The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read online

  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.

  I drove to her apartment to face what I had done.

  47

  I POUNDED ON THEIR DOOR, out of breath, hoarse. It was unlatched and swung open on my first blow. I ran in, ready to gulp down whatever pills she’d taken, ready to join her, ready to fall on her body, ready, I promise, to die for my mistakes. I swear it: I look back at that moment and I see no hesitation or posing in what I meant to do. I deserved to die and I meant to die.

  “Arthur Rex,” Dana clucked, as if at a naughty boy.

  I slumped down onto the floor at the sight of her and Petra sitting on the couch, sipping hot drinks, Maria on his back between them, a two-woman tummy rub in progress. His head hung backward and upside down over the front of the couch, the tips of his ears almost touching the floor. Our mother was in the kitchen. I shook and hyperventilated and gagged, laughing and crying and shouting. My nose ran uncontrollably, and I asked half questions that everyone ignored, and I ended on my knees, trying to hug Dana’s legs. “Don’t do that.” She kicked me away gently but firmly, like a dog humping her shin. I couldn’t stop shivering. “Go warm up in the bathroom. Come back when you can listen.”

  I stood for several minutes under the warming lamp, looking in the vanity mirror, trying to recognize myself or anything of what was happening. I didn’t move until I heard impatient scratching on the door. I opened it and followed Maria back into the living room.

  I stood before them and heard it all recited back to me from a different narrator’s view. When I winced and turned my eyes to the carpet, Dana said, without any humor at all, “Look at me when I’m speaking to you, please.” She had suspected me the night it began, but she knew it all by her own opening night. She knew it all when she called at two in the morning the night Dad died. She knew about us at the cemetery. She knew about us down on Nicollet Mall after we read the will at Bert’s office. She knew about us when I told her about the index card, when I told her I was going to stop publication of the play and she stormed out. She knew about us the night Petra came to tell me of the baby.

  “I kept waiting for you to figure out a good ending to this story,” Dana said. “You’re a writer and everything. Famous novelist? Not so good at endings, though, it started to seem. You really couldn’t think of one, could you? Lame-ass. You just left me there to find out by myself and then give up? I was supposed to just realize you were right for her, and I should get out of the way, leave you with her and the baby. B
ecause you’re such a great husband and father? You can’t even think of something consistent with the characters. That was the best you could come up with?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Too late for that. We need a good ending,” Dana said. “Do you have any suggestions? Last chance.”

  “I’m sorry.” I was still shivering. “I’m really, truly—”

  “We need action, not words, I think, at this point.” She just stared at me and shook her head. “Did you really think I’d drown myself, Hamlet?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really understand. I feel—”

  “No, no. No more feelings. Just plot now. Come on, buck up. Pull yourself together. This is important. Give me an ending, writer. What do you have? Nothing? Really? Well, then, let’s turn to a better man. What’s your favorite Shakespeare ending?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Petra said, “Please don’t pick Antony and Cleopatra, where the Middle Eastern girlfriend has to kill herself. I don’t dig snakes.”

  Dana looked sideways at Petra and laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that one. That’s good. You are good.” They had sorted everything out somehow, I don’t know when, but Petra looked grateful.

  “I don’t understand,” I repeated feebly.

  “Well, I’ll make it easy, killer. Do you think we’ve got a tragedy or a comedy here? I’ll give you a hint: I’m not going to kill myself for you. And neither is she. Or Mom, I don’t think.”

  “Okay. A comedy.”

  “Atta boy. Now we’re moving. So which comedy?”

  I tried to play along with whatever this was, even though I was so cold I was biting the insides of my cheeks until I tasted blood. “How about the one where the jerk realizes he shouldn’t have tried to steal his best friend’s girlfriend, and he apologizes, and everyone forgives him.”

  “Two Gentlemen of Verona?” Dana scoffed. “That wish-fulfillment piece of shit? Total crap. A man’s calculated effort to steal, then rape his dearest friend’s lover, and everyone just gets over it? I don’t think so. Not Shakespeare’s finest moment: nobody’s that forgiving. Try again. A little more realistic, please.”

  I was hunched and shaking before them, still wet, my stomach churning and beginning to cramp, naked, but for my clothes, in front of the five encouched female jurors: my mother, silent and miserable, her crossed leg bouncing with caffeine and unhappiness; Petra, kissing up slightly to Dana, positively delighted by whatever reconciliation they had come to without me; Maria, on his back again; Dana, smiling and angry at once, a curtain lowered over her soul, her disappointment in me and her exclusion of me from her sympathies the most brutal punishment I could imagine at the moment. Did I say five females? Yes, from time to time, Dana’s hand would leave Maria’s belly to rest on Petra’s.

  I chattered, “Is it As You Like It?”

  “Is what As You Like It? Speak up, boy.”

  “The one where everyone sort of dances around and gets married and forgives the one guy who ends up without a wife?”

  “Spoken like a true Shakespeare scholar.”

  I just looked it up, by the way, and I was right, although I didn’t have all the details at my fingertips that night, obviously. (I also noticed just now that in that play the faithful shepherd-lover is called Silvius, so that name’s appearance in Arthur isn’t that suspicious after all.) At the end of As You Like It, Jaques the cynic has, by his own choice and errors, removed himself from the party and the dancing circle. And that, I was hoping, was how we could end, me on the outside, but still not far away, still not utterly banished, their anger at me softening by their love for each other. That would be fair, while everyone else joined hands in celebration of life so far, inhaling together for whatever comes next—births, weddings, deaths. This would be a good time for the curtain to fall: the god Shakespeare descending deus ex machina to bless us one and all, even his faithless priest, me. Dana and Petra back together, eventually my mother forgives me, then cashes the first of many giant checks left to her by her devoted first husband, his shade in peace at last because he’s made everything right. Meanwhile, Uncle Arthur lives quietly and alone, visited occasionally by his mother, sister, estranged sons, baby niece. Dana and Petra raise a child that, with only sixteenth-century technology, resembles both of them, a twenty-first-century crowd-pleaser. We pray our little comedy has not offended. Good night.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Dana said. “You’re no Jaques. Try again.”

  “I don’t know, Dana. I really am so sorry. This just got all confused—”

  “You and I are way past that now. We need something definitive. Action. Proof. Something we can trust is a real change. A new footing for all of us. A baby’s on the way now, and everyone needs to know who you are in this.”

  “So tell me who I am. What do you want me to do?”

  My mother finally spoke, though she didn’t look at me, only at Dana, who was firmly in charge of this scene. There was no fun in my mother’s voice when she spoke, just the starkest disappointment in another Arthur: “Isn’t there one where the lech is tied to a tree and pinched and frightened by little children with torches or something until he gets the point?”

  “Merry Wives of Windsor,” Dana sighed. “Yeah, funny but not very conclusive. You get the sense that Falstaff isn’t really going to change.” She looked me up and down, my incessant shaking, my weak effort at a smile, my increasingly obvious intestinal discomfort. “We could force the villain to marry the girl he’s wronged. Measure for Measure. All’s Well That Ends Well. What do you say, Petra? That’s really your call.”

  “No, no, no, I’ll pass,” said Petra, waving one hand in front of her nose, her other resting on Dana’s hand on her still-flat stomach.

  “Hmm. Running out of canon, Artie. How do you feel about the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost?”

  “I could never read that one,” I admitted.

  “Too bad. It’s worth the trouble—you should go read it. Because it’s the one for us. To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “I suppose you don’t. You’re the guy who doesn’t even know Shakespeare when you read it. Pick up your coat.”

  “What?”

  “Get your coat. I see you had time to take it on your way out the door to view my corpse. Wouldn’t want to catch cold doing that.”

  “It was already—I was already wearing—I had it on me—already on,” I stumbled. The truth.

  “A heavy heart bears not a nimble tongue. Whatever. Fine. Get your coat.” I picked up my dripping coat. “Put it on. Zip up. It’s cold out there. Now take out your car key. Good. Here’s your ending: This shall you do for me / Your oath I will not trust. For a twelvemonth, probably more, depending on publishing, you will not see any of us, or call, or email, or anything. Not one word. Right, Mom? Just nod, Mom. Not one word. None of us. And if in that period you can prove something to us, then you will be welcomed back, and we will be right joyful of your reformation. You will publish The Tragedy of Arthur. Yes, you will. Don’t talk. Listen. And you will divest yourself of your precious reputation and self-love, which has led us to so many unfortunate dead ends these long years. And you will prove to us that we matter more to you. And you will publish our story, but mostly your story. You will tell the truth. You will write a little nonfiction for once in your life, and you will learn its lessons in public, where everyone can see you and judge you, not hidden behind your imagination or ambiguity or characters or your famous scorn of memoirs, but right out front, naked. And you will be judged for what you did. By everybody. Because with a Shakespeare play attached, everyone is going to read it. And if we are impressed by what you write, maybe we can talk about the ending to As You Like It again. If not, well, I think we’re back to the tragedies at that point. No, don’t say anything. Nobody here wants to hear it. None of us. Just take your keys and go. Now. And not a word until we’ve had a chance to read your book
. Not the galleys, either. The hardcover. Go. No, just go.”

  My mother didn’t look up, not even at the very end, and Petra busied herself with Maria, scratching him until his back leg kicked the air. Only my sister was still watching as I closed the door. She didn’t look sad.

  In a burst of childhood jealousy or childishly innocent amorality, I once (or more) poked around my sister’s desk and came upon her diary and my father’s half of their correspondence. I read their jokes and messages of love and discussions of books and plays, unlike anything I’d ever written or received. She caught me there, hands in her secrets. “Oh, my,” she fake-purred, trying to sound grown-up about it, trying to cast me as a boy years younger than she, just because I’d snooped. She was trying not to appear angry, just suddenly removed from being my twin, a distant, amused big sister. “A thief in our midst!” she laughed, and I hated her so much, this version of her who abandoned our identicality, pretended not to understand what drove me, pretended she wouldn’t have done the same thing in my shoes, pretended not to be part of our joint agreement against the world. (Obviously, yes, I had broken that agreement by breaking into her desk, except that her secrets in that desk were actually the first violation of our alliance.) I fled her bedroom, pursued by the stuffed bear she threw after me.

  In this case I went home, where, shivering and sweating hard and trying to take my temperature, I dropped the ancient thermometer in my bathtub, and a worm of silver mercury slithered from the glass wreckage.

  She sent me the 1904 edition of Arthur a few weeks later. No note, just the inscription For Arthur, from Dana.

  48

  ACT V: Mordred comes to court, knowing Arthur is in Ireland. He means to win Guenhera’s support for himself as the official heir, or perhaps even to seduce and impregnate her, to prove his divine right to the crown. He is greeted by actors who mistake him for an actor as well. Enraged by them and insulted by Guenhera, he then meets Philip of York, who insists that he is the anointed heir. Mordred kidnaps them both. Arthur turns his Irish invasion around to intercept Mordred alongside the Humber River in Yorkshire. In soliloquy, Arthur judges his life and kingdom as failures, but he cannot see what else he could have done. His army is trapped in the mud. Fatalistic, even self-destructive, he is impatient to get on to an ending, even a bad ending. Pictish ambassadors arrive, offering Guenhera and Philip in exchange for Arthur’s abdication. Outnumbered, Arthur is ready to accept when a report arrives of a Pictish attack. Angry at apparently having been lied to, Arthur kills the ambassadors and orders an immediate charge against the enemy. Mordred, surprised by the English movement and apparently not having called for any attack from his side, orders the death of the useless hostages and goes into battle. Guenhera and Philip are murdered. Arthur rallies his troops. Mordred kills Gloucester. Arthur learns of this and then of his wife’s death. Heartbroken, he rages, seems even to think that he won the battle of Lincoln, which he skipped, a victim of his own knightly PR. He cannot go on, realizes he has been a poor king, and finally places himself in God’s hands. At once he sees Mordred and knows he must save Britain at all costs, even that of his own life; this is his only possible legacy. Arthur kills Mordred but is mortally wounded. In his dying breath, he gives his crown to Constantine, who becomes king of a unified Britain.