The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [67]
“Oh, thank you for coming,” said my mother when I walked into the yellow kitchen, too late. She hugged me. She was grateful, as if I owed her nothing at all but was doing her some kindness, and I held her a long time, my carry-on bag trying to wedge its way between us. Dana stood to the side, sympathy personified.
Dana had moved back to Minneapolis six months earlier and been hired as the drama teacher at our old private school. Not long after, she was winning big roles in local theaters, doing much better than she ever had in New York. She had an apartment of her own but had been living with Mom since Sil was hospitalized for the last time. “I love it here,” she said when Mom had gone for a nap and we were having coffee in the kitchen, shrunken since our childhood. “I honestly feel”—she lowered her voice to a stage whisper—“that I’ve never been happier. Obviously, sad about Sil. I am. And I am, I am worried about what happens to Mom next, but I wish so much that you and Jana and the boys would come spend a month here. Everything’s different. I could almost say I’ve lived in a dream until now.” Dana took my hands. “It’s like I’ve never been happy before, like I didn’t know what the word really even meant. Everything else was just … preparing me. I have to tell you about someone I’ve been seeing. She’s moved in, actually.”
22
IT IS TIME TO CALL in the memoirist’s best friend: the changed name. I name my family, my poor sister, my German girl, my wronged wife. I call the villain of this story by my own or my father’s name. Yet one identity must be shrouded. What crime could justify this protection? Or, more likely, has the memoir come unmoored from memory’s safe harbor and now drifts off into black fantasy, and the desperate writer must do the legal minimum, lest the whole freyed tissue unravel?
No, she was real. She still is real, and if she was not as innocent as some, neither was she as guilty, not by a long distance, and I send her and her daughter all my worthless love and yet more concentrated apology.
What disguise can I tailor that will hide her from you while still showing you what she was? The more one loves, the more each detail matters. To smudge a line, pixelate the birthmark, drag a censor’s squealing black pen across her eyes, transpose two digits of her Social Security number—I am destroying her, and making all this more difficult to explain, because I will claim this one small memoirist’s privilege: if you saw her in every detail, up to her name, which fit her so snugly, you’d have done just the same as I. If you judge me harshly, it is only because, in my discretion, I am describing her so poorly.
No risk in confessing that she was ten years younger than Dana and I. Can I safely disclose that she was of another race? Of another religion? (One as irrelevant and inescapably identifying to her as Judaism had become to Dana and me.) Can I say she was a composer and musician, that she played the theremin, professionally, in films and in Minneapolis theaters? Or that Dana called her “my tigress of the Euphrates”? If true, how many people in Minneapolis now know at once whom I mean? If false, how odd are these colors, how far from comprehensible I’ve made her, and thus me and everything about to happen.
“And thus me.” For all I thought otherwise when I began this project, I do want to be understood. I do want to be forgiven. I do want you to believe me and agree with me and approve of me. And if I cannot have your acceptance, then I’m tempted to say, “So be it, I’ll play the villain instead.” That’s what passes for psychological depth in Richard III, you know.
May I self-mitigate, allow myself some standard excuses? How about … Dana’s ties to the girl were weak, as strained as my own to my life back in the wilds of Bohemia? No. I saw no arguments between them, heard no doubts disclosed during twin-to-twin heart-to-hearts. No, Dana was in love, every bit as much as I later became, but she was there first, had made and received promises, had sought so long for just this love and could rightly expect