You’re like a person without skin.
By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab. A mediocre review or careless slight can no longer harm him, but heartbreak, real true heartbreak, can pierce his thin hide and bring out the same shade of blood as ever.
How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting? Perhaps because he finds fresh sources for it. Even foolish old fears have never been vanquished, only avoided: telephone calls (frenetically dialing like a man decoding a bomb), taxicabs (fumbling the tip and leaping out as from a hostage situation), and talking to attractive men or celebrities at parties (still mentally rehearsing his opening lines, only to realize they are saying their good-byes). He still has these fears, but the passage of time solved them for him. Texting and email saved him from phones forever. Credit card machines appeared in taxis. A missed opportunity could contact you online. But heartbreak—how can you avoid it except to renounce love entirely? In the end, that is the only solution Arthur Less could find.
But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself.
Not as a novelist in his own right; rather, as a kind of witness. A Civil War widow, as Less thinks of it.
It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well.
Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.
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.
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 wonders when their conversations had begun to sound like a novel in translation.
One of those San Francisco bars that is neither gay nor straight, just odd, and Freddy still wore his blue shirt and tie from teaching, and they were having some new kind of beer that tasted like aspirin and smelled like magnolias and cost more than a hamburger.
Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.
Less does not remember what he replies. All he knows is that he has been fooled into returning to Mexico, to the scene of the crime, to be impaneled before the world beside the woman he has wronged. Marian Brownburn, with a microphone. Surely this is how gay men are judged in Hell. By the time he returns to the hotel, he is drunk and stinks of smoke and worms.
Perhaps the coffee will counteract the sedative. You take an upper for a downer, right? This, Less thinks to himself as he tries to butter the bread with its companion chunk of ice, is how drug addicts think.
His mind, a sloth making its slow way across the forest floor of necessity, is taking in the fact that he is still in Germany.
The time when any couple has found its balance, and passion has quieted from its early scream, but gratitude is still abundant; what no one realizes are the golden years.
Like a curious child, he tries the pool, then the sauna, the cold plunge, the steam room, the cold plunge again, until he is as scarlet as a fever victim.
It was the year the cicadas returned; Less had not been alive when they buried themselves in the earth.
But now they returned: tens of thousands of them, horrifying but harmless, drunk driving through the air so they bumped into heads and ears, encrusting telephone poles and parked cars with their delicate, amber-hued, almost Egyptian discarded shells. Girls wore them as earrings. Boys (Tom Sawyer descendants) trapped the live ones in paper bags and released them at study hour. At night, the creatures hummed in huge choruses, the sound pulsing around the neighborhood. And school would not end until June. If ever.
And his mother, a softball champ in her day, has had to pretend none of this matters to her at all and drives Less to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own beliefs than a relief to the boy.
Hopes are the ladders to dreams…
Their lovemaking had been ruined by the bedroom bookcase, from which dead writers stared at him like dogs at the foot of the bed.
“It was the Pulitzer committee,” he said evenly. “It turns out I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all these years.” “You won?” “It’s not Pew-lit-sir. It’s Pull-it-sir.”
At some point, Stella saw him from across the room and went over with her stork walk; she was all bones and sharp edges, a too-tall, unpretty woman who celebrated her flaws with confidence and grace, so they became, to Less, beautiful.
Less feels his mind drifting away like a spaceman from an airlock, off into the asteroid belt of his own concerns.
He did not take the wrong car; the wrong car took him.
Arthur Less has left the room while remaining in it.
You look handsome in your suit. I don’t know why you’re shacked up with a man in his fifties. Oh, I know, you like a finished product. You don’t want to add a pearl. Let’s have champagne before we go. I know it’s noon. I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren’t love, but this is love. What Frank wrote: It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything in the world.”
“The key to speaking a new language,” she told them, “is to be bold instead of perfect.”
Bold instead of perfect, Less’s tongue is bruised with errors.
Male friends tend to switch to girls in the Lessian plural, becoming Freundin instead of Freund; and, by using auf den Strich instead of unterm Strich, he can lead intrigued listeners to believe he is going into prostitution.
He called the course Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein, based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts.
Less stares at his schnitzel (a crisp map of Austria). He is not here, in Berlin, in the Schnitzelhaus.
At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears.
Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage.
He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.
Less kisses her on each cheek, but she leans in for a third. Two in Italy. Four in Northern France. Three in Germany?
His words, his banalities, his backward laugh. He feels drunk and blue. Yes, his gift to them is a Gift. Like Claudius with Hamlet’s father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.
His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before.
It is a traveler’s fallacy that one should shop for clothing while abroad. Those white linen tunics, so elegant in Greece, emerge from the suitcase as mere hippie rags; the beautiful striped shirts of Rome are confined to the closet; and the delicate hand batiks of Bali are first cruise wear, then curtains, then signs of impending madness. And then there is Paris.
An eel of panic wriggles through him as he searches the room for exits, but life has no exits.
Less himself staring at the ceiling fan and wondering if the room was in motion below a stationary fan, or the opposite, much like a medieval man wondering if the sky moved or the earth.
Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original. Something like an Arthur Less.
The silence lasts as long as it takes a camel to summit a dune.
This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.
Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? It isn’t in us, it isn’t in human beings, to be tied to one person forever. Siamese twins are a tragedy. Twenty years and one last happy road trip. And I thought, “Well, that was nice. Let’s end on success.”
“It’s true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it’s falling apart and it’s been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother’s. That’s how towns become ghost towns. It’s how houses become junk stores. And I think it’s how people get old.”
Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins.
We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding.
There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!” And the man is taken after all.
Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross’s.
Was he testing to see how elastic love could be?
Perhaps he did not know what he was doing; perhaps it was a kind of madness. But perhaps he did know. Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.
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