“I understand.”
Freddy seemed about to say something more, then stopped himself. He was silent, but his gaze was that of someone memorizing a photograph. What did he see there? He turned from Less and reached for his glasses. “You should kiss me like it’s good-bye.”
“Mr. Pelu,” Less said. “It’s not really good-bye.”
Freddy put on his red glasses, and in each aquarium a little blue fish swam.
“You want me to stay here with you forever?”
A bit of sun came through the trumpet vine; it checkered one bare leg.
Less looked at his lover, and perhaps a series of images flashed through his mind—a tuxedo jacket, a Paris hotel room, a rooftop party—or perhaps what appeared was just the snow blindness of panic and loss. A dot-dot-dot message relayed from his brain that he chose to ignore. Less leaned down and gave Freddy a long kiss. Then he pulled away and said, “I can tell you used my cologne.”
The glasses, which had amplified the young man’s determination, now magnified his already wide pupils. They darted back and forth across Less’s face as in the act of reading. He seemed to be gathering up all his strength to smile, which, at last, he did.
“Was that your best good-bye kiss?” he said.
Then, a few months later, the wedding invitation in the mail: Request your presence at the marriage of Federico Pelu and Thomas Dennis. How awkward. He could under no circumstances accept, when everyone knew he was Freddy’s old paramour; there would be chuckles and raised eyebrows, and, while normally Less wouldn’t have cared, it was just too much to imagine the smile on Carlos’s face. The smile of pity. Less had already run into Carlos at a Christmas benefit (a firetrap of pine branches), and he had pulled Less aside and thanked him for being so gracious in letting Freddy go: “Arthur, you know my son was never right for you.”
Yet Less could not simply decline the invitation. To sit at home while all the old gang gathered up in Sonoma to drink Carlos’s money—well, they would cackle about him all the same. Sad young Arthur Less had become sad old Arthur Less. Stories would be brought out of mothballs for ridicule; new ones would be tested, as well. The thought was unbearable; he could under no circumstances decline. Tricky, tricky, this life.
Along with the wedding invitation came a letter politely reminding him of an offer to teach at an obscure university in Berlin, along with the meager remittance and the meager time remaining for an answer. Less sat at his desk, staring at the offer; the rearing stallion on the letterhead seemed to be erect. From the open window came the song of roofers hammering and the smell of molten tar. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a pile of other letters, other invitations, unanswered; more were hidden deep within his computer; still more lay buried beneath a pile of phone messages. Less sat there, with the window rattling from the workers’ din, and considered them. A teaching post, a conference, a writing retreat, a travel article, and so on. And, like those Sicilian nuns who, once a year, appear behind a lifted curtain, singing, so that their families can gaze upon them, in his little study, in his little house, for Arthur Less a curtain lifted upon a singular idea.
My apologies, he wrote on the RSVP, but I will be out of the country. My love to Freddy and Tom.
He would accept them all.
What a ramshackle itinerary he has nailed together!
First: this interview with H. H. H. Mandern. This gets him plane fare to New York City, with two days before the event to enjoy the city, aflame with autumn. And there is at least one free dinner (the writer’s delight): with his agent, who surely has word from his publisher. Less’s latest novel has been living with his publisher for over a month, as any modern couple lives together before a marriage, but surely his publisher will pop the question any day now. There will be champagne; there will be money.
Second: a conference in Mexico City. It is the kind of event that for years, Less has refused: a symposium on Robert’s work. He and Robert split up a decade and a half ago, but once Robert became ill and unable to travel, the directors of literary festivals began to contact Less. Not as a novelist in his own right; rather, as a kind of witness. A Civil War widow, as Less thinks of it. These festivals want one last glimpse of the famous Russian River School of writers and artists, a 1970s bohemian world long receded over the horizon, and they will accept a reflected one. But Less has always refused. Not because it would diminish his own reputation—this is impossible, since Less feels almost subterranean in stature—but because it seems parasitic to make money off what was really Robert’s world. And this time, even the money isn’t enough. It’s not enough by half. But it neatly kills the five days between New York and the prize ceremony in Turin.
Third: Turin. Less is dubious. He is supposedly up for a prestigioso award for a book recently translated into Italian. Which book? It took some searching to discover it is Dark Matter. A pang of love and regret; the name of an old amour on your cruise ship’s passenger list. Yes, we are happy to provide airfare from Mexico City to Turin; your driver will await—as glamorous a sentence as Less has ever read. He wonders who funds such European excesses, considers they are perhaps laundering ill-gotten gains, and finds, printed at the bottom of the invitation, the name of an Italian soap conglomerate. Laundering indeed. But it gets him to Europe.
Fourth: the Wintersitzung at the Liberated University of Berlin—a five-week course “on a subject of Mr. Less’s choosing.” The letter is in German; the university is under the impression Arthur Less is fluent in German, and Arthur Less’s publisher, who recommended him, is also under this impression. So is Arthur Less. With God’s happiness, he writes back, I accept the pedestal of power, and sends it off with a flush of pleasure.
Fifth: a sojourn across Morocco, his single indulgence on the itinerary. He would be tacking onto another birthday celebration, for someone he has never met named Zohra, who has planned an expedition from Marrakech into the Sahara Desert and from thence northward to Fez. His friend Lewis insisted; they were looking to fill one spot on the trip—how perfect! The wine would be copious, the conversation scintillating, and the amenities deluxe. How could he say no? The answer, as always: money, money, money. Lewis relayed the cost, all inclusive, and, though the amount was staggering (Less checked twice to be sure it was not in Moroccan dirhams), he was, as always, already too much in love. Bedouin music was already playing in his ears; camels were already grunting in the darkness; he was already standing up from embroidered pillows and walking out into the desert night, champagne in hand, to let the floury Sahara warm his toes as, above him, the Milky Way glowed with his birthday candles.