Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

  He closes his eyes. In his “distant youth,” he often comforted his anxious mind with images of book covers, of author photographs, of newspaper clippings. These things he can now call easily to mind; they hold no comfort. Instead, his brain’s staff photographer produces a contact sheet of identical images: Javier pulling him toward the stone wall and kissing him.

  “This flight is overbooked, and we are looking for volunteers…”

  Overbooked again. But Arthur Less does not hear her, or else he cannot consider a second stay of execution, a second day of possibilities before he turns fifty. Perhaps it is all too much. Or else just enough.

  The piano piece ends, and the guests break into applause. From across the roofs comes either the echo of the applause or that of another party. A triangle of amber light catches one of Javier’s eyes and makes it gleam like glass. And all that goes through Less’s mind is the single thought: Ask me. With the married man smiling and touching Less’s red beard—Ask me—kissing him for perhaps half an hour longer, and here we have another man fallen under the spell of Less’s kiss, pushing him against the wall, unzipping his jacket, touching him passionately and whispering beautiful things but not the words that would change everything, for it is still possible to change everything, until Less tells him at last that it is time to go. Javier nods, walking him back into the green-striped room and standing beside him as he says his good-byes to the hostess, and to the other murder suspects, in his terrible French—Ask me—taking him to the front door and walking him downstairs as far as the street, all done in blue watercolors, blurred by the mist of rain, the carved stone porticos and wet satin streets—Ask me—and the poor Spaniard offers his own umbrella (refused) before smiling sadly—“I am sorry to see you go”—and waving good-bye.

  Ask me and I will stay.

  There is a call on Less’s phone, but he is preoccupied: already inside the plane, nodding to the beaky blond steward who greets him, as they always do, in the language not of the passenger, steward, or airport but of the plane itself (“Buonasera,” for it is Italian), bumping his awkward way down the aisle, assisting a tiny woman with her enormous overhead luggage, and finding his favorite seat: the rightmost, rearmost corner. No children to kick you from behind. Prison pillow, prison blanket. He removes his tight French shoes and slides them under the seat. Out the window: nighttime Charles de Gaulle, will-o’-the-wisps and men waving glowing wands. He closes the shade, then closes his eyes. He hears his neighbor sitting down roughly and speaking Italian, and he nearly understands it. Brief memory of swimming in a golf resort. Brief false memory of Dr. Ess. Brief real memory of rooftops and vanilla.

  “…welcome you on our flight from Paris to Marrakech…”

  The chimneys all looked like flowerpots.

  There is a second call, this time from an unknown number, but we will never know what it contains, for no message is left, and the intended receiver is already deep in takeoff slumber, high above the continent of Europe, only seven days from fifty, headed now at last to Morocco.

  Less Moroccan

  What does a camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sand that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaler. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. Not the flavorless grass she chews, then chews again, then again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age, taller than most and top heavy, tipping from side to side as she carries this human, this Arthur Less, pointlessly across the Sahara.

  Before her: Mohammed, a man in a long white djellaba and with a blue shesh wound around his head, leading her by a rope. Behind her: the eight other camels in her caravan, because nine people signed up to travel to this encampment, though only four of the camels have passengers. They have lost five people since Marrakech. They are soon to lose another.

  Atop her: Arthur Less, in his own blue shesh, admiring the dunes, the little wind devils dancing on each crest, the sunset coloration of turquoise and gold, thinking at least he will not be alone for his birthday.

  Days earlier—awakening from the Paris flight to find himself on the African continent: a bleary-eyed Arthur Less. Body still atingle with champagne and Javier’s caresses and a rather awkward window seat, he staggers across the tarmac beneath a dyed-indigo night sky, and into an immigration line that is beyond reason. The French, so stately at home, seem instantly to have lost their minds on the soil of their former colony; it is like the redoubled madness of seeing a lover you have wronged; they ignore the line, removing the ropes from the carefully ordered stanchions, and become a mob charging into Marrakech. The Moroccan officers, in the green and red of cocktail olives, stay calm; passports are examined, then stamped; Less imagines this happens all day, every day. He finds himself shouting “Madame! Madame!” at a Frenchwoman elbowing her way through the crowd. She pouts with a shrug (C’est la vie!) and keeps going. Is there an invasion he has not heard of? Is this the last plane out of France? If so: where is Ingrid Bergman?

  So there is plenty of time, as he shuffles with the crowd (in which, though European, he still towers), to panic.

  He could have remained in Paris, or at least have accepted yet another delay (and six hundred euros); he could have tossed this whole foolish adventure aside for one even more foolish. Arthur Less was supposed to go to Morocco, but he met a Spaniard in Paris, and no one has heard from him since! A rumor for Freddy to hear. But if he is anything, Arthur Less is a man who follows his plan. And so he is here. At least he will not be alone.

  “Arthur! You’ve grown a beard!” His old friend Lewis, outside customs, joyous as ever. Tarnished-silver hair worn long over the ears and bristling white on his chin; plump faced and well clad in gray linen and cotton; capillaries spreading in a fertile delta across his nose; signs that Lewis Delacroix is, at nearly sixty, a stride ahead of Arthur Less.

  Less smiles warily and touches his beard. “I…I thought I needed a change.”

  Lewis holds him at a distance to study him. “It’s sexy. Let’s get you into some air-conditioning. There’s a heat wave on, and even these Marrakech nights have been hell. Sorry your flight was delayed; what a nightmare to wait a whole day! Did you manage to fall in love with fourteen hours in Paris?”

  Less is startled and says he called up Alexander. He talks about the party and Alex not showing up. He doesn’t mention Javier.

  Lewis turns to him and asks, “Do you want to talk about Freddy? Or do you not want to talk about Freddy?”

  “Not talk.”

  His friend nods. Lewis, whom he met for the first time on that long road trip after college, who offered his cheap apartment on Valencia Street, above the communist bookstore, who introduced him to acid and electronic music. Handsome Lewis Delacroix, who seemed so adult, so assured; he was thirty. A generation apart back then; now they are essentially contemporaries. And yet Lewis has always seemed so much steadier; with the same boyfriend for twenty years, he is the very model of love’s success. And glamorous: this trip, for instance, is exactly the kind of luxury that afforded Lewis’s fascinating stories. It is a birthday trip—not for Arthur Less. For some woman named Zohra, who is also turning fifty, and whom Less has never met.

  “I’d say let’s get some sleep,” Lewis says as they find a taxi, “but nobody at the hotel is asleep. They’ve been drinking since noon. And who knows what else? I blame Zohra; well, you’ll meet Zohra.”

  The actress is the first to go. Perhaps it is the pale Moroccan wine, poured glass after glass at dinner (on the roof of the rented house, the riad, with a view of that upraised pupil’s hand: the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque
); or perhaps the gin and tonics she requests after dinner, when she sheds her clothes (the two riad workers, both named Mustafa, say nothing) and slips into the courtyard pool, where turtles stare at her pale flesh, wishing they were still dinosaurs, the water rippling from her backstroke as the others continue to introduce themselves (Less is in here somewhere, struggling with a wine bottle between his thighs); or perhaps the tequila she discovers later, once the gin runs out, when someone has found a guitar and someone else a shrill local flute and she begins an improvisational dance with a lantern on her head before someone leads her out of the pool; or perhaps the whiskey later passed around; or the hashish; or the cigarettes; or the three loud claps of the riad’s neighbor, a princess: the sign they are up too late for Marrakech—but how will we ever know? All we know is that in the morning, she is unable to get out of bed; naked, she calls for a drink, and when someone brings her water she knocks the glass away and says, “I mean vodka!” and because she is unwilling to move, and because their ride to the Sahara leaves at noon, and because her last two movies were in dubious taste, and because nobody but the birthday girl even knows her, it is in the care of the two Mustafas that they leave her.

  “Will she be okay?” Less asks Lewis.

  “I’m so surprised she couldn’t hold her liquor,” Lewis says, turning to him with his enormous sunglasses; they make him look like a nocturnal primate. They are seated together in a small bus; a freak heat wave has made the world outside shimmer like a wok. The rest of the passengers lean wearily against the windows. “I thought actors were made from steel.”

  “Please to all!” says their guide into his microphone; this is Mohammed, their Moroccan guide, in a red polo shirt and jeans. “Here we pass through the Atlas Mountains. They are, we say, like snake. Tonight we arrive at [name garbled by microphone], where we spend the night. Tomorrow is the valley of palms.”

  “I thought tomorrow was the desert,” comes a British accent Less recognizes, from the night before, as that of the technology genius who retired at forty and now runs a nightclub in Shanghai.

  “Oh yes, I promise the desert!” Mohammed is short, with long curly hair, probably in his forties. His smile is quick, but his English is slow. “I am sorry for the unpleasant surprise of the heat.”

  From the back, a female voice, Korean: the violinist. “Can they turn up the air?”

  Some words in Arabic, and the vents begin to blast warm air into the bus. “My friend said it was at top.” Mohammed smiles. “But we now know it was not at top.” The air does nothing to cool them. Beside them, on the road out of Marrakech, are groups of schoolchildren making their way home for lunch; they hold shirts or books over their faces to shield themselves from the merciless sun. Miles of adobe walls and, now and then, the oasis of a coffee shop where men stare at the bus as they pass. Here is a pizza joint. And here an uncompleted gas station: AFRIQUA. Someone has tied a donkey to a telephone pole in the middle of nowhere and left it there. The driver turns on music: the somehow-enchanting drone of Gnawa. Lewis seems to have fallen asleep; in those glasses, Less cannot tell.

  Tahiti.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti,” Freddy told him once, at an afternoon rooftop gathering of his young friends. A few other, older men peppered the crowd, eyeing each other like fellow predators; Less did not know how to signal that in this crowd of gazelles, he was a vegetarian. My last boyfriend, he wanted to tell them, is now in his sixties. Did any of them, like him, prefer middle-aged men? He never found out; they avoided him as if magnetically repulsed. Eventually, at these parties, Freddy would float over with a weary expression, and they would spend the last hours just the two of them, chatting. And this time—perhaps it was the tequila and sunset—Freddy had brought up Tahiti.

  “That sounds nice,” Less said. “But to me it seems so resorty. Like you’d never meet the locals. I want to go to India.”

  Freddy gave a shrug. “Well, you’d definitely get to meet the locals in India. I hear there’s nothing but locals. But do you remember when we went to Paris? The Musée d’Orsay? Oh right, you were sick. Well. There was a room of carvings by Gauguin. And one said: Be mysterious. And the other one said: Be in love, you will be happy. In French, of course. Those really moved me, more than the paintings. He made the same carving for his house in Tahiti. I know I’m strange. I should want to go because of the beaches. But I want to see his house.”

  Less was about to say something—but just then the sun, hidden behind Buena Vista, was glorifying a fog bank, and Freddy went straight to the railing to see it. They never talked about Tahiti again, so Less never gave it another thought. But clearly Freddy did.

  Because that is where he must be now. On his honeymoon with Tom.

  Be in love, you will be happy.

  Tahiti.

  It doesn’t take long to lose the next ones. The bus makes it to Ait Ben Haddou (with one lunch stop at a hallucinogenically tiled roadhouse), where they are led out of the bus. Ahead of him is a couple, both war reporters; the night before, they were regaling Less with stories of Beirut in the eighties, such as one about the bar whose cockatoo could imitate incoming bombs. A chic Frenchwoman with bobbed white hair and bright cotton slacks, a tall mustachioed German in a photojournalist jacket, they have come from Afghanistan to laugh, chain-smoke, and learn a new dialect of Arabic. The world seems to be theirs; nothing can take them down. Zohra, the birthday girl, comes over and walks beside him: “Arthur, I am so glad you came.” Not tall but definitely alluring, in a long-sleeved yellow dress that shows off her legs; she possesses a unique beauty, with the long nose and shining, oversized eyes of a Byzantine portrait of Mary. Every one of her movements—touching the back of a seat, brushing her hair from her face, smiling at one of her friends—is purposeful, and her gaze is direct and discerning. Her accent would be impossible to place—English? Mauritian? Basque? Hungarian?—except Less already knows, from Lewis, that she was born right here in Morocco but left as a child for England. This is her first trip home in a decade. He has watched her with her friends; she is always laughing, always smiling, but he sees, when she walks away, the shadow of some deep sadness. Glamorous, intelligent, resilient, bracingly direct, and prone to obscenities, Zohra seems like the kind of woman who would run an international spy ring. For all Less knows, this is exactly what she does.

  Most of all: she does not look anywhere near fifty, or even forty. You would never know she drinks like a sailor, as well as swears like one, smokes one menthol after another. She certainly looks younger than lined and weary, old and broke and loveless Arthur Less.

  Zohra fixes her dazzling eyes on him. “You know, I’m a big fan of your books.”

  “Oh!” he says.

  They are walking along beside a low wall of ancient bricks, and, below, a series of whitewashed houses rises from a river. “I really loved Kalipso. Really, really loved it. You motherfucker, you made me cry at the end.”

  “I guess I’m glad to hear that.”

  “It was so sad, Arthur. So fucking sad. What’s your next one?” She flips her hair over her shoulder, and it moves in a long fluid line.

  He finds himself clenching his teeth. Below, two boys on horseback are moving slowly up the river shallows.

  Zohra frowns. “I’m freaking you out. I shouldn’t have asked. None of my fucking business.”

  “No, no,” Arthur says. “It’s okay. I wrote a new novel, and my publisher hates it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they turned it down. Declined to publish it. I remember when I sold my first book, the head of the publishing house sat me down in his office, and he gave me this long speech about how he knew they didn’t pay very much, but they were a family, and I was now part of that family, they were investing in me not for this book but for my entire career. That was only fifteen years ago. And bam—I’m out. Some family.”

  “Sounds like my family. What was your new novel about?” Catching his expression, she quickly adds, “Arthur,
I hope you know you can tell me to bugger off.”

  He has a rule, which is never to describe his books until after they are published. People are so careless with their responses, and even a skeptical expression can feel akin to someone saying about your new lover: Don’t tell me you’re dating him? But for some reason, he trusts her.

  “It was…,” he starts, stumbling on a rock in the path, then starts again: “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his…his sorrows…” Her face has begun to fold inward in a dubious expression, and he finds himself trailing off. From the front of the group, the journalists are shouting in Arabic.

  Zohra asks, “Is it a white middle-aged man?”

  “Yes.”

  “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?”

  “Jesus, I guess so.”

  “Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.”

  “Even gay?”

  “Even gay.”

  “Bugger off.” He did not know he was going to say this.

  She stops walking, points at his chest, and grins. “Good for you,” she says.