The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [27]
Her sorrow was proof and vindication to my muddled adolescent mind: she was suffering because she could not find a soulmate in anyone else but me, and when she suffered, she wanted to be with no one else but me. I fear to write this down, but now it is too late: the evaporation of jealousy is as pleasurable an emotion as any I know; it is a release as profound and shuddering as any physical sensation. It is the erasure of fear, the removal of worry, the shimmering tingle once danger—for which your body has tensed—is past. It is not the arrival of permanent courage or trust; jealousy is tidal, and it flows and ebbs forever, and acceptance that it will return is part of the pleasure while it recedes. There is no happy ending, but nor is there eternal pain. Something is still going to happen, so the timing of the dropping of a curtain is largely arbitrary, which is why Shakespeare’s endings are so often the weakest parts of his plays. (Someone is getting married or everyone is dead; time to go home now and get on with your own lives. The Tragedy of Arthur is no different.)
Dana sobbed so hard she fell to her knees on the grass, and I gathered her up in my arms. “She’s not worth this,” I said.
“Then who is worth this? Why not her?” replied love’s logic.
“You’ll find one. You’ll probably find a hundred. It’s just—you’re just—they’re just not ready for you yet.” All the limp consolations one hopes will prop up the shaking, desperate, miserable. “You are,” I reminded her, “kind and loving and funny and talented and beautiful. That’s a pretty good deal.”
“How many did you kiss tonight?”
“Depends on how we’re counting.”
“Just tell me not Amy.”
“Not Amy. Not my type at all.”
“You don’t have a type. You’re an angry omnivore. Just not Amy.”
“I have a type. I just haven’t met a girl who fits it yet.”
This stretch of 93 percent accurately remembered conversation is embarrassing. If I was ever such a Don Juan as I was claiming (or wished to be, or pretended to be), it was to a certain extent a reaction to my father’s fraudulent claims to womanizing prowess. “Do you think he had all those ‘lady friends’?” I asked Dana when she came up to visit me one fall weekend, freshman year of college.
“Are you joking?” She had transformed herself in her first six weeks at Brown into a ferocious-looking lesbo-pug.
“I’m missing something, aren’t I?”
“No. Probably he just told you different things.” According to her, according to him, he had lived a perfectly monastic existence, in his cells and out, a devoted husband after the fact, a courtly lover, perfectly content to be perpetually separated from his soul’s most blessed love, the lost Mary.
Neither was true, Dana pointed out to me. He was just exceedingly lonely since the moment he had—in a burst of self-punishment, aware of his complete failure as a husband—sacrificed his sincere and natural hope for a normal marriage and love, setting Mom free to be with solid, dull Sil. That great act accomplished with a straight face, and rewarded with unlimited child visitation, the curtain should have fallen on a redemptive comical tragedy. Instead, my father lived on, not in Act V at all but in an interminable Act III, claiming to me that he was a swinger and to Dana that he was happy to love Mom at a distance. The truth was isolation and a lot of work—some legal, most otherwise—with an increasing preoccupation with making or finding (or stealing) a large amount of money, which, he had decided, would make up for all his previous failings. This desire led him back to prison—a brutally long sentence