I remember Arthur Less in his youth. I was twelve or so and very bored at an adult party. The apartment itself was all in white, as was everyone invited, and I was given some kind of colorless soda and told not to sit on anything. The silver-white wallpaper had a jasmine-vine repetition that fascinated me for long enough to notice that every three feet, a little bee was kept from landing on a flower by the frozen nature of art. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder—“Do you want to draw something?” I turned, and there was a young blond man smiling down at me. Tall, thin, long hair on top, the idealized face of a Roman statue, and slightly pop eyed as he grinned at me: the kind of animated expression that delights children. I must have assumed he was a teenager. He brought me to the kitchen, where he had pencils and paper, and said we could draw the view. I asked if I could draw him. He laughed at that, but he said all right and sat on a stool listening to the music playing from the other room. I knew the band. It never occurred to me that he was hiding from the party.
No one could rival Arthur Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it. He sat, and his mind immediately left me behind. His lean frame in pegged jeans and a big speckled white cable-knit sweater, his long flushed neck stretched as he listened—“So lonely, so lonely”—too big a head for his frame, in a way, too long and rectangular, lips too red, cheeks too rosy, and a thick glossy head of blond hair buzzed short on the sides and falling in a wave over his forehead. Staring off at the fog, hands in his lap, and mouthing along to the lyrics—“So lonely, so lonely”—I blush to think of the tangle of lines I made of him. I was too much in awe of his self-sufficiency, of his freedom. To disappear within himself for ten or fifteen minutes while I drew him, when I could barely sit still to hold the pencil. And after a while, his eyes brightened, and he looked at me and said, “What do you got?” and I showed him. He smiled and nodded and gave me some tips, and asked if I wanted more soda.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
His mouth screwed into a smile. He brushed the hair out of his eyes. “I’m twenty-seven.”
For some reason, I found this to be a terrible betrayal. “You’re not a kid!” I told him. “You’re a man!”
How inconceivable to watch the man’s face blush with injury. Who knows why what I said wounded him; I suppose he liked to think of himself as a boy still. I had taken him for confident when he was in truth full of worry and terror. Not that I saw all that then, when he blushed and his eyes went down. I knew nothing of anxiety or other pointless human suffering. I only knew I had said the wrong thing.
An old man appeared in the doorway. He seemed old to me: white oxford shirt, black spectacles, something like a pharmacist. “Arthur, let’s get out of here.” Arthur smiled at me and thanked me for a nice afternoon. The old man glanced at me and nodded briefly. I felt the need to fix whatever I had done wrong. Then, together, they left. Of course I did not know that it was the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Robert Brownburn. With his young lover, Arthur Less.
“Another Manhattan, please.”
It is later the same night; Arthur Less had better not be hungover for the interview tomorrow with Mandern. And he had better find something space operatic to wear.
He is talking: “I’m traveling around the world.”
This conversation takes place in a Midtown bar close to the hotel. Less used to frequent it as a very young man. Nothing has changed about the joint: not the doorman, dubious of anyone wanting to enter; not the framed portrait of an older Charlie Chaplin; not the lounge whose curved bar serves the young swiftly and the old tardily; not the black grand piano whose player (as in a Wild West saloon) dutifully plays whatever he is ordered to (Cole Porter, mostly); not the striped wallpaper, nor the shell-shaped sconces, nor the clientele. It is known as a place for older men to meet younger ones; two antiquities are interviewing a slick-haired man on a couch. Less is amused to think that now he is on the other end of the equation. He is talking to a balding but handsome young man from Ohio, who for some reason is listening intently. Less has not yet noticed, displayed above the bar, a Russian cosmonaut’s helmet.
“Where to next?” the fellow asks brightly. He has a redhead’s missing lashes and freckled nose.
“Mexico. Then I’m up for a prize in Italy,” Less says. He is drinking Manhattan number two, and it has done its job. “I’m not going to win it. But I had to leave home.”
The redhead rests his head on his hand. “Where’s home, handsome?”
“San Francisco.” Less is having a memory from nearly thirty years before: walking out of an Erasure concert with his friend, stoned, learning that the Democrats had retaken the Senate, and walking into this bar and declaring: “We want to sleep with a Republican! Who’s a Republican?” And every man in the place raising his hand.
“San Francisco’s not too bad,” the young man says with a smile. “Just a little smug. Why leave?”
Less leans against the bar and looks directly at his new friend. Cole Porter is still alive in that piano, and Less’s cherry is still alive in his Manhattan; he plucks it from the drink. Charlie Chaplin stares down (why Charlie Chaplin?). “What do you call a guy who you’re sleeping with—let’s say you do that for nine years, you make breakfast and have birthday parties and arguments and wear what he tells you to wear, for nine years, and you’re nice to his friends, and he’s always at your place, but you know all the time it can’t go anywhere, he’s going to find someone, it won’t be you, that’s agreed on from the start, he’s going to find someone and marry him—what do you call that guy?”
The piano moves into “Night and Day” with a furious tom-tom beat.
His barmate lifts an eyebrow. “I don’t know, what do you call him?”
“Freddy.” Less takes the cherry stem in his mouth and, within a few seconds, removes it tied into a knot. He places the knot on the bar napkin before him. “He found someone, and he’s marrying him.”
The young man nods and asks, “What are you drinking, handsome?”
“Manhattans, but I’m buying. Excuse me, bartender,” he says, pointing to the space helmet above them, “what’s that over the bar?”
“Sorry, mister, not tonight,” the redheaded man says, putting his hand on Less’s. “It’s on me. And the cosmonaut helmet is mine.”
Less: “It’s yours?”
“I work here.”
Our hero smiles, looking down at his hand, then up at the redhead. “You’ll think I’m nuts,” he says. “I have a crazy favor to ask. I’m interviewing H. H. H. Mandern tomorrow, and I need—”
“I also live nearby. Tell me your name again?”
“Arthur Less?” the white-haired woman asks in the green room of the theater, while H. H. H. Mandern vomits into a bucket. “Who the hell is Arthur Less?”
Less stands in the doorway, space helmet under his arm, a smile imprinted on his face. How many times has he been asked this question? Certainly enough for it not to sting; he has been asked it when he was very young, back in the Carlos days, when he could overhear someone explaining how Arthur Less was that kid from Delaware in the green Speedo, the thin one by the pool, or later, when it was explained he was the lover of Robert Brownburn, the shy one by the bar, or even later, when it was noted he was his ex-lover and maybe shouldn’t be invited over anymore, or when he was introduced as the author of a first novel, and then a second novel, and then as that fellow someone knew from somewhere long ago. And at last: as the man Freddy Pelu had been sleeping with for nine whole years, until Freddy married Tom Dennis. He has been all those things, to all those people who did not know who he was.