The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [210]
“I really did this?”
The counselor spoke quietly to me on the bus seat, trying to winkle some clue out of me, and I can imagine, but not remember, his expression of mingled doubt and concern. If this persistent man, standing laughing to himself on the corner in the August heat, wasn’t the kid’s father, what sort of criminality was he up to? And if he was the father, what was wrong with this annoying fat kid? And why wasn’t the dad shouting, settling this through force of will and parental entitlement?
“You held out all the way to the police coming,” my mother laughed. “I think you only gave in then because you were afraid they were coming for you.”
The police car arrived, and I glumly descended at last, forty-five minutes into this ordeal, took my father’s hand, and walked off with him for ice cream.
What was I thinking? I honestly remember none of this incident, and if it hadn’t been my mom—the least imaginative and fanciful member of my family—recounting it, I might have said she was trying her hand at fiction. But she was telling it straight. The most direct interpretation: I didn’t want him to be my father. I must have been so angry with him for the divorce, so ashamed of his imprisonment, so jealous of his relationship with my sister that fantasy’s appeal outmuscled reality’s prerogatives. Or, since I can’t remember a traumatic emotion, maybe it was all in fun. Maybe I was trying to play a misguided game with him, something I thought he’d enjoy. Maybe I was trying to impress him with my ability to re-create the world or myself. Maybe I already understood enough of what made him tick that I was imitating him. If so, by the time the police came, I would have known that I, like him, wasn’t good enough to do it forever. I may have stepped off the bus preparing for my first arrest, another Arthur Phillips off to serve time for failures in fantasizing.
Perhaps it was aggressive, a challenge to him to keep up. If he was so good at this sort of thing, I may have been dimly thinking, then I would be as good or better, and I deserved his respect as much as Dana did, or Shakespeare (who, by the time I was nine, had become a bullying, noxious presence). And, in this interpretation, his patient and friendly insistence that he was my father, his loving explanation to the mildly amused cops, his purchase of ice cream for me nevertheless, his general portrayal of a “father” (albeit one who didn’t discipline me for this irresponsible charade) was his victory: he had portrayed a dad more convincingly than I had portrayed an attempted-kidnapping victim.
5
BUT IF IN FACT that is how I felt one summer day at age nine, it was not permanent. Disappointment and separation were halting and uneven processes, shuffling back and forth like over-Thorazined mental patients. If I was resistant to my father’s gravity at age nine, he could, without much evident trouble, draw me back in before I was ten. I am a writer of stories, trained to think in terms of a character’s emotional “arc,” but my real-life, untidy path resembles not an arc but a failed rocket program, liftoff followed by repeated crashes back onto the launchpad, short orbital flights followed by long groundings, until, far off in the future, escape velocity is finally achieved and deep space collects me. But not yet.
After the bus incident, he was still able to induce wonder, to preach wonder, and I could still love, listen, and gaze at this star, my sister’s hand in mine, my eyes on my father.
When we were ten, we started spending weekends with him in his studio apartment on Lake Street, above the bookbinder where his friend Chuck Glassow had found him a job. He’d been out of jail for more than a year, had stuck to his probation requirements, and seemed to have become a reasonably normal divorced guy. Our mother was more than willing to enjoy weekends alone with her new husband.
We slept on an air mattress and, at bedtime, he would read to us: Alexandre Dumas or Arthur Conan Doyle if things went my way, Shakespeare if they didn’t. One June Friday the evening’s soporific,