The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [76]
All of which I would plead guilty to, except except except that my admission does no justice to her, for whom you would give up the past, for whom you would grow dizzy and drop principles and vows and ties to your old self. Can I say that the woman I wed was a fantasy and this stranger was reality? I don’t suppose I can, and yet … “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” wrote Marlowe, the man Shakespeare feared for many years was the better writer, the man who with those words issued a license to misery to millions of underexperienced teenagers and thousands of overeducated middle-aged jackasses.
Is it surprising that Dana and I would both feel so strongly about her? Not at all: she should have fit both of us; it makes a sort of geometric sense, just as Jana and Dana’s longstanding mutual dislike should have warned me much earlier that my marriage was doomed.
When Shakespeare was a young writer, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when the hero’s best friend loses his mind and madly pursues the hero’s beloved, he says, “Love bade me swear, and Love bids me forswear … / At first I did adore a twinkling star / But now I worship a celestial sun.” But later, in The Sonnets, when such a woman appears, destroying the friendship of the two men, the poet underplays her, says she’s not a classic beauty—she’s nothing like the sun.
So Shakespeare faced the same writerly problem that I now face, and he gave up: to describe that gravitational object of affection—a celestial sun—and justify the effect of her by portraying her charms or to skip the whole thing, admit it’s impossible, and say she’s nothing like the sun but she had her effect even so. I’m still young enough, naïve enough, competitive enough that I want to capture her in ink and paper, pixel and byte, so she might live longer, unchanged, immortalized by my writing, what every great artist hopes to achieve.
26
PETRA AND I WERE LED into the bank’s safe-deposit basement. “Your box hasn’t been opened in”—the dapper boy consulted a blue index card—“twenty-three years.”
“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction,” Petra said. Fair enough: safe-deposit boxes are one of those elements of life most people don’t deal with, or see only in crisis. Usually, the vaults exist only in movies, and so entering one makes you feel like you’re in a movie, but, really, we’re just talking about a chilly basement room of lockers and locked drawers. All the false theatrical majesty that banks employ to make their customers feel safe—Petra and I found it funny. She refused to take off her sunglasses, even in the basement, until the object was unveiled, and even then had trouble shedding that Scandinavian accent she’d played with during all the ID checks and goofy key protocol, ours turning in conjunction with the bank employee’s. “Darling,” she told the clerk as he left us in a private viewing room. “Do not come in here even if you hear screaming. Am I clear?”
My father’s safe-deposit box was a cube, rather than a skinny drawer, about eighteen inches to each side. Inside it sat a small wooden crate, even stenciled on the side in the stern broken capitals of the military or the coffee business: BANANAS, as if a tiny cargo ship had recently docked and unloaded gnomish pallets of wee goods. “This is too strange,” Petra said. “Your family is, really, just beyond.” The wooden lid lifted off easily in one piece to reveal canvas coverings. Flap after flap of excess canvas was unpeeled until we were looking at a black metal lockbox, square and only a few inches thick, closed on each side with clasps like those of a musical instrument case. All