Larry's Party (26 page)

The time has come, he decides, to have a talk with this only son of his, and to relieve the boy of the pressure of his privately stored suspicions. This will be one of the important conversations of his own life, he thinks, and possibly his son’s life too; it thrills him a little to think of the truth spilling out and the clean space it will leave in its wake, though he knows that when the moment comes he’ll have to struggle to find words. He’ll manage, though. Where darkness and secrecy have hidden themselves, he’ll plant openness and explanation.

But first he’ll have to consult with his ex-wife, Dorrie.

He phones Winnipeg at eleven o’clock one night -- after Ryan has gone to sleep on the sun porch, and after Beth, exhausted from teaching a summer course at Rosary, has gone upstairs to bed. (Why is it that Ryan’s visits necessitate a double life of tiptoeing and covert conversations? It’s always like this.)

Dorrie answers the phone sounding sleepy. She was sitting at the kitchen table, she tells Larry, reviewing a sales report for an early morning breakfast meeting. She plans to get away later in the week to Trois Pistols in Quebec, where she’s signed up for a short French course. Rain’s been falling all evening in Winnipeg after weeks of drought. There’d been lightning around suppertime and a change in the wind. How was Ryan getting along?

“I’m thinking of having a serious talk with him,” Larry says, cringing at the melodramatic shading of his voice.

“About?” She’s instantly alert.

“I think there are things he should know.”

“He knows about sex, Larry, if that’s what you’re talking about. He’s known for years. I bought him a book, and then we had a long talk. This was when he was, maybe, nine.”

“That’s great, Dorrie.” His fake flattery.

“Not great.” She’s on to him. Is she ever! “Just necessary.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“But if you still want to have a talk with him -”

“I want to - that is, I think we should tell him about us.”

“What about us?”

“About our getting married, about his birth. I keep thinking he’ll worry about it. That he’ll put two and two together, if he hasn’t already.”

“Oh.”

“I just wanted to know what you think.”

A brief silence, then “I, oh -”

She’s crying, he can tell. “Dorrie? Are you there?”

“No,” she’s saying. “No, I don’t want you to tell him about
that.”

“But he’s probably figured it out already.”

“‘Then there’s no need to -”

“I think he’ll be lonely, that’s all. Knowing about it all alone, living inside a question mark, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Well, don’t you think—?”

“He knows. I know he knows. There’ve been hints. Questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Like why we got divorced.”

“What do you say to that one?”

“I said I was too dumb to be married at that time in my life.”

“So was I. Christ. A regular doofus.”

“No, Larry. We were both dumb, but I was also stupid and also—”

“You’re too hard on yourself.”

“—and also crazy. But then I got sane. I figured it out, after you left, all those years, I figured out how to stop being a coupon cutter and get sane and stay that way. One of the things I figured out was that you don’t have to know every single particle of everything. Not every last shred has to be dragged out in the open. And I don’t want Ryan to think - to think we had to, you know, get married, that we were forced to—”

Larry remembers suddenly how she used to stutter when she cried.

“We loved each other, Dorrie. That’s the real reason we got married.”

“Did we?”

He can’t judge her tone, whether it’s bitter or beseeching. “Yes, we did,” he says, bringing a firmness to his voice. “I may have forgotten a lot, but I remember that for sure.”

She’s sniffling now, between her words. “He’ll be all right, Larry. He can handle this by himself. He doesn’t have to be told straight out.”

“You were the one who used to worry about explaining things to him.”

“I was younger then, I hadn’t got myself together yet.”

“But don’t you think it would help if—?”

“This one thing he can manage. Just this one thing. Please, Larry. Trust me on this one.”

He lets a moment of silence go by, then says, “If you’re sure—”

“I’m sure.”

“He’s turning into a great kid.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“Thanks to you.”

“You too.”

“I shouldn’t keep you.”

“Bye, Larry.” Tears in her voice; he can hear them.

“Night.”

Larry feels it the instant he puts down the phone: a guilty relief. And then, without warning, a potent electric shock of happiness so violent it seems to slice his body open from end to end. For a minute or two, all his senses are wired into this state of simple rapture. Dorrie’s voice, its dying vibrancy. His tender white-limbed wife asleep upstairs. And his beloved child, whose name, for no reason he can recollect, is Ryan. He’ll own this mysteriously bestowed name forever.

And what else? Larry asks himself. His own good luck, his dangerous history, his mistakes and promises, this dark silent capacious house, and the secrets and compromises that lie - serenely enough - beneath its roof.

At the age of forty-two Larry Weller, a landscape designer with an office in suburban Chicago, gives the appearance of having found tranquility and ease in his life. He’s not interested in breaking through the power firmament. He’s already, in fact, come further along in the world than he ever expected to. Everything about him announces a man in a state of reasonable good fortune. His business card with its nicely enigmatic logo. His paid-up Visa bill. His tax receipts, which are squared, stapled, and neatly filed in a place where only Larry or his wife can find them. His clothes, his jeans, sweaters, his wide and narrow leather belts, his sports shoes and crisp socks - all these modestly wrap, enhance, and decently accommodate Larry Weller’s middle-aged bones and attendant psyche, the relaxed apparel of good but not exclamatory quality. Moreover, his bodily flesh, his average face with its look of tightly woven canvas, his benign, slightly thickening trunk and limbs - these enable him to assume and maintain, when he chooses, a physical position of rare stillness, and his wife, Beth (his second wife, actually), has noted Larry’s postural feats with a measure of pride: the way he can sit for an hour or more without twitching or scratching, composing his limbs so that he becomes a benign, amiable statue - at a backyard barbecue, for instance, or at a public lecture, it doesn’t matter which - without crossing and uncrossing his legs in the tiresome way that more nervous, more self-conscious, and more appeasing men do, and how Larry is able to lean with just the right degree of incline into a gathering of people, his head angled forward, his frame subtly poised and attentive and eager to catch the least verbal breeze; he’s endlessly appreciative, or so it appears, of what he’s being offered, those scattered buds of suburban insight, or an obscure and mutually flattering joke, or perhaps an anecdote that wanders hither and thither across the sociological divide, but which Larry Weller, as signaled by his relaxed body messages, is anxious to absorb and applaud.

No one’s taught him these things; it’s just happened. You could call it Larry’s good luck, the result of a few jointed behavioral neurons sewn into his spinal cord, unique as his blood type or fingerprint whorls. The curious rarefactions of his body - its stillness, its unconscious geniality — are always there, insistently present, along with the patient, subcutaneous question - have these been printed in his genes or did he imprint them himself?

His voice, too, radiates an impression of calm, seasoned good will. Low tones predominate and respectful pauses, and these are generally, and generously, attributed to Larry’s Canadian Background, since it’s well known among his and Beth’s good friends that he was born and brought up in the Canadian city of Winnipeg. Just where this city is located is less well known: somewhere
up there,
somewhere northerly, a representative piece of that polite, white, silent kingdom with its aging, jowly Queen and snowy mountain ranges and people sugaring off and drinking tea and casting for trout and nodding amicably - much as Larry Weller nods at his neighbor across a backyard patio in Oak Park and sips his glass of California Chablis, and casts his glance fixedly up at the arch of maple boughs when asked for his views about the intentions of George Bush or about the exorbitant cost of National Public Radio. As for the politics of a universal health care plan, Larry is noticeably silent. A topic best avoided. Ah, but (changing the subject) the Canadian wilderness, the famed train journey across the western continent - this is everyone’s dream, is it not? Would Larry agree? Yes. Emphatically. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Someday Beth and I hope to...”

Is Larry cool? No, impossible. His genes are bright and lively enough, but his social conditioning keeps him suspicious of coolness. He’s recently filled out a pop culture quiz and scored in the “young fogey” category.

A comfortable man, comfortably settled, yet Larry himself would say, if asked - but no one so far
has
asked - that he’s been parachuted into a life whose contours are monumentally out of whack with those he once knew. His Winnipeg childhood was inexpressibly uneventful — though perhaps no one’s childhood can be described in such terms. He’d grown up the second child of a factory worker and a stay-at-home mother, whose primary leisure activities were attending Saturday morning garage sales in their immediate neighborhood or the occasional football game at the Winnipeg Stadium. As a child, Larry was enrolled in public schools, and had, in fact, been ignorant, as were his parents, of any other kind of schooling. His marks were no better than average, and sometimes worse. After limping through MacDonald Secondary, he spent a year at a local technical college - no one, given his problems with math and the mess he made of exams, suggested he apply to the university. At Red River College he earned a Diploma in Floral Arts, and after that began a slow, spiraling drift: upward to manager of a Winnipeg florist outlet - and southward, eventually, to Chicago where he’d studied landscape design for a year under the great Eric Eisner and then made his way to the tight green parceled-out, shadow-strewn spaces of genteel and progressive Oak Park - ending up, much to his surprise, a qualified landscape designer (honorary) with a specialty in garden mazes. (In point of fact, he’s done only one maze this year, for the Children’s Museum in Muncie, Indiana, but he’s been swamped by clients, especially from the American sunbelt, who want an Elizabethan knot garden crammed into their backyards, a squared lump of greenery and historic suggestion between the swimming pool and tennis court; a New Yorker, on the other hand, demanded a
faux
meadow on his Manhattan rooftop.)

He is, at forty-two - another surprise! - more or less solvent. He’s getting along in the world, he and Beth.

But perpetually - every minute of every day, in fact - he prepares himself for exposure and ruin: he has no university degree to fall back on or boast about, he has never read Charles Dickens or Ralph Waldo Emerson, he’d be more than half-stumped if asked to locate the state of Nebraska on a map, he has next-to-zero brain-vibes on the subject of the American Senate, its contribution to American governmental stability or its menacing echoes of elitism. So how is it he projects such an air of confidence when, at the same time, living a fraction of an inch from public humiliation? Do other people exist this close to the flame of extinction? (Hidden there, on the back wall of his retina, is a quizzing caption in a flowing script, his own handwriting most likely, which asks: how did I get here? how did this happen?)

He has a mortgage, fairly sizable, on a seven-room house on Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park. Three bedrooms! - as though a childless couple like himself and Beth could possibly need three bedrooms! The street he and Beth live on presents a sober stone and stucco frontality, though Larry knows how quickly the backs of these buildings dissolve, like movie locations, into weeds and garbage cans and evil-smelling alleys. (The word
alley
is not used in Canada; these not-quite streets are known instead as
lanes—
a beautiful word, Larry thinks, calling up a false image of quaint cobbled surfaces bordered by rows of sculptured evergreen plantings, miniature avenues which are insouciant, leafy, undeclared, and unnamed, and which lead inevitably to a distant moss-covered church, and couples wandering arm in arm toward declarations of love. Yes. Forever, yes. He is, has always been, a romantic, though it’s only recently he’s been able to identify and label the signs.)

And what else about Larry Weller? He is the middle-aged husband of a scholarly wife - “What does she see in me?” the querying script behind his eyes demands - who is a few years younger than himself, a woman whose specialty is women’s studies (sub-specialty: religion), an area of inquiry that mildly perplexes Larry; he would like to understand more precisely the range and purpose of women’s studies, but it seems he’s left the question too late. When he first met Beth she was still working on her doctoral thesis on women saints; she was more lighthearted in those days about her chosen field; she seemed always to have one eyebrow raised above the other, signaling that what she “did” with her saintly women was part of a vast joke and not to be taken seriously. Lately she’s changed, grown more hungry and avid, and certainly more anxious for publication. If her left eyebrow goes skyward now, it’s more likely to express frustration: no one cares, no one pays attention, academic success is a game of roulette or else vicious back-stabbing.