Larry's Party (33 page)

 

Larry Weller stars in his own life movie, but in no one else’s. This is hurtful to admit, but true. His ex-wives are into new stuff and don’t really need him, not even his money. His mother’s installed in an Anglican care facility in Winnipeg, where she’s bathed and diapered by an ever-changing roster of sweet-faced nurses and praised for her wonderful disposition and ardent prayerfulness.

Larry’s sixteen-year-old son by his first marriage is up in Winnipeg too. Ryan lives with his mother in the same house he’s always lived in, 234 Lipton Street, and goes to MacDonald Secondary, the same high school Larry attended. Unlike Larry, though, who never excelled at sports, Ryan runs the 100 meter event for the school track-and-field team. Last March he qualified for the Manitoba Allstars, and Larry wouldn’t be surprised if he harbored Olympic ambitions. Until a year ago Ryan had never possessed a nickname, but now he’s become Flyin’ Ryan, at least in the local papers - a name so loaded with tribute that it hardly qualifies as a nickname. What a way to imprint yourself on the world. What a way for the world to stamp you for life. Leapin’ Larry, that would have been a good way to go through the years, that would have given Larry Weller a headstart.

 

Larry’s sister, Midge, lives in Toronto where she runs a costume business, rent or buy. The truth is, he doesn’t know his sister all that well these days, but nevertheless Midge is half the reason Larry’s decided to relocate in Toronto; he’s been alone for months, and he’s figured out what he needs in his chilly life, or the slow drizzle his life’s become. He needs the warmth of blood connection, something he’s never really required before. Maybe this is what happens when you hit the mid-forties mark. He wants someone to keep tabs on him, someone who’ll phone him just to shoot the breeze: so how’d you sleep last night? how’s that cold of yours?

Not long ago he asked himself what there was to keep him in Chicago now that Beth had pulled out. He could do his maze design work and consulting from any major city in North America. Electronic outreach, instant communication; this was the nineties. He’s decided, too, to change the name of his one-man firm. Since 1988, when he first hung out his shingle, he’s advertised himself as A/Mazing Space. This name, with its coy slash and double pun, won’t do for Toronto, he sees that clearly, and it absolutely won’t begin to do for the year 1995. He’s dropped the old Laurence J. Weller, too, from his new business cards. Now it’s a simple: Larry Weller, Mazemaker. Clean. Direct. Stripped down. (He’s reminded tonight of another April night almost twenty years ago when he stood on a cold street in his shirt-sleeves, inviting the rest of his life to come at him, to take him in its embrace.)

 

A happy marriage, whether it’s long or short, gathers a kind of density around it, the easy verbal slippage of “my wife,” “my husband,” and the swing-in-the-garden sense of “we always” - fill in the blank - “we always take vitamin C when we’re coming down with a cold,” “we always stay home Sunday night,” “we always cancel the newspaper when we’re away for a week.” And the collected hours of joined sleep, they add up to certain assurances about love too: that even if you leave love alone it forms a cocoon around you. Which is why in the last year Larry’s been unable to adjust to the animal grief of stirring in his sleep and finding himself alone. He wonders if he’s acquired that sad body smell of lonely people, old cologne bottles, mothballs, broken shoes.

Tonight he tries to put himself to sleep by thinking of Beth breathing by his side, improvising a crude shelter for his thoughts, but he’s incapable of capturing her image. Instead he tunes in to the vagaries of her voice, her scent. None of this works. Every memory flash leads to a supplemental twinge. He is a man going through a bad time, he knows he is, but he avoids looking at that man, the self he frightens away with loud thoughts, grotesque images. His jalopy of a life. His Larry life, which is projected tonight on the ceiling of a stripped-down second-floor bedroom, a square of streetlight shining through an uncurtained window and reminding him of failure’s potent fumes. (If you’re living a life without sex, you start talking to yourself.)

A kind of sleep comes eventually. Sleep’s dark tower, windowed, locked. His dreams boil with green swamp water and sharp words waving their long leaves against his face.

The morning light is explicit and cruel, its first slapping steps on the floor grotesque. There lies his suitcase, open. There is the bed with its bare mattress ticking and rimmed stains, blood, semen, sweat, his and Beth’s, but now the bedsprings are preparing for a transfer of power. He himself will be on the road in an hour, Toronto bound. Yes, he will - Larry Weller, a forty-five-year-old white male, an endangered species if not rare, will be on his way to the next thing and the next. He longs for something, but what? (That infant in his highchair, he started all this.)

There’s a comic side to human striving, he knows that, and something pathetic about smiling too willingly into the camera and babbling on to yourself about the widening of life’s sensuous possibilities, but nevertheless he feels as he backs out of his driveway for the last time, a sudden jolt of brightness, which he supposes is ardor and disinterest stirred by the same stupid spoon. What a gullible dope he is. Larry. Larry Weller.

And then he remembers, as he drives south down Kenilworth Avenue and on to the ramp of the Eisenhower Expressway, an evening last week when he and Larry Fine sat on the screened porch together watching TV. This was the occasion of an international track meet beamed from Munich. One of the American runners was being interviewed. A bull of a man. Immense, muscled, with stunned-looking blue eyes. “I’ve had this dream since I was six years old,” he whimpered into the camera. “I’ve got this dream of gold for my country. The American dream, it’s still alive in the hearts of athletes. But hey, it’s not about winning, it’s about, uh, doing your best out there and paying your dues, you know, standing up for this country of ours that’s the only free country there is, know what I mean? - in the whole world.”

“Christ,” Larry Fine said, reaching for the off button. “Christ, why are guys such dumb pricks?” Then he said, sadly, “You know something? There’s a sense in which, deep down, all the men in the world are named Larry.”

At forty-five years of age Larry Weller has lost a number of his excretory “units,” or nephrons - despite the fact that he has never been a heavy drinker. His liver, like most people’s livers, has been shrinking since the age of forty.

His ancestors, of course, sleep in his blood and brain, their packets of DNA neatly arranged and pretending not to matter as much as they do. Larry’s bone mass, which peaked in his twenties, has also been declining in recent years, or so he suspects. He keeps meaning to get that test he’s heard about. As a landscape designer he spends a fair number of hours hunched over a drawing-board, and he’s sure this hunching and bunching of his spine, plus the natural tension that accrues, is responsible for the lower-back stiffness he feels in the morning. An occupational hazard, you might say. (He’s sometimes suspected that in that space between his skeletal frame and his thin muscles there lurks a kind of private joke.)

The separate bony plates of his head became fused shortly before his first birthday, shutting off any effective access to the primordial hum of the universe, the breath of a larger, more generous life, the smell of possibility — this is a loss, but one that Larry only occasionally senses: in the midst of ardor, in the face of unexpected beauty or mystery, while running his palm across the trimmed top of a green hedge or between the thighs of a woman, that narrow envelope so bravely opening itself to dramatic shifts of scenery.

Two minutes with his electric toothbrush each morning, and he is a better, braver man. He has twenty fillings in his teeth. Also two bridges. No caps so far. A very slight yellowing, especially of the bottom teeth. His lower left gums have receded so that the roots of the teeth are close to being exposed. His dental hygienist, last time he went for a cleaning, gave him a tiny dollsize toothbrush with which to poke into the problem area each morning and night. This adds another minute, or at least thirty seconds, to the time he must devote every day to looking after his body. He wonders what Charlotte Angus, who frequently spends the night at his apartment, thinks of this miniature brush hanging there in the bathroom next to his regular toothbrush. Maybe she believes it represents some weird fetish, and for that reason has, so far, withheld comment. He himself sees it as a nod in the direction of his eventual death, one more signpost on the way out.

Larry’s testosterone, if he follows the normal pattern for North American males, has probably been in decline since his thirties - this worries him, but it doesn’t worry him every minute of every day; he prefers to think his occasional episodes of sexual failure are psychological, and that a total reverse is possible. How many times has he felt the skin of his scrotum tighten? - a million? - and isn’t it reasonable that this involuntary mechanism wearies eventually? Since he moved to Toronto a year ago and met Charlotte Angus, he feels he’s operating on three out of four cylinders. Charlotte is the same age as he is. It might be different if she were twenty-five. But different in what way? He’s not sure.

The thickness, color, and sheen of Larry’s hair is at risk. He knows that about fifty percent of men of European descent suffer some balding, which ought to be a comfort but isn’t. Charlotte thinks that men are pathetic in their fear of baldness. As long as the emerging skull is clean and not too bony or warped with veins, what does it matter how much hair there is? And what about Yul Brynner?

Like everyone else, Larry’s skin started to lose its elasticity during his teens. His life range of expressions can be found on his face, etched there. A small brown spot sits in the middle of his upper left cheek, and another on the side of his neck. Are these caused by exposure to the sun, or could they be liver spots? He remembers hearing his mother talk about liver spots, how they arrived when she was still in her thirties and how she learned to sit with her hands folded like a basket in her lap, palms up, so that these unattractive blotches were hidden. Larry’s first wife, Dorrie, had rather rough skin, healthy but at the same time prickly. It could be that this roughness was caused by the extremes of the Manitoba climate rather than genetic factors. Beth, his second wife, had soft Irish-looking skin - her face, her arms, her legs and buttocks - made even softer by the nightly use of oils and creams. Charlotte Angus treats her forty-five-year-old body to a monthly massage at a Queen Street salon, followed by a salt bath and “body polish.” Each treatment sets her back seventy-five dollars, but she thinks of it as an investment in her mental health.

Presbyopia is something else Larry Weller suffers from; in plain English this means that his ability to focus on nearby objects has declined, and that he now requires reading glasses. Blues, greens, and violets are often difficult to distinguish. His eyes also adjust more slowly when he comes into a dark room. Last week he returned to his St. Patrick Street apartment after a late-night meeting with the McCord Foundation Board - Garth McCord is a Toronto land developer - and almost stumbled across Charlotte’s overnight bag in the bedroom. (He had forgotten to phone her to say he’d be late, and this forgetfulness is, he suspects, the most troubling part of his aging.)

His hearing, as nearly as he can tell, is stable, and he feels fortunate that he was never a heavy metal fan or had to work in a noisy factory like his father and thereby suffer irreparable damage. Would he wear a hearing aid if he had to? Probably not. Well, it would depend on how severe the loss was. He’d have to think about it. His life, he feels, is not so much a story as a sequence of soundings - real soundings, bouncing in his inner ear.

If the medical statistics tell the truth, Larry’s brain weighs less than it did when he was thirty. He can no longer balance a number of ideas in his head at the same time, and, in fact, he’s refused to take on new clients until the McCord project is completed. This is the largest garden maze he’s ever designed, a three-dimensional show-piece, and the mathematics confuse him occasionally in a new and worrying way. What’s happening inside his head? What became of the ease with which he could hold on to a visual concept? He likes to think, on the other hand, that he’s accumulated some experiential knowledge: wisdom, that is. He’s read recently that the human brain weighs almost exactly the same as the human foot, and this thought with its compacted unreason makes him shiver.

His lung cells have stiffened - which is absolutely normal at forty-six - so that his former capacity is now deflated by about twenty percent.

Larry’s arteries have also started to stiffen, but only slightly; this is not surprising when you remember that his heart muscle has contracted close to two billion times in his life. He tries not to worry too much about professional problems and he stays away from fatty food. His sister, Midge, and her live-in boyfriend, Ian, have become fanatics about fat and have cut out all butter, margarine, and oil from their diet. Lemon juice diluted with water is what they dribble over their salads these days.