Robert, seventy-five, breathing heavily, says, “Oh, my poor boy. A lot?”
Still Arthur says nothing. And Robert says nothing; he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can’t point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, “That one, that star, there.”
“Am I too old to meet someone, Robert?”
Robert sits up slightly, his mood shifting back to merrymaking. “Are you too old? Listen to you. I was watching a television show about science the other day. That’s the kind of nice-old-man thing I do now. I’m very harmless these days. It was about time travel. And they had a scientist on saying that if it were possible, you’d have to build one time machine now. And build another one years later. Then you could go back and forth. A sort of time tunnel. But here’s the thing, Arthur. You could never go any further back than the invention of that first machine. Which I think is really a blow to the imagination. I took it pretty hard.”
Arthur says, “We can never kill Hitler.”
“But you know it’s like that already. When you meet people. You meet them, say, when they’re thirty, and you can never really imagine them any younger than that. You’ve seen pictures of me, Arthur, you’ve seen me at twenty.”
“You were a handsome guy.”
“But really, really, you can’t imagine me any younger than my forties, can you?”
“Sure, I can.”
“You can picture it. But you can’t quite imagine it. You can’t go back any further. It’s against the laws of physics.”
“You’re getting too excited.”
“Arthur, I look at you, and I still see that boy on the beach with the red toenails. Not at first, but my eyes adjust. I see that twenty-one-year-old boy in Mexico. I see that young man in a hotel room in Rome. I see the young writer holding his first book. I look at you, and you’re young. You’ll always be that way for me. But not for anyone else. Arthur, people who meet you now will never be able to imagine you young. They can never go any further back than fifty. It isn’t all bad. It means now people will think you were always a grown-up. They’ll take you seriously. They don’t know that you once spent an entire dinner party babbling about Nepal when you meant Tibet.”
“I can’t believe you brought that up again.”
“That you once referred to Toronto as the capital of Canada.”
“I’m going to get Marian to pull the plug.”
“To the prime minister of Canada. I love you, Arthur. My point is”—and after this harangue he has apparently worn himself out, and takes a few deep breaths—“my point is, welcome to fucking life. Fifty is nothing. I look back at fifty and think, what the fuck was I so worried about? Look at me now. I’m in the afterlife. Go enjoy yourself.” Says Tiresias.
Marian reappears on the screen: “Okay, boys, time’s up. We’ve got to let him rest.”
Robert leans over to his ex-wife. “Marian, he didn’t marry him.”
“He didn’t?”
“Apparently I heard wrong. The fellow married someone else.”
“Well, that’s shitty,” she says, then turns to the camera with an expression of sympathy. White hair held back with barrettes, round black glasses reflecting a sunny day in the past. “Arthur, he’s worn out. It’s good to see you again. We can set up another chat later.”
“I’ll be home tomorrow, I’ll drive up. Robert, I love you.”
The old rogue smiles at Arthur and shakes his head, his eyes bright and clear. “Love you always, Arthur Less.”
“In this room, we take off our clothes before the meal.” The young woman pauses before the doorway, then covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes are wide with horror. “Not clothes! Shoes! We take off our shoes!” It is Less’s first restaurant of three today, and, the call to Robert having already thrown off his schedule, Less is eager to begin, but he gamely follows her ponytail to an enormous hall set with a table and sunken seating, where an elderly man, dressed all in red, bows and says, “Here is the banquet hall, and you can see it transforms into a place for maiko dancing.” He pushes a button, and as in a Bond villain’s lair, the back wall begins to tilt down, becoming a stage, and theater lights pivot out from above. The two seem enormously pleased by this. Less does not know what a maiko might be. He is given a seat by the window and eagerly awaits his kaiseki meal. Seven dishes, as before, taking almost three hours. Grilled, simmered, raw. And—why did he not expect this?—again butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Again, it is lovely. But, like a second date too soon after the first, perhaps a bit familiar?
Look at me now, comes Robert’s voice, haunting him from earlier. I’m in the afterlife. A stroke. Robert has never been kind to his body; he’s worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners, and Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of “a gaudy life.” It is only the carrier of that wonderful mind, after all. A case for the crown. And Robert has cared for that mind like a tiger with her young; he has given up drinking and drugs, kept a strict schedule of sleep. He is good, he is careful. And to steal that—to steal his mind—burglar Life! Like cutting a Rembrandt from its frame.
The second meal of the day takes place in a more modern restaurant decorated with the unembellished severity of a Swede, in blond wood; his waiter is blond as well, and Dutch. Less is given a view of a solitary tree decorated with green buds; it is a cherry, and he is informed he is too early for the blossoms. “Yes, yes, I know,” he says as graciously as he can manage. Over the next three hours he is served grilled and simmered and raw plates of butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. He greets each dish with a mad smile, recognizing the spiral nature of being, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. He murmurs quietly: You again.
When he returns to the ryokan to recover, the old woman is gone, but the young woman in braids is still there, reading a novel in English. She greets him with more apologies about his luggage: no suitcase has arrived. Somehow, it is more than Less can bear, and he leans against the counter. “But, Mr. Less,” the woman says hopefully, “a package did arrive for you.”
It is a shallow brown box postmarked from Italy, surely a book or something from the festival. Less takes it to his room, where he sets it on a table before the garden. In the bathroom, as if in an enchanted hut, a bath already awaits him, perfectly warm, and he soaks his weary body as he prepares for the next meal. He closes his eyes. Did you love him, Arthur? There is the scent of cedar all around. Oh, my poor boy. A lot?
He dries himself and puts on a gray quilted robe, preparing himself to put on the same wilted linen clothes he has worn since India. The package sits waiting for him on the table; he is so tired he considers leaving it for later. But, sighing, he opens it, and inside, wrapped in layers of Italian Christmas paper—how has he forgotten he gave his Japanese address?—is a white linen shirt and a suit as gray as a cloud.