The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (17 page)

T
HAT LETTER DISSOLVES RAPIDLY
into total vagueness there. I censored myself because I was ashamed, I suppose, or at least nervous about what I was doing and what Dana might think of me. And because I was trying, again, to cut off the past and make a clean start. Now the memoirist in me
has
to look bad. The worse I appear, the more vicariously luxurious the reading experience, and the more impressive my inevitable late-chapter redemption, paying for any inadvertent titillation early on.

“I want to go out of London,” Heidi said in my hotel room much later that morning. “I don’t like England.” I had not come to the end of my desire for her, whether due to her innate qualities or my innate needs or her careful dosing and doling out of her charms, I cannot say. But I was, by a long distance, not sated. I was also expected in fifteen minutes down in the breakfast room, to join my colleagues and our British partners before the next client meeting. I would be working for the next twelve hours, presenting and analyzing and lying, a wide enough window through which to lose a new love who did not like England.

“I want to go to …” She stretched beneath the sheet and rolled her eyes, considering her choices, putting herself in each place, gauging her satisfaction around the globe, purring in Günterless freedom, only a sheet between her and her next destination. And her next guy. I was not sated.

“What do you want?”

“I want to go to Venezia.”

“I’d follow you to Venice.”

“Then good. We go. I shower.”

She meant
then
. I mouthed the usual words about my job, meetings, hotels, but I didn’t mean any of them. It was as if I were reciting lines, but I kept rushing them, only wanting to hear her lines, hear her argue me around to what I wanted to do anyhow. I wanted to believe she wanted me to come along. She wouldn’t do it: “You need to be here? So be here. Don’t listen to me. We had a nice time. I hope you write wonderful commercials. Become very successful and make a lot of money. I am just crazy.”

I was already packing my bag.

She enjoyed her aura of risk taking, but it was me taking the risk. I was paying to keep up with what she did for free. I was abandoning my job; she was just leaving some sort of fiancé behind, possibly in jail. Still, with the heightened thrill of transgression and betrayal, we flung ourselves out of our worlds.

“Don’t bring that,” she said as I began packing my work papers, sketch pads, account folders. “I don’t want you to be that.” So I would not be that. Her decision cast me instead as … not that. “I” would be her decision, and that was fine with me. She was unlikely to make me my father’s son.

She knew that I was quitting my job, even while I was still kidding myself that it would all sort itself out later with an apology or something. That command to leave my work behind was Heidi testing her power over me. She was seeing if she really had me, and so I left my work behind for her. It made no real difference, but her idea of what we were doing required a clean break. I broke. And when I came to, I was different, and I owe that to Heidi.

She was also saying, “Don’t bring any fuel for future regret,” and I immediately, instinctively knew she was right. I considered leaving behind
everything
of mine except wallet and passport but, as always, was terribly concerned with what others would think of me (in this case, that I’d been kidnapped).

We were suddenly in a frenzy, dashing madly to dress and escape, up against some clock we could not have identified. I wasn’t running out on a hotel bill (it was on TBWA, my agency); still, I began behaving at once like a criminal, desperate to be gone. What was I stealing?
That day, twenty-eight years old, I would have self-righteously said, “Happiness,” snatched from corporate dullardry. Not true, of course (I quite liked my job and colleagues). Later, thirty-seven years old, I would, self-glorifying, have said I was stealing my “better self” away, becoming a novelist, chasing destiny in the form of this hot Saxon girl. That was certainly the gist of my letters home at the other end of this adventure, how I told the story for years to friends, to Dana, to myself, to my wife. Now, forty-six, I would, slightly more self-aware, say that I was just chasing a girl because I hadn’t had enough girls yet, and I was stealing away from adult responsibility because it hadn’t yet proven to me its superiority over youthful irresponsibility, and I was trying to achieve
indifference
to my father and my past. Over the years, I have pulled out all these meanings as needed to garb my naked actions. Philosophy is inclination dressed in a toga.

I cut my last line to adulthood: I had Heidi lay my files and folders outside my colleague’s door, atop the newspapers, while I lurked, lip-nibbling, behind a corner. She and I then bounced and bounded down the stairs as if pursued or dropped, stopping at the door to the lobby, which we stared at as if on its other side we would face gunfire or fierce barking.

The odds were I could just walk through the lobby. My “team” was supposed to be breakfasting with our London partners in the hotel restaurant, behind frosted and puckered glass. I would be a frosty puckered blur if they even looked up. Head down, I followed the German girl across a vast carpet of turrets and vined ruins in twisted woods. We made it to the front door, where we had to stop to let in two men in their thirties.

“Arthur Phillips,” declared the first in an English accent, and I was caught, immobile, the flight impulse only strong enough to make my toes clench inside my shoes.

“Is the copywriter,” replied the second man as they passed me without looking, putting a retrospective question mark to the first man’s use of my name. “The account manager is Peter Sampson.” The back of my scalp burned with unneeded adrenaline. They headed for that wavy glass, and the elevators chimed for attention, certain to hold everyone I had ever known.

“We go?” Heidi suggested.

“
Ja, ja
, we go.”

We couldn’t stop laughing, and the cabby was excessively chatty. “You been visiting London? First time? I’m Lawrence.” Heidi and I suffered some odd hysteria, pawing each other and guffawing unreasonably, my heart’s rhythms insisting that this was the great and formative instant of my life, the start of adulthood, curtain up, and that holy annunciation repeated itself every few minutes as some new sensation hit me: the plumed horse guards in front of a palace, the smell of the cab, the smell of Heidi’s hair, the smell of a green and misty damp spring park where we idled behind a moving truck whose back panel read—I’m not making this up—
DESTINY MOVERS
. “Look at
that
,” I said to Heidi with urgency. “Look at that!”

“What? Movers?” she said, the gaudy omen fluttering its wings, but not for ears deaf to English intimations, and (by kissing her) I put the thought out of my mind that she and I were already off on disparate desperate adventures with diverging lessons and retroactive importance, only sex and scenery in common.

“Flying off to where today?” asked Lawrence, his eyes framed in the black rubber oval of his rearview mirror, a Celtic crucifix dangling from the reflected bridge of his nose.

“Paris,” I lied at precisely the moment Heidi lied, “Mantua,” both of us covering our tracks for no pursuers.

“Oh, so a sad farewell at the airport, then, eh?” Lawrence clucked sympathetically. “Well, I’ll get you there, no worries. We’ll make short work of this mess. You know, you probably escaped by a hair. Ten minutes later, this would be two hours’ traffic.”

We were lucky! We had escaped with moments to spare! We were clumsily lying and our contradictory lies were massaged into sense by this loquacious Cockney. The narcotics of hysterically imagined danger and actual spontaneity carried us to Heathrow, to a counter where I treated, and into the last two (widely separated) seats on a flight to Venice, for which we had to sprint through the airport and onto the plane, our breathless and enforced parting in the cabin yet another stimulant. I sat far in the back, tumescent and aching for Heidi, writing that letter to Dana, trapped between two enraged and
tormented babies and the useless adults who sighed beneath them. Heidi—the back of her head calling out to me when I stood to go to the toilet—glowed far away between the ridged and glistening back panels of two Italian fashion-magazine cover boys, back from a show, off to a shoot, back from a shoot, off to a show, Milano, Firenze, Roma, Verona.

My thoughts were an unbridled horse, dragging me through the mud and brambles: what we would be in Venice, hot jealousy of the Italian heroes (out of all proportion to their threat or my claim), remorse at my abandonment of my employers and my girlfriend in New York, fear at my unsalaried future, fear and exhilaration at my unidentifiable self: Who would recognize me where we were going? And if there was no one who could, if I had no job, if I was not in the company of my twin or friends, what would make me me? Surely a new and better me was waiting at the hyper-aptly named Marco Polo Airport. The jealousy I felt for Heidi on that flight was the strongest I have ever known; I nearly wept with anger at the Italian men. I think now this was quite logical, for during this bridge time, Heidi was the only definition of me: I was only “the man who was with Heidi” (whose last name I did not know), and if I’d lost her, already, to either or both of the incomprehensibly handsome man-gods flanking her, then I was in danger of vanishing entirely, shattering between squalling babies.

And so I steamed between my howling colleagues and saw the twin
Vogue uomos
take her between them, bending and forcing, stroking and guiding, grasping and greasing, wetting and chafing, until I was both excruciatingly aroused and shaking with violent impulse: I crushed their heads in car trunks, then squealed the tires on the flesh of their backs until the smoking rubber raked skin from red fibrous muscles snapped off slick and fraying bone.

Restored to her and myself at the airport, I clung to Heidi until the boat came to shuttle us into town, clung to her through the spray until the gulls became pigeons and we stepped onto puddled stone, some inches above the sea, onto a mirage city straining to reach high enough to stay dry for one more minute.

I had both our suitcases, rolling one and shouldering the other,
plus her carry-on. I was also trying when possible to hold her hand, nibble her nape, grab her ass in narrow alleys no wider than a man and his roller bag. She must have sensed my urgency, running ahead to a corner while I sweated and tugged her belongings onto towering curbs, around metal posts, across doll bridges, up uneven stairs. She would dose me with her touch with the stingy precision of a medic rationing morphine as too many men in his unit cried out with wounds. She would kiss me at the base of a bridge, her hands in my hip pockets, then begin to retreat until only her lips remained. Then they, too, were gone, and she was waving from a corner, behind which she disappeared. When I reached that corner, I turned it and found a multi-balconied square out of which a dozen bridges sprang into their own alleys, terraced staircases, options. And no Heidi.

There were two hotels in the square. Neither contained her. There were restaurants, cafés, gelato palazzos, but she was not. I didn’t dare cross one of the bridges. The smart thing was to wait, on view, in the open.

A richly symbolic young man’s moment: across one of these bridges I would find my German stimulant. Across the others, perhaps some other life entirely. But to sit here immobile cannot go on much longer! Cross! Cross! Cross a bridge! If now it seems an author’s invention, an overdetermined moment of thematic import, at the time I just felt panic, no consciousness at all of beauty (Venetian or symbolic, literary or life changing), no sense of a Moment at all, only frustration that made my eyes sting and my fingers fist and un-fist spasmodically, an anger at Heidi for her alternating carelessness, cruelty, idiocy, sluttishness, prudishness, guile, incompetence.

When the rain came with the darkness, I and the bags waited under lit awnings until restaurateurs and hotel night managers asked me to “move along,
signore, per favore
, to go on.”

I checked into one of the two hotels, took a room on a high floor opening onto the square, ready to witness her return, lost or grieving or teasing, and then for us to gaze at each other in wrestling doubt and lust. Morning came, mocking gray. I left notes at both hotels, tried to reconstruct our path from the vaporetto, but I was soon lost in identical streets. I found a staircase jetty that may have been the
site of our first steps in Venice, posted a note for her in the tourist office, struggled through the shifting city’s float-away alleys and mirror tricks, soaked my feet when the sea would strike up through the paving stones to test for weakness and claim dominion.

She’d taken me for the free airline ticket and was now laughing with her two
Voguemen
. She was lost and seeking me. She was in trouble and counting on me. These were the choices. I was certain of each. I tried to report her as missing. I went to the police station and tried to explain. You did not know her last name? You had known her less than twenty-four hours when she vanished? At the time, you were lovers,
signore
? You met when she left her previous lover in a London prison, because he had irritated her by taking her to too many Shakespeare plays? All of your conversation in that twenty-four hours—perhaps two hours total—was built on a mutual distaste for Shakespeare? The playwright,
signore
?

I had opened her suitcases, of course, before calling on the smirking carabinieri. No documents, no money. Just clothes, toiletries, a novel in German with a photomontage on the cover of a bullfighter and a cadaver on a morgue table. She would never leave all this behind, I argued, though I had left far more behind in London for her, traded it all for a new chapter of life.

I knew then that’s what she’d done. Once I was over the pain of not being able to have sex with her again, I didn’t blame her, wasn’t even that hurt by her rejection of me on such limited acquaintance. She had neatly and pleasantly moved on. And had been kind enough to convince me to do the same, before it was too late for me. Sadly, I realized she had had more effect on me than any woman in my life in New York except Dana. And the significance of that grew as I spent days alone. I was pathologically grateful to Heidi, and if she should read the German edition of this book, then I send her my sincerest regards. But don’t read the play, Heidi! You won’t like it!