The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [10]
I agreed wholeheartedly: Dad, forests, adventure, wonder, Dana, and I versus prisons, bulldozers, boring people, facts. That seemed precisely to explain the world.
The following two weekends he asked for us again, and our mother continued to be improbably generous in sharing us, considering his performance as a first husband and her full, inarguable custody. But my mother’s way of judging people was her own, and she never hesitated to let him be a father when he could. She didn’t hold her or our repeated disappointments against him. “That’s the way he is. Don’t expect anything else,” I heard her say more than once, though decades spun by before I could consistently follow that advice.
He took us out to an extremely nice dinner two Saturdays later, at the Normandy Hotel, a Minneapolis fixture back then. The gift certificate he used to pay for the meal (without incident) is tinted in retrospect with a shading of doubtful authenticity. “The gift of a lady friend,” he claimed as provenance, a forged girlfriend vouching for a forged voucher. (The “lady friends” of those years when he was out of prison were often referred to but never produced, and, before I understood that they never existed, they may have inspired in me another strange unilateral competitiveness with my father. My subsequent compulsive behavior toward women, I can admit now, may have been an effort to show him and the world that I was not a forger. And there, just there! I wonder, replaying that meal, whether life really works like this: if he had thought of some other explanation for the gift certificate, or said nothing at all, would everything have ended differently today?)
He returned to his theme as I tore into a tenderloin of pork covered in apples and cream: the world’s vanishing faith in wonder, in relation to the vanishing natural world, and in inverse proportion to its growing store of dubiously valuable scientific knowledge. Dana was rapt, I recall. I remember watching her watch him, and I began to be aware of how he looked at me slightly less often than at her when he spoke. I suspected I was getting less of his eye, which in turn made me mad, so I looked up less often from my food, which led him to address the only child who was showing any interest in him, so by the end, he didn’t look at me at all. I was already able to make others fulfill my own worst fears.
After dessert (a wedge of chocolate cake the size of my head cragging like an Alp through a cloud of sugar-gritty whipped cream), we returned to his apartment, but instead of changing into pajamas and lying down for some blank-verse torture, we were instructed to trade our dress-up clothes for jeans and sweatshirts, and my resentments scurried back down into their hole. He filed us back outside to his elderly station wagon. We drove west, then south through the late-gathering July evening, the mosquitoes pursuing us through the night, the sound of them sharpening their beaks like sirens’ songs luring us to slap our own ears.
He drove on through curiosity, then boredom, answering no direct questions. “Fairies have to travel farther to reach us nowadays,” he teased, while Dana and I played hot hands in the back seat until one of us smacked the other’s knuckles hard enough to produce tears. His face in the rearview said, “All our skill at disproving things is like a wall we build between us and wonder. To jump that wall, you need a long running start.”
I woke when our tires crossed from asphalt to dirt. It was totally dark: our headlights were off, and there was no moon. Far from the city, it was night in a way I have never seen since, a darkness that may no longer exist. “From