The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [65]
I returned to my life in Prague, made more alienating by the comparison to home, by the feeling that Dana needed me, by the memory of my father’s face when he lied. I tried to settle into my Czech routines, my foreign family. I suffered an odd symptom: I started to lose my language skills. I had increasing difficulty recalling Czech vocabulary and grammar. I grew so frustrated that I went back to language school, even though I had been fluent and at one point had burnished my accent and slang to the point that I occasionally passed as Czech for a few minutes at a time. I ended up talking to a therapist about it.
That old childhood daydream came back: I was saddled with Shakespeare’s company again, though he was now fully adapted to modern life, reliant on his cellphone, jaywalking to reach a hot dog stand after a meeting at my publisher’s. I still didn’t like him: that same haircut, but now in jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt. There was, though, something I was desperate to ask him, the same questions I wanted my father to answer: Am I good? Will I be okay? But every time this daydream raged, it had to end with me struggling foolishly to win his distracted attention. “Take those off for a minute,” I say.
“What?” Shakespeare shouts, the airplane headphones blocking out everything except the romantic comedy he’s watching. I mime and mouth for him to take off the headphones. “There’s no pause function on this,” he says, half-trying to hide his exasperation at my intrusion. “She’s a hotel chambermaid, very earthy. And the guy … wait, not him, wait … him, that guy, him: he’s a millionaire hotel guest, very uptight. They’re made for each other, but they don’t know it yet.”
And I tell him to go back to his movie.
I wrote to my father, still, from Prague, wrote for him, still. The definition of insanity, the twelve-steppers have patiently taught me, one day at a time, is to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I wrote for him, still. I have now written four novels, and I devised the idea of an anagram for him to decipher over years. The first letters of the titles of my novels are S, P, E, and A. I planned to write, with all my remaining years, books initialed S, H, A, K, E, R, and E, and then, maybe, A, N, D, M, E.
Shakespeare’s lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.
20
ACT IV: King Arthur has allowed his court to become so feminized and debauched that the queen gets an hour every day to run things, putting knights on trial for charges of rudeness or romantic misbehavior. This ends only when a refreshed Saxon army invades England yet again, thanks to Arthur’s soft and distracted defense policies. This harsh lesson teaches Arthur, finally, that his job, and the nature of life, is to be constantly at war with someone. He has no natural allies to help fight the Saxons because he impulsively married for love, rejecting the French. Since Arthur still doesn’t have an heir (Guenhera has miscarried twice), he is forced to name Mordred his heir in exchange for military assistance against the Saxons, barring any natural-born children. Guenhera, pregnant again, waits for news of the battle of Linmouth, and goes into labor. Mordred, having assisted Arthur in defeating the Saxons, finds himself both jealous of and charmed by Arthur and realizes he’s been fooled: Arthur will never let him be King of Britain. He vows to force the issue, perhaps even seduce Guenhera himself, proving God’s will by producing a child with her.