Less(62)

“Oh, Marian, you broke your hip!”

Again the sigh. “Not broken, it turned out. But I’m bruised black and blue. What do we do? Things fall apart. Sorry I had to skip Mexico City; that would have been a nicer reunion.”

“I’m so glad you’re there with him, Marian. I’ll be there tomorrow, I have to check on—”

“No, no, Arthur, don’t do that! You’re on your honeymoon.”

“What?”

“Robert’s fine. I’ll be here a week or so. See him when you get back. I wouldn’t have bothered you at all except he insisted. He misses you, of course, at a time like this.”

“Marian, I’m not on my honeymoon. I’m in Japan for an article.”

But there was no contradicting Marian Brownburn. “Robert said you got married. He said you married Freddy somebody.”

“No no, no no,” Arthur says, and finds himself getting dizzy. “Freddy somebody married somebody else. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be right there.”

“Listen,” Marian says in her administrative voice. “Arthur. Don’t you get on a plane. He’ll be furious.”

“I can’t stay here, Marian. You wouldn’t stay here. We both love him, we wouldn’t stay here while he’s suffering.”

“Okay. Let’s set up one of those video calls you boys do…”

They arrange to chat again in ten minutes, during which time Less manages to find the inn’s computer, which is startlingly up-to-date, considering the ancient room in which it sits. As he waits for the video call, he stares at a bird of paradise arranged in a bowl by the window. A minor stroke. Fuck you, life.



Arthur Less’s life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less’s life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend’s Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more—but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor’s notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever.

This was how he felt when Robert left him.

Or perhaps you assumed he left Robert?

As with Proust, he knew the end was coming. Fifteen years, and the joy of love had long since faded, and the cheating had begun; not simply Less’s escapades with other men but secret affairs that ran the course of a month to a year and broke everything in sight. Was he testing to see how elastic love could be? Was he simply a man who had gladly given his youth to a man in midlife and now, nearing midlife himself, wanted back the fortune he squandered? Wanted sex and love and folly? The very things Robert saved him from all those years ago? As for the good things, as for safety, comfort, love—Less found himself smashing them to bits. Perhaps he did not know what he was doing; perhaps it was a kind of madness. But perhaps he did know. Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

The real end came when Robert was on one of his reading trips, this time through the South. Robert called dutifully the first night he arrived, but Less was not home, and over the next few days his voice mail was filled, first with stories, about, for instance, Spanish moss hanging from the oaks like rotting dresses, then with briefer and briefer messages until, at last, there were none. Less was preparing himself, in fact, for Robert’s return, when he was planning on a very serious conversation. He sensed six months of couples counseling, and he sensed it would end with a tearful parting; perhaps all that would take a year. But it had to start now. His heart was in a knot, and he practiced his lines as one practices a phrase in a foreign language before heading to the ticket counter: “I think we both know something isn’t working, I think we both know something isn’t working, I think we both know something isn’t working.” When, after a silence of five days, his phone rang at last, Less suppressed a heart attack and answered it: “Robert! You got me at last. I wanted to talk. I think we both know—”

But his speech was pierced by Robert’s deep voice: “Arthur, I love you, but I will not be coming home. Mark will be over to get some of my things. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to talk about it now. I am not angry. I love you. I am not angry. But neither of us is the man we used to be. Good-bye.”

The End. And all that he held in his hand were the notes and afterword.



“Look at you, Arthur.”

It’s Robert. The connection is poor, but it is Robert Brownburn, the world-famous poet, appearing on the screen, and beside him (surely an effect of transmission), his ectoplasmic echo. Here he is: alive. Beautifully bald, with a baby’s halo of hair. He is dressed in a blue terry bathrobe. His smile contains some of the same brilliant devilry, but today it sags to the right. A stroke. Holy shit. A tube runs under his nose like a fake mustache, his voice grates like sand, and from beside him Less can hear (perhaps heightened by the microphone’s proximity) a machine’s loud respiration, bringing back memories of the “heavy breather” who would sometimes call the Less house, young Arthur Less listening with fascination as his mother yelled out, “Oh, is that my boyfriend? Tell him I’ll be right there!” But here is Robert. Slumped, slurring, mortified but alive.