The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [216]
Glassow was (I noted with a dash of preadolescent bitterness) what my father wanted to be but wasn’t. (Of course, it was only due to my father’s training of me that I could appreciate and admire him.)
I remember him at Embers one weekend evening, taking coffee in the brown plastic mug and giving ten different explanations for the ten times we asked him, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo?”
“I’m going to the casino after, but I wanted to see you kids first.”
“There was a mix-up at the dry cleaner,” he sighed, shaking his head, breathing out smoke from his Chesterfield, a line of gray that tracked along the top edge of the red booth.
“Ask your dad. His idea of a practical joke, saying dinner with you three was black-tie tonight.”
His imagination inspired me and Dana to try out personalities around him. Something as mild as this game led us to put on different voices, attitudes, vocabularies, to see if, in disguise, we could sneak closer to the truth. “Baby,” said Dana like a tender mother, “baby, really, why so swank?”
“I’m going to a ceremony, a roast for a friend who’s getting a prize for his charitable work. Couldn’t be prouder.”
“Cut the crap, Chuck.” I tried a twelve-year-old tough guy. “What’s up?”
Chuck accordioned his cigarette butt into the black ashtray permanently stained gray inside its crenellations. “Fact is, compadre, I’m trying to impress a broad. I’m taking her first-nighting at the opera.”
“Come on, for real, Uncle Charles, please,” cajoled a young, young Dana, avuncularizing Glassow for the first and only time.
And this man, whom neither of us has seen in decades, now owns a quarter of my family’s coming fortune.
But I’m ahead of myself.
6
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, two gallants at school called Dana a dyke, and so I tried to fight them. When it was over, and my nose was broken into its current alignment, and the two bravos had triumphantly kicked me in the stomach, adding, “Arthur is a fag,” Dana, back home, set to work nursing my body and lacerated ego.
She didn’t bother with “you were really brave” or “those guys are jerks” or “you were outnumbered” or even “thank you.” We knew all that, and we both knew the other one knew it. And she knew how small I felt, how useless, how badly I had fallen short of some idea of myself as courageous and chivalrous, and, most of all, how ashamed I was that I couldn’t destroy someone who had hurt her.
I lay on the sofa, replaying the battle in my head, but with better results and snappier repartee. Dana brought ice in a cloth and laid it gently across my purple nose, unbloodied my cheeks with wet paper towels, dropped aspirin in my mouth, and recited, “Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?” A puff of laughter started to build in the back of my throat, despite my condition, but it struck the bones and hollows of my face and quickly retreated as my eyes crossed and flooded.
“Listen to this. Listen,” she said, as if I had a choice. “The younger son needs to make money, and so he goes to the fair and challenges the wrestler, who is a complete brute, for a prizefight. Everyone says he’s insane, begs him to back out, but he won’t. Stubborn like you. The princess in the audience, probably really hot, sayzzzzzz . . .” She dragged out the word, and I heard the pages riffling, and I knew exactly what book was on her lap across the room from me, though behind my eyelids, closed under acid ice, all I saw were black fireworks. “Young gentleman, your spirits are too bold for your years. You have seen cruel proof of this man’s strength: if you saw yourself with your eyes or knew yourself with your judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal enterprise. We pray you for your own sake to embrace your own safety and give over this attempt. That