The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (15 page)

“Thanks.”

“Okay, no, I guess he said, ‘I can outlive him,’ and I said ‘Constantine?’ and he didn’t say anything else, just started to insult me. A lot.”

“Oh.” She nodded, looked around the room. “Look at her.”

“Oh my. Whose team?”

“I can’t tell.” She sipped her drink and turned back to me. “Do you think he might have meant that he could outlive Sil? For Mom?”

“That hadn’t occurred to me. It’s a sweet idea. But, ah—” Of course she was right. It was instantly clear, and I suddenly felt ill, for missing this, for fear that I had done something wrong by not noticing, and in amazement at how little of my father’s interior life I could map. “I don’t know,” I said.

Dana wasn’t drinking enough, so I started bullying her into keeping up. A mean drunk, in short, mad at my father, suspecting my sister of having already figured out the depth of my crime while I still had only the dim sense of having done something wrong. She put up with my dumb jokes, my pushiness, and she didn’t call me on it.

Later, I saw her looking at that girl shouldered up in a clump of other women on a red curved sofa. She was a striking Asian beauty, I think, long straight black hair and a white T-shirt. Any more detail than that would make a mockery of my efforts to be honest here. But I watched Dana measure her up, and so I insisted in my mood and my cups, “Straight. Boys only. Plain as day. She yearns for a rising son.”

“I don’t think so.” Dana smiled, like a boy mathematician challenging his elders for the first time, and I should have known better. But she reeled me in. “Of course, you’re a very handsome man.” I should have stopped her right there and punched her, but this was that night, and the moron bowed to his twin sister and said, “Why, thank you, my dear.”

“You really don’t think I have a chance?” she sighed.

I don’t know who suggested the bet. It’s not impossible that it was my idea, but I think it more likely hers, more likely still that she slid the idea into my drunk head and waited for me to suggest it back to her as my notion.

A magic lantern turns, and sepia transparencies circle the room, glide over walls, color the picture frames and bookshelves and doorknobs: Dana, serene on a bar stool; me next to the Asian girl, no face on her at all, as if I could hardly focus by then and so could not transcribe any image into memory; my sister and the faceless Asian girl looking down at me from an impossibly high vantage, their faces together, almost blacked out, except for their Cheshire-feline amusement, by some bright light behind them; the neon word, vertically hung,
TATTOOS
, glowing against total darkness; Dana going over sheets of designs with a shockingly wrinkled lady with shaking hands while I with shaking eyelids watch the light flicker and fade; the wrinkly lady waking me up, taking me by the hand, walking me to a dentist chair set at an odd angle, proposing I do something very strange to her wrist.

I awoke in a great deal of pain. The hangover
ordinaire
was bad enough, but I could have slept through that. I was roused by the flames rising from my crotch, and I am not using that general term euphemistically. The pain was significant enough that its actual source was hidden like the sun behind sunny haze. I certainly yelled aloud. I heard laughter from the bedroom, and Dana called out, “Shut up. We’re sleeping.” I hobbled, crying, to the bathroom, where I threw up and then attempted to defuse the bomb that was my fly.

Apparently, the bet’s parameters agreed upon, I had said, “Do your worst” or something to that effect. The more the Asian girl looked at me from her red couch, the more I’d gloated. (She had actually been looking at Dana; I was having some trouble focusing. On those occasions when she
was
looking at me, it was only to discern my relationship to the beautiful girl she’d spotted as soon as we walked in.) “Are you sure you’re up for this?” I taunted Dana. “She’s totally into me. You sure you won’t chicken out or claim it’s not fair? No mercy for little girls. Or former mental patients.”

“I’ll try to be brave. Besides, I need some ink for lez cred.”

“It won’t hurt your auditions?” I asked.

“Not there it won’t.”

The next morning in the bathroom I found in my jeans pocket two neatly folded cocktail napkins. The first had a sketch of a female torso, T-shirt just high enough and jeans waist just low enough, and in the sub-navel space remaining, the ornate words
NO ENTRANCE
with an arrow pointing toward Dana’s groin.

This is obviously not funny, nor did it seem funny ever again after I had (I suppose) found it wonderfully witty at the bar. I don’t see any point to it at all, really. It’s not amusing, affectionate, profound. It was just a lame joke that I was ready to make permanent in my sister’s skin because I was drunk and angry at my father’s latest betrayal of my notions of what he owed me. I was owed, and my sister would pay me in flesh after the Asian girl paid me in flesh.

If I had not found the two napkins in my pocket as I was examining my wounds, I would have been entirely at a loss, because the fresh tattoo work on me, especially on that variable surface, was not yet legible.

“Well, in the unlikely event of my victory …” Dana had mused.

“In your dreams. Do your worst.”

“I think a tribute to the three most important men in my life would be nice.”

The brutal Act I, Scene iv of
The Tragedy of Arthur
depicts the English nobles viciously abusing a naïve messenger from the Pictish court. Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, the play’s source, refers only to an ambassador being mistreated. In the play, the messenger boy, trained to be provocative in order to incite a war at Mordred’s instruction, has insulted Prince Arthur and demanded English obedience to the northern king. Gloucester, the lord protector, fails to restrain his touchy English lords. They hold the messenger down and carve with a dagger their reply to the Picts directly into the unlucky boy’s forehead:
ARTHUR REX
—Arthur is the king.

The elderly tattoo artist used a nice black-letter Gothic calligraphy, but the surface of the skin was probably difficult to work on as it was (is) thin, elastic, and has a tendency to bunch, even if I had remained very still, which I doubt I did. Eventually, though, I healed,
and the result became clear (though only under certain conditions). Then it produces the effect of a sort of stylized medieval scepter (admittedly for a tiny king) inscribed with a regal motto of sovereignty—
—although a jester’s belled baton has been occasionally cited by select viewers.

Dana’s design was certainly more elegant, and it does indeed make a sort of living tribute to her three men. That first week, though, it was an eloquent and burning statement of her anger at me, as there was no position I could assume that was not literally punishing.

Bits of the previous night came back under the clarifying force of the icy damp cloth laid across my lap. “I told Dad I was going to lead my life, and he could do whatever dumb thing he wanted and martyr his golden years to the god of stubborness if that’s what he was into,” I’d recounted to Dana at the bar. “It didn’t matter to me or to you.”

“To me?” Dana repeated. “You said it didn’t matter to me? How he pleaded?”

“No, actually, as I say that, I don’t think I did. No, actually, I tried to make him feel guilty about leaving you behind, or something.”

“Well, which? Which was it?”

“Dana, you weren’t there. It didn’t work. He was so poisonous, I can’t even tell you. He was aggressive and manipulative, and he doesn’t care. I honestly don’t know what else I could have said or done.”

“Did you get the impression he wanted you to talk him out of it?”

“…”

“Arthur?”

“Do you see her? Looking over here?”

“Arthur. Did you get the impression he wanted you to talk him out of it?”

“No,” I lied, or thought I was lying. If there’s a difference there. “I didn’t get the impression he cared at all what I said or did. He just kept—
You
weren’t there,” I repeated, with accusation.

“Oh. So you think if I’d been there, I would have been able to talk him into defending himself?”

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. Buy another round, please.”

The wager, I believe, was made shortly after this.

A
T THE END OF THE RUN
of
The Wizard of Oz
, Dana flew out to Minnesota to visit Dad, staying with Mom and Sil. She called a day later to report that Sil had been diagnosed with prostate cancer weeks before. He wouldn’t have told us about it at all—not wanting to bother us with such boring stuff—if Dana hadn’t turned up in the middle of it. “I don’t think he would have told Mom, if he could have figured out how to keep it to himself,” Dana reported over the phone.

I was in New York, feeling very alone and slowly beginning to understand my (losing) part in the battle of prideful wills I had waged with my father, the responsibility I bore for what had happened to him. I could feel purer concern for Sil, without second thoughts or selfishness of any sort. That unimpeded response to Sil contrasted, like iodine dye in a scan of the prostate, bright against the murk of my reaction to my father. And with that, as was my lifelong tendency, I took off on a flight from anger to reaction to remorse to reparation. I flew high and fast, soared well past the complicated truth to my next bright clear destination: I was
solely
responsible for my father’s sentence. If I weren’t such a rotten son, if only I wasn’t stuck on what I needed to hear him say, instead of saying myself what he needed to hear, and so on. His original real
felonies
with
victims
, his stubbornness and King Leary behavior: I forgot all of that in the enchantment of self-blame, an act as self-centered as my original behavior (and his), and no more helpful to anyone involved.

I flew back to Minnesota to pay my double homages, visiting Sil at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and my father in his new digs at Faribault, attempting to cook for Mom, staying on the couch while Dana bunked with her.

My arrival annoyed Sil. “You visit for this? Jesus. Come for a birthday, but not this. I got the TV to work, but I can’t find the game. This is going to be the year. Puckett? My God. Hrbek? I have to beat this cancer until October.”

I helped him pull up the Twins game on his porthole TV, and we spoke of nothing but baseball. I tried to ease my conscience: “Sil, I’ve
been very, you know, in New York, far from here, and, even before that—”

“If you’re about to say you’ve become a Yankees fan, you should just leave. Right now.”

“No, God, no, not that. Jesus Christ, that’s not even funny. No, I just wanted to apologize, and say thank you, I guess, or sorry, if I’ve ever—”

“Please, please, stop. Artie, stop. I can’t hear the game.”

I was not to be thwarted in my quest to make everything right and everyone aware of all my lapses, to be forgiven, not for anything in particular but for my personality. I studied Sil’s unshaven face, the translucent gray whiskers like fish bones. Sil was going to die, and my future—my hope to go on with a normal life—depended on not leaving things unsaid, not letting people go without a communion of our feelings.

But Sil was having none of it, deftly blocked all my advances. My relentless pursuit of absolution continued to be of no interest to him. I slapped myself against the stones of Sil, for whom no topic (other than the Twins) justified any sort of emotional outburst or self-examination.

I told him that I loved him. He laughed for a while and nodded. And lived for another twenty-two years.

“Dad,” I tried at the prison. “I’ve been looking hard at myself and … I think you’re in here because of me, and I’m sorry.” Imagine how important I would be if this were true! Having spent some time being a terrible father myself now, this is what I think I was saying: “Tell me I’m important to you. Tell me you’re sorry you missed my youth. Tell me we could have been something else.” My father, no doubt trying to be kind and rid me of any guilt in the matter, told the truth and said, “That’s ridiculous. I put myself in here. Nothing you could have done or said could have stopped that. You’re very funny.” He also said, “I’m in the right place. I’ve got something huge to work on, to keep me busy in here. I sometimes think I couldn’t be happier.”

“Mom,” I tried once more. “I’m thinking of moving back to Minneapolis.”

“Are you in trouble at work?”

“Of course not. I was just thinking, Sil’s sick, maybe you’d like to have—”

“You hang around making me feel old? That’s very sweet. You could bring me meals on wheels or change my colostomy bag. First I have to get one, but just knowing you’re there for me, I can hardly wait. I’ll call my doctor in the morning. Listen, how does Dana seem to you? Has she got herself together okay? I can’t tell when she’s putting on a brave face to calm me down. Do you think New York is okay for her? You want to be useful, you could make sure she’s not letting herself get too stressed again.”

And so I flew back to New York with Dana, decided—in my next swing—that I was irrelevant to them all, and that was okay, if I could just be a man about it. I tried to write short stories about all this good stuff, changing everyone’s name but little else, and the stories always sucked. I pseudonymously submitted them anyhow to some literary magazines and shuffled a deck of rejections.