The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [70]
Dana and Petra had just bought a dog together, a male beagle they’d named Maria, as Dana had dreamt of doing for years, a very specific fantasy of very specific domesticity. Dana had been in high school when she first imagined living with a woman and co-owning a dog. She’d read Twelfth Night and heard in Sir Toby’s praise of his girlfriend, Maria, all the evidence she needed to know Shakespeare’s favorite breed:
SIR ANDREW Before me, she’s a good wench.
SIR TOBY She’s a beagle, true-bred.
And so Dana decided that someday she would have a beagle, and she and her beloved would name it Maria. She had waited more than thirty years for this woman who, in a second or two, had stormed and colonized my imagination from across a crowded wake.
“How’s the dog?” I asked.
“Not just any dog: Maria.”
“Maria. Ay, she’s a beagle.”
“True-bred,” agreed the woman so foully out of reach, so criminally denied me. “Dana was crazy picky. We had to interview breeders. Very much Gay Parent Overcompensation Disorder. Finally, she asks this guy in Wisconsin, ‘How are your beagles?’ and he says, ‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, and their heads are hung with ears that sweep away the morning dew.’ ”
“ ‘Crook-kneed and dewlapped like Thessalian bulls’?”
“You know the guy?”
“I know my sister.”
23
MY FATHER HAD A LITTLE LESS than two months remaining on his sentence. I suppose I would have flown to Minneapolis for his release if I hadn’t already been there to mark the end of Sil’s term, but I’m not certain of it. This period was the closest I ever came to my ideal of indifference to him, true-dyed, in the blood, not just feigned with conviction. I was due in Prague, should have been hurrying back to see what remained of my marriage, or what remained of my desire to save my marriage, to see who was still angry, who was offering apologies or planning departures. But I could find no desire to return. I sank into my hotel bed in Minneapolis and felt at home. I spent almost all of every day with my sister. I watched her record a radio ad, which reminded me of Dad’s vocal prowess when he used to read to us. I watched her study martial arts under the unblinking eyes of a slate-faced sensei. We cooked and ate long wine-rich dinners at her apartment. I played with her dog in Loring Park. I couldn’t help but notice we were almost always in the company of her love.
I visited Dad August 3, two weeks after Sil died, ready to try on the unnatural role of son, wanting to hear his plans for what was certain to be a short and thoroughly depressing last chapter of life, arming myself with as much protective covering as I could strap over my heart.
But I spent the drive down to Faribault recalling details of Petra’s face, laughing aloud at how she looked dressed as a man and how her hands felt on my back as she clasped my filled bra for the “Bend It ’til It Breaks” party hosted by Dana’s theater friends. “When you cross-dress, you’re every bit as alluring as Bugs Bunny,” she said. By the time I was passing through the various layers of security in visitor parking, I had a vast store of generosity for Dad bubbling up in me. I decided to see him through to the end as any man deserved, as his best efforts would have merited. One of us would do the right thing for the other. I planned to rent him an apartment, set up an allowance, find him a job teaching art at a senior center. I would expect nothing in return, not a glance, not a chat.
I waited in the newly rechristened Family Hall, which now served food: a bunch of withered, whiskered pre-raisins clung exhausted to their stems. For ten minutes I waited and thought of past visits and imagined Petra sitting next to me and what I would say to her about this room and what she would say to me about the man it had made me. And then they led him in. And I didn’t recognize him.
He was, magically, nearly eighty years old. He had been a time-lapse father, but this last leap, especially after Sil’s death, was horrific. A rickety man aswim in an orange jumpsuit, a visible skull,