The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [90]
I wept for Petra, with Petra, on Petra’s golden hands. I apologized for all of it, and she brushed away my apologies as irrelevant, relics of a different kind of relationship than we now had, and she kissed my brow. “You love him, despite everything,” she said, using up words and gestures and caresses that her girlfriend would need from her in a few hours. She would have to forge facsimiles then, as I was stealing the originals. And she seemed original to me in every way, even in her sympathy: “You love him, despite everything.” The words are commonplace, but she seemed like an oracle extracting hidden truths from my clotted veins, reading the world to me. “Yes,” I agreed, amazed, “that’s exactly it. I do,” and I laid my head on her lap and she stroked my hair.
I spoke with Jana a few hours later, told her I would be staying longer in Minneapolis for work and because of my father’s failing health. She had seen my father’s effect on me for years, and she said, “You love your father, don’t you? Still. Even with all of your lives and what he has done.” It wasn’t the same when she said it.
32
MY CAREER. Yes, after four novels in quick succession, I knew I was doomed to slouch in my study in Prague, if I still had a study there, in an apartment paid for by the novel of the same name, decorated with souvenirs of my publicity and publications. I was going to gaze, glazed, at a blank page until, dispirited, I would stare at a screen rendition of a blank page instead. My father had sensed how starved for inspiration I was. “You’re between books,” he’d said innocently. And for that reason, too, the Arthur project fell like rain onto a dying land.
I have never been strong at getting things done. Decisiveness and action are not my traits. I stumble into situations and then notice I like them well enough not to resist (so I take pleasure in creating characters who are my opposite, men of adventure and certainty). But now I began in earnest, fighting for my father’s life. I devolved into a sweaty, sparsely whiskered graduate student, eating strangely. I read the play at least twenty more times, making lists of vocabulary and grammar, noting references to research, labeling files: SOURCES, STYLE, STRUCTURE, DICTION. I read the pertinent bits of Holinshed’s Chronicles and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. I read the RSC Complete Works, sitting on a bench in the park with my sister’s beagle at my side. I read Shakespeare biographies and analyses (Shapiro, Bate, Tanner, Bryson, Greenblatt, Wood, Garber, Bloom, Vendler), books and articles on Shakespearean language (Crystal) and computer stylometry (Elliott and Valenza), Jacobethan theatrical practice (Joseph and Verre), Shakespearean forgeries (Ireland), and books about those apocryphal plays that haven’t made the official roster (Tucker Brooke). It is a measure of my fever—money-hungry, lust-breathing, fame-thirsty, guilt-fueled, daddy-pleasing—that I enjoyed all of it. I let Dana guide my education, spending much of my time at her apartment or in her theater’s greenroom, waiting for her to come out of rehearsal, seeing Petra often, but trying to give myself fully to my father’s project, to become the world’s most devoted and loving son for his dying months, proving that I meant no dishonor with Petra (and that I therefore deserved to have her).
I had my entertainment lawyer draft nondisclosure agreements, and I sent teasing letters to scholars at local universities, often the very men and women whose books and articles I’d been studying, tempting them with “a remarkable,