The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [50]
My arrival annoyed Sil. “You visit for this? Jesus. Come for a birthday, but not this. I got the TV to work, but I can’t find the game. This is going to be the year. Puckett? My God. Hrbek? I have to beat this cancer until October.”
I helped him pull up the Twins game on his porthole TV, and we spoke of nothing but baseball. I tried to ease my conscience: “Sil, I’ve been very, you know, in New York, far from here, and, even before that—”
“If you’re about to say you’ve become a Yankees fan, you should just leave. Right now.”
“No, God, no, not that. Jesus Christ, that’s not even funny. No, I just wanted to apologize, and say thank you, I guess, or sorry, if I’ve ever—”
“Please, please, stop. Artie, stop. I can’t hear the game.”
I was not to be thwarted in my quest to make everything right and everyone aware of all my lapses, to be forgiven, not for anything in particular but for my personality. I studied Sil’s unshaven face, the translucent gray whiskers like fish bones. Sil was going to die, and my future—my hope to go on with a normal life—depended on not leaving things unsaid, not letting people go without a communion of our feelings.
But Sil was having none of it, deftly blocked all my advances. My relentless pursuit of absolution continued to be of no interest to him. I slapped myself against the stones of Sil, for whom no topic (other than the Twins) justified any sort of emotional outburst or self-examination.
I told him that I loved him. He laughed for a while and nodded. And lived for another twenty-two years.
“Dad,” I tried at the prison. “I’ve been looking hard at myself and … I think you’re in here because of me, and I’m sorry.” Imagine how important I would be if this were true! Having spent some time being a terrible father myself now, this is what I think I was saying: “Tell me I’m important to you. Tell me you’re sorry you missed my youth. Tell me we could have been something else.” My father, no doubt trying to be kind and rid me of any guilt in the matter, told the truth and said, “That’s ridiculous. I put myself in here. Nothing you could have done or said could have stopped that. You’re very funny.” He also said, “I’m in the right place. I’ve got something huge to work on, to keep me busy in here. I sometimes think I couldn’t be happier.”
“Mom,” I tried once more. “I’m thinking of moving back to Minneapolis.”
“Are you in trouble at work?”
“Of course not. I was just thinking, Sil’s sick, maybe you’d like to have—”
“You hang around making me feel old? That’s very sweet. You could bring me meals on wheels or change my colostomy bag. First I have to get one, but just knowing you’re there for me, I can hardly wait. I’ll call my doctor in the morning. Listen, how does Dana seem to you? Has she got herself together okay? I can’t tell when she’s putting on a brave face to calm me down. Do you think New York is okay for her? You want to be useful, you could make sure she’s not letting herself get too stressed again.”
And so I flew back to New York with Dana, decided—in my next swing—that I was irrelevant to them all, and that was okay, if I could just be a man about it. I tried to write short stories about all this good stuff, changing everyone’s name but little else, and the stories always sucked. I pseudonymously submitted them anyhow to some literary magazines and shuffled a deck of rejections.
Act III: King Arthur, pressured into marrying to secure Britain’s peace, rejects a valuable French offer and instead marries for love: his friend Constantine’s sister, Guenhera, who has loved Arthur since he was a boy. (It’s pronounced GWEN-er-UH, I think.) That dog trainer reappears, discussing the marriage (and Guenhera’s pregnancy) in relation to all the illegitimate children Arthur has strewn across Britain. The queen miscarries, and Arthur—as loving of his wife as he once was mad for shepherd girls—demobilizes his army to cultivate his kingdom of peace and art, nostalgic for his own childhood peace. He spends most