Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

“What is it?” Less asks. “Magic mushroom.” Less is startled. “Really?” A frown beneath the sunglasses. “It’s a breath mint, man. I’m fucking eighty-four.”

It is a cartoon of itself, but then, in his trim gray suit, so is Arthur Less. So are we all.

Our first stop was what Less referred to as an “exclusive waterfront hotel,” which turned out to be an artist’s project: a single room floating on a California lake.

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.”

Less pauses, then asks, “Thomas, why are you wearing a sweater when it’s so warm out?” Thomas shrugs slightly and says, “As my grandma Cookie says, we’re all having different experiences.” We certainly are.

Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love—because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

You could almost have it both ways—you could forgive this Larry, struggling with his cane and Wanda and harbors and restaurants and shopping, his cancer and gays and Jews and assholes, forgive him and let him die forgiven. And still never forgive the one who left.

Perhaps he hoped this whole muddle with the van and the gate would allow him to elude unnecessary entanglement with the past, as we all hope that we will be spared the pain and shame and humiliation we work so hard to avoid. But things go wrong. And perhaps what stands before him is a man who can do no harm anymore. A magician with no more tricks up his sleeve.

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal. What can we do but look away from such painful miracles?

There are a hundred of these towns. The difference is that this one is queer. It didn’t start off queer; it started off as a Christian retreat by the ocean. But things went another way. Who knows why? Who knows why anything happens in America?

Less comes to understand that life for some goes smoothly, as free from incident as it is perhaps from poetry; a fainter kind of happiness than Less has ever perceived. We are all having different experiences.