Less(63)

Less: “How are you doing?”

“I feel like I’ve been in a bar fight. I am speaking to you from the afterlife.”

“You look awful. How dare you do this,” Less says.

“You should see the other guy.” His words are mumbled and odd.

“You sound Scottish,” Less says.

“We become our fathers.” Or forefathers: his s’s have become f’s, as in old manuscripts: When in the courfe of human events it becomes necefsary…

Then the doctor, an elderly woman in black glasses, leans into view. Thin, bony, creased with lines as if crumpled in a pocket for a long time, with a wattle under her chin. A white bob and Antarctic eyes. “Arthur, it’s Marian.”

Oh, what jokers! Less thinks. They’re kidding! There is that scene at the end of Proust when our narrator, after many years out of society, arrives at a party furious no one told him it’s a costume party; everyone is wearing white wigs! And then he realizes. It isn’t a costume party. They have simply grown old. And here, looking at his first love, the first wife—surely they’re kidding! But the joke goes on too long. Robert keeps breathing heavily. Marian does not smile. No one is kidding.

“Marian, you look wonderful.”

“Arthur, you’re all grown up,” she muses.

“He’s fifty,” Robert says, then winces in discomfort. “Happy birthday, my boy. Sorry I missed it.” Forry I mifsed it. Life, liberty and the purfuit of happinefs. “I had a rendezvous with Death.”

Marian says, “Death didn’t show. I’ll leave you boys alone for a minute. But only a minute! Don’t tire him out, Arthur. We have to take care of our Robert.”

Thirty years ago, a beach in San Francisco.

She vanishes; Robert’s eyes watch her leave, then they return to Less. A procession of shades, as with Odysseus, and here before him: Tiresias. The seer. “You know, it’s good to have her here. She drives me crazy. Keeps me going. There’s nothing like doing the crossword with your ex-wife. Where the hell are you?”

“Kyoto.”

“What?”

Less leans forward and shouts: “Kyoto. Japan. But I’m coming back to see you.”

“Fuck that. I’m fine. I lost my fine motor skills, not my goddamn mind. Look at what they have me doing.” In very slow motion, he manages to lift his hand. In it, a bright-green ball of putty. “I have to squeeze it all day. I told you this was the afterlife. Poets have to squeeze bits of clay for eternity. They’re all here, Walt and Hart and Emily and Frank. The American wing. Squeezing bits of clay. Novelists have to”—and he closes his eyes and catches his breath for a moment, then continues more weakly—“novelists have to mix our drinks. Did you write your novel in India?”

“I did. I have one chapter left. I want to see you.”

“Finish your fucking novel.”

“Robert—”

“Don’t use my stroke as an excuse. Coward! You’re afraid I’m going to die.”

Less cannot answer; it is the truth. I know I’m out of your life But the day that I die I know you are going to cry. In the silence, the machine breathes on and on. Robert’s face crumbles a little. Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar.

“Not yet, Arthur,” he says briskly. “Don’t be in such a fucking hurry for it. Didn’t someone say you’d grown a beard?”

“Did you tell Marian I married Freddy?”

“Who knows what I said? Do I look like I know what I’m saying? Did you?”

“No.”

“And now here you are. Here we both are. You look very, very sad, my boy.”

Does he? Well rested and pampered, fresh from his bath? But you can’t hide anything from Tiresias.

“Did you love him, Arthur?”

Arthur says nothing. There was a time—at a bad Italian restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco, basically abandoned except for two waiters and a tourist family from Germany whose matriarch later fell in the bathroom, hit her head, and insisted on going to the hospital (not comprehending the cost of American health care)—there was a time when Robert Brownburn, only forty-six years old, took Arthur Less’s hand and said, “My marriage is failing, it has been failing a long time. Marian and I hardly sleep together anymore. I get to bed very late, she gets up very early. She’s angry we never had children. And now that it’s too late, she’s even angrier. I’m selfish and terrible with money. I’m so unhappy. So, so unhappy, Arthur. What I’m saying is that I am in love with you. I was already going to leave Marian before I met you. And I shall dance and sing for thy delight each May-morning, I think the poem goes. I have enough to buy some shitty place somewhere. I know how to live on just a little money. I know it’s preposterous. But you are what I want. Who gives a fuck what anybody says? You are what I want, Arthur, and I—” But there was no more, because Robert Brownburn shut his eyes to hold in the longing that had overcome him in the presence of this young man, clutching his hand in this bad Italian restaurant to which they would never return. The poet wincing in pain before him, suffering, suffering, for Arthur Less. Will Less ever again be so beloved?

Robert, seventy-five, breathing heavily, says, “Oh, my poor boy. A lot?”

Still Arthur says nothing. And Robert says nothing; he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can’t point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, “That one, that star, there.”