Less(18)

“Is it still active, that volcano?”

“No,” Fernando says sadly, shaking his head. “It is closed.”



What was it like to live with genius?

Like living alone.

Like living alone with a tiger.

Everything had to be sacrificed for the work. Plans had to be canceled, meals had to be delayed; liquor had to be bought, as soon as possible, or else all poured into the sink. Money had to be rationed or spent lavishly, changing daily. The sleep schedule was the poet’s to make, and it was as often late nights as it was early mornings. The habit was the demon pet in the house; the habit, the habit, the habit; the morning coffee and books and poetry, the silence until noon. Could he be tempted by a morning stroll? He could, he always could; it was the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired; but a morning walk meant work undone, and suffering, suffering, suffering. Keep the habit, help the habit; lay out the coffee and poetry; keep the silence; smile when he walked sulkily out of his office to the bathroom. Taking nothing personally. And did you sometimes leave an art book around with a thought that it would be the key to his mind? And did you sometimes put on music that might unlock the doubt and fear? Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.

Where did the genius come from? Where did it go?

Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you’d never met but whom you knew he loved more than you.

Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better.

Life with doubt. Doubt in the morning, with the oil beading on a cup of coffee. Doubt in the pee break, not catching his eye. Doubt in the sound of the front door opening and closing—a restless walk, no good-bye—and in the return. Doubt in the slow sound of typewriter keys. Doubt at lunchtime, taken in his room. Doubt vanishing in the afternoon like the fog. Doubt driven away. Doubt forgotten. Four in the morning, feeling him stirring awake, knowing he is staring at the darkness, at Doubt. Life with Doubt: A Memoir.

What made it happen? What made it not happen?

Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding.

Was it worth it?

Luck in days of endless golden words. Luck in checks in the mail. Luck in prize ceremonies and trips to Rome and London. Luck in tuxedos and hands secretly held beside the mayor or the governor or, one time, the president.

Peeking in the room while he was out. Rooting through the trash bin. Looking at the blanket heaped on the napping couch, the books beside it. And, with dread, what sat half-written in the typewriter’s gap-toothed mouth. For at the beginning, one never knew what he was writing about. Was it you?

Before a mirror, behind him, tying his tie for a reading while he smiles, for he knows perfectly well how to tie it.

Marian, was it worth it for you?



The festival takes place in University City, in a low-ceilinged concrete building associated with the Global Linguistics and Literature Department, whose famous mosaics have for some reason been removed for restoration, leaving it as barren as an old woman without her teeth. Again, the Head does not make an appearance. Less’s day of judgment has arrived; he finds he is shaking with fear. Color-coded carpets lead to various subdepartments, and around any corner Marian Brownburn might appear, tanned and sinewy, as he remembers her on a beach, but when Less is led to a green room (painted a pastel green, supplied with a tower of fruit), he is introduced only to a friendly man in a harlequin tie. “Se?or Less!” the man says, bowing twice. “What an honor for you to come to the festival!”

Less looks around for his personal Fury; there is no one in the room but him, this man, and Arturo. “Is Marian Brownburn here?”

The man bows. “I am sorry it was so much in Spanish.”

Less hears his name shouted from the doorway and flinches. It is the Head, his curly white hair in disarray, his face a grotesque shade of red. He motions Less over; Less quickly approaches. “Sorry I missed you yesterday,” says the Head. “I had other business, but I wouldn’t miss this panel for the world.”

“Is Marian here?” Less asks quietly.

“You’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“I’d just like to see her before we—”

“She isn’t coming.” The Head puts his heavy hand on Less’s shoulder. “We got a note last night. She broke her hip; she’s nearly eighty, you know. A shame, because we had so many questions for you both.”

Less experiences not a helium-filled sense of relief, but a horrible deflating sorrow. “Is she okay?”

“She sends her love to you.”

“But is she okay?”

“Sure. We had to make a new plan. I’m going to be up there with you! I’ll talk for maybe twenty minutes about my work. Then I’ll ask you about meeting Brownburn when you were twenty-one. Do I have that right? You were twenty-one?”



“I’m twenty-five,” Less lies to the woman on the beach.

Young Arthur Less sitting on a beach towel, perched with three other men above the high-tide line. It is San Francisco in October 1987, it is seventy-five degrees, and everyone is celebrating like children with a snow day. No one goes to work. Everyone harvests their pot plants. Sunlight flows as sweet and yellow as the cheap champagne sitting, half-finished and now too warm, in the sand beside young Arthur Less. The anomaly causing the hot weather is also responsible for extraordinarily high waves that send men scrambling from the rockier gay section over to the straight section of Baker Beach, and there they all huddle together, united in the dunes. Before them: the ocean wrestles with itself in silver-blue. Arthur Less is a little drunk and a little high. He is naked. He is twenty-one.