Less Read online

  There is no Arthur Less without the suit. Bought on a whim, in that brief era of caprice three years ago when he threw caution (and money) to the wind and flew to Ho Chi Minh City to visit a friend on a work trip, searching for air-conditioning in that humid, moped-plagued city, found himself in a tailor shop, ordering a suit. Drunk on car exhaust and sugarcane, he made a series of rash decisions, gave his home address, and by the next morning had forgotten all about it. Two weeks later, a package arrived in San Francisco. Perplexed, he opened it and pulled out a medium blue suit, lined in fuchsia, and sewn with his initials: APL. A rosewater smell from the box summoned, instantly, a dictatorial woman with a tight bun, hectoring him with questions. The cut, the buttons, the pockets, the collar. But most of all: the blue. Chosen in haste from a wall of fabrics: not an ordinary blue. Peacock? Lapis? Nothing gets close. Medium but vivid, moderately lustrous, definitely bold. Somewhere between ultramarine and cyanide salts, between Vishnu and Amon, Israel and Greece, the logos of Pepsi and Ford. In a word: bright. He loved whatever self had chosen it and after that wore it constantly. Even Freddy approved: “You look like someone famous!” And he does. Finally, at his advanced age, he has struck the right note. He looks good, and he looks like himself. Without it, somehow he does not. Without the suit, there is no Arthur Less.

  But apparently the suit is not enough. Now, with a schedule crammed with lunches and dinners, he will have to find…what? A Star Trek uniform? He wanders down from the bookstore to his old neighborhood, where he lived after college, and it gives him a chance to reminisce about the old West Village. All gone now: the soul food restaurant that used to hold Less’s extra key underneath the coconut cake, the string of fetish stores whose window displays of rubberized equipment gave young Less terrors, the lesbian bars Less used to frequent on the theory he would have a better chance with the men there, the seedy bar where a friend once bought what he thought was cocaine and emerged from the bathroom announcing he had just snorted Smarties, the piano bars stalked, one summer, by what the New York Post inaccurately called “the Karaoke Killer.” Gone, replaced by prettier things. Beautiful shops of things made of gold, and lovely little chandelier restaurants that served only hamburgers, and shoes on display as if at a museum. Sometimes it seems only Arthur Less remembers how downright filthy this place used to be.

  From behind him: “Arthur! Arthur Less?”

  He turns around.

  “Arthur Less! I can’t believe it! Here I was, just talking about you!”

  He has embraced the man before he can fully take in whom he is embracing, instead finding himself immersed in flannel, and over his shoulder a sad big-eyed young man with dreadlocks looks on. The man releases him and starts to talk about what an amazing coincidence this is, and all the while Less is thinking: Who the hell is this? A jolly round bald man with a neat gray beard, in plaid flannel and an orange scarf, standing grinning outside a grocery-store-used-to-be-a-bank on Eighth Avenue. In a panic, Less’s mind races to put this man before a series of backgrounds—blue sky and beach, tall tree and river, lobster and wineglass, disco ball and drugs, bedsheets and sunrise—but nothing is coming to mind.

  “I can’t believe it!” the man says, not releasing his grip on Less’s shoulder. “Arlo was just telling me about his breakup, and I was saying, you know, give it time. It seems impossible now, but give it time. Sometimes it takes years and years. And then I saw you, Arthur! And I pointed down the street, I said, Look! There’s the man who broke my heart; I thought I’d never recover, I’d never want to see his face again, or hear his name, and look! There he is, out of nowhere, and I have no rancor. How long has it been, six years, Arthur? No rancor at all.”

  Less stands and studies him: the lines on his face like origami that has been unfolded and smoothed down with your hand, the little freckles on the forehead, the white fuzz from his ears to his crown, the coppery eyes flashing with anything but rancor. Who the hell is this old man?

  “You see, Arlo?” the man says to the young man. “Nothing. No feelings at all! You just get over all of them. Arlo, will you take a picture?”

  And Less finds himself embracing this man again, this chubby stranger, and smiling for a picture that young Arlo moves to take until the man begins instructing him: “Take it again; no, take it from over there, hold the camera higher; no, higher; no, HIGHER!”

  “Howard,” Less says to his old lover, smiling. “You look wonderful.”

  “And so do you, Arthur! Of course, we didn’t know how young we were, did we? Look at both of us now, old men!”

  Less steps back, startled.

  “Well, good to see you!” Howard says, shaking his head and repeating, “Isn’t that lovely? Arthur Less, right here on Eighth Avenue. Good to see you, Arthur! You take care, we’ve got to run!”

  A kiss on the cheek is misaimed and lands on the history professor’s mouth; he smells of rye bread. Brief flash to six years ago, seeing his silhouette in the theater and thinking: Here is a good companion. A man he almost stayed with, almost loved, and now he does not even recognize him on the street. Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing. It is not impossible both are true. A wave to poor Arlo, to whom none of this is a comfort. The two are about to cross the street when Howard stops, turns back, and, with a bright expression, says: “Oh! You were a friend of Carlos Pelu, weren’t you? Isn’t it a small world! Maybe I’ll see you at the wedding?”

  Arthur Less did not publish until he was in his thirties. By then, he had lived with the famous poet Robert Brownburn for years in a small house—a shack, they always called it—halfway up a steep residential stairway in San Francisco. The Vulcan Steps, they’re called, curving from Levant Street at the top, down between Monterey pines, ferns, ivy, and bottlebrush trees, to a brick landing with a view east to downtown. Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress. The “shack” was only four rooms, one of them expressly Robert’s, but they painted the walls white and hung up paintings Robert had gotten from friends (one of them of an almost-identifiable Less, nude, on a rock), and planted a seedling trumpet vine below the bedroom window. It took five years for Less to take Robert’s advice and write. Just labored short stories at first. And then, almost at the end of their lives together, a novel. Kalipso: a retelling of the Calypso myth from The Odyssey, with a World War II soldier washed ashore in the South Pacific and brought back to life by a local man who falls in love with him and must help him find a way back to his world, and to his wife back home. “Arthur, this book,” Robert said, taking off his glasses for effect. “It’s an honor to be in love with you.”

  It was a moderate success; none other than Richard Champion deigned to review it in the pages of the New York Times. Robert read it first and then passed it to Less, smiling, his glasses on his forehead for his poet’s second pair of eyes; he said it was a good review. But every author can taste the poison another has slipped into the punch, and Champion ended by calling the author himself “a magniloquent spoony.” Less stared at those words like a child taking a test. Magniloquent sounded like praise (but was not). But a spoony? What the hell was a spoony?

  “It’s like a code,” Less said. “Is he sending messages to the enemy?”

  He was. “Arthur,” Robert said, holding his hand, “he’s just calling you a faggot.”

  Yet, like those impossible beetles that survive years in the dunes, living only on desert rains, his novel somehow, over the years, kept selling. It sold in England, and France, and Italy. Less wrote a second novel, The Counterglow, which got less attention, and a third, Dark Matter, which the head of Cormorant Publishing pushed hard, giving it an enormous publicity budget, sending him to over a dozen cities. At the launch, in Chicago, he stood offstage and listened to his introduction (“Please welcome the magniloquent author of the critically acclaimed Kalipso…”) and heard the whimpering applause of perhaps fifteen, twenty people in the auditorium—that dreadful harbinger, like the dark rain spots one notices on a sid
ewalk before the storm—and he was brought back to his high school reunion. The organizers had convinced him to do a reading billed, on the mailed invitation, as “An Evening with Arthur Less.” No one in high school had ever wanted an evening with Arthur Less, but he took them at their word. He showed up at low squat Delmarva High School (even squatter than in memory), thinking of how far he had come. And I will let you guess how many alumni came to “An Evening with Arthur Less.”

  By the publication of Dark Matter, he and Robert had parted, and since then, Less has had to live on desert rains alone. He did get the “shack” when Robert decamped to Sonoma (mortgage paid off after Robert’s Pulitzer); the rest he has patched together, that crazy quilt of a writer’s life: warm enough, though it never quite covers the toes.

  But this next book! This is the one! It is called Swift (to whom the race does not go): a peripatetic novel. A man on a walking tour of San Francisco, and of his past, returning home after a series of blows and disappointments (“All you do is write gay Ulysses,” said Freddy); a wistful, poignant novel of a man’s hard life. Of broke, gay middle age. And today, at dinner, surely over champagne, Less will get the good news.

  In his hotel room, he puts on the blue suit (freshly dry-cleaned) and smiles before the mirror.

  Nobody came to “An Evening with Arthur Less.”

  Freddy once joked that Less’s agent was his “great romance.” Yes, Peter Hunt knows Less intimately. He handles the struggles and fits and joys that no one else witnesses. And yet, about Peter Hunt, Less knows almost nothing at all. He cannot even recall where he is from. Minnesota? Is he married? How many clients does he have? Less has no idea, and yet, like a schoolgirl, he lives on Peter’s phone calls and messages. Or, more precisely, like a mistress waiting for word from her man.

  And here he is, coming into the restaurant: Peter Hunt. A basketball star in his college days, and his height still commands a room when he enters it, though now instead of a crew cut, he has white hair as long as a cartoon conductor’s. As he crosses the restaurant, Peter telepathically shakes hands with friends on all sides of the room, then locks his gaze with poor smitten Less. Peter is wearing a beige corduroy suit, and it purrs as he sits. Behind him, a Broadway actress makes an entrance in black lace while on either side of her, two lobsters thermidor are revealed in clouds of steam. Like any diplomat at a tense negotiation, Peter never discusses business until the eleventh hour, so for the whole meal it is literary talk about authors Less feels obliged to pretend he has read. Only as they are having their coffee does Peter say: “I hear you’ll be traveling.” Less says yes, he’s on a trip around the world. “Good,” Peter says, signaling for the bill. “It will take your mind off things. I hope you’re not too attached to Cormorant.” Less stutters, then falls silent. Peter: “Because they passed on Swift. I think you should fiddle with it while you’re traveling. Let new sights bring new ideas.”

  “What did they offer? They want changes?”

  “No changes. No offer.”

  “Peter, am I being dumped?”

  “Arthur, it is not to be. Let’s think beyond Cormorant.”

  It is as if a trapdoor has opened beneath his dining chair. “Is it too…spoony?”

  “Too wistful. Too poignant. These walk-around-town books, these day-in-the-life stories, I know writers love them. But I think it’s hard to feel bad for this Swift fellow of yours. I mean, he has the best life of anyone I know.”

  “Too gay?”

  “Use this trip, Arthur. You’re so good at capturing a place. Tell me when you’re back in town,” Peter says, giving him a hug, and Less realizes that he is leaving; it is over; the bill was delivered and paid for all while Less was grappling in the dark, bottomless, slick-walled pit of this bad news. “And good luck tomorrow with Mandern. I hope his agent’s not there. She’s a monster.”

  His white hair whips around like a horse’s tail, and he strides across the room. Less watches the actress accept Peter’s kiss on her hand. Then he is gone, Less’s great romance, off to charm another smitten writer.

  Back in his room, he is surprised to find, in the Lilliputian bathroom, a Brobdingnagian tub. So, even though it is ten o’clock, he runs a bath. As it fills, he looks out at the city: the Empire State Building, twenty blocks down, is echoed, below, by an Empire Diner with a card stock sign: PASTRAMI. From the other window, near Central Park, he sees the sign for the Hotel New Yorker. They are not kidding, no sir. No more than the New England inns called the Minuteman and the Tricorner are kidding, with their colonial cupolas topped with wrought iron weather vanes, their cannonball pyramids out front, or the Maine lobster pounds called the Nor’easter, hung with traps and glass buoys, are kidding, or the moss-festooned restaurants in Savannah, or the Western Grizzly Dry Goods, or the Florida Gator This and Gator That, or even the Californian Surfboard Sandwiches and Cable Car Cafés and Fog City Inn, are kidding. Nobody is kidding. They are dead serious. People think of Americans as easygoing, but in fact they are all dead serious, especially about their local culture; they name their bars “saloons” and their shops “Ye Olde”; they wear the colors of the local high school team; they are Famous for Their Pies. Even in New York City.

  Perhaps Less, alone, is kidding. Here, looking at his clothes—black jeans for New York, khaki for Mexico, blue suit for Italy, down for Germany, linen for India—costume after costume. Each one is a joke, and the joke is on him: Less the gentleman, Less the author, Less the tourist, Less the hipster, Less the colonialist. Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn’t even know where he’s stored.

  He turns off the water and gets into the tub. Hot hot hot hot hot! He steps out, red to his waist, and lets the cold run a little longer. Mist haunts the surface and the reflection of the white tiles, with their single stripe of black. He slips back in, the water only slightly too hot now. His body ripples beneath the reflection.

  Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink. He has never seen another gay man age past fifty, none except Robert. He met them all at forty or so but never saw them make it much beyond; they died of AIDS, that generation. Less’s generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond fifty. How are they meant to do it? Do you stay a boy forever, and dye your hair and diet to stay lean and wear tight shirts and jeans and go out dancing until you drop dead at eighty? Or do you do the opposite—do you forswear all that, and let your hair go gray, and wear elegant sweaters that cover your belly, and smile on past pleasures that will never come again? Do you marry and adopt a child? In a couple, do you each take a lover, like matching nightstands by the bed, so that sex will not vanish entirely? Or do you let sex vanish entirely, as heterosexuals do? Do you experience the relief of letting go of all that vanity, anxiety, desire, and pain? Do you become a Buddhist? One thing you certainly do not do. You do not take on a lover for nine years, thinking it is easy and casual, and, once he leaves you, disappear and end up alone in a hotel bathtub, wondering what now.

  From nowhere, Robert’s voice:

  I’m going to grow too old for you. When you’re thirty-five I’ll be sixty. When you’re fifty I’ll be seventy-five. And then what will we do?

  It was in the early days; he was so young, maybe twenty-two. Having one of their serious conversations after sex. I’m going to grow too old for you. Of course Less said this was ridiculous, the age difference meant nothing to him. Robert was hotter than those stupid boys, surely he knew that. Men in their forties were so sexy: the calm assurance of what a man liked and didn’t, where he set limits and where he set none, experience and a sense of advent
ure. It made the sex so much better. Robert lit another cigarette and smiled. And then what will we do?

  And then comes Freddy, twenty years later, standing in Less’s bedroom: “I don’t think of you as old.”

  “But I am,” Less says from where he lies in the bed. “I will be.” Our hero resting sideways on his elbows. The dappled sunlight showing how the trumpet vine has grown, over the years, to lattice the window. Less is forty-four. Freddy, twenty-nine, wearing his red glasses, Less’s tuxedo jacket, and nothing else. In the center of his furred chest, barely an indent where the hollow used to be.

  Freddy looks at himself in the mirror. “I think I look better in your tuxedo than you do.”

  “I want to make sure,” Less says, lowering his voice, “that I’m not preventing you from meeting anyone.”

  Freddy catches Arthur Less’s gaze in the mirror. The young man’s face tightens slightly, as if he had a toothache. At last, he says, “You don’t have to worry about it.”

  “You’re at an age—”

  “I know.” Freddy has the look of someone paying very close attention to every word. “I understand where we are. You don’t have to worry about it.”

  Less settles back in the bed, and they look at each other silently for a moment. The wind sets the vine tapping against the window, scrambling the shadows. “I just wanted to talk—” he begins.

  Freddy turns around. “We don’t need to have a long talk, Arthur. You don’t have to worry about it. I just think you should give me this tuxedo.”

  “Absolutely not. And stop using my cologne.”

  “I will when I’m rich.” Freddy gets onto the bed. “Let’s watch The Paper Wall again.”

  “Mr. Pelu, I just want to make sure,” Less goes on, unable to let go until he is certain he has made his point, “that you don’t get attached to me.” He wonders when their conversations had begun to sound like a novel in translation.