Larry's Party (14 page)

This kind of love doesn’t go away as easily as people think. It hangs in the head like a muzzy fog, sometimes for years. The only reason he’d gone to the fifth year reunion was to get a glimpse of Megsy Hicks, but she hadn’t turned up. Someone, Heather probably, reported that she’d moved to Toronto and had married into money, which figured. She wasn’t at the tenth reunion either, and Larry, who’d dragged his new wife, Dorrie, along, had spent a dazed evening, reworking through the filtration plant of his mind, just why his face should so suddenly lose its musculature on hearing Megsy Hicks’ name, and revert to that wayward, flesh-betraying wobble of unreason. Megsy Hicks, he was told, had planned to come, but her husband had to go off to Paris - Paris, uh-huh! - at the last minute, on business, and she’d decided to go along.

There hadn’t been a fifteenth reunion. Somehow it never got organized, but now there was to be a sixteenth, and Larry had let himself get talked into going. “It’ll be fun for you to see some old friends,” Heather told him, meaning it would do him good to feel himself part of the ongoing world once again. So what if he was divorced, she said. So were a lot of other people who’d be there.

And why, after all, should he worry? He was thirty-three years old, a father, a taxpayer, an employed citizen, the manager of Flowercity, a prospering florist shop which last week won first place in the provincial table decoration division. His foolish, puny body had filled out in his early twenties, and he’d learned, as most people do eventually, to fold his moments of terror into a wide and easy-breathing safety zone of his own devising. He’d made mistakes in his life, one big mistake anyway, his marriage to Dorrie, but he had prospects, he had a future, though he’s not sure how much he really wants this new Larry self to come forward and identify itself. And most important, he had what really mattered in a person’s life: he had friends.

A lot of friends or not quite enough? He isn’t sure. He stands at the back of his crowded life and ponders this question.

 

One of his friends is a guy named Gene Chandler. Gene’s a jock who likes a beer and a good laugh. The two of them got to know each other at Red River College, where Larry was studying Floral Arts and Gene was doing the Basic Communications course that later landed him a reporter’s job at the
Free Press.
Now he’s writing editorials, moving on. They still get together now and then for a cappuccino at the Capri or maybe a hockey game - someone down at the paper’s always giving Gene free tickets. When Gene and his wife, Liz, heard about Larry’s marriage break-up, they had him over for seafood lasagna and urged him to share his feelings, which he tried hard to do, for their sake if not for his. He’d made a mistake. He’d married someone he had nothing in common with. He and Dorrie couldn’t talk, not the way married couples needed to talk. And they had different goals, it seemed. “That’s bad,” Liz said, serving out forkfuls of green salad. “Having different goals can be tough.”

It happened that Gene Chandler had a golfing buddy called Big Bruce Sztuwark, and it was through Gene Chandler that Larry connected with Bruce Sztuwark, who wanted a hedge maze constructed on his riverside property west of the city, and the word was that Larry Weller was into mazes. Big Bruce weighs a good two hundred and fifty pounds and possesses the untroubled bluntness of a man with pockets of dough. He and his wife, Erleen, had been over to England last year where they’d seen a terrific classic style maze, a beauty, somewhere over near Wales, he’s forgotten the exact name of the place, but he was blown over by it, both of them were. Hey, Bruce said to Erleen at the time, we oughta get ourselves one of those for at home. Can’t you just imagine it - a real live maze in Winnipeg!

As he talked to Larry, he rocked his magisterial chest rhythmically back and forth. “We don’t need a contract,” he said when they got together a second time to discuss the construction of the maze. “We’ve got friends in common. We can trust each other, right?”

Now Larry’s spending his evenings drawing up plans, and as his 2H pencil moves over the drafting paper he’s feeling himself coming alive again. The apartment he’s rented on Westminster Avenue is a dump, but he likes the neighborhood of worn-down early-century houses and small shops and brick duplexes. Across the street is the Tall Grass Bakery, where he buys warm bread and the city’s best cinnamon rolls and where the gentle-voiced staff know him by name.
Hiya, Larry, what’ll it be today?
Just like they’ve known him forever. Just like friends.

 

It was really Bob Buxtead, not Larry, who won the table decoration trophy at the Provincial Florists Association playoffs. Larry paid the registration fee and offered encouragement, and sat in the front row watching Bob, who stood in a glare of light on the stage at the Convention Center along with the other contestants. They were each given thirteen flowers to work with, a handful of dark glossy twigs, and a plug of florist’s foam. An hour and fifteen minutes later, following a dramatic drum roll, Bob was declared the winner; the judges were unanimous, and now he’s going off to Toronto next week for the nationals.

Bob Buxtead started out at the store two years ago as a temporary holiday replacement, just a kid, but he was so good that Larry decided to keep him on permanently. He has a long oaken older-man’s face, a square jaw carefully shaved, and a rich, strenuous way of concentrating on what his rather squarish hands are doing. He hums little encouragements to himself as he progresses on a piece, and this humming abruptly stops as he pauses to reach for a flower, a leaf, a width of ribbon, whatever he needs - and then resumes. The hum of creation. He’s weird at times. Once he remarked to Larry that he saw flowers as a branch of poetry, and Larry hadn’t known what to say or where to look.

Bob Buxtead brought a blue teapot to work and a box of mixed herbal teas, and he brings Larry a cup of lemon zinger or raspberry leaf in the middle of the afternoon instead of the usual bitter coffee, sitting in its pot all day. “Some people find caffeine a depressant, not a stimulant,” he tactfully offered. Sports hold no interest for him - he admits it - and in fact he seems to have no aptitude at all for male joshing, for rough teasing or ongoing jokes. He arrives on time in the morning, works diligently on his orders, eats a packed lunch at noon, and breaks only for his three o’clock cup of tea. There are some days when he and Larry exchange only a few dozen words.

And yet, when Bob Buxtead announced that he was getting married to his girlfriend, a nurse at Winnipeg General, he asked Larry to serve as best man. “I can’t think of a better friend,” he said simply.

If friendship is a question of picking up the tune, then Larry has far from perfect pitch. But perhaps it was true that the two of them had become friends. The atmosphere at Flowercity has changed since Bob Buxtead arrived. Things are calmer, even on the busiest days, and in a curious corkscrewy way that Larry can’t begin to articulate, sweeter.

 

Lucy Warkenten is one of Larry’s good friends, although they’ve only known each other for a couple of years. Forty-one years old, unmarried, a bookbinder by profession, she balances a tender sense of courtesy with an impulse to lunge, lurch, and barge into the affairs of her friends, of which she has dozens. And yet, when she and Larry go off for their weekly Tuesday movie (half-price tickets for the early show) she is able to make him feel that he’s her only friend, and that she is privileged to be seated next to so agreeable a person. Their after-movie pizza is accompanied by discussions on such subjects as social expectations, censorship, gardens, Egyptian labyrinths, papermaking and its place in the culture, the harm parents do their children, the futility of psychoanalysis, and the difficulties of battling grief and depression, those twin shadows. All these subjects are new to Larry, at least the expression of them, but Lucy has the ability, as he sees it, to place resonant phrases in his throat and the accompanying impulse to nod enthusiastically and say in her floating, forthcoming, ribbony voice “Exactly!”

“So, you’re seeing a woman then?” Larry’s mother said a few weeks ago, speaking shyly.

“Not the way you think,” Larry told her.

When he’s with Lucy, thoughts of age, sex, and failure slip away, and his own ignorance too. A curtain of transparency ripples between them, and he sees their friendship as a kind of enchantment he’s fallen into, and knows enough to prize it. Between them they never speak of his marriage and divorce, nor of Lucy’s living alone and the likelihood that she will go on living alone.

A pact between exiles?

Well, maybe.

 

Larry doesn’t think of his folks as friends exactly, but in a way they are. He sees them once or twice a week, dropping in after work or bringing Ryan over for Sunday supper. They’ve been pretty good about the divorce, not butting in, and not coming down too hard on Dorrie. “She knows how to manage money,” Larry’s dad said, “that’s one thing. She won’t be bleeding you royal for the rest of your bloody life.” Larry’s mother, Dot, did say once, rather sourly, that she’d rather be a dot than a door, meaning she’d never thought much of Dorrie. “She’s such a
tight
wound-up little thing.”

Well, yes, Larry could see how she got that impression. Dorrie’s squirrely little body seemed to be made of bundled wire. She was a natural keeper of strict schedules and hard budgets. A tireless seeker of bargains. Pitiless. (Who said that about being pitiless? Some friend of Larry’s, but he can’t remember who.) Once, in the midst of making love, she caught her breath and said to Larry, “Hurry up, can’t you I’ve got to be at work early tomorrow.”

Larry’s sister, Midge, who’s been through the marital wars herself, is direct about Dorrie. “She’s a total bitch. I mean! And on top of that she’s brainless. And she tricked you into getting married. Why the hell wasn’t she on the pill like every other woman in the universe? Because she’s dumb, that’s why. Dumb like a fox. Honestly, Lare-snare, you’re well out of it. Good riddance, I say.”

 

His son, Ryan? — is Ryan a friend? Fathers and sons are supposed to be pals. But Ryan’s a little boy. He still cries when he’s frustrated or frightened, and this ability to cry - and Larry’s ability to comfort, at least in part - means that they’re not quite friends. The footing’s not equal.

He loves his child. But he was the one who walked out and left this small boy behind. That’s what the crying’s really about. That’s another reason they aren’t friends.

 

“A three-year marriage that doesn’t pan out isn’t a tragedy,” said Larry’s long-time friend Jim Carmody over a drink following the provincial floral competition. Jim is a flower consultant for Weddings Unlimited.

“Actually it was five years,” Larry said.

“Well, whatever.”

 

“To tell the truth, I used to wonder what you saw in her,” said Sally Wolsche Ullrich, a woman who works in dried plants and flowers, and has been a friend of Larry’s for some years. “Of course, no one ever understands other people’s marriages, it’s like those marriages are shielded from us, such terribly, terribly private arrangements when you think of it. But still! You and Dorrie always seemed to run on different gears, know what I mean?”

“Sort of,” Larry said.

Ben Shaw, Dorrie’s oldest brother, ran into Larry out at St. Vital Mall not long ago and said, “Hey, buddy, listen. I’m sorry as hell how things’ve worked with you and Dor. God only knows, she’s not the easiest gal in the world - well, what woman is! Ha. Life’s a bitch and then you marry one. But look, let’s not let this get in the way of us being friends or anything dumb-ass like that, okay?”

Larry, who has never once thought of his brother-in-law as a friend, said, “Sure, yeah, I’m with you. Okay, Ben, okay.”

 

“It’s a rotten time,” said Michael Kelly, one of Larry’s neighbors on Lipton Street. Michael, who works as a stage carpenter, has just split up with his live-in partner, Scott Allyson, after twelve years. “Like, every relationship has conflict, and Scott and I hung on all this time because we were able to integrate our conflict. On the other hand, you’ve got to keep saying to yourself that it’s damaging to live with someone who isn’t the
right
person. A kind of poison creeps in, it can kill you in the end. I didn’t know your wife all that well, but the one or two times we got together, well, she seemed kind of on another wavelength. Like another planet almost.”

“Yeah,” Larry nodded, “that’s true.”

 

“You loved her,” Bill Herschel said right after the break-up. They were in Bill’s car, which was piled to the roof with Larry’s clothes, and they were on their way to the newly rented Westminster Avenue apartment. Larry was crying. He’d lost his son, his wife, his place on the planet.

The houses in old, narrow-streeted Winnipeg were often built in groups of three. Sister houses, they were called, double-story models whose cheap, plain identical architecture was varied only by a gable or a veranda railing or a piece of gingerbread trim. The Herschels’ house had been sistered with Larry’s boyhood house, and between the two growing boys there had always been the airy accident and ease of friendship, which has continued into their adult life. Theirs is a friendship mitered and nailed down, and requiring not a word of analysis or effort of maintenance. Each would have been embarrassed to describe the bond between them, a bond that stretched easily over absence or confession and even, as on the day Larry left Dorrie, tears.