The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [98]
35
I MOVED OUT OF MY HOTEL and into my father’s apartment as his roommate and caretaker. He had finally revealed the details of his medical condition to me and then to Dana, the inoperable and growing lump in his brain, for which all treatment seemed to him (and to me) far worse than the eventual death it promised. He wanted no sympathy and no treatment. He couldn’t prevent the former, but he could in exchange for it insist on doing his part for “our work.”
“Yard sale,” he announced, intending to raise money for the project, though we needed none.
His worldly goods consisted of a few boxes of books, some jazz LPs and 45s from the fifties, papers and letters, some art supplies, all of which he’d stored in my mother’s basement. “Seriously? She let you do that?”
“I hope so. Will you call her?”
“You should call,” Dana said, the ridiculous, last-moments-of-a-romantic-comedy matchmaker tone convecting through her voice. She opened her phone and dialed for him, held it to his ear until he finally used his own hand, held Dana’s hand with his other.
“Hello, Mary,” he said, then paused for so long that Dana and I looked at each other with brows lifted, stunned that Mom had so much to say right out of the gate. Finally, he went on and our fantasies deflated: “This is Arthur. I’m in Minneapolis. Artie and Dana got me a place. I hope you’re keeping well. Say, I have some boxes with you, I hope, still. I need them. Maybe we should speak on the telephone. You must know how to call the kids. Or there’s a phone here, I think. So. Goodbye.” He handed the open phone back to Dana. “She has an answering machine,” he explained helpfully.
At Mom’s request, I picked up the boxes without him. (“Good sense,” Dad said, surrendering at once, the same man who two decades earlier had intended to outlive Sil and win her back.)
Meanwhile, Dana and Petra took him clothes shopping, though both of them adamantly denied responsibility for the T-shirt he was wearing the next day that read I WOULD DO ME.
He laid his few salable possessions on a blanket on the small patch of grass in front of the apartment building, everything but his private papers, and we sat on the stairs next to them, drinking Diet Coke. “Too sweet,” he said. “Lacks that lingering bite that Tab had.”
“That was the cyclamate. Turns out to be bad for you.”
“Literary executorship is a lot to ask.” He seemed worried about me, offering me an out. “It can certainly demand a lot of your time. Worse, probably put your own writing in the shade for a spell.”
I savored the concern; it was well made. “Don’t worry about that. My work will be there when we’re done. Besides, this is more important than my writing. It is, and that’s okay. We’re doing something world changing. And we’re doing it together.”
A year later, I am writhing to escape this web spun by two dead men, and literary executorship has become the most self-eradicating punishment Dante could have devised for an egotistical author. There was another writer born on my and Will’s birthday, a hero of mine, whose son also signed his life over to promoting and protecting his father’s works. I think of them both as these two other laughing corpses fling their bolas around my ankles.
But that day, I was eager to reassure: “You’ll be with us for a while longer, Dad. And, even after, you can count on me.” We sat under the painted bedsheet he’d strung up between two posts: YARD SALE—I’M DYING.
“You’re dying? Seriously?” asked a typical customer, torn between looking for a bargain and paying her last respects to the chipper old man.
“Well, it’s serious for me.”
“You’re really dying? You seem so cheery.”
“There are limited options for my mood. You’ll see someday.”
“Ha, ha, true enough, I suppose. Well, I’m sorry. And that’s amazing. You’re inspirational. How much for the Stan Kenton?”
A child’s memory is poor because extraordinary events—I went to a party!