Arthur

Arthur

“I am like the truth,” he said to himself, knowing there was nobody around to hear, “ugly and unwanted.”

As his feet shuffled over the cobblestones, which were wet and slippery from the rain, Arthur once again had the idea it was through these kinds of muffled conversations people had with themselves, in the early hours of the morning and under the influence of alcohol, that the art of philosophy must have been born.

On the one hand, he thought it difficult to believe that the key to heaven, the human soul and Plato’s world of forms was to be found in a tall glass of ale. On the other, he found it equally hard to deny the fact that his philosophical hunches had grown significantly since he first began drinking several years ago.

Coming up the decrepit stairwell of his building, he almost stepped on a rat. The scabby little thing would have been caught beneath his boot were not already missing half its tail. Drawn forth by some invisible force, it wrung itself through a tiny crack in the plastered wall, and disappeared into nothingness.

Arthur quickly followed suit. Prying open the door, the metal frame of which screeched against the tiled floor, he retreated into his Spartan home. Spartan, for it was small even for a single inhabitant. A rusty bedframe filled up most of the room, and what bit of space was left was taken up by a kitchen sink, a desk, and multiple piles of books, some of which were stacked all the way to the ceiling, and in the absence of light could easily be mistaken for actual people.

The sight of such a place would have made any other person miserable, yet Arthur, upon stepping into his humble abode, could not help but smile.

* * *

“I was thinking we could leave Berlin this weekend, go up to the mountains. What do you think?”

“I think your breath smells awful.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I’ve brushed my teeth so many times my gums are bleeding, and if I have another mint I might throw up. I don’t know what else I can do.”

“You could try keeping your mouth shut.”

He closed his mouth and she began to kiss him on his neck, her lips slowly trailing upward to a sensitive spot behind the ear. Looking down at their naked bodies on the bed, Arthur realized that her beauty captivated him only half as much as his own ugliness did; his short, pale, pudgy body, covered in spots, pocks and moles, awkwardly grinded up against her smooth, slick skin.

“Helen, do you like me?”

Helen answered with her hand, which she shoved into his face in order to push him off of her. “Okay,” she exclaimed, “that’s enough for one day,” and got up.

Watching her trying to comb the knots out of her hair, he could not help but notice how much she and his mother were alike. Both were vain to the core, and belonged to that petty yet ever-growing class of people whose futile and frivolous pursuit of earthly beauty blinded them to a much higher one: the truth.

Before completely losing himself in thought, though, he could just perceive Helen carelessly scattering the contents of her powder box all over his desk.

“Careful!” he cried, the instinct of self-preservation taking hold of him, and pounced onto her like a puma.

“Have some trust in me. I’m always cautious with your stuff.”

“This is not just stuff, Helen,” he said, snatching his writings off the table and cradling them as though they were a newborn baby.

“Oh, my apologies,” she said, with false humility and reverence, “I meant your great gift to mankind.”

Much to her dismay he, busy reorganizing his papers, did not hear the remark. “What are you getting so dolled up for?” he asked, absentmindedly, staring down at the neatly-typed title decorating the topmost page: The World as Will.

Helen smiled. “Why, for you of course.”

Arthur never laughed; he cackled. “You’re a funny one, aren’t you? But really, what is the occasion? Do you have a performance today?”

“No,” she said, straightening herself in her seat before declaring, deftly and ladylike, “Otto Urs is going to paint me.”

He raised a bushy eyebrow.

“He promised last night.” Smiling, she turned to catch the look on his face, but, much to her displeasure, it was still buried in the papers. “Actually,” she added, after a pause, “he made me promise, told me I had the features of Eros. You know, the incarnation of love itself. Why are you sneering? Do you not believe me?”

“Oh, no,” he cackled. “I believe you, alright.”

Pouting, Helen turned away from him. “Well, I don’t care either way. You don’t know the first thing about love.”

“And Otto doesn’t know the first thing about Greek mythology, or he would have known that Eros is a male,” he said, removing a fake tear with his finger. “But now that you said it, I am struck by the similarities!” He cackled on, malevolently, but his cackle soon receded way back into his throat; the way she pronounced Otto’s name did not sit well with him. “Do you actually think he is a good painter?” he inquired, seriously.

“Don’t ask me,” Helen replied, knowing he despised the man, the way he despised a good many people. “Ask Berlin.”

“If I were to ask Berlin I might get lynched. I’m asking you.”

“Well,” she started, in a very different, steady tone of voice, “his color palette is most pleasing to the eye and his use of light and shadow are quite revolutionary. But the real beauty of his work lies in his simplicity. With a single stroke does what other painters do with a hundred. And with the plainest of scenes, a look, a touch, a smile, he shows us the whole world, and more.”

Taking his jaws apart, which had been clenched together throughout the time that Helen spoke, he told her, “In your own words, please, if I wanted to hear my mother talk to me about art, I would lie down and wait for a nightmare to come claim me.”

Helen groaned. “Why do I have to tell you in my own words? I’m not a writer. Your mother communicates the feelings inside of me better than I ever could.” She then asked him, quickly, thus leaving him no time to respond to her previous remark, if he could pass her cigarettes.

“Where are they?”

“In my coat.”

Watching his naked body slide across the bed, she added, “Would you like me to put in a good word with your mother?”

“Don’t bother.” He almost interrupted her. “She’s dead to me, so I might as well be dead to her, too. I can’t find them.”

“The left pocket. On the inside.”

Arthur pulled out something, but it weren’t cigarettes.

“What is this?” From the tone of his voice, you’d almost think he found a severed head.

“What is what?” Helen asked, rather nonchalantly.

His trembling fingers pressed against the hardcover of a fancy manuscript, coated in red linen, adorned with an elegant golden imprint that read, A Lady Travels: Journeys in England and Scotland, From the Diaries of Johanna Schopenhauer.

“Oh, Christ.” (She’d forgotten about the book).  

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, waving it around like it was on fire.

“Where do you think? Your mother gave it to me.”

“But you haven’t read it, have you?” He pronounced the word read as though the verb denoted some sacrilegious act.

“Of course I have! What else was I supposed to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” he yelled, his big, balding head growing redder and redder with the second. “Burn it, dump it into a canal, feed it to a bunch of goats—anything but read it!”

“Who are you, a member of the inquisition?” Helen yelled in return. “I do not know why you’re making such a big deal out of this; it’s a good book. It’s a very good book, in fact.” She folded her arms to solidify her statement and then engaged him in a staring contest. She would have won, too, were it not for the unappetizing bits of foam that started dripping down the corners of his mouth. “Okay, fine,” she said, unfolding her arms again. “It’s not a very good book...But I won’t tell her that.”

“Because you’re trying to curry favor with her,” he lashed out at her.

“Because she’s my friend,” she lashed back at him.

“Because you want her to set you up with Otto.”

“Because that’s what friends do.”

“Oh, Helen—poor, ignorant, misguided little Helen—you are everything that is wrong with this world!” he flung his hands up to the plastered ceiling in a faint search for God. “Tell me, what’s more important: being nice to someone, or telling them the truth?”

Helen clicked her tongue the way she always did when she no longer saw any use in debating him, not because she believed his argument to be infallible, but simply because she thought he was being facetious.

Only a few things in the world annoyed Arthur as profoundly as that click of the tongue. “Answer me, Helen.”

“I really don’t see the—”

“Will you read what I wrote, too, then?” he said, shoving The World as Will into her face which Helen, almost instinctually, waved it away like a glass of spoiled milk.

“I cannot believe you!”

“I promise I’ll read it,” she said in a half-baked attempt to console him, “just not now. I—I have to get ready for Otto.”

“Sure, Otto…”

Every time a silence came to hang over them, it stayed around just a little longer than the one that preceded it.

“What did she say after I left?” he asked at last, in a defeated voice.

“You mean last Friday?”

“Yes.”

“That she would not be taking alms from you like a beggar.”

“Of course that’s what she said. Would you listen to her? The best-selling women’s author in all of Germany – the old crone is completely hysterical!”

“You’re not being fair.”

“I only said I would give her the money necessary for basic provisions, bread and water, but no more than that.”

“And that’s exactly what she meant when she said she would not take alms. You cannot expect a human being to live off bread and water alone.”

“And why not? I myself have been doing it for years, and get along just fine.”

“‘Fine’ isn’t the word I would use,” she said to herself.

“Well, it’s not my fault you two are spoiled to the bone,” he retorted, hugging himself. “I should have known. She wouldn’t allow me this victory unless she gained something from it herself.”

“Arthur, I don’t understand,” Helen said, leaning over to roll up her stockings. “What does your mother want your money for in the first place? Her estate is enormous. The food, the amusement, it’s the stuff of nobles.”

Arthur smiled a sinister smile. “And who do you think pays for all of it? A salon, my dear, is nothing but a glorified tavern. All people do there is drink and talk nonsense, and that is why I normally stay away from them.”

“Well, you know what?” Helen exclaimed as she threw on the rest of her undergarments, minding not to let them touch her face, “I like them.” Then she added, in such a way as though simply believing it made it so, “And I like your mother. And I think Otto has an absolute gift for painting. I could watch him work for days and just—”

“Oh!” he shouted, lost in his own head, oblivious to the world around him, which included Helen. “They claim to be enlightened Epicureans, but they’re nothing but degenerate hedonists! The exaggerated hugging, the insincere compliments, the meaningless small-talk and repetitive chit-chat, so much precious time wasted. And they have the nerve to call it high culture!”

“But why does your mother need your money?” she reminded him.

“Right,” he said, returning from the world within his mind to the real one, and he cleared his throat. “While salons are costly, they’re not very lucrative. My mother wants to provide the finest of the finest in order to attract the best of the best. And so she wastes her share of my father’s fortune to play musical chairs with Goethe and Schelling and whoever else happens to be in fashion. And now that her creditors are closing in on her, she wants me to become the latest sponsor of her abominable escapades, and give her my share of the inheritance, which I have handled respectfully and responsibly, so she can continue to desecrate my father’s corpse? If I believed in a hell, I would send her there.” By the end of it, he was red like a lobster, bits of foam dripping down his chin. 

Helen shook her head. “Just a mother and her son, yet you quarrel enough for a family of fifteen,” she observed, handing him a towel.

Arthur shook his head as well, but in an opposite direction. “More often than not, it’s the smaller families that quarrel the most,” he said, wiping the foam off his face. “When two people are confined into small spaces together, they slowly grow into each other’s opposites.”

This time it was Helen who laughed, and the sound, which was both rare and deadly, made Arthur perch his ears like a little rabbit listening for an approaching fox.

“What’s so amusing?” he asked.

“It’s just—” Helen giggled, “I just realized how you and your mother are alike.”

“You’re delusional,” he said, waving her away like a glass of spoiled milk (or fresh milk, since he only drank water).  

“She might be wasteful, and you’re stingy.”

“I’m not stingy,” he objected, “I just consider many things in life to be unnecessary luxuries.”

“And she might be social, and you’re somewhat of a hermit.”

“So remind me how we are like reflections in a mirror, would you?”

“Because you both think you’re the smartest people on this planet.” Having reduced him to silence, Helen put on the rest of her clothes quickly.

Just when she was ready to leave, Arthur held out The World as Will once more. “Could you please read something? Just a tiny bit. Anything.”

She hesitated. “Okay. But you read it to me, while I have my cigarette.”

He read to her while she smoked, and from the animated way in which he spoke, she got the impression he had read it aloud to himself many times before:

“As I was walking down the beach, I came across a field covered with skeletons, the skeletons of large turtles, in fact, five foot long and three foot broad. As I observed them, a group of live turtles emerged from the sea. But as they crept onto the beach to lay their eggs, a pack of wild, starving dogs appeared at the top of the dunes. They rushed at the turtles, lay them on their backs, tore open their unarmored bellies, and began to devour them alive. The cacophony of cries attracted a tiger, which began to attack the dogs, biting off their heads. I looked at this carnage, and at the skeletons, and in my mind I imagined this whole thing repeated thousands and thousands of times over, year in year out, and I thought to myself: is it for this that these little turtles are to be born? What offence could they possible have committed, while still in their mothers’ wombs, to deserve this punishment?”

By the time he was finished Helen, ash spilling on her skirt, stared at his naked self in shock and awe. “What was that supposed to be?” she asked.

“A new passage I added to the book,” Arthur said, ever so lightly. “It’s an anecdote, a story that tells the idea rather than explains it. Do you like it?”

“No, it’s awful!”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” she put out her cigarette and wiped its residue off her lap. “Because it’s grotesque!”

“But do you get the point?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Some of Otto’s work is grotesque as well, yet you adore that!”

“Otto’s work is different.” She made for the door, but Arthur got up to block her way.

“And why would that be?”

“Because it has a point! This—” she pulled the pages out of his hands and waved them around in front of his face—“does not. This is just pointless suffering.”

“But that is the point!” Arthur clarified, angry and happy at the same time. “The point is that there is no point. The point is that life is pointless suffering!”

“Well, what a point that is!” Helen shouted, and threw the pages up into the air.

Shrieking, Arthur left his post at once and began dancing around the room in a frantic effort to collect his words.  

“You know,” she told him as the watched his performance, “if marriage is as awful and boring as you always say it is—if I really have to spend hundreds and hundreds of nights in a dark, tiny bedroom—then the least I could ask for is a husband who writes funny or uplifting stories that make me want to smile, not shoot myself!” She then grabbed her purse and yanked open the door.

“And besides,” she added, “your story doesn’t make any sense. Who has ever seen a tiger at the beach?”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned around and left.

The last page had slid under the bed. Arthur, still fully naked, dropped down on his knees and extended his arm, but he couldn’t reach it.