Larry's Party (15 page)

The crying started with nothing, just a sting behind his eyes as Bill’s car pulled away from the curb, then a full-scale unstoppable propulsion of tears, and the next minute he was drowning, his throat, his lungs filling up. He was making a fool of himself, noisy and gulping for air like those heroes in movies who clutch each other in the big emotional scenes and sob out loud with their big hunky shoulders heaving. You were supposed to cry yourself watching those scenes, but Larry tends to squirm instead. And now, here he was, weeping his eyes out as the car spun on to Broadway Avenue, and here was Bill with one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on Larry’s sleeve and he was saying, “You did love her. That’s something you’re going to want to remember. It’ll make all this seem worthwhile in the long run, the fact that you really did love her in the beginning.”

The final assault and mop-up of his marriage seems a blur to Larry, and he knows he has his friends to thank. His sadness was curbed, and surprisingly quickly, by the small gifts and kind words of those friends. His gratitude, though, was hobbled by the fact that he distrusted slightly the state of his own wretchedness, which felt mechanically induced and inflated, like something from a TV show. He eyed his responses skeptically, and found himself shaken by the fear of artifice, in much the same way he had been wracked by the slipperiness of his love for Dorrie during their English honeymoon, dismayed to find that love so freshly pledged and publicly sworn could keep rising up and then disappearing.

And so he wonders, looking back to the days following his leaving Dorrie, if his grief wore a kind of stage make-up that gave him away. His confusion, except for his grief over Ryan, felt bejeweled, unearned. Bill found him a lawyer, who got things rolling right away. Other friends lent him furniture, invited him to meals and football games, praised him for his so-called adjustment and offered cheerful unmocking compliments about his new growth of beard, the first serious beard of his life. Almost no one asked for the details of the break-up, and Larry was grateful for that, since he knows, even at age thirty-three, that discovery wears people out, and repetition has a way of enlarging the half-rehearsed acts that make up sad marriages.

Sometimes at night he woke from bizarre dreams and whispered to himself, “Careful, careful.” Be careful of chaos, of silence, of words, of other people, of myself, that stranger Larry Weller. Sometimes, too, he felt he needed lessons in how to be a grown-up man. How do you learn to deal with the daily calendar, a new red number every day, pushing you into the tunnel of an ever-receding future?

It’s come as a surprise to Larry, considering the gaping hole at the center of his life, that so many of his old routines continue as before. Here he is, suddenly a single guy, a divorced man, living not in a house but in a one-bedroom apartment, but he nevertheless spends the same eight hours every day working in the same old florist establishment, taking telephone orders for the same bridal bouquets and centerpieces, and tallying up the bills at the end of the week. Flowers, their intricate waxy petals, keep him from thinking about wanting the life he wants. He still has Sunday supper sitting in his mother’s padded breakfast nook, the unvarying roasted meat and potatoes and Brussels sprouts in their blue-and-white serving dish. Shame attends him, and loneliness, but there are days when he wants to say, “I’m in love,” meaning in love with his new arrangements. On Saturdays he and Bill Herschel drive out to Birds Hill to spend an hour or two on the hiking trails. They’ve done this since they were young boys, telling each other dirty jokes, beneath which lay unlit embers of sex, what they needed to know or pronounce out loud. To Birds Hill they took a cheap Boy Scout compass and a map, and there they willed themselves to become lost, so that they could arrive, heroically, at a state of being found. It was a game; they’d invented it, its theatrics and rewards. You took a stream, you followed it closely; it would lead you somewhere; you could count on it. Larry sometimes felt that his body’s essence, his sense of who he was, drained away between the bookends of those weekend walks.

Now they take their children along, Larry’s son, Ryan, and Bill’s two girls. Bill wears a pair of binoculars around his neck, and Larry carries a small and beautiful spiral notebook in his back pocket.

This notebook was a gift from Lucy Warkenten, she who believes so ardently in the power of books and their registered messages. “You just might want to jot down your feelings from time to time,” she’d suggested shortly after the separation. “People under stress sometimes find they can discharge their feelings if they get them down on paper.” This was just one of the many pieces of helpful advice Larry has received from his friends.

So far he’s written only two words in the notebook, and these are on the first page. “Dorrie. Dorrie.”

Often he hears of a divorced couple who become friends, and he finds himself wondering from time to time if this will ever happen to him and Dorrie. He doubts it. Some extravagant meltdown would be necessary first. Or a prolonged period of rainy stillness, leading to accidental laughter or a shared impromptu meal or an emergency of some kind or an old joke recalled, or perhaps the photographs from their English honeymoon brought out.

He’s going on with his life, but at the same time he’s deeply distressed, he knows he is. He reasons that being friends with Dorrie might take the edge off the panic he continually feels. But that’s not going to happen; he feels pretty sure of that.

 

Something happened to Larry back in high school; some fever of discouragement came over him. His other, earlier self, the brave little boy standing at the edge of the playground and hugging the elbows of his woolen sweater - he had loved him better. That photograph self, posed against the green unfallen world.

But adolescent Larry Weller, that mediocre student at MacDonald Secondary in west Winnipeg, only son of Dot and Stu Weller, brother of Midge Weller —
that
Larry had found himself slipping backward and was too stupidly feeble to put up a defense, and too addicted to the luxury of dreams to wake up. He was condemned to daily humiliations — of not knowing how to position his feet under his desk in study hall, of accidentally slurping his soup in the cafeteria, and what made it worse was that he understood precisely how widespread, how dull, how ordinary these adolescent lapses were.

He had the wrong nose, the wrong shoulders. Once begun, the momentum of failure increased incrementally, and he was saved from real despair only by the certainty that the excruciating awe, pity, and embarrassment of his life would someday come to an end. He knew this without believing it, in the same way you know but can’t believe the center of the earth is molten material. Maybe that’s why he walked around wanting to punch someone in the nose. Anyone.

And yet, Bill Herschel had found his way out, why shouldn’t Larry Weller? Bill had a girl, someone he took to movies, someone he kissed and whose sweater front he was allowed to touch. He’d found a way to warm his freezing limbs. Meanwhile, on Saturday nights, when his fellow students were out at a rock concert or gathered in someone’s rec room to smoke, drink beer, and make out, Larry was at home reading old copies of
Popular Mechanics
or watching television with his parents, either the hockey game or the Saturday night movie. The living-room curtains were pulled snug; the furnace hummed. He felt his loneliness become a kind of embarrassment, and that embarrassment was eating his self away. Neither his mother nor father seemed to have any inkling about their son’s failure to connect with the world, and, enclosed in the shell of their bland unawareness, he was safe, at least temporarily. Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence.

At ten o’clock on those long ago evenings his mother made tea and set out three mugs and a plate of fruitcake or buttered toast. No, they didn’t have an inkling, and, as Bill Herschel liked to say, it takes a thousand inklings to make a clue. As long as Larry could keep his folks in a state of dumb innocence he felt he could get through it himself, this sinking hell, the slow torture of it. After that he would join the grown-up world and spend his time, legitimately, as his parents did, embedded in their cozy weekend evenings, their hobbies and TV shows. That was the future, the way out. This knowledge was stored coldly in his chest.

It seems now a long way back to those Saturday evenings, and Larry has made it a point not to relive his adolescent panics. Tonight, attending his sixteenth high school reunion, standing between Bill and Heather Herschel and joining in the school song -
Onward, onward, brave MacDonald—
he is stirred and grateful to find himself part of this celebrating crowd of men and women who are dressed for an evening of pleasure, suits and ties, short silky swinging dresses, bringing with them their grown-up regard for each other, and their newly evolved, kinder selves. Larry looks around at the singing faces and robust swaying shoulders, his classmates dwarfed in the tall shadowy gymnasium through whose open windows the fragrance of spring floats in. The old teenage sadness feels at this moment utterly displaced by the thundery weather of love, or, at the very least, good will.

The singing ends raggedly - more than a few have forgotten the words - and then, still standing, they hear from the platform a list of the deceased being read aloud, their dead classmates. Cameron Ford, Bruce Wilkinson, Shirley McGuinty, Clara-Jane Barber, Anita Becherston, Kenny Charles, Bugsy Lambert. Someone, one of the men, moans when Bugsy’s name is mentioned, a cry of shocked surprise, and then the flat unaccented reading of the list continues - Simon Lu, Charlotte Sawatski, Kay Armstrong. The dead, Larry thinks, don’t have to remember names, shake hands, kiss or not kiss, or try to he funny or at ease, yet how could so many have perished in a mere sixteen years - car accidents? cancer? - and why doesn’t the woman reading the names put a little bubble of tenderness around each one as she pronounces it?

Through a haze of sorrow, or was it a kind of respect for those who’d let go of the world so uncomplainingly, Larry only gradually comprehends who it is who’s rattling off the names of the dead as though they were items on a grocery list. It’s Megsy Hicks.

Only she’s Megsy Hicks Clarkson now, according to the program. Tall, bony, shiny-suited. Her round glasses twinkle intelligently under the lights, and her long straight hair holds flashes of gray. Just as she had once triumphed over the wearing of spectacles, Larry sees that she is now soaring above the humiliation of premature gray. There seems something magnificent about this. He feels his insides soften with remembered love and wonders, with a sidelong look in the direction of fate, if he will speak to her before the evening is out.

But the dinner places are assigned, and he finds himself at a table in the far corner of the gym. Seated next to him is Nancy Oleson, an outstandingly pretty girl back in high school, but now, in her mid-thirties, scrawny and sexless in blue stretch pants and a not very fresh cotton shirt. Her fingers play compulsively with her headful of stiffened hair. Divorced, she tells Larry. The guy was an asshole.

Bill and Heather are at the table too, and Larry would bet money that Heather’s hand is resting on Bill’s knee or else Bill’s hand under the table has slipped between Heather’s thighs. They are feeling the weight of their anointment: high school sweethearts, young love. And their faces have grown correspondingly soft, transfigured with nostalgia, radiant.

The heat catches. Skip Hurst, a former nerd like Larry, tells a long, funny story about having a flat tire in Thailand where he now lives. He’s married to a Thai woman, a doctor, and he proudly passes around a photo of her holding their newly born baby. “I don’t know why I came all this way to the reunion,” he says suddenly, cheerfully. His skin has a capillary richness. “I hated every minute of high school.”

“Oh, so did I.” This, surprisingly, from Heather. Then she adds, “Until I met Bill that day in the cafeteria. He dropped his carton of milk on my shoe. The little pointy corner got me on my big toe. Yikes.”

“Anything to get your attention,” Bill says.

“I had a crush on you,” Nancy Oleson tells Skip. She’s on her fourth glass of wine, not drunk exactly, but warming up. “I guess I pretty well had a crush on anything in pants that moved.”

“How about me?” Bill asks.

She gives a nice dirty laugh. “I think it was Larry I had my eye on. Yes, you, Larry Weller. You were so sweet and shy, and one day you lent me your colored pencils in geography. Mr Bailey’s class.”

“I remember,” Larry says. It’s true, he does remember.

“So why the hell didn’t you ask me out, then?”

Everyone laughs. They either know the answer to this question or they don’t, it doesn’t matter.

They’re served a tossed salad, then a plate crowded with chicken, rice, and hard peas, and for dessert a sweetly medicinal-tasting ice-cream concoction. With coffee, a hood of intimacy falls over the table, and the talk moves easily, touching on travel, children, marriage, divorce, work, disappointments. This talk is skewed with the remembrance of an old self-consciousness now banished, at least for this evening, and perhaps - who can tell? - forever. It’s as though they know that the meaning of their lives is not a fact to be discovered but a choice they make, have already, in fact, made. Sixteen years have passed with their gaps and revelations. History has been laid down like paving stones, added up, subtracted, and lightly dismissed. Laughter flows, and Larry, only moderately drunk, feels blessed. If only they could go on like this forever, seated at this floating table with its covering of love. Friends, friends. Isn’t this what he’s longed for all his life, to be in the brimming midst of friends?