The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [126]
She was dressed in fanciful Elizabethan costumes in a play set in an imagined ancient Greece, a prequel of sorts to another, better play, and based on a story written by a fourteenth-century Englishman, adapted by two seventeenth-century Englishmen, one of whom was trying to write in the style of the other, including a scene that was patently an homage to a previous, much better play, based in turn on an eleventh-century Danish legend. Dana recited these men’s rhymes, took only those steps and made only those gestures predetermined by her director, a Croatian journeyman Antonio who, after finishing work on this play, hurried off to direct an episode of a well-loved and well-worn network hospital drama.
But for all this artifice, there was Dana. I wasn’t the only one who thought she (Emilia) was a unique and original figure on that stage. Strangers—hundreds of strangers five times a week for seven weeks—looked at her like they’d never seen anything like her, and they hadn’t. There is nothing in Shakespeare to predict Dana, except, perhaps, Guenhera in Arthur, proving only how much my father loved her.
When we were sixteen, I earned my driver’s license on the first try, outscoring Dana by one crucial point. I passed; she failed. The next day, I took the opportunity to visit Dad alone, the first time I’d ever done that. (My own limited empathy fails to provide subtitles to my mother’s nodding, expressionless silence when she handed me the keys. Nothing new there, I suppose: a famously vicious and dismissive New York newspaper book reviewer—whom I made the career-bashing mistake of kissing and feeling up at a party at Yale decades earlier and then never calling—faulted my last novel for “a curious absence of empathy.”)
I have better luck reading Dana’s heart. I didn’t tell her I was going to visit Dad because I didn’t want her to come with me, and I didn’t want to say no if she asked. And so when I returned, obviously bothered by the visit, I saw her swallow her anger and hurt feelings in order to be ready to listen to me. I lay on her floor, next to the bed, where she’d been reading by lamplight. She switched it off, and we were in the near darkness of a Minnesota April evening. I turned on my side, away from the window, to see the old dolls under her bed, sidelit from the hall, ignored for years now but still carefully glued in position under their sleeping mistress, awaiting her renewed interest, voices, animation, never to return. Their tea poured, forever ignored, hands touched surreptitiously under the table forever, glances forever discreetly exchanged in the crowded tea party, hopes forever suppressed behind pursed plastic lips.
“How is he?” she asked in the dark.
“He’s him.”
“How are you?”
“I’m me, unfortunately,” I whined imprecisely.
“I feel for both of you,” Dana said, as if she were being ironic, but she actually did feel for both of us, and I appreciated her feeling for me, but then an instant later I denied myself that balm and found it cheap, because if she felt for him (who deserved none of her fine feeling), then her feelings were indiscriminate and therefore worthless. My God, what a curiously contorted bastard.
All I said was “What’s with these stupid dolls? Why do you still have them? Are they supposed to be gay?”
“Yeah. Lesbian Barbie,” she sighed. I thought that was pretty funny, and I valued her again at once in my storm-front sentimentality. “Why does he piss you off so much?” she asked.
“He’s just so awful.” I don’t disagree with that, but only now can I translate it into adult: Why doesn’t he understand that his behavior affects my happiness and that I am ashamed and angry and embarrassed and confused about what it means to be a man and a father as a result?
This is not so remarkable. It is remarkable that Dana was able to answer me back then as if she already spoke adult. That is empathy. “You’re stuck until you forgive him,” came her voice through the darkness.
“ ‘There’s no forgiveness without an apology first,’ ” I snipped, stingily quoting some puritanical pamphlet