The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [74]
Jana told me, over speakerphone as I was driving to my father’s old attorney’s office, that she was trading me in for a friend of ours, Jiři, whose advances and honest love she had long ago rebuffed. She said he had been waiting for her all these years, willing to be merely a friend, even a friend to me (whose treatment of her he loathed, she reported impartially), but she had had enough of her mistake. She was going. “I hope you’ll be very happy,” I shouted, the car swerving across lane markers on I-35.
The surface similarities to my parents and Sil were gaudy, and I think, sometimes, of the fairies of Shakespeare’s childhood and Midsummer, who trick unwary travelers. “I’ll lead you about a round, / Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier.” If one of them could do a Czech accent and acquire a cellphone, how easily they could play their fairy games and ruin us all.
How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up. I unconsciously provoked Jana until she threatened to run off with some Czech or other, which, in her emotion-strained English, was phrased as a fait accompli, which I gladly took as a statement of our separation and a permit to do whatever I wanted. I don’t deny the hypocrisy of my position. I had finagled a license to do as I wished and to feel morally pure as I did it. I was anesthetized to all that came next, heard no better angels murmuring to me, for many months to come—none that I couldn’t mock back into silence. (Still, I emailed the boys every night, long letters. Ha! Feeble memoirist: I need to assert that I am a good father.)
“Do I deserve this?” I asked the GPS after Jana hung up.
“Turn left in three hundred yards,” she purred. “That’s it. Yes. Yes! Just there. Just like that.”
25
BERTRAM THORN’S SHABBY OFFICE had likely never been impressive, even back in the days when he had partners and my father could afford their services. The misguided slogan—“Breve, Thorn, Tonos and Ogonek: We put the GATOR in litigator”—with its cartoon illustration hung over his law degree from the University of Florida. The thin dark-wood paneling with its peeling veneer. The dusty files bulging with tedious briefs. The exhausted and sagging venetian blinds with their knotted strings. The hairpiece so obvious, so mountainous, contoured, Mannerist, it could only be his real hair.
“He instructed me about this. The kids would come for it,” Bert said with an odd sadness I hadn’t expected in this aged lawyer. But a young lawyer defends as best he can a young client, then sees him sentenced again and again, then loses touch as he is locked away from other eyes, then greets that vanished client’s son, come to find the odd heirloom left behind those years ago, and the lawyer—I saw it happen—is struck nauseous at the sudden thundering announcement of time’s criminal trespass. “You were just little kids,” he said to the middle-aged man in his office. “A little boy.”
When I was a boy—lonely, chubby, prone to fantasy in solitude—I sometimes imagined that I was Death itself, and that no one could see me, except my next victim. I might be on the city bus—the old candy-red 1B—sitting across from an old man, his hands laced across the crook of a cane swaying between his spread knees. I would imagine saying to him in my kindly little boy’s voice, “It’s time,” and he would nod, rise, walk with me out the bus’s rear emergency exit, pass straight though it, leave the moving bus behind and beneath us as I took his arm. He drops his cane, and we walk through air to the destination where only I can deliver him.
I judged them, sometimes, those whose faces revealed (in my imagination) fear or disappointment.