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 hell 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—”