The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (37 page)

That smug certainty of modern science’s all-seeing eye, that conviction that there is no human ingenuity still to come: this gives me some faith in the falseness of the otherwise disorienting forensics report.

I will only assert that there is always a way to fool a test. That the most complex tests are being fooled right now by someone who hasn’t been caught yet. The good forgers, recall, will never be known. Peter Bryce said as much to me: “I suppose by definition I only catch bad forgers, don’t I?” Tomorrow’s tests will catch today’s master criminal, just as today’s scientist feels safe mocking yesterday’s master
criminal. There has always been erroneous, arrogant certainty on the part of some technicians that they could never be tricked by artistry. Always has been; always will be. I don’t know how my father did it, but he did it. If I’m the only one who can see it, that doesn’t make me wrong. He did it.

P
ETRA CAME TO ME
, shaking and wet from the snow, and she let me wrap a blanket around her and hold her, the first time in weeks. She said nothing, just stood there and let me hold her, and I knew everything was going to be fine.

And then she stepped away from me, said she had just come from her doctor. She was pregnant. She had only meant to punish Dana, she said, maybe more, and Dana never wanted a baby and Petra did, and maybe she had felt something else about me last summer and fall, but it didn’t matter now, not at all. She wanted the child, and she wanted to leave Minneapolis and go home to her own family in a different city in a different country, and she had come to say goodbye and tell me this news, but she expected and wanted me to do nothing about it.

“But I love you. That’s not nothing. No poetry, Petra. No lies. Just: I love you and I want us to take this gift and be happy. The end.”

“That seems possible to you?”

I laughed in my certainty. “Yes. Wait. Don’t you see? This fixes everything. It’s
authenticating.
” God help me, that was the first word that came to mind, and I can picture (I can’t stop picturing, unfortunately) Petra’s face in response. “My kids, our baby: you’ll see. We can put this all together. The pieces all fit. It’s a great thing, a great start to a great story. You have to trust me. Stay. Trust me. I’ll take
care of everything.” I tried to hold her again, but she stepped away, shedding the blanket and me.

“You’re wrong.”

“But you’re not—you’re not
indifferent
to me?” I asked hopefully, though even as I said it, the expression before me was projected back over the faces, the poses, the images of our nights together, and they changed, recolored by how she was now, passion becoming indifference, wonder becoming regret, love becoming hate, shame smearing a gritty film over all of it. “What are we going to tell Dana?”

“That’s not really your problem, is it?” she said, with a look of bottomless disgust.

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “Tomorrow. After her matinee. I’ll pick her up at the theater. You can come if you want, or I’ll do it alone.”

She left me in the dark apartment, watching the snow come down, my father’s ghost still snoring in the back bedroom. I sat alone on the couch. There was no more wine. That feeling of a con being revealed—the nausea and instant aging and fury and shame and humiliation: I tried to imagine learning that your brother has impregnated your girlfriend.

I put off telling Dana. Characteristically, I suppose, even predictably, it appears. Friday, I resolved to do it.
Kinsmen
was off that night, and I left her a voicemail asking her to meet me for dinner. And I waited. And practiced what I would say. I think I would have done it. I was ready.

Petra called instead. She was sobbing, just sounds, until a few words emerged, incoherent. “Do you want to come and do this with me?” I asked. She just cried and cried. “Pet?” I told her to calm down or some other pointless inanity. At last she said, “I told her. I’m so sorry. Tonight I told her. You never did. And she told me to leave and I did. Please, I’m so sorry. I’m here. Now. She took something. I don’t know. Arthur, she’s hurt herself. She’s … oh, God …” My sister was dead.

M
Y FATHER SPENT HIS LIFE
pretending to be other people, the creator of other people’s work, creating pretend things, things everyone knew were impossible, whether they realized it right away or only later. He gave himself over to his unoriginality. At the end, he had stripped away everything but the unkillable urge to convince me (and the world) that Shakespeare wrote
Arthur
, when obviously Arthur wrote Shakespeare. As he lay dying alone, all that mattered was an act of self-immolation.

To strive to break loose, to skin oneself down to the unique germ
under all the layers of other people’s effects, and to try to rebuild on that one unique element, to avoid at all cost any hint of pastiche, imitation, anxiogenic influence, and then to burst out and display colors never before seen in combinations never before imagined: this is the chimera I have been scrambling after in response to what I thought of my father back when I was an ordinary, common disappointed child. But we
all
seem to pray at this cult of our own originality. This accounts for our flood of dull memoirs, which tend to be, ironically, quite similar: everyone feels they are unique and the story of themselves will be unique, too.

But, on a planet of seven billion, it is unlikely that very many of us (if any) are literally unique. That blow to the beloved identity can feel fatal, and so the forger settles for second best: he finds the acknowledged and accredited unique figure (Shakespeare) and says to himself either (A) “Well, if I can be him, then he’s not so unique, so I don’t have to feel bad for being a bundle of low-grade copies myself,” or (B) “Well, if I can be him, then I’m unique, too, just like him, unlike these seven billion walking duplicates.”

But Dana. Beautiful Dana. Her job was to pretend to be other people, to speak words written by someone else, while other such people pretended to love or hate her, to make a darkened room full of strangers admire her in her artificial imitations and recitations.

I sat between Petra and my mother on the opening night of
The Two Noble Kinsmen
. Dana made her first entrance.

She was dressed in fanciful Elizabethan costumes in a play set in an imagined ancient Greece, a prequel of sorts to another, better play, and based on a story written by a fourteenth-century Englishman, adapted by two seventeenth-century Englishmen, one of whom was trying to write in the style of the other, including a scene that was patently an homage to a previous, much better play, based in turn on an eleventh-century Danish legend. Dana recited these men’s rhymes, took only those steps and made only those gestures predetermined by her director, a Croatian journeyman Antonio who, after finishing work on this play, hurried off to direct an episode of a well-loved and well-worn network hospital drama.

But for all this artifice, there was
Dana
. I wasn’t the only one who thought she (Emilia) was a unique and original figure on that stage. Strangers—hundreds of strangers five times a week for seven weeks—looked at her like they’d never seen anything like her, and they hadn’t. There is nothing in Shakespeare to predict Dana, except, perhaps, Guenhera in
Arthur
, proving only how much my father loved her.

When we were sixteen, I earned my driver’s license on the first try, outscoring Dana by one crucial point. I passed; she failed. The next day, I took the opportunity to visit Dad alone, the first time I’d ever done that. (My own limited empathy fails to provide subtitles to my mother’s nodding, expressionless silence when she handed me the keys. Nothing new there, I suppose: a famously vicious and dismissive New York newspaper book reviewer—whom I made the career-bashing mistake of kissing and feeling up at a party at Yale decades earlier and then never calling—faulted my last novel for “a curious absence of empathy.”)

I have better luck reading Dana’s heart. I didn’t tell her I was going to visit Dad because I didn’t want her to come with me, and I didn’t want to say no if she asked. And so when I returned, obviously bothered by the visit, I saw her swallow her anger and hurt feelings in order to be ready to listen to me. I lay on her floor, next to the bed, where she’d been reading by lamplight. She switched it off, and we were in the near darkness of a Minnesota April evening. I turned on my side, away from the window, to see the old dolls under her bed, sidelit from the hall, ignored for years now but still carefully glued in position under their sleeping mistress, awaiting her renewed interest, voices, animation, never to return. Their tea poured, forever ignored, hands touched surreptitiously under the table forever, glances forever discreetly exchanged in the crowded tea party, hopes forever suppressed behind pursed plastic lips.

“How is he?” she asked in the dark.

“He’s him.”

“How are you?”

“I’m me, unfortunately,” I whined imprecisely.

“I feel for both of you,” Dana said, as if she were being ironic, but
she actually did feel for both of us, and I appreciated her feeling for me, but then an instant later I denied myself that balm and found it cheap, because if she felt for him (who deserved none of her fine feeling), then her feelings were indiscriminate and therefore worthless. My God, what a curiously contorted bastard.

All I said was “What’s with these stupid dolls? Why do you still have them? Are they supposed to be gay?”

“Yeah. Lesbian Barbie,” she sighed. I thought that was pretty funny, and I valued her again at once in my storm-front sentimentality. “Why does he piss you off so much?” she asked.

“He’s just so awful.” I don’t disagree with that, but only now can I translate it into adult:
Why doesn’t he understand that his behavior affects my happiness and that I am ashamed and angry and embarrassed and confused about what it means to be a man and a father as a result?

This is not so remarkable. It
is
remarkable that Dana was able to answer me back then as if she already spoke adult. That is empathy. “You’re stuck until you forgive him,” came her voice through the darkness.

“ ‘There’s no forgiveness without an apology first,’ ” I snipped, stingily quoting some puritanical pamphlet of self-reliance I was reading, besotted as I was back then by Ayn Rand. “ ‘And even then, apology-and-forgiveness is just a compact of shared weakness.’ ”

“No, it’s strengthening, I think. Forgiving him means you don’t need him to help you be you anymore,” Dana said, or something along those lines, and I remember feeling uncomfortably, almost painfully, hot, down there on the floor, silent on my side, in the dark on her white shag rug, angry again, certain that she, too, was in on whatever conspiracy was afoot of people who knew what I was thinking and wanted to make me admit I didn’t understand myself at all. And then, on cue, Dana asked from the dark (though it looked like one of her dolls speaking), “Now you’re mad at me, too, aren’t you?”

I could say so little, couldn’t say why I was crying, why I loved Dana more than anyone I’d ever known, why I only felt truly myself when I was with her. But at least I knew it, and my hand was already up above me, squeezing hers on the bed as I coughed on my tears.

Desperate to be unique and desperate to be joined to someone
else; desperate to be free of my father, of influence, of expectations, of limitations, and yet desperate to be contained and defined, known and understood; desperate to be lauded for my distinctiveness and loved for my similarity. I was desperate to be like my sister and loved by my sister, who had somewhere found the secret to originality.

Those mystifying dolls under the bed, lit from the hall like stage actresses, dressed in incongruous outfits—stewardess skirts and pillboxes, Regency high-waisted drawing-room dresses, military fatigues, cheerleader sweaters and kilts, tiaras and ermine robes—they, all of them, were enacting some scene from inside Dana’s head. They, all of them, were aspects of her, all abandoned under the bed the day she no longer needed them to sort out who she was.

So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity, being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and community, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken for a pauper, believing oneself an orphan. But Dana had somehow settled all that on her own. I knew she would never be at a loss, no matter what life’s drama did to her. Dana was never an article of stupid faith for me. She was my only undeniable fact.