The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [101]
“Okay. What happened?”
“Will you please let me fucking think?”
Here are the facts in a straight line, which is not, by a long shot, how I heard this story: under the pressure of the approaching opening night, Dana had decided that her performance was “still not coming together,” and she decided that this was because she was muddled and fuzzed by her own Zoloft-Wellbutrin proportions, and that enduring a little anxiety and depression was a small risk if it meant she could access more “honesty” for her performance, a little more “buzz of life,” and so she had lately started fiddling with the dosages, a common enough event in her life, my life, the life of every mildly depressed person who relies upon and resents these drugs. And, as always happens, it’s a trial-and-error process, this self-examination, self-prescription, and self-monitoring, except that it is only trial and error and more trial and more error and error and spiraling, reactive error.
But this time she felt she had balanced it just right, and her dress rehearsal this evening had been exactly it, and she was so excited—“admittedly overexcited”—backstage after the run-through—bubbly to the point of boiling—that she had hugged the actor who plays her lover, Palamon, and then grabbed his face and “planted one on him,” and then he, probably having had some feelings of his own swelling over the weeks of rehearsal, kissed her back, which she, “for some reason, just went for. It wasn’t about him at all, or about the kiss as like a kiss qua kiss, or, or, or desire, it wasn’t that, although it probably looked like that, and I can imagine that he felt something like that, and I have to say sorry to him, too, but more it was just this thing, admittedly the stupidest thing, it was just me sort of keeping it going, not wanting it to be over, I think because of the run-through, and it was more like I was celebrating, not me kissing Tom, certainly, or even, or even Emilia kissing Palamon, it was more like actress was kissing theater or something, or muse, or, or, or, and, and, and Petra saw me.”
Petra stood and watched an extremely passionate, deeply sexual moment between her girlfriend and a strange man, entirely unjustified by the play, in an otherwise empty fluorescent-lit hallway between dressing rooms. And after the predictable scene that quickly flew out of control, Petra left the theater and drove off and positioned herself strictly straight-to-voicemail.
“Go back to Lyndale,” Dana said. “Left. Left! LEFT!” She directed me to a florist, and I idled while she ran in and out, then guided me to another florist eight blocks up, and I idled while she ran in and out again, this time with flowers. “You have to do something,” she said in a tone as if I had made a mistake and owed her a display of masterful repair work. “Sorry. I don’t mean it like that,” she self-corrected at once. “The sound isn’t matching my point, if you know what I mean.” I did.
I demanded her promise that she would immediately go back to her last doctor-approved dosage. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t say her performance was at risk, nothing. She just nodded.
I drove her to Dad’s, introduced her to Professor Crystal, who was still contentedly taking notes at the table while Dad sat on the couch in the dark, ensuring that the kindly scholar didn’t make a break for it with our quarto. “All the rhymes rhyme in original pronunciation,” the smiling Welshman said cryptically. “That’s good,” he added when he saw my confusion.
And then, following Dana’s orders to the letter, I drove alone to her apartment, carrying a pot of pansies, with clear and even scripted instructions to explain how meaningless the kiss was, how important Petra was to Dana, how Dana would do anything to make it right. I was drilled to recite from Arthur. “Tell her: And I would pass my hours of peace with her, / Empillowed on her breast before my ship.” But I was never any good at memorization, so I let that go as soon as I was back in the car.
“You,” Petra said when she opened the door. “All right.”
“These are supposed