“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?
Robert, seventy-five, breathing heavily, says, “Oh, my poor boy. A lot?”
Still Arthur says nothing. And Robert says nothing; he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can’t point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, “That one, that star, there.”
“Am I too old to meet someone, Robert?”
Robert sits up slightly, his mood shifting back to merrymaking. “Are you too old? Listen to you. I was watching a television show about science the other day. That’s the kind of nice-old-man thing I do now. I’m very harmless these days. It was about time travel. And they had a scientist on saying that if it were possible, you’d have to build one time machine now. And build another one years later. Then you could go back and forth. A sort of time tunnel. But here’s the thing, Arthur. You could never go any further back than the invention of that first machine. Which I think is really a blow to the imagination. I took it pretty hard.”
Arthur says, “We can never kill Hitler.”
“But you know it’s like that already. When you meet people. You meet them, say, when they’re thirty, and you can never really imagine them any younger than that. You’ve seen pictures of me, Arthur, you’ve seen me at twenty.”
“You were a handsome guy.”
“But really, really, you can’t imagine me any younger than my forties, can you?”
“Sure, I can.”
“You can picture it. But you can’t quite imagine it. You can’t go back any further. It’s against the laws of physics.”
“You’re getting too excited.”
“Arthur, I look at you, and I still see that boy on the beach with the red toenails. Not at first, but my eyes adjust. I see that twenty-one-year-old boy in Mexico. I see that young man in a hotel room in Rome. I see the young writer holding his first book. I look at you, and you’re young. You’ll always be that way for me. But not for anyone else. Arthur, people who meet you now will never be able to imagine you young. They can never go any further back than fifty. It isn’t all bad. It means now people will think you were always a grown-up. They’ll take you seriously. They don’t know that you once spent an entire dinner party babbling about Nepal when you meant Tibet.”
“I can’t believe you brought that up again.”
“That you once referred to Toronto as the capital of Canada.”
“I’m going to get Marian to pull the plug.”
“To the prime minister of Canada. I love you, Arthur. My point is”—and after this harangue he has apparently worn himself out, and takes a few deep breaths—“my point is, welcome to fucking life. Fifty is nothing. I look back at fifty and think, what the fuck was I so worried about? Look at me now. I’m in the afterlife. Go enjoy yourself.” Says Tiresias.
Marian reappears on the screen: “Okay, boys, time’s up. We’ve got to let him rest.”
Robert leans over to his ex-wife. “Marian, he didn’t marry him.”
“He didn’t?”
“Apparently I heard wrong. The fellow married someone else.”
“Well, that’s shitty,” she says, then turns to the camera with an expression of sympathy. White hair held back with barrettes, round black glasses reflecting a sunny day in the past. “Arthur, he’s worn out. It’s good to see you again. We can set up another chat later.”
“I’ll be home tomorrow, I’ll drive up. Robert, I love you.”
The old rogue smiles at Arthur and shakes his head, his eyes bright and clear. “Love you always, Arthur Less.”