Larry's Party (27 page)

His life has changed since his early, capsized marriage. Today, he and Beth spend long, settled, lamplit American evenings in their cozy back-of-the house den, baking their ankles before a newly installed gas fireplace; a kind of anxious boredom occasionally visits them as they read, sip decaffeinated coffee from flowered mugs, and now and then tune into Masterpiece Theater or else watch a rented video, and he knows now how, out of boredom, men and women nudge at their happiness in order to revive the intensity of early love. Glancing up from his book (something new off the press, perhaps, about formal gardens), Larry is most often swamped by the golden unreality and goodness of the scene he and his wife occupy, the shelves of stacked magazines that surround them, his wife’s hands, slim as knives skimming over her lapful of manuscript pages. And of the other scene that is socketed directly into this one, himself and Beth later in the evening, climbing the stairs to their large square bedroom, the sheets tumbled crazily on the queensize bed, the walls tipped sideways, the only sound their hard breathing and tender, yet occasionally selfish, efforts, and later the moist gliding of her skin on his, coming heavily to rest, along with her muffled moaning of his name,
oh Larry, my Larry
. (“How did this happen?” a voice whispers inside his brain. “How do I deserve such recognition?”)

Often, of course, they’re out for the evening. He and Beth regularly attend performances of the Chicago Symphony, since Beth’s parents, Belford and Ruth Prior - “Bells” was in securities before he retired to Hawaii, Ruth practiced tax law — send Beth and Larry a pair of season tickets every Christmas. Of course Beth and Larry go, despite the terrible parking problems in the Loop and despite the worry about leaving an unattended car, and despite the fact that Beth is curiously bored by music and quite often falls into a doze halfway through the evening.

What does Larry Weller, formerly of Winnipeg, Canada, make of the concert series? To be truthful, he finds the symphonic strains largely opaque, he who grew up without ever once attending an evening of classical music, though a wealth of resources were readily available in that city, had he only known. On the other hand, the alternating rhythms of the symphonic movements are oddly, eerily familiar. They crash on his ears, loud and soft, ripply and smooth, sliding and stopping. These musical variations echo his own life: now happy, now sad, dipping, rising, fast and slow, up and down. Is it always going to be like this, he wonders, and is this all there is?

 

In January of last year Larry’s wife at long last published her book about early women saints:
Happy Enough
by Dr. Beth Prior, based on her doctoral thesis of the same name; University of Illinois Press. $29.95. Illustrated.

A handsome, oversize book, it can be found turned outward on the shelves of all good bookstores, at least in the Chicago area, showing off its handsome, slick green-and-blue cover with the stunning portrait of St. Agatha (3rd century AD) holding forth a platter on whose shining surface are arranged her two breasts, nipple side up, which have been forcibly detached from her body as a punishment for zealous piety. The creaminess of these breast mounds reminds Larry of the cups of baked custard his mother used to prepare for him and his sister, Midge, when they were children. “It’s good for what ails you,” his mother used to sing mysteriously, setting the little glass cups down on the kitchen table, her tone at once apologetic and proud. A sprinkle of golden nutmeg was strewn across the top, and he and Midge scraped this damp, dimpled crust away in a flash, popping it on to their tongues and grinning at each other as though they had somehow outwitted their mother.

The reviews of Beth Prior’s book were uneven, as they tend to be for such academic studies, but generally positive. “Dr. Prior has the good sense not to mock the excesses of early Christian ecstatics, but to view them in the context of their female powerlessness in early Western societies” (
Northwestern Arts & Letters,
Vol. XVI, May 1992, pp. 24-5).

On the strength of the
Northwestern
review and also a favorable mention in the April issue of the
Women’s Book Review
(“learned, humane, innovative”), Beth has applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, knowing that they - whoever they are - wouldn’t dream of turning her application down. She has youth on her side, after all; she has a fresh new-minted (almost) PhD; she’s widely read in a number of areas, she’s committed and clear-eyed, and, furthermore, the feminist/deconstructionist revamping of history is a hot topic at the moment. She can’t miss.

The thought of obtaining such a fellowship was exciting to her - this much was clear to her husband, Larry, who observed the intensity with which she filled in the forms, pushing her pen down feverishly into the allotted squares and agonizing over which of her colleagues she could count on for a letter of recommendation: Dr. Rosemary Stanley from U.I.C.? - no, too conservative. Felix Zuegler, who’d written an introduction to
Happy Enough? -
he was perhaps too closely connected with the project to be thought objective. Whoever she thought of was too important or else not important enough. A whole night’s sleep was lost over this matter of supporting letters, though in the morning she announced to Larry that she didn’t think the letters would carry much weight after all, not when set beside her curriculum vitae, that fifteen-page closely spaced document (soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture, as Larry likes to say).

It worried him a little to see his wife counting on the fellowship so much - her fever of intelligence was once something else - and he wondered what he could do to cushion the blow, should it come. It was important to have an alternate plan, he told himself; he would have to put his mind to it; he would have to think sideways, perhaps even apply for a grant himself, not that there was much chance of getting one.

It’s my turn, Beth said blithely, as if temporal justice accompanied the presentation of awards. A Guggenheim, she explained to Larry, is almost a guarantee of a tenured position, a tenured life, and she’s been bouncing around long enough from one post-doc post to the next. It also carries sufficient cash for a whole year of travel and research, and perhaps the promise of another book, this time a contemporary study of the feminist perspective on the Annunciation, that moment, historical or mythical, when the angel Gabriel announced to the Holy Virgin that she was chosen to be the Mother of the Messiah. “The greatest imposition ever perpetrated on a woman,” declared Beth Prior, aged thirty-five, beloved and baffling second wife of Larry Weller.

“You could always shut down the office for a few months,” she told him, “and join me halfway through. You know you’ve always wanted to see the European mazes. And, listen, Larry, I think we should list the house with a good rental agency right now. You have to start early with these things, you have to plan ahead.”

 

When the letter from the Guggenheim Foundation came, informing her that she had not, unfortunately, been awarded a fellowship - “An unprecedented number of applications were received this year” - she went quiet; the bones of her face froze sharp as stone, than collapsed to tearful rubble. She wept and raged, slamming her hands on the oak coffee table so that it rattled on its legs. She reviewed her qualifications. She railed against the application process, then against the ignorance of the jury who were, she suspected, all men, white European men, with men’s circumscribed and testosterone-limited bias; the Guggenheim game was infamous for favoring male candidates; she should have known she’d get shoved aside. Screwed, shafted.

The next day there was a second envelope from the Foundation, this time for Larry. His application had been approved, the letter said, and hearty congratulations were offered.

“You didn’t tell me you’d applied,” Beth said stiffly. “You never mentioned it once.”

“I didn’t think I had much of a chance.”

“It isn’t as though you’ve actually published anything.”

“And I certainly don’t have a PhD.”

“Damn, damn, damn, damn.”

“Look, Beth -”

“It isn’t fair. Even you can see it isn’t fair.”

“No,” Larry said. It pained him to look at her trembling hands. “It isn’t fair, you’re right. But we can share it. Who was it who said two can travel as cheaply as one?”

“That’s ridiculous. And I wish you’d stop trying to cheer me up. It’s making me crazy. I find it—” She stopped herself.

“What?”

“Humiliating.”

“Why humiliating?”

“That you would have done this behind my back.”

“I didn’t think of it that way.”

“A breach of trust. That’s what it really amounts to.”

“I’m sorry. You know I’d never—”

“No, I don’t know that. And I’m not sure you’re sorry.”

“It isn’t as though I lied about it.”

“You have to admit, Larry, that what you did doesn’t exactly represent full disclosure on your part. And full disclosure is what we’ve based our whole—”

“I just thought -”

“What did you think? I’d be interested in knowing.”

“You seemed to want to go so terribly much.”

“It wasn’t just the going, Larry. God! It was — I don’t know - the having.”

“But in a way we’re both having.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

Maybe he didn’t. He saw that now. There was so much that he didn’t “get.” And he wasn’t sure he believed in the possibility of full disclosure either. He thought of Dorrie. He thought of his mother and father. The gaping silences. The missing wire of connection.

“Look,” he said. “If we got busy we could be in England in a month’s time.” This came out, he realized, in the practiced, oily, diverting tones of a fond uncle. “Or how about we just pack our bags and go tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s not possible. How could we possibly -?”

“Next week, then.”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course we’ll go.”

“Anyway,” she paused, “it’s a good thing I listed the house. You wanted me to wait, remember? I told you we should go ahead.”

“We’ll have a terrific time.”

He said this loudly into the air, speaking in a falsely ringing male voice that cantilevered, it seemed to him, over a swamp of dishonesty - but whose, his or Beth’s? The balance between himself and his wife had shifted subtly, that much was clear. He had in some way betrayed her. And she would be a long time forgiving him.

“Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered into her knife-like hands. Cursing him.

 

They landed at Shannon, rented a bright blue Ford Fiesta and headed off to see the the original site of the Hollywood stone, the oldest dateable labyrinth in the British Isles, 550 AD. Rain poured straight out of a blackened sky, and silvered the sides of their little bouncing car. “I feel damp right to the middle of my American corpuscles,” Beth said, shivering in the front seat. Twenty minutes later the sun came brightly to their rescue, leaving the green cultivated Irish countryside glistening all around them. “Like top-of-the-market broccoli,” Beth observed with a wave at the hedgerows.

What was important, Larry explained, was the location of the Hollywood stone. It had been discovered some years earlier at the beginning of a circuitous fourteen-mile pilgrims’ path through the Wicklow Mountains, the start of an approach to Glendalough, an early Celtic monastic community.

The Christian maze so clearly incised on the rounded, brownish lump of stone suggested two conjoined messages. One of those messages informed travelers that the road to the Celtic sanctuary was convoluted and difficult, much as today’s generic zig-zag road signs give warning of hairpin turns ahead. A more profound reading of the maze related to the difficulty of life and life’s tortuous spiritual journey.

That this double message could be conflated into one symbolic sign seemed wonderful to Beth. “It’s like a naive form of perspective,” she marveled. “No absolute rules and no worry about the confusion between the elemental and the spiritual.”

Her face was flushed with happiness, as it always was when she was in the proximity of holiness. An avowed agnostic, believing the sacred has been taken over by psychology, she nevertheless was someone who melted toward the vision of God’s grace, seeing it as a storm of sunlight, the most powerful force in history.

The Hollywood stone itself, unfortunately, was no longer in its original position beside St. Kevin’s Road, but had been moved to the Museum of Antiquities in Dublin where Larry and Beth saw it later that day.

“It’s a rotten shame,” Beth murmured against the glass case, “to take something sacred away from where it belongs. A sign for pilgrims. Encouragement for the road ahead.”

“Or discouragement maybe.”

“That too.” She has been in an agreeable, speculative mood all day, though both she and Larry were wobbly with jet lag.

“Its surface would be rubbed away in no time,” Larry reminded her. “By tourists like us. Or by the rain and wind.”

“You’re right,” Beth sighed, her good humor vanishing. “We do have to make the necessary compromises, don’t we?”

 

In England the weather was exceptionally fine. The time was late June. Lilacs bloomed all over London, over the doorways of houses, in public parks and squares, and Beth was awed by the thought that this once smoky old city, with its layers of history and pollution, could support so delicate and fragrant a flower, and in such profusion. The sharply sweet fragrance entered the window of their hotel in Pembridge Gardens in Notting Hill. They breathed in its druggy, weighted scent, and spoke again and again about how fortunate they were to be in this peaceful, green, beflowered city, so far from the scorched flatlands of Illinois where (as they had seen on last night’s news) a drought was threatening this year’s corn crop.

Immediately after breakfast each morning Beth travels by tube to the National Gallery or to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is her intention to see and take notes on every representation of the Annunciation she can find. Almost always the composition of this sacred encounter is the same. Mary on the right of the tableau is calmly seated with an open book before her. At the left stands, or rather crouches, the angel Gabriel, with his feminine, overly saccharine face and flowing locks, and immense, gaudily painted, backfolded wings, holding in his arms a strongly shaped phallic lily. Between the two figures lies the artist’s blurred suggestion of a civilized society, a tower or two or else a stone archway leading into an enclosed garden, that symbol of virginity, and always, somewhere in the blue air, a bird with his beak pointed sharply toward Mary, delivering the tumultuous news: she, of all women, has been chosen.