The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [46]
“I used to get lawyers who could quote it back to me. I can’t even afford Bert anymore.”
“Listen, Dad. Why aren’t—”
“Skip it. These jackals want me on this? On this, this offal? Fine. It’s five years old. I never finished my piece of it, but your pal’s dad has it all, so, I’m—”
“He’s not my pal. It was Dana! Dana snitched on that! Why do you harp on that, like you think—”
“I’m not going to waste my time arguing with these people. Hell, I can confess to stuff they don’t even know about.”
“What? What is that supposed to mean? What are you—Isn’t a jail sentence more of a waste of your time than defending yourself?”
“Doesn’t matter. I can still outlive him.”
“Outlive Ted Constantine? What’s the point of that?”
He just looked at me, then made aggressive small talk. “What are you doing with your life?”
“Are you insane? You have to focus, Dad. Don’t do this to Dana, at least,” I tried, playing my double-guilt card, implying that he was hurting her and that I was able to acknowledge his lifelong preference.
He was very bitter. Just that day? At that period of his life? It confirms some negligence as a son that I don’t know. There was no puckish joy. He was not extolling the creators and damning the gray men who raked the wonder out of life. He was broke, friendless, and humiliated, beaten, unable to pull off his odd crimes because of improvements in forensic detection. Prison and prosecutors had whipped out of him his charming and challenging arrogance. In another, more gullible era he would have presented the king with a taxi-dermied marvel from the New World, a beast with the head of a lion and the body of a trout, and he would have been loved for it. In our world, he forged, in this case, scratch-off tickets for the New York Lottery, which Chuck Glassow then sold to New York bodega owners for less than they paid the state for real tickets. Unwitting gamblers scratched off my dad’s metal paint and lost, just like with real lottery tickets, never knowing they had paid someone other than the state of New York for the pleasure. “Victimless,” my father said again, as he said of all his crimes, but this time that wasn’t quite accurate. It was simply that he had stolen the state’s victims for himself. They didn’t know their victimization had been transferred, and if you look at New York’s lost revenue—ostensibly used for schools—the claim of innocent wonder-working seemed even further from the old ideals than usual. “Dad, you have to stop and you have to stay out of jail. So, please—”
He cursed Ted Constantine, old Sil, and then me. “What the hell are you doing writing ads?”
“I did one for you with The Tempest. Did you see it? I sent it to you.”
“I saw. You used him to sell liquor.”
“Don’t. Please. Please don’t talk to me like—”
“Like you’re selling out, playing along with this repellent system? Like you’re a huckster, pulling the wool over suckers’ eyes for nothing more than a paycheck, and you earn your money by convincing fools that one brand of vodka will get you laid? When any pygmy from the African bush knows that all vodka is exactly the same? Why aren’t you making anything? I confess! Guilty! I wasn’t the finest father, but I did teach you that, didn’t I? You could help Sil move AC units, couldn’t you?”
“Fake lottery tickets? Are you—”
“Go back to New York. Just go.”
I hadn’t prepared myself for this. He had never been aggressive like this before. Also, I was twenty-three. Those are my justifications, as far as I will go in claiming memoirist’s last-word privileges to minimize what I did next: I left.
I left, probably left him (after a few minutes of thinking) in a mood of self-loathing and with an urge to punish himself. I probably knew he would feel like that. I can’t say I knew what he would do next, what tool was readily at hand with which he could punish himself; that self-conviction is just beyond memory’s reasonable doubt.
I left and stepped into the hall and told Mindy Stark that my father was in his right mind and ready to talk to her now. And I flew back to New York and