The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [26]
I watched as girl after girl became her best bud and phone confidante and lake-biking pal. She didn’t hide anything from me. She told me all about it. She wasn’t trying to exclude me. She was probably going to great lengths to make me feel included, hers. But that only went to prove the truth echoing in the hollows of my hollowed, crannied soul: to be reassured of one’s importance is proof positive of one’s failure to be preeminently important. (It’s funny: as I reread this paragraph, I can recall the sparks of hope that I sometimes felt when my father faced another spell of incarceration. “Maybe now,” some part of me exulted. “Maybe now I will be everything to Dana.”)
And so Dana migrated from group to group, a social nomad, always working her way into a clique because her still uncalibrated compass led her to pursue confidential friendships with girls who simply were not gay. They might have been literate, even poetic; sporty, even jocky; moody, even depressive; unconventional, even bizarre. But they weren’t gay, or were not yet willing to consider it. And they weren’t Dana’s sun, her bright angel, her dawn. And when she subdued herself to fit in or exalted herself to stand out, and I watched from a knot of toadish boys, I wished I could help her, and I hated that she was desperate for some other bond than ours, and I felt pity for her and rage at the girls who couldn’t see her grace and did not love her enough.
Unlike Dana, I was drowning in a primal soup of undifferentiated emotions. Actions born of confusion, motives crashing off one another, contradictory gestures, opposite and mutually exclusive truths told to different people for opposite reasons, resulting in arguments, broken friendships, fights. Dana was clarity; I was chaos. My love life was far more “normal” than hers, more hormonal, less romantic, alternately sullen and grubby, swollen and grabby. And all along I dreamt of being Dana’s … what? Not her lover—this is not a report of rank incest—but I dreamt of being something indescribably close, perfectly joined, soulmated beyond the possibility of any rupture or misunderstanding.
Dana was a pretty seventeen-year-old who attracted her share of average-minded boys. She was also smart and published her poetry in the school magazine and was in the Drama Club, and so attracted brainy and artsy boys as well. And while the snobbery arrayed against us for our relative poverty and parental criminality closed some doors, by senior year we fit comfortably enough into the world of Lake Minnetonka boating Sundays and Lake of the Isles Saturday-night house parties. Dana was still divided: she wanted to fold herself into these moneyed routines but couldn’t completely erase herself, wouldn’t flirt with Evan Wallace, wouldn’t encourage the boys at all, and so, rejecting all prom invitations, she insisted that I issue none of my own and instead, both years, we rented a stretch limo with a group of friends (straining to pay our share), migrated in a herd, danced in a circle, threw up on a sidewalk, and I watched Dana watch her latest crush kiss a boy.
We ended up in Kenwood Park after senior prom, just the two of us, at two in the morning, her in a gown Mom had sewn from patterns, me in a leased tuxedo foaming at the chest with flamenco ruffles. (Years later, I actually joined a hipster-flamenco group in Hungary, during my years of wandering. We used the hideous photos of that prom night for ironic publicity.)
It is odd, I know, to think of episodes where she was in pain as the ultimate evidence of our closeness, but there it is. There is something unbearably sweet in memories of her coming to me—and me alone—to open her heart.
The park at that late hour in May would have been very dark, and in its stretches of wood one could, briefly, for the space of a few yards, imagine oneself in a forest, far from city lights or the twentieth century. My night’s thrills had been surreptitious—stolen kisses with