The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (19 page)

“Bohemia!” my father wrote me back in ’94, congratulating me on my wedding, sending his well-justified regrets for the ceremony, where Dana served as my best woman and Sil and Mom were graciously entertained by Jana’s mother, an unwilling tour guide guiding unwilling tourists. “A magical place with a wild sea,” Dad rhapsodized. He preferred, no shock, the imaginary oceanic country of
The Winter’s Tale
to the landlocked but no less beautiful reality of Kafka, Havel, Kundera, Skvorecky, Stoppard, me. That was okay by then. I could laugh at my father by then. “And Arthur, his wandering and resistance complete, has taken a wife and accepted his crown! It reminds me of a story, and this time it may end well.”

In 1995, genetics, uninspired in its patterns, coughed up twins again, two boys who developed, to my obtuse surprise, into little Czechs who for a while thought their foreign father was okay, but then grew increasingly embarrassed by his accent and general air of
not belonging and his stupid answers to their czildhood predicaments. This period has mostly passed, and we understand one another better now. I harbor hopes for their twenties.

I intend to keep my kids out of this except to make three relevant points:

1) As twins, they were fascinating to watch. They were independent of me and Jana in a way monos would not have been. They had that same sense of completion and confidence—visible almost as soon as consciousness flickered on behind their oversized brown Slavic irises, my own blue eyes receding back into the gene pool. Their version of twindom involved more fisticuffs and flaring conflict than Dana’s and mine, but Jana and I learned early that our well-meaning intrusions in their intra-twin broils only made them go on longer and with more fragile conclusions, whereas left to their own violent devices, they would pummel each other only so far and so long as was necessary to institute some closer, still more conspiratorial partnership.

2) They loved their Aunt Dana instantly and with a laughing, un-Czech joviality that began when they were about three. She visited, as she did twice a year for seven years, until her conflicts with Jana made visiting untenable, and the twins would keep her to themselves—in their room, in the garden, in the woods, later in the streets of Prague.

3) They are fifteen now, and though as tightly bound to each other as ever, they will face struggles ahead that I would like to prepare them for, and perhaps a candid explanation of why I no longer live with them will help more than it embarrasses. And so I have written such an explanation for them, but elsewhere. This is not the place.

Except to say that I did not find my lost half in Bohemia after all, try as I did to fit myself against the unique edges of a lovely, kind woman, wounding her in the process with my own incompatible, jagged shards.

But I did write in Prague, and with some success, publishing four novels from 2002 to 2009. Each time I wound myself into ridiculous states of affectation and superstition, convinced that I could not finish a novel without sacrificing something: attendance at the twins’ birthday party, kindness to my wife, a visit to a sickly parent, honesty
to one of my rare Czech friends. I returned to the States on book tours and for family visits, though the tours became shorter and rarer as the book business shrank and publishers looked to more and more eye-popping product to halt the collapse. (Which, I have to admit, would include a new Shakespeare play, so we may save each other yet.)

I did not achieve true indifference to my father, and Jana would testify to that, having spent so long trying to nurse me through my anger and recurrent fears and sorrows, scolding me only when I would declare myself “over him,” since she knew she would bear the brunt of my renewed grief and furies the next time he let me down. She, in her Central European wisdom, knew that the goal itself was inane, and she would mock Dana’s forgiveness of Dad as American sentimentality, weak and self-deluding. You don’t get over things, Jana taught me.
You suffer infinitely
. It’s hard not to love the Czechs.

And how right she was. I sent him a personalized copy of my first novel, named after my new hometown, waited vainly for a response, then visited him about a month later.
To my father, who taught me so much about creativity. With all my love …
I sat across from him at yet another of those Formica-topped tables in yet another windowless room with carpeting the color of vomited-up oatmeal. In those surroundings, my feelings of having arrived (I was a novelist; I was a father; I was thirty-eight years old) merged with all the emotions of childhood visits to other Family Rooms. They were all present at once, and I realized how much of my life had been about him, and how much I wanted to hear him tell me that I was a great writer, as important to him as he was to me. This moment waited and trembled, and I did not know how to speak.

After ten minutes, at the most, asking after his daily routine and complimenting him on his retained youthfulness (he did look pretty good for seventy-two, not much older than my last visit, three or four years earlier), I couldn’t help myself any longer. I very uncoolly asked him if he’d had the time (!) to take a look at my novel yet.

He nodded eagerly, was very kind, effusive, really, in his praise of it, the imagery, the story, everything. It’s difficult to describe the relief and love, the pride and love, the happiness and love, the sense of
having forgiven and having been forgiven, both at the same instant. I should have been satisfied. I should have kissed him and flown back quickly to the Czech Republic to work on my next book and my indifference and my adulthood and my marriage.

Instead, I blundered on, blubbered forward. “There was something of you in the character of Imre, you know.”

“Was there? I—I didn’t … sense myself in him.”

He met my eye, and I knew, and I didn’t even call him on it, just felt disappointment as a sudden outrushing of all my air, almost of muscular control. I slumped against the table, trying to catch an in breath.

“I think he traded it for cigarettes,” I told Dana back in New York on the way home, futilely garbing pain in a joke for her.

“First edition? Warmly inscribed? Must have gotten a carton at least.”

“I would hope.” I melted into her couch.

“Well, come on, what did you expect, really? It was already written out centuries ago. The half-made man, self-loathing, comes to his wizardly father for approval, for his freedom to become fully human. Sound familiar, Caliban?”

“No. That sounds forced and irrelevant and annoying.”

Dana was reading a book by Harold Bloom, a Yale professor who traveled all the way to the maximalist and insane thesis that Shakespeare invented how people now live, communicate, think. Before Shakespeare, we were different, and since the plays have sunk into us (taught, explained, performed, filmed, turned into other works by later artists), we have all slowly but surely become like his characters. We think as he showed us people could think. Life is true to his art, not vice versa. The logical extreme evolution of our slavish love for this one writer ends in blasphemy: he is literally our creator. Dana, obsessing over the book with an enthusiasm that made me worry she’d stopped taking her medication, had decided that I most resembled the slave barbarian enthralled to the old magician in
The Tempest
. “Tell me you know how stupid that idea is,” I begged.

She was still living in our old rent-controlled one-bedroom. It was immediately comfortable to be with her back in New York, to wallow in nostalgia for our younger arrangement, if only for a couple of days
of meetings with Random House and my agent, interviews about
Prague
. She seemed at first to be thriving, perfectly suited to her surroundings. (I often used that phrase to describe happiness in others back then, as I realized how ill at ease and increasingly lost I was feeling in Prague.) She had no shortage of friends. People said hello to her all over the neighborhood, and her voicemail and email were clogged with invitations. She was at thirty-eight as physically lovely as ever, maybe even more so. She was single, still went out and met women when the need hit her, but it rarely did. When I arrived in town, I went straight to her rehearsal for an off-Broadway Beckett production, and she was clearly well liked there. Cast members sat next to me during breaks, excited to meet Dana’s twin and hear my stories about her past lives and loves, until the director passively aggressed from the stage, “I would hate to clear the house of family and friends, but I will have silence now, please. Thank you.”

But for all this, Dana’s loneliness emerged, and it was troubling. She took my arm, leaned in close to me, pleased me with her relief at my visit, her need of me, her questions about my next book, about the boys, the gifts she had for them. She didn’t want to go out, turned down all invitations from cast and crew.

Instead she holed us up in our old apartment, where we feasted out of white cartons with trusted old pagodas on the sides and watched DVDs of the young actress Anne Hathaway. When Dana was out west with a role in a pilot for a TV show that was never picked up, she had developed a powerful crush on Hathaway, having seen but not met her at a party in Hollywood. She paused each film whenever there was a close-up of the starlet’s face, her oversized features, her sparkling eyes. “I get the strangest feeling about her,” Dana said, after we’d emptied a village of pagodas and two bottles of wine. “When I look at her, I have the feeling that she is
it
, somehow. She’d be it if we ever met.” Dana had even written fan letters to her, an act of subservience she had previously stooped to only for Harold Bloom. She’d invited Hathaway to the opening nights of the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway plays that made up her own professional life, and, in the most openly affectionate letter, she quoted the sonnet to
her namesake: “ ‘
I hate’ from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’
 ”

“I’ve never
sent
them,” she said to my undisguised worry, but she was lying. “I’m not as far gone as all that.” She did, however, suggest, “Maybe you could write a screenplay with a part for her. And then you could introduce us.” Dana was a professional actress, but she didn’t ask me to write something for her to star in, only something for her fanciful crush. I offered her some of my Czech antidepressants, which she sampled. “Are you still taking something?” I asked. “Forty is coming. Only a fool would go in unarmed.”

I don’t want to paint her during that week in one color. She was also her amazing self, asking after everything, reporting on Mom and Sil, insightful and funny and loving and generous and intensely interested in my boys. She stayed up all night reading the manuscript pages of my next book before my flight home in the morning. She suggested a different ending, and I rewrote the book to her specifications. (“You’re smart to leave out the lesbians this time,” she said. “You’re not strong at them.”) It was my most successful novel, and several reviews quoted a passage Dana wrote in my manuscript’s margins.

I returned to my life in Prague, made more alienating by the comparison to home, by the feeling that Dana needed me, by the memory of my father’s face when he lied. I tried to settle into my Czech routines, my foreign family. I suffered an odd symptom: I started to lose my language skills. I had increasing difficulty recalling Czech vocabulary and grammar. I grew so frustrated that I went back to language school, even though I had been fluent and at one point had burnished my accent and slang to the point that I occasionally passed as Czech for a few minutes at a time. I ended up talking to a therapist about it.

That old childhood daydream came back: I was saddled with Shakespeare’s company again, though he was now fully adapted to modern life, reliant on his cellphone, jaywalking to reach a hot dog stand after a meeting at my publisher’s. I still didn’t like him: that same haircut, but now in jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt. There was, though, something I was desperate to ask him, the same questions
I wanted my father to answer:
Am I good? Will I be okay?
But every time this daydream raged, it had to end with me struggling foolishly to win his distracted attention. “Take those off for a minute,” I say.

“What?” Shakespeare shouts, the airplane headphones blocking out everything except the romantic comedy he’s watching. I mime and mouth for him to take off the headphones. “There’s no pause function on this,” he says, half-trying to hide his exasperation at my intrusion. “She’s a hotel chambermaid, very earthy. And the guy … wait, not him, wait … him, that guy, him: he’s a millionaire hotel guest, very uptight. They’re made for each other, but they don’t know it yet.”

And I tell him to go back to his movie.

I wrote to my father, still, from Prague, wrote
for
him, still. The definition of insanity, the twelve-steppers have patiently taught me, one day at a time, is to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I wrote for him, still. I have now written four novels, and I devised the idea of an anagram for him to decipher over years. The first letters of the titles of my novels are
S, P, E
, and
A
. I planned to write, with all my remaining years, books initialed
S, H, A, K, E, R
, and
E
, and then, maybe,
A, N, D, M, E
.

Shakespeare’s lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers:
Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters
. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.

A
CT IV:
King Arthur has allowed his court to become so feminized and debauched that the queen gets an hour every day to run things, putting knights on trial for charges of rudeness or romantic misbehavior. This ends only when a refreshed Saxon army invades
England yet again, thanks to Arthur’s soft and distracted defense policies. This harsh lesson teaches Arthur, finally, that his job, and the nature of life, is to be constantly at war with someone. He has no natural allies to help fight the Saxons because he impulsively married for love, rejecting the French. Since Arthur still doesn’t have an heir (Guenhera has miscarried twice), he is forced to name Mordred his heir in exchange for military assistance against the Saxons, barring any natural-born children. Guenhera, pregnant again, waits for news of the battle of Linmouth, and goes into labor. Mordred, having assisted Arthur in defeating the Saxons, finds himself both jealous of and charmed by Arthur and realizes he’s been fooled: Arthur will never let him be King of Britain. He vows to force the issue, perhaps even seduce Guenhera himself, proving God’s will by producing a child with her. On his way to another war in Ireland, this one a war of choice, Arthur returns to court to see his wife, who has miscarried for the third time. Young Philip of York appears, claiming to be King Arthur’s son (perhaps from Arthur’s mysterious layover in York back in Act II). Arthur, solving his political problem at great cost to others, impulsively makes Philip his heir and forces the queen to accept him. Later, Philip admits in soliloquy that he is an impostor.