Larry's Party (36 page)

Unless your life is going well you don’t dream of giving a party. Unless you can look in the mirror and see a benign and generous and healthy human being, you shrink from acts of hospitality. Which is why Larry Weller has not given a party in some time. He can’t, in fact, remember the last time. Anti-social is what he’s been since his second wife, Beth, left him three years ago.

But now Beth is going to be in town.

And so, by chance, is Larry’s first wife, Dorrie - spending a few days here on business.

Two ex-wives in Toronto on the same weekend. A coincidence.

Beth faxed Larry from England to say she’d love to see him after all this time. (“It’s been far too long, and I’ve got some wonderful news.”) And Dorrie wrote one of her postcards. “I’ve got meetings all Saturday morning, but the rest of the weekend’s free. Why don’t we try to get together for old time’s sake?”

“It’s really the perfect occasion to give a party,” said Larry’s friend Charlotte Angus, as though the matter were already settled. “And I promise to pitch in and help.” Then she added, more tentatively, “If you’d like me to, that is.”

“Of course, I’d like you to. But how? What can we -?” He feels lost in this too sudden social thicket; it’s been so long. “When? What kind of? What time?”

“Saturday evening? Dinner. Seven o’clock is good. It’s early, but that way you can count on everyone leaving before midnight.”

“You really think this is a good idea? It seems -”

How did it seem? He put the question to himself. A forty-six-year-old man (forty-seven in August) hosting a party? You don’t see it happen often, a single man, twice divorced, paying off his social debts, inviting his friends not to a restaurant, but into his own space for an evening of conviviality. A table set. Talk, laughter. Food and drink raining down. Most men in Larry’s position
receive
rather than
dispense
hospitality. That’s Charlotte’s opinion. Such men receive and receive and receive. It can go on for years, this social imbalance, before anyone thinks to question it. Some state of emergency must occur to make a reversal seem inevitable.

And now that moment has come. Two ex-wives arriving on the same weekend and both of them - Larry can’t help but be pleased, even flattered - both writing ahead, seeking his company. This is civilized behavior, this reflects well on him as a man, as a former husband, and so on and so on.

“What I can’t believe,” Charlotte said to Larry, “is that they’ve never met each other. I mean, wouldn’t you think that once, in all those years, they would have -?”

“Chicago’s a long way from Winnipeg,” Larry told her, not very convincingly. “They did talk on the phone once or twice.”

“Politely, I’m sure.”

“Very.”

“Both of them right up to the minute on post-marital etiquette, I suppose.”

Larry had to think about that. He’s seen Beth’s jealous side, how irrationally disparaging she sometimes was about his first wife, and he also remembers Dorrie’s rough edges. Still, that was ancient history, the temperaments of his spouses; he was in his twenties when he married Dorrie, in his thirties when he and Beth got together; his marriages seem far away to him now, inventions of another, younger, less solid self. He knows so much more than he did twenty years ago, at least he likes to think so. A billion bytes of information weigh him down. “I think,” he told Charlotte, “that you can depend on them both.”

“Good. Because it does hold plenty of potential for — ”

“I know, I know.” The fact was, he was excited now by the prospect of the party, and excited by his excitement.

It was over lunch on a Wednesday when he and Charlotte had this conversation. Larry’s noticed lately the way in which restaurant eating enlarges his sense of himself, and how he and Charlotte probe over their small public tables possibilities that they shrink from in private.

Earlier in the day he had given a short press conference about the launch of the McCord maze, a project that has engaged him for the last two years. In exactly five weeks’ time the maze will be opened to the public. It is a relatively low-key piece of work, but one that Larry nevertheless feels is the most creatively adventurous of his life. He’s pulled the rug out this time, but subtly, softly. Instead of the stiff, formal plantings of traditional mazes - holly, box, yew - he’s employed dozens of dense but informal hedges - such gently sprawling plants as five-leaf aralia (tolerates polluted air well), amur maple, honeysuckle, ninebark, which bears up against wind and cold, winterberry for its bright red berries and dark leaves, Russian olive, rose of Sharon, caragana because of its feathery lightness, winged euonymus, and forsythia. (Garth McCord has gone on record as saying forsythia is too “suburban” a shrub. He made quite a point of it, it was his money after all, but in the end a compromise was reached.) Larry hopes, and this was the view he presented to the press this morning in a prepared statement - that the maze will incorporate the essential lost-and-found odyssey of a conventional maze, but will allow the maze walker to forget that the shrub material is a kind of wall and think of it, rather, as an extension of a dreamy organic world, with the maze and maze solver merging to form a single organism.

The McCord ravine property, generously donated to the city parks system, slopes toward a small stream, and the maze’s path, downward and then up on the return journey, is intended to mirror the descent into unconscious sleep, followed by a slow awakening. (Three reporters attended the press conference - Larry admits to himself, if not to Charlotte, that he was disappointed at the turnout - and each of them scribbled down the phrase:
extension of the dreamy organic world.)

Larry and Charlotte Angus were seated at an outdoor table in a cafe called the Blinking Duck, off King Street, sharing a seafood salad and discussing the still-abstract notion of Larry’s dinner party and glancing up at a curiously blank sky. This is Canada, that cold crested country with its changeable weather and staunch heart. Today, though, is exceptionally warm for April, and Larry had made the mistake of wearing his gray wool blazer and a tie. “Why don’t you slip that off,” Charlotte advised in her thoughtful way, and he did.

We might have either eight or ten at the table, Charlotte was saying, but why not make it an even ten since the table seats that number beautifully. Simple but elegant food. A light red wine, Italian maybe. An early evening.

A breeze rolled across the terrace, a thrusting April breeze, lifting the twin points of Charlotte’s scarf by a fraction of an inch. Everything Larry knows about women informs him that she is at a place in her life where a scarf at the neck is presumed to do wonders in the perking-up department. “Actually,” she announced, fingering the scarf’s border, “a dinner party isn’t quite the same as an ordinary party.”

“Why is that?” He felt his own sleepy smile drift over the pink paper tablecloth. He’s been seeing Charlotte for more than a year now, and they’ve grown easy with each other. At least part of this ease springs from a habit of half-hearted teasing, as though each has made a pact to claim a certain amount of ironic territory from the other.

“Oh, I don’t know. A dinner party’s safer somehow. It’s more of an event.” Charlotte’s voice had taken on an arc of singing confidence. She is a shy woman, but given to bursts of energy. “A staged event. You can keep a dinner party under control.”

“With small talk you mean?”

“Well,” she said, shrugging, “thank heavens, I say, for small talk. Small talk’s better than big talk. Big scary talk. Aesthetics, societal values. And people stabbing you to death by mentioning authors you’ve never heard of. Quoting from Kierkegaard. I mean!”

Larry’s smile widened. He is not a man given to dinner-table quoting, though he sometimes wishes he had the capability.

Charlotte was not finished with the subject. “Have you ever imagined how silent the world would be if we couldn’t talk about the weather or the price of real estate? Or about the squirrel nuisance in our backyards? What if we didn’t have our vacations to babble on about? Or what our children are doing? My God!”

“Even that’s not a safe topic.” Larry took in Charlotte’s mobile mouth and swinging earrings, remembering that his own son, Ryan, had recently been accused of doping up before a race, steroids, that the matter was under investigation.

“And another thing,” Charlotte went on, “you can’t ask people what kind of work they do. It’s considered intrusive nowadays. I mean, what if they happen to be out of work? Or what if they work for some company that makes porno films or sanitary napkins or something? It’s all right for you, Larry, you work with lovely green living things.”

“So,” Larry said, “you think a dinner party’s safe? In terms of conversational neutrality.”

Charlotte’s eyebrows go up. “Well, keeping control’s somewhat important, isn’t it? I mean, the dynamics. It might be, you know -” She sliced a hand through the air in front of her.

A pause followed. Larry couldn’t have said whether it was a long pause or a short pause. He glanced about and saw that the restaurant was beginning to fill up with young couples, most of whom looked like lovers. Twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, their hands meeting over the table tops, little sexual wavings of their fingertips.

“I’m a rotten cook,” Larry said, shaking his head and thinking about his friend Bill Herschel, who smokes his own trout and regularly bakes bread for his family. “Beth used to insist we take turns doing dinner -”

“Really? You never mentioned that.”

“It was one of her things.”

“As a feminist, you mean.”

“But all I could do was pasta.”

“Pasta? Hmmmm. No, I don’t think so. Not for ten people.”

“Then we’re in trouble.”

“I did promise to help.” Charlotte was speaking more loudly now that the noise level has risen. “But, look, how exactly would you, you know - introduce me to the ex-wives? I mean, what words would you use?”

“We-ll.” He paused, uneasy, warning himself to put on his safety brakes, knowing how sensitive Charlotte could be. “I’ll just say we’re friends.”

“And we are, aren’t we, Larry?” Her eyes met his, making a pledge. Or asking, it seemed to him, for a heightened confirmation.

“We’re good friends.” He kept his gaze guarded, tapping light as a fingertip on the word
good,
but it seemed to satisfy her.

“Maybe,” she said, wrinkling her forehead, “we should have eight instead of ten. Or better yet, nine. That way we can talk asymmetrically around the table. Asymmetry always brings a better focus to the conversation.”

How does she know such things? “Are you sure that’s what we want? Focus?”

“Of course it is.”

“Instead of a nice out-of-focus blur? Like that French movie we saw, where we didn’t know what was going on?”

“We can buy some of the stuff for the dinner already made,” Charlotte hurried on, taking a small notepad out of her bag. “Dessert, for instance. Everyone does nowadays. Yes, definitely a bought dessert. Something chocolate. From Dufflet.”

“Speaking of dessert -”

“Exactly what I was thinking. Why don’t we split a slice of cheesecake. The almond looks good.”

“Why not.”

They’ve fallen into the habit in recent months of sharing portions of food - some insufficiency in their appetites, Larry thinks, or else the geriatric equivalent of holding hands. He regarded her fondly. The bravery of her lipstick banner. Her eyes. Placating, eager eyes; how did she manage to keep such eagerness alive? (A gleam of green eye-shadow, expertly applied. Quizzing brows. The droop of one eyelid when she was tired.) Her bright silk scarf evoked blazing images of Central America, but Larry knows she bought it in Provence - or was it Spain? - last summer. It must be hot, he reflected, having something like that tied around your neck.

Charlotte’s a woman who always “does her best,” who “throws herself into things,” and perversely it is this, he thinks, that keeps him from loving her with the same warmth she directs toward him. Something - perhaps the death of her husband five years ago, perhaps her genetic make-up - compels her, it seems to Larry, to bite harder than most at the biscuit of life. To bite and to keep on biting.

 

“If you decide on lamb,” Charlotte Angus said to Larry one week before his dinner party, “you really ought to serve beans.”

“Why beans? No one likes beans. At least no one I know.”

“That’s how they serve lamb in France. Very rare, pink in the middle, and with white beans. It’s traditional. Or those little lima beans. You can buy frozen ones.”

“Beans are indigestible.”

“Big piles of beans are indigestible. You’re absolutely right. The thing is to serve just a
few
beans alongside the meat. More of a garnish, really, than a serving.”