”

  “I know,” Petra said without expression. Masked, flushed with drink but not flustered, she asked, “What else you got?”

  “I’m not sure. A line from Shakespeare.”

  And she kissed me. There was nothing I could do: I was pinned down by a beagle.

  She spoke of death and small joys as she kissed me and stroked my face with those same fingers I had once longingly watched stroke the face of her iPhone, turning and unpinching webpages with soft sweeps. “You have to seize what you can of happiness and pleasure,” she said. (You did say all this, you know.) “You have to pay later either way. It’s all-you-can-eat, and you have to pay the same whether you stuff yourself or go without. Obviously, you pay when you die. And you pay when your parents die. But when the neighbor’s kid gets hit by a car and you watch her parents shuffle around heartbroken until you finally move to a new house? That’s paying, too. You have no fun, you still pay, it’s just that you let death cut your purse. He conned you. You die and you didn’t live. You’re death’s gull. We’ll both pay, eventually, whether you kiss me back or not. But it would be better if you kissed me back.”

  “What about—”

  “Don’t.”

  “You’re just angry about—”

  “Don’t. Don’t. Do I look angry? Do I feel angry?”

  There. That’s that.

  In Shakespeare’s day, they believed in magic. Now we only have its weak residue: magical thinking. If I could count precisely to sixty between two passing orange minutes on her digital clock, starting at 5:23 A.M. and ending exactly as it melted into 5:24, then when she woke she would love me and not say this had been a terrible mistake. If I could close my eyes and guess, give or take five, how many bricks were in the top row of the bedroom wall, then Dana would even bless this relabeling of our triangle’s points. If I could do it within three bricks, she would forgive me. If I could guess the bricks within two, then Dana would even be happy, for herself and us, and she would say she had wanted exactly this to happen, and she would believe that she must have subconsciously known that when she’d kissed her co-star in the hall she could speed us all along to this great ending.

  I opened my eyes. “You ass,” Petra groaned. “Why didn’t you leave in the dark?”

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Do you want to talk about …?” I glided a single plucked pansy across her eyes.

  “Sometime. Not now.”

  “Fair enough. One of us should say something to Dana?”

  “I don’t know. No. Later.”

  “Fair enough.”

  My muted phone was heavy with eight voicemails and fourteen texts waiting for me, though they all said about the same thing.

  36

  I WILL NOT PAINT a stirring word-portrait of my troubled conscience or simmering shame to win any sympathy. Nor will I belabor the lies I wove of where I’d spent the night, the tempered and deniable hope I offered my twin sister that morning. I know. I know. “Thanks for all the updates,” she said when I walked in. “Not like I was waiting for any news.” I know.

  She had slept on our couch and was sipping coffee two-handed, be-shawled by a blanket. Professor Crystal was back at it in the living room, offering a cheery good morning and stepping far from the quarto to drink his own coffee. My father was still asleep. On the kitchen bar, already arrived in white, red, and blue livery from Random House, was the contract in triplicate awaiting my thrice-inked countersignature. I needed a notary public. Grateful for the excuse, I fled, and Dana was required to sit guard for another hour, my semi-comforting lies draped over her ears.

  When I returned from the FedEx on Hennepin, irreparably tethered to my publisher and Shakespeare, Dana hadn’t moved, though the coffee cup had been replaced by her phone, which she clutched and watched in its stubborn, haughty silence. My father was still asleep. “I need you to go get some stuff until she calls back and says I can go home.”

  “It’s your apartment.”

  “I’m not going there until she says I can.”

  “I’m sure she just needs a little time to think.”

  “I’m such a stupid bitch.”

  “Stop, please.”

  I collected her things for her; Petra was not there. For fifteen days in October Dana slept at Dad’s, Mom’s, or on the couch in her dressing room at the theater. Professors came and went from my living room, and my father snored away more of each day, living on Diet Coke, which he said was growing on him, even when I called a Coke bottling plant and was given the name of a supermarket in Arden Hills that still carried Tab. Petra refused to talk to Dana, and I, semi-honorably, tried to stay away from the woman I loved until they settled their relationship, although honesty demands I admit it was really just good sportsmanship on my part, that I was merely waiting for new arrangements to be put in place to match my hopes, and twice I slipped away from the family squat. Once, Petra accepted me and my pansies; once, she told me to go home.

  The Two Noble Kinsmen opened on October 22, and I sat between my mother and Petra and for a few minutes was all
owed to hold Petra’s hand in the dark. Petra came with us when Mom and I went to meet Dana at the stage door, and they said their awkward hellos. I took my mother home, left them to talk.

  I came back to my own apartment, where my father was exhaustedly overseeing a tireless Brooklyn-born Ivy League Bardman, and when I walked in, Dad croaked, “Finally.” I thanked him for standing guard and promised him a ticket to Dana’s show the next night, told him to get some rest. “At your service,” he muttered. “Gentlemen, good night.” He stood unsteadily and shuffled down the dark hall to bed.

  Dana called a little after two in the morning. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said, again and again. “I don’t know how to apologize so she believes me. Something’s broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.” I listened and consoled, worried for her, sympathetic, honestly loving and sorry. Truly. I did also hear in this the first difficult but necessary steps to a new and better arrangement. Better for everyone, it seemed apparent to me. I began planning to find a new apartment for me and Petra, as I didn’t feel I’d be able to live in their old place. Maria would go with Dana, obviously, whom I loved and pitied, I promise, and for whom I felt burning guilt. There. Okay, yes: and I also felt a little annoyance that she wouldn’t face up to what was obviously best for everyone and let us all just get on with it. There. “What do you think I should do?” she asked.

  “All you can do is tell her you love her and you want to start over, if that’s what you want. You deserve to be happy with the person who’s right for you.”

  “You’re so smart.”

  The next morning, October 23, I clutched the quarto in its case all the way to a chemistry lab at the University of Minnesota, where I was met by my editor and a Random House lawyer in from New York, as well as two experts in dating and validating antique documents: a Russian ink specialist up from Chicago and the paper consultant, flown in all the way from London. Both men had been commissioned by Professor Verre, who, though absent, had himself been appointed by Random House to oversee and collate all the investigations into authenticity. The nondisclosure agreements were signed and rebrief-cased.