Larry's Party (11 page)

And what next? Larry supposes that Spanish-speaking laborers equipped with hoes arrive to beat back the weeds, but are they men or women who do this work? Maybe both, and maybe children, too, in that part of the world. Larry wonders what goes on in their heads when they perform this tedious and backbreaking work, and whether they have any idea when they pack the cut flowers into insulated boxes, laying the heads end to end, that these living things are about to be carried aboard enormous jet aircraft, handled gently, handled like the treasure they are, that they will be transported across international frontiers, sorted, sold, inspected, sold again, and that without noticeable wilting or fading - except to an expert eye - they will come to rest in the hands of a young Canadian male in an ordinary mid-continental florist establishment, bringing with them a spot of organic color in a white and frozen country (where the mercury has fallen overnight to twenty degrees below zero and where the windchill factor has risen steadily all day so that no living matter has any right to exist, but it does and here it is - this astonishing object he holds in his grasp).

Larry thinks how the alstroemeria head he cups in his hand has no memory and no gratitude toward those who delivered it to this moment.
It toils not, neither does it spin.
It’s sprouted, grown, bloomed, that’s all. But Larry, placing it beside a branch of rosy kangaroo paw from British Columbia and a spray of Dutch leather leaf and a spear or two of local bear grass, feels himself a fortunate man. He’s worried sick at the moment about the distance that’s grown between himself and his wife, about the night terrors that trouble his only child, about money, about broken or neglected friendships, about the pressure of too much silence, about whether his hedges will weather the winter, but he is, nevertheless, plugged into the planet. He’s part of the action, part of the world’s work, a cog in the great turning wheel of desire and intention.

The day will arrive in his life when work - devotion to work, work’s steady pressure and application - will be all that stands between himself and the bankruptcy of his soul. “At least you have your work,” his worried, kind-hearted friends will murmur, and if they don’t, if they forget the availability of this single consolation - well then, he’ll say it to himself:
at least I have my work.

The word
labyrinth
has only recently come into the vocabulary of Larry Weller, aged thirty-two, a heterosexual male (married, one child) living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He doesn’t bother himself with the etymology of the word
labyrinth;
in fact, at this time in his life he has zero interest in word derivations, but he can tell you plain and simple what a labyrinth is. A labyrinth is a complex path. That’s it. It’s not necessarily something complicated or classical, as you might think. The overpass out on Highway 2 is a kind of labyrinth, as Larry will be happy to tell you. So is the fox-and-geese tracery he stamped into the backyard snow as a child in Winnipeg’s West End. He sees that now. So’s a modern golf course. Take St. George’s Country Club out in the St. James area of the city, for instance, the way it nudges you along gently from hole to hole, each step plotted in a forward direction so that you wouldn’t dream of attacking the whole thing backwards or bucking in any way the ongoing, numerically predetermined scheme. And an airport is a labyrinth too, or a commercial building or, say, a city subway system. It seems those who live in the twentieth century have a liking for putting ourselves on a predetermined conveyor track and letting it carry us along.

A maze, though, is different from a labyrinth, at least in the opinion of some. A maze is more likely to baffle and mislead those who tread its paths. A maze is a puzzle. A maze is designed to deceive the travelers who seek a promised goal. It’s possible that a labyrinth can be a maze, and that a maze can be a labyrinth, but strictly speaking the two words call up different
ideas.
(Larry read these definitions, and their relationship to each other, three years ago, in a library book called
Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development.
)

If he had not married Dorrie Shaw, if he had never visited Hampton Court, his life would have swerved on an alternate course, and the word
labyrinth
would have floated by him like one of those specks in the fluid of his eye.

He finds it paradoxical that while his life is shrinking before his very eyes, his vocabulary should be expanding. It’s weird. It’s far-out. It’s
paradoxical -
that’s the bouncy new word he’s been saying out loud lately, not to show off, but because it “pops” on his tongue. It’s a word he’s only recently taken into his brain, last week in fact. “Isn’t it paradoxical,” his sister Midge said to him over the phone, “that I kicked my husband out because he was just plain queer, and now I’ve moved in with him because he’s queer and he’s sick and maybe dying?”

“It’s what?” Larry asked her, ashamed of his begging tone, his needy need to know what words mean. “What did you call it?”

“A paradox. You know, like ironic.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

He went the next day and bought himself a pocket dictionary and he keeps it down at Flowercity. It’s on a shelf under the counter, handy. There are people, he’s noticed, whose vocabularies stand a step or two higher on the evolutionary staircase, and he’s had this idea lately that words can help him in the future or maybe even with his present difficulties. The empty white echo he sometimes hears can be calmed by words. It might be the solution: that all he needs are some new words, big or little it doesn’t matter, as long as their compacted significance registers, in his head, on his tongue. He could increase his overall word power, add a new word every day. Who knows what’s likely to happen if he sharpens up: the way he talks, the way he thinks. There are men and women who live by cunning and silence, but he doesn’t want to be one of them, grunting, pointing, holding back. He wants to be ready when the time comes to open his mouth and let the words run out like streaming lava.

There are people out there who imagine they want to pass straight through language to clarity, but Larry Weller of Winnipeg, Canada, wants, all of a sudden, at age thirty-two, to hang on to words, even separate words that sit all on their own, each with a little brain and a wreath of steam around its breathed-out sound: cantankerous, irrepressible, magnanimous. And, yes, ironic. You can discuss this idea of words, but you’ll need more words just to get started: hypothesis, axiomatic, closure.

He was a dreamy kid growing up, and after that a dreamy adolescent, just letting his life happen to him. It took him years to get himself wide awake, and lately he’s been feeling that he’s dozing off again, collapsing inward like the shrink-wrapped merchandise on the rack at the front of the store, the little plastic bottles of Vita-Grow and Root-Start and Mite-Bomb. The music that pours out of the radio all day at the store has flattened his brain with its wailing. He’s reached a dead end in his job - branch manager of a so-so flower shop - where he’s been for fourteen years. An impasse. (That’s another of his new words; he got that one from TV.) Besides his job stalemate, he’s got a wife who won’t sleep in the same bed with him anymore, at least not until he promises to sell their house and move upmarket.

 

Upmarket. He doesn’t need to look that one up. He hears it all the time these days, and little by little he’s absorbed more or less the sense of what it means. Last year he and Dorrie traded in their old Toyota and “moved upmarket” to a
brand-new
Toyota. Not a huge move, just a subtle shift upward. (The word subtle he can pronounce, but not spell, but then he doesn’t need to spell it, does he?)

The florist chain he works for used to be called Flowerfolks, until it went upmarket, becoming Flowercity with a whole new clientele and a different product line: more exotics, more artificials and dried stuff. Ryan, his four-year-old son, has gone “upmarket” too, toddling off to junior-kindergarten in coordinated outfits manufactured by OshKosh and Kids-Can-Grow.

It’s ironic, Larry thinks,
ironic
that his wife Dorrie grew up in a pokey little lace-curtainy house over on Borden Road, her mom and dad and six kids packed into four rooms, no basement, a garage full of junk, so that when she and Larry first bought the Lipton Street house, a fixer-upper if there ever was one, she thought they’d arrived at a palace. Well, not now. She’s got her eyes on the Linden Woods subdivision, but she can’t get Larry motivated to move out that way. He’s worked too hard on the hedge maze in the Lipton Street yard, which is just beginning to take shape.

So who’s going to buy a house, Dorrie says, that’s got a yard choked to the gills with bushes?

One of these days she’s going to get a bulldozer in there and clear the whole thing out. This bush business is driving her straight up the wall. That’s an expression she’s picked up from Larry’s English mother, and these days just about everything drives her up the wall.

 

Or else drives her bananas. Like, for instance, the way her husband, Larry, talks. Those big words he’s spouting. She hadn’t figured him for a show-off when they first met back in 1976, so how come he’s exploding these days with fancy words?

Is this a fair accusation? Well, yes and no. A lot of Larry’s recently acquired vocabulary is clustered around his
preoccupation
with mazes. He’s lifted his collection of new words from a series of library books, and they’ve stuck to him like burrs. Dorrie says he’s trying to put her down when he uses these words. She says he always has his nose in a book. He used to be fun, he used to make her laugh, but now all he can talk about are such things as: turf mazes, shepherd’s race, Julian’s bower, knot garden, Jerusalem, Minotaur,
jeu-de-lettres
, pigs-in-clover, frets and meanders, the Trémaux algorithm,
pavimentum tessellatum,
fylfot, wilderness, unicursal, topiary, nodes, the Mount of Venus,
maisons de Dëdalus,
Troy-town, cup-and-ring, ocular or spiral, serpent-through-waist, chevron.

On and on. He’s astonished himself to think he’s taken in so many words in the last few years, harpoons aimed straight at the brain, and that he actually remembers them.

 

One of Larry’s steady customers down at the flower shop is Mrs. Fordwich, who popped in the other morning, ordering flowers for the annual Chamber Music Fund Raiser, and, since it was getting close to Christmas, Larry suggested a basket of mixed poinsettias. “I don’t think so, Larry,” she said slowly. “I mean, poinsettias at this time of the year! It’s a little banal, don’t you think?”

Banal. It seems to him he’s heard that word before, and now, from Mrs. Fordwich, he detects, along with the word’s lazy, offhand delivery, a shade of dismissal in her voice. He stares at her woundedly. But what exactly does banal mean?

Later, he reaches under the counter for his dictionary. The definition of banal is: meaningless from overuse; hackneyed; trivial. There are punctures in Larry’s overall perception, he sees, that will exclude him, cripple him unless he smartens up - and what else? He’ll be left all his life with that drifting, stupid,
banal
crinkle on his puss:
Hey,
would you mind running that by me one more time. I didn’t quite catch -

This is no one’s fault exactly; this is what you’d expect, given Larry Weller’s history, his background, his
banal
take on the world.

Carnations are probably banal too, he reasons. Asparagus fern sure as hell is banal. Chrysanthemums? Definitely, those poofy pots from Safeway with the bow stuck on the side. And maybe, just probably, he’s a little banal himself.

 

A
spokeshave
is a cutting tool having a blade set between two handles, and it’s used for rounding wood or other materials.

Larry had never seen or heard the word spokeshave until he and Dorrie and their little boy, Ryan, were invited, along with a few other neighbors, over to Lucy Warkenten’s apartment for a Christmas drink.

Lucy lives next door to the Wellers on the second floor of an old house, and works as a bookbinder, using a screened-off corner of her living room for “a studio.” Larry has always felt friendly toward Lucy, who is about forty years of age and lives alone. She wears long creased skirts and Mexican sweaters and lots of wooden jewelry. Artsy-fartsy, Dorrie calls her, one of your old-time cactus-cunt virgins.

The party was held late on a dark Sunday afternoon, and Lucy had candles burning all around the room. Under a white-painted, sparkle-strewn twig of a tree she had placed wrapped toys for the Lee children who lived downstairs and for four-year-old Ryan: tiny windmills to construct, intricate puzzles, Japanese pencils. There was a bowl of spiced wine punch on the coffee table and plates of fruitcake and cookies. After everyone was served, eating, drinking, and chattering away to each other, Lucy Warkenten drew Larry over to the window and showed him how his maze looked when viewed from above.