The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [56]
We were suddenly in a frenzy, dashing madly to dress and escape, up against some clock we could not have identified. I wasn’t running out on a hotel bill (it was on TBWA, my agency); still, I began behaving at once like a criminal, desperate to be gone. What was I stealing? That day, twenty-eight years old, I would have self-righteously said, “Happiness,” snatched from corporate dullardry. Not true, of course (I quite liked my job and colleagues). Later, thirty-seven years old, I would, self-glorifying, have said I was stealing my “better self” away, becoming a novelist, chasing destiny in the form of this hot Saxon girl. That was certainly the gist of my letters home at the other end of this adventure, how I told the story for years to friends, to Dana, to myself, to my wife. Now, forty-six, I would, slightly more self-aware, say that I was just chasing a girl because I hadn’t had enough girls yet, and I was stealing away from adult responsibility because it hadn’t yet proven to me its superiority over youthful irresponsibility, and I was trying to achieve indifference to my father and my past. Over the years, I have pulled out all these meanings as needed to garb my naked actions. Philosophy is inclination dressed in a toga.
I cut my last line to adulthood: I had Heidi lay my files and folders outside my colleague’s door, atop the newspapers, while I lurked, lip-nibbling, behind a corner. She and I then bounced and bounded down the stairs as if pursued or dropped, stopping at the door to the lobby, which we stared at as if on its other side we would face gunfire or fierce barking.
The odds were I could just walk through the lobby. My “team” was supposed to be breakfasting with our London partners in the hotel restaurant, behind frosted and puckered glass. I would be a frosty puckered blur if they even looked up. Head down, I followed the German girl across a vast carpet of turrets and vined ruins in twisted woods. We made it to the front door, where we had to stop to let in two men in their thirties.
“Arthur Phillips,” declared the first in an English accent, and I was caught, immobile, the flight impulse only strong enough to make my toes clench inside my shoes.
“Is the copywriter,” replied the second man as they passed me without looking, putting a retrospective question mark to the first man’s use of my name. “The account manager is Peter Sampson.” The back of my scalp burned with unneeded adrenaline. They headed for that wavy glass, and the elevators chimed for attention, certain to hold everyone I had ever known.
“We go?” Heidi suggested.
“Ja, ja, we go.”
We couldn’t stop laughing, and the cabby was excessively chatty. “You been visiting London? First time? I’m Lawrence.” Heidi and I suffered some odd hysteria, pawing each other and guffawing unreasonably, my heart’s rhythms insisting that this was the great and formative instant of my life, the start of adulthood, curtain up, and that holy annunciation repeated itself every few minutes as some new sensation hit me: the plumed horse guards in front of a palace, the smell of the cab, the smell of Heidi’s hair, the smell of a green and misty damp spring park where we idled behind a moving truck whose back panel read—I’m not making this up—DESTINY MOVERS. “Look at that,” I said to Heidi with urgency. “Look at that!”
“What? Movers?” she said, the gaudy omen fluttering its wings, but not for ears deaf to English intimations, and (by kissing her) I put the thought out of my mind that she and I were already off on disparate desperate adventures with diverging lessons and retroactive importance, only sex and scenery in common.
“Flying off to where today?” asked Lawrence, his eyes framed in the black rubber oval of his rearview mirror, a Celtic crucifix dangling from the reflected