The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [28]
“I have made a series of rather fundamental mistakes,” he told me when I visited him during spring break my junior year in college, 1985. “But I’m on to something big now, I think.”
“That’s nice. How are you, Dad?”
“Gently used. Slightly foxed. Warmly inscribed.”
He was that day very sentimental, even mawkish for my collegiate tastes; during that period I fancied myself to be above a long list of emotions. “Sil took you to a lot of Twins games? When you were a kid?” he asked.
“Yeah, quite a few. He’s a statistics machine, you know.”
“Taught you how to play, too? Had a catch with you in the evenings?”
“I suppose so, yeah.”
“What did you talk about?”
“When?”
“When you’d play catch.”
“We did that for ten years. I’m going to a game with him this week.”
“Yeah. But as an example. Please.”
“I don’t know. We usually talked about baseball, I guess. That’s what Sil and I have in common. And a fondness for Mom.”
“I have that, too,” said the oldish man in his orange jumpsuit.
“I know.”
“But really no feel for baseball.”
“I liked that ball you gave me,” I lied about the forged Rod Carew baseball I’d thrown away, eager to call the infield fly rule on this sentimental chat.
“I was lucky to get it. I knew he was your hero.”
I am trying—and failing, I fear—to restore dialogue from twenty-five years ago, to be honest enough for a memoir and fair to my father (and my younger self) and still make it clear why this moment is worth memorializing:
“I wrote a play,” I announced. “It’s being put on. Not Mainstage, but the black box.”
“No kidding? What’s it about?”
“Apartheid. The human cost of institutional racism. The urgent need for the university to divest from South African money. Greed.”
“Very impressive,” he mumbled, but I could tell it wasn’t interesting him, that his momentary thrill of learning that I had written a play was already extinguished, that my writing was not of the sort to produce wonder, that my intentions for a socially engaged theater were somehow wrong. “Where’s the magic, though? I mean, does it make your hair stand up?”
He managed not to mention Shakespeare. I had learned enough about prison visits by 1985 to know that you always left on a good note or else regret could crush you until the next time, and so I said goodbye politely enough, although I was in a righteous anger. It was not just blind fury but that rarer kind where you have the icy adrenaline pleasure of knowing you’re right. I drove, alone, back to Mom’s house, fuming at his self-centered sentimentality over his maybe having missed some of my childhood and his obvious lack of interest in me right now. After he’d spent most of my childhood in jail, now I was not magical enough? “Fuck his magic,” I shouted in the empty car. “Fuck His Magic” became a song by the Fairy Rings, and I still have a cassette of them playing it at Brown’s Spring Fling.
But making the leap from antipathy to apathy is not something you can achieve just by wishing.
I flew back to Harvard and my great triumph as a playwright. Dana took the train up for opening night. Since freshman year, she had transformed herself again and again, leaving behind her bull-dykery for punk rock and had now become a flower child, a retro pose that fit her least well of all her looks so far. She wore a woolen Latin American serape and had semi-dreadlocked hair. She saw my reaction to her hippiedom and, with a shrug, acknowledged it would soon pass.
“I didn’t know you could be so passionate about the suffering of others,” she said, hugging me backstage at the theater, a black cube with a single black curtain and a set of four chairs—two black, two white—on a chessboard floor. “You are going to score a lot of taffeta being this noble. But can you keep it up? Or does apartheid awareness evaporate with orgasm?”
It was certainly deflating, though she wasn’t being cruel; she just saw through my affectations as quickly as I saw through hers. I wished I could have prevented myself from laughing, but her voice was a tickle, and I couldn