Less(11)

“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.

“I said, who the hell are you?”

No one out there in the theater will know who he is; when he will help H. H. H. Mandern, sick with food poisoning but unwilling to let down his fans, onto the stage, he will be introduced merely as “a huge fan.” When he leads that hour-and-a-half-long interview, filling it with extended descriptions when he sees the writer is failing, answering some questions from the audience when Mandern turns his weary eyes to Less, when he saves this event, saves this poor man’s career, still nobody will know who he is. They are there for H. H. H. Mandern. They are there for his robot Peabody. They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives. That other writer, sitting beside him, face partly visible in the open visor of a space helmet, is inconsequential; he will not be remembered; no one will know, or even wonder, who he is. And later tonight, when he boards a plane for Mexico City, and the young Japanese tourist beside him, hearing he is a writer, grows excited and asks who he is, Less, still in free fall from the broken bridge of his last hopes, will answer as he has so many times before.

A magniloquent spoony.

No rancor. No feelings at all.

Arthur, you know my son was never right for you.

“Nobody,” says our hero to the city of New York.





Less Mexican





Freddy Pelu is a man who doesn’t need to be told, before takeoff, to secure his own oxygen mask before assisting others.

It was just a game they were playing, waiting for friends to join them at the bar. One of those San Francisco bars that is neither gay nor straight, just odd, and Freddy still wore his blue shirt and tie from teaching, and they were having some new kind of beer that tasted like aspirin and smelled like magnolias and cost more than a hamburger. Less was in a cable-knit sweater. They were trying to describe each other in a single sentence. Less had gone first and said the sentence written above.