Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

“Your first time in Mexico?”

  “Yes, yes, it is.”

  “Welcome to Mexico!”

  What other desperate characters have they invited to this shindig? He dreads the appearance of any acquaintances; he can bear only a private humiliation.

  Arturo turns to Less with the pained expression of one who has just broken something beloved of yours. “Señor Less, I am so sorry,” he begins. “I think you speak no Spanish, am I correct?”

  “You are correct,” Less says. He is so weary, and the festival packet is so heavy. “It’s a long story. I chose German. A terrible mistake in my youth, but I blame my parents.”

  “Yes. Youth. And so tomorrow the festival is completely in Spanish. Yes, I can take you in the morning to the festival center. But you are not to speak until the third day.”

  “I’m not on until the third day?” His face takes on the expression of a bronze-medal winner in a three-man race.

  “Perhaps”—here Arturo takes a deep breath—“I take you downtown to see our city instead? With a compatriot?”

  Less sighs and smiles. “Arturo, that is a wonderful suggestion.”

  At ten the next morning, Arthur Less stands outside his hotel. The sun shines brightly, and overhead in the jacarandas three fantailed black birds make peculiar, merry noises. It takes a moment before Less understands they have learned to imitate the player piano. Less is in search of a café; the hotel’s coffee is surprisingly weak and American flavored, and a poor night’s sleep (Less painfully fondling the memory of a good-bye kiss) has led to an exhausted state.

  “Are you Arthur Less?”

  North American accent, coming from a lion of a man in his sixties, with a shaggy gray mane and a golden stare. He introduces himself as the festival organizer. “I’m the Head,” he says, holding out a surprisingly dainty paw for a handshake. He names the midwestern university at which he is a professor. “Harold Van Dervander. I helped the director shape this year’s conference and put together the panels.”

  “That’s wonderful, Professor Vander…van…”

  “Van Dervander. Dutch German. We had a very esteemed list. We had Fairborn and Gessup and McManahan. We had O’Byrne and Tyson and Plum.”

  Less swallows this piece of information. “But Harold Plum is dead.”

  “There were changes to the list,” the Head admits. “But the original list was a thing of beauty. We had Hemingway. We had Faulkner and Woolf.”

  “So you didn’t get Plum,” Less contributes. “Or Woolf, I assume.”

  “We didn’t get anyone,” says the Head, lifting his massive chin. “But I had them print out the original list; you should have found it in your packet.”

  “Wonderful,” Less says, blinking in perplexity.

  “Your packet also includes a donation envelope to the Haines Scholarship. I know you have just arrived, but after a weekend in this country he loved, you may be so moved.”

  “I don’t—” says Arthur.

  “And there,” the Head says, pointing to the west, “are the peaks of Ajusco, which you will remember from his poem ‘Drowning Woman.’” Less sees nothing in the smoggy air. He has never heard of this poem, or of Haines. The Head begins to quote from memory: ‘Say you fell down the coal-chute one Sunday afternoon…’ Remember?”

  “I can’t—” says Arthur.

  “And have you seen the farmacias?”

  “I haven’t—”

  “Oh, you must go, there’s one just around the corner. Farmicias Similares. Generic drugs. It’s the whole reason I throw this festival in Mexico. Did you bring your prescriptions? You can get them so much cheaper here.” The Head points, and Less can now make out a pharmacy sign; he watches a small round woman in a white lab coat dragging the shop gate open. “Klonopin, Lexapro, Ativan,” he coos. “But really I come down here for the Viagra.”

  “I won’t—”

  The Head gives a cat grin. “At our age, you’ve got to stock up! I’ll try a pack this afternoon and tell you if it’s legit.” He puts his fist down at his crotch level, then springs his erectile thumb upward.

  The mynah birds above mock them in ragtime.

  “Señor Less, Señor Banderbander.” It is Arturo; he seems not to have changed clothes or demeanor from the night before. “Are you ready to go?”

  Less, still bewildered, turns to the Head. “You’re coming with us? Don’t you have to see the panels?”

  “I really have put together some wonderful panels! But I never go,” he explains, spreading his hands on his chest. “I don’t speak Spanish.”

  Is it his first time in Mexico? No.

  Arthur Less visited Mexico nearly thirty years ago, in a beat-up white BMW fitted with an eight-track tape player and only two tapes, two suitcases of hurriedly packed clothes, a bag of marijuana and mescaline taped under the spare tire, and a driver who sped down the length of California as if he were running from the law. That driver: the poet Robert Brownburn. He awakened young Arthur Less with a call early that morning, telling him to pack for three days, then showed up an hour later, motioning him quickly into the car. What caper was this? Nothing more than a fancy of Robert’s. Less would grow used to these, but at the time he had known Robert for only a month; their encounters for drinks had turned into rented hotel rooms, and now, suddenly, this. Being whisked away to Mexico: it was the thrill of his young life. Robert shouting above the noise of the motor as they sped between the almond groves of Central California, then long stretches of quiet while they switched the tapes around again, and the rest stops where Robert would take young Arthur Less off behind the oak trees and kiss him until there were tears in his eyes. It all startled Less. Looking back, he understood that surely Robert was on something; probably some amphetamine one of his artist friends had given him up in Russian River. Robert was excited and happy and funny. He never offered whatever he was on to Less; he only handed him a joint. But he kept driving, with hardly a stop, for twelve hours, until they reached the Mexican border at San Ysidro, then another two hours through Tijuana and down toward Rosarito, where, at last, they drove along an ocean set on fire by a sunset that cooled to a line of neon pink, and finally arrived in Ensenada, at a seaside hotel where Robert was slapped on the back in welcome and given two shots of tequila. They smoked and made love all weekend, barely escaping the hot room except for food and a mescaline walk on the beach. From below, a mariachi band endlessly played a song that only constant repetition had allowed Less to memorize, and he sang along to the llorars as Robert smoked and laughed:

  Yo se bien que estoy afuera

  Pero el día que yo me muera

  Se que tendras que llorar

  (Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar)

  I know I’m out of your life

  But the day that I die

  I know you are going to cry

  (Cry and cry, cry and cry)

  On Sunday morning, they bid good-bye to the hotel staff and headed in another speed streak back toward home; this time, they made it in eleven hours. Weary and dazed, young Arthur Less was dropped off at his apartment building, where he stumbled in for a few hours’ sleep before work. He was deliriously happy, and in love. It did not occur to him until later that during the entire trip, he never asked the crucial question—Where is your wife?—and so decided never to mention the weekend around Robert’s friends, fearing he would give something away. Less grew so used to covering up their scandalous getaway that even years later, when it can’t possibly matter anymore, when asked if he has ever been to Mexico, Arthur Less always answers: no.

  The tour of Mexico City begins with a subway ride. Why did Less expect tunnels filled with Aztec mosaics? Instead, he descends, with wonder, into a replica of his Delaware grammar school: the colorful railings and tiled floors, primary yellows and blues and oranges, the 1960s cheerfulness that history revealed to be a sham but that still lives on here, as it does in the teacher’s-pet memory of Arthur Less. What retired principal has been brought down to design a subway on
Less’s dreams? Arturo motions for him to take a ticket, and Less duplicates his motions of feeding it to a robot as red-bereted police officers look on in groups large enough to make futbol teams.

  “Señor Less, here is our train.” Along comes an orange Lego monorail, running along on rubber wheels before it comes to a stop and he steps inside and takes hold of a cold metal pole. He asks where they are going, and when Arturo answers “the Flower,” Less feels he is indeed living now inside a dream—until he notices above his head a map, each stop represented by a pictograph. They are indeed headed to “the Flower.” From there, they switch lines to head to “the Tomb.” Flower to tomb; it is always thus. When they arrive, Less feels gentle pressure on his back from the woman behind him and is ejected smoothly onto the platform. The station: a rival grammar school, this time in bright blues. He follows Arturo and the Head closely through the tiled passages, the crowds, and finds himself on an escalator gliding upward into a square of peacock sky…and then he is in an enormous city square. All around, buildings of cut stone, tilting slightly in the ancient mud, and a massive cathedral. Why did he always assume Mexico City would be like Phoenix on a smoggy day? Why did no one tell him it would be Madrid?

  They are met by a woman in a long black dress patterned with hibiscus blossoms, their guide, who leads them to one of Mexico City’s markets, a stadium of blue corrugated steel, where they are met by four young Spanish men, clearly friends of Arturo’s. Their guide stands before a table of candied fruits and asks if anyone has allergies or things they will not or cannot eat. Silence. Less wonders if he should mention make-believe foods like bugs and slimy Lovecraftian sea horrors, but she is already leading them between the stalls. Bitter chocolates wrapped in paper, piled in ziggurats beside a basket of Aztec whisks, shaped like wooden maces, and jars of multicolored salts such as those Buddhist monks might use to paint mandalas, along with plastic bins of rust- and cocoa-colored seeds, which their guide explains are not seeds but crickets; crayfish and worms both live and toasted, alongside the butcher’s area of rabbits and baby goats still wearing their fluffy black-and-white “socks” to prove they are not cats, a long glass butcher’s case that for Arthur Less increases in horrors as he moves along it, such that it seems like a contest of will, one he is sure to fail, but luckily they turn down the fish aisle, where somehow his heart grows colder among the gray speckled bodies of octopuses coiled in ampersands, the unnamable orange fish with great staring eyes and sharp teeth, the beaked parrotfish whose flesh, Less is told, is blue and tastes of lobster (he smells a lie); and how very close this all is to childhood haunted houses, with their jars of eyeballs, dishes of brains and jellied fingers, and that gruesome delight he felt as a boy.

  “Arthur,” the Head says as their guide leads them on between the icy shoals. “What was it like to live with genius? I understand you met Brownburn in your distant youth.”

  No one is allowed to say “distant youth” but you, isn’t that a rule? But Less merely says, “Yes, I did.”

  “He was a remarkable man, playful, merry, tugging critics this way and that. And his movement was sublime. Full of joy. He and Ross were always one-upping each other, playing a game of it. Ross and Barry and Jacks. They were pranksters. And there’s nothing more serious than a prankster.”

  “You knew them?”

  “I know them. I teach every one of them in my course on middle-American poetry, by which I don’t mean the middle America of small minds and malt shops, or midcentury America, but rather the middle, the muddle, the void, of America.”

  “That sounds—”

  “Do you think of yourself as a genius, Arthur?”

  “What? Me?”

  Apparently the Head takes that as a no. “You and me, we’ve met geniuses. And we know we’re not like them, don’t we? What is it like to go on, knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity? I think it’s the worst kind of hell.”

  “Well,” Less said. “I think there’s something between genius and mediocrity—”

  “That’s what Virgil never showed Dante. He showed him Plato and Aristotle in a pagan paradise. But what about the lesser minds? Are we consigned to the flames?”

  “No, I guess,” Less offers, “just to conferences like this one.”

  “You were how old when you met Brownburn?”

  Less looks down into a barrel of salt cod. “I was twenty-one years old.”

  “I was forty when I happened upon Brownburn. Very late for us to meet. But my first marriage had ended, and suddenly there was humor and invention. He was a great man.”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Oh yes, we invited him to the festival.”

  “But he’s bedridden in Sonoma,” Less says, his voice finally taking on the fish market’s chill.

  “It was an earlier list. Arthur, I should tell you, we have a wonderful surprise for you—”

  Their guide stops and addresses the group:

  “These chilis are the center of Mexican cuisine, which has been labeled by UNESCO as a World Heritage intangible.” She stands beside a row of baskets, all filled with dried chilis in various forms. “Mexico is the main Latin American country that uses hot peppers. You,” she says to Less, “are probably more used to chilis than a Chilean.” One of Arturo’s friends who has joined them for the day is Chilean and nods in agreement. When asked which is the spiciest, the guide consults the vendor and says the tiny pink ones in a jar from Veracruz. Also the most expensive. “Would you like to taste some relishes?” A chorus of Sí! What follows is a contest of escalating difficulty, like a spelling bee. One by one, they taste the relishes, increasing in heat, to see who fails first. Less feels his face flush with each bite, but by the third round he has already outlasted the Head. When given a taste of a five-chili relish, he announces to the group:

  “This tastes just like my grandmother’s chow-chow.”

  They all look at him in shock.

  The Chilean: “What did you say?”

  “Chow-chow. Ask Professor Van Dervander. It is a relish in the American South.” But the Head says nothing. “It tastes like my grandmother’s chow-chow.”

  Slowly, the Chilean begins to guffaw, hand over his mouth. The others seem to be holding something in.

  Less shrugs, looking from face to face. “Of course, her chow-chow wasn’t so spicy.”

  At that, the dam breaks; all the young men burst into howls of laughter, hooting and weeping beside the chili bins. The vendor looks on with raised eyebrows. And even when it begins to subside, the men keep stoking their laughter, asking Less how often he tastes his grandmother’s chow-chow. And does it taste different at Christmas? And so on. It does not take long for Less to understand, sharing a pitying glance with the Head, feeling the burn of the relish beginning anew in the back of his mouth, that there must be a false cognate in Spanish, yet another false friend…

  What was it like to live with genius? Well, then there was the time he lost his ring in the mushroom bin at Happy Produce.

  Less wore a ring, one Robert gave him on their fifth anniversary, and, while it was long before the days of gay marriage, they both knew it meant a kind of marriage: it was a thin gold Cartier Robert had found in a Paris flea market. And so young Arthur Less wore it always. While Robert wrote, locked in his room with the view of Eureka Valley, Less often went grocery shopping. This day he was in the mushrooms. He had pulled out a plastic bag and had just begun choosing mushrooms when he felt something spring from his finger. He knew instantly what it was.

  In those days, Arthur Less was far from faithful. It was the way of things among the men they knew, and it was something he and Robert never spoke of. If on his errands he met a handsome man with a free apartment, Less might be willing to dally for half an hour before he came home. And once he took a real lover. Someone who wanted to talk, who came just short of asking for promises. At first it was a wonderful, casual connection not very far from his home, something easy to grab on an afternoon or whe
n Robert was on a trip. There was a white bed beside a window. There was a parakeet that warbled. There was wonderful sex, and no talk afterward of I forgot to tell you Janet called, or Did you put the parking permit on the car? or Remember, I’m going to LA tomorrow. Just sex and a smile: Isn’t it wonderful to get what you want and pay no price? Someone very unlike Robert, someone cheerful and bright, with affection, and, maybe, not terribly smart. It took a long time for it to be sad. There were fights and phone calls and long walks with little said. And it ended; Less ended it. He knew he had hurt someone terribly, unforgivably. That happened not long before he lost his ring in the mushroom bin.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” a bearded man asked, farther down the row of vegetables. Tall, glasses, holding a baby bok choy.

  “Oh shit, I just lost my wedding ring.”

  “Oh shit,” the man said, looking over at the bin. Maybe sixty cremini mushrooms—but, of course, it could have gone anywhere! It could be in the buttons! In the shiitakes! It could have flown into the chili peppers! How could you paw through chili peppers? The bearded man came over. “Okay, buddy. Let’s just do this,” he said, as if they were setting a broken arm. “One by one.”

  Slowly, methodically, they put each mushroom into Less’s bag.

  “I lost mine once,” the man offered as he held the bag. “My wife was furious. I lost it twice, actually.”

  “She’s going to be pissed,” Arthur said. Why had he made Robert into a woman? Why was he so willing to go along? “I can’t lose it. She got it in a Paris flea market.”

  Another man chimed in: “Use beeswax. To keep it tight until you get it fitted.” The kind of guy who wore his bicycle helmet while shopping.

  The bearded man asked, “Where do you get it fitted?”

  “Jeweler,” the bike guy said. “Anywhere.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Arthur said. “If I find it.”