Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

  For a fifty-year-old man, the boredom of lying convalescent in bed is rivaled only by sitting in church. Less is given the Raja Suite and set up in the comfortable bed with a view of the ocean marred only by a thick beekeeper’s veil of mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. It is elegant, cool, well staffed, and stiflingly dull. How Less misses the mongoose. He misses Rupali and the picnickers, the battle of the bands, the pastor and the tailor and Elizabeth the yellow snake; he even misses Jesus Christ Our Savior. His only intrigue is with the porter, Vincent, who stops by every day to check in on our invalid: a clean-shaven tapered face and topaz eyes, the kind of bashful handsome man who has no idea he is handsome, and whenever Vincent pays a visit, Less prays for Jesus Christ Our Savior to extinguish his libido; the last thing he needs is a convalescent crush.

  So the weeks pass in blank tedium, which turns out—finally—to be the perfect situation for Less, at last, to try to write.

  It is like pouring water from an old leaking bucket into a shining new one; it feels almost suspiciously easy. He simply takes a gloomy event in the plot—say, a market owner dying of cancer—and inverts it, having Swift, out of pity, accept seven fragrant rounds of cheese, which he will then have to carry around San Francisco, growing more rank, throughout the rest of the chapter. In the sordid scene in which Swift takes a bag of cocaine to the hotel bathroom, cutting out a line on the counter, Less merely adds a motion-activated hand dryer and—whirr! A blizzard of indignity! All it takes is a pail thrown out a window, an open manhole, a banana peel. “Are we losers?” Swift asks of his lover at the end of their ruined vacation, and Less gleefully adds the response: “Well, baby, we sure ain’t winners.” With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining. What sport! If only one could do this with life!

  He finds himself awakening at dawn, when the sea is brightening but the sun still struggles in its bedclothes, and sits down to lash his protagonist a few more times with his authorial whip. And somehow, a bittersweet longing starts to appear in the novel that was never there before. It changes, grows kinder. Less, as with a repentant worshipper, begins again to love his subject, and at last, one morning, after an hour sitting with his chin in his hand, watching birds cross the gray haze of the horizon, our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.

  Finally, one afternoon, Vincent arrives and asks, “Please, how is your foot?” Less says he can now walk around without crutches. “Good,” Vincent says. “And now, please, Arthur, get ready for an exceptional outing.” Less asks, teasingly, where are they going together? Perhaps Vincent is at last going to show him some of India. But no; the man blushes and replies: “I, alas, am not going together.” He says they are offering this exceptional outing to guests when the resort opens. A buzzing outside; he looks out the window to see a speedboat, helmed by two expressionless teens, approaching the dock. Vincent helps as Less limps to the boat and shakily boards. The engine starts with a tiger’s roar.

  The boat ride is half an hour, during which Less sees leaping dolphins and flying fish skipping like stones over the water, as well as the floating mane of a jellyfish. He recalls an aquarium he visited as a boy, where, after enjoying a sea turtle that swam breaststroke like a dotty old aunt, he encountered a jellyfish, a pink frothing brainless negligeed monster pulsing in the water, and thought with a sob: We are not in this together. They arrive, at last, at an island of white sand no bigger than a city block, with two coconut palms and small purple flowers. Less steps ashore gingerly and makes his way to the shade. More dolphins leap in a darkening ocean. An airplane underlines the moon. It is unmistakably paradise—until Less turns around to see the boat departing. Castaway. Is it possible this is some final plot of Carlos’s? To imprison him in a room for weeks and only now, when he is one chapter away from finishing his novel, abandon him on a desert island? It is a New Yorker cartoon fate. Less appeals to the setting sun: He gave up Freddy! He gave him up willingly; he even stayed away from the wedding. He has suffered enough, all on his own; he is crippled, uniplegic, forsaken, and bereft of his magic suit. He has nothing left to take away, our gay Job. He drops to his knees in the sand.

  A nagging hum from behind him. When he looks around, he sees another speedboat headed his way.

  “Arthur, I have an idea,” Carlos tells him after dinner. Carlos’s assistants have made a quick campfire and grilled them two harlequined fish they speared along the reef, and Less and Carlos are sitting down among cushions to share a bottle of cold champagne.

  Carlos reclines on one of the spangled cushions; he is wearing a white caftan. “When you get home, I want you to find all your correspondence about the Russian River School. From all the men we knew. The important ones, Robert and Ross and Franklin in particular.”

  Less, caught awkwardly between two pillows, struggles to right himself and wonders, Why?

  “I want to buy them from you.”

  Above the slow washing-machine sound of the surf comes a series of plops that must be a fish. The moon is high overhead, wrapped in a haze, casting a gauzy glow over everything and spoiling the view of the stars.

  Carlos stares intently at Less in the firelight. “Everything you’ve got. How many do you think there are?”

  “I’ve…I don’t know. I’d have to look. Dozens, you know. But they’re personal.”

  “I want personal. I’m building a collection. They’re back in style now, that whole era. There are college courses all about it. And we knew them. We were part of history, Arthur.”

  “I’m not sure we were part of history.”

  “I want to get everything together in a collection, the Carlos Pelu Collection. I have a university interested; they can maybe name a room in the library after me. Did Robert write you any poems?”

  “The Carlos Pelu Collection.”

  “You like the sound of it? You’d make the collection complete. A love poem of Robert’s for you.”

  “He didn’t write that way.”

  “Or that painting by Woodhouse. I know you need money,” Carlos says quietly.

  And so here is the plan: for Carlos to take everything. To take his pride, to take his health and his sanity, to take Freddy, and now, at last, to take even his memories, his souvenirs, away. There will be nothing left of Arthur Less.

  “I’m doing okay.”

  The fire, made of coconut shells, finds a particularly delicious morsel and flames up in delight, lighting both of their faces. They are not young, not at all; there is nothing left of the boys they used to be. Why not sell his letters, his keepsakes, his paintings, his books? Why not burn them? Why not give up on the whole business of life?

  “Do you remember that afternoon on the beach? You were still seeing that Italian…,” Carlos says.

  “Marco.”

  He laughs. “Oh my God, Marco! He was afraid of the rocks and made us go sit with the straight people. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember. That’s when I met Robert.”

  “I think about that day a lot. Of course, we didn’t know it was a big storm out in the Pacific, that we were out of our minds to be on the beach! It was incredibly dangerous. But we were young and stupid, weren’t we?”

  “That we can agree on.”

  “Sometimes I think about all the men we knew on that beach.”

  Little parts of the memory light up now in Less’s brain, including Carlos standing on a rock and staring at the sky, his trim and muscled body doubled in the tide pool below. The fire crackles, throwing helicoids of sparks into the air. Other than the fire and the sea, there is no other sound.

  “I never hated you, Arthur,” Carlos says.

  Less stares into the fire.

  “It was always envy. I hope you understand that.”

  A mob of tiny translucent crabs crosses the sand, making a break for the water.

  “Arthur, I’ve got a theory. Now, hear me out. It’s that our lives are half comedy and half tragedy. And for some people, i
t just works out that the first entire half of their lives is tragedy and then the second half is comedy. Me, for example. Look at my shitty youth. A poor kid come to the big city—maybe you never knew, but, God, it was hard for me. I just wanted to get somewhere. Thank God I met Donald, but him getting sick, and dying—and then suddenly I had a son on my hands. The ass-kicking work it took to turn his business into what I’ve got. Forty years of serious, serious stuff.

  “But look at me now—comedy! Fat! Rich! Ridiculous! Look at how I’m dressed—in a caftan! I was such an angry young man—I had so much to prove; now there’s money and laughter. It’s wonderful. Let’s open the other bottle. But you. You had comedy in your youth. You were the ridiculous one then, the one everyone laughed at. You just walked into everything, like someone blindfolded. I’ve known you longer than most of your friends, and I’ve certainly watched you more closely. I am the world’s leading expert on Arthur Less. I remember when we met. You were so skinny, all clavicle and hip bone! And innocent. The rest of us were so far from being innocent, I don’t think we even thought about pretending. You were different. I think everybody wanted to touch that innocence, maybe ruin it. Your way of going through the world, unaware of danger. Clumsy and naive. Of course I envied you. Because I could never be that; I’d stopped being that when I was a kid. If you’d asked me a year ago, six months ago, I would have said, yes, Arthur, the first half of your life was comedy. But you’re deep into the tragic half now.”

  Carlos picks up the champagne bottle to refill Less’s glass. “What’s that?” Less asks. “The tragic—”

  “But I’ve changed my mind.” Carlos plows on. “You know Freddy does an imitation of you? You’ve never seen it? Oh, you’ll like it.” Carlos has to get up for this one—an elaborate movement requiring him to brace himself against the palm. It is possible he is drunk. Even as he does this, he retains the same regal hauteur as when he used to pace a swimming pool like a panther. And in one nimble movement, he becomes Arthur Less: tall, awkward, bug eyed, knock kneed, and wearing a terrified grin; even his hair seems to be brushed up in that comic-book-sidekick hairstyle Less has always worn. He speaks in a loud, slightly hysterical voice:

  “I got this suit in Vietnam! It’s summer-weight wool. I wanted linen, but the lady said no, it’ll wrinkle, what you want is summer-weight wool, and you know what? She was right!”

  Less sits there for a moment and then chuckles in astonishment. “Well,” he says, “summer-weight wool. At least Freddy was listening.”

  Carlos laughs, loses the pose, and becomes his old self again, leaning against a palm, and it flashes across his face again, briefly, the expression Less noticed in the car. Fear. Desperation. About something other than these “letters.” “So what do you say, Arthur? Sell them to me.”

  “No, Carlos. No.”

  Carlos turns from the fire, cursing his son.

  Less says, “Freddy has nothing to do with this.”

  Carlos looks out at the moonlight on the water. “You know, Arthur, my son’s not like me. Once I asked him why he was so lazy. I asked him what the hell he wanted. He couldn’t tell me. So I decided for him.”

  “Let’s back up a minute.”

  Carlos turns to look down at Less. “You really haven’t heard?” It must be the moonlight—that couldn’t be tenderness in his face.

  “What was that about the tragic half?” Less asks.

  Carlos smiles as if he has decided something. “Arthur, I changed my mind. You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don’t matter. Good luck in things that do. I think—you probably won’t agree with this—but I think your whole life is a comedy. Not just the first part. The whole thing. You are the most absurd person I’ve ever met. You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won. And you don’t even realize it.”

  “Carlos.” He doesn’t feel victorious; he feels defeated. “My life, my life over the past year—”

  “Arthur Less,” Carlos interrupts, shaking his head. “You have the best life of anyone I know.”

  This is nonsense to Less.

  Carlos looks into the fire, then tosses back the rest of his champagne. “I’m heading back to shore; I’ve got to leave early tomorrow. Make sure you give Vincent your flight details. To Japan, right? Kyoto? We want to make sure you get home safe. I’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, he strides off across the island to where his boat waits in moonlight.

  But Less does not see Carlos in the morning. His own boat takes him back to the resort, where he stays up late looking at the stars, recalling the lawn outside his cottage and how it shimmered with glowworms, and he sees one particular constellation that looks like the stuffed squirrel named Michael he had as a boy, who was left behind in a Florida hotel room. Hello, Michael! He goes to bed very late, and when he does get up, he finds that Carlos has already left. He wonders what it is he is meant to have won.

  For a seven-year-old boy, the boredom of sitting in church is rivaled only by sitting in an airport lounge. This particular boy has been sitting with his Sunday-school book in his lap—a set of Bible stories with wildly inconsistent illustration styles—and staring at a picture of Daniel’s lion. How he wishes it were a dragon. How he wishes his mother had not confiscated his pen. It is a long stone room with a white wood ceiling; perhaps two hundred sandals are arrayed outside on the grass. Everyone is in their best clothes; his are exquisitely hot. Fans above nod back and forth, spectators at the tennis match of God and Satan. The boy hears the parson talking; he can think only of the parson’s daughter who, while only three, has completely captured his heart. He looks over, and she is on her mother’s lap; she looks back and blinks. But even more interesting is the window behind her, opening onto the road, where a white Tata is stuck in traffic, and there, clearly visible in its open window: the American!

  How incredible, he wants to tell everybody, but of course he’s forbidden to speak; it is driving him as mad as the parson’s temptress daughter. The American, the one from the airport, in the same beige linen as before. All around him, vendors are walking from car to car with hot food wrapped in paper, water, and sodas, and everywhere horns are musically honking. It feels like a parade. The American leans his head out the window, presumably to check the traffic, and then, for one, brief moment, his eyes meet those of the boy. What is contained in that blue gaze, the boy cannot comprehend. They are the eyes of a castaway. Headed to Japan. Then the invisible obstacle is removed, traffic begins to move forward, the American pulls himself back into the shadow of the car, and he is gone.

  Less at Last

  From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. I admit it looks bad (misfortune is about to arrive). I recall our second meeting, when Less was just over forty. I was at a cocktail party in a new city, looking out at the view, when I felt the sensation of someone opening a window and turned. No one had opened a window; a new person had simply entered the room. He was tall, with thinning blond hair and the profile of an English lord. He gave a sad grin to the crowd and raised a hand the way some people do when (after being introduced with an anecdote) they say “Guilty!” Nowhere on earth could he be mistaken for anything but an American. Did I recognize him as the same man who taught me to draw in that cold white room when I was young? The one I thought was a boy but who betrayed me by being a man? Not at first. My initial thoughts were certainly not those of a child. But then, yes, on a second glance, I did recognize him. He had aged without growing old: a harder jaw, a thicker neck, a faded color to his hair and skin. No one would mistake him for a boy. And yet it was definitely him: I recognized the distinctly identifiable innocence he carried with him. Mine had vanished in the intervening years; his, strangely, had not. Here was someone who should have known better; who should have built an amusing armor around himself, like everyone else in that room, laughing; who should, by now, have grown a skin. Standi
ng there like someone lost in Grand Central Station.

  So it is that, almost a decade later, Arthur Less wears the same expression as he emerges from the plane in Osaka and, finding no one to greet him, experiences that quicksand sensation every traveler recognizes: Of course there is no one to greet me; why would anyone remember, and what am I supposed to do now? Above him, a fly orbits a ceiling lamp in a trapezoidal pattern, and in life’s constant imitation, Arthur Less begins a similar orbit around the Arrivals terminal. He passes a number of counters whose signs, while ostensibly in English, mean nothing to him (JASPER!, AERONET, GOLD-MAN), reminding him of that startling moment while reading a book when he finds it is all complete gibberish and realizes that he is, in fact, dreaming. At the final counter (CHROME), an elderly man calls out to him; Arthur Less, by now fluent in global sign language, understands this is a private bus company and the Kyoto city council has left him a ticket. The name on the ticket: DR. ESS. Less experiences a brief wonderful vertigo. Outside, the minibus is waiting; it is clearly meant only for Less. A driver exits; he is wearing the cap and white gloves of a cinema chauffeur; he nods to Arthur Less, who finds himself bowing before he enters the bus, chooses a seat, wipes his face with a handkerchief, and looks out the window at this, his final destination. Only an ocean left to cross now. He has lost so much along the way: his lover, his dignity, his beard, his suit, and his suitcase.