Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

“For fuck’s sake.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, it was on that road trip we met a nice young man in Texas. A painter down in Marfa. We met him together, and they kept in touch, and now Clark’s going to marry him. He’s lovely. He’s wonderful.”

  “You’re going to the wedding, apparently.”

  “I’m reading a poem at the wedding.”

  “You are out of your mind. I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Clark. I’m heartbroken. But I know it’s not about me. I want you to be happy. But you’re deluded! You can’t go to his wedding! You can’t think it’s all fine, it’s all great! You’re just in a phase of denial. You’re divorcing your partner of twenty years. And that’s sad. It’s okay to be sad, Lewis.”

  “It’s true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it’s falling apart and it’s been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother’s. That’s how towns become ghost towns. It’s how houses become junk stores. And I think it’s how people get old.”

  “Have you met someone?”

  “Me? I think maybe I’ll go it on my own. Maybe I’m better that way. Maybe I was always better that way and it was just that when I was young, I was so scared, and now I’m not scared. I’ll still have Clark. I can still always call Clark and ask his advice.”

  “Even after everything?”

  “Yes, Arthur.”

  They talk a bit longer, and the sky shifts above them until it is quite late. “Arthur,” Lewis says at one point, “did you hear that Freddy locked himself in the bathroom the night before the wedding?” But Less is not listening; he is thinking about how he used to visit Lewis and Clark over the years, about the dinner parties and Halloweens and times he slept on their couch, too tipsy to get home. “Good night, Arthur.” Lewis gives his old friend a salute and heads into the darkness, so Less is left alone by the dying fire. A brightness catches his eye: Mohammed’s cigarette as he moves from tent to tent, buttoning the flaps like he is tucking in sleeping children for the night. From the furthermost tent, the tech whiz moans from his bed. From somewhere, a camel complains, followed by a young man’s voice soothing it—do they sleep beside the creatures? Do they sleep under this most excellent canopy, this majestical roof, this amazing mirrored coverlet, the stars? Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins. He reaches for, but does not catch, a falling star. Less, at last, goes to bed. But he cannot stop thinking of what Lewis has told him. Not the story about the ten years, but the idea of being alone. He realizes that, even after Robert, he never truly let himself be alone. Even here, on this trip: first Bastian, then Javier. Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.

  He chuckles to himself in the moments before sleep. Alone: impossible to imagine. That life seems as terrifying, as un-Lessian, as that of a castaway on a desert island.

  The sandstorm does not start until dawn.

  As Less lies sleepless in bed, his novel appears in his mind. Swift. What a title. What a mess. Swift. Where is his editor when he needs her? His editrix, as he used to call her: Leona Flowers. Traded years ago in the card game of publishing to some other house, but Less recalls how she took his first novels, shaggy with magniloquent prose, and made them into books. So clever, so artful, so good at persuading him of what to cut. “This paragraph is so beautiful, so special,” she might say, pressing her French-manicured hands to her chest, “that I’m keeping it all to myself!” Where is Leona now? High in some tower with some new favorite author, trying her same old lines: “I think the chapter’s absence will echo throughout the novel.” What would she tell him? More likable, make Swift more likable. That’s what everyone’s saying; nobody cares what this character suffers. But how do you do it? It’s like making oneself more likable. And at fifty, Less muses drowsily, you’re as likable as you’re going to get.

  The sandstorm. So many months of planning, so much travel, so much expense, and here they are: trapped inside as the wind whips their tents like a man with a mule. They are gathered, the three of them (Zohra, Lewis, Less) in the large dining tent, hot as a camel ride and just as smelly, with its heavy horsehair sand door that has not been washed and three visitors who have not been, either. Only Mohammed seems fresh and cheerful, though he tells Less he was awakened at dawn by the sandstorm and had to run for shelter (for he has, indeed, slept out of doors). “Well”—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—“we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.” Zohra greets this with a raised butter knife; tomorrow is her birthday. But they must submit to the sand. They spend the rest of the day drinking beer and playing cards, and Zohra fleeces them both.

  “I’ll get my revenge,” Lewis threatens, and they go to bed to find, in the morning, that, like a bad houseguest, the storm has no intention of leaving and, moreover, that Lewis has proved prophetic: he has been afflicted as well. He lies on his mirrored bed, sweating, moaning “Kill me, kill me,” as the wind shakes his tent. Mohammed appears, swathed in indigo and violet, full of regret. “The sandstorm is only in these dunes. We drive out of the desert, it is gone.” He suggests they pile Lewis and Josh into the jeeps and head back to M’Hamid, where at least there is a hotel and a bar with a television, where the others, the war reporters, the violinist, the male model, are waiting. Zohra, only her eyes showing in the folds of her bright-green shesh, blinks silently. “No,” she says finally, and turns to Less, ripping off her veil. “No, it’s my birthday, goddamn it! Dump the others in M’Hamid. But we’re going somewhere, Arthur! Mohammed? Where can you drive us that we wouldn’t believe?”

  Would you believe Morocco has a Swiss ski town? For that is where Mohammed has taken them, driving them out of the sandstorm and through deep canyons where hotels are carved into the rock and Germans, ignoring the hotels, camp beside the river in beat-up Westfalias; past villages that, as in a folktale, seem inhabited only by sheep; past waterfalls and weirs, madrassas and mosques, casbahs and ksars, and one small town (a lunch stop) where the next-door wood-carver is visited by a woman all in teal who borrows his shavings to sprinkle them on her doorstep, where, it seems, her cat has peed, and where boys are gathered in what at first seems to be an outdoor school and later (when the cheering starts) turns out to be a televised football match; through limestone plateaus; up the spiraling ziggurat roads of the Middle Atlas until the vegetation changes from fronds to needles, where, passing through a chilly pine forest, Mohammed says, “Look out for beasts,” and at first there is nothing, until Zohra screams and points to where sits, on a wooden platform and turning as if interrupted at tea (or déjeuner sur l’herbe), a troop of poker-faced Barbary macaques, or, as she puts it: “Monkeys!” Their own troop is now far away, in M’Hamid, and Less and Zohra are alone, seated in the dark scented bar of the alpine resort, in leather club chairs with glasses of local marc, below a crystal chandelier and before a crystal panorama. They have eaten pigeon pie. Mohammed sits at the bar, drinking an energy drink. Gone is his desert costume; he has changed back into a polo shirt and jeans. It is Zohra’s birthday; it will be Less’s at midnight, in about two hours’ time. Satisfaction has arrived, indeed, on a later camel.

  “And all this,” Zohra is saying, brushing her hair out of her face, “all this travel, Arthur, just to miss your boyfriend’s wedding?”

  “Not a boyfriend. And more to avoid the confusion,” Less answers, feeling himself blushing. They are the only guests in the bar. The bartenders—two men in striped vaudeville vests—seem to be deciding on a cigarette break with the frantic whispered patter of a comedy routine. He has been telling Zohra about his trip, and somehow the champagne has let his tongue get away from him.

  Zohra wea
rs a gold pantsuit and diamond earrings; they have checked into the hotel, showered, and changed, and she smells of perfume. Surely, when she packed for her birthday trip, she picked these things for someone other than Less. But he is who she has. He wears, of course, his blue suit.

  “You know what?” Zohra says, holding out the glass and staring at it. “This hooch reminds me of my grandmother in Georgia. The republic, not the state. She used to make something just like this.”

  “It just seemed better,” Less continues, still on Freddy, “to get away. And bring this novel back to life.”

  Zohra sips her marc and stares at the view, such as it is at this hour. “Mine left me too,” she says.

  Less sits quietly for a moment, then says suddenly: “Oh! Oh no, he didn’t leave me—”

  “Janet was supposed to be here.” Zohra closes her eyes. “Arthur, you’re here because there was an empty space and Lewis said he had a friend; that’s why you’re here. It’s lovely to have you. I mean, you’re all that’s left. Everybody else is so fucking weak. What happened to everybody? I’m glad you’re here. But I’ll be honest with you. I’d rather have her.”

  For some reason, it never occurred to Less that she was a lesbian. Perhaps he is a bad gay, after all.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “What else?” Zohra says, sipping from the little glass. “She fell in love. She lost her mind.”

  Less murmurs his sympathy, but Zohra is lost in herself. At the bar, the taller man seems to have won and heads out in long strides to the balcony. The short man, bald on top except for a single oasis, stares after his friend with unconcealed longing. Outside: a view perhaps of Gstaad or St. Moritz. The dark rolling forests of sleeping macaques, the Romanesque steeple of a skating rink, the cold black sky.

  “She told me she met the love of her life,” Zohra says at last, still staring out the window. “You read poems about it, you hear stories about it, you hear Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning. It’s what she always had with me. Isn’t it? But what if she’s right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I’ve never felt. Have you?”

  Less begins to breath unevenly.

  She turns to him: “What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can’t live with. It’s because they aren’t this person. This woman Janet met. Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them, and think love is all these other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You’re screwed. The way Janet is. She ruined our life for it! But what if that’s real?” She is gripping the chair now.

  “Zohra, I’m so sorry.”

  “Is it like that with this Freddy?”

  “I…I…”

  “The brain is so wrong, all the time,” she says, turning to the dark landscape again. “Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.”

  This insanity, the insanity of her lover, has her bewildered and hurt and incandescent. And yet what she has said—the lying brain—this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.

  “What is love, Arthur? What is it?” she asks him. “Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?”

  “It doesn’t sound happy” is all he can say.

  She shakes her head. “Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty. That is the wisdom from my love life. You’ll understand at midnight.” It is clear she is drunk. Outside, the shivering bartender smokes like he means it. She sniffs the glass of marc and says, “My Georgian grandmother used to make booze just like this.”

  It keeps ringing in his ears: Is it the good dear thing? Is it the good dear thing?

  “Yes.” She smiles at the memory and sniffs the glass. “It smells just like my grandmother’s cha-cha!”

  The cha-cha proves too much for the birthday girl, and by eleven thirty, he and Mohammed are leading her up to her room as she smiles and thanks them. He puts her, happily drunk, to bed. She is speaking French to Mohammed, who comforts her in the same language and then again in English. As Less tucks her in, she says, “Well, that was ridiculous, Arthur, I’m sorry.” As he closes her door, he realizes that he will spend his fiftieth birthday alone.

  He turns; not alone.

  “Mohammed, how many languages do you speak?”

  “Seven!” he says brightly, striding to the elevator. “I learn from school. They make fun of my Arabic when I come to the city, it is old-fashioned, I learned in Berber school, so I work more hard. And from tourists! Sorry, still learning English. And you, Arthur?”

  “Seven! My God!” The elevator is completely mirrored, and as the doors close, Less is confronted by a vision: infinite Mohammeds in red polo shirts beside infinite versions of his father at fifty, which is to say himself. “I…I speak English and German—”

  “Ich auch!” says Mohammed. The following is translated from the German: “I lived for two years in Berlin! Such boring music!”

  “I have been coming from there! Is excellent your German!”

  “And yours is good. Here we are, you first, Arthur. Are you ready for your birthday?”

  “I am fear of the age.”

  “Don’t be frightened. Fifty is nothing. You’re a handsome man, and healthy, and rich.”

  He wants to say he is not rich but stops himself. “How many year have you?”

  “I’m fifty-three. You see, it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Let’s get you a glass of champagne.”

  “I am fear of the old, I am fear of the lonely.”

  “You have nothing to fear.” He turns to a woman who has taken over the station behind the bar, easily his height with her hair in a ponytail, and speaks to her in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. Perhaps he is asking for champagne for the American, who has just turned fifty. The bartender beams at Less, raises her eyebrows, and says something. Mohammed laughs; Less just stands with his idiot’s grin. “Happy birthday, sir,” she says in English, pouring out a glass of French champagne. “This is my treat.”

  Less offers to buy Mohammed a drink, but the man will indulge only in energy drinks. Not because of Islam, he explains; he is agnostic. “Because alcohol makes me crazy. Crazy! But I smoke hashish. Would you like?”

  “No, no, not tonight. It makes me crazy. Mohammed, are you really a tour guide?”

  “I must to make a living,” Mohammed says, suddenly shy in his English. “But in truth, I am writer. Like you.”

  How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again? Where is the exit from moments like this? Where is the donkey door out?

  “Mohammed, I am honored to be with you tonight.”

  “I am very great fan of Kalipso. Of course, I read not the English but the French. I am honored to be with you. And happy birthday, Arthur Less.”

  Probably now Tom and Freddy are packing their bags; they are many hours ahead, after all, and in Tahiti it is midday. Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith. The grooms are folding their linen shirts, their linen pants and jackets, or surely Freddy is folding them. He recalls Freddy was always the packer, while Less lounged on the hotel sofa. “You’re too fast and sloppy,” Freddy said that last morning in Paris. “And everything c
omes out wrinkled—see, watch this.” He spread out the jackets and shirts on the bed like they were clothes for a great paper doll, placed the pants and sweaters on top, and folded the whole thing up in a bundle. Hands on his hips, he smiled in triumph (by the way, everyone is completely naked in this scene). “And now what?” Less asked. Freddy shrugged: “Now we just put it in the luggage.” But of course this bolus was too large for the luggage to swallow, no matter how Freddy coaxed it, and after many tries of sitting and pressing, he eventually remade it into two packages, which he fit neatly into two bags. Victorious, he looked smugly at Less. Framed in the window, with that lean silhouette from his early forties, the spring Paris rain dotting the window behind him, Freddy’s former lover nodded and asked, “Mr. Pelu, you’ve packed everything; now what are we going to wear?” Freddy attacked him in a fury, and for the next half an hour, they wore nothing at all.

  Yes, surely Mr. Pelu is folding.

  Surely this is why he never calls to wish Less a happy birthday.

  And now Less stands on the balcony of the Swiss hotel, looking out over the frozen town. The railing is carved, absurdly, with cuckoos, each with a sharp protruding beak. In his glass: the last coin of champagne. Now he is off to India. To work on his novel, on what was supposed to be a mere final glaze and now appears to be breaking the whole novel to shards and starting again. To work on the tedious, self-centered, pitiable, laughable character Swift. The one nobody feels bad for. Now he is fifty.

  We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn’t Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now”). Don’t little children, awakened one morning and told, “Now you’re five!”—don’t they wail at the universe’s descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death—shouldn’t we all wail to the stars?