Less (Arthur Less, #1)

by Andrew Sean Greer

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself.

It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well.

Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

Here is a good companion. A man he almost stayed with, almost loved, and now he does not even recognize him on the street. Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing. It is not impossible both are true.

Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.

“There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…to your final place of rest.” He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.

LMFAO

It takes an hour and a half in traffic to get to the hotel; the rivers of red taillights conjure lava flows that destroyed ancient villages.

“Well,” Less said. “I think there’s something between genius and mediocrity—” “That’s what Virgil never showed Dante. He showed him Plato and Aristotle in a pagan paradise. But what about the lesser minds? Are we consigned to the flames?” “No, I guess,” Less offers, “just to conferences like this one.”

“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.”

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?

auuuhvhhhh i love words

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.

“How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.

At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile. At four and nine?

Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original. Something like an Arthur Less. And what is the plan? Will they just keep rebuilding forever? Or one day will someone say, Hey, what the hell? Let it fall, bugger off. And that will be the end of Ait Ben Haddou. Less feels on the verge of an understanding about life and death and the passage of time, an ancient and perfectly obvious understanding,

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn’t Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now”).

He recalls an aquarium he visited as a boy, where, after enjoying a sea turtle that swam breaststroke like a dotty old aunt, he encountered a jellyfish, a pink frothing brainless negligeed monster pulsing in the water, and thought with a sob: We are not in this together.

LOL

I sat upright in bed for a long time, shivering, though it was warm in Tahiti. Shivering, shaking; I suppose it was what you would call an attack of something or other. From behind me, I heard rustling and then a stillness. Then I heard his voice, my new husband, Tom, who loved me, and therefore saw everything: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now.”

ooooof