Larry's Party (22 page)

“Well,” Beth says, swerving into her narrative voice, its stretched vowels and pauses, “his name was St. Guignolé, sixth century or thereabouts.” (This vagueness, this
thereabouts,
is simulated; Larry recognizes it as a ploy to defuse the consoling and positive message she is about to deliver.) “So,” she continues, “there’s this ancient wooden statue of St. Guignolé in a church in France, in Brest, I think” - more rationed vagueness, that carefully inserted
I think -
“and thousands of visitors of both sexes have made pilgrimages over the years in order to whittle away at St. Guignolé’s upright member, carrying home the sawdusty bits, which they boil up in their broth and drink for supper.”

“Go on,” Larry says, knowing she will go on.

“Well, there are so many visitors scratching away that poor old Guignolé’s dingie-thingie -”

“His dingie-thingie?”

“His prick, then.”

“Oh, that.” He loves the puckery, faintly acidic way Beth pronounces the word
prick,
as though, in fact, it pricks the roof of her mouth just to say it.

“Well, his wooden prick, his member, had to be replaced every twenty years or so. A new one had to be carved and stuck on. The priests finally got so exasperated that they encased him in plaster, only to find that the pilgrims scraped away at the plaster casing and carried
that
home.”

“And so?” Larry asked his wife. “You’re suggesting we make an emergency pilgrimage to -?”

“The point is that this, this thing - whatever it is that’s worrying you - is an ancient and universal concern. Potency, fertility. It’s just the old fear-of-death image in disguise.”

“Ah,” he said, only half mocking. “So that’s what it is.”

“The point is that you’re an absolutely normal and typical human being.”

“Standard issue. Great.”

“Well, what exactly do you want, Larry?”

If only he knew.

 

Their private word for Larry’s condition was “it.” Is “it” keeping you awake again? Is “it” still tormenting you? Tell me about “it.”

But talking “it” over with Beth makes matters worse; she’s too humidly helpful, too bent on swiftly applied intellectual therapy, too urgently determined to confine his sense of anxiety by placing “it” in a socially approved context, something men Larry’s age experience, something they “go through.” Beth believes that “it” is like a novel with its ups and downs of plot, and anyone’s life is just that: a story about the fate of a child. What Larry’s going through is a natural phase. A chapter. A passing condition, this inflation of sadness. She would like him to be burstingly confessional - at least this is what Larry senses - so that she can reverse the direction of his thoughts. Any minute “it” will blow away, she’ll say. She said something like this only yesterday, in fact, making a bunchy flower of her lips and blowing against his cheek.

He doesn’t want “it” to blow away, that’s the catch.

When he wakes in the middle of the night, three o‘clock, four o’clock, he is immediately alert to the presence of “it” in the room, so close he could reach out and take it in his hand and marvel at the faithfulness and constancy of an “it” that has chosen him and now resolutely hangs on. “It” has the size and hardness of a walnut, a woody, fibrous shell with a few raised ridges, and a sense of packed hollowness within.

He tries to visualize his life - his life so far - and a grid rises up in his mind, neatly squared off, but oddly disassociated, as though its configuration originated in a dream. He possesses a dead father and a living mother. And a sister, Midge, in Toronto that he hardly ever sees, but who, if she suspected he was in despair, would sign off work for a week and jump on the next plane, ready to administer great bracing poultices of good cheer. His oldest friend, Bill Herschel, is engaged in the important work of saving the species of the planet; Larry’s moist little whimpers of self-doubt wouldn’t even register if set beside the endangered flora and fauna of the mid-continent. No, he definitely will not discuss “it” with Bill.

How much does the external world bear on Larry Weller? Wars, plagues, racial injustice, third world poverty, the oppression of women? Is this what wakes him in the darkness of his and Beth’s bedroom? He wishes it were true; he would like to be a man who wrestles with giants. He would admire that man.

So far his anxiety seems merely to vibrate in tune with a saddened world. What he grapples with is the question of where he is in his life
so far.

It’s a safe enough game, a counting game, simple arithmetic: numbers set on that imagined squared-off grid. He needs to concentrate on the numbers, but he also needs to look at them sideways, through eyes that have been brought together in a squint. Too much truth, the same truth, becomes cheap. (He hopes this exercise isn’t in the same category as “stocktaking” or, worse, “soul-searching.”)

So. He has one parent, one sibling, two wives, one child.

He has a Diploma in Floral Arts (1969) from a Manitoba technical college, and a more recent and far more distinguished Diploma (honorary; Lasalle University) in Landscape Design.

He’s lived in two cities, Winnipeg and Chicago. Make that two countries.

He’s never missed a child support payment. His own hopefulness keeps him faithful to his self, that intermittently flickering self with its winking, provisional set of driving lights.

He’s owned two Toyotas, an old tan Corolla that he traded in for a semi-new Camry. After the Camry came the deep silver Audi, and now the two-door Honda Accord. These cars are the clothes he puts on after he puts on his primary clothes. That’s it in the wheels department. So far.

Houses. Three. The house he grew up in, a bungalow with a chainlink fence around its tiny rectangle of a yard, his boyhood bedroom (knotty pine) leading off the kitchen. Then the Lipton Street house, a fixer-upper, where he and Dorrie lived during their five years of marriage, and where she and Ryan continue to live. And now the Oak Park house, solidly two-story, gumwood trim in the hall and stairway, heavily mortgaged and in need of work - especially the garden which, so far, he hasn’t touched - not quite a case of the shoemaker’s children, but close. He’s thinking of letting it go wild, flowers, grasses, but imagines trouble from the Neighborhood Association. In between owning the three houses there have been some apartments and townhouse rentals, mostly forgettable, mostly forgotten - those heartbreaking, desperate, intermediate addresses: 566 Calonia, 312 MacNair, 22 Ciscoe Bay, 2236 Harlem Avenue.

Health. Over the years he’s smoked the odd bit of dope, but not any longer. He plans to start running again any day now. Cut down on caffeine. A mole on his back - is it growing? That rope of fat just below his belt. And the current middle-of-the-night insomnia. And that other thing. Had he ever been what the world calls a sexy man? Christ. He doubts it, it can’t possibly be true, and he knows that no matter what evidence is brought forward he will continue to doubt it. You could call forth the first - sweet accommodating, generous Sally, and the five that followed, those rescue ships with their pantyhose, their jeans and mini-skirts, and then Dorrie, their ardent, private, rancorous, intense history, and then, after the separation, those two or three others - how careless not to know exactly! - and then, Beth, a safe harbor, a blessing, a continuance. This was his history, but none of it, it seemed, reflecting
him.
Was he a sexy man? Question unanswerable. Who is he, this shadowy, temporary self?

Hobbies. How can people think of hobbies when their bodies are disintegrating and when their histories are in disarray.

Religion. If he’d ever believed in God, that Being has long since shrunk into the shadows of hedgerows. On a plane not long ago he sat next to a young man who was reading a crisp new Bible, pipelining straight to God, while Larry made do with the latest McMurtry. Once he heard the singer Curtis Mayfield performing a certain number on the car radio - he forgets which song it was - and felt a ripple across his flesh and wondered if that was what people meant by a spiritual experience. Making love, the sexual spasm - is that a part of religion? His dad’s old joke was that church was for sinners. And that they were out to grab your dollars. His mother, though, has started going to Sunday services in recent years, but he’s never heard her mention, either on the telephone or in a letter, the names of God or Jesus, the two main players. It looked for a time as though her sadness would last all her life, in the same way that furniture and china endure, but no, it began to crumble. She grew fervent and peaceful. He wonders if she prays. Praying must be like talking to the fairies, he’s always thought, and yet he’s done it the odd time himself -
Make this stop, make this go away, just let me have one more hard-on before I die, let me sleep, Jesus H. Christ.

Once Larry heard a woman say: “I believe in silver. Sterling silver.” His father believed in a clean basement. His mother, Dot, believes, it seems, in guilt and salvation, and his sister in colonic irrigation. What shadow of the insubstantial brushes against Larry and instructs him to believe?

It’s really when entering a previously unknown maze, especially a hedge maze, that Larry is brought to a condition which he thinks of as spiritual excitement. The maze’s preordained design, its complications, which are at once unsettling and serene, the shifts of light and shade, the pulsing vegetal growth which is encouraged but also held in check - all this ignites Larry’s sense of equilibrium and sends him soaring.

 

For his fortieth birthday (August 17th) his mother sent him a check for twenty dollars enclosed in one of those masculine birthday cards featuring a richly colored montage of armchair, pipe, highball glass, and Irish setter. He wonders how she imagines his life, his and Beth’s. “Have yourself a celebration” she wrote in her near-illegible hand. And “Take it from me, life really does begin at forty!”

Beth gave him a handsome reprint of an eighteenth-century book, Batty Langley’s
New Principles of Gardening,
1728, which contains a number of extraordinary maze designs.

Lucy Warkenten, an old friend from Winnipeg, sent him a set of subtly marbled postcards she’s made herself, and with a calligraphy pen she’s written the single word “Onward!”

Bill Herschel faxed a surprisingly solemn message. “Let’s promise to celebrate the next one together.” (When they’d been boys back in Winnipeg they’d given each other on their birthdays dribble glasses or plastic dog poop.)

Larry’s sister, Midge, and her latest live-in, Ian Stoker, sent a jokey card with a play on the word forty. Four-T. Taste. Talent. Technique. Testosterone.

Ha.

Larry’s son, Ryan, sent, as usual, a necktie, which Larry knows has been selected, paid for, wrapped and mailed by his ex, Dorrie. These neckties have marched straight up the scale over the years. The fortieth birthday tie is Italian, deep-blue variegated silk, beautiful, in an all-over pattern which Larry, peering carefully, identifies as being based on the ancient Shandwick maze. Where had she found it, and had she realized?

The real surprise is a birthday card from Dorrie herself. There have been few cards or gifts or even letters between them since their divorce - Dorrie never was one for writing letters, and there was a six-month blackout period of angry non-communication just after he left her. Nowadays she and Larry see each other occasionally when Larry’s in Winnipeg, and they talk frequently on the phone, conferring about their son, Ryan. His marks at school. His allergy to peanuts, and an emergency rush to the hospital last year. Orthodonture, yes or no. Travel arrangements for Ryan’s three-times-a-year-trip to Chicago. Ryan’s passion for athletics - was this a cause for concern? No, Dorrie thinks. Yes, says Larry, who has only a passing interest in sports himself.

They’re on amicable enough terms after all these years, but the truth is they’re really strangers to each other. Larry, looking at Dorrie’s birthday card - a curling wreath of dark greenery with the raised number 40 in the middle - was startled to see that he had forgotten what her handwriting looked like, how small and fine and girlish it was, and how neatly it lined itself up. “Here’s to being older and wiser,” she’d written with what looked like a fountain pen, and then, “affectionately, Dorrie.”

Affectionately. Such an after-dinner mint of a word. Affectionately smacked his heart. Not love, no, not love. Well, who expects love from an ex-spouse?

And then, just yesterday, he was struck by the thought that Dorrie, his Dorrie, would turn forty herself in a matter of weeks: September 24th. Impossible. Dorrie’s firm, energetic flesh, now softened and creased and quietly discoloring. No. Never. Her small, talky, bossy breasts sagging and tinged with blue. He can’t imagine it. Does she wake up in the middle of the night, does she sit rigidly on the edge of the bed, stare out the window at the chipped moon, and wonder at which moment her life began to drain away?

He blinked the image away, holding the lids of his eyes open against exhaustion, and letting those eyes fill with slow sadness. Getting older was to witness the steady decline of limitless possibility. That’s all it was.

 

Emaciated, old Laura Latimer Moorhouse of the Milwaukee Latimers made an appointment to see Larry in his Lake Street office. He took her coat - some kind of lustrous fur — and offered her one of his rattan chairs, which she collapsed into, breathing hard and clutching the head of her cane.

Ancient, Larry thought. And in terrible health. Her chin had the tufted look of velveteen. Her skin was yellow.

“Are you comfortable enough?” Larry asked.

She nodded briskly, but the teased blond hair didn’t move.

She wanted a hedge maze built in the grounds of the Milwaukee Memorial Children’s Hospital. The design was entirely up to him. She’d heard excellent reports of his work, and she’d already consulted with members of the hospital board. The cost, of course, would be borne by herself. She was prepared to spend a good deal of money for the maze, and for the ensuing upkeep, since her time on earth was nearly over and she’d come to the realization that she had lived a stupid and thoughtless and selfish life.