Larry's Party (32 page)

Of course, of course.

Larry had been surprised and even impressed. Had Dorrie prepared this statement herself, then memorized it? Her voice, which might have grown company-cool over the years, was instead packed with warm tones. This was an empathetic person speaking, a person Mr. and Mrs. Consumer out there could trust. He remembered that she’d done a three-week management course in Vancouver a couple of years ago; it’s possible she picked up a few public relations pointers.

“Thank you so much, Dorrie Shaw-Weller,” the twinkly-eyed TV host wound up, “for agreeing to come on the show and offer our viewers an explanation.”

“Thank
you
for giving me the opportunity,” said Dorrie in her persuasive manner. Her hands rose straight up before her, framing a box of crisp air, then falling open slightly as if offering a shrugging embrace, a gesture that said
look, we all make mistakes, so please, please forgive me, all you understanding folks out there.

 

A lot of people are named after someone, but not the casually disentitled Larry Weller. His folks just liked the name Larry a lot, that’s all, but they had the good sense to realize it would have to come enclosed in the more formal Laurence - this was back in 1950. Larry was the name they dressed him in. It was sweet, perky. “I just thought it sounded like a real boy’s name,” his mother told him once. “Like Jack. Now that’s another name I like. It’s, you know, masculine. There’s nothing silly about it, but at the same time it isn’t one of those stuffed-shirt names.”

“Are you sure,” his second wife, Beth, asked him, “that you weren’t named after St. Laurence?” Beth had written her PhD dissertation on the early female saints of the church, and was able to describe for Larry the brave deeds of St. Laurence and his fiery death, how the prefect of Rome had demanded to see the treasures of the church, and how Laurence, in response, gathered together the poor and infirm who lived on the alms of the faithful. “Here,” Laurence announced, gesturing at the tattered crowd, “are the treasures of the church.” For his trouble he was roasted over a sort of hibachi; Larry’s seen the nineteenth-century woodcut in Beth’s
Pictorial Lives of the Saints.
“I’m cooked enough,” the irreverent Laurence is believed to have shouted. “You can eat me now.”

Much as Larry would like to be associated with this hero of legend, he doubts very much that his parents had the early Laurence in mind. They weren’t Catholic, for one thing, and didn’t know diddly-squat about saints. No, he was just one more citizen of the Larry nation, those barbecuers, those volunteer firemen, those wearers of muscle shirts. Men called Larry have to be brave, while other men are allowed lapses.

His middle name, John, was also randomly chosen. “I wanted you to have a middle name,” said his mother, Dot, who had none and deeply resented the blank in her life, “and John had a nice royal ring to it.”

So there he was, Laurence John. Larry. His chance to show the world other sides of himself was curtailed by that fact.

 

Men, unlike women, live with their family names all their lives. A name settles with all its appropriate weight on their chests, like an X-ray apron, and there it stays. Larry’s second wife, an ardent feminist, wouldn’t have dreamt of changing her name to Weller, and Dorrie, who assumed it automatically back in 1978, has now reestablished her maiden name, Shaw, bolting it with a hyphen to Weller. This sounded strange to Larry at first, but now he’s used to it.

The name Weller itself has two possible origins, as Larry discovered when he looked it up in a book of Beth’s. There are some sources going back to the twelfth century that describe Weller as meaning a “boiler of salt.” A later version, and the one that Larry prefers, has Weller as one who dwells by a stream or spring, a sort of professional water overseer.

Like a lot of people, Larry’s never really liked his first name much; its Larryness has alway seemed an imprisonment, and a sly wink toward its most conspicuous rhyme: ordinary. His middle name, John, is a blank of a name, occupying space. But the name Weller he’s learned to love: one who lives within the sight and sound of running water, a water man, a well man, a custodian of all that is clear, pure, sustaining, and everlastingly present.

There are some men, mostly jocks, who get called by their last name all the time. No one understands how this gets started, calling someone like Bill Jones, say, Jones or Jonesy, and never Bill; it’s a little like those houses where people either use the back door all the time or the front door, and no one knows why.

Larry almost never gets called Weller; when it happens, he wants to laugh. The name shatters against his ear into flakes of grammar: well, weller, wellest. Sometimes his sister, Midge, phoning on a Sunday night will address him, tenderly, as Lare-Bear. Bill Herschel used to call him Square-Lare, but that only lasted a short time and now he calls him Lorenzo. Wary Larry, Beth sometimes called him when he was having trouble making decisions. But mostly he’s just Larry.

Larry, Larry. It’s a word that’s grown a skin of pure transparence. He doesn’t see or hear it anymore. It’s absurd. As absurd as the pointless flowers and trees, the wave action of the sea, the stones and stars that gape at each other through blind air. Useless, all of it. A disordered abundance.

 

No one gets named Larry anymore. It’s had it as a name. Think of someone called Larry and you automatically conjure up a guy drinking beer in a sixties rec room. He’s wearing polyester pants. He’s watching the ball game on TV and belching softly. Next he’s reaching under his T-shirt and scratching his belly hairs and doesn’t care who sees him do it. He knows he’s at the end of the Larry line, so what the hell. It was Beth who provided this profile of a “typical” Larry type. That was years ago, soon after they met. (“I can’t believe I’m kissing a man named Larry,” he remembers her saying, her voice full of honest wonder and her mouth tight like a fold of paper.)

But there are a lot of leftover Larrys out there. Not as many, maybe, as there are Mikes or Tonys or Als or Gregs, but enough so that no one blinks when you say your name is Larry. No one asks you how you spell it.

There’s Larry on the Larry King show, who’s sneery but oddly sane, and who sometimes shows surprising restraint. There’s Larry Holmes, the boxer. There used to be Larry Olivier, the great actor, but he was really a Laurence at heart; you didn’t get to call him Larry unless you were one of his inner circle, which you weren’t.

 

Larry Weller of Chicago, soon to pull up stakes and relocate in Toronto - he’s decided to make it a permanent move - knows only three Larrys, personally that is. Larry Liddle from Windows Incorporated comes out to the Weller house with his crew of men on the first Saturday of each April to take down the storm windows and put up the screens. In the fall he comes again and does the whole thing in reverse. He’s a red-faced man with long ropy muscles and a headful of tight solid-gray curls. Every time Larry hands him a check he stares at it for a minute, then gives a little whistle of appreciation. “Hey, another Larry, what do you know!” He seems to find this coincidence exhilarating, something to celebrate, although Larry Weller knows that by next fall Larry Liddle will have forgotten their shared name and that they will go through the whole ritual of recognition, astonishment, and fellow-feeling once again.

Except that there won’t be another fall. He announced this to Larry Liddle last week when he came to take down the storm windows. The house has been sold; he and and his wife are soon to be divorced, and he himself is heading off to Toronto to set up a design office. “That’s up there in Canada, isn’t it?” said Larry Liddle. “Yes,” Larry Weller said, and then added apologetically, “That’s where I come from originally.” “Well,” said Larry Liddle. “Well, well, well.” He stared at the check, seemingly stricken at the thought of Larry’s departure and at a loss for words. Finally he said, “That’s going to make one less Larry around here for company,” which was true enough.

Larry K. Wellington is a Chicago architect who’s widely known for the pink office tower that cantilevers like a stack of cupcakes over Wacker Drive and also for a dozen dazzling summer-houses he’s designed in the Michigan dunes. People get Larry Weller and Larry Wellington mixed up all the time. There have been a couple of misattributions in journals, and clients sometimes phone the wrong number and need to be redirected. The two Larrys met only once, at a fundraising dinner for the soon-to-be-demolished Wardlaw Gardens off Washington Boulevard. Larry Weller loathed Larry K. Wellington from the moment Larry K. Wellington addressed him through his long narrow nose: “So you’re that garden maestro, huh.” The silk knot of his tie stood out criminally. Like a small animal. Like a grenade ready to go off. His handshake was overly long, damp, and probing, and there was a wet look to his chin as though he had dribbled his red wine and couldn’t be bothered to mop himself up. “So,” Larry K. Wellington said with leering familiarity, “it seems the two of us are stuck for life with the same sobriquet. You know what they used to call me in school? Scary Larry. I had this way about me. Even then. The look of success. It made people jealous, see what I mean. They could tell I was going to get ahead and they weren’t. What a crappy world. It’s all crap in the end.”

It seemed impossible to Larry Weller that such a man was allowed to walk freely on the streets of Chicago. And that his name happened to be Larry.

Thank God for Larry Fine, who lives on Kenilworth Avenue across the street from the Weller house. Larry Fine is a psychologist, or a behavioralist as he’s quick to tell you, who teaches at the University of Chicago. This Larry has thick, thick wrists covered with mats of hair, but he’s a good mile and a half from being a traditional hetero type. He bakes, he wears aprons, he sews his own curtains. Last Christmas he made Larry Weller a shirt out of green linen. He names everything he owns. His kitchen stove is called Eleanor. His car is Jacqueline. His computer is called Gertrude, daughter of a previous Gertrude. Larry Fine is probably a little in love with Larry Weller. They both know this, but it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t stop them from enjoying a beer together on Larry Weller’s screened porch - especially on lonely evenings since Beth’s taken off - and talking about sports, sex, theology, AIDS research, the meaning of garden mazes, and the importance of names.

“We’ll look back on this century,” Larry Fine says, “and we’ll see that one of the big social changes in America was the claiming of our own names. We stopped letting other people name us. You can own your name the same way you own your breath. You can shorten it or beef it up and it’s still yours. Have you seen those ads for the Lois Club? All the women in Chicago named Lois get together.once a month. I don’t know if they bawl their eyes out or perform Lois chants, but they’re dishing straight into their randomly assigned names. On the other hand, you want to look at the evolving nature of the baptism ceremony. Our rituals tell us everything, and the old patriarchal laying on of hands is out the window, there’s no more of this ‘I christen thee Elvis Presley’ or whatever, and expecting it to last. There’s a whole different emphasis now. We get to name ourselves if we want to. There’ve always been a few oddballs who did it, but they were showbiz types or else people on the run. Now it’s as mainstream as the stud in my navel. Did you know that it’s out on the west coast, the frontier, where people go to court the most often to change their names? They want to be something else, and they know they’ve got to get rid of the old moniker for once and for all. For me it’s different. At one time, ten years ago maybe, I was ready to be an Abraham or Ezra, something with a little biblical zing, but I made up my mind I’d hang on to the name Larry. I’d force it, by God, to take a new shape. I’d give it some gender stretch, some fiber, a few brain cells even. It’s a dopey name, let’s face it, but it’s ours and we can learn to love it.”

 

“Just sell the furniture,” faxed Beth from the University of Sussex, where she’s beginning her second year as head of Women’s Studies. “Or keep what you want.”

And now it’s gone, every stick of it, except for his and Beth’s queensize sleigh bed which was seized upon by the couple who have bought the house. They loved it; they had to have it; they were willing to pay whatever Larry had paid, and more. Their name is Halfhead, Wilford and Stacey Halfhead, and Larry’s been wondering, ever since he signed the documents, what it’s like to live with a name like Halfhead. Would you have to pump yourself up with fresh resolve every time you introduced yourself? Every time you made a phone call? “Hello, this is Halfhead calling.” Wilford Halfhead is in computers, as everyone seems to be these days, and she, Stacey, the brave, or else insane, woman who has taken the Halfhead name for her own, weaves blankets. Larry supposes that this bed and all its disintegrating erotic ether will soon be covered over with one of Stacey’s cheerful woolen creations.

He couldn’t bear to part with the pine refectory table and its ten chairs, and so he had them sent by van to Toronto. He and Beth paid too much for them at a downtown auction - they’d never get the investment back. That’s part of it, but not all. Here on this beautiful table he’s often spread his working drawings, most recently for the Malone maze in County Mayo; here is where Beth, having run out of desk space, spliced together the revisions on her dissertation. Evenings, the two of them sat across from each other at one end, talking over plates of grilled fish or else pasta, depending on whose night it was to cook. Talking, talking. He’d married a talking woman; and now, in his last week in Oak Park, the last night in fact, he feels the house’s deep silence.

The TV has been sold, and the VCR; there seemed little point in lugging out-of-date electrical gear all the way to Canada. Two sofas went quickly through an ad in the
Trib,
one of them recovered only weeks before Beth took the job in England and decided she didn’t want to be married anymore, at least not married to Larry Weller. The stone-topped coffee table went to Larry Fine across the street. An antique dealer drove over from La Grange last Saturday - his business card identified him as The Lone Granger - and snapped up two wing chairs and Beth’s oak desk and then, at the last minute, decided to buy the rugs as well. Larry’s feet echo on the shining floorboards. Without furniture, without the lamplit islands he and Beth brought into existence, there is only rectilinear space and cold air. What he feels on the final night in the Oak Park house is love’s booming vacuum. No, it’s more like love that’s been replaced by a frantic sadness; he has a long drive ahead of him tomorrow, but he knows he won’t sleep tonight. How had he recovered from his first marriage? Maybe he hadn’t, maybe all this failure was cumulative.