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 sidewalk 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.