The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [99]
“You know, you start, when your eyes are fresh, you look at a painting like A View of Delft, and you say, ‘My God! Look what that fellow can do! He can paint like that, and it looks just like the sky over Delft!’ and you are happy or ambitious or jealous or all of those. And then, all these years hurry by, all the middle part that clouds your eyes and your brain. And then, you look at real clouds like these, and you think, ‘Hmph. That looks like that painting by what’s-his-name, the Dutch fellow.’ ”
“I remember the weather the day we did the UFO,” I said. “Like this.”
“Well, you should exert your memory a little more forcefully,” he said with a non-sequiturial whip crack of anger, “because that was July.”
We took in about sixty-five dollars that day, deducting the cost of the painted sheet. We threw out what didn’t sell, and after that my father owned some clothes, toiletries, and a box of letters. I asked him if he wanted to go to a museum, a library, a bookstore, a movie, a park, the beach, for a boat ride, if he wanted some cash and to be left alone. “I want to help with the play,” he said. “And sleep.”
There was real help he could now offer (when he wasn’t sleeping, which was sometimes fifteen hours a day): the professors were coming, and somebody had to keep a close eye on them.
As we were not going to let our billion-dollar pamphlet leave our sight, scholars either had to invite me and the book to their campus, or they could visit us on Lake Street. They were allowed as much time as they wanted with the quarto; they could take notes. They could not photograph more than four pages; they could not take the play out of the room.
My father or I would sit, reading on the couch or listening to my iPod—which device quite impressed my dad—and though some of the scholars grumbled about the restrictions (and I caught one with a pocket scanner when I came out of the bathroom), most viewed the situation as a common enough challenge of their field, and just being allowed to read the play thrilled most of them almost to giggling. They were a funny bunch, about what you would expect Shakespeare scholars to be. Some of them I quite like, and I am sorry to have dragged them into this; I hereby apologize, not for the last time.
“He’s quite dishy, isn’t he?” Petra said late one October afternoon of David Crystal, the world’s leading expert in Shakespearean linguistics, who flew in from Wales to study The Tragedy of Arthur in my living room.
Petra and I were sharing a bottle of wine and then starting a second in the kitchen while my father slept and Dana was at rehearsal. Across the room, by the big windows, Professor Crystal had the play open on the glass table in front of him, his laptop displaying the online OED. He would occasionally laugh aloud or grunt or exclaim, “Well, look at that!” while he read, and seemed quite oblivious to Petra and me getting drunk and punchy across the bar in the kitchen, our hands brushing now and again, my imagination piloting us far into the future.
She left to pick up Dana, and I stayed as the sun set early, still a little drunk, watching this engrossed and happy linguist grow happier and more engrossed by the blue glow of his laptop lexicon, while I sank into melancholy, as the wine wore off, and Petra had been away from me and with my sister for minutes, then hours, and I was left with her lipstick on a wine glass, which I masochisto-moronically held on to while replaying and reconsidering the four moments in which the skin of her hand touched or nearly touched my own. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” I couldn’t help asking