The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read online

  He was broke and so had a public defender, a blond-ponytailed girl of about eight, whom he seemed to enjoy baffling. I joined them in their intense and highly professional planning session.

  “Well, okay, so we’ve come to the plea phase? And it’s like they’re saying, ‘So what do you say for yourself, mister?’ I know, I mean, obviously, I know that you know all this, but just to square our T’s. Now, I don’t want you to say anything to me yet. Let’s just lay out what they’re all lining up against you? Their side of the story? And then we can see what sort of answer is the best one for us? To make?”

  “I never knew so young a body with so old a head,” recited my father.

  “Dad.”

  “Is your father up for this?” she asked me and turned, with me, to him. “Mr. Phillips, are you up for this? I know this can feel kind of crazy pressurized? But still, Mr. Phillips? We have to do this pretty much now, because they really do load up my client list. A keep-it-moving sort of feeling is what we need.”

  I had never seen him like this before, though I had never been present at this stage of any of his jurisprudential adventures. He was no fun, to say the least. He was nearly sixty and was angry, depressed, all the predictable responses at last. He had no interest in defending himself, but he’d lost that old humor about it, the feeling that he was above it all.

  Okay, here’s the memoirist’s self-accusation: if only I had …

  Told him I loved him? Told him I forgave him? Asked him to come live with me and Dana? Told him I thought he was a great artist? Asked him to go over the evidence slowly with me and the lawyer, to see just how strong the prosecution’s case was? I did try the last one.

  He wasn’t answering her questions, except to mock her in a way he thought she didn’t notice. She noticed.

  “Ms. Stark, can I get a minute alone with my father?” I had some notion—likely absorbed from movies—that I would talk sense into him.

  In truth, I didn’t know him anymore. His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy—even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those. I found him embarrassing, an obligation with strands of sticky guilt floating off him, trying to wrap themselves around my ankles and throat. Even so, if he’d shown any sign of interest in my being there, if he hadn’t resisted my efforts to help, I would have … He was only withholding, to use that memoir term of complaint. We spoke such different languages that I wouldn’t have recognized a plea for help, a call for attention, a whimper for love, if he ever made such a sound. But let the record show I tried.

  “You can’t just quote Shakespeare to her. She doesn’t even know you’re doing it. She just thinks you’re odd.”

  “I used to get lawyers who could quote it back to me. I can’t even afford Bert anymore.”

  “Listen, Dad. Why aren’t—”

  “Skip it. These jackals want me on this? On this, this offal? Fine. It’s five years old. I never finished my piece of it, but your pal’s dad has it all, so, I’m—”

  “He’s not my pal. It was Dana! Dana snitched on that! Why do you harp on that, like you think—”

  “I’m not going to waste my time arguing with these people. Hell, I can confess to stuff they don’t even know about.”

  “What? What is that supposed to mean? What are you—Isn’t a jail sentence more of a waste of your time than defending yourself?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I can still outlive him.”

  “Outlive Ted Constantine? What’s the point of that?”

  He just looked at me, then made aggressive small talk. “What are you doing with your life?”

  “Are you insane? You have to focus, Dad. Don’t do this to Dana, at least,” I tried, playing my double-guilt card, implying that he was hurting her and that I was able to acknowledge his lifelong preference.

  He was very bitter. Just that day? At that period of his life? It confirms some negligence as a son that I don’t know. There was no puckish joy. He was not extolling the creators and damning the gray men who raked the wonder out of life. He was broke, friendless, and humiliated, beaten, unable to pull off his odd crimes because of improvements in forensic detection. Prison and prosecutors had whipped out of him his charming and challenging arrogance. In another, more gullible era he would have presented the king with a taxi-dermied marvel from the New World, a beast with the head of a lion and the body of a trout, and he would have been loved for it. In our world, he forged, in this case, scratch-off tickets for the New York Lottery, which Chuck Glassow then sold to New York bodega owners for less than they paid the state for real tickets. Unwitting gamblers scratched off my dad’s metal paint and lost, just like with real lottery tickets, never knowing they had paid someone other than the state of New York for the pleasure. “Victimless,” my father said again, as he said of all his crimes, but this time that wasn’t quite accurate. It was simply that he had stolen the state’s victims for himself. They didn’t know their victimization had been transferred, and if you look at New York’s lost revenue—ostensibly used for schools—the claim of innocent wonder-working seemed even further from the old ideals than usual. “Dad, you have to stop and you have to stay out of jail. So, please—”

  He cursed Ted Constantine, old Sil, and then me. “What the hell are you doing writing ads?”

  “I did one for you with The Tempest. Did you see it? I sent it to you.”

  “I saw. You used him to sell liquor.”

  “Don’t. Please. Please don’t talk to me like—”

  “Like you’re selling out, playing along with this repellent system? Like you’re a huckster, pulling the wool over suckers’ eyes for nothing more than a paycheck, and you earn your money by convincing fools that one brand of vodka will get you laid? When any pygmy from the African bush knows that all vodka is exactly the same? Why aren’t you making anything? I confess! Guilty! I wasn’t the finest father, but I did teach you that, didn’t I? You could help Sil move AC units, couldn’t you?”

  “Fake lottery tickets? Are you—”

  “Go back to New York. Just go.”

  I hadn’t prepared myself for this. He had never been aggressive like this before. Also, I was twenty-three. Those are my justifications, as far as I will go in claiming memoirist’s last-word privileges to minimize what I did next: I left.

  I left, probably left him (after a few minutes of thinking) in a mood of self-loathing and with an urge to punish himself. I probably knew he would feel like that. I can’t say I knew what he would do next, what tool was readily at hand with which he could punish himself; that self-conviction is just beyond memory’s reasonable doubt.

  I left and stepped into the hall and told Mindy Stark that my father was in his right mind and ready to talk to her now. And I flew back to New York and got very, very drunk with Dana after I picked her up at the stage door.

  He insisted on pleading nolo contendere and would not say another word on the matter to anyone. His public defender, with scant knowledge of my father’s criminal record and in plain malpractice, had not warned him, or had not even known, that mandatory sentencing, which had recently been introduced in Minnesota, would gravely affect Recidivist Dad unless he pleaded guilty and made a deal. He would do neither, nor trouble himself to plead not guilty and take his chances. According to the draconian tables of the law, the judge had no leeway. It was 1987. My father came out of prison for the last time in 2009.

  But that sentence was still days in the future. Now I could get drunk with my best friend, and we could go try to score and forget about the whole business.

  I was unwilling to talk much about what had happened. I wanted to be free of him entirely, just be a happy young man with money and a buzz and an erection. I also suspected I had done something wrong and, like a child, didn’t want to talk about it, because talking about it might make it real.

  Dana, however, was eager to talk about it, out of guilt for putting The Wizard of Oz ahead of her fa
ther, out of dread that she had trusted me to represent sage advice. “He said that? That his goal was to outlive Constantine? What were his exact words?”

  I couldn’t remember and didn’t care to try. I was straining hard for jollity, and Dana was being a sweet, needling drag, extracting detail after detail from me. We had to shout to make ourselves heard over the music. “Look: he wants to stay in prison. I think he’s more comfortable there now. He can’t get into any more trouble, and he doesn’t know how to live on the outside anymore. You see,” I added knowingly, having seen a movie or TV show once, “you develop an inferiority complex in there. They do it on purpose. They inculcate in prisoners the idea that they can’t make it outside.”

  She nodded at my great expertise, and we drank. To be more accurate, I drank and told her to drink. “Look: he’s done with us,” I insisted, mixing up subject and object. “He’s washed his hands of us. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

  We were in some sort of lounge, and I was feeling nervous about how Dana was looking at me. “Drinks are on me, you know,” I said again.

  “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 w
as 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.

  15

  AT 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.