Less(19)

The woman beside him, tanned to alder wood, topless, has begun to talk to him. She wears sunglasses; she is smoking; she is somewhere past forty. She says, “Well, I hope you’re making good use of youth.”

Less, cross-legged on his towel and pink as a boiled shrimp: “I don’t know.”

She nods. “You should waste it.”

“What’s that?”

“You should be at the beach, like today. You should get stoned and drunk and have loads of sex.” She takes another drag off her cigarette. “I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That’s all you’ll talk about when you’re forty. Real estate! Any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever thought were important. Waste every day, that’s what I say.”

He laughs goofily and looks over at his group of friends. “I guess I’m doing pretty good at that.”

“You queer, honey?”

“Oh,” he says, smiling. “Yeah.”

The man beside him, a broad-chested Italianate fellow in his thirties, asks for young Arthur Less to “do my back.” The lady seems amused, and Less turns to apply cream to the man’s back, the color of which reveals it is far too late. Dutifully, he does his job anyway and receives a pat on the rump. Less takes a swig of warm champagne. The waves are growing in intensity; people leap in there, laughing, screaming with delight. Arthur Less at twenty-one: thin and boyish, not a muscle on him, his blond hair bleached white, his toes painted red, sitting on a beach on a beautiful day in San Francisco, in the awful year of 1987, and terrified, terrified, terrified. AIDS is unstoppable.

When he turns, the lady is still staring at him and smoking.

“Is that your guy?” she asks.

He looks over at the Italian, then turns back and nods.

“And the handsome man beyond him?”

“My friend Carlos.” Naked, muscled, and browned by the sun, like a polished redwood burl: young Carlos lifting his head from the towel as he hears his name.

“You boys are all so beautiful. Lucky man to have snatched you up. I hope he fucks you silly.” She laughs. “Mine used to.”

“I don’t know about that,” Less says softly, so that the Italian will not hear.

“Maybe what you need at your age is a broken heart.”

He laughs and runs a hand through his bleached hair. “I don’t know about that either!”

“Ever had one?”

“No!” he shouts, still laughing, bringing his knees up to his chest.

A man stands up from behind the woman; her pose has hidden him all this time. The lean body of a runner, sunglasses, a Rock Hudson jaw. Also naked. He looks down first at her, then at young Arthur Less, then says aloud to everybody that he is going in.

“You’re an idiot!” the lady says, sitting straight up. “It’s a hurricane out there.”

He says he has swum in hurricanes before. He has a faint British accent, or perhaps he’s from New England.

The lady turns to Less and lowers her sunglasses. Her eye shadow is hummingbird blue. “Young man, my name’s Marian. Will you do me a favor? Go in the water with my ridiculous husband. He may be a great poet, but he’s a terrible swimmer, and I can’t bear to watch him die. Will you go with him?”

Young Arthur Less nods yes and stands up with the smile he saves for grown-ups. The man nods in greeting.

Marian Brownburn grabs a large black straw hat, puts it on her head, and waves to them. “Go on, boys. Take care of my Robert!”

The sky takes on a shimmer as blue as her eye shadow, and as the men approach the waves they seem to redouble in violence like a fire that has been fed a bundle of kindling. Together they stand in the sun before those terrible waves, in the fall of that terrible year.

By spring, they will be living together on the Vulcan Steps.



“We had to do a quick change to the program. You can see it has a new title.” But Less, conversant only in German, can make nothing of the words on the paper he has just been handed. People are coming and going now, clipping a microphone to his lapel, offering him water. But Arthur Less is still halfway lit by beach sunshine, halfway in the water of the Golden Gate in 1987. Take care of my Robert. And now, an old woman falling and breaking her hip.

She sends her love. No rancor, no feelings at all.

The Head leans forward with a whisper and a comradely wink: “By the way. Wanted you to know, those pills work great!”

Less looks over at the man. Is it the pills that make him so flushed and grotesque? What else do they sell here for middle-aged men? Is there a pill for when the image of a trumpet vine comes into your head? Will it erase it? Erase the voice saying, You should kiss me like it’s good-bye? Erase the tuxedo jacket, or at least the face above it? Erase the whole nine years? Robert would say, The work will fix you. The work, the habit, the words, will fix you. Nothing else can be depended on, and Less has known genius, what genius can do. But what if you are not a genius? What will the work do then?

“What’s the new title?” Less asks. The Head passes the program to Arturo. Less consoles himself that tomorrow he will board a plane to Italy. The language is getting to him. The lingering taste of mescal is getting to him. The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.