The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [55]
I actually hadn’t thought of that solution, had you? (Or of Shylock as “mine.”) I told her about your “Antonios” discovery, and she thought that was pretty smart. “Mein Gott! This is true. Every one of his Antonios is a sissy boy. Three of them? Four? I wish I told this to Günter.” At any rate, she became, Dana, if I may speak frankly to your virginal sensibilities, more and more aroused with each new flawed plot, character inconsistency, technical error, longueur. Any fault she could find was a slap in the face of her pedantic, imprisoned lover, whose crimes, she claimed, held no interest for her when, once more, I tried to ask about him, about her past. But she was done with her past. Very admirable.
I’ll write again soon. I’m in an odd bit of travel as I write you. On a plane, actually …
Love and all that,
A.
18
THAT LETTER DISSOLVES RAPIDLY into total vagueness there. I censored myself because I was ashamed, I suppose, or at least nervous about what I was doing and what Dana might think of me. And because I was trying, again, to cut off the past and make a clean start. Now the memoirist in me has to look bad. The worse I appear, the more vicariously luxurious the reading experience, and the more impressive my inevitable late-chapter redemption, paying for any inadvertent titillation early on.
“I want to go out of London,” Heidi said in my hotel room much later that morning. “I don’t like England.” I had not come to the end of my desire for her, whether due to her innate qualities or my innate needs or her careful dosing and doling out of her charms, I cannot say. But I was, by a long distance, not sated. I was also expected in fifteen minutes down in the breakfast room, to join my colleagues and our British partners before the next client meeting. I would be working for the next twelve hours, presenting and analyzing and lying, a wide enough window through which to lose a new love who did not like England.
“I want to go to …” She stretched beneath the sheet and rolled her eyes, considering her choices, putting herself in each place, gauging her satisfaction around the globe, purring in Günterless freedom, only a sheet between her and her next destination. And her next guy. I was not sated.
“What do you want?”
“I want to go to Venezia.”
“I’d follow you to Venice.”
“Then good. We go. I shower.”
She meant then. I mouthed the usual words about my job, meetings, hotels, but I didn’t mean any of them. It was as if I were reciting lines, but I kept rushing them, only wanting to hear her lines, hear her argue me around to what I wanted to do anyhow. I wanted to believe she wanted me to come along. She wouldn’t do it: “You need to be here? So be here. Don’t listen to me. We had a nice time. I hope you write wonderful commercials. Become very successful and make a lot of money. I am just crazy.”
I was already packing my bag.
She enjoyed her aura of risk taking, but it was me taking the risk. I was paying to keep up with what she did for free. I was abandoning my job; she was just leaving some sort of fiancé behind, possibly in jail. Still, with the heightened thrill of transgression and betrayal, we flung ourselves out of our worlds.
“Don’t bring that,” she said as I began packing my work papers, sketch pads, account folders. “I don’t want you to be that.” So I would not be that. Her decision cast me instead as … not that. “I” would be her decision, and that was fine with me. She was unlikely to make me my father’s son.
She knew that I was quitting my job, even while I was still kidding myself that it would all sort itself out later with an apology or something. That command to leave my work behind was Heidi testing her power over me. She was seeing if she really had me, and so I left my work behind for her. It made no real difference, but her idea of what we were doing required a clean break. I broke. And when I came to, I was different, and I owe that to Heidi.
She was also