Larry's Party (37 page)

“How many is a few? Twelve beans? Twenty?”

“You’re lying on my arm, love. There, that’s better.”

“So we get some beans to garnish the lamb. Does that mean we don’t have to garnish the beans?”

“A little parsley sprinkled on. Or fresh sage. They have it at St. Lawrence Market. Sage would do very nicely now that I think of it.”

“And to garnish the sage?”

“You know what, Larry? You’re being awkward and jocular. Male jocularity at this hour isn’t -”

“Appropriate,” he supplied. Beth, too, had objected to jocularity.

“Exactly.”

“When is the proper time for male jocularity?” He fitted his body to hers, drew a leg up around her soft hip.

“Never. I thought you knew. There’s a new by-law. Oh, God, look at the time. I’ve got to be at work early this morning. Meetings. The trauma team’s doing a presentation.”

“What do you mean I’m being awkward?”

“Did I say you were awkward?”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re - you’re trying to trap me into saying things that are wifely and trivial and presumptuous. So that I’ll look like a domestic bully when all I am is the girlfriend who’s trying to help you out.”

“1 love the way you say that. ‘The Girlfriend.’ With capital letters.”

“More like italics. 1 mean, at age forty-six, anything associated with the word girl is completely incongruous and - good God, just look at this skirt of mine. What comes over me when I spend a night at your place? - at home I
hang up
my clothes, I look after myself. I’m going to have to press this, and fast. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as distilled water on the premises?”

“I’ll buy some today. When I’m out buying the lima beans.”

“You’ll need about three packages. For nine people that should just do it nicely.”

“Is it nine? I’ve lost track.”

“You know very well we said nine. Why all of a sudden are you trying to make this party seem all my idea? And, Larry, look, if you want to serve the lamb with the bone out, and I do recommend it, you’d better order it now. Today, I mean. Olliffe’s does a gorgeous job. They’ll marinate it too. Olive oil. Lemon. Rosemary. Lovely.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, you could - no, that’s enough girlfriendly advice for this morning. Although maybe, on second thought -”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Will I see you tonight?”

She paused and gave him a look. An unreadable look, but he knew there was punishment in it somewhere. “How about tomorrow night instead,” she said. “At my place.”

 

Beth abandoned Larry, finally, in 1994, leaving behind in their Oak Park house a closetful of soft clothes and a bathroom cluttered with high-tech hairbrushes and miniature perfume bottles.

Otherwise she left him carefully, tactfully,
psychologically.
There was her first calm face-to-face announcement in a Southampton restaurant, followed a few days later by an expansive letter.

On and on it went. He found the prose hard to follow, as though it had been written during a bout of drunkenness, but that was impossible since Beth never touched anything stronger than spring water - her allergies, her fear of gaining weight. The closing paragraph went:

Dear bossy, pedagogical Beth. Heartbrokenly he read this letter, at the same time feeling his face ease into a smile.

Wait a minute. Whoa there.
Healtbrokenly smiled?
Surely not. Perhaps he smiled
around
his heartbreak.
Under
it,
through
it.

Larry, more and more the observer, the critic, stepped back and watched himself picking up his wife’s letter and attacking it with a surgical red pencil. C-minus. And that was being generous.

Understanding and forgiveness, uh-huh! So that’s what she prescribed. Was that all?

When Beth left him, not for another man but for a teaching job in England, he had been close to his forty-fourth birthday, a man in his mellow season, or so romantic fools would have him believe. Understanding and forgiveness should have come easily. Like rolling off a log. With the softened shrug of an unmuscled shoulder. Where, after all, is it written that love is more potent than a fresh career opportunity? “My adorable Larry,” his smooth-skinned Beth had penned in a postscript, freshly oxygenated it would seem by the transports of her own rhetoric. “You have been translator to my unformed soul, attentive reader to my body and mind, and lastly, editor and publisher of my fumbling love. Let’s you and me together, turn over our separate pages. And read on!”

Yes, well. What else was there to do?

 

Unless a man has himself abandoned a wife, he will be unable to understand-and-forgive. Instead he’ll see those twinned verbs as miniature implements - spade, hoe - on a woman’s charm bracelet, fanciful and decorative, and not stop to consider for a minute the immensities of charity they demand. Nor - sweet Christ! - the seesaw of guilt they bounce into view.

Larry and his first wife, Dorrie, had been married for five years when he left her. Five years, one child, a house in the process of renovation, a fully occupied width of time — and yet he has trouble remembering what their life had been made of. The two of them came together, it always seemed to him, back in the time of the old poetry, 1977, when the world rhymed and chimed and the ceilings were higher or, even if they weren’t, the possibility of height was felt.

“What was she like?” Charlotte Angus asked Larry once; this was after an episode of lovemaking in Charlotte’s white and cream bedroom.

“Who?”

“Dorrie. The first.”

“You won’t believe this, but I can’t remember.”

“Was she terrific in bed?”

“Hmmmm. Hard to put into words.”

“Meaning you’d rather not say. Meaning it’s none of my business.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry. My big mouth.”

“She could be funny. She’d do imitations of her boss at the Toyota dealership. And of my dad, too. She was good at it. Before everything fell apart.”

“And did everything really fall apart?”

“Everything. Well, everything except Dorrie.”

“Why didn’t you go to a marriage counselor?”

“It wasn’t in our vocabulary.”

“Did you think there was a stigma attached to -?”

“Not a stigma, not that. It really was a question of vocabulary.”

“If Derek and I had had problems, I’m sure we would have sought out professional help. It would have been the most natural thing in the world.”

Mention of Derek, Charlotte’s dead husband, tended to make Larry feel slightly sick. “Maybe you and Derek had that kind of vocabulary,” he said carefully.

“Are you sure you mean vocahulary? You honestly didn’t know what a marriage counselor was?”

“We knew that. Everyone knew that.”

“Well then?”

He thought of his mother, who had been depressed for long stretches of her life, but had never dreamt of seeking psychiatric counseling. “I didn’t know the words around the words,” he told Charlotte. “How to get there.”

“Sometimes, Larry, you say something and I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

“Sometimes I don’t know either,” he said.

It seemed to him that what he swallowed was the bitterness of his own essence. He was not the man he started out to be. He’s richer and sadder now, and he’s lost the trick of keeping track of himself.

 

“Well? What do you think?”

“Looks nice. The tablecloth was a good idea.”

“It pulls everything together, doesn’t it? And I’m glad you thought of those dark green candles, Larry. White candles look churchy.”

“Thanks for bringing flowers.”

“I remembered,” Charlotte said, “what you said once - about not having roses on a dinner table, the smell getting into the soup.”

“My days as a florist!” He let out a sigh. “We must have learned that in the first term. It’s with you forever.” He looked around at the set table, the gleam of forks and knives, the shining wine glasses, the dining chairs standing at attention. “It’s all with you forever, isn’t it. Every bit of it.”

“You’re not going to get maudlin, are you, Larry?”

“I might. I’m beginning to have doubts about this whole — ”

“It’s nerves, not doubts. And it’s perfectly normal. When Derek and I used to have dinner parties, I always panicked at the last minute. Like maybe I’ll burn the main course, maybe nobody’ll come, that sort of thing. You did hear from everyone, though, didn’t you?”

“Both the wives faxed.”

“How odd.”

“That’s what I thought. Midge phoned. She and Ian are going to be a few minutes late. And Sam Alvero left a message - he might be a few minutes early, something about picking up his car at the body shop.”

“The McCords?”

“His secretary phoned. She wanted to know if it was black tie or what. I said casual.”

“Now, that’ll be interesting. I wonder what he thinks casual means. Speaking of which, are you going to change?”

“Don’t you like this sweater?”

“I do. You look all wrapped up and safe.”

“That was the idea.”

“Whereas I feel exposed as hell in this dress. Exposed to the gaze of the ex-wives. Their darting little eyes. Inquisitive. I was going to wear a scarf but — ”

“You look perfect.”

“Not too mysterious or menacing? Here she is, folks - Larry Weller’s new woman friend. Hmmm. Now who might she be, how does she fit into the picture? Not exactly a spring chicken, is she? Oh my God, I’m babbling.”

“Nerves.”

“Hold on to me a minute.”

“Hmmmm.”

“That’s better.”

“It’s going to be fine.”

“Actually I can smell the lamb, can you? Heavenly, heavenly garlic. I hope they’re all hearty garlic eaters. Well, too bad for them if they’re not.”

“I can’t smell anything.”

“That’s because you’ve been here all afternoon. And you got the carrots ready, I see.”

“And the soup. But maybe you’d better taste it.”

“We’ve still got half an hour. We could do place cards.”

“I don’t know. That sounds awfully -”

“Formal? Maybe you’re right. Well, let’s at least figure out the seating. Commit it to memory.”

“Why don’t we just let everyone sit where they want -?”

“We can’t
do
that, Larry! What if the two wives ended up next to each other? I mean, we want to keep this informal, but having them side by side might be asking for” - she paused - “for trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? They’re not going to pull each other’s hair out. It isn’t as though they’re rivals.”

“Oh, Larry!”

“What do you mean—‘Oh, Larry’?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes you’re such an innocent.”

“The two of them occupied completely separate slices of time. No overlap at all. I don’t see how they can be rivals. They’re really - I don’t know - fellow escapees.”

“Oh, Larry,” Charlotte said again, shaking her head. “You don’t - you don’t get it, do you?”

“I guess not.” In a way, though, he did.

“Anyway, they’re going to be here any minute and we really should put some thinking into the seating strategy.”