The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (9 page)

I watched as girl after girl became her best bud and phone confidante and lake-biking pal. She didn’t hide anything from me. She told me all about it. She wasn’t trying to exclude me. She was probably going to great lengths to make me feel included,
hers
. But that only went to prove the truth echoing in the hollows of my hollowed, crannied soul: to be reassured of one’s importance is proof positive of one’s failure to be preeminently important. (It’s funny: as I reread this paragraph, I can recall the sparks of
hope
that I sometimes felt when my father faced another spell of incarceration. “Maybe
now,
” some part of me exulted. “Maybe
now
I will be everything to Dana.”)

And so Dana migrated from group to group, a social nomad, always working her way into a clique because her still uncalibrated compass led her to pursue confidential friendships with girls who simply were not gay. They might have been literate, even poetic; sporty, even jocky; moody, even depressive; unconventional, even bizarre. But they weren’t gay, or were not yet willing to consider it. And they weren’t Dana’s sun, her bright angel, her dawn. And when she subdued herself to fit in or exalted herself to stand out, and I watched from a knot of toadish boys, I wished I could help her, and I hated that she was desperate for some other bond than ours, and I felt pity for her and rage at the girls who couldn’t see her grace and did not love her enough.

Unlike Dana, I was drowning in a primal soup of undifferentiated emotions. Actions born of confusion, motives crashing off one another, contradictory gestures, opposite and mutually exclusive truths told to different people for opposite reasons, resulting in arguments, broken friendships, fights. Dana was clarity; I was chaos. My love life
was far more “normal” than hers, more hormonal, less romantic, alternately sullen and grubby, swollen and grabby. And all along I dreamt of being Dana’s … what? Not her lover—this is not a report of rank incest—but I dreamt of being something indescribably close, perfectly joined, soulmated beyond the possibility of any rupture or misunderstanding.

Dana was a pretty seventeen-year-old who attracted her share of average-minded boys. She was also smart and published her poetry in the school magazine and was in the Drama Club, and so attracted brainy and artsy boys as well. And while the snobbery arrayed against us for our relative poverty and parental criminality closed some doors, by senior year we fit comfortably enough into the world of Lake Minnetonka boating Sundays and Lake of the Isles Saturday-night house parties. Dana was still divided: she wanted to fold herself into these moneyed routines but couldn’t completely erase herself, wouldn’t flirt with Evan Wallace, wouldn’t encourage the boys at all, and so, rejecting all prom invitations, she insisted that I issue none of my own and instead, both years, we rented a stretch limo with a group of friends (straining to pay our share), migrated in a herd, danced in a circle, threw up on a sidewalk, and I watched Dana watch her latest crush kiss a boy.

We ended up in Kenwood Park after senior prom, just the two of us, at two in the morning, her in a gown Mom had sewn from patterns, me in a leased tuxedo foaming at the chest with flamenco ruffles. (Years later, I actually joined a hipster-flamenco group in Hungary, during my years of wandering. We used the hideous photos of that prom night for ironic publicity.)

It is odd, I know, to think of episodes where she was in pain as the ultimate evidence of our closeness, but there it is. There is something unbearably sweet in memories of her coming to me—and me alone—to open her heart.

The park at that late hour in May would have been very dark, and in its stretches of wood one could, briefly, for the space of a few yards, imagine oneself in a forest, far from city lights or the twentieth century. My night’s thrills had been surreptitious—stolen kisses with other boys’ dates, pecking at the weak-willed girls of the herd, playing
and luring with the darker shades of my father’s reputation (“I don’t want to talk about, I just can’t” being, at eighteen, powerful love poetry). And when the night of heightened sensitivity and thin skin and cruel games had passed, it left me happy, holding my sobbing twin’s hand, my arm around her shoulders, draped by my borrowed tux jacket, in a tiny forest, leaning against trees and smoking, carving inanities in the bark.

Her sorrow was proof and vindication to my muddled adolescent mind: she was suffering because she could not find a soulmate in anyone else but me, and when she suffered, she wanted to be with no one else but me. I fear to write this down, but now it is too late: the evaporation of jealousy is as pleasurable an emotion as any I know; it is a release as profound and shuddering as any physical sensation. It is the erasure of fear, the removal of worry, the shimmering tingle once danger—for which your body has tensed—is past. It is not the arrival of permanent courage or trust; jealousy is tidal, and it flows and ebbs forever, and acceptance that it will return is part of the pleasure while it recedes. There is no happy ending, but nor is there eternal pain. Something is still going to happen, so the timing of the dropping of a curtain is largely arbitrary, which is why Shakespeare’s endings are so often the weakest parts of his plays. (Someone is getting married or everyone is dead; time to go home now and get on with your own lives.
The Tragedy of Arthur
is no different.)

Dana sobbed so hard she fell to her knees on the grass, and I gathered her up in my arms. “She’s not worth this,” I said.

“Then who
is
worth this? Why not her?” replied love’s logic.

“You’ll find one. You’ll probably find a hundred. It’s just—you’re just—
they’re
just not ready for you yet.” All the limp consolations one hopes will prop up the shaking, desperate, miserable. “You are,” I reminded her, “kind and loving and funny and talented and beautiful. That’s a pretty good deal.”

“How many did you kiss tonight?”

“Depends on how we’re counting.”

“Just tell me not Amy.”

“Not Amy. Not my type at all.”

“You don’t have a type. You’re an angry omnivore. Just not Amy.”

“I have a type. I just haven’t met a girl who fits it yet.”

This stretch of 93 percent accurately remembered conversation is embarrassing. If I was ever such a Don Juan as I was claiming (or wished to be, or pretended to be), it was to a certain extent a reaction to my father’s fraudulent claims to womanizing prowess. “Do you think he had all those ‘lady friends’?” I asked Dana when she came up to visit me one fall weekend, freshman year of college.

“Are you joking?” She had transformed herself in her first six weeks at Brown into a ferocious-looking lesbo-pug.

“I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

“No. Probably he just told you different things.” According to her, according to him, he had lived a perfectly monastic existence, in his cells and out, a devoted husband after the fact, a courtly lover, perfectly content to be perpetually separated from his soul’s most blessed love, the lost Mary.

Neither was true, Dana pointed out to me. He was just exceedingly lonely since the moment he had—in a burst of self-punishment, aware of his complete failure as a husband—sacrificed his sincere and natural hope for a normal marriage and love, setting Mom free to be with solid, dull Sil. That great act accomplished with a straight face, and rewarded with unlimited child visitation, the curtain should have fallen on a redemptive comical tragedy. Instead, my father lived on, not in Act V at all but in an interminable Act III, claiming to me that he was a swinger and to Dana that he was happy to love Mom at a distance. The truth was isolation and a lot of work—some legal, most otherwise—with an increasing preoccupation with making or finding (or stealing) a large amount of money, which, he had decided, would make up for all his previous failings. This desire led him back to prison—a brutally long sentence on his fourth conviction—but didn’t abandon him there.

“I have made a series of rather fundamental mistakes,” he told me when I visited him during spring break my junior year in college, 1985. “But I’m on to something big now, I think.”

“That’s nice. How are you, Dad?”

“Gently used. Slightly foxed. Warmly inscribed.”

He was that day very sentimental, even mawkish for my collegiate
tastes; during that period I fancied myself to be above a long list of emotions. “Sil took you to a lot of Twins games? When you were a kid?” he asked.

“Yeah, quite a few. He’s a statistics machine, you know.”

“Taught you how to play, too? Had a catch with you in the evenings?”

“I suppose so, yeah.”

“What did you talk about?”

“When?”

“When you’d play catch.”

“We did that for ten years. I’m going to a game with him this week.”

“Yeah. But as an example. Please.”

“I don’t know. We usually talked about baseball, I guess. That’s what Sil and I have in common. And a fondness for Mom.”

“I have that, too,” said the oldish man in his orange jumpsuit.

“I know.”

“But really no feel for baseball.”

“I liked that ball you gave me,” I lied about the forged Rod Carew baseball I’d thrown away, eager to call the infield fly rule on this sentimental chat.

“I was lucky to get it. I knew he was your hero.”

I am trying—and failing, I fear—to restore dialogue from twenty-five years ago, to be honest enough for a memoir and fair to my father (and my younger self) and still make it clear why
this
moment is worth memorializing:

“I wrote a play,” I announced. “It’s being put on. Not Mainstage, but the black box.”

“No kidding? What’s it about?”

“Apartheid. The human cost of institutional racism. The urgent need for the university to divest from South African money. Greed.”

“Very impressive,” he mumbled, but I could tell it wasn’t interesting him, that his momentary thrill of learning that I had written a play was already extinguished, that my writing was not of the sort to produce wonder, that my intentions for a socially engaged theater
were somehow wrong. “Where’s the magic, though? I mean, does it make your hair stand up?”

He managed not to mention Shakespeare. I had learned enough about prison visits by 1985 to know that you always left on a good note or else regret could crush you until the next time, and so I said goodbye politely enough, although I was in a righteous anger. It was not just blind fury but that rarer kind where you have the icy adrenaline pleasure of knowing you’re
right
. I drove, alone, back to Mom’s house, fuming at his self-centered sentimentality over his maybe having missed some of my childhood
and
his obvious lack of interest in me right now. After he’d spent most of my childhood in jail, now
I
was not magical enough? “Fuck his magic,” I shouted in the empty car. “Fuck His Magic” became a song by the Fairy Rings, and I still have a cassette of them playing it at Brown’s Spring Fling.

But making the leap from antipathy to apathy is not something you can achieve just by wishing.

I flew back to Harvard and my great triumph as a playwright. Dana took the train up for opening night. Since freshman year, she had transformed herself again and again, leaving behind her bull-dykery for punk rock and had now become a flower child, a retro pose that fit her least well of all her looks so far. She wore a woolen Latin American serape and had semi-dreadlocked hair. She saw my reaction to her hippiedom and, with a shrug, acknowledged it would soon pass.

“I didn’t know you could be so passionate about the suffering of others,” she said, hugging me backstage at the theater, a black cube with a single black curtain and a set of four chairs—two black, two white—on a chessboard floor. “You are going to score a lot of taffeta being this noble. But can you keep it up? Or does apartheid awareness evaporate with orgasm?”

It was certainly deflating, though she wasn’t being cruel; she just saw through my affectations as quickly as I saw through hers. I wished I could have prevented myself from laughing, but her voice was a tickle, and I couldn’t, when faced with Dana, hold myself in a pose.

She came with me to the Drama Club party that night, where I pompously accepted pompous toasts and we all congratulated ourselves for striking a blow for freedom in South Africa. Dana drank
with us, smiled at me in a way that invalidated all the nonsense, not smug but desmuggifying, and I truly didn’t mind. “I
love
that sweater,” she enthused to the girl who played Winnie Mandela. Her gaydar had improved exponentially since high school.

“Seriously,” I asked despite myself, several hours later, back in my dorm, Dana stretched out on the common room’s futon couch. “Did you like any of it?”

“The play?” she sighed, behind closed eyes.

“The play, yes.”

“No.”

“Don’t soften the blow. Just tell me.”

“It wasn’t like a play. It was like … like a tender for bids on your penis. Please don’t waste your talent writing things to meet girls.” I liked the mention of my “talent” as though it were a fact. That was more than enough. I thought she’d fallen asleep until she added, “You know you don’t give a rat’s furry pink ass about South Africa. You as much as said so in every line of that play.”

None of this angered me in the slightest, while my father’s fainter uninterest had brutalized me. Dana was right, and I loved her. I spread a blanket over her, tucked her in, my best and wisest and never-wrong critic.

A
S A GIRL
, Dana was, like Dad, an author lover. It mattered to her to know about the person who had written the stories, books, and plays she loved. Shakespeare, for example—a man about whom a very small number of things are known—was her friend. She felt grateful to him for what he had made for her to enjoy. I have some of the letters she wrote to our father, describing her feelings as she read each play. Here’s part of one dated March 29, 1974, so she was not quite ten years old: