Larry's Party (18 page)

“I guess that showed him.”

“What these women wanted was spiritual purity. Of course, they were probably a little crazy and some of them were anorexic and dying to die. The shortest route to heaven was a quickie divorce between the body and the spirit.”

“So sex was out of the picture.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“Who?”

“Dorrie? Your first wife?”

Larry blinked. This seemed a trick question, arriving without preamble.

“Well, was she?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Why, Larry?” Beth’s voice bent sharply, and her eyes stared hard at the bony plate in his chest. “It seems to me that’s something you would have noticed in five years of marriage, whether or not your wife was beautiful.”

“She could be attractive.”

“Fat or thin?”

“Skinny.”

“A skinny car saleswoman. Wait, I’m getting an image. Lots of jangling jewelry?” She said this cruelly, which was not her usual way.

“Lots.”

“Gobs of blue eye shadow?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Oh God, why am I jealous of her? Will you explain that to me please?”

“You shouldn’t be. There’s no reason.”

“I’m mean. I’m pathetic.”

“You’re not.”

“There is a reason, though.”

“What?”

“Because you told me once, way back when we first met, that she was sexy.”

“Did I say that?”

“You said sex was the only part of your marriage with Dorrie that worked.”

“Well, except for the end, the last few months. At the end nothing worked.”

“Oh, Larry, love, I shouldn’t have brought this up. You look so tragic and sad all of a sudden. You look like you’re going to cry.”

 

Larry met Dorrie Shaw at a Halloween party in 1975. He came as a clown; she was a Martian. The Martian suit, with its spiky green antennae and pointed shoes, made her look full of sparks and suppressed laughter. Her breasts were small and round, and, he guessed, hard as tennis balls. When she danced she swerved her hips wildly, her feet moving like flints, but she held her upper body stiff with her elbows tucked in close. The effect was unexpectedly elegant. And sexy.

A week later he phoned her at work - she’d let slip that she was employed by Manitoba Motors - and asked her out to a movie. “I’m the clown guy,” he reminded her. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “You’re the one who works in a flower store.”

A few days later he was in her bed, sweetly, plumply, satisfyingly fucked. Dorrie had her own apartment on Lorraine Avenue, a miniature living room, a strip kitchen, and a surprisingly large bedroom with a double bed. Larry could tell she’d put some thought into the bedside lighting, which was soft and pinkish in tone.

He was twenty-five and had been to bed with five different women since his first encounter with Sally. Not a large number, but not a shameful zero either. At this time in his life he began to suspect that there was more ongoing sex in the world than he’d been led to believe, though he wasn’t sure about Dorrie’s sexual past. She was secretive, careful, clean, and skillful. Her personal contradictions kept him off guard; she was a distracted woman but one who possessed the gift of fierce concentration. She kept her eyes squeezed tight when she made love, her whole body taking him in its grasp and, afterwards, falling asleep under the dead-weight of happiness, the peace of the well-fucked - as she herself would have put it.

Fucking was her sole word for the act of love, and she was able to pronounce that charged, heated monosyllable with a calm neutrality, exactly as she pronounced such other activities as shopping or driving. How many other men had there been? He was always, before their marriage, and during, on the edge of putting the question to her, but when the subject loomed, some sharp movement on her part, a dismissive shake of her head, warned him to hold off. She kept her secrets, and he half admired her for leaving him to pluck them out by guesswork.

They made love in his father’s car, on the floor in the backroom of the florist’s where he worked, on the grass at Birds Hill Park, in an upstairs bathroom at Bill and Heather Herschel’s, where they went to a housewarming party, in eleven different freezing hotel rooms during their honeymoon in England, on an airplane coming home to Canada, struggling under the Air Canada blanket and trying to keep their breathing inaudible. When they came together they were intense and silent, as though they’d been born to an age ignorant of the discourse of love. Endearments, curses, complaints closed themselves off when their bodies joined, a light switch doused. Only at the end of their marriage did Dorrie sometimes bark into his ear a command to hurry, that he was taking too long, and that was one of the ways he knew it was over between them.

 

Larry doesn’t like to think of himself as being prim or prudish, not at all, and yet he never really got used to the way Dorrie said fuck instead of making love.

Plunge, prick, thrust, ram, split, screw, stab, and throb. Pulsate, stroke, bang, pummel. Hot beef injection. Slam, pierce, penetrate. Skewer, poke, drill, pop. Enter, entering into the darkness, the body, losing yourself in fire, in silence, in love.

When Larry was in his late teens he started jogging in the early evening after supper. “Ha,” Larry’s dad said with a lazy wink, “I’d rather do my jogging between eleven and twelve at night.” As far as Larry knows, this was the only instance in which his father had referred to the act of sex.

But Mr. Herschel, next door, was full of sexual innuendo. An extroverted twinkly neighborhood man, a planner of block parties, the possessor of a full head of hair, pale-eyed, tie-clipped, he liked his jokes broad and raw and was always ready with a variation. “When the weather’s hot and sticky,” he recited, “That’s no time for dipping dickie. When the frost is on the pumpkin, that’s the time for dickie dunking.”

Were penises funny then? Or such a serious business that they had to be roughly masked in backyard humor. Was a penis an event? Was it history? Was it sacred or profane? As a boy Larry didn’t know. And at age thirty-six he still doesn’t know. The business of sex holds these questions in its mesh, like sequins or tiny beads.

How does a penis taste? He’ll never know.

All he knows is that his penis is with him forever, doing more or less what a penis is meant to do. It’s his to wash and tug at and dust with talcum powder and look after and use, and his to witness as it grows old along with the rest of his body. His partner in life, this extension of flesh, so creaturely, blind, and blundering, so friendly and willing in its puppyish moods, but which, in the future - he has no doubt about it - will be ready to betray him.

 

“Just tell me this,” Beth Prior asked her new husband. “Did you love her? Or should I even be asking this question?”

“You know you have every right to ask that question.”

“Well?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean yes?” Her fingernails were flat and clean like little stained-glass windows.

“I loved her. But that was then. This is now.”

“And there’s nothing left, you swear?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Is that your best answer?”

“I think so.”

“Shall I turn out the light?”

“Yes.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

 

Three years ago, when Larry’s father started having pains in his gut, his wife, Dot, made him go to the doctor. Some tests were ordered, but the results were inconclusive. It was decided after some consultation that he should have a CAT scan.

The machine was a miracle but at the same time a disappointment. A big humming beer can, Larry’s father had been led to believe. He thought he was going to feel like rolling into a science fiction story, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was - well — like normal. Except that there in the silent half-darkness his body was chopped into transverse slices and photographed. A slice of pancreas, a slice of liver, a slice right through his lower colon where the cancer was eventually discovered. The sealed human body was, after all, a knowable country, with its folded hills and valleys laid open to view.

This is how Larry thinks of his life. He was born in the year 1950, and, given extraordinary luck, it’s possible he’ll live for a hundred years, right into the middle of the next century, in fact — ending his life in the year 2050. This span of years feels lucky to him and almost mystical in its roundness and balance.

But when he looks at that allotted time and the self he’s been assigned, he is unable to focus. The sequential years shatter the minute he sets his glance in their direction. They lose their meaning, and fall instead into CAT-scan slices, brilliantly dyed and intricately detailed: his work, his friends, his family, his son, his love for his two wives, his bodily organs - and the few small bits of knowledge he’s managed to accumulate so far.

His brain is always busy, and he wonders if other people live their lives in the same state of unfolding thought; it’s as though a little man lived inside his head, a dancing stick figure who gestures and darts just behind the wall of his forehead, a loose-jointed professor jumping up and down with excitement, debating, questicuning, and never sleeping except when Larry sleeps.

For the last few years he’s been thinking of the
how
of mazes. How to design and install them, what shrubbery to select, how to maintain and control growth. Now, under the direction of Dr. Eric Eisner, he is thinking of the
why
of the subject. Ur. Eisner - sixtyfive years old, bald, slit-eyed, portly - rejects, on the whole, the theory that the medieval garden maze constituted a holy pilgrimage in microcosm, a place where a pilgrim might wend his way to the maze’s secret heart and therein find sanctuary and salvation. “It’s an awful cute theory,” Dr. Eisner tells Larry in his south Chicago accent, “but a little too neat.” No. According to Dr. Eisner, the underlying rationale of the maze is sexual - this from a man who lives alone in a high-rise apartment and appears to have no sexual impulses whatever. A labyrinth, Dr. Eisner says, twists through the mystery of desire and frustration. It doubles back on itself, relishing its tricks and turns. It’s aroused by its own withholding structure. In the center, hidden - but finally, with a burst, revealed - lies sexual fulfillment, heaven. “Or as close to heaven,” Dr. Eisner concludes breezily, socially, “as any mortal man can come.”

That’s where Larry is now. At the site of that heaven. Forget the past, forget the future, the real music is spilling out of now, out of here. It’s crashing on his eardrums. It’s the lozenge on his tongue, the swelling of his penis, the shapes of women’s eyes, the outreaching limbs of trees, the suck, the sniff, the savor of this minute — which will not come again.

 

Beth Prior, Larry’s now-wife, likes to claim she’s a third-wave feminist, which means she’s anxious to understand the mysteries of men as well as women.

She’s fond of quoting what Toni Morrison says about “the other” that Americans fear and envy and anguish over. Only it was never race for me, Beth says. It was men who were “the other.” Who were they really? What did they want?

“Now let me get this straight,” she asks Larry. (It’s Sunday afternoon; they’re lying naked except for a coating of sunblock, in the blaze of the enclosed deck off their townhouse on Harlem Avenue. She has her nose in a terry beach towel, and her fingers are tapping a tune on Larry’s warm chest.) “When teenage boys go around having erections and daydreams and masturbating all over the place and
suffering,
what is it they actually
want?
I mean, do they just want to stick their penises
into
something?”

“You mean like in a knot-hole? Or a jar of liver?”

“I’m serious. I need to know these things.”

“I don’t think so. That’s not all of it, not just sticking it into something.”

“Or ramming it into something.”

“You mean like punching someone in the nose?”

“Something like that.”

“I used to go around wanting to punch someone in the face—”

“You, Larry? I can’t believe it.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Who did you want to punch?”

“It wasn’t a who. It was - just the whole world.”

“You’re talking about ordinary male anger and aggression.”

“Maybe. I grew up with a dad who was mad, remember.”

“A mad dad. I don’t see your father that way. What was he mad at?”

“At the government. His gas mileage. And, I don’t know, he was mad at the newspaper, mad at the weather. Mad at everything. It could be I caught it from him.”

“Like a virus.”

“Or it could be just - just wanting to be noticed.”

“And do you still want to punch someone in the nose?”

“Sometimes. Not as often, but sometimes. How did we get on this subject?”

“I was asking you why boys want to stick their penises into things.” She propped herself up on her elbows, her face peering at him sideways, earnest and avid and smiling into his eyes. “Tell me.”

The rapture of another body, of a woman’s body - that was it, he wanted to tell her, or the largest part of it. Wanting to know another body and knowing your own was never going to be enough. But to say this to Beth was to risk her feeling she was only a portion of a larger female tide that washes over him and makes his existence bearable.

And there’s something else that Beth can never be told, which is that the wholly unexpected happiness of Larry’s second marriage has created within him a new tide of love toward his first wife, Dorrie. During his and Dorrie’s brief marriage the feeling between them had never been more than a ragged, stunted, starved impulse; the two of them lacked the imagination to bring anything more to life, and at the time of the separation he had come close to hating her. But now, since meeting Beth, he’s been conscious of a rapid and steady mending of his old faulty attachment. In the mist of his subconscious his now-wife, Beth, and his then-wife, Dorrie, merge: a pair of sea creatures, sisters, all skin and clefts and tender seeking hands. The old resentments and angers of his life with Dorrie have faded from view, leaving a circle of radiance behind: their young, uncertain bodies, their heartbreakingly dumb silence, their wordless arrival at states of ecstasy, and the long sleep that followed, the happy, enviable, reassembling unconsciousness of children.