The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [66]
Is it the dialogue headings down the left margin over and over again—“ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP”—that make me leery?
Dana called me in Prague, the night of July 18, 2009, to say that Sil, whose long illness I had come to permanently view as temporary, had taken a critical turn, and that I should fly to Minneapolis immediately if I wanted to say goodbye.
The next morning, on my way out of the apartment to the airport, my wife and I had one of those fights that are entirely unnecessary, in which everyone is simply reciting lines scripted by their worst impulses, a dull sequel to old fights, a dull prologue to later fights, a DVD frozen on the same stupid mid-blink face of a normally good-looking actor.
Jana’s mother, once such charming local color, so amusingly foreign and so obviously unrelated to my sexy Czech-model girlfriend, was now a live-in nightmare and plainly the mother of my increasingly foreign and disgruntled wife. Jana’s mother and sister had both married men who were relentlessly and regretlessly unfaithful, and so the ladies had seized the opportunity while I was packing for my trip to Sil’s deathbed to express their breakfast-table certainty, in front of our twins, that I was having an affair. Jana—very much the child of her mother’s dour Czech unhappiness and sullen victimhood—allowed her buttons to be masterfully pushed. Reminders of my authorial unpredictability and American suspiciousness were ringing in the room, and Jana greeted me with tearful accusations in front of the boys and her nodding mother and sister. The script called for her to break something, so she indulged in a single dramatic but economical flying saucer and an alienating stream of Czech obscenities, amusing to Tomáš and Miloš, then almost fifteen and, for the time being, just about done with me anyhow. My steady, then angry (and truthful) denials launched her defensive weapon: she had slept with … it doesn’t matter whom. I said I didn’t believe her, which was a serious tactical blunder because I thought she was unattractive, did I? Broken by giving birth (a rather contemptuous sweep of the arm at my laughing sons) to them? I thought she couldn’t win another man? “Arrogant American Jew!” Oy vey.
And so—on the long flight, the endless day as time zones passed in one direction at the same speed that time passed in the other and noon held on and on for hours beneath me, and, later, disoriented in the JFK holding area where counterterrorism shades into countertourism—if I allowed myself to believe that Jana had cheated on me, then it was a delusion of jet lag and stress and sorrow, but one I could pull from my luggage again, further on in this story, as necessary.
21
I ARRIVED IN MINNEAPOLIS. My stepfather had died while I was nodding off in a pressurized cabin.
It was the end of a love story, great at least for its many possible interpretations. Perhaps it was the comedy of Silvius the devoted lover whose dedication survived my mother’s false first choice (Shakespeare taught Jane Austen that trick). Or perhaps it was the tragedy of my mother settling for the dull, second-best offer, because her true love was too unsteady, flew too close to the sun, unable to tame himself to ordinary, human love—the poster on her daughter’s wall daily reminding her of The Tragedy of her first husband. How to define that second marriage to a first love? Each new scrap of evidence recolors all the rest, just as a good director can decide whether Henry V will be a hero, a brute, or a canny bluffer. The fewer the stage directions, the richer the possibility of each retelling.