Larry's Party (21 page)

To lull himself back to sleep, and keep himself from disturbing Beth - who sleeps a profound, saintly, and unsedated seven hours - he lets his mind wander through the seven spacious rooms of his house, the fastened doors, the square entrance, the stained glass in the hallway, the dining room weighted with its beamed ceiling and side lights, the living room and its twin bay windows and smell of cold ashes from the fireplace grate.

And then, if sleep continues to resist him, he flips through the files of his various completed projects: the tiny Presbyterian Center maze in upstate New York, the Barnes project with all its intricacies and inventions, the University of Maryland Governor’s Garden, the Self-Realization Fellowship maze at their Colorado retreat, the Questly Curl, as it’s come to be known, in Tennessee, and the St. Matthews maze, medieval in inspiration and high-tech in horticulture, which is confidently expected to win the Northenden-Eden Prize. And, finally, his thoughts drift and scroll along to that first venture in Winnipeg, his experimental maze that wrapped around and around the small bungalow on Lipton Street - originally advertised as a handyman special - where he and his first wife, Dorrie, lived in the early days of their marriage.

From the start the maze was a cause for conflict. Dorrie wanted green grass and flowers, not the dense, bushy fortress she was stuck in the middle of, and he wasn’t sure he blamed her. It looked weird. It looked dumb. She resented the money Larry spent on plant stock, although he managed, through connections in the business, to get almost everything at wholesale prices. On weekends he was forever planting and pruning his shrubs instead of getting around to putting in the roof insulation the way he’d promised. The neighborhood was going downhill and the house was a dump anyway. They should put it on the market - as soon as the insulation was in place - and, what with her rising commissions at Manitoba Motors, buy out in the new subdivision in Linden Woods.

Over my dead body, Larry said, or words to that effect; he understood what she was saying, but he wasn’t budging - not after all the work he’d done and what with the maze finally getting on its legs.

Linden Woods was all Dorrie could talk about. A big new house with a showroom kitchen and a whirlpool bath off the master bedroom, walk-in closets, the works. She swore she was going nuts living in Larry’s crazy bush pile, and one day she really did go nuts, phoning a demolition company while Larry was at work and arranging to have the maze plowed up.

Half of it was gone by the time he discovered what was up. Wiped out, erased, the front yard leveled.

She might as well have chopped his heart in two. That’s how one of Larry’s friends put it at the time.

But today, after all these years, the remaining half of the maze, neatly bisected, is still standing; its looped paths lie open at their ends so that you can enter at any point. Strictly speaking, it’s not really a maze at all anymore, just a matrix of patterned shrubs filling the small space of the backyard. Dorrie, who is now Vice-President of sales for Nu-Cloz, a national sportswear chain, arranges to have the quasi-maze pruned early each summer, and then again in the fall.

She and Ryan have not moved to Linden Woods after all, although they could easily afford it. The old neighborhood’s picked up, for one thing, with young families moving in and renovating. Her closest friend, Lucy Warkenten, lives next door, and she doesn’t know what she’d do without Lucy. And there’s Larry’s mom, just a few blocks away; even though she and Larry are divorced, she likes to keep in touch. She phones or drops in often. Almost every day, in fact. Then, too, Dorrie thinks it would be a shame to take Ryan out of his school, with all his friends and how well he’s doing. Stability matters, she thinks, and after Larry left her in the spring of 1983 she felt a need to cling to everything that was familiar.

Larry was back in Winnipeg just a month ago, July, for his father’s funeral, and of course he stopped by the old Lipton Street house as he always does when he’s in town, and, as usual, found himself surprised at how complete Dorrie’s life seemed without him. He and Dorrie are on better terms these days, and he was impressed, visiting her, to see the glass-walled extension she’s put on the kitchen; a solarium, she calls it. It’s small, just a few square feet really, but the dark little house is filled with light now and a new dancing sense of space.

He doesn’t know why Dorrie keeps the half-maze going. They’ve never once spoken of it; he feels it would be dangerous to mention it, even in passing. It grows, a truncated, chopped, mutable thing; it thrives; it’s a curiosity. Larry often thinks on restless nights, lying beside his dear sleeping Beth, how this first maze may lack the enclosed secrets of the true form, but that its continued existence remains, so far at least, the most unexamined mystery of his life, a circling, exquisite puzzle of pain, and pain’s consolation.

Turning forty opened a seam of panic in Larry Weller, and he had to admit, sadly, that there was nothing remarkable in this.

A fortieth birthday is twinned with anxiety, with mortal dread, it’s to be expected, it’s par for the course, at least among Larry’s acquaintances or from what he glimpses on the commercials he sees on TV, which seem differently targeted for the post-forties, more sincerely sorry that “you out there” must be informed about the hazards of heart disease or hemorrhoids or depression triggers. Forty is on the side of the wealthy and the ailing - Larry sometimes burns with the shame of having “done well” - and the disequilibrium forty brings is all too well marked on the psychological road map; you shrug when it comes along, shrug and suffer in the shambling morning light and wait for your brain to absorb its juices. Forty invites a plague of spiritual fleas, but even these can be safely, dully predicted, especially when you know a wider stream of melancholy lies ahead. It’s boring, the “age-forty trembles.” Forty-year-olds are immobilized by the crud of doubt, but they’ve been warned, haven’t they? Yes, they have. “Forty is the end of the party,” says the laconic Eric Eisner, Larry’s mentor, “and by the time you get to the cheese course of life, you’ve lost your appetite. What’s left for us oldies is a freefall into hoary age and the thinning of imagination.”

“I’m a forty-year-old man,” Larry says to himself at least once every day, while putting his mouth to the rim of his coffee cup or starting his car or glancing up into the canopy of leaves over the street where he lives. And the thought -
forty years old
— hangs around and around, and forms part of the atmosphere. He understands at last the rather surprising, hard dullness of being an adult, and perhaps for that reason he’s become a man too easily consoled by games and surfaces. And now, suddenly, having celebrated four decades of life, he is a sad man but without the sad history to back it up. What he needs is a good slap on the ear, but at the same time it seems to him that one wrong step would throw him off-course, and that what he would lose would be not money or friendship or intention, but his own self.

He can’t complain, or at least he shouldn’t complain. After a slow start in the world, and a life so frictionless he’d never learned to
push,
he’s ended up in Chicago, a sought-after and relatively well-regarded landscape designer with a specialty in garden mazes. He’s a man who’s had a fair number of jump-cuts in his life, and it always surprises him how much he’s accommodated, how much — from the other side - he’s been allowed. You can have too much luck; it gets to look like clutter, like junk. At forty he finds his early engines of shyness reversed. His first marriage fizzled, a sputtering ruin before it began - he survived that - and he’s found love, and its pungent oils and pleasures, with his second wife, Beth, who has a post-doctoral appointment in the religion department at University of Illinois Chicago, a brainy, speculative, sweet-tempered, supple-limbed young woman whose work on female saints often leads people to believe she is something of a saint herself, and, in fact, she does possess certain saintly virtues, most notably the ability to concentrate her mind so that her thoughts are knife sharp.

Together she and Larry have bought a heritage house on Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, set among the hush of other heritage houses along the deep-dyed greenness of rolling boulevards. He’d like a carload of kids, but he understands Beth’s reservations about career and motherhood, and he does have a twelve-year-old son up in Canada, from his first marriage, and, besides, where would he, a man of forty, find the energy for fatherhood? Or the time? He and Beth seem to be busy all the time, either with work or travel or with their increasingly active social life, attending dinner parties, receptions, lectures, or free-floating events that defy categorizing but require their presence.

Their calendar is full. It still surprises him that he who grew up so shy and awkward as a kid should own a set of evening clothes which he climbs into more or less unselfconsciously several times a year. His father, who’s been gone two years now, would have been bug-eyed to see his only son zooted up in a penguin suit, which is what he almost certainly would have called it - his son, the high roller. A regular toff. Off to a cocktail party, out to an exhibition of architectural drawings. How had this happened? Was this the life that Larry Weller signed up for - Larry, son of the late Stu Weller, master upholsterer for a Winnipeg bus factory?

The fact is, he can never quite believe in his tuxedoed self, cousin to that phantom presence that lurks in his dreams, the guy watching the action, suffering, scared, and greedy in his borrowed, baggy clothes, but never actually stepping on stage and exposing his face.

Being self-employed — A/Mazing Space Inc. - gives Larry the kind of freedom that other people only dream of, and yet at forty he persists in feeling himself an inhabitant of a flat, bottomless, roofless world where all information is ingoing. Always, flickering at the edge of his vision, is something new he must absorb, and yet this flicker is accompanied by the apprehension of himself as a man condemned, no matter what his accomplishments, to be ordinary, and to pass slowly, painfully, through each of life’s orderly prescriptive stages.

The evidence is in. Whether the cause is genetic or accidental, he knows himself doomed to live inside the hackneyed parentheses of predictability, a walking, head-scratching cliché: first the dreamy child, next the miserable adolescent, followed closely by the baffled young husband, and now, too suddenly, a settled forty-year-old white male professional who chafes at that number forty and lies awake wondering if he is about to enter a phase of banked authority and nostril-quivering sincerity - a cover, of course, for the trembling protein stew of his present incarnation. No one yet has noticed, but when they do Larry’s certain that he’ll be described as suffering from “midlife crisis” or “male menopause,” those trumped-up diseases of trite and trivial contemporary man. He’s right on time, too, stepping into the shoes of expectation as though they were made for him - angst-ridden at forty uh-huh. Right. Also self-doubting. Also emasculated, or at least veering in that direction. The old, old story. So what’s new?

And where does he go, now that he’s been smugly socialized down to his forty-year-old toenails? Delustered. Textureless. Inoffensive. Impotent. Ordinary. Any minute someone will take him aside and suggest he go and “see someone,” insisting that the blue-footed flame that heats his perplexity is “statistically in line” for men of his age, that men have periodical cycles just like women, and that a strong surge of September air will blow his grief to dust. He should buck up and count his blessings. Meanwhile, has he, seriously, investigated the spiritual side of his nature?

 

“I understand what you’re going through,” Beth said to him some months ago after they had almost, but not quite, made love. A razor blade of moonlight streamed in from a crack in the curtains, neatly bisecting their queensize bed and its handmade (Appalachian) quilt. She kept her hand on Larry’s collapsed penis, stroking it as one might a small woodland creature. “I blame myself for foisting that surprise party on you. Who wants to announce forty to the world. We should go into a cave at forty and meditate along with the hanging bats. Learn their echoing, reverberative secrets. Figure out how to live on the quiet side of ecstasy, just, you know, how to be at home in our environment, how to adapt. Forty’s the age when we know we’ve already had half of what we’re going to get, that’s if we’re lucky. You look down the tunnel and you see more of the same, and it’s frightening, I can understand that.”

Stop, stop, stop.

Larry’s wife, Beth, is not yet forty; in fact, she won’t be forty for another seven years, and a part of Larry resents her swift and accurate diagnosis of his condition. She accepts the Christian notion that darkness surrounds and threatens every glimmer of common happiness. She’s oddly apologetic about it, as though she holds at least some partial responsibility. In a minute she’ll be telling the story of some obscure Celtic saint with an unpronounceable name and the power to reverse sexual inadequacy. Yes, here it comes. Her intake of breath against his pajama-sleeve announces her strategy. Larry braces himself and thinks: she means to be kind, to be helpful, supportive, et cetera, a saintly wife with a statistically average mate.