“Oh my God!”
“Bigger temples keep one. We can get around him,” Carlos says, and, honking noisily, they do. Less turns his head to see the creature disappearing through the rear window, turning its head back and forth, lifting its burden, clearly aware of the commotion it is making and taking not a little joy in it. Then a crowd of men with limp Communist flags comes out of a building, smoking, and the unearthly vision is blocked.
“Listen, Arthur, I have an idea—ah, we’ve arrived,” Carlos says abruptly, and Less can feel more than see their sharp descent toward the ocean. “Before we say good-bye, I have two quick questions. Easy questions.” They pass through a gate; Less finds it hard to believe the driver is still honking.
“We’re saying good-bye?”
“Arthur, stop being so sentimental. At our age! I’ll be back in a few weeks, and we’ll celebrate your recovery. I have business. It’s a miracle we get this time together. The first is, you still have your letters from Robert?”
“My letters?” The honking stops, and the car comes to a halt. A young man in a green uniform approaches Less’s side.
“Come on, Arthur, do you or don’t you? I have a plane to catch.”
“I think so.”
“Bravo. And the other question is, have you heard from Freddy?”
Less feels the rush of hot air as the car door opens beside him. He looks and sees a handsome porter standing there, holding his aluminum crutches. He turns back to Carlos.
“Why would I hear from Freddy?”
“No reason. Keep yourself busy with your book until I get back, Arthur.”
“Is everything okay?”
Carlos gestures good-bye, and then Less is outside watching the grand white Ambassador toil its way uphill into the palms until nothing is left but the constant goosing of its horn.
He can hear the sea and the voice of the porter: “Mr. Less, some of your bags have arrived. They are already in your room.” But he is still staring at the palms in the wind.
Strange. It was said so casually that Less almost missed it. Sitting in the corner of the car and asking that simple question. It did not show in his face—Carlos kept the same expression of placid impatience as always—but Less could see him playing with a ring, turning and turning a lion-headed ring on his finger as his eye focused on wounded, aging, helpless Arthur Less. Less understands that the entire conversation was illusion, maya, chimera, and that Carlos’s real purpose was otherwise. But he cannot decode it. He shakes his head and smiles at the porter, taking his crutches and looking up at his new white prison. Something in the way his old friend asked it, some hidden track that only a careful listener, or one who has listened for so many years, would notice, and that no one would ever suspect of Carlos: Fear.
For a fifty-year-old man, the boredom of lying convalescent in bed is rivaled only by sitting in church. Less is given the Raja Suite and set up in the comfortable bed with a view of the ocean marred only by a thick beekeeper’s veil of mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. It is elegant, cool, well staffed, and stiflingly dull. How Less misses the mongoose. He misses Rupali and the picnickers, the battle of the bands, the pastor and the tailor and Elizabeth the yellow snake; he even misses Jesus Christ Our Savior. His only intrigue is with the porter, Vincent, who stops by every day to check in on our invalid: a clean-shaven tapered face and topaz eyes, the kind of bashful handsome man who has no idea he is handsome, and whenever Vincent pays a visit, Less prays for Jesus Christ Our Savior to extinguish his libido; the last thing he needs is a convalescent crush.
So the weeks pass in blank tedium, which turns out—finally—to be the perfect situation for Less, at last, to try to write.
It is like pouring water from an old leaking bucket into a shining new one; it feels almost suspiciously easy. He simply takes a gloomy event in the plot—say, a market owner dying of cancer—and inverts it, having Swift, out of pity, accept seven fragrant rounds of cheese, which he will then have to carry around San Francisco, growing more rank, throughout the rest of the chapter. In the sordid scene in which Swift takes a bag of cocaine to the hotel bathroom, cutting out a line on the counter, Less merely adds a motion-activated hand dryer and—whirr! A blizzard of indignity! All it takes is a pail thrown out a window, an open manhole, a banana peel. “Are we losers?” Swift asks of his lover at the end of their ruined vacation, and Less gleefully adds the response: “Well, baby, we sure ain’t winners.” With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining. What sport! If only one could do this with life!
He finds himself awakening at dawn, when the sea is brightening but the sun still struggles in its bedclothes, and sits down to lash his protagonist a few more times with his authorial whip. And somehow, a bittersweet longing starts to appear in the novel that was never there before. It changes, grows kinder. Less, as with a repentant worshipper, begins again to love his subject, and at last, one morning, after an hour sitting with his chin in his hand, watching birds cross the gray haze of the horizon, our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.
Finally, one afternoon, Vincent arrives and asks, “Please, how is your foot?” Less says he can now walk around without crutches. “Good,” Vincent says. “And now, please, Arthur, get ready for an exceptional outing.” Less asks, teasingly, where are they going together? Perhaps Vincent is at last going to show him some of India. But no; the man blushes and replies: “I, alas, am not going together.” He says they are offering this exceptional outing to guests when the resort opens. A buzzing outside; he looks out the window to see a speedboat, helmed by two expressionless teens, approaching the dock. Vincent helps as Less limps to the boat and shakily boards. The engine starts with a tiger’s roar.
The boat ride is half an hour, during which Less sees leaping dolphins and flying fish skipping like stones over the water, as well as the floating mane of a jellyfish. He recalls an aquarium he visited as a boy, where, after enjoying a sea turtle that swam breaststroke like a dotty old aunt, he encountered a jellyfish, a pink frothing brainless negligeed monster pulsing in the water, and thought with a sob: We are not in this together. They arrive, at last, at an island of white sand no bigger than a city block, with two coconut palms and small purple flowers. Less steps ashore gingerly and makes his way to the shade. More dolphins leap in a darkening ocean. An airplane underlines the moon. It is unmistakably paradise—until Less turns around to see the boat departing. Castaway. Is it possible this is some final plot of Carlos’s? To imprison him in a room for weeks and only now, when he is one chapter away from finishing his novel, abandon him on a desert island? It is a New Yorker cartoon fate. Less appeals to the setting sun: He gave up Freddy! He gave him up willingly; he even stayed away from the wedding. He has suffered enough, all on his own; he is crippled, uniplegic, forsaken, and bereft of his magic suit. He has nothing left to take away, our gay Job. He drops to his knees in the sand.
A nagging hum from behind him. When he looks around, he sees another speedboat headed his way.
“Arthur, I have an idea,” Carlos tells him after dinner. Carlos’s assistants have made a quick campfire and grilled them two harlequined fish they speared along the reef, and Less and Carlos are sitting down among cushions to share a bottle of cold champagne.
Carlos reclines on one of the spangled cushions; he is wearing a white caftan. “When you get home, I want you to find all your correspondence about the Russian River School. From all the men we knew. The important ones, Robert and Ross and Franklin in particular.”
Less, caught awkwardly between two pillows, struggles to right himself and wonders, Why?