Back in his room, he is surprised to find, in the Lilliputian bathroom, a Brobdingnagian tub. So, even though it is ten o’clock, he runs a bath. As it fills, he looks out at the city: the Empire State Building, twenty blocks down, is echoed, below, by an Empire Diner with a card stock sign: PASTRAMI. From the other window, near Central Park, he sees the sign for the Hotel New Yorker. They are not kidding, no sir. No more than the New England inns called the Minuteman and the Tricorner are kidding, with their colonial cupolas topped with wrought iron weather vanes, their cannonball pyramids out front, or the Maine lobster pounds called the Nor’easter, hung with traps and glass buoys, are kidding, or the moss-festooned restaurants in Savannah, or the Western Grizzly Dry Goods, or the Florida Gator This and Gator That, or even the Californian Surfboard Sandwiches and Cable Car Cafés and Fog City Inn, are kidding. Nobody is kidding. They are dead serious. People think of Americans as easygoing, but in fact they are all dead serious, especially about their local culture; they name their bars “saloons” and their shops “Ye Olde”; they wear the colors of the local high school team; they are Famous for Their Pies. Even in New York City.
Perhaps Less, alone, is kidding. Here, looking at his clothes—black jeans for New York, khaki for Mexico, blue suit for Italy, down for Germany, linen for India—costume after costume. Each one is a joke, and the joke is on him: Less the gentleman, Less the author, Less the tourist, Less the hipster, Less the colonialist. Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn’t even know where he’s stored.
He turns off the water and gets into the tub. Hot hot hot hot hot! He steps out, red to his waist, and lets the cold run a little longer. Mist haunts the surface and the reflection of the white tiles, with their single stripe of black. He slips back in, the water only slightly too hot now. His body ripples beneath the reflection.
Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink. He has never seen another gay man age past fifty, none except Robert. He met them all at forty or so but never saw them make it much beyond; they died of AIDS, that generation. Less’s generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond fifty. How are they meant to do it? Do you stay a boy forever, and dye your hair and diet to stay lean and wear tight shirts and jeans and go out dancing until you drop dead at eighty? Or do you do the opposite—do you forswear all that, and let your hair go gray, and wear elegant sweaters that cover your belly, and smile on past pleasures that will never come again? Do you marry and adopt a child? In a couple, do you each take a lover, like matching nightstands by the bed, so that sex will not vanish entirely? Or do you let sex vanish entirely, as heterosexuals do? Do you experience the relief of letting go of all that vanity, anxiety, desire, and pain? Do you become a Buddhist? One thing you certainly do not do. You do not take on a lover for nine years, thinking it is easy and casual, and, once he leaves you, disappear and end up alone in a hotel bathtub, wondering what now.
From nowhere, Robert’s voice:
I’m going to grow too old for you. When you’re thirty-five I’ll be sixty. When you’re fifty I’ll be seventy-five. And then what will we do?
It was in the early days; he was so young, maybe twenty-two. Having one of their serious conversations after sex. I’m going to grow too old for you. Of course Less said this was ridiculous, the age difference meant nothing to him. Robert was hotter than those stupid boys, surely he knew that. Men in their forties were so sexy: the calm assurance of what a man liked and didn’t, where he set limits and where he set none, experience and a sense of adventure. It made the sex so much better. Robert lit another cigarette and smiled. And then what will we do?
And then comes Freddy, twenty years later, standing in Less’s bedroom: “I don’t think of you as old.”
“But I am,” Less says from where he lies in the bed. “I will be.” Our hero resting sideways on his elbows. The dappled sunlight showing how the trumpet vine has grown, over the years, to lattice the window. Less is forty-four. Freddy, twenty-nine, wearing his red glasses, Less’s tuxedo jacket, and nothing else. In the center of his furred chest, barely an indent where the hollow used to be.
Freddy looks at himself in the mirror. “I think I look better in your tuxedo than you do.”
“I want to make sure,” Less says, lowering his voice, “that I’m not preventing you from meeting anyone.”
Freddy catches Arthur Less’s gaze in the mirror. The young man’s face tightens slightly, as if he had a toothache. At last, he says, “You don’t have to worry about it.”
“You’re at an age—”
“I know.” Freddy has the look of someone paying very close attention to every word. “I understand where we are. You don’t have to worry about it.”
Less settles back in the bed, and they look at each other silently for a moment. The wind sets the vine tapping against the window, scrambling the shadows. “I just wanted to talk—” he begins.
Freddy turns around. “We don’t need to have a long talk, Arthur. You don’t have to worry about it. I just think you should give me this tuxedo.”
“Absolutely not. And stop using my cologne.”
“I will when I’m rich.” Freddy gets onto the bed. “Let’s watch The Paper Wall again.”
“Mr. Pelu, I just want to make sure,” Less goes on, unable to let go until he is certain he has made his point, “that you don’t get attached to me.” He wonders when their conversations had begun to sound like a novel in translation.
Freddy sits up again, very serious. A strong jaw, the kind an artist would sketch, a jaw that reveals the man he has become. His jaw, and the eagle of dark hair on his chest—they belong to a man. A few details—the small nose and chipmunk smile and blue eyes in which his thoughts can so easily be read—are all that remains of that twenty-five-year-old watching the fog. Then he smiles.
“It’s incredible how vain you are,” Freddy says.
“Just tell me you think my wrinkles are sexy.”
Crawling closer: “Arthur, there isn’t a part of you that isn’t sexy.”
The water has grown cold, and the tiled windowless room feels like an igloo now. He sees himself reflected in the tiles, a wavering ghost on the shiny white surface. He cannot stay in here. He cannot go to bed. He has to do something not sad.
When you’re fifty I’ll be seventy-five. And then what will we do?
Nothing to do but laugh about it. True for everything.