Less(6)
Arthur Less, encircling the globe! It feels cosmonautical in nature. The morning he left San Francisco, two days before the event with H. H. H. Mandern, Arthur Less marveled that he would not be returning, as he had his entire life, from the east but from the mysterious west. And during this odyssey, he was certain he would not think about Freddy Pelu at all.
New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them. You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.
Next morning: the coffeemaker in his hotel room is a hungry little mollusk, snapping open its jaws to devour pods and subsequently secreting coffee into a mug. The instructions on care and feeding are clear, and yet somehow Less manages to produce, on the first go, nothing but steam and, on the second, a melted version of the pod itself. A sigh from Less.
It is an autumn New York morning, and therefore glorious; it is his first day of his long journey, the day before the interview, and his clothes are still clean and neat, socks still paired, blue suit unwrinkled, toothpaste still American and not some strange foreign flavor. Bright-lemon New York light flashing off the skyscrapers, onto the quilted aluminum sides of food carts, and from there onto Arthur Less himself. Even the mean delighted look from the lady who would not hold the elevator, the humor-free girl at the coffee shop, the tourists standing stock-still on busy Fifth Avenue, the revved-up accosting hawkers (“Mister, you like comedy? Everybody likes comedy!”), the toothache sensation of jackhammers in concrete—none of it can dull the day. Here is a shop that sells only zippers. Here are twenty of them. The Zipper District. What a glorious city.
“What are you going to wear?” the bookstore employee asks when Less stops by to say hello. He has walked twenty wonderful blocks to get here.
“What am I going to wear? Oh, just my blue suit.”
The employee (in pencil skirt, sweater, and glasses: a burlesque librarian) laughs and laughs. Her mirth settles into a smile. “No, but seriously,” she says, “what are you going to wear?”
“It’s a great suit. What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s H. H. H. Mandern! And it’s almost Halloween! I found a NASA jumpsuit. Janice is coming as the Queen of Mars.”
“I was under the impression he wanted to be taken seriously—”
“But it’s H. H. H. Mandern! Halloween! We have to dress up!”
She does not know how carefully he packed his luggage. It is a clown car of contradictory possessions: cashmere sweaters yet light linen trousers, thermal underwear yet suntan lotion, a tie yet a Speedo, his workout set of rubber bands, and so on. What shoes do you pack for the university and the beach? What sunglasses for northern European gloom and South Asian sun? He would be passing through Halloween, Día de los Muertos, Festa di San Martino, Nikolaustag, Christmas, New Year’s, Eid al-Mawlid, Vasant Panchami, and Hina Matsuri. The hats alone could fill a shopwindow. And then there is the suit.
There is no Arthur Less without the suit. Bought on a whim, in that brief era of caprice three years ago when he threw caution (and money) to the wind and flew to Ho Chi Minh City to visit a friend on a work trip, searching for air-conditioning in that humid, moped-plagued city, found himself in a tailor shop, ordering a suit. Drunk on car exhaust and sugarcane, he made a series of rash decisions, gave his home address, and by the next morning had forgotten all about it. Two weeks later, a package arrived in San Francisco. Perplexed, he opened it and pulled out a medium blue suit, lined in fuchsia, and sewn with his initials: APL. A rosewater smell from the box summoned, instantly, a dictatorial woman with a tight bun, hectoring him with questions. The cut, the buttons, the pockets, the collar. But most of all: the blue. Chosen in haste from a wall of fabrics: not an ordinary blue. Peacock? Lapis? Nothing gets close. Medium but vivid, moderately lustrous, definitely bold. Somewhere between ultramarine and cyanide salts, between Vishnu and Amon, Israel and Greece, the logos of Pepsi and Ford. In a word: bright. He loved whatever self had chosen it and after that wore it constantly. Even Freddy approved: “You look like someone famous!” And he does. Finally, at his advanced age, he has struck the right note. He looks good, and he looks like himself. Without it, somehow he does not. Without the suit, there is no Arthur Less.