The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read Online Free

art experts who swept through the world’s museums a few years ago, like avenging angels of facts or Santa Clausicidal maniacs, downgrading this or that old master (even
signed
paintings) to the status of “School of …” or “In the style of …” or the smirky “Attributed to …” My father ranted about these guys when I visited him in the late 1990s, as if it were the only thing on his mind. “Who wants to be
that
?” he stormed from across some other Formica. “What kid dreams of growing up to be the tight-ass joykill who travels the globe waving his facts around and denying people pleasure? As if his facts prove anything.”
    “What difference does it make?” I asked.
    “All the difference in the world.”
    “Why? It’s the same painting. It just means you can’t be pretentious about it. But if you liked the picture before, you still like it now. It doesn’t matter who painted it.”
    “Aesthetic empiricism,” he replied blandly. “I know, but that’s rare, Artie. Fact is, most people like the brand name, and the brand name helps them enjoy the product and opens them to trust other products. So being the big Dutch queen who prances around snatching off the brands—even if he’s right, which there’s no saying he is, although I do know the truth in one case, and he is right—that stops a lot of people from learning what they like. They don’t want to say they like it, because they’re afraid the Dutch guy’s going to call them a fool for liking the wrong thing.”
    A few years ago I was reading a book of essays I’d been asked to review for
Harper’s
called
The Curtain
, by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. In it he writes, “Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in its form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche.” I was at home in Prague, lying in bed next to my wife, who was humming in her sleep. I hadn’t been to the United States in a few years, hadn’t seen my father in years, and I had lately noticed with some relief how rarely I thought of him with anger or pain,
finally
, and then, at Kundera’s provocation, I began to cry. I still don’t agree with the sentiment—that a name on a work of art matters—but it was my father’s view of the world, and that day in court when I’d applauded him alone, he’d won me over, when I was an overweight and otherwise underdeveloped thirteen-year-old, and my father could still, for a little longer, do no wrong, no matter how many times the state said otherwise.
    I would have said it was a strict borderline: I loved him without reservation until the age when reservations were required. And yet, my mother told me a story last year that I had forgotten (and still cannot recall), of an event from when I was nine years old and attending a summer day camp in Minneapolis. According to her, one afternoon the bus dropped me off at the corner where my mother always met me, but this day my father was waiting. I stepped to the last stair ofthe bus and saw him instead of her smiling in the sunlight. I turned back to the drug-addled camp counselor who was vaguely in charge of not losing us or giving us to strangers, and I said, “My mom isn’t here yet. I’m not supposed to wait alone.”
    “It’s all right,” said Dad, stepping up to the bus. “I’m his father. Come on, Arthur, let’s go get an ice cream.”
    “Great then,” said the counselor.
    “That’s not my dad,” I said. “I don’t know that man.”
    The counselor’s laughter grew nervous as I retreated back onto the shadowy bus and refused to budge from my brown plastic seat. I suppose a request for my father’s identification must have