Larry's Party (35 page)

 

Charlotte is a widow. Her husband, Derek, an accountant, died four years ago of prostate cancer and left her reasonably well off. She doesn’t have to work, but how else is she going to fill her time? - that’s what she says. Especially with the two boys grown up, one in Alberta, the other on the coast. Besides, she has her diploma in counseling; it would be a waste not to use it.

She and Larry met at a dinner party given by mutual acquaintances. Everyone else around the table was part of a couple, and it was clear from the forced exuberance of the conversation that match-making was in the air: a good woman on her own, and, that rare thing, an available single man. The two of them were seated side by side, and so closely that Larry’s elbow, cutting into his roast chicken, slid silkily against the sleeve of Charlotte’s blouse. “Sorry,” she said, smiling down at her plate and withdrawing her pink swathed arm. (She was, he later learned, devoted to shades of pink and rose, as well as the softer reds.) The talk at the table was general, but it tended to flow strongly, Larry noticed, in the direction of the two unattached guests, himself and Charlotte Angus. Did he like Toronto? How did it compare to Chicago? Had Charlotte seen
Showboat?
No? What about you, Larry? You really shouldn’t pass it up. Either of you.

A week later they were in bed together. That first night - they went to Larry’s apartment rather than Charlotte’s house in Deer Park - they were both shy as virgins. Larry had not had a night of sex since his wife, Beth, left him, and for Charlotte it had been years. In fact, she confided - this was later - that she’d only ever had one partner. She and Derek had married young and they’d both been old-fashioned when it came to monogamy. At least she had been.

Her skin had the powdery softness of a cared for but unexercised body. “Oh,” she said, drawing in her breath sharply, as if pierced by an old recollection, “oh, oh.”

He was not so much excited as at home in her flesh, its willing tenderness, and that chorus of reassuring, breath-filled “oh’s.” She had not wanted the light left on. “Please,” she’d said, gesturing toward the lamp,

Darkness covered them like a cool sheet. He prized it, drank its richness in. As for Charlotte, she was trembling, her arms and legs, a luxurious shudder he reached out to embrace.

It’s happened before in his life, lying at attention beside the body of a lovely woman - midnight, a summer breeze at the screen, crickets stitching up the darkness, the rumble of occasional traffic in the street - and always he’s felt a flood of gratitude so sharp, so sudden and powerful that it resists the confines of language or gesture or even the rough and tentative modeling of thought. What is this paradise? Touching. Being touched. The unburdened self, half-conscious once again of primitive melodies playing offstage. The unearned privilege of a human hand on his human body. A willing caress, that leaping increment of knowledge locked in the skin, yes, oh, yes. His throttled, misshapen, and discontinuous life might yet be rescued. As it was this very minute by a woman called Charlotte Angus. When he least deserved it.

 

Sometimes he thinks Charlotte loves him, though he may just be reading the flickering shadow of shared boredom. Certainly they haven’t spoken about love, not yet.

She was curiously maternal in her ways. And, why not? She’d been a mother since she was twenty-five years old. (The thought of the twenty-five-year-old Charlotte, her shy smile, her earlobes innocent of jewelry, swamped his heart.) Some days he objected to her mothering and some days he didn’t. He should take zinc tablets, she suggested. If only Derek had taken zinc. He should try using foam innersoles in his shoes, they made the most remarkable difference. When he had trouble sleeping, all he had to do was imagine he was writing his own name on a velvet blackboard; write it slowly with the pad of your middle finger, thinking each loop and serif in your head; if you make a mistake you can erase it and start over again.

He feels he must respond by saying something aerobic and jaunty: “Great.” “Terrific.”

Well, he thinks, maybe this is how it goes between forty-five-year-old lovers. At this age the body needs every available encouragement. Attention to diet and exercise. Recipes for relaxation. Forty-five-year-olds aren’t out rolling in the autumn leaves, for God’s sake, they aren’t making impromptu snow angels in the park or frugging the night away. No. They’re concentrating on improvements to their domestic arrangements; it was time, for instance, that Larry went shopping for some comfortable furniture; the dining table and chairs he’d brought from Chicago were utterly beautiful, Charlotte had never seen anything like them, but the rest of the apartment needed, well, cheering up. She offered helpful hints about window coverings. Also advice on spot removal and invisible mending - that light gray suit of his, though, really should go to Neighborhood Services. He was working too hard, throwing too much of himself into the McCord maze, driving himself toward a deadline that was, when it came right down to it, completely arbitrary.

Larry listened and nodded. That was the trouble with middle age: you forget what you had at stake. You just plain forget.

It is not the time, and they both feel this instinctively, to talk about living together. But two or three nights a week they end up in either Larry’s bed or hers. These nights are long and sumptuous. He wakes and watches her, asleep on her heavy side. They both remark, often, about how much better they’re sleeping, how generally more relaxed they feel. Larry even drifted off to sleep one Sunday afternoon on Charlotte’s living-room couch. It was a cool spring day, and Charlotte, seeing him there, covered him with a mohair blanket. (She was a woman devoted to texture and to small exacting shifts of comfort.)

He felt the feather touch of the blanket as it dropped around his shoulders, and, without quite waking, knew himself to be in the embrace of profound tenderness, that second cousin to passionate love. His breathing deepened, carrying him - with lowered pulse rate, the dim headlights of a dream beckoning- toward the coastline of perfect sleep.

His dear Charlotte. This is something new. This is sweeter in a way than the lies, theater, and staged manipulation of marriage, but he can’t quite move his bones all the way into it. He’s caught between a rock and a soft place; that’s how he feels when he thinks about Charlotte Angus, whose shame and goodness is her eagerness to please - that softly dropped blanket, her generous mouth and tongue, the way she barges straight through uncertainty, toughing it out. For no reason that he can imagine, she’s reached toward his living body and offered herself.

Larry’s father, who died in 1988, left instructions to have his body cremated. This surprised everyone, that Stu Weller, a stubborn traditionalist, was capable of forming so progressive and environmentally responsible a decision. Now, October 1996, Larry’s mother, Dot, has joined her husband in death. “A grand old lady,” said the head of the nursing team in Winnipeg. “She was ready to go,” said Midge Weller. “Yes,” agreed Larry’s ex-wife, Dorrie, “those last few months were really terribly sad.” “I suppose she would want cremation?” Larry said. He posed this as a question. “Absolutely,” Midge answered.

Midge and Larry flew to Winnipeg, row 23, seats A and B, a pair of middle-aged siblings, both stocked with their dead parents’ store of genetic tissue and something of their dead parents’ perpetual confusion. Suddenly they had been orphaned. Midge leafed through a copy of
Victoria Magazine,
sniffling, red-eyed. The exquisite table settings, the photographs of antique linen, the recipes for violet marmalade reminded her not of her mother, but the distance her mother had always stood from such things. “She was so goddamned plain,” Midge told Larry. “She never allowed herself to swing free. To be extravagant and silly.” Larry, reading the latest
Newsweek
-more confused threats from the Middle East - felt unworthy of this insight. He had loved his mother, he was certain of that. In fact, what he felt for her went beyond love. A woman of uneven moods, of bursts of physical energy and slow tears, who, late in her life, found peace in the liturgy of the Anglican church and the love of Christ. Dot Weller had given birth to him, he’d nuzzled at her breasts, flesh of her flesh. But these scenes belonged to the background music of Larry’s life - there, but not pressingly there.

It was decided between Midge and Larry that they would scatter Dot’s ashes the day after the funeral on the waters of West Hawk Lake where their father Stu’s ashes had gone. (Larry’s son, Ryan, gave the eulogy at the simple Anglican ceremony, and Dorrie, who had been with Dot at the end, holding on to her hand, served coffee and sandwiches in her Lipton Street house. And it was Dorrie who lent Midge and Larry her car for their ash-scattering expedition.) They drove eastward. The day was windy, and the fields and rocks had the stubbled, deadened, monochrome look that precedes the first snow and the freezing over of the lake. “We’re just in time,” Midge said.

“You mean she was just in time,” Larry said.

His mother had said to him as a child - and this discussion he now musingly recalls - driving along the flat Manitoba highway, the trees stripped of their leaves, the snow fences bundled here and there along the shoulder, soon to be erected for the winter - that human bodies turn to dust. He remembers that he doubted the truth of this statement. Dust was that dry accretion under his bed. A human body rotted, spoiled.

But dust was what he and his sister carried in the trunk of Dorrie’s car, a box of dust. Larry has recently learned that it takes hours of intense heat to reduce a human body to powder. Even so, there were pieces that refused to break down, hardened bits, bones perhaps or teeth. It was astonishing, the durability of bodily atoms.

Midge switched on the radio and turned up the heat so that the car became a little cave with its own soothing weather. He knew she was dreading the moment when the two of them would stand by the lakeshore - for one thing, neither of them was sure whether this was a legal act or not - and plunge their hands into the dry remains of Dot Weller, their mother.

The moment didn’t happen, not that day anyway. Arriving after a two-hour drive and parking at a deserted scenic lookout, Larry opened the trunk of the car and found - nothing. “I thought you put it in,” he told Midge. “I thought you did,” said Midge, weeping openly and hugging herself against the cold.

“Christ. She’s still back on Dorrie’s front porch.”

“I can’t bear this.”

“We don’t have to put her in the lake. It was only an idea. I mean, Dad’s ashes have long since -”

“It looks too cold anyway.”

“Those waves.”

a body as heavy as Larry’s, or two female nurses working together. He had to be carefully placed, his spine aligned, in order to avoid future orthopedic deformities. The function of his joints was maintained by daily motion exercises. An indwelling catheter handled the urine which he continued to produce in his unconscious state, and the digital removal of his stools from his rectum was regularly performed.

Electronic monitoring recorded his vital signs and attempted to measure his level of consciousness - even though little is understood about coma and its curious halfway position between life and death. Does a comatose body think or dream, does it hear noises and sense the tensions that surround it? His chin and cheeks were shaved, and his fingernails and toenails trimmed. His feet were bound to an L-shaped plastic board in order to provide support. Without this foot board his feet would have “dropped” to a plantar flexion position, permanently shortening the muscles and tendons at the back of his ankles, so that, should he survive, he would be unable to stand upright.

Hundreds of hands had touched him during the twenty-two-day period of his unconsciousness. The hands of professionals, doing their job, ticked off items on his chart, keeping his blood-filled tissues alive and elastic. His most private orifices, his nostrils, his anus, were kept free and clean. The faces of the strangers who performed these acts are utterly unknown to him, and this seems to him to represent a fundamental imbalance in the world. His two failed marriages, the distance he feels between himself and his dead parents, his inability to understand his son, or to will himself in love with Charlotte Angus - all these failings speak of the separateness of human beings, with every last person on earth withdrawing to the privacy of his own bones.

But it isn’t true. It is impossible to live a whole life sealed inside the constraints of a complex body. Sooner or later, and sometimes by accident, someone is going to reach out a hand or a tongue or a morsel of genital flesh and enter that valved darkness. This act can be thought of as a precious misfortune or the ripest of pleasures. The skin will break open, or the cell wall, and all the warm fluids of life will be released - whether we wish it or not - to pour freely into the mixed matter of the world, that surging, accommodating ocean. Larry Weller is disturbed by this notion, but oddly comforted, too. He is recovering; in a sense he’s spent his whole life in a state of recovery, but has only begun, at age forty-five, to breathe in the vital foreknowledge of what will become of the sovereign self inside him, that luxurious ornament. He’d like that self to be more musical and better lit, he’d like to possess a more meticulous sense of curiosity, and mostly he’d like someone, some
thing to
love. He’s getting close. He feels it. He’s halfway awake now, and about to wake up fully.