The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (23 page)

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 artist hopes to achieve.

P
ETRA 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.

Finally, on a foam pad, inside a sealed plastic bag, was a book about the size of a thin paperback.

I straddled the border of laughter and anger. This was not my thing, had nothing to do with me. Was he so cell-shocked that he had forgotten which of his kids liked this stuff? “Dana will be sorry she didn’t come,” Petra said, her Scandinavian clowning still half audible, and I was even more irritated because I felt suddenly and strongly that I had done something wrong. “I feel like Dana should be here,” Petra confirmed my fear. “What is it?”

It was a quarto edition, dated 1597, of the play
The Tragedy of Arthur
, or, to be more accurate to the title page,
The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain
. The same play that our family owned in its 1904 edition, given to my grandfather for his contributions to his Canadian high school’s drama club. A play Dana read to me when I was a kid, but which otherwise I had never heard of or thought about. A Shakespeare play. His name was there on the title page.

Petra was staring at it, frightened to touch it, her face right next to it. “This is real? He has a real …?” Her excitement now began to affect me in that overly dramatic basement. Her excitement burned through one layer of necessary doubt, because the obvious answer to “This is real? He has a real …?” is “No. Of course not. Of course he doesn’t.” My father, of all people, a forger, owned and had kept hidden for decades a real 412-year-old document? No. Empirically disproven by everything I knew about him. Yet, that day, it was just me and Petra and an object that reflected her enthusiasm, inspired short-breathed excitement in her, and, as I wanted to inspire that, too, I didn’t quite disbelieve. “Can we read it?” she asked.

Belief, credulity, confidence. When one looks back, belief resembles nothing so much as a virus, and only as you recover do you realize how fever-addled you were. My immune system was vulnerable as I stood in that bank vault. What had left me exposed? What had blinded me, left me like a certain talk-show host cooing at the moral power of an improbable memoirist, left me like Dutch art experts certain that Vermeer painted the van Meegerens, left me like all the Shakespeare scholars who daily add their names to the roll of endorsements for
The Tragedy of Arthur
?

I held on to at least a facsimile of healthy skepticism. “This is interesting.” We agreed to pack it back up and take it to their apartment, to look it over and wait for my father’s promised explanation by email. We were in this together, Petra and I; I felt that more than I felt anything else. We should go find Dana; I felt that second most of all. “Should we wear latex gloves or something when we touch it?” I asked.

“Oh, I have boxes and boxes of them at home,” she said, smiling enigmatically, and I let her carry the
BANANAS
out of the bank, to the car.

She wasn’t kidding about the gloves, as it turned out, which I found very funny, especially when she pretended to be too embarrassed to explain why she had them (something innocuous to do with cleaning a theremin, she finally confessed). We examined the play and then read it aloud, sitting and standing side by side, our heads together, our hands occasionally touching in their prophylactic latex.

A printed book from the 1500s is not immediately easy to read, even if you are not standing two inches away from a woman you are overwhelmingly attracted to. The type is wobbly and squished in places, faint then blotted. Spellings are strange, and they can vary even from page to page. In
Arthur
, for example, both “moue” and “moove” serve as “move.” There are no
j
’s, and
u
and
v
are interchangeable. There are varieties of
s
we don’t use anymore that look like
f
’s, and so forth. Acts and scenes are only sometimes numbered, and exits and entrances aren’t always clear. Punctuation seems pretty random. There are mistakes and variations of characters’ names in the speech headings. On two speeches the Master of the Hounds is inexplicably labeled “Kempe.” You get used to it eventually. Petra and I did, together, over a long summer afternoon at her place.

We had to repeat certain sentences several times to grasp their meaning. We often stopped to look up words online. Petra frequently wanted to find a picture as well, to have a visual sense of the play’s flowers, towns, rivers, apples.

The play was more or less what I recalled from thirty years before, when I was fifteen and had a broken nose and Dana read the whole thing to me to cheer me up. I could almost feel that odd movement of
shifting threads in my fractured sinuses when Petra and I came to the scene where King Arthur rallies his troops for the first time.

“What is this thing?” Petra asked more than once during our reading. She also said, “Oh, I love that line” and “I can’t believe we get to read this” and “Do you think Shakespeare ever touched this exact copy?” and “My God, he was so amazing” and “He was the best” and “I have goose bumps—look!” and “To read something new!” and I lost a breath as I recalled that we were coming closer and closer to a scene where Arthur kisses his new queen, and my desire and hope galloped far ahead of the main body, and my mouth went dry, and I prayed that Dana would not come home yet.

We had been at this for more than an hour, perhaps two, turning each page with the utmost care, the paper smooth and pale, the thread and glue that held the leaves together still intact but obviously stiff. We stopped to marvel at this wonder. “So is it yours? Did he give it to you?” she asked. “What does he want you to do with it? How does he have it?”

“I have no idea. Let’s keep reading.” I knew that the kiss was coming and, like a teenager, I imagined it would somehow transform everything if we could read it, like this, side by side, hunched over the booklet, taking turns being princes, kings, soldiers, dog trainers, shepherdesses, messengers. Our hands touched now and then, and if the play—if Shakespeare—told Petra to kiss me, I felt sure she would do it. Act III, Scene i:

There were no stage directions. But she reached up and stroked my cheek with the latex-armored back of her hand, and I pressed my cheek against those twice-sheathed bones, certainly justifiable by the script, but my heartbeat betrayed a method actor’s seriousness.

“She’s waited so long for him,” Petra said. “She’s put up with all his
wandering. It’s a strange sort of love, isn’t it? She’s literally watched him with other women and she’s ready to forgive him all of it.”

“You don’t believe him? He says he’ll give it all up for her.”

“I do believe him. I don’t believe
her
. I think she just wants to be queen and she’s taken the measure of him. She’s playing him. She knows she has nothing to offer politically. The French ambassador is in the hall ready to offer up a princess with land and wealth. Guenhera has nothing comparable—she plays dumb about it, but that’s pretty tongue-in-cheek. But she has something else: she offers up youth, doesn’t she?”

“She’s not that much younger than Arthur.”

“Not her youth,
his
youth. She reminds him of being a boy in the woods,
playing
at being a king. Before the war, before the double crosses, the politics. She offers him a new childhood, and he leaps at it. Look at this: he can’t propose fast enough. She plays his impulsiveness like a master. He could be drunk. He’s about ready to marry France, and she has him in a few minutes, begging
her
to believe
his
sincerity—not just to sleep with her but to give her the crown. He’s
begging
. Shakespeare in fifth gear—man, oh man.”

This was the second time I’d had this play explained to me by a woman.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He knows what she’s up to. He’s not a fool. He’s just done with the past, or wants to be, and he wants to erase his mistakes, and she needs the same thing. It’s not just a power play; she has a past—she only hints at her own errant behavior, but it’s there. And any Elizabethan audience would know the versions of the Arthur story where she’s an absolute ho-bag. She’s made her own mistakes in love. She wants to feel clean and new again, and something happened to them, back when they were kids. Something happened to her that was like imprinting. It was instantaneous. It might not have made any sense, but that doesn’t mean she can ever escape it. Look what she did to try to escape: she made herself watch him with other women. She roamed on her own. And she’s lived as a spinster, for a time anyhow. But she knows there’s only one way for her to go. Let’s read that scene again. Back from the start.”

But the door opened, and Maria jumped off the couch barking, and Dana came in talking: “Baby, you home? I nailed it, I so
nailed
it!” She came upon the two of us bent over the book, our gloved hands side by side. She had come from her callback audition for a production of
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, a late-career Shakespeare collaboration and, with its intimations of lesbian love, one of her favorites. She crossed to us, hugged me, kissed Petra, and then gasped as she saw the quarto’s cover page. “What is—Oh, my God.”

“It’s Dad’s. It’s what he told me to pick up. I don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God! No. How?” She was shaking as she took a pair of gloves from Petra, kissed her with an apology for having forgotten to do it earlier, even though she had, and Petra stroked the back of Dana’s head. Dana put her face right down to the page and sniffed it deeply, twice, again, again. “It is, isn’t it? Oh, my God. How does …?”

She had visited Dad a month earlier, she said, and he hadn’t mentioned it. What did I know about it? Nothing, I said; Dad promised an explanation to follow. I peeled off my gloves and collapsed, exhausted, onto their sofa, left her and Petra to surround the little book. I wanted her to deal with it. It was already much too much for me. I played up my ignorance, my incompetence, my Shakespeare indifference, and especially Dad’s confusion. I told her to keep it safe and do whatever should be done with it. “Does it need some humidity-controlled chamber or something?”

She looked up, obviously unwillingly, and considered me awhile before she sacrificed herself: “No. No, no. He has some reason. It’s not for me.” She didn’t seem hurt, though I don’t know how she couldn’t have been. But she insisted that without invitation or instruction from Dad, it was not hers to intrude. “I just want—oh, my God, I just want to read it and touch it. Is it any different than the 1904?”

“I would love to compose the music for a production,” Petra said, her arm around Dana’s shoulder.

“Oh, you’d make it sing. What does it sound like?”

“There is so much you could play with. There’s Renaissance stuff,
authentic to his layer, or you go darker, medieval or earlier, authentic to the setting, or you go
out there
, just bang away without a thought to the time …” She pulled off her gloves with her teeth and crossed the room to their upright piano, started in with a left hand somewhere between a Gregorian chant and a jazz walking bass line. Dana delicately lifted over the pages, found a favorite passage, and read aloud to the music that shifted tones and tonalities in response to her voice: