Less begins to imagine (as the mayor doodles on in Italian) that he has been mistranslated, or—what is the word?—supertranslated, his novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet (Giuliana Monti is her name) who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed, without a single interview request by a journalist (his publicist said, “Autumn is a bad time”), but here in Italy he understands he is taken seriously. In autumn, no less. Just this morning, he was shown the articles in la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, local papers, and Catholic papers, with photographs of him in his blue suit, gazing upward at the camera with the same worried unsophisticated sapphire gaze he showed to Robert on that beach. But it should be a photograph of Giuliana Monti. She has written this book. Rewritten, upwritten, outwritten Less himself. For he has known genius. He has been awakened by genius in the middle of the night, by the sound of genius pacing the halls; he has made genius his coffee, and his breakfast, and his ham sandwich and his tea; he has been naked with genius, coaxed genius from panic, brought genius’s pants from the tailor and ironed his shirts for a reading. He has felt every inch of genius’s skin; he has known genius’s smell and felt genius’s touch. Fosters Lancett, a knight’s move behind him, for whom an hour-long talk on Ezra Pound is a simple matter—he is a genius. Alessandro, in his Oil Can Harry mustache, the elegant Luisa, the perverted Finn, the tattooed Riccardo: possible geniuses. How has it come to this? What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth? Decided by high school students, in fact. Is there a bucket of blood hanging high in the auditorium rafters, waiting to be dropped on his bright-blue suit? Will this become a dungeon at last? It is a mistake, or a setup, or both. But there is no escaping it now.
Arthur Less has left the room while remaining in it. Now he is alone in the bedroom of the shack, standing before the mirror and tying his bow tie. It is the day of the Wilde and Stein awards, and he is thinking, briefly, of what he will say when he wins, and, briefly, his face grows golden with delight. Three raps on the front door and the sound of a key in the lock. “Arthur!” Less is adjusting both the tie and his expectations. “Arthur!” Freddy comes around the corner, then produces, from the pocket of his Parisian suit (so new it is still partially sewn shut) a flat little box. It is a present: a polka-dot bow tie. So now the tie must be undone and this new one knotted. Freddy, looking at his mirror image. “What will you say when you win?”
And further: “You think it’s love, Arthur? It isn’t love.” Robert ranting in their hotel room before the lunchtime Pulitzer ceremony in New York. Tall and lean as the day they met; gone gray, of course, his face worn with age (“I’m dog-eared as a book”), but still the figure of elegance and intellectual fury. Standing here in silver hair before the bright window: “Prizes aren’t love. Because people who never met you can’t love you. The slots for winners are already set, from here until Judgment Day. They know the kind of poet who’s going to win, and if you happen to fit the slot, then bully for you! It’s like fitting a hand-me-down suit. It’s luck, not love. Not that it isn’t nice to have luck. Maybe the only way to think about it is being at the center of all beauty. Just by chance, today we get to be in the center of all beauty. It doesn’t mean I don’t want it—it’s a desperate way to get off—but I do. I’m a narcissist; desperate is what we do. Getting off is what we do. You look handsome in your suit. I don’t know why you’re shacked up with a man in his fifties. Oh, I know, you like a finished product. You don’t want to add a pearl. Let’s have champagne before we go. I know it’s noon. I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren’t love, but this is love. What Frank wrote: It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything in the world.”
More thunder unsettles Less from his thoughts. But it isn’t thunder; it is applause, and the young writer is pulling at Less’s coat sleeve. For Arthur Less has won.
Less German
A phone call, translated from German into English:
“Good afternoon, Pegasus Publications. This is Petra.”
“Good morning. Here is Mr. Arthur Less. There is a fence in my book.”
“Mr. Less?”
“There is a fence in my book. You are to correct, please.”
“Mr. Arthur Less, our writer? The author of Kalipso? It is wonderful to speak with you at last. Now, how can I help you?”
(Sound of keys on a keyboard) “Yes, hello. It is nice to speak. I call over a fence. Not fence.” (More keyboard sounds) “An error.”
“An error in the book?”
“Yes! I call over an error in my book.”
“I apologize. What is the nature of this error?”
“My birth year is written one nine sex four.”
“Again?”
“My birth year is sex five.”
“Do you mean you were born in 1965?”
“Exactly. The journalists write that I have fifty years. But I have forty-nine years!”
“Oh! We wrote your birth year wrong on the flap copy, and so journalists have been reporting that you’re fifty. When you’re only forty-nine. I’m so sorry. That must be so frustrating!”
(Long pause) “Exactly exactly exactly.” (Laughter) “I am not an old man!”
“Of course not. I’ll make a note for the next printing. And may I say in your photograph you look under forty? All the girls in the office are in love with you.”
(Long pause) “I do not understand.”
“I said all the girls in the office are in love with you.”
(Laughter) “Thank you, thank you, that is very very nice.” (Another pause) “I like love.”
“Yes, well, call me if you have any other concerns.”
“Thank you and good-bye!”
“Have a good day, Mr. Less.”
What a delight, for Arthur Less, to be in a country where he at last speaks the language! After the miraculous reversal of his Italian fortunes, in which he stood up in a daze and accepted a heavy golden statuette (which would now have to be figured into his luggage weight allowance)—the journalists shrieking as in an operatic finale—he is to arrive in Germany on the winds of success. Added to this: his fluency in German, and his esteemed position of professor, and how forgotten are the cares of Gestern! Chatting with the stewards, babbling freely with passport control, it seems almost possible he has forgotten that Freddy’s wedding is a matter of mere weeks away. How heartening it is to watch him speak; how disconcerting, however, to listen.
Less has studied German since he was a boy. His first teacher, when he was nine, was Frau Fernhoff, a retired piano instructor, who had them all (him, sharp-witted Georgia beanpole Anne Garret, and odd-smelling but sweet Giancarlo Taylor) stand up and shout, “Guten Morgen, Frau Fernhoff!” at the beginning of each afternoon lesson. They learned the names of fruits and vegetables (the beautiful Birne and Kirsche, the faux-ami Ananas, the more-resonant-than-“onion” Zwiebel), and described their own prepubescent bodies, from their Augenbrauen to their gro?er Zehen. High school led to more sophisticated conversation (“Mein Auto wurde gestohlen!”) and was led by buxom Fr?ulein Church, an enthusiastic teacher in wrap dresses and scarves who had grown up in a German district of New York City and who often spoke of her dream of following the Von Trapp trail in Austria. “The key to speaking a new language,” she told them, “is to be bold instead of perfect.” What Less did not know was that the charming Fr?ulein had never been to Germany, nor spoken German with Germans outside of Yorkville. She was ostensibly German speaking, just as seventeen-year-old Less was ostensibly gay. Both had the fantasy; neither had carried it out.
Bold instead of perfect, Less’s tongue is bruised with errors. Male friends tend to switch to girls in the Lessian plural, becoming Freundin instead of Freund; and, by using auf den Strich instead of unterm Strich, he can lead intrigued listeners to believe he is going into prostitution. But, even at four and nine, Less has yet to be disabused of his skills. Perhaps the fault lies with Ludwig, the folk-singing German exchange student who lived with his family, took Less’s ostensibility away, and never corrected his German—for who corrects what is spoken in bed? Perhaps it was the grateful, dankbaren East Berliners whom Less met on a trip with Robert—escaped poets living in Paris—astonished to hear their mother tongue working in the mouth of this slim young American. Perhaps it was too much Hogan’s Heroes. But Less arrives in Berlin, taxiing to his temporary apartment in Wilmersdorf, swearing he will not speak a word of English while he is here. Of course, the real challenge is to speak a word of German.