“I loved Dark Matter. There is a part that reminded me of Kawabata.”
“He’s one of my favorites! The Old Capital. Kyoto.”
“I am from Kyoto, Mr. Less.”
“Really? I’ll be there in a few months—”
“Mr. Less. We are having a problem…”
This conversation takes place as the woman in the brown wool dress leads him down a theater hallway. It is decorated with a lone prop tree, the kind the hero hides behind in comedies; the rest is all brick painted glossy black. Less and his escort have run from the hotel to the event space, and he can already feel the sweat turning his crisp white shirt into a transparency.
Why him? Why did they ask Arthur Less? A minor author whose greatest fame was a youthful association with the Russian River School of writers and artists, an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books. Well, Less knows why. It is no mystery. A calculation was made: what literary writer would agree to prepare for an interview and yet not be paid? It had to be someone terribly desperate. How many other writers of his acquaintance said “no chance”? How far down the list did they go before someone said: “What about Arthur Less?”
He is indeed a desperate man.
From behind the wall, he can hear the crowd chanting something. Surely the name H. H. H. Mandern. In the past month, Less has privately gorged on H. H. H. Mandern’s works, those space operettas, which at first appalled him, with their tin-ear language and laughable stock characters, and then drew him in with their talent for invention, surely greater than his own. Less’s new novel, a serious investigation of the human soul, seems like a minor planet compared with the constellations invented by this man. And yet, what is there to ask him? What does one ever ask an author except: “How?” And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: “Beats me!”
The escort is chattering about the theater capacity, the preorders, the book tour, the money, the money, the money. She mentions that H. H. H. Mandern seems to have come down with food poisoning.
“You’ll see,” the escort says, and a black door opens onto a bright clean room where deli meats fan across a folding table. Beside it stands a white-haired lady in shawls, and below her: H. H. H. Mandern, vomiting into a bucket.
The lady turns to Arthur and scans the space helmet: “Who the hell are you?”
New York: the first stop on a trip around the world. An accident, really, of Less trying to find his way out of a sticky situation. He is quite proud he has managed to do so. It was a wedding invitation.
Arthur Less has, for the past decade and a half, remained a bachelor. This came after a long period of living with the older poet Robert Brownburn, a tunnel of love he entered at twenty-one and exited, blinking in the sunlight, in his thirties. Where was he? Somewhere in there he lost the first phase of youth, like the first phase of a rocket; it had fallen, depleted, behind him. And here was the second. And last. He swore he would not give it to anyone; he would enjoy it. He would enjoy it alone. But: how to live alone and yet not be alone? It was solved for him by the most surprising person: his one-time rival Carlos.
If asked about Carlos, Less always calls him “one of my oldest friends.” The date of their first encounter can be pinpointed precisely: Memorial Day, 1987. Less can even remember what each of them wore: he, a green Speedo, Carlos, the same in bright banana. Each with a white-wine spritzer in hand, like a pistol, eyeing the other from across the deck. A song was playing, Whitney Houston wanting to dance with somebody. Shadow of a sequoia falling between them. With somebody who loved her. Oh, to have a time machine and a video camera! To capture thin pink-gold Arthur Less and brawny nut-brown Carlos Pelu in their youth, when your narrator was only a child! But who needs a camera? Surely, for each of them, that scene replays itself whenever the other’s name is mentioned. Memorial Day, spritzer, sequoia, somebody. And each smiles and says the other is “one of my oldest friends.” When of course they hated each other on sight.
Let us take that time machine after all, but to a destination almost twenty years later. Let us land ourselves in mid-2000s San Francisco, a house in the hills, on Saturn Street. One of those creatures on stilts, a glass wall revealing a never-used grand piano and a crowd of mostly men celebrating one of a dozen fortieth-birthday parties that year. Among them: a thicker Carlos, whose longtime lover left him real estate when he died, and who turned those few lots into a property empire, including far-flung holdings in Vietnam, Thailand, even some ridiculous resort Less heard about in India. Carlos: same dignified profile, but no trace anymore of that muscled young man in a banana Speedo. It was an easy walk for Arthur Less, from his little shack on the Vulcan Steps, where he now lived alone. A party; why not? He chose a Lessian costume—jeans and a cowboy shirt, only slightly wrong—and made his way south along the hillside, toward the house.
Meanwhile, imagine Carlos, enthroned in a peacock chair and holding court. Beside him, twenty-five years old, in black jeans, T-shirt, and round tortoiseshell glasses, with dark curly hair: his son.
My son, I recall Carlos telling everyone when the boy first appeared, then barely in his teens. But he was not his son—he was an orphaned nephew, shipped off to his next of kin in San Francisco. How do I describe him? Big eyed, with brown sun-streaked hair and a truculent demeanor in those days, he refused to eat vegetables or to call Carlos anything but Carlos. His name was Federico (Mexican mother), but everybody called him Freddy.
At the party, Freddy stared out the window, where the fog erased downtown. These days he ate vegetables but still called his legal father Carlos. In his suit he was painfully thin, with a concave chest, and, while lacking youth’s verve, Freddy had all of youth’s passions; one could sit back with a bag of popcorn and watch the romances and comedies of his mind projected onto his face, and the lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses swirled with his thoughts like the iridescent membranes of soap bubbles.
Freddy turned at the sound of his name; it was a woman in a white silk suit and amber beads, with a cool Diana Ross demeanor: “Freddy, honey, I heard you were back in school.” What was he studying to be? she asked gently. Proud smile: “A high school English teacher.”
This caused her face to flower. “God, that’s nice to hear! I never see young people going into teaching.”
“To be honest, I think it’s mostly that I don’t like people my age.”
She picked the olive from her martini. “That’ll be hard on your love life.”
“I suppose. But I don’t really have a love life,” Freddy said, taking a long gulp from his champagne, finishing it.
“We just have to find you the right man. You know my son, Tom—”