The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [18]
The news bursting from her: Dad owned a very rare copy of a Shakespearean oddity, a play that people argued about, that no one could decide about, and “he thinks we should read it and make up our own mind about it!”
He nodded along to her pleasure. “That’s it exactly.” He was very interested in her opinion of the play. He wanted her to read it as often as she liked, change her mind as often as she liked, but to report back to him what she made of it. “And you, too, of course, Arthur, if you’re interested.” I took a quick look at the play, which seemed no different from all the rest, and I retreated to the sofa and my comic book.
Dana had long since read all of Shakespeare, had cried when she’d reached her last play, despondent that there was nothing new to explore, faintly consoling herself with Dad’s promise about the joys of rereading. She had already, at that young age, experienced something coming to an end, a love affair’s first flush, and now, to discover that there was still (possibly) one left: she was torn between wanting to stay up all night reading it and rationing her last virgin pleasure over weeks or months.
My father only had the one copy and, in those pre-Internet days, didn’t know if he’d ever be able to find another, as it was long out of print, long discredited, just a novelty item, and so he attached very strict rules to Dana’s borrowing of it. She could read it only in his home. She could never lend it to anyone. She was free to tell people about it, of course, but under no circumstances was she allowed to Xerox it for herself or others. The book’s rarity and importance and ambiguous value were impressed upon her. Unsurprisingly, the next inscription on the flyleaf reads, April 22, 1977 For my Dana on her 13th birthday, with eternal love. Dad.
The fussy rules, the improbable interest in her eleven-year-old opinion, the clubby and ceremonial sentimentality: all of this bothered me. I was forced to be bored so as not to face my anger at my father’s obsession, which took my best friend, Dana, away from me, not only in the close quarters of his sad-sack parolee apartment, but increasingly in the relative space of my mother’s small house as well, where Dana read Shakespeare and wrote my father self-assigned book reports.
I am reminded of a childhood fantasy from about this time, which now appears quite explicable, a recurrent daydream, conjured in moments of solitude and boredom. If, for example, I peered through the glass porthole behind which wet clothes leapt and fell in graceful arcs in their hot drum, the hypnotic effect of the abstract patterns numbed and nudged my mind off its tracks, and William Shakespeare sat at my side on the laundromat bench, where he would ask me what the dryer was and how it worked. Shakespeare was stranded in the twentieth century, helpless and desperate to understand everything he’d missed in the intervening years, relying on me.
I was forced (by my father? my sister?) to babysit him and explain everything (clothes dryers, air travel, vending machines, vaccinations), and it was a chore. I loathed having to look after this fifty-year-old man, his frisky mullet warming the back of his neck above the stiff collar. I don’t know why, if I was so discontented with the task, I didn’t either (a) in my fantasy, demand to be relieved from my duty, or (b) in reality, stop fantasizing about punitive tedium.
Still I went on with my odd assignment, explaining the plot and premise of Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island to the great man. (“The conceit and argument,” he would correct me.) He quite liked these shows, evidence to me even then of his limited brilliance. I demonstrated how to peel a Band-Aid when I cut my hand (and thus distracted myself just enough to prevent tears). I would send Shakespeare