Larry's Party (28 page)

Beth writes these details down in her spiral scribbler and later enters them into her laptop. She watches for variations, rejoicing when they occur. Such anomalies represent to her ruptures in the traditional narrative, and indications of interpretive privilege - a privilege she intends to avail herself of once she begins her new book. A book written under the
aegis
of a Guggenheim Fellowship; aegis, this is how she more and more often thinks of it.

 

Larry, searching his way through the wonderful and beautiful mazes of Europe, did Hampton Court first, to get it over with. He was among the earliest at the gate on a soft, breezy Tuesday morning, and he walked through the corridors of the maze in twenty minutes flat, reciting the classic formula to himself, right, left, left, et cetera, and taking the turns on automatic pilot. Birds twittered overhead in the morning light; the glossy banked hedges of yew were still damp with moisture, giving off the air of expensive upholstery, rigorously propped up.

In the last few years he’s seen several American reproductions of the Hampton Court trapezoid: at Deerfield in Pennsylvania where thousands of six-inch boxwood seedlings have grown slowly to maturity, and are brilliantly set off by azalea borders. Then there is the maze at Williamsburg, executed in holly with geometric topiary and pleached hornbeam; a smaller version of Hampton Court, it was a little jewel.

He had anticipated that the Hampton Court pilgrimage would turn a significant key in his consciousness, filling him with the bloom of recollected happiness or else nudging at failure. This was the place, after all, where he and his first wife, Dorrie, had come on the final day of their honeymoon, fourteen years earlier, and where he had undergone between the teasing avenues of yew what he supposes he must call a transformative experience. He has never been able to identify what happened to him during the hour he wandered lost and dazed and separated from the others, but he remembers he felt a joyous rising of spirit that was related in some way to the self’s dimpled plasticity. He could move beyond what he was, the puzzling hedges seemed to announce; he could become someone other than Larry Weller, shockingly new husband of Dorrie Shaw, non-speculative citizen of a former colony, a man of limited imagination and few choices.

But today, turning the hedge corners briskly and appraising the tricky dead-end shadows, he remained stubbornly unmoved. Sixteen nodes, sixteen branches; it seemed a little too neat. He noticed that the old plant stock was in need of thinning. He felt the strengthening sun and wished he’d worn a hat. A party of schoolchildren had arrived, and the voice of their teacher attempting to keep them in check was full of hard, braying, authoritative tones. He observed the essential monotony of the ancient maze - if 1690 could be termed ancient - and the way in which the twin trees at the center seemed, somehow, out of scale and rather prim and silly, as though the maze traveler were being taunted instead of rewarded. Important design possibilities had been overlooked, he saw, though he supposed he should admire the innovative “island” that lay within the perimeter hedge, something that had not been fully appreciated in its day. He paused to take a deep breath, inviting a wave of strong feeling, but none came. Two schoolgirls stood giggling at the end of a shrubbery wall and casting curious, flirtatious looks in his direction.

He caught the first bus back to London.

 

The Leeds Castle maze, set on two islands in the middle of a lake, was something else. Beth, who was quickly growing tired of her Annunciation project - too many vapid virginal faces, too much male presumption on the part of the painters who immortalized them - joined Larry for a day at Maidstone in Kent. The maze, designed and executed just four years earlier, was stunning in its intricacy and verve, and Larry, working his way through the clever passages, recovered something of his old sense of a maze’s connection with more elementary human scramblings. “A maze,” he told Beth, quoting from something he’d read not long ago but whose source he’d misplaced, “is a kind of machine with people as its moving parts.”

“But,” Beth asked, “surely we don’t want to be part of a machine?” Her old quizzing curiosity had revived wonderfully after weeks of insomnia and gloomy note scribbling in the British Library. Only yesterday she’d exclaimed to Larry how happy she was to be a woman who’d chosen not to run with the wolves. Today her face glowed with the afternoon’s heat, and the expensive pumpkin-colored sundress she’d bought in a London boutique showed off her slender, sharp shoulders - so that Larry was thinking already of their hotel room back in London, the wide double bed and its cool, uncreased sheets.

Beth repeated her question. “Do you honestly think people want to be a part of a machine?” More and more her face has the stretched look of someone trying to stay “interested.”

“Yes,” Larry said, surprised at the speed of his response. “At least I do.” He waved a hand toward the crowds of holidaymakers pressing around them. Children. Lovers with their arms linked. Families. Groups of Boy Scouts, smart in their uniforms but reassuringly unruly. There were immense touring parties of tentative Japanese moving rapidly to and fro like starlings, and chuckling Germans with cameras at their bellies and bottled water in their backpacks. Americans drifted by in groups of three or four. “Pretty snazzy,” one of these elderly Americans pronounced.

“A maze is designed so that we get to be part of the art,” Larry told Beth.

“So you think this is an art, do you?” She gestured broadly. Her tone was only half mocking.

He ducked the question; the word art made him nervous. “The whole thing about mazes,” he said, “is that they make perfect sense only when you look down on them from above.”

Beth took this in. “Like God in his heaven, you mean. Being privy to the one authentic map of the world.”

“Something like that.”

“So what kind of a God wants us to get confused and keep us in a state of confusion?”

“Isn’t that what we’ve always had? Chaos from the first day of creation? But mazes are refuges from confusion, really. An orderly path for the persevering. Procession without congestion.”

“You read that somewhere.”

“Probably.”

“At least they provide a way out.”

“One exit anyway.”

“Salvation or death? Or more confusion. An unsolvable maze has got to be invalid.”

“Some people would say there’s amusement in confusion.” More and more, lately, he lets his thoughts come out in words, these same thoughts he’d once kept shyly locked up in his head.

“Would you say that, Larry? That confusion is
fun
?”

“Not fun exactly, but a little time off. And God knows we all need time off.”

“You aren’t by any chance trying to tell me something, Larry.”

“You’re working” - he looked for the words - “awfully hard.”

“Too ambitiously, you mean.”

“Not that exactly. Too -”

“Desperately?” she supplied.

“That’s not what I mean.”

They’d reached the underground grotto by now. All around them were walls decorated with sea shells. Grinning statues and cascades of water. A fun fair with the fun twisted grotesquely sideways, and something larger and more primitive hinted at.

“I just think,” Larry went on, “that we need little stopping places now and then to crawl into. It’s our scared animal selves pushing forward. Making burrows and then trying to find our way out again.”

“Who was it who said life is mostly a matter of burrows?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said. “Did someone say that?”

“Auden, I think.”

Larry only vaguely divines who Auden is - his hideous ignorance! A poet? He nodded noncommittally.

“Or maybe it was Camus.”

They had arrived in an underground passage ninety feet below the maze hedges. A flooded cave stood before them, and also the maze’s goal, the seat of the nymph. They’d come this far, part of a wave of other maze walkers, and there was a sense that they were about to ascend into the sunlit world once again where struggle and confusion ceased, at least momentarily.

Beth, turning suddenly, reached over and gripped Larry’s hand hard in both of hers. “I’m glad we’re living inside the same burrow,” she said, speaking in an intense, urgent whisper.

“Me too.” His wet voice. He could hear himself swallow. His treasonous saliva. His thundering ardor dissolving in its own juices.

“And sharing the same Guggenheim too.” Her tone had turned arch. She gave Larry a quick look to check his expression.

He smiled down into her eyes, and then into the parting of her crisp dark hair, and felt himself, temporarily, forgiven.

 

They settled in, renting a small Wandsworth flat and buying their own groceries. A certain amount of peace came with this decision, since both of them were domestic by disposition.

They never lost, though, the sense of being travelers. All around them they could see similar men and women; the modern inhabitants of the world were wanderers, pilgrims, and the labyrinth was their natural habitat. Each weekend Larry and Beth went mazing, as they called it, starting off with the largest hedge maze in the world at Longleat House in Wiltshire, 380 feet by 175 feet, composed of yew and a series of six wooden bridges. Designed and built in 1978, the maze employed spiral junctions and a species of psychological teasing that directly addressed and manipulated the visitors’ compulsion to conserve time and energy. “A beauty,” Larry said at the end of the day. “My feet are killing me,” said Beth, “and my brain’s going to need a week in traction.” (Her Annunciation work was once again progressing.)

They visited, on various sunny or rainy weekends, the brick pavement maze at Kentwell Hall, the symbolic hedge maze at Blenheim Palace, a yew construction at Hever Castle in Kent with structured buttresses, the serious-sounding Environmental Maze in Wales (rhododendron, birch, and oak), a massive battlemented hedge at Knightshayes Court with alcoves for statuary, and the turf maze at Saffron Walden. “I’ve got a feeling I’ve been here before,” Larry said when he and Beth arrived at the picturesque main street. “Not the maze, but the town.”

“So what’s this supposed to be for?” Beth asked about the turf maze, which was a series of circles cut into the ground back in medieval times. The Saffron Walden design was Christian and traditional, but it was thought, Larry said, reading from his guidebook, that the maze provided a kind of bawdy sport for young men and maids. “Marvelous,” Beth breathed. “You can imagine them, can’t you, racing around after each other, tripping on their petticoats, stealing kisses.”

“The turf wears away,” Larry explained, “so the chalky ground becomes the path and the turf the divider.”

“You’re sounding pedagogical, Larry. You’re sounding like
me.”

The foot-shaped Bicton maze in Devon was the creation of Randoll Coate and Adrian Fisher, the genius of contemporary maze design, and Larry and Beth traced their way through each toe of the foot, and arrived breathless and full of delight at the roundabout in the heel, where they were spun toward the maze’s solution. “So this is what mazes are about,” Beth said. “You kept telling me they were about love or sex or death or God. But really they’re just fun.”

“I told you they were fun. You’ve forgotten.”

This seemed to him something that had happened often. Beth had a way of reconstructing their life together, reassembling their conversations, their various arrivals and departures and chapters of marital history. It worried him, but only occasionally. Half the time he thinks how fortunate a man he is to be married to a woman of imagination. A flag of persistent untruth flutters in his head, but he chooses to ignore it.

 

In August Larry and Beth went to France, where they were joined for two weeks by Larry’s son, Ryan, who was thirteen now. He arrived at Roissy airport, it seemed to Larry, with a new lanky look about him. (It was one of Larry’s own secret sorrows that he would never himself be described as being
lanky,
having passed directly from weedy adolescence to full-fleshed adulthood.)

Their first stop was the Jardin des Plantes in Paris itself to see the recently restored eighteenth-century maze, with its central summerhouse and bell. Then they drove (a rented Renault 19) to Chartres to have a look at the pavement maze in the great cathedral. “This floor design,” Larry said to his son, more loudly and teacherly than he intended, “happens to be the oldest surviving medieval Christian labyrinth in the world.”

“You’re supposed to look at the windows too,” Beth said. She was an uneasy stepmother, and never knew quite what tone to take.

This gift to his son, this sight, this slice of holy silence, struck Larry as a rare privilege. How often are we able to give openly the treasure of surprise? But Ryan was busy staring at a couple kissing behind a statue of Saint Joseph. “Tonsil hockey,” he murmured to himself, or perhaps to his father and his father’s wife, who were standing a few feet away.

“This particular maze is from the thirteenth century,” Larry continued. It seemed important to make the boy understand the unicursal marvel he was looking at, that this wasn’t just a piece of hopscotch on the floor, though, in fact - and he couldn’t resist explaining further - the game of hopscotch is based on cathedral architecture. “That’s back in the twelve hundreds.”

“The
treizième siècle,”
said Ryan, as nonchalantly as though he were blowing out a balloon of bubble gum.

Larry’s ex-wife had insisted on registering Ryan in the French immersion stream of his school, right from the age of six. Now, at thirteen, he was startlingly fluent, able to interpret for his father and stepmother, inquiring about the price of postcards, making table reservations in hotels, and even, in one case, talking a policeman out of a parking violation in Aix-en-Provence, where they’d gone to see the magnificent three-hundred-year-old Chateauneuf le Rouge maze. Beth has a formal understanding of French grammar, and Larry remembered a few phrases from high school, but neither of them could comprehend the language as it was spoken on the street, much less spout it back in the slangy, unselfconscious manner that Ryan assumed.