The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [102]
“They might.”
I joined her on the couch, and Maria immediately parked on my lap. Petra poured me some of the wine she’d already begun. Something jazzy and modal and Middle Eastern was on the stereo.
“She’s sorry,” I started. “It didn’t mean anything and really, truly wasn’t what it looked like. You’re everything to her. She’ll do anything to—”
“I know,” Petra said without expression. Masked, flushed with drink but not flustered, she asked, “What else you got?”
“I’m not sure. A line from Shakespeare.”
And she kissed me. There was nothing I could do: I was pinned down by a beagle.
She spoke of death and small joys as she kissed me and stroked my face with those same fingers I had once longingly watched stroke the face of her iPhone, turning and unpinching webpages with soft sweeps. “You have to seize what you can of happiness and pleasure,” she said. (You did say all this, you know.) “You have to pay later either way. It’s all-you-can-eat, and you have to pay the same whether you stuff yourself or go without. Obviously, you pay when you die. And you pay when your parents die. But when the neighbor’s kid gets hit by a car and you watch her parents shuffle around heartbroken until you finally move to a new house? That’s paying, too. You have no fun, you still pay, it’s just that you let death cut your purse. He conned you. You die and you didn’t live. You’re death’s gull. We’ll both pay, eventually, whether you kiss me back or not. But it would be better if you kissed me back.”
“What about—”
“Don’t.”
“You’re just angry about—”
“Don’t. Don’t. Do I look angry? Do I feel angry?”
There. That’s that.
In Shakespeare’s day, they believed in magic. Now we only have its weak residue: magical thinking. If I could count precisely to sixty between two passing orange minutes on her digital clock, starting at 5:23 A.M. and ending exactly as it melted into 5:24, then when she woke she would love me and not say this had been a terrible mistake. If I could close my eyes and guess, give or take five, how many bricks were in the top row of the bedroom wall, then Dana would even bless this relabeling of our triangle’s points. If I could do it within three bricks, she would forgive me. If I could guess the bricks within two, then Dana would even be happy, for herself and us, and she would say she had wanted exactly this to happen, and she would believe that she must have subconsciously known that when she’d kissed her co-star in the hall she could speed us all along to this great ending.
I opened my eyes. “You ass,” Petra groaned. “Why didn’t you leave in the dark?”
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“Do you want to talk about …?” I glided a single plucked pansy across her eyes.
“Sometime. Not now.”
“Fair enough. One of us should say something to Dana?”
“I don’t know. No. Later.”
“Fair enough.”
My muted phone was heavy with eight voicemails and fourteen texts waiting for me, though they all said about the same thing.
36
I WILL NOT PAINT a stirring word-portrait of my troubled conscience or simmering shame to win any sympathy. Nor will I belabor the lies I wove of where I’d spent the night, the tempered and deniable hope I offered my twin sister that morning. I know. I know. “Thanks for all the updates,” she said when I walked in. “Not like I was waiting for any news.” I know.
She had slept on our couch and was sipping coffee two-handed, be-shawled by a blanket. Professor Crystal was back at it in the living room, offering a cheery good morning and stepping far from the quarto to drink his own coffee. My father was still asleep. On the kitchen bar, already arrived in white, red, and blue livery from Random House, was the contract in triplicate awaiting my thrice-inked countersignature. I needed a notary