Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

  I have neglected to mention that his suitcase has not made it to Japan.

  Less is here to review Japanese cuisine for a men’s magazine, in particular kaiseki cuisine; he volunteered for the gig at that poker game. He knows nothing at all about kaiseki cuisine, but he has dinner plans at four different establishments over two days, the last an ancient inn outside Kyoto, so he is expecting a wide variety. Two days, then he will be done. All he knows of Japan is a memory from when he was a little boy, when his mother drove him into Washington DC, for a special trip, and he was made to wear a button-up shirt and wool trousers, and was taken to a large stone building with columns, and stood in line for a long time in the snow before being allowed entrance to a small dark chamber in which various treasures appeared, scrolls and headdresses and suits of armor (which Less took for real people at first). “They’ve let them out of Japan for the first time and probably never will again,” his mother whispered, apparently referring to a mirror, a jewel, and a sword on display with two very real and disappointing guards, and when a gong sounded and they were told to leave, she leaned down to him and asked: “What did you like best?” He told her, and her face twisted in amusement: “Garden? What garden?” He had been drawn not to the sacred treasures but to a glass case containing a town in miniature, to which an eyepiece was attached so that he could peer in on one scene or the next like a god, each done in such exquisite detail that it seemed he was looking in on the past through a magic telescope. And of all the wonders in that case, the greatest was the garden, with its river that seemed to trickle, filled with orange-spotted carp, and bushy pines and maples and a little fountain made from a piece of bamboo (in reality as big as a pin!) that tipped and tipped, as if dropping its load of water into the stone pool at its base. The garden enchanted little Arthur Less for weeks; he walked among the brown leaves of his backyard, looking for its little golden key. He took it for granted he would find the door.

  So all this is surprising and new. Arthur Less sits in the bus and watches the industrial landscape bloom along the highway. He expected something prettier, perhaps. But even Kawabata wrote about the changing landscape around Osaka, and that was sixty years ago. He is tired; his flights and connections have felt more dreamlike than even his drugged tour of the Frankfurt airport. He did not hear again from Carlos. A piece of nonsense buzzes in his brain: Is this because of Freddy? But that story had reached its end, as this one almost has.

  The bus continues into Kyoto, which feels like a mere elaboration on the small townlets before it, and while Less is still trying to figure out if they are in the downtown—if perhaps this is a main street, if that is in fact the Kamo River—they have arrived. A low wooden wall off the main road. A young man in a black suit bows and stares curiously at the place where Less’s suitcase should be. A middle-aged woman in kimono approaches from the cobblestone courtyard. She is lightly made up, her hair pulled into a style Less associates with the early twentieth century. A Gibson girl. “Mr. Arthur,” she says with a bow. He bows in return. Behind her, at the front desk, there is a ruckus: an old woman, also in kimono, chattering on a cell phone and making marks on a wall calendar.

  “That is just my mother,” the proprietress says, sighing. “She thinks she is still the boss. We give her a fake calendar to make reservations. The phone also is fake. Can I make you a cup of tea?” He says that would be wonderful, and she smiles handsomely; then her face darkens in terrible sorrow. “And I am so sorry, Mr. Arthur,” she says, as if imparting the death of a loved one. “You are too early to see the cherry blossoms.”

  After the tea (which she makes by hand, whisking it into a bitter green foam—“Please eat the sugar cookie before the tea”) he is shown to his room and told it was, in fact, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s favorite. A low lacquered table is set on the tatami floor, and the woman slides back paper walls to reveal a moonlit corner garden dripping from a recent rain; Kawabata wrote of this garden in the rain that it was the heart of Kyoto. “Not any garden,” she says pointedly, “but this very garden.” She informs him that the tub in the bathroom is already warm and that an attendant will keep it warm, always, for whenever he needs it. Always. There is a yukata in the closet for him to wear. Would he like dinner in the room? She will bring it personally for him: the first of the four kaiseki meals he will be writing about.

  The kaiseki meal, he has learned, is an ancient formal meal drawn from both monasteries and the royal court. It is typically seven courses, each course composed of a particular type of food (grilled, simmered, raw) and seasonal ingredients. Tonight, it is butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Less is humbled both by the exquisite food and by the graciousness with which she presents it. “I most sincerely apologize I cannot be here tomorrow to see you; I must go to Tokyo.” She says this as if she were missing the most extraordinary of wonders: another day with Arthur Less. He sees, in the lines around her mouth, the shadow of the smile all widows wear in private. She bows and exits, returning with a sake sampler. He tries all three, and when asked which is his favorite, he says the Tonni, though he cannot tell the difference. He asks which is her favorite. She blinks and says: “The Tonni.” If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

  The next day is already his last, and it looks as if it will be a full one; he has arranged to visit three restaurants. It is eleven in the morning, and Arthur Less, still wearing his clothes from the day before, is already on his way to the first, recovering his shoes from the numbered cabinet where the hotel worker keeps them when he is waylaid by the elderly mother. She stands behind the reception desk, dwarfed and age speckled as a winter starling, perhaps ninety years old, and chattering, chattering away, as if the cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese (a hair-of-the-dog sensibility). And yet somehow, from his months of travel and pantomime, his pathetic journey into the empathic and telepathic, he feels he does understand. She is talking about her youth. She is talking about when she was the proprietress. She pulls out a weathered black-and-white photograph of a seated Western couple—the man silver haired, the woman quite chic in a toque—and he recognizes the room where he had tea. She is saying the girl serving tea is her and the man, a famous American. There is a long expectant pause as recognition rises like a deep-sea diver, slowly, cautiously, until it surfaces, and he exclaims:

  “Charlie Chaplin!”

  The old woman closes her eyes with joy.

  A young woman in braids arrives and turns on the little television behind the counter, changing the channels until she lands on a scene of the emperor of Japan having tea with a few guests, one of whom he recognizes.

  “Is that the proprietress?” he asks the young woman.

  “Oh yes,” she says, “she is so sorry she could not say good-bye to you.”

  “She didn’t tell me it was so she could have tea with the emperor!”

  “It is with her great apologies, Mr. Less.” There are more apologies. “I am also so sorry your suitcase is not here for you. But early this morning we had a call: there is a message.” She hands him an envelope. Inside is a piece of paper with the message in all caps, which reads like an old-fashioned telegram:

  ARTHUR DO NOT WORRY BUT ROBERT HAS HAD A STROKE BACK HOME NOW PLEASE CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN

  —MARIAN

  “Arthur, there you are!”

  Marian’s voice—almost thirty years since they last spoke; he can only imagine the names she called him after the divorce. But he remembers Mexico City: She sends her love. In Sonoma it is seven at night the previous day.

  “Marian, what’s happened?”

  “Arthur, don’t worry, don’t worry, he’s okay.”

  “What. Happened.”

  That sigh from across the world, and he takes a moment from his worries to marvel: Marian! “He was just in his apartment, reading, and fell flat on the floor. Luckily, Joan was there.” The nurse. “He bruised himself a little. He’s having trouble talking, a little trouble with his right ha
nd. It’s minor.” She says this sternly. “It’s a minor stroke.”

  “What is a minor stroke? Does that mean it’s nothing, or does that mean thank God it wasn’t a major one?”

  “The thank-God kind. And thank God he wasn’t on the stairs or something. Listen, Arthur, I don’t want you to worry. But I wanted to call you. You know you’re listed first on his emergency contacts. But they didn’t know where you were, so they called me. I’m second.” A little laugh. “Lucky them, I’ve been stuck at home for months!”

  “Oh, Marian, you broke your hip!”

  Again the sigh. “Not broken, it turned out. But I’m bruised black and blue. What do we do? Things fall apart. Sorry I had to skip Mexico City; that would have been a nicer reunion.”

  “I’m so glad you’re there with him, Marian. I’ll be there tomorrow, I have to check on—”

  “No, no, Arthur, don’t do that! You’re on your honeymoon.”

  “What?”

  “Robert’s fine. I’ll be here a week or so. See him when you get back. I wouldn’t have bothered you at all except he insisted. He misses you, of course, at a time like this.”

  “Marian, I’m not on my honeymoon. I’m in Japan for an article.”

  But there was no contradicting Marian Brownburn. “Robert said you got married. He said you married Freddy somebody.”

  “No no, no no,” Arthur says, and finds himself getting dizzy. “Freddy somebody married somebody else. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be right there.”

  “Listen,” Marian says in her administrative voice. “Arthur. Don’t you get on a plane. He’ll be furious.”

  “I can’t stay here, Marian. You wouldn’t stay here. We both love him, we wouldn’t stay here while he’s suffering.”

  “Okay. Let’s set up one of those video calls you boys do…”

  They arrange to chat again in ten minutes, during which time Less manages to find the inn’s computer, which is startlingly up-to-date, considering the ancient room in which it sits. As he waits for the video call, he stares at a bird of paradise arranged in a bowl by the window. A minor stroke. Fuck you, life.

  Arthur Less’s life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less’s life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend’s Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more—but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor’s notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever.

  This was how he felt when Robert left him.

  Or perhaps you assumed he left Robert?

  As with Proust, he knew the end was coming. Fifteen years, and the joy of love had long since faded, and the cheating had begun; not simply Less’s escapades with other men but secret affairs that ran the course of a month to a year and broke everything in sight. Was he testing to see how elastic love could be? Was he simply a man who had gladly given his youth to a man in midlife and now, nearing midlife himself, wanted back the fortune he squandered? Wanted sex and love and folly? The very things Robert saved him from all those years ago? As for the good things, as for safety, comfort, love—Less found himself smashing them to bits. Perhaps he did not know what he was doing; perhaps it was a kind of madness. But perhaps he did know. Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

  The real end came when Robert was on one of his reading trips, this time through the South. Robert called dutifully the first night he arrived, but Less was not home, and over the next few days his voice mail was filled, first with stories, about, for instance, Spanish moss hanging from the oaks like rotting dresses, then with briefer and briefer messages until, at last, there were none. Less was preparing himself, in fact, for Robert’s return, when he was planning on a very serious conversation. He sensed six months of couples counseling, and he sensed it would end with a tearful parting; perhaps all that would take a year. But it had to start now. His heart was in a knot, and he practiced his lines as one practices a phrase in a foreign language before heading to the ticket counter: “I think we both know something isn’t working, I think we both know something isn’t working, I think we both know something isn’t working.” When, after a silence of five days, his phone rang at last, Less suppressed a heart attack and answered it: “Robert! You got me at last. I wanted to talk. I think we both know—”

  But his speech was pierced by Robert’s deep voice: “Arthur, I love you, but I will not be coming home. Mark will be over to get some of my things. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to talk about it now. I am not angry. I love you. I am not angry. But neither of us is the man we used to be. Good-bye.”

  The End. And all that he held in his hand were the notes and afterword.

  “Look at you, Arthur.”

  It’s Robert. The connection is poor, but it is Robert Brownburn, the world-famous poet, appearing on the screen, and beside him (surely an effect of transmission), his ectoplasmic echo. Here he is: alive. Beautifully bald, with a baby’s halo of hair. He is dressed in a blue terry bathrobe. His smile contains some of the same brilliant devilry, but today it sags to the right. A stroke. Holy shit. A tube runs under his nose like a fake mustache, his voice grates like sand, and from beside him Less can hear (perhaps heightened by the microphone’s proximity) a machine’s loud respiration, bringing back memories of the “heavy breather” who would sometimes call the Less house, young Arthur Less listening with fascination as his mother yelled out, “Oh, is that my boyfriend? Tell him I’ll be right there!” But here is Robert. Slumped, slurring, mortified but alive.

  Less: “How are you doing?”

  “I feel like I’ve been in a bar fight. I am speaking to you from the afterlife.”

  “You look awful. How dare you do this,” Less says.

  “You should see the other guy.” His words are mumbled and odd.

  “You sound Scottish,” Less says.

  “We become our fathers.” Or forefathers: his s’s have become f’s, as in old manuscripts: When in the courfe of human events it becomes necefsary…

  Then the doctor, an elderly woman in black glasses, leans into view. Thin, bony, creased with lines as if crumpled in a pocket for a long time, with a wattle under her chin. A white bob and Antarctic eyes. “Arthur, it’s Marian.”

  Oh, what jokers! Less thinks. They’re kidding! There is that scene at the end of Proust when our narrator, after many years out of society, arrives at a party furious no one told him it’s a costume party; everyone is wearing white wigs! And then he realizes. It isn’t a costume party. They have simply grown old. And here, looking at his first love, the first wife—surely they’re kidding! But the joke goes on too long. Robert keeps breathing heavily. Marian does not smile. No one is kidding.

  “Marian, you look wonderful.”

  “Arthur, you’re all grown up,” she muses.

  “He’s fifty,” Robert says, then winces in discomfort. “Happy birthday, my boy. Sorry I missed it.” Forry I mifsed it. Life, liberty and the purfuit of happinefs. “I had a rendezvous with Death.”

  Marian says, “Death didn’t show. I’ll leave you boys alone for a minute. But only a minute! Don’t tire him out, Arthur. We have to take care of our Robert.”

  Thirty years ago, a beach in San Francisco.

  She vanishes; Robert’s eyes watch her leave, then they return to Less. A procession of shades, as with Odysseus, and here before him: Tiresias. The seer. “You know, it’s good to have her here. She drives me crazy. Keeps me going. There’s nothing like doing the crossword with your ex-wife. Where the he
ll are you?”

  “Kyoto.”

  “What?”

  Less leans forward and shouts: “Kyoto. Japan. But I’m coming back to see you.”

  “Fuck that. I’m fine. I lost my fine motor skills, not my goddamn mind. Look at what they have me doing.” In very slow motion, he manages to lift his hand. In it, a bright-green ball of putty. “I have to squeeze it all day. I told you this was the afterlife. Poets have to squeeze bits of clay for eternity. They’re all here, Walt and Hart and Emily and Frank. The American wing. Squeezing bits of clay. Novelists have to”—and he closes his eyes and catches his breath for a moment, then continues more weakly—“novelists have to mix our drinks. Did you write your novel in India?”

  “I did. I have one chapter left. I want to see you.”

  “Finish your fucking novel.”

  “Robert—”

  “Don’t use my stroke as an excuse. Coward! You’re afraid I’m going to die.”

  Less cannot answer; it is the truth. I know I’m out of your life / But the day that I die / I know you are going to cry. In the silence, the machine breathes on and on. Robert’s face crumbles a little. Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar.

  “Not yet, Arthur,” he says briskly. “Don’t be in such a fucking hurry for it. Didn’t someone say you’d grown a beard?”

  “Did you tell Marian I married Freddy?”

  “Who knows what I said? Do I look like I know what I’m saying? Did you?”

  “No.”

  “And now here you are. Here we both are. You look very, very sad, my boy.”

  Does he? Well rested and pampered, fresh from his bath? But you can’t hide anything from Tiresias.

  “Did you love him, Arthur?”

  Arthur says nothing. There was a time—at a bad Italian restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco, basically abandoned except for two waiters and a tourist family from Germany whose matriarch later fell in the bathroom, hit her head, and insisted on going to the hospital (not comprehending the cost of American health care)—there was a time when Robert Brownburn, only forty-six years old, took Arthur Less’s hand and said, “My marriage is failing, it has been failing a long time. Marian and I hardly sleep together anymore. I get to bed very late, she gets up very early. She’s angry we never had children. And now that it’s too late, she’s even angrier. I’m selfish and terrible with money. I’m so unhappy. So, so unhappy, Arthur. What I’m saying is that I am in love with you. I was already going to leave Marian before I met you. And I shall dance and sing for thy delight each May-morning, I think the poem goes. I have enough to buy some shitty place somewhere. I know how to live on just a little money. I know it’s preposterous. But you are what I want. Who gives a fuck what anybody says? You are what I want, Arthur, and I—” But there was no more, because Robert Brownburn shut his eyes to hold in the longing that had overcome him in the presence of this young man, clutching his hand in this bad Italian restaurant to which they would never return. The poet wincing in pain before him, suffering, suffering, for Arthur Less. Will Less ever again be so beloved?