But then I would run out of stories, and things would go south. “Tell me again,” Penelope would begin. At this point into her third or fourth glass of wine.
And Arthur would say, “We’ve been over this a hundred times.”
“Is it like you said in your book? Because you were dissatisfied with me? With us?”
“That had nothing to do with it.”
“Then what?”
“I told you, I was speaking out a fear—”
“Don’t give me that fear bullshit! Answer me. Do you want to do—that—to him?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, I don’t understand. Am I phrasing the question correctly? Asking the right question? How can you be afraid that you’ll do that if you don’t want to do it? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I wanted to write a book that would take great courage to write — that no other writer would write. Think of Henry Miller. De Sade. Burroughs. I wanted to be unafraid. These writers looked into the abyss and wrote what they saw.”
“Were any of those writers married? Were any of them the primary caregiver of an eleven-year-old child?”
“I wanted to do something bigger. To sacrifice something.”
“Yourself, that’s who you’ve sacrificed. And your family along with you. You’re telling me you’re a terrorist, is what you’re saying. The kind that blows himself up on a plane.”
“We live an age where you can write almost anything. The only way forward is to utter what can’t be said. That which carries personal cost. If I were just risking my professional reputation — who would care? Who outside of my professional circle would take notice?”
Other times, Arthur would be the one on the offensive. In fact, Penelope’s relentless questioning seemed to help him find his voice. “The death of transgression is the death of art — don’t you understand? That an individual artist might do enough damage to be dangerous. This is hopeful, this means that art can still have an impact. If an artist is permitted to do or say anything, it’s proof that art no longer matters enough to care about. An artist becomes the cursing lunatic on the street whom people just shake their heads at. I want to wake people up! You’ve said it yourself, Penelope. The writers around me are writing such little books.” He looked at me. “I warned you about music; it was dying its last breath while we were still in school — and despite all attempts to rouse it, it’s dead. Irretrievably dead. Look at it now — you’ve been there, you’ve had four years of it — an academically sealed mausoleum, written and picked over by graduate students. The same is happening now with literature. Dying its slow death in academia. Its life drained away by writers describing smaller pieces of the world. Dying the death of clever, of marketable. Literature is no longer a word we use anymore. Literary is the current term. ‘Literary fiction,’ quote-unquote. Demoted to an adjective. And rightly so. Little of what’s being published these days deserves the noun. If the endeavor is to survive at all, it needs a shock to the system.”
“And you’re that shock,” I said. “You haven’t lost your flair for hyperbole, I see. Or self-aggrandizement.”
“We worry about the rainforest when we should be worried about the extinctions closer to home. We are fast approaching a culture without art.”
“Arthur. You can’t seriously believe all this. The Pulitzer Prize committee. The acquisitions department at the Whitney. They have no trouble finding great art to celebrate.”
“Do you think I care about what the institution’s patent office and zookeepers think of the crisis we’re in? Don’t you get it? A culture without art is a culture without a soul, nothing but a lifeless machine. To answer your implied question, yes, I do believe it, and I will take your feigned nonchalance as a sign I’m getting through to you. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a fictional account of incest published — if you’re writing from the point of view of the perpetrator? Have you ever heard of Varmes City Press? Neither had I, until they emerged, the sole fringe press that would agree to print my book.” He said this with a kind of incredulity, as though he himself could scarcely believe what he had done. That it hadn’t escaped his notice that perhaps this entire thing had been a colossal miscalculation. The shock of it was in his eyes. But then he went on. “My agent begged me to remove that last section. He said he himself had done this and shown it to Random House, to my previous editor, who said she’d buy it on the spot. But that would have been a little book, a small book. Which would have just contributed to the problem.”
Penelope stared — no, watched — she watched him. As though he were a stranger. “So,” she said, clearing her throat. “You wrote the book to save literature.”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you just say you’re sorry?”
“Sorry?”
“Do you see what you’ve done? You’ve killed us, Art. You’ve destroyed this family. Nothing will ever be the same.”
I should have left them alone to their arguing, but, as I said, I am a child of divorced parents, and old habits die hard. I wanted to get between them, to referee. But all I could do was watch. I could see how much pain they were in, both of them. Arthur could not explain away what he had done. And Penelope couldn’t accept the explanations Arthur gave. Just like Penelope, I, too, returned to that day. Arthur had put the manuscript into my hands as well. Tell me what to do with this. I’d sat out on the balcony holding it as they talked away about its fate. I now imagined chucking the stack over the railing, the pages scattering and flapping out before me like a flock of pigeons. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I came over to watch Penelope burn with the rage of a Homeric war widow. And Arthur, again and again, fail to offer any kind of solace. He would blink at her, big hands dangling stupidly at his sides, baffled to be having this same conversation yet again. Didn’t we resolve this one already? Because, just as abruptly as things would go south at the beginning of an evening, they would, despite Penelope’s dire pronouncements moments earlier, return to normal. Taking Arthur by one of his big dangling hands, she’d say, “Let’s go to bed, hon. I can’t think about this anymore.”
8. PENELOPE
WERE IT NOT FOR THE twin poles of Thanksgiving and Christmas to guide me, I’d remember all this as having happened over several seasons. But it was days, not months, from the holiday blowout around the Morels’ dining room table to my time with Penelope on Balthazar’s outdoor bench — from Viktoria’s first relapse to her haunting messages on my answering machine. The weather was no help; wild swings had gusts of sleet blowing through in the morning and snowmelt streaming in the gutters, baking hot by the afternoon — a time-lapse development to match the overclocked developments in my own life.
It was the first week of December.
Here was another thing: Will no longer made me nervous. His maturity amazed me. Were all eleven-year-olds like this — like little men? He seemed fully formed, with thoughts and feelings very much his own. The way he furrowed his brows when worrying over his parents. The way he sighed and rolled his eyes when I failed to understand a point he was making. The way he said actually, the way he said by the way and maybe so and just between you and me. And yet he still had all the features of a little boy; he could fit his fist easily inside my hand. Still thrill at the rifle crack of an empty heel-stomped juice box and make kazoo sounds with his empty lunch-sized box of raisins. He would say, “Do you think they’ll get a divorce?” With eyes that said, Say no.