Larry's Party (31 page)

The black Oxfords. These are the shoes he was wearing when he looked down and realized Eric Eisner, a man thirty years his senior, was wearing the same: the same cut and make and invisible soles, the same laces neatly looped into bows. If you were allowed only one pair of shoes, you’d probably choose these - they’re generic, they’re shoe shoes, they announce the presence of a man coming forth in all his adult sobriety and good sense and prudence and leather-enriched masculinity.

His tasseled loafers. He calls them his weekend shoes because he’s embarrassed to mention, or even think, the name of the Italian manufacturer. He’s worn these soft loafers for years on lazy Chicago Saturdays — they match perfectly the red-copper mood of weekend mornings. They’re made of brown calfskin, rich as mahogany, more expensive by three hundred percent than any of the other shoes in his wardrobe. The designer’s name is etched discreetly on the uppers, but Larry cares nothing about this, he really doesn’t. (A former prime minister of Canada owned dozens of pairs of these beauties, before public disclosure and a rapid sinking into shame.) In September Larry wore his tasseled loafers to England. (They make ideal flight wear, since the expensive leather has a yielding forgivingness.) He was wearing these very shoes - in a restaurant in Southampton, Italian food, crowded with good smells and noisy conversation — when his wife, Beth, looking nervously alive and beautiful, leaned across her plate of grilled polenta and Dover sole and announced that she didn’t want to be married anymore. It wasn’t a question of another man. There was no one else in the picture. It was where she was at this time in her life. The dream of mothering a child was gone. The thought of their life together was gone. Oak Park, Illinois, was a dot on another planet with a different set of gravitational rules, and these she no longer comprehended. The loss of sex would be a sorrow to her - he, Larry, had always been the most tender of lovers, really, she meant it - but renunciation has its own excitement, even an erotic excitement, a kind of fascinated suffering, not that she expected him to understand any of that. She hardly understood it herself. But he mustn’t worry, she was happy, yes happy. He might find it foolish, her little white room, that narrow bed of hers, but she’d made her choice.

His running shoes, Nikes, are ten years old.

It was funny how everyone in the second half of the twentieth century suddenly started buying these large, lumpy, sculptured, multicolored shoes. It was as though people discovered overnight that their footwear didn’t have to be black or brown, and didn’t need to conform to what was streamlined and quietly tasteful. The traditional shoe was challenged, and it collapsed at the first skirmish. Shoes could trumpet their engineered presence, their tread, their aggressive padding; they could make all manner of wild claims, converting whole populations to athletic splendor and prodigious fitness. Larry’s running shoes are red and white, with little yellow insignias located near the toes. Each of the heels has a transparent built-in bubble for additional comfort and buoyancy when running on hard pavement.

 

For Larry Weller the threadiest part of his life is his hair.

There are men (not Larry) with receding hair who, in defense, grow an informal rat-tail or plume at the back and seem dumbly oblivious to how weedy and wasted this makes them look. Hey, but it’s real hair, they seem to be saying, I can still get hair to grow out of this skull of mine, even if it’s only this wisp, this gesture at having hair.

Other men, Eric Eisner for instance, clamp a wig on their bald pate, and there it sits, stiffened and thick in the shape of an artichoke. These men can’t see how funny they look, especially from behind, and so they persist in believing they look just fine.

Larry, whose forty-fourth birthday is coming up, pretends indifference when it comes to his hair, but there isn’t a moment when he isn’t at some level conscious of his various sproutings, his long, sparse leg hairs, the wavier, thicker hair on his chest, his pubic extravagance for which he is endlessly grateful, his underarm thickets, the dark whorls at his wrist nudging his shirt cuff, the light, modest sprinkling on the tops of his hands, the coarse bristle across his face, and, most important of all, his head threads, which are thinning evenly, neatly, all over.

He thinks of himself as a lucky man in the hair department. He’s had his good hair innings, and that hairy part of himself has given him a richness of enjoyment that he would be reluctant to admit. His wife, Beth, from whom he is separated, would no doubt be ready to offer a range of theories, psychological and mythical, about male hair and its importance to a man’s self-image, but Larry isn’t interested in any of these theories, not these days.

His body hair came early, age thirteen, fourteen. It grew in quickly, secretly, a solace, covering the approved areas and convincing him that he had resources he would one day be able to call upon.

From 1970 to 1978, like every other North American male, he had a headful of shoulder-length hair. He kept it clean with daily shampoos - daily shampooing was an invention of the seventies, or perhaps the late sixties, and no one, it seems, died of it. His folks hated his long hair, though. His father, especially, grumped about hair in the bathroom drains and how he couldn’t tell if his son was a boy or a girl from behind. Larry wondered himself about the pleasure he felt when turning his head quickly and feeling that silken ride of hair kissing his face.

After the break-up with his first wife he grew a beard. It started with a lazy feeling of sadness - too sad to move around much or talk, too sad to shave. His friends, hesitant about offering sympathy or advice, were given the opportunity, instead, to comment on Larry’s beard, how well it was coming along, how there were glints of surprising red amongst the brown, how some men could wear a beard and others couldn’t. “Jesus Christ himself,” his father commented. Finally, the hay-fever season did Larry in; ragweed pollen moved into his beard and drove him crazy at night. He rose one September morning at five o’clock and shaved himself clean. “Hello there,” he said to the young chin in the mirror, and made a face.

These last few weeks, late summer, he’s been growing a moustache. It’s only an experiment, to see if he can do it, to see what shape it’s going to take. It’s also a present he’s given himself. No money invested. Just these self-produced hairs popping out of their hidden hair pockets and making themselves known.

His dressed self. The sum of a thousand misunderstandings.

His hand at first traveled frequently to his upper lip, finding reassurance in the roughness there. His moods were diagonal and time-warped. He felt as self-conscious as a boy, but surprisingly no one commented on the pathetic early days of the moustache, the peculiar discolored scruff between nose and mouth that looked, oddly, like an undressed wound. Perhaps hair is no longer a topic of social interest, perhaps it no longer
signifies.
People do what they want with their hair these days. Anything goes; that booming cliché. The fact is, nothing quite goes.

As the bristles of his moustache grow out they soften into little paintbrushes. He trims it (them?) once a week now, with a kind of love, like pruning shrubbery, like facial sculpture. He’s not sure, though, if he likes what he sees. His mouth has been transformed into a smirk, and now that his house is on the market he wonders if the moustache makes him look shifty and unreliable as a vendor. Would you buy a used house from a man with a ... ?

But under the moustache is the old Larry and also Larry’s sense of touring in his own life adventure: The Larry Weller Story. No one else knows it, but he does, and that’s what matters. And beneath his clothes is Larry’s old body, the body he was born with, the value-added body that’s housed him for forty-four years, his thickening walls of flesh, his thumping conduits of blood and electricity. He’s keeping it cool and secret for now.
(Oh, Beth, my dear one.)
He’s keeping himself alive in there, his skin, his skull, his dressed-up face with its precisely woven shadows - doing what everyone tells him to do, which is to take care of himself, endlessly pardoning himself as he stands there at the edge of his consciousness, letting himself off with echoes and explanations -
we had some good years together, not everyone can say that -
and hanging on to the threaded filaments he’s collected along the way, which will either bury him alive or give him a chance to catch his breath.

Larry could be someone else, but he’s not. He’s Larry Weller, an ordinary man who’s been touched by ordinary good and bad luck.

Laurence John Weller, forty-five, is a man who shelters under the kicking cadence of a nickname - which is, not surprisingly, Larry. Except for rare occasions - his christening, his two weddings, his various diplomas and awards for landscape design - he has always been known as Larry, and probably always will be.

The world is divided, he sometimes thinks, between the nicknamed and those who remain tied all their lives to their formal designation, the indissoluble Williams, the Andrews, the serenely intact Marys and Marthas. The bearers of nicknames are asked to walk around in the world with their hands in their pockets; they invite themselves to be imposed upon - either that, or they reach out and claim special privileges. Larry’s Oak Park neighbor Ace Hollyard comes to mind: “Call me Ace, as in ace in the hole.” Or Larry’s former client, the Irish showbiz czar “Bacon” Malone.

There are names, of course, that refuse to open up to variation. Larry thinks of his friend and mentor Eric Eisner; what can you do with the name Eric? Or Garth. (Garth McCord, the well-known Toronto industrialist and land developer, has recently - just last week in fact - contacted Larry Weller of Chicago with a major landscape proposal, and Larry is thinking seriously of taking it on, even though it means moving to Toronto for the better part of a year.)

Larry’s late father had a nickname too: Stu, for Stuart; his elderly mother is Dot (Dorothy), and his only sister, Marjorie, has been called Midge (or sometimes Pigeon or Widge) since the day she was born back in the late forties. That tells you something; a whole family surrendering to the diminutive. It suggests that the Wellers are not quite grown-up folks, but more like a diagram - pop, mum, sis, bro - of what a more robustly named family could be.

Larry grew up in Winnipeg (the ’peg) next door to the Herschel family: Hersh and Gert, and their kids, Bill and Toots. It was as though the Herschels, like the Wellers, failed to earn the full dignity that people named Jonathan or Ann-Marie or Clark or Susanna insist upon. On the other hand, you could argue that the nicknamed population possess greater adaptability, turning toward the world their sunny freckledness and their willingness to “go along.” They’re the planet’s guys and gals, they’re hands-on friendly, they let you know just by the nonchalance of their names that they’ve already relinquished a little morsel of their DNA, their panic and their pride. They stand there as though they have no secrets. As though they don’t know how to grow up and leave their oatmeal behind, that special gift bowl with their name incised on the rim.

Being called Larry means that a part of Larry is always going to be that boy hanging around the house on a summer day, waiting in the stopped August light for something to happen. On a piece of paper, out of boredom, that kid will print his name over and over again, Larry Weller, Larry Weller, until it dissolves into nonsense. A pencil’s rough squiggle.

By coincidence, both Larry’s ex-wives had nicknames. His second wife’s name was Beth, short for Elizabeth; she could just as easily have been a Liz, but then she would have been a different person with a different set of arrangements. His first wife, Dorrie, had been christened Dora by her parents, a name that in Dorrie’s opinion reeked of old-maidishness, smelly-footedness, and typing-pool ambitions. As a matter of fact, Dorrie continues to use the name Dorrie, even though she’s recently been appointed chief executive officer of SkyBlue Greetings, the Canadian branch of an international card company. She started out selling cars (Manitoba Motors), then moved to sportswear (Nu-Cloz), working her way up to vice-president in charge of sales, and now, since last December, she’s into stationery products; she’s been moving up the ladder all these years, but dealing, Larry’s observed, with merchandise that is increasingly smaller and lighter and more ephemeral.

Not long ago, Larry happened to catch her on a national TV news show: Ms. Dorrie Shaw-Weller, as she calls herself now, was making a public apology for a tasteless Father’s Day card her firm had produced. The offending card was flashed on the screen, a girl’s flat cartoonish face and a balloon over her head containing the words: “Thanks, Dad, for not drowning me at birth.”

“We do vet our new lines carefully,” Dorrie Shaw-Weller said into the microphone. Her voice was head-shakingly sincere. Her gray eyes held a suggestion of personal distress but were clearly prepared to level with the viewers’ outrage. “We at SkyBlue Greetings are proud of our reputation for being sensitive to women and to minorities, and we deeply regret that this card somehow slipped through our focus group. We have, of course, already withdrawn it from the retail outlets.”