Less

Less at Last

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. I admit it looks bad (misfortune is about to arrive). I recall our second meeting, when Less was just over forty. I was at a cocktail party in a new city, looking out at the view, when I felt the sensation of someone opening a window and turned. No one had opened a window; a new person had simply entered the room. He was tall, with thinning blond hair and the profile of an English lord. He gave a sad grin to the crowd and raised a hand the way some people do when (after being introduced with an anecdote) they say “Guilty!” Nowhere on earth could he be mistaken for anything but an American. Did I recognize him as the same man who taught me to draw in that cold white room when I was young? The one I thought was a boy but who betrayed me by being a man? Not at first. My initial thoughts were certainly not those of a child. But then, yes, on a second glance, I did recognize him. He had aged without growing old: a harder jaw, a thicker neck, a faded color to his hair and skin. No one would mistake him for a boy. And yet it was definitely him: I recognized the distinctly identifiable innocence he carried with him. Mine had vanished in the intervening years; his, strangely, had not. Here was someone who should have known better; who should have built an amusing armor around himself, like everyone else in that room, laughing; who should, by now, have grown a skin. Standing there like someone lost in Grand Central Station.

So it is that, almost a decade later, Arthur Less wears the same expression as he emerges from the plane in Osaka and, finding no one to greet him, experiences that quicksand sensation every traveler recognizes: Of course there is no one to greet me; why would anyone remember, and what am I supposed to do now? Above him, a fly orbits a ceiling lamp in a trapezoidal pattern, and in life’s constant imitation, Arthur Less begins a similar orbit around the Arrivals terminal. He passes a number of counters whose signs, while ostensibly in English, mean nothing to him (JASPER!, AERONET, GOLD-MAN), reminding him of that startling moment while reading a book when he finds it is all complete gibberish and realizes that he is, in fact, dreaming. At the final counter (CHROME), an elderly man calls out to him; Arthur Less, by now fluent in global sign language, understands this is a private bus company and the Kyoto city council has left him a ticket. The name on the ticket: DR. ESS. Less experiences a brief wonderful vertigo. Outside, the minibus is waiting; it is clearly meant only for Less. A driver exits; he is wearing the cap and white gloves of a cinema chauffeur; he nods to Arthur Less, who finds himself bowing before he enters the bus, chooses a seat, wipes his face with a handkerchief, and looks out the window at this, his final destination. Only an ocean left to cross now. He has lost so much along the way: his lover, his dignity, his beard, his suit, and his suitcase.

I have neglected to mention that his suitcase has not made it to Japan.

Less is here to review Japanese cuisine for a men’s magazine, in particular kaiseki cuisine; he volunteered for the gig at that poker game. He knows nothing at all about kaiseki cuisine, but he has dinner plans at four different establishments over two days, the last an ancient inn outside Kyoto, so he is expecting a wide variety. Two days, then he will be done. All he knows of Japan is a memory from when he was a little boy, when his mother drove him into Washington DC, for a special trip, and he was made to wear a button-up shirt and wool trousers, and was taken to a large stone building with columns, and stood in line for a long time in the snow before being allowed entrance to a small dark chamber in which various treasures appeared, scrolls and headdresses and suits of armor (which Less took for real people at first). “They’ve let them out of Japan for the first time and probably never will again,” his mother whispered, apparently referring to a mirror, a jewel, and a sword on display with two very real and disappointing guards, and when a gong sounded and they were told to leave, she leaned down to him and asked: “What did you like best?” He told her, and her face twisted in amusement: “Garden? What garden?” He had been drawn not to the sacred treasures but to a glass case containing a town in miniature, to which an eyepiece was attached so that he could peer in on one scene or the next like a god, each done in such exquisite detail that it seemed he was looking in on the past through a magic telescope. And of all the wonders in that case, the greatest was the garden, with its river that seemed to trickle, filled with orange-spotted carp, and bushy pines and maples and a little fountain made from a piece of bamboo (in reality as big as a pin!) that tipped and tipped, as if dropping its load of water into the stone pool at its base. The garden enchanted little Arthur Less for weeks; he walked among the brown leaves of his backyard, looking for its little golden key. He took it for granted he would find the door.

So all this is surprising and new. Arthur Less sits in the bus and watches the industrial landscape bloom along the highway. He expected something prettier, perhaps. But even Kawabata wrote about the changing landscape around Osaka, and that was sixty years ago. He is tired; his flights and connections have felt more dreamlike than even his drugged tour of the Frankfurt airport. He did not hear again from Carlos. A piece of nonsense buzzes in his brain: Is this because of Freddy? But that story had reached its end, as this one almost has.

The bus continues into Kyoto, which feels like a mere elaboration on the small townlets before it, and while Less is still trying to figure out if they are in the downtown—if perhaps this is a main street, if that is in fact the Kamo River—they have arrived. A low wooden wall off the main road. A young man in a black suit bows and stares curiously at the place where Less’s suitcase should be. A middle-aged woman in kimono approaches from the cobblestone courtyard. She is lightly made up, her hair pulled into a style Less associates with the early twentieth century. A Gibson girl. “Mr. Arthur,” she says with a bow. He bows in return. Behind her, at the front desk, there is a ruckus: an old woman, also in kimono, chattering on a cell phone and making marks on a wall calendar.

“That is just my mother,” the proprietress says, sighing. “She thinks she is still the boss. We give her a fake calendar to make reservations. The phone also is fake. Can I make you a cup of tea?” He says that would be wonderful, and she smiles handsomely; then her face darkens in terrible sorrow. “And I am so sorry, Mr. Arthur,” she says, as if imparting the death of a loved one. “You are too early to see the cherry blossoms.”

After the tea (which she makes by hand, whisking it into a bitter green foam—“Please eat the sugar cookie before the tea”) he is shown to his room and told it was, in fact, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s favorite. A low lacquered table is set on the tatami floor, and the woman slides back paper walls to reveal a moonlit corner garden dripping from a recent rain; Kawabata wrote of this garden in the rain that it was the heart of Kyoto. “Not any garden,” she says pointedly, “but this very garden.” She informs him that the tub in the bathroom is already warm and that an attendant will keep it warm, always, for whenever he needs it. Always. There is a yukata in the closet for him to wear. Would he like dinner in the room? She will bring it personally for him: the first of the four kaiseki meals he will be writing about.

The kaiseki meal, he has learned, is an ancient formal meal drawn from both monasteries and the royal court. It is typically seven courses, each course composed of a particular type of food (grilled, simmered, raw) and seasonal ingredients. Tonight, it is butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Less is humbled both by the exquisite food and by the graciousness with which she presents it. “I most sincerely apologize I cannot be here tomorrow to see you; I must go to Tokyo.” She says this as if she were missing the most extraordinary of wonders: another day with Arthur Less. He sees, in the lines around her mouth, the shadow of the smile all widows wear in private. She bows and exits, returning with a sake sampler. He tries all three, and when asked which is his favorite, he says the Tonni, though he cannot tell the difference. He asks which is her favorite. She blinks and says: “The Tonni.” If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

The next day is already his last, and it looks as if it will be a full one; he has arranged to visit three restaurants. It is eleven in the morning, and Arthur Less, still wearing his clothes from the day before, is already on his way to the first, recovering his shoes from the numbered cabinet where the hotel worker keeps them when he is waylaid by the elderly mother. She stands behind the reception desk, dwarfed and age speckled as a winter starling, perhaps ninety years old, and chattering, chattering away, as if the cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese (a hair-of-the-dog sensibility). And yet somehow, from his months of travel and pantomime, his pathetic journey into the empathic and telepathic, he feels he does understand. She is talking about her youth. She is talking about when she was the proprietress. She pulls out a weathered black-and-white photograph of a seated Western couple—the man silver haired, the woman quite chic in a toque—and he recognizes the room where he had tea. She is saying the girl serving tea is her and the man, a famous American. There is a long expectant pause as recognition rises like a deep-sea diver, slowly, cautiously, until it surfaces, and he exclaims:

“Charlie Chaplin!”

The old woman closes her eyes with joy.

A young woman in braids arrives and turns on the little television behind the counter, changing the channels until she lands on a scene of the emperor of Japan having tea with a few guests, one of whom he recognizes.

“Is that the proprietress?” he asks the young woman.

“Oh yes,” she says, “she is so sorry she could not say good-bye to you.”

“She didn’t tell me it was so she could have tea with the emperor!”

“It is with her great apologies, Mr. Less.” There are more apologies. “I am also so sorry your suitcase is not here for you. But early this morning we had a call: there is a message.” She hands him an envelope. Inside is a piece of paper with the message in all caps, which reads like an old-fashioned telegram:

ARTHUR DO NOT WORRY BUT ROBERT HAS HAD A STROKE BACK HOME NOW PLEASE CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN

—MARIAN

“Arthur, there you are!”

Marian’s voice—almost thirty years since they last spoke; he can only imagine the names she called him after the divorce. But he remembers Mexico City: She sends her love. In Sonoma it is seven at night the previous day.

“Marian, what’s happened?”

“Arthur, don’t worry, don’t worry, he’s okay.”

“What. Happened.”

That sigh from across the world, and he takes a moment from his worries to marvel: Marian! “He was just in his apartment, reading, and fell flat on the floor. Luckily, Joan was there.” The nurse. “He bruised himself a little. He’s having trouble talking, a little trouble with his right hand. It’s minor.” She says this sternly. “It’s a minor stroke.”

“What is a minor stroke? Does that mean it’s nothing, or does that mean thank God it wasn’t a major one?”

“The thank-God kind. And thank God he wasn’t on the stairs or something. Listen, Arthur, I don’t want you to worry. But I wanted to call you. You know you’re listed first on his emergency contacts. But they didn’t know where you were, so they called me. I’m second.” A little laugh. “Lucky them, I’ve been stuck at home for months!”

“Oh, Marian, you broke your hip!”

Again the sigh. “Not broken, it turned out. But I’m bruised black and blue. What do we do? Things fall apart. Sorry I had to skip Mexico City; that would have been a nicer reunion.”

“I’m so glad you’re there with him, Marian. I’ll be there tomorrow, I have to check on—”

“No, no, Arthur, don’t do that! You’re on your honeymoon.”

“What?”

“Robert’s fine. I’ll be here a week or so. See him when you get back. I wouldn’t have bothered you at all except he insisted. He misses you, of course, at a time like this.”

“Marian, I’m not on my honeymoon. I’m in Japan for an article.”

But there was no contradicting Marian Brownburn. “Robert said you got married. He said you married Freddy somebody.”

“No no, no no,” Arthur says, and finds himself getting dizzy. “Freddy somebody married somebody else. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be right there.”

“Listen,” Marian says in her administrative voice. “Arthur. Don’t you get on a plane. He’ll be furious.”

“I can’t stay here, Marian. You wouldn’t stay here. We both love him, we wouldn’t stay here while he’s suffering.”

“Okay. Let’s set up one of those video calls you boys do…”

They arrange to chat again in ten minutes, during which time Less manages to find the inn’s computer, which is startlingly up-to-date, considering the ancient room in which it sits. As he waits for the video call, he stares at a bird of paradise arranged in a bowl by the window. A minor stroke. Fuck you, life.

Arthur Less’s life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less’s life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend’s Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more—but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor’s notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever.

This was how he felt when Robert left him.

Or perhaps you assumed he left Robert?

As with Proust, he knew the end was coming. Fifteen years, and the joy of love had long since faded, and the cheating had begun; not simply Less’s escapades with other men but secret affairs that ran the course of a month to a year and broke everything in sight. Was he testing to see how elastic love could be? Was he simply a man who had gladly given his youth to a man in midlife and now, nearing midlife himself, wanted back the fortune he squandered? Wanted sex and love and folly? The very things Robert saved him from all those years ago? As for the good things, as for safety, comfort, love—Less found himself smashing them to bits. Perhaps he did not know what he was doing; perhaps it was a kind of madness. But perhaps he did know. Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

The real end came when Robert was on one of his reading trips, this time through the South. Robert called dutifully the first night he arrived, but Less was not home, and over the next few days his voice mail was filled, first with stories, about, for instance, Spanish moss hanging from the oaks like rotting dresses, then with briefer and briefer messages until, at last, there were none. Less was preparing himself, in fact, for Robert’s return, when he was planning on a very serious conversation. He sensed six months of couples counseling, and he sensed it would end with a tearful parting; perhaps all that would take a year. But it had to start now. His heart was in a knot, and he practiced his lines as one practices a phrase in a foreign language before heading to the ticket counter: “I think we both know something isn’t working, I think we both know something isn’t working, I think we both know something isn’t working.” When, after a silence of five days, his phone rang at last, Less suppressed a heart attack and answered it: “Robert! You got me at last. I wanted to talk. I think we both know—”

But his speech was pierced by Robert’s deep voice: “Arthur, I love you, but I will not be coming home. Mark will be over to get some of my things. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to talk about it now. I am not angry. I love you. I am not angry. But neither of us is the man we used to be. Good-bye.”

The End. And all that he held in his hand were the notes and afterword.

“Look at you, Arthur.”

It’s Robert. The connection is poor, but it is Robert Brownburn, the world-famous poet, appearing on the screen, and beside him (surely an effect of transmission), his ectoplasmic echo. Here he is: alive. Beautifully bald, with a baby’s halo of hair. He is dressed in a blue terry bathrobe. His smile contains some of the same brilliant devilry, but today it sags to the right. A stroke. Holy shit. A tube runs under his nose like a fake mustache, his voice grates like sand, and from beside him Less can hear (perhaps heightened by the microphone’s proximity) a machine’s loud respiration, bringing back memories of the “heavy breather” who would sometimes call the Less house, young Arthur Less listening with fascination as his mother yelled out, “Oh, is that my boyfriend? Tell him I’ll be right there!” But here is Robert. Slumped, slurring, mortified but alive.

Less: “How are you doing?”

“I feel like I’ve been in a bar fight. I am speaking to you from the afterlife.”

“You look awful. How dare you do this,” Less says.

“You should see the other guy.” His words are mumbled and odd.

“You sound Scottish,” Less says.

“We become our fathers.” Or forefathers: his s’s have become f’s, as in old manuscripts: When in the courfe of human events it becomes necefsary…

Then the doctor, an elderly woman in black glasses, leans into view. Thin, bony, creased with lines as if crumpled in a pocket for a long time, with a wattle under her chin. A white bob and Antarctic eyes. “Arthur, it’s Marian.”

Oh, what jokers! Less thinks. They’re kidding! There is that scene at the end of Proust when our narrator, after many years out of society, arrives at a party furious no one told him it’s a costume party; everyone is wearing white wigs! And then he realizes. It isn’t a costume party. They have simply grown old. And here, looking at his first love, the first wife—surely they’re kidding! But the joke goes on too long. Robert keeps breathing heavily. Marian does not smile. No one is kidding.

“Marian, you look wonderful.”

“Arthur, you’re all grown up,” she muses.

“He’s fifty,” Robert says, then winces in discomfort. “Happy birthday, my boy. Sorry I missed it.” Forry I mifsed it. Life, liberty and the purfuit of happinefs. “I had a rendezvous with Death.”

Marian says, “Death didn’t show. I’ll leave you boys alone for a minute. But only a minute! Don’t tire him out, Arthur. We have to take care of our Robert.”

Thirty years ago, a beach in San Francisco.

She vanishes; Robert’s eyes watch her leave, then they return to Less. A procession of shades, as with Odysseus, and here before him: Tiresias. The seer. “You know, it’s good to have her here. She drives me crazy. Keeps me going. There’s nothing like doing the crossword with your ex-wife. Where the hell are you?”

“Kyoto.”

“What?”

Less leans forward and shouts: “Kyoto. Japan. But I’m coming back to see you.”

“Fuck that. I’m fine. I lost my fine motor skills, not my goddamn mind. Look at what they have me doing.” In very slow motion, he manages to lift his hand. In it, a bright-green ball of putty. “I have to squeeze it all day. I told you this was the afterlife. Poets have to squeeze bits of clay for eternity. They’re all here, Walt and Hart and Emily and Frank. The American wing. Squeezing bits of clay. Novelists have to”—and he closes his eyes and catches his breath for a moment, then continues more weakly—“novelists have to mix our drinks. Did you write your novel in India?”

“I did. I have one chapter left. I want to see you.”

“Finish your fucking novel.”

“Robert—”

“Don’t use my stroke as an excuse. Coward! You’re afraid I’m going to die.”

Less cannot answer; it is the truth. I know I’m out of your life / But the day that I die / I know you are going to cry. In the silence, the machine breathes on and on. Robert’s face crumbles a little. Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar.

“Not yet, Arthur,” he says briskly. “Don’t be in such a fucking hurry for it. Didn’t someone say you’d grown a beard?”

“Did you tell Marian I married Freddy?”

“Who knows what I said? Do I look like I know what I’m saying? Did you?”

“No.”

“And now here you are. Here we both are. You look very, very sad, my boy.”

Does he? Well rested and pampered, fresh from his bath? But you can’t hide anything from Tiresias.

“Did you love him, Arthur?”

Arthur says nothing. There was a time—at a bad Italian restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco, basically abandoned except for two waiters and a tourist family from Germany whose matriarch later fell in the bathroom, hit her head, and insisted on going to the hospital (not comprehending the cost of American health care)—there was a time when Robert Brownburn, only forty-six years old, took Arthur Less’s hand and said, “My marriage is failing, it has been failing a long time. Marian and I hardly sleep together anymore. I get to bed very late, she gets up very early. She’s angry we never had children. And now that it’s too late, she’s even angrier. I’m selfish and terrible with money. I’m so unhappy. So, so unhappy, Arthur. What I’m saying is that I am in love with you. I was already going to leave Marian before I met you. And I shall dance and sing for thy delight each May-morning, I think the poem goes. I have enough to buy some shitty place somewhere. I know how to live on just a little money. I know it’s preposterous. But you are what I want. Who gives a fuck what anybody says? You are what I want, Arthur, and I—” But there was no more, because Robert Brownburn shut his eyes to hold in the longing that had overcome him in the presence of this young man, clutching his hand in this bad Italian restaurant to which they would never return. The poet wincing in pain before him, suffering, suffering, for Arthur Less. Will Less ever again be so beloved?

Robert, seventy-five, breathing heavily, says, “Oh, my poor boy. A lot?”

Still Arthur says nothing. And Robert says nothing; he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can’t point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, “That one, that star, there.”

“Am I too old to meet someone, Robert?”

Robert sits up slightly, his mood shifting back to merrymaking. “Are you too old? Listen to you. I was watching a television show about science the other day. That’s the kind of nice-old-man thing I do now. I’m very harmless these days. It was about time travel. And they had a scientist on saying that if it were possible, you’d have to build one time machine now. And build another one years later. Then you could go back and forth. A sort of time tunnel. But here’s the thing, Arthur. You could never go any further back than the invention of that first machine. Which I think is really a blow to the imagination. I took it pretty hard.”

Arthur says, “We can never kill Hitler.”

“But you know it’s like that already. When you meet people. You meet them, say, when they’re thirty, and you can never really imagine them any younger than that. You’ve seen pictures of me, Arthur, you’ve seen me at twenty.”

“You were a handsome guy.”

“But really, really, you can’t imagine me any younger than my forties, can you?”

“Sure, I can.”

“You can picture it. But you can’t quite imagine it. You can’t go back any further. It’s against the laws of physics.”

“You’re getting too excited.”

“Arthur, I look at you, and I still see that boy on the beach with the red toenails. Not at first, but my eyes adjust. I see that twenty-one-year-old boy in Mexico. I see that young man in a hotel room in Rome. I see the young writer holding his first book. I look at you, and you’re young. You’ll always be that way for me. But not for anyone else. Arthur, people who meet you now will never be able to imagine you young. They can never go any further back than fifty. It isn’t all bad. It means now people will think you were always a grown-up. They’ll take you seriously. They don’t know that you once spent an entire dinner party babbling about Nepal when you meant Tibet.”

“I can’t believe you brought that up again.”

“That you once referred to Toronto as the capital of Canada.”

“I’m going to get Marian to pull the plug.”

“To the prime minister of Canada. I love you, Arthur. My point is”—and after this harangue he has apparently worn himself out, and takes a few deep breaths—“my point is, welcome to fucking life. Fifty is nothing. I look back at fifty and think, what the fuck was I so worried about? Look at me now. I’m in the afterlife. Go enjoy yourself.” Says Tiresias.

Marian reappears on the screen: “Okay, boys, time’s up. We’ve got to let him rest.”

Robert leans over to his ex-wife. “Marian, he didn’t marry him.”

“He didn’t?”

“Apparently I heard wrong. The fellow married someone else.”

“Well, that’s shitty,” she says, then turns to the camera with an expression of sympathy. White hair held back with barrettes, round black glasses reflecting a sunny day in the past. “Arthur, he’s worn out. It’s good to see you again. We can set up another chat later.”

“I’ll be home tomorrow, I’ll drive up. Robert, I love you.”

The old rogue smiles at Arthur and shakes his head, his eyes bright and clear. “Love you always, Arthur Less.”

“In this room, we take off our clothes before the meal.” The young woman pauses before the doorway, then covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes are wide with horror. “Not clothes! Shoes! We take off our shoes!” It is Less’s first restaurant of three today, and, the call to Robert having already thrown off his schedule, Less is eager to begin, but he gamely follows her ponytail to an enormous hall set with a table and sunken seating, where an elderly man, dressed all in red, bows and says, “Here is the banquet hall, and you can see it transforms into a place for maiko dancing.” He pushes a button, and as in a Bond villain’s lair, the back wall begins to tilt down, becoming a stage, and theater lights pivot out from above. The two seem enormously pleased by this. Less does not know what a maiko might be. He is given a seat by the window and eagerly awaits his kaiseki meal. Seven dishes, as before, taking almost three hours. Grilled, simmered, raw. And—why did he not expect this?—again butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Again, it is lovely. But, like a second date too soon after the first, perhaps a bit familiar?

Look at me now, comes Robert’s voice, haunting him from earlier. I’m in the afterlife. A stroke. Robert has never been kind to his body; he’s worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners, and Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of “a gaudy life.” It is only the carrier of that wonderful mind, after all. A case for the crown. And Robert has cared for that mind like a tiger with her young; he has given up drinking and drugs, kept a strict schedule of sleep. He is good, he is careful. And to steal that—to steal his mind—burglar Life! Like cutting a Rembrandt from its frame.

The second meal of the day takes place in a more modern restaurant decorated with the unembellished severity of a Swede, in blond wood; his waiter is blond as well, and Dutch. Less is given a view of a solitary tree decorated with green buds; it is a cherry, and he is informed he is too early for the blossoms. “Yes, yes, I know,” he says as graciously as he can manage. Over the next three hours he is served grilled and simmered and raw plates of butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. He greets each dish with a mad smile, recognizing the spiral nature of being, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. He murmurs quietly: You again.

When he returns to the ryokan to recover, the old woman is gone, but the young woman in braids is still there, reading a novel in English. She greets him with more apologies about his luggage: no suitcase has arrived. Somehow, it is more than Less can bear, and he leans against the counter. “But, Mr. Less,” the woman says hopefully, “a package did arrive for you.”

It is a shallow brown box postmarked from Italy, surely a book or something from the festival. Less takes it to his room, where he sets it on a table before the garden. In the bathroom, as if in an enchanted hut, a bath already awaits him, perfectly warm, and he soaks his weary body as he prepares for the next meal. He closes his eyes. Did you love him, Arthur? There is the scent of cedar all around. Oh, my poor boy. A lot?

He dries himself and puts on a gray quilted robe, preparing himself to put on the same wilted linen clothes he has worn since India. The package sits waiting for him on the table; he is so tired he considers leaving it for later. But, sighing, he opens it, and inside, wrapped in layers of Italian Christmas paper—how has he forgotten he gave his Japanese address?—is a white linen shirt and a suit as gray as a cloud.

As a final challenge, the last restaurant of the trip sits on a mountainside outside Kyoto, requiring Less to rent a car. This goes more smoothly than Less imagined; his international driving permit, which looks to him like a flimsy phony, is taken very seriously and photocopied numerous times, as if to be handed out as keepsakes. He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert and enters to find the steering wheel missing—then is shown to the driver’s side, all the time merrily thinking: Oh, I guess they drive on the other side over here! Somehow he never thought of it; should they give out international driving permits to people who never think of it? But he has done his time in India; it is all a matter of Looking-Glass driving. Like laying type for a letterpress; you just reverse your mind.

The instructions for getting to the restaurant are as mysterious as a love note or an exchange of spies—Meet at the Moon Crossing Bridge—but his faith is fast; he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster and follows the clear, perfect signs out of Kyoto, toward the hill country. Less is grateful the signs are clear because the GPS, after giving crisp, stern directions to the highway, becomes drunk on its own power outside the city limits, then gives out completely and places Arthur Less in the Sea of Japan. Also unnerving is a mysterious windshield box, which reveals its purpose when the Toaster approaches a tollbooth: it produces a high-pitched reproving female shriek not unlike his grandmother’s when she came upon a piece of broken china. He dutifully pays the toll man, thinking he has done what the machine wants, and passes into a green countryside where a river has magically appeared. But the pastoral scene does not last long—at the next tollbooth, the lady shrieks again. Surely she is berating him for not possessing an electronic pass. But could she also have discovered his other crimes and inadequacies? How he made up ceremonies for a fifth-grade report on the religions of Iceland? How he shoplifted acne cream in high school? How he cheated on Robert so terribly? How he is a “bad gay”? And a bad writer? How he let Freddy Pelu walk out of his life? Shriek, shriek, shriek; it is almost Greek in its fury. A harpy sent down to punish Less at last.

“Take the next exit.” The GPS, that rum-drunk snoozing captain, has awakened and is back in command. Mist is rising as steam rises from damp clothing set beside a fire; here, it is from the pine-dark, folded wool of the mountains. A leaden river is coiling along a bank of reeds. The Toaster passes a sake factory, or so he assumes, because here is a cheerful white barrel sitting as advertisement on the road. Some farm or other has a sign out, in English: SUSTAINABLE HARVEST. Less rolls down the window, and there is the salt-green smell of grass and rain and dirt. He rounds a corner and sees white tourist buses parked all in a row along the river, their great side mirrors like the horns of caterpillars; before them, in a military line, stand elderly people in clear raincoats, taking photographs. Scattered below the steaming mountains are perhaps fifteen thatched-roof houses furred with moss. Across from them: a bridge over the river, a wood-stone trestlework, and Less steers the car to cross it, passing tourists huddled against the rain. He imagines a boat is meant to take him upriver to the restaurant, and as he reaches the other bank and parks the Toaster (from the dashboard comes the harpy’s shrill reminder), he sees a few people waiting on the dock, and among them—he recognizes her through her clear umbrella—is his mother.

Arthur, hello, honey. I just thought I’d take a little trip, he can just imagine her saying. Have you been eating enough?

His mother lifts the umbrella, and, free of its distorting membrane, she is a Japanese woman wearing his mother’s hair scarf. Orange with a pattern of white scallop shells. How did it get all the way here from her grave? Or no, not her grave; from the Salvation Army in suburban Delaware where he and his sister donated everything. It was all done in such a rush. The cancer moved very slowly at first, then very quickly, as things always do in nightmares, and then he was in a black suit talking to his aunt. From where he stood, he could see the scarf still hanging on its wooden knob. He was eating a quesadilla; as an areligious WASP, he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing. He had somehow renounced that inheritance. So it was Freddy who took over, Freddy who had already mourned his own parents, Freddy who ordered up a Mexican feast that was all prepared when Less stumbled in from the church service, drunk on platitudes and pure horror. Freddy had even hired someone to take his raincoat. And Freddy himself, in the very jacket Less bought for him in Paris, stood directly behind Less the whole time, silently, one hand resting on his left shoulder blade as if propping up a cardboard sign against the wind. One person after another came up and said his mother was at peace. His mother’s friends: each with her own peculiar spiked or curled white hairdo, like a dahlia show. She is in a better place. So glad she went so peacefully. And when the last had gone by, he could feel Freddy’s breath on his ear as he whispered: “The way your mother died was awful.” The boy he met years before would never have known to say that. Less turned to look at Freddy and saw, in the close-cut hair on his temples, the first shimmer of silver.

Less had so specifically wanted to save that orange scarf. But it was a whirlwind of duties. Somehow it got bundled into the donation pile and vanished from his life forever.

But not forever. Life has saved it after all.

Less steps out of his car and is greeted by a young man in black, who holds an enormous black umbrella over our hero; Less’s new gray suit is dotted with rain. His mother’s scarf vanishes into a shop. He turns to the open water, where already the low dark boat of Charon is coming to carry him off.

The restaurant sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor; some of the walls seem bent with humidity, and paper hangings have taken on the crinkle Less associates with books he has left in the rain. Intact are the old tile roof, wide roof beams, carved rosettes, and sliding paper walls of the old inn this used to be. A tall stately woman meets him at the entrance, bowing and greeting him by name. On their tour of the old inn, they pass a window onto an enormous walled garden.

“The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar.” The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation.

“And now,” Less says, “it’s unpoplar.”

She blinks for a polite moment, then leads him into another wing, and he follows the sway of her green and gold kimono. At the portal, she slips off her clogs, and he unlaces and removes his shoes. There is sand in them: Saharan or Keralan? The woman gestures to a sniffling teenage girl in a blue kimono, who leads him down another corridor. This one is filled with hanging calligraphy and has the Alice in Wonderland effect of beginning with an enormous wooden frame and ending in a door so small that as the woman slides it sideways into a pocket in the wall, she is forced to get onto her knees to enter. It is clear that Less is meant to do the same. He supposes he is meant to experience humility; by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost. There, in the room, a small table, a paper wall, and one glass window so ancient that the garden behind it undulates dreamily as Less crosses the room. The room is wallpapered in large faint gold and silver snowflakes; he is told the design is from the Edo period, when microscopes made their way to Japan. Before that, no one had seen a snowflake. He takes a seat on a cushion beside a golden folding screen. The young woman exits through the little door. He hears her struggling to close it behind her; it has clearly suffered for centuries and is ready to die.

He looks around at the golden screen, the stylized snowflakes, the single iris in a vase below a drawing of a deer, the paper wall. The only sound is the breathing of a humidifier behind him, and, despite the purity of the room, the view, no one has bothered to remove from its surface the sticker DAINICHI RELIABILITY. Before him: the warped view of the garden. He starts back in recognition. Here it is.

They must have based the miniature garden of his childhood on this four-hundred-year-old garden, because it is not merely a similar garden; it is the very garden: the mossy stone path beside shaggy bamboo, wandering, as in a fairy tale, off into the dark distant pines of a mountain where mysteries await (this is an illusion, because Less knows perfectly well that what awaits is an HVAC system). The movement in the grass that could be a river, the bits of old stone that could be the steps of a temple. The bamboo fountain filling and tipping its water into the stone pool—the same, all precisely the same. The wind moves; the pines move; the leaves of the bamboo move; and, like a flag in the same wind, the memory of this garden moves within Arthur Less. He remembers that he did indeed find a key (steel, belonging to the lawn mower shed) but never the door. It was always an absurd childish fantasy that he would. Forty-five years have passed, during which he forgot all about it. But here it is.

From behind him comes the girl’s sniffle; again, she struggles with the door as if with the stone of a tomb. He doesn’t dare look back. At last she conquers it and appears by his side with green tea and a brown lacquered basket. She produces a worn card and reads aloud from it: English, apparently, but it makes as much sense as someone talking in a dream. He does not need a translation, anyway; it is his old pal butter bean. Then she smiles and departs. Another wrestling match with the door.

He takes careful notes of what is on his plate. But he cannot taste it. Why have these memories been brought out again, here in Japan—the orange scarf, the garden—like a yard sale of his life? Has he lost his mind, or is everything a reflection? The butter bean, the mugwort, the scarf, the garden; is this not a window but a mirror? Two birds are quarreling in the fountain. Again, as he did as a boy, he can only look on. He closes his eyes and begins to cry.

He hears the girl struggling again with the door but does not hear it open. Here comes the mugwort.

“Mr. Less,” comes a male voice from behind him—from behind the door, in fact, he realizes when he turns around. Less kneels down close to it, and the voice says: “Mr. Less, we are so sorry.”

“Yes, I know!” Less says loudly. “I am too early for the cherry blossoms!”

A cleared throat. “Yes, and also, also…We are so sorry. This door is four hundred years old, and it is stuck. We have tried.” A long silence behind the door. “It is impossible to open.”

“Impossible?”

“We are so sorry.”

“Let’s think for a minute—”

“We have tried everything.”

“I can’t be trapped in here.”

“Mr. Less,” comes the male voice again, muffled by the door. “We have an idea.”

“I’m all ears.”

“It is this.” A whispered exchange in Japanese, followed by another clearing of the throat. “That you break the wall.”

Less opens his eyes and looks at the latticed paper wall. They might as well be asking him to leave a space capsule. “I can’t.”

“They are simple to repair. Please, Mr. Less. If you could break the wall.”

He feels old; he feels alone; he feels unpoplar. In the garden: a cluster of small birds passes like a school of colorless fish, darting back and forth before the window of this aquarium (in which it is Less who is contained, and not the birds), disappearing at last to the east with one stately gesture, and then—because life is comedy—there appears one final bird, scrambling across the sky to catch up with his mates.

“Please, Mr. Less.”

Says the bravest person I know: “I can’t.”

It was around seven in the morning not long ago that your narrator had a vision of Arthur Less.

I was awakened by a mosquito who had, impressively, made her way past a fortress of fuming coils, electric fans, and permethrin-coated netting to settle inside my ear. I thank that mosquito every hour. If she (for humans are only hunted by females) had not been so skilled an intruder, I think I never would have seen it. Life is so often made by chance. That mosquito: she gave her life for me; I killed her with one smack of my palm. The South Pacific made a quiet rumble from the open window, and the sleeper beside me made a similar sound.

Sunrise. We had arrived at the hotel in the dark, but gradually, light began to reveal that our room was covered on three sides by windows; I realized the house was set out in the ocean itself, like a thrust stage, and that the view from every window was of the water and the sky. I watched as they took on shades of iris and myrtle, sapphire and jade, until all around me, in sea and sky alike, I recognized a particular shade of blue. And I understood that I would never see Arthur Less again.

Not in the way I had; not in the casual sprawl of all those years. It was as if I had been informed of his death. So many times I had left his house and closed the door, and now, carelessly, I had locked it behind me. Married—it seemed instantly so stupid of me. Around me everywhere, that shade of Lessian blue. We would run into each other now, of course, on the street or at a party somewhere, and maybe even get a drink together, but it would be having a drink with a ghost. Arthur Less. It could never be anyone else. From somewhere high above the earth, I began a plummeting descent. There was no air to breathe. The world was rushing in to fill the void where Arthur Less had always been. I hadn’t known that I assumed he would wait there forever in that white bed below his window. I hadn’t known I needed him there. Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day—it’s gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid. Arthur Less, who was supposed to remain in that bed forever, now on a trip around the world—and who knows where he might be? Lost to me. I started shaking. It seemed so long ago I had seen him at that party, looking like a man lost in Grand Central Station, that crown prince of innocence. Watching him only a moment before my father introduced me: “Arthur, you remember my son, Freddy.”

I sat upright in bed for a long time, shivering, though it was warm in Tahiti. Shivering, shaking; I suppose it was what you would call an attack of something or other. From behind me, I heard rustling and then a stillness.

Then I heard his voice, my new husband, Tom, who loved me, and therefore saw everything:

“I really wish you weren’t crying right now.”

And he is standing up within his paper room, our brave protagonist. He stands very still, fists clenched. Who knows what is raging through that queer head of his? They seem to echo now, the birds, the wind, the fountain, as if coming from the end of a long tunnel. He turns from the garden, which moves fluidly behind the ancient glass, and faces the paper wall. Here, he supposes, is the door. Not into the garden at all, but out of it. Nothing more than sticks and paper. Any other man could break it with a blow. How old is it? Has it ever seen a snowflake? Of all the absurdities of this trip, perhaps this is the most absurd—to be afraid of this. With one hand, he reaches out to touch the rough paper. The sunlight glows brighter behind it, making the shadow of a tree branch more distinct upon its surface—the Persian silk tree he climbed as a boy? There is no returning there. Or to the beach on a warm San Francisco day. Or to his bedroom and a good-bye kiss. In this room, everything is reflecting, but here is just the blank white wall of the future, on which anything might be written. Some new mortification, some new ridicule, surely. Some new joke to play on old Arthur Less. Why go there? And yet, despite everything, beyond it—who knows what miracle still awaits? Picture him lifting his fists above his head and, now with unconcealed pleasure, laughing, even, with ringing madness and a kind of crazed ecstasy, bringing them down with a splintering noise…

…and picture him getting out of a taxi on Ord Street in San Francisco, at the bottom of the Vulcan Steps. His plane has dutifully departed Osaka and landed on time in San Francisco; his crossing was fair, and his neighbor, who was reading the latest by H. H. H. Mandern, was even treated to a little story (“You know, I once interviewed him in New York City; he was sick with food poisoning, and I wore a cosmonaut’s helmet…”) before our protagonist passed out from his pills. Arthur Less has completed his trip around the world; he is finished; he is home.

The sun has long since entered the fog, so the city is washed in blue as if by a watercolorist who has changed her mind and thinks it’s all rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. He has no suitcase to carry; it is apparently making its own way around the world. He screws his eyes up the dark passage to home. Picture him: the balding blond of his hair, the semi-frown on his face, the wrinkled white shirt, the bandaged left hand, the bandaged right foot, the stained leather satchel, and his beautiful gray tailored suit. Picture him: almost glowing in the dark. Tomorrow, he will see Lewis for coffee and find out whether Clark has really left him and whether it still feels like a happy ending. There will be a note from Robert, to be filed with everything that will never be in the Carlos Pelu Collection: To the boy with red toenails—thank you for everything. Tomorrow, love will surely deepen its mystery. All that, tomorrow. But tonight, after a long journey: rest. Then the strap of the satchel catches on the handrail, and for a moment—and because there are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity—it seems as if he is going to keep walking, and the satchel will tear…

Less looks back and untangles the strap. Fate, thwarted. Now: the long ascent toward home. Placing his foot on the first step with relief.

Why is his porch light on? What is that shadow?

He would be interested to know that my marriage to Tom Dennis lasted one entire day: twenty-four hours. We talked it all through on the bed, surrounded by the sea and the sky in that Lessian blue. That morning, when I stopped crying at last, Tom said as my husband he had a duty to stay with me, to help me work through it. I sat there nodding and nodding. He said that I had traveled an awfully long way to figure out something I should have known sooner, something people had been telling him for months, and that he should have known when I locked myself in the bathroom the night before our wedding. I nodded. We embraced and decided he could not be my husband after all. He closed the door, and I was left in that room filled side to side, and top to bottom, with the blue that signified the vast mistake I had made. I tried to call Less from the hotel phone but left no message. What would I say? That when he told me, long ago, as I tried on his tuxedo, not to get attached, he was years too late? That it did not do the trick, that good-bye kiss? The next day, on the main island, I inquired about Gauguin’s house but was informed by a local: “It is closed.” For many days, I watched and was amazed by the ocean, composing endless fascinating variations on its tedious theme. Then, one morning, my father sent me a message:

Flight 172 from Osaka, Japan, arriving Thursday, 6:30 p.m.

Arthur Less, squinting up at his house. And now a security light, triggered by his movements, has come on, blinding him briefly. Who is that standing there?

I have never been to Japan. I have never been to India, or to Morocco, or to Germany, or to most of the places Arthur Less has traveled to over the past few months. I have never climbed an ancient pyramid. I have never kissed a man on a Paris rooftop. I have never ridden a camel. I have taught a high school English class for the best part of a decade, and graded homework every night, and woken up early in the morning to plan my lessons, and read and reread Shakespeare, and sat through enough conferences and meetings for even those in Purgatory to envy me. I have never seen a glowworm. I do not, by any reckoning, have the best life of anyone I know. But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.

Because it is also mine. That is how it goes with love stories.

Less, still dazzled by the spotlight, starts up the stairs and becomes ensnared, as he always does, in the thorns of a neighbor’s rosebush; carefully he removes each spur from his shimmering gray suit. He passes the bougainvillea, which, like some bothersome talkative lady at a party, briefly obstructs his path. He pushes it aside, showering himself with dried purple bracts. Somewhere, someone is practicing piano over and over; they cannot get the left hand right. A window undulates with a watery television radiance. And then I see the familiar blond glow of his hair appearing from the flowers, the halo of Arthur Less. Look at him tripping at the same broken step as always, pausing to look down in surprise. Look at him turning to take the last few steps toward the one who awaits him. His face tilted upward toward home. Look at him, look at him. How could I not love him?

My father asked me once why I was so lazy, why I did not want the world. He asked me what I wanted, and though I did not answer then, because I did not know, and followed old conventions even to the altar, I know it now. It is long past time to answer the question—and I see you, old Arthur, old love, looking up to that silhouette on your porch—what do I want? After choosing the path people wanted, the man who would do, the easy way out of things—your eyes wide in surprise as you see me—after holding it all in my hands and refusing it, what do I want from life?

And I say: “Less!”