The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  “Dad. We have time.”

  “Please tell me what I was saying.”

  “You were saying about being here, the noise—”

  “I know, but before, but that’s not the point.” He shook his head and looked at his hands, then the ceiling, then me, perfectly expressive in his gestures now, maybe a little practiced, in retrospect. “The point is, I could fix, a little, of things that I failed.” Even that garbled syntax was a hint: I am unable to grab the man who is playing my part in this scene and warn him of the mistake he’s about to make.

  “You don’t have to fix anything,” I said. “You just have to get ready for life outside again. Think about what you want to do. Who do you want to see?”

  “Listen to me. Artie. This is what I want to do. I’m not going to take up golf. Hobble over for seniors’ coffee at Embers.” I couldn’t bear to tell him Embers had closed, that Minneapolis was an entirely new city, all its residents altered or dead and replaced. “I’m not going to—whatever you people think an ancient convict is supposed to do. I was a serious person.”

  “I know.”

  “And this city, your friend Constantine—they owe me. You always told him about me. Helped him lock me up.”

  “You don’t really believe that, Dad.”

  He looked down and pushed his fingers against his cheek, gnawed at the skin at the corner of his lips, badly shaven, red and chapped. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry. You forget which conversations with yourself were settled a long time ago and which ones are still recent. You get mad, you know, and then you forget why, and then you remember why, but that wasn’t why, that was an old time you got mad.” He laughed a little at this. “That’s not important now, and there isn’t time, and I lose too much time when I’m mad, I argue all day in my head and the day is gone.”

  “You’ll be out in five weeks. You know that, right?”

  “And I’ll be out of time not long after that.”

  “You’ll get used to living out there. Dana and I can help with all of it.” I was volunteering, and, faster than scheming, an internal projection image flashed: me picking him up, taking him to Dana’s for dinner, where I would sit next to Petra, the four of us, our dog.

  “There isn’t much time. Will you believe me when I say I know?”

  “Time may feel different in here. Out there, you’ll—”

  “I’m not making small talk, Arthur. Listen to me, please. I don’t have much time, and I want you to do something. With me.”

  Was there that gap, that period? Or was it: “I want you to do something with me”? Or was there a hint of another word: “I want you to do something f-with me.” I know now that it must have been “I want you to do something for me,” but I heard “with.” I heard, finally, my father asking for my unique help, not anyone else’s, not Dana’s. I was forty-five, still barely married with twins of my own, sweeping from my pillow each morning last night’s molted hair, but my daddy wanted to do something with me, and I nearly fell over myself.

  “You have to call Bert Thorn. Today. Do you remember him? He’s still alive. He still has an office. Promise: today. Yes? Tell him I want you to have the key. Right now. And then just keep an open mind and think. I’m going to write you a letter. They let us use the email now, once a week, but they read it all, so be smart.”

  “I’m right here. Just tell me what you want. But”—and I was ashamed of myself for thinking it—“I’m not going to commit a crime, you know.”

  “Of course not. That’s all over. That’s why this can happen. I can’t think straight out loud anymore,” he stammered, and his lips curled up, and his face crumpled.

  “Jesus, Dad.”

  “I can’t. I used to be able to think and talk. Now I have to pick one.”

  “Shh, Dad, it’s okay.” His hands started to tremble on the Formica, then bounced, flopped around. I took them and held him steady. The guard drew in a breath to shout us apart (NO. 3: NO TOUCHING), but just shook his head and looked away, and my father wept. “So don’t speak, just think,” I said, a little stupidly, and my father wept. “Think about being out with us.”

  After a few minutes, when he’d stopped, he squeezed my hands and opened his mouth, but then just stood and walked off to his escort. He had failed at something, yet again, I thought, looking at his departure, wishing terribly that I could help him.

  Like all good pigeons, I took on most of the work of conning me myself.

  24

  THE ORDER OF EVENTS, which cluster around one another in haze, shimmers and becomes unsteady. And so, I reconstruct based on the recalled emotion: event A must have happened first, because it would have made me angry, and only my anger would have justified my behavior at B. And yet, what if B came first? It shouldn’t have, but I can’t be sure now. And then, what happens to all my carefully stored up justifications, my story line?

  Driving from prison to my father’s old attorney’s office according to the sultry instructions of my rental car’s GPS navigator, I called Jana to say I was going to stay awhile longer in Minneapolis. I reasonably expected resignation, a talk about logistics, half an apology about her send-off, maybe even a softly voiced question along the lines of “Do you want to come home to us?” Instead, she yelled over the speakerphone, “Who is that talking to you? Who is she?”

  “What? Nobod—oh, it’s the GPS thing.”

  “She sounds like a slut. Of course you pick this voice.”

  Now I can sympathize with Jana, a woman I loved, in one particular way. My initial intoxicating love never grew into something more adult, more settled, more profound, though she rightly expected that it would. How much shame should I bear for that? I, too, thought we would make it. But either I was the wrong man or she was the wrong woman or we were the wrong pair or it was the wrong time or I was broken from the moment my mother carelessly laid two eggs instead of one or or or. I can sympathize with the woman, who was every bit as frustrated and frightened and angry as I was.

  But at the time, her behavior certainly bore an uncanny resemblance to aggression, and I, dressed as passivity for this allegorical masque, gladly let her push me along a path I was eager to pursue anyhow, snapping the last fraying filaments of guilt that would have tugged me back to my odd life as a tourist-husband in the toy-castle town in Bohemia.

  Jana told me, over speakerphone as I was driving to my father’s old attorney’s office, that she was trading me in for a friend of ours, Jiři, whose advances and honest love she had long ago rebuffed. She said he had been waiting for her all these years, willing to be merely a friend, even a friend to me (whose treatment of her he loathed, she reported impartially), but she had had enough of her mistake. She was going. “I hope you’ll be very happy,” I shouted, the car swerving across lane markers on I-35.

  The surface similarities to my parents and Sil were gaudy, and I think, sometimes, of the fairies of Shakespeare’s childhood and Midsummer, who trick unwary travelers. “I’ll lead you about a round, / Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier.” If one of them could do a Czech accent and acquire a cellphone, how easily they could play their fairy games and ruin us all.

  How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up. I unconsciously provoked Jana until she threatened to run off with some Czech or other, which, in her emotion-strained English, was phrased as a fait accompli, which I gladly took as a statement of our separation and a permit to do whatever I wanted. I don’t deny the hypocrisy of my position. I had finagled a license to do as I wished and to feel morally pure as I did it. I was anesthetized to all that came next, heard no better angels murmuring to me, for many months to come—none that I couldn’t mock back into silence. (Still, I emailed the boys every night, long letters. Ha! Feeble memoirist: I need to assert that I am a good father.)

  “Do I deserve this?” I asked the GPS after Jana hung up.

  “Turn left in three
hundred yards,” she purred. “That’s it. Yes. Yes! Just there. Just like that.”

  25

  BERTRAM THORN’S SHABBY OFFICE had likely never been impressive, even back in the days when he had partners and my father could afford their services. The misguided slogan—“Breve, Thorn, Tonos and Ogonek: We put the GATOR in litigator”—with its cartoon illustration hung over his law degree from the University of Florida. The thin dark-wood paneling with its peeling veneer. The dusty files bulging with tedious briefs. The exhausted and sagging venetian blinds with their knotted strings. The hairpiece so obvious, so mountainous, contoured, Mannerist, it could only be his real hair.

  “He instructed me about this. The kids would come for it,” Bert said with an odd sadness I hadn’t expected in this aged lawyer. But a young lawyer defends as best he can a young client, then sees him sentenced again and again, then loses touch as he is locked away from other eyes, then greets that vanished client’s son, come to find the odd heirloom left behind those years ago, and the lawyer—I saw it happen—is struck nauseous at the sudden thundering announcement of time’s criminal trespass. “You were just little kids,” he said to the middle-aged man in his office. “A little boy.”

  When I was a boy—lonely, chubby, prone to fantasy in solitude—I sometimes imagined that I was Death itself, and that no one could see me, except my next victim. I might be on the city bus—the old candy-red 1B—sitting across from an old man, his hands laced across the crook of a cane swaying between his spread knees. I would imagine saying to him in my kindly little boy’s voice, “It’s time,” and he would nod, rise, walk with me out the bus’s rear emergency exit, pass straight though it, leave the moving bus behind and beneath us as I took his arm. He drops his cane, and we walk through air to the destination where only I can deliver him.

  I judged them, sometimes, those whose faces revealed (in my imagination) fear or disappointment. One old man, not ready at all, stared at me. “You’re just a little kid,” he whispered.

  “Come on, fella, you had your turn, so toughen up,” I chided, a prim reaper.

  Bert was like this, a little scared by my arrival, my adulthood, my demand for the family jewels. He covered that fear and sadness with a layer of artifice: he sat down heavily, puffed out his cheeks, and said, “Well, this has been a long time coming. I’m feeling a little old!”

  He had the key in his own safe, which he kept behind a painting of an open, empty safe. The key was for a safe-deposit box. There’s no way to write that without sounding melodramatic. It didn’t feel overdone, though, as this parody of an old family retainer handed over my father’s long-guarded secret; it felt pathetic.

  The box was downtown, at a local bank whose corporate ownership had switched several times in the recent disorders of high finance but which I always associated with the sponsorship of Minnesota Twins games, delivered to my bedroom on summer nights with the windows open, through a battery-devouring radio and a single white earphone, yellowed from use, pressed in place during the frustrating not-dark of summer bedtimes when I was expected to abide by the clock, not the sky, and so lay in bed clandestinely listening to Tony Oliva and Rod Carew and Harmon Killebrew and Bert Blyleven battle the endless tide of Tigers, Brewers, Royals, Angels. All those warm boyhood nights sponsored by this bank, its name and motto repeated every half inning until I fell asleep, the earphone falling onto the pillow decorated with Twins’ logos, the batters retreating into white noise.

  Whatever spark of pride I had felt at being chosen over Dana quickly faded, maybe with the sight of Bert’s fear or with the thought of my childhood as a time of sleep and warmth, of her. So I called her as I left Bert’s. Whatever this gift of our father’s was, I would share it with her. “Dad asked me to do some project with him,” I said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he had, no doubt, a dozen other projects in mind for her. Forty-five years old, and I was a little boy boasting, casually cruel, cruelly casual to the woman who’d loved me best since before I was born. But, in the next breath, I self-corrected: “And I want you to come. It’s turned odd already, of course. I want to do it with you. We’ll have some fun.” We agreed I’d pick her up at her place and we’d go to the bank together.

  When I arrived to fetch her, though, ready to let her open the box, keep whatever expired stock certificates moldered inside it, she was gone, and Petra was there, bearing excuses. Dana had been called for a last-minute audition and hurried off, urging me to carry on without her. I wondered if it was true, or if Dana was instead giving me my moment and protecting herself against any more of my sharp elbows. And then I asked the bearer of Dana’s regrets to join me instead for “a trip to a secret vault.”

  “Ooh! The family vault! What’s it all about?”

  “Dark Phillips business. Dana must have told you of our shameful past. You want in?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, adopting a Scandinavian accent. She finished sending some message on her cellphone, her finger caressing its face. “Okay. The game is afoot!”

  We drove my rental Taurus back across the river and spoke of Europe. “So you’ve got a wife and kids.”

  “Kids. Not so much wife.”

  “And you have a key to a secret,” she murmured in that Garbo accent, and I had to remind myself that she was talking about an actual key.

  “How long have you been with Dana?”

  Jana was nothing; Petra was everything. What mechanism can so alter us? How could everything I once thought was undimmable fire now seem shadowed ash? An adolescent could blame it all on (or credit it all to) the new love’s dawning glow: she was so much better, so much more, that all I’d loved before was revealed as dim and dun. Romeo has very little difficulty casting off Rosaline once he sees Juliet, easily downplaying all he had previously felt and suffered as mere fantasy, and we all take his side, and make excuses and say now he’s learned real love. But when we have middle-aged experience, and when the lover is not a child of fifteen, and when the woman he would forget is not a stranger or a crush but his wife of fifteen years and the mother of his twin boys, then love is not inevitable but shameful, testimony not to the new beloved’s heightened perfections but to the man’s weakness, disloyalty, cowardice.

  All of which I would plead guilty to, except except except that my admission does no justice to her, for whom you would give up the past, for whom you would grow dizzy and drop principles and vows and ties to your old self. Can I say that the woman I wed was a fantasy and this stranger was reality? I don’t suppose I can, and yet … “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man who with those words issued a license to misery to millions of underexperienced teenagers and thousands of overeducated middle-aged jackasses.

  Is it surprising that Dana and I would both feel so strongly about her? Not at all: she should have fit both of us; it makes a sort of geometric sense, just as Jana and Dana’s longstanding mutual dislike should have warned me much earlier that my marriage was doomed.

  When Shakespeare was a young writer, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when the hero’s best friend loses his mind and madly pursues the hero’s beloved, he says, “Love bade me swear, and Love bids me forswear … / At first I did adore a twinkling star / But now I worship a celestial sun.” But later, in The Sonnets, when such a woman appears, destroying the friendship of the two men, the poet underplays her, says she’s not a classic beauty—she’s nothing like the sun.

  So Shakespeare faced the same writerly problem that I now face, and he gave up: to describe that gravitational object of affection—a celestial sun—and justify the effect of her by portraying her charms or to skip the whole thing, admit it’s impossible, and say she’s nothing like the sun but she had her effect even so. I’m still young enough, naïve enough, competitive enough that I want to capture her in ink and paper, pixel and byte, so she might live longer, unchanged, immortalized by my writing, what every great arti
st hopes to achieve.

  26

  PETRA AND I WERE LED into the bank’s safe-deposit basement. “Your box hasn’t been opened in”—the dapper boy consulted a blue index card—“twenty-three years.”

  “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction,” Petra said. Fair enough: safe-deposit boxes are one of those elements of life most people don’t deal with, or see only in crisis. Usually, the vaults exist only in movies, and so entering one makes you feel like you’re in a movie, but, really, we’re just talking about a chilly basement room of lockers and locked drawers. All the false theatrical majesty that banks employ to make their customers feel safe—Petra and I found it funny. She refused to take off her sunglasses, even in the basement, until the object was unveiled, and even then had trouble shedding that Scandinavian accent she’d played with during all the ID checks and goofy key protocol, ours turning in conjunction with the bank employee’s. “Darling,” she told the clerk as he left us in a private viewing room. “Do not come in here even if you hear screaming. Am I clear?”

  My father’s safe-deposit box was a cube, rather than a skinny drawer, about eighteen inches to each side. Inside it sat a small wooden crate, even stenciled on the side in the stern broken capitals of the military or the coffee business: BANANAS, as if a tiny cargo ship had recently docked and unloaded gnomish pallets of wee goods. “This is too strange,” Petra said. “Your family is, really, just beyond.” The wooden lid lifted off easily in one piece to reveal canvas coverings. Flap after flap of excess canvas was unpeeled until we were looking at a black metal lockbox, square and only a few inches thick, closed on each side with clasps like those of a musical instrument case. All eight of those released, the black top lifted straight off, sticking at the cracked rubber airtight strips.