The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [64]
She was still living in our old rent-controlled one-bedroom. It was immediately comfortable to be with her back in New York, to wallow in nostalgia for our younger arrangement, if only for a couple of days of meetings with Random House and my agent, interviews about Prague. She seemed at first to be thriving, perfectly suited to her surroundings. (I often used that phrase to describe happiness in others back then, as I realized how ill at ease and increasingly lost I was feeling in Prague.) She had no shortage of friends. People said hello to her all over the neighborhood, and her voicemail and email were clogged with invitations. She was at thirty-eight as physically lovely as ever, maybe even more so. She was single, still went out and met women when the need hit her, but it rarely did. When I arrived in town, I went straight to her rehearsal for an off-Broadway Beckett production, and she was clearly well liked there. Cast members sat next to me during breaks, excited to meet Dana’s twin and hear my stories about her past lives and loves, until the director passively aggressed from the stage, “I would hate to clear the house of family and friends, but I will have silence now, please. Thank you.”
But for all this, Dana’s loneliness emerged, and it was troubling. She took my arm, leaned in close to me, pleased me with her relief at my visit, her need of me, her questions about my next book, about the boys, the gifts she had for them. She didn’t want to go out, turned down all invitations from cast and crew.
Instead she holed us up in our old apartment, where we feasted out of white cartons with trusted old pagodas on the sides and watched DVDs of the young actress Anne Hathaway. When Dana was out west with a role in a pilot for a TV show that was never picked up, she had developed a powerful crush on Hathaway, having seen but not met her at a party in Hollywood. She paused each film whenever there was a close-up of the starlet’s face, her oversized features, her sparkling eyes. “I get the strangest feeling about her,” Dana said, after we’d emptied a village of pagodas and two bottles of wine. “When I look at her, I have the feeling that she is it, somehow. She’d be it if we ever met.” Dana had even written fan letters to her, an act of subservience she had previously stooped to only for Harold Bloom. She’d invited Hathaway to the opening nights of the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway plays that made up her own professional life, and, in the most openly affectionate letter, she quoted the sonnet to her namesake: “ ‘I hate’ from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’ ”
“I’ve never sent them,” she said to my undisguised worry, but she was lying. “I’m not as far gone as all that.” She did, however, suggest, “Maybe you could write a screenplay with a part for her. And then you could introduce us.” Dana was a professional actress, but she didn’t ask me to write something for her to star in, only something for her fanciful crush. I offered her some of my Czech antidepressants, which she sampled. “Are you still taking something?” I asked. “Forty is coming. Only a fool would go in unarmed.”
I don’t want to paint her during that week in one color. She was also her amazing self, asking after everything, reporting on Mom and Sil, insightful and funny and loving and generous and intensely interested in my boys. She stayed up all night reading the manuscript pages of my next book before my flight home in the morning.