Larry's Party (23 page)

“I’m sure you—” Larry felt compelled to protest.

“Stupid, thoughtless, and selfish,” she repeated. Her mouth became a crumple.

“But we all -” Larry began.

“No. Most people live sensible and thoughtful lives. It’s a fact. It’s something I’ve noticed. Except for hardened criminals, most people manage to form meaningful attachments. They take care of one another. I’ve never had that opportunity, you see, to form a genuine attachment. My two husbands - what can I say? - they were perfect heels. And no, Mr. Weller, I have not had children of my own. Trouble in the woman department, and probably just as well. I was fat all my life. A fat girl, a fat woman. My mother would have loved me more if I hadn’t been fat, I’m one hundred percent sure of that. She gave me a girdle when I was eight years old and made me wear it. What kind of a mother does that! You can imagine. My skin under the girdle was a mass of eczema, that was from the rubber probably. I was fat until one year ago when my cancer was diagnosed, stomach, liver, everywhere - that’s why I’m thin and ratchety for the first time in my life. What you see before you is only half the person I was, only one-third of the old Laura Moorhouse, as a matter of fact. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Three hundred pounds, that’s what
she
was, and now she weighs in at ninety-nine. Call me perverse, but I’m proud to he a ninety-nine-pound woman. I’m brimming over with pride. Another sin, but a consolation too. Why a maze, Mr. Weller? I knew you’d ask. Because I’ve always loved mazes. Now, this may sound whimsical, but I’ve felt all my life that I was a kind of maze myself, my body I mean. There was something hidden in the middle of me, but no one could find it, it was so deeply concealed, and I don’t just mean by fat cells. Why a children’s hospital? A good question. Not because I love children. I don’t think I do, really. It’s because I long to
be
a child, even a sick child, a very sick child. I want my mother, my daddy. I want them standing next to my bed, one on either side, holding on to me, reaching out and putting their hands to my forehead, checking to see if I have a fever, soothing me, taking turns, first one, then the other. They love me so. You must excuse me. I’m trying not to go hysterical on you, Mr. Weller, and usually I don’t, but it isn’t often I speak out like this so frankly. Never, in fact. It could be the medication I’m on that’s loosened my tongue. I’ve never told anyone this, that I long to have someone place a hand on my forehead and just hold it there. Pressing. Really, it isn’t much to ask, is it? I’ve never discussed this longing, never expressed it, that is. How could I? I mean, it doesn’t come up in ordinary conversation, does it? But then, how often does anyone have a real conversation, just talking back and forth the way we’re talking, you and I, sitting in this little room of yours. Just these white walls. These green plants. With nothing getting in the way. Nobody putting a finger to my lips and saying stop, stop, enough, you’re embarrassing me. Well, I can’t say that it’s ever happened to me before. No, not even once.”

 

Two years ago, when Stu Weller was close to death, Larry flew to Winnipeg to be by his side.
By his father’s side,
that scented phrase with its promise of resolution. What he actually felt when he reached the hospital was the helpless unease that the healthy experience in the presence of the profoundly ill.

His father’s mouth looked large and lippy beneath the fleshy cave of his nose. The thick rind of a male body was still there under the hospital sheet, but inside was stinking rot. Larry could have sworn his father cringed as he entered the room and presented his preposterous healthy face.
So it’s you.

“He tires easily,” Larry’s mother said. Meaning, there will be no resolution. Larry immediately grasped that fact. No embrace. No prayers. Nor confessions. Nor blessings. Well, it was dirty pool to grill the dying, asking them to betray their secrets when they were down and out, and when they’re about to go even further down.

To be alone, sick and unvisited, would be preferable, Larry thought, to the parade of visitors, neighbors, friends, and family who arrived at St. Boniface Hospital, all wanting a piece of final satisfaction from Stu Weller, critically ill, dying of cancer, smelling of shit, sucking in the gas of his last hours, already, in fact, out of reach.

“All I wanted,” said Larry’s sister, Midge, who had flown in from Toronto, where she owned a costume shop, “was to have one conversation with the old bugger.” She was blubbering cold leaky tears. “We never did, you know, not once.”

Larry dug in his pocket and found a Kleenex. “He wasn’t much for words.”

“Except to complain. Except to bitch at Mum because she was out at her Agape group all the time. It was different for you. He took you to all those football games when you were a kid. Hockey too.”

“Hey, that’s right.” Larry was taken by surprise. He’d forgotten those outings. “That was a helluva long time ago.”

“So did you do the father-son thing? Did you, like, really talk when you were sitting there in the stands, the two of you?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe ‘Great play.’ Or ‘Lousy block.’ That was pretty much the extent of it.”

“It figures.”

“Once he asked me if I was in love with Dorrie. Before we got married.”

“Really? He said it like that? ‘In love’?”

“I couldn’t believe it. The word ‘love’ coming out of his mouth.”

“So what did you say back?”

“What do you mean, what did I say?”

“About being in love with Dorrie. Did you say you were or you weren’t?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Yeah, I bet.” She gave him a look. “Leave it to dopey Dorrie to get herself pregnant—”

“It’s water over the dam, Midge. Jesus.”

“Some dam. Ha. Anyway you got a great little kid out of the deal.”

“Right.”

“Even if you hardly ever see him.”

“I know, I know.”

“Anyway, I hope when you do see him that you talk. Really talk, I mean. I myself find it impossible to believe that a father would not once have a conversation with his only daughter. Even when Paul got AIDS, when he was in the hospice dying, our dear father Stu never once, he didn’t even, he just - oh, Christ, why’d you get me started?”

“That’s the way he was. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have the deepest feeling of—”

“I could kill him. No one should be allowed to be that inarticulate. People who won’t talk to their own children should be put in jail.”

“It’s a generation thing.” There was pain in this conversation with his sister, but Larry wanted it to continue. “Communication wasn’t such a big priority in the folks’ generation -”

“Do you think he and Mum ever had a conversation? I bet they didn’t. I bet they just lived inside their dumb silence. All those years, eating, sleeping, looking after the house and yard, with never anything passing between them. At least Paul and I — but the two of
them!”

“We can’t know—”

“What do you mean you can’t know? What’s that supposed to mean? Do you honestly believe they had one genuine conversation in their whole married life?”

“It’s possible,” Larry told her. “Not that I could prove it.”

 

Lately Larry’s sad most of the time. Even when he’s signing contracts or eating or laughing out loud or attempting to make love to Beth he feels the undertow of something missing. He’d like to shrink back to his old life, but the noisy amplitude of these recent years has to find someplace to go. And he’s tired - tired of his name, tired of being a man, tired of the ghostly self he’s chained to and compelled to drag around. He can’t avoid the shame of his awful hopeful voice as he answers the telephone, too patently constructed to be a real voice, a voice to stay away from if you’ve got any sense. His mannerisms, his little ways, get on his nerves, his habit of placing a finger on the knot of his tie when he’s under stress or clearing his throat unnecessarily before speaking. Here I am: a serious, likeable man scrolling through the flow of my life. A man—surely you can detect this - in a state of personal crisis.
Oh, that!

But it’s boring down there in the depths, and he senses that even his patient Beth has had enough. When was the last time she asked him how “it” was going? Maybe in the future she’ll look back and resent all the energy she put into their supine bedtime conversations, cheering him out of his glooms, offering narratives from her vast storehouse, trying to patch him up and put his psyche in working order again. What dullness. Besides, she’s busy preparing a lecture on the virgin saints, Cecilia, Margaret, Agatha, Mahya, Dorothy; virginity is strength, she intends to prove, a part of the body held in reserve, which must be seen not as passivity, but as the mask of a potent power over the self. She has it all worked out.

What do you do with private disappointment, Larry wonders. How do you fix it? He can’t explain, not even to himself, but he’s forgotten those things he used to take on trust, love’s careless ease or lethargy, drowning in ordinary contentment. There’s been a falling off of faith, which he presumes is temporary. Sooner or later a restoration will present itself, he feels sure of that - but when will it come?

Yet even in the midst of his present confusion he knows with certainty that the important conversations of his life will always be with women.

Tenderly, smilingly, he remembers Vivian Bondurant. Viv of the clear brown eyes and capable hands. They’d worked together at Flowerfolks for years back in the seventies, and the two of them had talked all day long. Their talk had been unstructured, loose, and capable of sustaining interruptions and uneven silences. She’d taught him, a tongue-tied kid just out of school, to open his mouth. He hasn’t seen her in years. She’d be what? - forty-seven now. Almost fifty. Christ.

He and Dorrie hadn’t known how to talk. No one had told them how it was with married people, how much they need space to let out the low, continuous rumble of their thoughts. The two of them exchanged consumer information; that’s what he remembers anyway. They quarreled about trivialities, about hurt feelings, about money and in-laws, just as though they’d learned these topics of discord from reading Ann Landers. Mostly, especially toward the end, they were silent - though a part of Larry has come to believe that their silence held a sinewy richness of its own.

Right away it was different with Beth. Lying in the dark bedroom, their arms around each other, they’ll talk for an hour or more before falling asleep, and Larry feels gladness swarming in his ears. Such ease, such unlooked-for happiness. One night in early October, the wind banging the north side of the house, Larry tells his wife about Laura Latimer Moorhouse’s visit. Beth resettles her white limbs and murmurs into his ear:
No! That’s awful! And then what? Oh, Larry.
Now she is wondering, aloud, what will happen to a world that’s lost its connection with the sacred. We long for ecstasy, to stand outside of the self in order to transcend that self, but how do we get there?

Her tone is only mildly speculative. She has only to push the words out as her thoughts form, easy as air, exhaling against the blanket binding, against Larry’s chest. Larry imagines the vibrations of her voice entering the wallpaper, passing straight through the retrofitted drywall, the ancient lath and brick, and traveling into black space and becoming flecks in the earth’s vitreous humor.

And then he recalls, as he often does, lying in his boyhood bed and hearing through the plaster the sound of his parents talking in the next room. Their night noises, their bed talk. The woody rasp as they cleared their human throats or blew their noses. Sometimes it went on and on. The words were inaudible, a low, buzzing, reverberative music whose content, to their son Larry at least, was unguessable. First his mother, then his father, back and forth like a kind of weaving. There would be a pause, and then the murmurous resonance resumed. He would fall asleep, finally, to the rhythm of those strange voices: Stu and Dot Weller, his silent parents, coming awake in the soundwaves of their own muffled words, made graceful by what they chose to say in the long darkness.

 

Larry’s busy these November days with the Latimer project, and he welcomes being busy, sensing that his freakish profession is the only thing that keeps him from disappearing; it also quietens the late millennial despair that drifts about the world these days, singing a version of: here we go again, and again, and again. He’s done a preliminary set of drawings, thinking as he works how happiness lurks between the hand and the eye, and between the objective design and the abstractions that bloom in his head. A small untended space, but critical. Last week he drove up to Milwaukee and made a presentation to the hospital board.

A round of applause greeted his short talk, and the chair of the board expressed regret that wonderful Laura had not lived to see her dream realized, not even in blueprint form, but nevertheless, ahem, a worthy project was well and truly launched, and the necessary funding was solidly in place. Larry got the green light. He was to begin at once.

The winter would be taken up with planning and subcontracting, and by April the first hedges will be in place. He’s decided on a combination of barberry, for its orange-red autumn foliage, and cornelian cherry, which takes well to formal shearing. A good June and July should double their growth in the first year, and by August - by August! And then a dazzling thought comes at him sideways - by August he will be forty-one! No longer forty, with forty’s clumsy, abject round shoulders and sting of regret, but forty-one! A decent age, a mild, assured, wise and good-hearted manly age.

 

The number forty-one redoubles in Larry’s head like a balloon of sweetness, which he shakes off roughly, as if it were a piece of foolishness he will not stoop one inch to acknowledge.

In the center of the Milwaukee maze he has designed a number of topiary figures grouped around a mirrored wishing-well, where children will be able to toss their pennies and whisper their deepest desires. To get better. To live. To grow up. To be like everyone else. Isn’t that what we all want in the end?