For it was somewhere in the Sahara that Arthur Less would turn fifty.
He swore he would not be alone. Memories of his fortieth, wandering the broad avenues of Las Vegas, still came to him in worser moments. He would not be alone.
Sixth: to India. Who gave him this peculiar idea? Carlos, of all unlikely people. It was at the very Christmas party where his old rival first discouraged Less in one field (“My son was never right for you”) and then encouraged him in another (“You know, there’s a retreat center very close to a resort I’m fixing up, friends of mine, beautiful place, on a hill above the Arabian Sea; it would be a wonderful place for you to write”). India: perhaps he could rest at last; he could polish the final draft of his novel, the one whose acceptance his agent will surely be celebrating in New York with that champagne. When was monsoon season again?
And, finally: to Japan. He was, improbable as it seems, at a writer’s poker game in San Francisco when it fell into his lap. Needless to say, these were heterosexual writers. Even in his green eyeshade, Less was not a convincing player; the first game, he lost every hand. But he was a good sport. It was during the third game—when Less began to think he could not bear another minute of the cigarette smoke and grunting and warm Jamaican beer—when one man looked up and said his wife was pissed at all his travel, he had to stay home and pass on an article, and could anyone could go to Kyoto in his stead? “I can!” Less shrieked. The poker faces all looked up, and Less was reminded of volunteering for the school play in junior high: the same expressions on the faces of the football players. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice: “I can.” A piece for an in-flight magazine about traditional kaiseki cuisine. He hoped he would not be too early for the cherry blossoms.
From there, he will head back to San Francisco and return, once again, to his house on the Vulcan Steps. Paid for, almost all of it, by festivals, prize committees, universities, residency programs, and media conglomerates. The rest, he has found, he can cover with free airline points that, neglected over the decades, have multiplied into a digital fortune, as in a sorcerer’s magic chest. After prepaying for the Morocco extravagance, he has just enough in his savings to cover necessities, providing he practices the Puritanical thrift drilled into him by his mother. No clothing purchases. No nights on the town. And, God help him, no medical emergencies. But what could possibly go wrong?
Arthur Less, encircling the globe! It feels cosmonautical in nature. The morning he left San Francisco, two days before the event with H. H. H. Mandern, Arthur Less marveled that he would not be returning, as he had his entire life, from the east but from the mysterious west. And during this odyssey, he was certain he would not think about Freddy Pelu at all.
New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them. You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.
Next morning: the coffeemaker in his hotel room is a hungry little mollusk, snapping open its jaws to devour pods and subsequently secreting coffee into a mug. The instructions on care and feeding are clear, and yet somehow Less manages to produce, on the first go, nothing but steam and, on the second, a melted version of the pod itself. A sigh from Less.
It is an autumn New York morning, and therefore glorious; it is his first day of his long journey, the day before the interview, and his clothes are still clean and neat, socks still paired, blue suit unwrinkled, toothpaste still American and not some strange foreign flavor. Bright-lemon New York light flashing off the skyscrapers, onto the quilted aluminum sides of food carts, and from there onto Arthur Less himself. Even the mean delighted look from the lady who would not hold the elevator, the humor-free girl at the coffee shop, the tourists standing stock-still on busy Fifth Avenue, the revved-up accosting hawkers (“Mister, you like comedy? Everybody likes comedy!”), the toothache sensation of jackhammers in concrete—none of it can dull the day. Here is a shop that sells only zippers. Here are twenty of them. The Zipper District. What a glorious city.
“What are you going to wear?” the bookstore employee asks when Less stops by to say hello. He has walked twenty wonderful blocks to get here.
“What am I going to wear? Oh, just my blue suit.”
The employee (in pencil skirt, sweater, and glasses: a burlesque librarian) laughs and laughs. Her mirth settles into a smile. “No, but seriously,” she says, “what are you going to wear?”
“It’s a great suit. What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s H. H. H. Mandern! And it’s almost Halloween! I found a NASA jumpsuit. Janice is coming as the Queen of Mars.”
“I was under the impression he wanted to be taken seriously—”
“But it’s H. H. H. Mandern! Halloween! We have to dress up!”
She does not know how carefully he packed his luggage. It is a clown car of contradictory possessions: cashmere sweaters yet light linen trousers, thermal underwear yet suntan lotion, a tie yet a Speedo, his workout set of rubber bands, and so on. What shoes do you pack for the university and the beach? What sunglasses for northern European gloom and South Asian sun? He would be passing through Halloween, Día de los Muertos, Festa di San Martino, Nikolaustag, Christmas, New Year’s, Eid al-Mawlid, Vasant Panchami, and Hina Matsuri. The hats alone could fill a shopwindow. And then there is the suit.