Was it worth it?
Luck in days of endless golden words. Luck in checks in the mail. Luck in prize ceremonies and trips to Rome and London. Luck in tuxedos and hands secretly held beside the mayor or the governor or, one time, the president.
Peeking in the room while he was out. Rooting through the trash bin. Looking at the blanket heaped on the napping couch, the books beside it. And, with dread, what sat half-written in the typewriter’s gap-toothed mouth. For at the beginning, one never knew what he was writing about. Was it you?
Before a mirror, behind him, tying his tie for a reading while he smiles, for he knows perfectly well how to tie it.
Marian, was it worth it for you?
The festival takes place in University City, in a low-ceilinged concrete building associated with the Global Linguistics and Literature Department, whose famous mosaics have for some reason been removed for restoration, leaving it as barren as an old woman without her teeth. Again, the Head does not make an appearance. Less’s day of judgment has arrived; he finds he is shaking with fear. Color-coded carpets lead to various subdepartments, and around any corner Marian Brownburn might appear, tanned and sinewy, as he remembers her on a beach, but when Less is led to a green room (painted a pastel green, supplied with a tower of fruit), he is introduced only to a friendly man in a harlequin tie. “Se?or Less!” the man says, bowing twice. “What an honor for you to come to the festival!”
Less looks around for his personal Fury; there is no one in the room but him, this man, and Arturo. “Is Marian Brownburn here?”
The man bows. “I am sorry it was so much in Spanish.”
Less hears his name shouted from the doorway and flinches. It is the Head, his curly white hair in disarray, his face a grotesque shade of red. He motions Less over; Less quickly approaches. “Sorry I missed you yesterday,” says the Head. “I had other business, but I wouldn’t miss this panel for the world.”
“Is Marian here?” Less asks quietly.
“You’ll be fine, don’t worry.”
“I’d just like to see her before we—”
“She isn’t coming.” The Head puts his heavy hand on Less’s shoulder. “We got a note last night. She broke her hip; she’s nearly eighty, you know. A shame, because we had so many questions for you both.”
Less experiences not a helium-filled sense of relief, but a horrible deflating sorrow. “Is she okay?”
“She sends her love to you.”
“But is she okay?”
“Sure. We had to make a new plan. I’m going to be up there with you! I’ll talk for maybe twenty minutes about my work. Then I’ll ask you about meeting Brownburn when you were twenty-one. Do I have that right? You were twenty-one?”
“I’m twenty-five,” Less lies to the woman on the beach.
Young Arthur Less sitting on a beach towel, perched with three other men above the high-tide line. It is San Francisco in October 1987, it is seventy-five degrees, and everyone is celebrating like children with a snow day. No one goes to work. Everyone harvests their pot plants. Sunlight flows as sweet and yellow as the cheap champagne sitting, half-finished and now too warm, in the sand beside young Arthur Less. The anomaly causing the hot weather is also responsible for extraordinarily high waves that send men scrambling from the rockier gay section over to the straight section of Baker Beach, and there they all huddle together, united in the dunes. Before them: the ocean wrestles with itself in silver-blue. Arthur Less is a little drunk and a little high. He is naked. He is twenty-one.
The woman beside him, tanned to alder wood, topless, has begun to talk to him. She wears sunglasses; she is smoking; she is somewhere past forty. She says, “Well, I hope you’re making good use of youth.”
Less, cross-legged on his towel and pink as a boiled shrimp: “I don’t know.”
She nods. “You should waste it.”
“What’s that?”
“You should be at the beach, like today. You should get stoned and drunk and have loads of sex.” She takes another drag off her cigarette. “I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That’s all you’ll talk about when you’re forty. Real estate! Any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever thought were important. Waste every day, that’s what I say.”
He laughs goofily and looks over at his group of friends. “I guess I’m doing pretty good at that.”
“You queer, honey?”
“Oh,” he says, smiling. “Yeah.”
The man beside him, a broad-chested Italianate fellow in his thirties, asks for young Arthur Less to “do my back.” The lady seems amused, and Less turns to apply cream to the man’s back, the color of which reveals it is far too late. Dutifully, he does his job anyway and receives a pat on the rump. Less takes a swig of warm champagne. The waves are growing in intensity; people leap in there, laughing, screaming with delight. Arthur Less at twenty-one: thin and boyish, not a muscle on him, his blond hair bleached white, his toes painted red, sitting on a beach on a beautiful day in San Francisco, in the awful year of 1987, and terrified, terrified, terrified. AIDS is unstoppable.
When he turns, the lady is still staring at him and smoking.
“Is that your guy?” she asks.
He looks over at the Italian, then turns back and nods.
“And the handsome man beyond him?”
“My friend Carlos.” Naked, muscled, and browned by the sun, like a polished redwood burl: young Carlos lifting his head from the towel as he hears his name.
“You boys are all so beautiful. Lucky man to have snatched you up. I hope he fucks you silly.” She laughs. “Mine used to.”
“I don’t know about that,” Less says softly, so that the Italian will not hear.
“Maybe what you need at your age is a broken heart.”
He laughs and runs a hand through his bleached hair. “I don’t know about that either!”
“Ever had one?”
“No!” he shouts, still laughing, bringing his knees up to his chest.
A man stands up from behind the woman; her pose has hidden him all this time. The lean body of a runner, sunglasses, a Rock Hudson jaw. Also naked. He looks down first at her, then at young Arthur Less, then says aloud to everybody that he is going in.
“You’re an idiot!” the lady says, sitting straight up. “It’s a hurricane out there.”
He says he has swum in hurricanes before. He has a faint British accent, or perhaps he’s from New England.
The lady turns to Less and lowers her sunglasses. Her eye shadow is hummingbird blue. “Young man, my name’s Marian. Will you do me a favor? Go in the water with my ridiculous husband. He may be a great poet, but he’s a terrible swimmer, and I can’t bear to watch him die. Will you go with him?”