Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

  By spring, they will be living together on the Vulcan Steps.

  “We had to do a quick change to the program. You can see it has a new title.” But Less, conversant only in German, can make nothing of the words on the paper he has just been handed. People are coming and going now, clipping a microphone to his lapel, offering him water. But Arthur Less is still halfway lit by beach sunshine, halfway in the water of the Golden Gate in 1987. Take care of my Robert. And now, an old woman falling and breaking her hip.

  She sends her love. No rancor, no feelings at all.

  The Head leans forward with a whisper and a comradely wink: “By the way. Wanted you to know, those pills work great!”

  Less looks over at the man. Is it the pills that make him so flushed and grotesque? What else do they sell here for middle-aged men? Is there a pill for when the image of a trumpet vine comes into your head? Will it erase it? Erase the voice saying, You should kiss me like it’s good-bye? Erase the tuxedo jacket, or at least the face above it? Erase the whole nine years? Robert would say, The work will fix you. The work, the habit, the words, will fix you. Nothing else can be depended on, and Less has known genius, what genius can do. But what if you are not a genius? What will the work do then?

  “What’s the new title?” Less asks. The Head passes the program to Arturo. Less consoles himself that tomorrow he will board a plane to Italy. The language is getting to him. The lingering taste of mescal is getting to him. The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.

  Arturo studies the program for a moment, then looks up gravely:

  “Una Noche con Arthur Less.”

  Less Italian

  Along with the other drugs Arthur Less bought at Mexico City’s airport farmacia, Less has obtained a new variety of sleeping pill. He recalls Freddy’s advice from years before: “It’s a hypnotic instead of a narcotic. They serve you dinner, you sleep seven hours, they serve you breakfast, you’re there.” Thus armed, Less boards the Lufthansa aircraft (he will have a fairly rushed layover in Frankfurt), settles into his window seat, chooses the Tuscan chicken (whose ravishing name reveals itself, like an internet lover, to be mere chicken and mashed potatoes), and with his Thumbelina bottle of red wine takes a single white capsule. His remaining anxiety from “Una Noche con Arthur Less” is working against his exhaustion; the sound of the Head’s amplified voice loops in his brain, saying again and again, We were talking backstage about mediocrity; he hopes the drug will do its duty. It does: he does not remember finishing the Bavarian cream in its little eggcup, nor the removal of his dinner, nor setting his watch to a new time zone, nor a dozing talk with his seatmate: a girl from Jalisco. Instead, Less awakens to a plane of sleeping citizens under blue prison blankets. Dreamily happy, he looks at his watch and panics: only two hours have passed! There are still nine more to go. On the monitors, a recent American cop comedy plays soundlessly. As with any silent movie, it needs no sound for him to imagine its plot. A heist by amateurs. He tries to fall back asleep, his jacket as a pillow; his mind plays a movie of his present life. A heist by amateurs. Less takes a deep breath and fumbles in his bag. He finds another pill and puts it in his mouth. An endless process of dry swallowing he remembers from being a boy with his vitamins. Then it is done, and he places the thin satin mask again over his eyes, ready to reenter the darkness—

  “Sir, your breakfast. Coffee or tea?”

  “What? Uh, coffee.”

  Shades are being opened to let in the bright sun above the heavy clouds. Blankets are being put away. Has any time passed? He does not remember sleeping. He looks at his watch—what madman has set it? To what time zone: Singapore? Breakfast; they are about to descend into Frankfurt. And he has just taken a hypnotic. A tray is placed before him: a microwaved croissant with frozen butter and jam. A cup of coffee. Well, he will have to push through. 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.

  He is going to Turin for a prize ceremony, and in the days leading into the ceremony there will be interviews, something called a “confrontation” with high school students, and many luncheons and dinners. He looks forward to escaping, briefly, into the streets of Turin, a town unknown to him. Contained deep within the invitation was the information that the greater prize has already been awarded to the famous British author Fosters Lancett, son of the famous British author Reginald Lancett. He wonders if the poor man is actually coming. Because of his fear of jet lag, Less requested to arrive a day before all these events, and for some reason they acceded to his request. A car, he has been told, will be waiting for him in Turin. If he manages to make it there.

  He floats through the Frankfurt airport in a dream, thinking: Passport, wallet, phone, passport, wallet, phone. On a great blue screen he finds his flight to Turin has changed terminals. Why, he wonders, are there no clocks in airports? He passes through miles of leather handbags and perfumes and whiskeys, miles of beautiful Turkish retail maids, and in this dream, he is talking to them about colognes and letting them giggle and spritz him with scents of leather and musk; he is looking through wallets and fingering the ostrich leather as if some message were written in braille; he imagines standing at the counter of a VIP lounge and talking to the receptionist, a lady with sea-urchin hair, about his childhood in Delaware, charming his way into the lounge where businessmen of all nationalities are wearing the same suit, and he sits in a cream leather chair, drinks champagne, eats oysters, and there the dream fades…

  He awakens in a bus, headed somewhere. But where? Why is he holding so many bags? Why is there the tickle of champagne in his throat? Less tries to listen, among the straphangers, for Italian; he must find the flight to Turin. Around him seem to be only American businessmen, talking about sports. Less recognizes the words but not the names. He feels un-American. He feels homosexual. Less notes there are at least five men on the bus taller than he, which seems like a life record. 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. Less is due to be back in Germany in just a week’s time, to teach a five-week course at the Liberated University. And it is while he is in Germany that the wedding will take place. Freddy will marry Tom somewhere in Sonoma. The shuttle crosses the tarmac and deposits them at an identical terminal. Nightmarishly: passport control. Yes, he still has his in his front left pocket. “Geschäftlich,” he answers the muscular agent (red hair cut so close, it seems painted on), secretly thinking: What I do is hardly business. Or pleasure. Security, again. Shoes, belt, off, again. What is the logic here? Passport, customs, security, again? Why do today’s young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings? Submitting to his bladder at last, Less enters a white tiled bathroom and sees, in the mirror: an old balding Onkel in wrinkled, oversized clothes. It turns out there is no mirror: it is the businessman across the sink. A Marx Brothers joke. Less washes his own face, not the businessman’s, finds his gate, and boards the plane. Passport, wallet, phone. He sinks into his window seat with a sigh and never gets his second breakfast: he has fallen instantly to sleep.

  Less awakens to a feeling of peace and triumph: “Stiamo iniziando la discesa verso Torino. We are beginning our descent into Turin.” His seatmate seems to have moved across the aisle. He removes his eye mask and smiles at the Alps below, an optical illusion making them into craters and not mountains, and then he sees the city itself. They land serenely, and a woman in the back applauds—he is reminded of landing in Mexico. He recalls smoking on an airplane once when he was young, checks his armrest, and finds an ashtray in it still. Charming or alarming? A chime rings, passengers stand up. Passport, wallet, phone. Less has manned his way through the crisis; he no longer feels mickeyed or dull. His bag is the first to arrive on the luggage roller coaster: a dog eager to greet its master. No passport control. Just an exit, an
d here, wonderfully, a young man in an old man’s mustache, holding a sign lettered SR. ESS. Less raises his hand, and the man takes his luggage. Inside the sleek black car, Less finds his driver speaks no English. Fantastico, he thinks as he closes his eyes again.

  Has he been to Italy before? He has, twice. Once when he was twelve, on a family trip that took the path of a Pachinko game by beginning in Rome, shooting up to London, and falling back and forth among various countries until they landed, at last, in Italy’s slot. Of Rome, all he remembers (in his childish exhaustion) are the stone buildings stained as if hauled from the ocean, the heart-stopping traffic, his father lugging old-fashioned suitcases (including his mother’s mysterious makeup kit) across the cobblestones, and the nighttime click-click-click of the yellow window shade as it flirted with the Roman wind. His mother, in her final years, often tried to coax other memories from Less (sitting bedside): “Don’t you remember the landlady with the wig that kept falling off? The handsome waiter who offered to drive us to his mother’s house for lasagna? The man at the Vatican who wanted to charge you for an adult ticket because you were so tall?” There with her head wrapped in a scarf with white seashells. “Yes,” he said every time, just as he always did with his agent, pretending to read books he had never even heard of. The wig! Lasagna! The Vatican!

  The second time he went with Robert. It was in the middle of their time together, when Less was finally worldly enough to be of help with travel and Robert had not become so filled with bitterness that he was a hindrance, 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. Robert was in a rare mood for travel and had accepted an invitation to read at a literary festival in Rome. Rome was itself enough, but showing Rome to Less was like having the chance to introduce someone to a beloved aunt. Whatever happened would be memorable. What they did not realize until they arrived was that the event was to take place in the ancient Forum, where thousands would gather in the summer wind to listen to a poet read before a crumbling arch; he would be standing on a dais lit by pink spotlights, with an orchestra playing Philip Glass between each poem. “I will never read anywhere like this again,” Robert whispered to Less, standing backstage as a brief biographical clip played for the audience on an enormous screen—Robert as a boy in a cowboy costume; as a serious Harvard student with his pal Ross; then he and Ross in a San Francisco café, a woodland setting—picking up more and more artistic companions until Robert reached the face recognizable from his Newsweek photograph: hair gone gray and wild, retaining that monkey-business expression of a capering mind (he would not frown for a photo). The music swelled, his name was called. Four thousand people applauded, and Robert, in his gray silk suit, readied himself to stride onto a pink-lit stage below the ruins of the centuries, and let go of his lover’s hand like someone falling from a cliff…

  Less opens his eyes to a countryside of autumn vineyards, endless rows of the crucified plants, a pink rosebush always planted at the end. He wonders why. The hills roll to the horizon, and atop each hill, a little town, silhouetted with its single church spire, and no visible way of approach except with rope and a pick. Less senses by the sun’s shift that at least an hour has passed. He is not headed to Turin, then; he is being taken somewhere else. Switzerland?

  Less understands at last what is happening: he is in the wrong car.

  SR. ESS—he anagrams in his mind what he took, in his lingering hypnosis and pride, for signor and a childlike misspelling of Less. Sriramathan Ess? Srovinka Esskatarinavitch? SRESS—Società di la Repubblica Europea per la Sexualité Studentesca? Almost anything makes sense to Less at this altitude. But it is obvious: having cleared the problems of travel, he let his guard slip, waved at the first sign resembling his name, and was whisked away to an unknown location. He knows life’s commedia dell’arte and how he has been cast. He sighs in his seat. Staring out at a shrine to an auto accident, placed at a particularly rough curve in the road. He feels the Madonna’s plastic eyes meet his for an instant.

  And now the signs for a particular town become more frequent, and a particular hotel: something called Mondolce Golf Resort. Less stiffens in fear. His narrating mind whittles the possibilities down: he had taken the car of a Dr. Ludwig Ess, some vacationing Austrian doctor who is off to a golf resort in Piemonte with his wife. He: brown skulled, with white hair in puffs over his ears, little steel glasses, red shorts and suspenders. Frau Ess: short, blond hair with a streak of pink, rough linen tunics and chili pepper leggings. Walking sticks packed in their luggage for jaunts to the village. She has signed up for courses in Italian cooking, while he dreams of nine holes and nine Morettis. And now they stand in some hotel lobby in Turin, shouting with the proprietor while a bellboy waits, holding the elevator. Why did Less come a day early? There will be no one from the prize foundation to straighten out the misunderstanding; the poor Ess voices will echo emptily up to the lobby chandelier. BENVENUTO, a sign reads as they pull into a drive, A MONDOLCE GOLF RESORT. A glass box on a hill, a pool, golf holes all around. “Ecco,” the driver announces as they pull to the front; the last sunlight flashes on the pool. Two beautiful young women emerge from the entryway’s hall of mirrors, hands clasped. Less readies himself for full mortification.

  But life has pardoned him at the scaffold steps:

  “Welcome,” says the tall one in the sea-horse-print dress, “to Italy and to your hotel! Mr. Less, we are greet you from the prize committee…”

  The other finalists do not arrive until late the following day, so Less has almost twenty-four hours in the golf resort by himself. 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. Unable to decipher the menu at the restaurant (where he dines alone in a shimmering greenhouse), for three meals he orders something he recalls from a novel: steak tartare of the local Fassona. For three meals he orders the same Nebbiolo. He sits in the glass sunlit room like the last human on earth, with a wine cellar to last him a lifetime. There is an amphora of petunia-like flowers on his private deck, worried day and night by little bees. On closer inspection, Less sees that instead of stingers, they have long noses to probe the purple flowers with. Not bees: pygmy hummingbird moths. The discovery delights him to his core. Less’s pleasures are tinted only slightly the following afternoon, when a mixed group of teenagers appears at the edge of the pool and stares as he does his laps. He returns to his room, all Swedish whitened wood, with a steel fireplace hanging on the wall. “There is wood in the room,” the sea horse lady said. “You know how to light a fire, yes?” Less nods; he used to go camping with his father. He stacks the wood in a little Cub Scout tepee, and stuffs the underspace with Corriere della Sera, and lights the thing. Time for his rubber bands.

  Less has, for years, traveled with a set of rubber bands that he thinks of as his portable gym. The set is multicolored, with interchangeable handles, and he always imagines, when he coils them into his luggage, how toned and fit he will be when he returns. The ambitious routine begins in earnest the first night, with dozens of special techniques recommended in the manual (lost long ago in Los Angeles but remembered in parts), Less wrapping the bands around the legs of beds, columns, rafters, and performing what the manual called “lumberjacks,” “trophies,” and “action heroes.” He ends his workout lacquered in sweat, feeling he has beat back another day from time’s assault. Fifty is further than ever. The second night, he advises himself to let his muscles repair. The third, he remembers the set and begins the routine with half a heart; the thin walls of the room might tremble with a neighbor’s television, or the dead bathroom light might depress him, or the thought of an unfinished article. Less promises himself a better workout in two days. In return for this promise: a dollhouse whiskey from the room’s dollhouse bar. And then the set is forgotten, abandoned on the hotel’s side table: a slain dragon.

  L
ess is no athlete. His single moment of greatness came one spring afternoon when he was twelve. In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer. August’s steam-room setting came on automatically in May, cherry and plum blossoms made the slightest wind into a ticker-tape parade, and the air filled with pollen. Schoolteachers heard the boys giggling at the sweat shine of their bosoms; young roller skaters found themselves stuck in softening asphalt. 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.

  Then picture young Less: twelve years old, his first year wearing the gold-rimmed glasses that would return to him, thirty years later, when a shopkeeper recommended a pair in Paris and a thrill of sad recognition and shame would course through his body—the short boy in glasses in right field, his hair as gold-white as old ivory, covered now by a black-yellow baseball cap, wandering in the clover with a dreamy look in his eyes. Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada. His father (though Less would not know this for over a decade) had had to attend a meeting of the Public Athletics Board to defend his son’s right to participate in the league despite his clear lack of talent at baseball and obliviousness on the field. His father actually had to remind his son’s coach (who had recommended Less’s removal) that it was a public athletic league and, like a public library, was open to all. Even the fumbling oafs among us. 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. Picture Less with his leather glove weighing down his left hand, sweating in the spring heat, his mind lost in the reverie of his childhood lunacies before they give way to adolescent lunacies—when an object appears in the sky. Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him. The bright sun spangles his vision. And—thwack! The crowd is screaming. He looks into the glove and sees, gloriously grass-bruised and double-stitched in red, the single catch of his life span.