Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

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

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.

For there is a creature more ridiculous still and here it comes, scrabbling across the floor, bewigged in white powder, snorting like a steam engine: a bulldog, Tomboy, losing her little mind with love.

“Are you doing okay, Bee?” “As well as any of us.” She is talking about divorce in their family as one talks about an ancestral scourge. And with Less, she is talking about his and Robert’s breakup. “You went through it. Things are harder but better. I don’t have to paw through someone else’s junk drawer to find the scissors. Metaphorically speaking.”

What should he do with this man? Strangle him? Salute him? Put him in a novel? You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

A dramatic reaction, I know, to such Walloonery; his innocence about rent and probate and the passage of time is, of course, part of Arthur Less’s charm. He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. 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.

Arthur Less (still decorated with pink fluff) is picked up at the Palm Springs airport by a publicist named Eleanor and taken into Palm Springs proper, where he experiences, in the sudden transition from Northern to Southern California, a shock similar to a diver’s on rising too fast from the depths. 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 pretense of sun and warmth in chill October, such as here, in Eleanor’s convertible, where, to counteract the cold, she has turned the heat up high. It feels to Less like the kind of deep act of denial seen only at family holidays.

“I thought we were saying what it was for,” Arthur interjects, sounding very much like the teacher’s-pet self of his youth.

Here: Some great god in a fedora strode forth, carrying a silver cane, leading the audience in a religious revival of chants and slogans. When it was finished, the roar was Tyrannosaurian. Mandern held out his arms to embrace the sound’s monstrous shape, and Arthur could only stand in awe.

The first was named Dolly: a glossy black dog, a pug, that fixed our hero with an almost human gaze. By which I mean one of garrulous idiocy.

“Dolly, meet our friend Arthur.” Dolly cocked her head, as if Less might make more sense sideways.

the task he fancifully signed us up for was to make a raft and float it two nights down the American River. Perhaps Less had a Huck Finn fantasy, common to many writers; perhaps Californians harbor gold-rush dreams; perhaps the lumberjackery of it all held an erotic charge. What we found dispelled any fantasy:

securing them with a variety of knots that she demonstrated. This was all to be done, of course, hip-deep in the river. Having not been raised by longshoremen, I found the knots impossible, but Less had an even harder time; our leader savaged my Walloon ruthlessly, as if seeking redress for the failures of New Sweden, and more than once, Less slipped into the currents of the American and had to pull himself to shore.

Dawn arrives (along with Less’s matinal nose-blowing) and he emerges again from his tent to find Mandern thoughtful by the morning fire. Less is left alone with his coffee, looking around at this foreign world, his own country. He looks over at Mandern: When will this gruff old man reveal even deeper instability? Today, at this supposed oasis? He watched Mandern easily put down two martinis last night; will it be something stronger tonight? Were those, in fact, breath mints? Is that pipe, in fact, empty? Less girds himself against chaos, but then again, he girds himself against everything.

Arthur Less has been out of place many times in his life. I would guess he has been out of place almost everywhere except that bedroom with the trumpet vine (as perhaps have I). He has been at Cub Scout meetings where every boy has been asked to tie his favorite knot, gay parties where he has had to write on his name tag his sexual kink (long underwear), bars where he has had to pick songs from the jukebox, yoga classes where he has had to imitate the pose of a contortionist, and every morning of his life when he has had to decide whether it could be done today. He has done them all. So being in a place of utter misrule and chaos is no problem for him. In some way, that is the comfort zone of Arthur Less. He knows, in such places, where he stands.

She leaves behind the scent of orange and sesame, as might a vegan ghost.

Art, what’s your philosophy?” A few axioms come to mind—Don’t buy tomatoes in winter; men over forty should not dye their hair; expensive underwear is worth it—but no philosophies. Less demurs: “Um, I don’t think I have one.”

What is this sensation? Of being free of something you thought you had conquered, only to have it lash out with a tentacle to draw you back?

“Archie, he sounded…” The pause is of someone searching for the right knife in a drawer, the right word to do a hard job quickly. “He sounded old.”

How wonderful to believe in a universe that holds, for you, a special plan! Only the very young, Less observes, could think so.

He interrogates his memory under the bare bulb of panic,

Roadside stands, all closed at this early hour, mark the miles. In California they would advertise avocados, almonds, and artichokes, but here it is geodes and gems; one in particular shouts FOSSILS! in a font of pure amazement.

Her smile was bright and grim. He wondered if her job was to turn back middle-aged gay writers trying to hike the Grand Canyon in designer shoes. He asked her as much. She answered, essentially, yes. He thought he heard a chipmunk gasp from its rock enclosure. Then Less turned around and headed back up to the rim. He swore never to return to the Grand Canyon.

His first forays are a series of false starts: tent-only state parks, human-only county parks, wino-only city parks—until he discovers he belongs to that rarefied set: RVers. He begins to notice signs (WELCOME, RVERS!) that provide a solution: private parks. And here he enters worlds previously unknown.

Perhaps he was simply born too late for LBJ love-ins, too early for Clintonesque raves.

A buttoned-up, goody-goody, suburban gay white boy of the eighties. What plant could flower under the cold sun of Reagan?

When, at the climax of the piece, the other half of the whole-wheat sandwich fails to appear (“Half a Whole-Wheat Sandwich, Reprise”), when Lawrence Less as well fails to appear and Thomas-Archie realizes his father is gone for good, gasping in understanding, Arthur Less breaks down in racking sobs that are equal parts relived sorrow and musical-theater joy, and show me the homosexual who could sift out which is which.

you’ll want to know that down here, you’ll be hearing ‘ma’am’ and ‘sir’ all the time. People will love it if you do that too. You just ‘sir’ them to death!” My notes show that Arthur Less—outside of a college registrar’s mistake that had him briefly training with the ROTC (he thought it was an improv class)—has never called anyone “sir.”

Why did no one tell me life could be this? As if they had been hiding from him that, instead of Puritan hard work and failed get-rich schemes, promises broken and pointless battles waged, life could be sequins and song. He felt he had been lied to from the Pilgrims on down. The secret had been kept from him like a mad aunt locked in the basement, and now a neighbor had innocently set her loose—and she was wonderful!

Grew up in Pickens, South Carolina, and got out of there fast. My teacher said I had something. Went up to New York City—turned out something wasn’t enough.

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.

Less looks down; Dolly has emerged from her slumber on his lap, lifting her head above the bar with one paw; the pose is that of a celebrity rolling down the window of her limousine, ostensibly to look at the crowds but in actuality to be adored by them. “What the fuck is your name, baby?” “This is Dolly.” “Well, hello fucking Dolly!” Less cannot tell if she is referencing the 1964 Jerry Herman musical or the 1969 Gene Kelly film version or simply speaking English.

Dolly cocks her head as if she cannot place his accent.

Safe and sound—from what particular horror, Arthur Less? The explosion of your Walmart incognito? The desperations of middle age? The extinction of the DVD? A poor man looking for something so common, it is scrawled in every rest stop? Or is it a glimpse of life without your Freddy, delivered in the plain brown wrapper of Stubbs?

“Have you changed, Archie?” she asks. “I don’t want to change, Bee! I’m in my fifties,” he says decisively. “I’ve changed enough.”

Fuck that. You don’t get that, Rebecca. This isn’t redecorating, this is house-on-fire shit. This is grabbing what to save. This is leaving shit behind. This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don’t want to change bullshit. Hell no—you’ve changed. That’s happened. Now what? Everything changes and this one fucking time, you’re in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that’s fine! That’s fine! But choose.’”

Less takes the back seat and is driven, by the terrified teenage STUDENT DRIVER, all the way to Dover, hearing Andrew’s unabridged (but mostly uneventful) life until now. 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.

What is acceptable as true in a novel—that the waitress, existing merely to drop soup on the protagonist, need only have a hairdo and a hand—is, in the real world, an unforgivable moral error. For while our middle-aged author would probably consider himself a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, certainly never a protagonist, the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It’s nothing but protagonists. It’s protagonists all the way down.

But my fiancé was no easy roommate, leaving glasses on wood tables (wood tables, dear reader!) and dropping socks and candy wrappers whenever they ceased being of immediate use; he became like those beachgoers who assume their litter will go out with the tide. I should have known from this that my relationship was in some trouble. But I knew all couples had these fights, and I assumed they were not a detour from love but its bumpy path.

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?