Less(23)
From the cabin’s doorway: the sea horse lady bursting in, opening windows to let out the smoke from Less’s botched attempt at a fire.
Arthur Less was up for a prize only once before: something called the Wilde and Stein Literary Laurels. He was informed of the mysterious honor through his agent, Peter Hunt. Less, perhaps hearing “Wildenstein,” replied he wasn’t Jewish. Peter coughed and said: “I believe it is something gay.” It was, and yet Less was surprised; he had spent half a lifetime living with a writer whose sexuality was never mentioned, much less his half life as a married man. To be called a gay writer! Robert scorned the idea; it was like elevating the importance of his childhood in Westchester, Connecticut. “I don’t write about Westchester,” he would say. “I don’t think about Westchester. I’m not a Westchester poet”—which would have surprised Westchester, whose council had placed a plaque on the middle school Robert had attended. Gay, black, Jewish; Robert and his friends thought they were beyond all that. So Less was surprised to know this kind of award even existed. His first response to Peter was to ask: “How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono. But Peter persuaded him to attend. Less and Robert had split by then, and, anxious about how he would appear to this mysterious gay literary world, and desperate for a date, he panicked and asked Freddy Pelu.
Who knew Freddy, then only twenty-six, would be such a boon? They arrived to a college auditorium (banners everywhere: Hopes Are the Ladders to Dreams!), on whose stage six wooden chairs were arranged as in a court of law. Less and Freddy took their seats. (“Wilde and Stein,” Freddy said. “It sounds like a vaudeville act.”) Around them, people were shouting recognition and hugging and having intense conversations. Less recognized none of them. It seemed so strange; here, his contemporaries, his peers, and they were strangers. But not to bookish Freddy, suddenly come alive in literary company—“Look, there’s Meredith Castle; she’s a language poet, Arthur, you should know her, and that one is Harold Frickes,” and so on. Freddy peering through his red glasses at these oddities and naming each with satisfaction. It was like being with a bird-watcher. The lights went down, and six men and women walked onstage, some of them so elderly, they seemed to be automatons, and sat in the chairs. One small bald man in tinted glasses stepped to the microphone. “That’s Finley Dwyer,” Freddy whispered. Whoever that was.
The man began to welcome them all, and then his face brightened: “I admit I will be disappointed tonight if we reward the assimilationists, the ones who write the way straight people write, who hold up heterosexuals as war heroes, who make gay characters suffer, who set their characters adrift in a nostalgic past that ignores our present oppression; I say we purge ourselves of these people, who would have us vanish into the bookstore, the assimilationists, who are, at their core, ashamed of who they are, who we are, who you are!” The audience applauded wildly. War heroes, suffering characters, adrift in a nostalgic past—Less recognized these elements as a mother might recognize the police description of a serial killer. It was Kalipso! Finley Dwyer was talking about him. Him, harmless little Arthur Less: the enemy! The audience roared on, and Less turned and whispered shakily, “Freddy, I have to get out of here.” Freddy looked at him with surprise. “Hopes are the ladders to dreams, Arthur.” But then he saw Less was serious. When the award for Book of the Year came up, Less did not hear the announcement; he was lying on his bed, while Freddy was saying not to worry. Their lovemaking had been ruined by the bedroom bookcase, from which dead writers stared at him like dogs at the foot of the bed. Perhaps Less was ashamed, as Finley Dwyer had accused. A bird outside the window seemed to be mocking him. He had not, in any case, won.
Less has read (in the packet the beautiful women handed him before vanishing into the glasswork) that, while the five finalists were chosen by an elderly committee, the final jury is made up of twelve high school students. The second night, they appear in the lobby, dressed up in elegant flowered dresses (the girls) or their dad’s oversized blazers (the boys). Why did it not occur to Less these were the same teens by the pool? The teens move like a tour group into the greenhouse, formerly Less’s private dining room, which now bustles with caterers and unknown people. The beautiful Italian women reappear and introduce him to his fellow finalists. Less feels his confidence drop. The first is Riccardo, a young unshaven Italian man, incredibly tall and thin, in sunglasses, jeans, and a T-shirt that reveals the Japanese carp tattoos on both arms. The other three are all much older: Luisa, glamorously white-haired and dressed in a white cotton tunic, with gold alien bracelets for fending off critics; Alessandro, a cartoon villain, with streaks of white at his temples, a pencil mustache, and black plastic spectacles that narrow his look of disapproval; and a short rose-gold gnome from Finland who asks to be called Harry, though his name on the books is something else entirely. Their works, Less is told, are a Sicilian historical novel, a retelling of Rapunzel in modern-day Russia, an eight-hundred-page novel of a man’s last minute on his deathbed in Paris, and an imagined life of St. Margory. Less cannot seem to match each novel with its author; has the young one made the deathbed novel or Rapunzel? Either seems likely. They are all so intellectual. Less knows at once he hasn’t a chance.
“I read your book,” says Luisa, her left eye batting away a loose scrap of mascara while her right one stares straight into his heart. “It took me to new places. I thought of Joyce in outer space.” The Finn seems to be brimming with mirth.