Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

What is it like to return to your country after so long? Less assumed it would be like picking up a novel you had put aside some time ago; perhaps you’ll need to reread a little, remind yourself of who Janie is, and Butch, and Jack, and why everyone in Newtown-on-Tippet is so upset about the castle. But no, no, no. It is far stranger. More like picking up a novel only to discover the novel has been writing itself while you were away. No Janie, no Butch, no Jack. No Newtown. No castle. For some reason, you are in outer space, orbiting Saturn. Worse, the previous pages have been torn out; there is no rereading. You have to start from where you are—where your country is—and simply plod ahead.

You may think: What’s happened? Good God, are they kidding? But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

he waves back and merrily answers his ringing phone for the third call this morning. Things are going so well today that it feels not impossible it is the Nobel Committee. But, friends, it is not the Nobel Committee. It is a rule of life, alas, that it is never the Nobel Committee.

You be the strong one Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And I’ll be the strong one Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.” I paused, suspicious. “What about Sundays?” You patted me on the arm with reassurance. “On Sundays, Freddy, nobody’s the strong one.”

The memorial opens with a chorale of varied homosexuals singing a Leonard Cohen song. Marian leans over and asks, softly, where Less found such an awful group, and Less says someone else found them but whispers, “They’re okay, they’re okay,” to which Marian snorts and says: “It’s the OK Chorale.”

Less has been approached by a young man in an ill-fitting navy suit—how young, Less cannot tell you. His guess is somewhere between conception and thirty.

One day, I came home to find a poltergeist!—or evidence of one. Laundry was strewn eerily around the place; there were books in teetering piles, coffee cups where none had been that morning, and from the bedroom an unearthly voice was chanting: “No, no, no, no, no…” When I opened the door, I found, to my horror, a demon staring back at me with red-rimmed eyes and growling: “Freddy, I’m working!” I closed the door on this hellscape and stood a moment taking in the horror: my partner had begun a novel.

The two novelist Arthur Lesses do not even find themselves shelved together—our Arthur Less gets shelved in Queer Authors, the other in Black Authors; neither gets shelved in General Fiction. They are both too unknown for General Fiction.

“Do you know the problem with American writers?” “Commas.” A finger-wag from the Czech. “Your problem is you are all New Yorkers.” Less has no idea anymore what they are talking about. His mind is making the pointless scribbles of a pen that has run out of ink.

Through the window, piano music steals in softly and, finding nothing worth taking, steals back out again and goes silent. “Tell me,” he says. So she tells him.

Less’s friends Lewis and Clark. Twenty years a couple, they suddenly announced they were splitting up. It turned out they had a date every ten years to reconsider their contract, and at the last appointment, the contract was not renewed. They drank champagne and parted. “We took each other as far as we could,” Clark reported, smiling, to a stunned Arthur Less, who reported it to me. Just like that, the love was over. And after traveling all that way!

He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose. A mindset so UnitedStatesian, you could serve it with ketchup. But, friends, you cannot live on ketchup.

Oh, California! The statistically impossible blondness; the ubiquity of sunglasses, as if everyone has just been to the ophthalmologist; the non-native date palms that, like many non-natives, seem positively patriotic about their newfound country;

The problem in the world is that we aren’t kind to one another. It’s kindness and human spirit that drives us. We have one another. That’s all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don’t care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.”

I think my anxiety has reached middle age. I think it’s going to age right along with me.”

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?