At the grim prospect of loss, the bike guy started to pick through the mushrooms along with them. A male voice from behind him: “Lose your ring?”
“Yep,” said the bearded guy.
“When you find it, use chewing gum till you get it fixed.”
“I said beeswax.”
“Beeswax is good.”
Was this how men felt? Straight men? Alone so often, but if they faltered—if they lost a wedding ring!—then the whole band of brothers would descend to fix the problem? Life was not hard; you shouldered it bravely, knowing all the time that if you sent the signal, help would arrive. How wonderful to be part of such a club. Half a dozen men gathered around, engaged in the task. To save his marriage and his pride. So they did have hearts, after all. They were not cold, cruel dominators; they were not high school bullies to be avoided in the halls. They were good; they were kind; they came to the rescue. And today Less was one of them.
They reached the bottom of the bin. Nothing.
“Ooh, sorry, buddy,” the bike guy said, and grimaced. The bearded man: “Tell her you lost it swimming.” One by one they shook his hand and shook their heads and left.
Less wanted to cry.
What a ridiculous person he was. What a terrible writer, to get caught up in a metaphor like this. As if it would reveal anything to Robert, signify anything about their love. It was just a ring lost in a bin. But he could not help himself; he was too attracted to the bad poetry of it all, of his one good thing, his life with Robert, undone by his carelessness. There was no way to explain it that would not sound like betrayal. Everything would show in his voice. And Robert, the poet, would look up from his chair and see it. That their time had come to an end.
Less leaned against the Vidalia onions and sighed. He took the bag, now empty of mushrooms, to crumple it up and toss it in the trash bin. A glint of gold.
And there it was. In the bag all along. Oh, wonderful life.
He laughed, he showed it to the shop owner. He bought all five pounds of mushrooms the men had handled and went home and made a soup with pork ribs and mustard greens and all the mushrooms and told Robert everything that had happened, from the ring, to the men, to the discovery, the great comedy of it all.
And in the telling, laughing at himself, he watched as Robert looked up from his chair and saw everything.
That’s what it was like to live with genius.
The subway ride back to the hotel is made half as charming by being filled with twice as many people, and the heat of the afternoon has made Less self-conscious that he smells of fish and peanuts. They pass the Farmacias Similares on the way to the hotel, and the Head tells them he will catch up with them in a minute. They continue to the Monkey House (missing its mynahs), and, though Less bows a quick good-bye, Arturo will not let him go. He insists that the American must taste mescal, that it might change his writing, or perhaps his life. There are some other writers waiting. Less keeps saying he has a headache, but nearby construction noise drowns him out and Arturo cannot understand. The Head returns, beaming in the late-afternoon light, a white bag in his hand. So Arthur Less goes along. Mescal turns out to be a drink that tastes as if someone has put their cigarette out in it. You drink it, he is informed, with an orange slice that has been coated in toasted worms. “You are kidding me,” Less says, but they are not kidding him. Again: no one is kidding. They have six rounds. Less asks Arturo about his event at the festival, now a mere two days away. Arturo, his dour mood unchanged even after a bath of mescal, says, “Yes. I am sorry to say tomorrow the festival is also entirely in Spanish; shall I take you to Teotihuacán?” Less has no idea what this is, agrees, and asks again about his own event. Will he be onstage alone, or in conversation?
“I hope there will be conversation,” Arturo states. “You will be there with your friend.”
Less asks if his fellow panelist is a professor or a fellow writer.
“No, no, friend,” Arturo insists. “You are speaking with Marian Brownburn.”
“Marian? His wife? She’s here?!”
“Sí. She arrives tomorrow night.”
Less tries to assemble the wayward congress of his mind. Marian. The last words she ever said to him were Take care of my Robert. But she had not known then that he would take him from her. Robert kept Less away from the divorce, found the shack on the Vulcan Steps, and he never met her again. Would she be seventy? Finally given a stage to say what she thinks of Arthur Less? “Listen listen listen, you can’t have us together. We haven’t seen each other in almost thirty years.”
“Señor Banderbander thinks it is a nice surprise for you.”
Less does not remember what he replies. All he knows is that he has been fooled into returning to Mexico, to the scene of the crime, to be impaneled before the world beside the woman he has wronged. Marian Brownburn, with a microphone. Surely this is how gay men are judged in Hell. By the time he returns to the hotel, he is drunk and stinks of smoke and worms.
The next morning Less is awakened at six, as planned, introduced to a cup of coffee, and led into a black van with smoked windows; Arturo is there with two new friends, who seem to speak no English. Less looks for the Head, to forestall disaster, but the Head is nowhere in sight. All of this is in the predawn darkness of Mexico City, with the sound of awakening birds and pushcarts. Arturo has also hired another guide (presumably at the festival’s expense): a short athletic man with gray hair and wire glasses. His name is Fernando, and he turns out to be a history professor at the university. He tries to engage Arthur in a discussion of the highlights of Mexico City and whether Less is interested in seeing them, perhaps after Teotihuacán (which has not yet been described). There are, for example, the twin houses of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, surrounded by a fence of spineless cactus. Arthur Less nods, saying this morning he feels like a spineless cactus. “Sorry?” the guide asks. Yes, Less says, yes, he would like to see that.
“I am afraid it is closed to mount a new exhibit.”
And there is, as well, the house of the architect Luis Barragán, designed for a lifestyle of monkish mystery, where low ceilings lead to vaulted spaces, and Madonnas watch over the guest bed, and his private changing room is overseen by a Christ crucified without a cross. Less says that sounds lonely, but he would like to see that as well.
“Yes, ah, but it too is closed.”
“You are a terrible tease, Fernando,” Less says, but the man does not seem to know what this means and goes on to describe the National Museum of Anthropology, the city’s greatest museum, which can take days or even weeks to see completely but, with his guidance, can be done in a number of hours. By this point, the van has clearly taken them out of Mexico City proper, the parks and mansions replaced by concrete shantytowns, painted all in taffy colors that Less knows belie their misery. A sign points to TEOTIHUACÁN Y PIRÁMIDES. The museum of anthropology, Fernando insists, is not to be missed.
“But it is closed,” Less offers.
“On Mondays, I am sorry, yes.”
As the van rounds the corner of an agave grove, he is aware of an enormous structure, with the sun pulsing behind it and striping it in shadows of green and indigo: the Temple of the Sun. “It is not the Temple of the Sun,” Fernando informs him. “That is what the Aztecs thought it was. It is most probably the Temple of the Rain. But we know almost nothing about the people who built it. The site was long abandoned by the time the Aztecs came through. We believe they burned their own city to the ground.” A cold blue silhouette of a long-lost civilization. They spend the morning climbing the two massive pyramids, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, walking the Avenue of the Dead (“It is not the Avenue of the Dead, really,” Fernando informs him, “and it is not the Temple of the Moon”), imagining all of it covered in painted stucco, miles and miles, every wall and floor and roof in the ancient city that once held hundreds of thousands of people, about whom literally nothing is known. Not even their names. Less imagines a priest covered in pe
acock feathers walking down the steps as in an MGM musical, or a drag show, arms spread wide, as music plays from conch shells all around and Marian Brownburn, standing at the top, holds the beating heart of Arthur Less. “They chose this spot, we think, because it was far from the volcano that destroyed villages in ancient times. That volcano there,” Fernando said, pointing to a peak barely visible in the morning haze.
“Is it still active, that volcano?”
“No,” Fernando says sadly, shaking his head. “It is closed.”
What was it like to live with genius?
Like living alone.
Like living alone with a tiger.
Everything had to be sacrificed for the work. Plans had to be canceled, meals had to be delayed; liquor had to be bought, as soon as possible, or else all poured into the sink. Money had to be rationed or spent lavishly, changing daily. The sleep schedule was the poet’s to make, and it was as often late nights as it was early mornings. The habit was the demon pet in the house; the habit, the habit, the habit; the morning coffee and books and poetry, the silence until noon. Could he be tempted by a morning stroll? He could, he always could; it was the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired; but a morning walk meant work undone, and suffering, suffering, suffering. Keep the habit, help the habit; lay out the coffee and poetry; keep the silence; smile when he walked sulkily out of his office to the bathroom. Taking nothing personally. And did you sometimes leave an art book around with a thought that it would be the key to his mind? And did you sometimes put on music that might unlock the doubt and fear? Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.
Where did the genius come from? Where did it go?
Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you’d never met but whom you knew he loved more than you.
Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better.
Life with doubt. Doubt in the morning, with the oil beading on a cup of coffee. Doubt in the pee break, not catching his eye. Doubt in the sound of the front door opening and closing—a restless walk, no good-bye—and in the return. Doubt in the slow sound of typewriter keys. Doubt at lunchtime, taken in his room. Doubt vanishing in the afternoon like the fog. Doubt driven away. Doubt forgotten. Four in the morning, feeling him stirring awake, knowing he is staring at the darkness, at Doubt. Life with Doubt: A Memoir.
What made it happen? What made it not happen?
Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding.
Was it worth it?
Luck in days of endless golden words. Luck in checks in the mail. Luck in prize ceremonies and trips to Rome and London. Luck in tuxedos and hands secretly held beside the mayor or the governor or, one time, the president.
Peeking in the room while he was out. Rooting through the trash bin. Looking at the blanket heaped on the napping couch, the books beside it. And, with dread, what sat half-written in the typewriter’s gap-toothed mouth. For at the beginning, one never knew what he was writing about. Was it you?
Before a mirror, behind him, tying his tie for a reading while he smiles, for he knows perfectly well how to tie it.
Marian, was it worth it for you?
The festival takes place in University City, in a low-ceilinged concrete building associated with the Global Linguistics and Literature Department, whose famous mosaics have for some reason been removed for restoration, leaving it as barren as an old woman without her teeth. Again, the Head does not make an appearance. Less’s day of judgment has arrived; he finds he is shaking with fear. Color-coded carpets lead to various subdepartments, and around any corner Marian Brownburn might appear, tanned and sinewy, as he remembers her on a beach, but when Less is led to a green room (painted a pastel green, supplied with a tower of fruit), he is introduced only to a friendly man in a harlequin tie. “Señor Less!” the man says, bowing twice. “What an honor for you to come to the festival!”
Less looks around for his personal Fury; there is no one in the room but him, this man, and Arturo. “Is Marian Brownburn here?”
The man bows. “I am sorry it was so much in Spanish.”
Less hears his name shouted from the doorway and flinches. It is the Head, his curly white hair in disarray, his face a grotesque shade of red. He motions Less over; Less quickly approaches. “Sorry I missed you yesterday,” says the Head. “I had other business, but I wouldn’t miss this panel for the world.”
“Is Marian here?” Less asks quietly.
“You’ll be fine, don’t worry.”
“I’d just like to see her before we—”
“She isn’t coming.” The Head puts his heavy hand on Less’s shoulder. “We got a note last night. She broke her hip; she’s nearly eighty, you know. A shame, because we had so many questions for you both.”
Less experiences not a helium-filled sense of relief, but a horrible deflating sorrow. “Is she okay?”
“She sends her love to you.”
“But is she okay?”
“Sure. We had to make a new plan. I’m going to be up there with you! I’ll talk for maybe twenty minutes about my work. Then I’ll ask you about meeting Brownburn when you were twenty-one. Do I have that right? You were twenty-one?”
“I’m twenty-five,” Less lies to the woman on the beach.
Young Arthur Less sitting on a beach towel, perched with three other men above the high-tide line. It is San Francisco in October 1987, it is seventy-five degrees, and everyone is celebrating like children with a snow day. No one goes to work. Everyone harvests their pot plants. Sunlight flows as sweet and yellow as the cheap champagne sitting, half-finished and now too warm, in the sand beside young Arthur Less. The anomaly causing the hot weather is also responsible for extraordinarily high waves that send men scrambling from the rockier gay section over to the straight section of Baker Beach, and there they all huddle together, united in the dunes. Before them: the ocean wrestles with itself in silver-blue. Arthur Less is a little drunk and a little high. He is naked. He is twenty-one.
The woman beside him, tanned to alder wood, topless, has begun to talk to him. She wears sunglasses; she is smoking; she is somewhere past forty. She says, “Well, I hope you’re making good use of youth.”
Less, cross-legged on his towel and pink as a boiled shrimp: “I don’t know.”
She nods. “You should waste it.”
“What’s that?”
“You should be at the beach, like today. You should get stoned and drunk and have loads of sex.” She takes another drag off her cigarette. “I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That’s all you’ll talk about when you’re forty. Real estate! Any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever thought were important. Waste every day, that’s what I say.”
He laughs goofily and looks over at his group of friends. “I guess I’m doing pretty good at that.”
“You queer, honey?”
“Oh,” he says, smiling. “Yeah.”
The man beside him, a broad-chested Italianate fellow in his thirties, asks for young Arthur Less to “do my back.” The lady seems amused, and Less turns to apply cream to the man’s back, the color of which reveals it is far too late. Dutifully, he does his job anyway and receives a pat on the rump. Less takes a swig of warm champagne. The waves are growing in intensity; people leap in there, laughing, screaming with delight. Arthur Less at twenty-one: thin and boyish, not a muscle on him, his blond hair bleached white, his toes painted red, sitting on a beach on a beautiful day in San Francisco, in the awful year of 1987, and terrified, terrified, terr
ified. AIDS is unstoppable.
When he turns, the lady is still staring at him and smoking.
“Is that your guy?” she asks.
He looks over at the Italian, then turns back and nods.
“And the handsome man beyond him?”
“My friend Carlos.” Naked, muscled, and browned by the sun, like a polished redwood burl: young Carlos lifting his head from the towel as he hears his name.
“You boys are all so beautiful. Lucky man to have snatched you up. I hope he fucks you silly.” She laughs. “Mine used to.”
“I don’t know about that,” Less says softly, so that the Italian will not hear.
“Maybe what you need at your age is a broken heart.”
He laughs and runs a hand through his bleached hair. “I don’t know about that either!”
“Ever had one?”
“No!” he shouts, still laughing, bringing his knees up to his chest.
A man stands up from behind the woman; her pose has hidden him all this time. The lean body of a runner, sunglasses, a Rock Hudson jaw. Also naked. He looks down first at her, then at young Arthur Less, then says aloud to everybody that he is going in.
“You’re an idiot!” the lady says, sitting straight up. “It’s a hurricane out there.”
He says he has swum in hurricanes before. He has a faint British accent, or perhaps he’s from New England.
The lady turns to Less and lowers her sunglasses. Her eye shadow is hummingbird blue. “Young man, my name’s Marian. Will you do me a favor? Go in the water with my ridiculous husband. He may be a great poet, but he’s a terrible swimmer, and I can’t bear to watch him die. Will you go with him?”
Young Arthur Less nods yes and stands up with the smile he saves for grown-ups. The man nods in greeting.
Marian Brownburn grabs a large black straw hat, puts it on her head, and waves to them. “Go on, boys. Take care of my Robert!”
The sky takes on a shimmer as blue as her eye shadow, and as the men approach the waves they seem to redouble in violence like a fire that has been fed a bundle of kindling. Together they stand in the sun before those terrible waves, in the fall of that terrible year.
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