The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [49]
The elderly tattoo artist used a nice black-letter Gothic calligraphy, but the surface of the skin was probably difficult to work on as it was (is) thin, elastic, and has a tendency to bunch, even if I had remained very still, which I doubt I did. Eventually, though, I healed, and the result became clear (though only under certain conditions). Then it produces the effect of a sort of stylized medieval scepter (admittedly for a tiny king) inscribed with a regal motto of sovereignty——although a jester’s belled baton has been occasionally cited by select viewers.
Dana’s design was certainly more elegant, and it does indeed make a sort of living tribute to her three men. That first week, though, it was an eloquent and burning statement of her anger at me, as there was no position I could assume that was not literally punishing.
Bits of the previous night came back under the clarifying force of the icy damp cloth laid across my lap. “I told Dad I was going to lead my life, and he could do whatever dumb thing he wanted and martyr his golden years to the god of stubborness if that’s what he was into,” I’d recounted to Dana at the bar. “It didn’t matter to me or to you.”
“To me?” Dana repeated. “You said it didn’t matter to me? How he pleaded?”
“No, actually, as I say that, I don’t think I did. No, actually, I tried to make him feel guilty about leaving you behind, or something.”
“Well, which? Which was it?”
“Dana, you weren’t there. It didn’t work. He was so poisonous, I can’t even tell you. He was aggressive and manipulative, and he doesn’t care. I honestly don’t know what else I could have said or done.”
“Did you get the impression he wanted you to talk him out of it?”
“…”
“Arthur?”
“Do you see her? Looking over here?”
“Arthur. Did you get the impression he wanted you to talk him out of it?”
“No,” I lied, or thought I was lying. If there’s a difference there. “I didn’t get the impression he cared at all what I said or did. He just kept—You weren’t there,” I repeated, with accusation.
“Oh. So you think if I’d been there, I would have been able to talk him into defending himself?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know. Buy another round, please.”
The wager, I believe, was made shortly after this.
15
AT THE END OF THE RUN of The Wizard of Oz, Dana flew out to Minnesota to visit Dad, staying with Mom and Sil. She called a day later to report that Sil had been diagnosed with prostate cancer weeks before. He wouldn’t have told us about it at all—not wanting to bother us with such boring stuff—if Dana hadn’t turned up in the middle of it. “I don’t think he would have told Mom, if he could have figured out how to keep it to himself,” Dana reported over the phone.
I was in New York, feeling very alone and slowly beginning to understand my (losing) part in the battle of prideful wills I had waged with my father, the responsibility I bore for what had happened to him. I could feel purer concern for Sil, without second thoughts or selfishness of any sort. That unimpeded response to Sil contrasted, like iodine dye in a scan of the prostate, bright against the murk of my reaction to my father. And with that, as was my lifelong tendency, I took off on a flight from anger to reaction to remorse to reparation. I flew high and fast, soared well past the complicated truth to my next bright clear destination: I was solely responsible for my father’s sentence. If I weren’t such a rotten son, if only I wasn’t stuck on what I needed to hear him say, instead of saying myself what he needed to hear, and so on. His original real felonies with victims, his stubbornness and King Leary behavior: I forgot all of that in the enchantment of self-blame, an act as self-centered as my original behavior (and his), and no more helpful to anyone involved.
I flew back to Minnesota to pay my double homages, visiting Sil at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and my father in his new digs at