The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [69]
Here’s the thing about Shakespeare: at the end of the comedies comes the wedding, the circle of life, the dance, the love that will lead to family and birth and life and then some unknown end. But there isn’t this: that after the marriage and dance, after the decades together, after the funeral, there is the woman, grown old and thoughtful and angry at herself for being angry at him, after everyone knows that everyone did their best, but who sits under the medlar tree and tries to say, “That was a bore” (God damn it). “I took the easy way, and I regret it.” If Dana and Harold Bloom are right, if we’re all just walking figments of Shakespeare’s imagination, then where in the canon is my mom, who could not quite say the truth about what she’d lived, that Sil’s love was not enough, that kindness and best efforts were not enough?
“Am I an ingrate? A shrew?”
“No.”
“I don’t really feel like one. I just know that’s the word for people who talk like this in this situation. Not even cold in the earth.”
“You can talk however you want to me.” If I later heard her words as a warning against living too little, risking too little, loving too little, playing it safe, well, one crime I will not cop to is ignoring motherly advice.
I didn’t know yet that her words were being banked, in some part of my cunning mind, converted to useful currency. I thought I was just being a good, understanding adult and son. But she spoke of regrets, and I recalled Jana’s farewell address to me earlier that week, and I later saw the maternal regret as deeply wise license. She later said exactly the opposite to Dana (“Thank God for Sil. I got what I needed, I owe him everything, and I am so blessed”), demonstrating a mental flexibility that is evidence of wisdom or empathy or Alzheimer’s. Her conversation with me may just have been steam releasing, only a piece of her.
We walked back home, to the remnants of the remarkable event Dana had organized with help from some theater friends. When Mom and I walked in, the afternoon had progressed to one of Sil’s cousins singing Sinatra on the karaoke machine Dana had rented while martinis were being shaken up by a catering bartender in a Twins uniform with MAUER written on the back.
And then I saw her.
Desire was instantaneous, that species of desire that feels like something rarer than mere lust but that no twenty-first-century grown-up can dare call by its proper name: “love at first sight.” The body stirs, but above the waist. The mind stirs, and insists something significant is happening, casts you into some pastoral scene, some favorite film, some recurrent dream where everyone used to be faceless, like wooden cutouts waiting for tourists. My urges were celestial, not yet sexual: I wanted to touch her face, to put the tips of my fingers against her cheek, to trace the groove between lip and nose. The beach at sunset, the path of skin that ran from her shoulder up to the tender intersection where jaw, ear, and neck meet and merge: dreary anatomical words, neck, skin, ear, nose. They fail.
I didn’t know who she was yet. She knew me before I knew her. “You’re Dana’s twin,” the stranger said as I zombie-staggered toward her.
“No one has ever recognized us like that. We don’t really look alike.”
“You can say that if you want,” she answered with a smile, and I began cataloguing all that I would give up for this woman. “But that doesn’t make it true. I’m—” She spoke her name, and all was confounded. I have to give her a name now, for textual convenience: something ancient that evokes the Levant, spiced, golden dark. “—Petra.”
I had her hand, and I let it drop as if I’d hurt myself. I echoed awhile: “Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, my sister’s, my sister’s—”
“Your sister’s,” she confirmed, laughing.
(A pretty good line from a rough critic: “Reading Arthur Phillips’ dialogue is like poring over the minutes of a stammerers’ convention.”)
“I’m so sorry about Sil. I met him a few times. A gentleman, and actually a sweetheart.”
“Thank