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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.
We slept well, as villains do.
How did he end up safe? Well, my darling, the world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe.
“See, I thought from how you sounded, you was from the Netherlands.” He knows what this means. The query takes many forms—“Are you an actor?”; “You remind me of my cousin, do you know him?”; “Anyone ever tell you you look like…”—and he has never known what to say. Because the question she is really asking, without at all knowing she is asking it, without meaning anything in the world except that she detects a linguistic flourish, is Are you a homosexual? He sure is!
As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly,’” she tells him. “Proverbs, twenty-six, eleven.”
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.
He thought he was the only one for whom ordering a deli sandwich and wrestling an alligator held equal levels of terror. It is one of the reasons I always think of him as the bravest man I know—for who can guess what feats of valor he has overcome simply to arrive at your door?
When Less takes a seat, she immediately serves him coffee and asks where he is from; he politely returns the question, and she says she is from here. “Went to Nashville, but my mama got sick so we came back,” she says, placing a sandwich in a panino press and gesturing to her partner. “I had to get out—you know what I mean.” And she gives a wink; with a shock, Less understands she has identified him, for she, too, is from the Netherlands. (So they don’t kill them here in Alabama?)
When it comes to drinking, should we know no no?
he is told with a grin, “Oh, this is the club for Jews and gays. The other one’s for assholes.” Often, a hand is put on his arm to reassure him he’s in the right place. They serve Netherlanders here.
Anyway, dogs never say goodbye.
You understand?” Less repeats the phrase he has memorized for just this occasion: “I have understood the words you have said.”
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?
CLOSED FOR THE SEASON REASON? FREEZIN’!
But things went another way. Who knows why? Who knows why anything happens in America?
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.
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?
