Less Is Lost

It always feels as if everyone else was born with an instruction manual he was never given; how did they know how to ski, how to laugh, how to throw together a meal, or tidy up an apartment, or pass through a turnstile with your luggage? How to plan birthdays, such as his upcoming one, or plum the baffling depths of boyfriends, such as Freddy, or be a man in the world, such as this one? What is the question?

Having fallen for the deceptions typical of sports enthusiasts, who describe every mountain as “a Cadillac trail” every river as "an easy ride," and every creaking lake as “definitely frozen solid,” Arthur Less was tricked into the horror he’d sworn never to face: a Ski Vacation. I admit it was my doing. He was promised grilled cheese sandwiches and hot tomato soup; he was promised hot tubs and champagne; he was promised the feeling of triumph that only comes from a day spent gliding happily through the snow, of conquering a mountain; he was lied to. hoodwinked and gulled.

The difference, you see, dear reader, is that I love him. How do I put it? He is not the best, God knows. He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody's tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

For while our middle-aged author would probably consider himself a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, certainly never a protagonist, the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

Less comes to understand that life for some goes smoothly, as free from incident as it is perhaps from poetry; a fainter kind of happiness than Less has ever perceived. We are all having different experiences.

The most popular street name in America is Second Street (First replaced mainly by Main), and it is on Second and Elm (no elm) that Rosina takes her final turn. The cockpit lights up, the engine gives a telltale death rattle, a shudder passes through her system from nose to tail, and she voids, through her exhaust, a puff of white smoke such as the Vatican emits when it has chosen a pope. From this moment, she is never to speak again.

With a jolt. and too late, Less realizes Dolly has been his companion across the country, that he has gotten as used to her snore as he has to my own, as used to her nightly danse Apache and absurdities and rituals as he has to my sleeping bonnet, and that they will not, in all likelihood, see each other again. Less reaches out, but Xiomara is already departing and her umbrella hides any attempt by Dolly to look back. Anyway, dogs never say goodbye.

Less sighs a little. Reading an Overman novel is like being put in the care of a neglectful uncle; any character might die, any violent memory might appear, any drug might be shot into any vein.

I know this face, as Less himself might have if a flourish of trumpeting eighteen-wheelers did not focus him back on the road. It is the expression of vanity, heartache, and ecstasy; genesis, joy, and destruction. I know it precisely. Talking to people and listening to nothing they utter, noticing just how they touch the small scar on the temple. Hearing only the Michigan accent they're trying to hide. Shaking with sobs in the morning and pouring the wine, with a smile, over dinner. Robbery: friends mined for stories; lovers for sentiment; history for structure; family for secrets; small talk for sorrow; sorrow for comedy: comedy for gold. Then triumph. A satisfied curl of the lip that is not for work done, and well done, but for doing a thing that has never been done.

"What if the whole idea of America is wrong?" What should he do with this man? Strangle him? Salute him? Put him in a novel?

“When I was teaching in Padua, my sister died. I've told you that. I went into the Scrovegni Chapel there to look at the Giottos and I felt nothing. But I made myself look. He painted that chapel in 1305. Dante visited him. And in the scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents is one of the first realistic depictions of human tears. How they leave a trail down the cheek and hang for a moment on the jaw before falling. Someone noticed, seven hundred years ago. Someone knew my pain.” He put Less's glass on the table. “That's what you have to do. Pay attention. It's not for yourself, It's for someone seven hundred years from now.”

Sure of his infallibility, he unzipped the insect mesh and let in a rowdy bachelorette party of mosquitoes that raided the human open bar; he even zipped the sleeping bags to the ceiling. And on the final day, when a wild downpour arrived at lunchtime, it was decided that, while the tent could be trusted, Less himself could not. A hotel must be booked.

This clumsiness of the heart also became apparent on a certain California road trip: Less was equipped only with his lover, an old Saab, and some hastily purchased camping equipment consisting of two intra-zipping sleeping bags and a large nylon disk. This disk, of Swiss manufacture, unfolded into a tent whose vast interior defied belief; Less was fascinated by its pockets, air vents, rain flies; its stitching, netting, and circular Guggenheim ceiling. But, like the Swiss, it was neutral; it did not love him back.