Larry's Party (39 page)

“‘That it even occurs to him!”

“My husband Derek never once -”

“My father, Midge’s and mine I should say—”

“Ah, I do not understand. Midge here is your sister, Larry? You did not tell me.”

“His big sister, let me add! And Ian at the other end of the table is my partner.”

“Your husband. I see.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“This really is a family party. I see. I am honored to be included.”

“Almost a reunion, Samuel. But I was going to say that my dad occasionally would make tea -”

“Are you sure, Larry? I don’t remember your dad lifting a finger in the kitchen.”

“But tea was absolutely all he did.”

“So that makes you the first generation of male soup makers.”

“Garth’s never made soup.”

“Neither have you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was just saying—”

“You don’t even like soup. Remember that time in Santa Barbara. You sent the soup back. You said you thought it was idiotic to fill up on peasant slop instead of waiting for—”

“Marcia means to say that—”

“I remember having the most wonderful sorrel soup in Tennessee. Remember, Larry, it was during our honeymoon.”

“Your honeymoon? Ah, in Spain we say
luna de miel.
Direct translation. I always feel happy when I find direct translation.
Luna
is moon, you see, and
miel
-”

“When Derek and I were married we said that we’d postpone our honeymoon until—”

“When I find direct translation, I feel the world is more small.”

“True, true.”

“There’s this restaurant in Saskatoon that serves lemon meringue soup!”

“What? Where?”

“I understand, Beth, that you live in England. Marcia and I try to get to London twice a year, and, in fact, that’s where we first developed our passion for garden mazes. We saw three or four—”

“At least four! I’m a mad fanatic for keeping track of details, ask anyone, and I’m sure we visited at least four, maybe five -”

“In the abstract, there’s no reason for these mazes. They’re wrapped in privilege, they do nothing -”

“And we were so taken by the, the mystery of them, all they stood for, symbolically, transcendentally, that we thought we’d try to bring the tradition home to Toronto.”

“A maze is not culturally specific, that’s what Garth believes.”

“So this is the McCord maze you mentioned earlier?”

“To be officially opened in a few days.”

“Mazes are like - they’re like thumbprints on the planet.”

“The tighter the whorl, the higher the blood pressure. Did you know that?”

“Tighter the what? Higher the what?”

“One of our culture’s flipped pancakes, completely useless except - ”

“The mayor’s going to cut the ribbon.”

“And she’ll lead the first party through.”

“The way we see it, at the center of the maze there’s an encounter with one’s self. Center demands a reversal, a new beginning, a sense of—”

“—of rebirth. In the turns of the maze, one is isolated and then comes alive again.”

“Which speaks to the contemporary human torment of being alternately lost and found.”

“You can see that Garth’s become a convert.”

“Wait’ll you see the seven-point node - it’s got a magnolia tree and—”

“The thing about a maze, there can be one route or many. If you think of that symbolically, it means that our lives are open—”

“Most of the city councillors will be there, officials and so on. Marcia and I’ll be there, of course. Samuel will do the interpreting of plant types. And Larry here will accompany us in case we really get lost.”

“We’ve always needed the idea that history moves forward, toward improvement of some kind, at the very least renewal. But this maze of Larry’s hints at the circular journey which is really, when you stop to think about it - ”

“Edmond Carpent says that the maze - ”

“Take the Ore algorithm -”

“Controlled chaos and contrived panic.”

“That’s exactly right, Dorrie. Wonderful. But how -?”

“I read an article on it. A whole book, in fact.”

“Oh! The Spellman book?”

“You look surprised.”

“You do surprise me, Dorrie. You always have.”

“I live with a maze, remember? Right outside my window. Well, half a maze anyway.”

“And you’ve kept it going. I’ve always wondered why -”

“It wasn’t an act of penance, if that’s what you think. I guess ...

I’ve got used to it. I love it, if you want to know the truth.”

“What are you two whispering about?”

“Can I offer a little more of Larry’s soup? Dorrie? Garth?”

“Just a smidgen.”

“So curious this language, English. Smidgen!”

“But does anyone really get lost in a maze?”

“Larry did. On our honeymoon.”

“The Versailles maze, destroyed unfortunately, had thirty nodes and forty-three branches and -”

“Your
honeymoon? I do not understand. Did you not say—”

“I wasn’t
really
lost -”

“Weren’t you, Larry? At Hampton Court? I remember how we waited for you. How we were worried when you didn’t come out with the rest of us.”

“A person doesn’t need any particular knowledge to solve a maze. You’re born with the necessary navigational equipment.”

“So this was
another
honeymoon.”

“Ah!”

“I haven’t had a chance to explain that both Dorrie - and Beth - well, by coincidence they both -”

“- happened to be here in town, and that’s why Larry and I decided to have a few friends in to dinner at Larry’s place and -”

“And Derek? Is he—?”

“Dead. Some time ago. Cancer.”

“I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have -”

“Terribly sorry.”

“Cancer, a scourge.”

“My therapist believes that most cancers are caused by anger, by not recognizing and embracing your anger. He says I’m a case in point, not that I have cancer, not yet anyway, but he says I really have got to attempt to claim -”

“Do you have a family back in Spain, Samuel?”

“My brothers, my sister -”

“But are you married?”

“She has been dead one year. My wife. It was a depression. She took some sleeping pills.”

“My therapist says - ”

“‘That’s one reason I accepted to take this project in Canada. To make some air between my sorrow and myself.”

“To put some distance.”

“Yes, precisely! To put some distance.”

“Who was it who said ‘only disconnect?’”

“Forster, wasn’t it? But I think he actually said -”

“If no one would like another helping of the soup—”

“Let me give you a hand, Charlotte.”

“No, Larry. Let
me
give Charlotte a hand. If I sit any longer this baby’ll get a permanent crick in its neck.”

 

“Ah hah! that looks like a leg of lamb.”

“I thought I smelled lamb when I came in the door earlier.”

“I adore lamb!”

“Larry, this is a night of surprises.”

“He shops, he cooks, he carves.”

“And sets a mean table.”

“No, really, I -”

“And he gets himself lavishly praised.”

“Men!”

“It’s not their fault that we love and patronize them in the same breath.”

“Good heavens. I just noticed! This is our old table we’re sitting at. Larry and I bought this table in Chicago, at an auction!”

“Beautiful.”

“Men! The praise men get just for being men!”

“What’s it like being a man these days?”

“Yes, what’s it like? In the last days of the twentieth century?”

“Tell us.”

 

Larry, slicing through the pink lamb and serving second helpings on to still-warm dinner plates, is struck by a thought. That he’s hardly ever given a party before. He grew up in a house that, except for family dinners, never once resonated with the chimes of party noise and festivity. No children’s birthday parties, nothing happening on New Year’s Eve except the TV, Times Square, New York City, and a glass of sweet sherry at midnight. Had his mother and father simply lacked the gene for hospitality? Or, and this is more likely, had they been too shy, or else ignorant of the shaping impulse that blows a party into being? It should be such a simple, natural thing, really, the gathering of a few friends under a roof, the offering of food and drink and warmth and also that curious tensile and sometimes dangerous platform of opportunity for
something to happen.

But, of course, it isn’t simple at all - and he realizes this now, looking around the softly lit table, his friends, this gathering of strangers and kin - and three women he has known so well,
known -
and feeling the party, his first and only party, slipping sideways, collapsing, turning rigid. Shouldn’t a party loosen ordinary human bonds? Good question.

At this moment Larry is feeling the opposite, that the membrane between people is tougher than he’d imagined. Where was the tonic glitter of personality he’d imagined. Perhaps he should open another bottle of wine. Wine the great loosener. Yes.

“Yes,” his first wife, Dorrie, is asking from her end of the table, “tell us what it’s like being a man these days.” Her mouth is crisper than he’d remembered and now it shapes itself into the beginning of a smile, or perhaps another question.

Dorrie’s idea of giving a party had been to invite another couple over to the house for pizza and TV. He remembers those late seventies evenings, Dorrie in jeans and a sweater and her thick hair brushed smooth around her small face, setting a bowl of chips-and-dip on the coffee table, and another of peanuts, muttering to herself about whether the rug needed a quick vacuum. Then thawing the frozen pizza for heating up later, checking to see that there was a bottle of wine in the fridge, worrying about the baby waking up.

How many such evenings had there been? - probably only a few, Larry thinks. And where had he been in the preparations for those joyless, weary, two-couple gatherings? Nowhere. It seemed nothing had been expected of him.

He wonders what kind of parties Dorrie gives now. She lives in the same house, but both the house and her life have changed dramatically. She’s stronger now, but she’s also softened; he supposes some people would call this change a mellowing, but it goes beyond that. He can tell by the way she’s cutting her lamb, the neat, sure strokes of her knife, the alert look of pleasure on her face, that she’s more comfortable in the world than she once was. None of which should surprise him. But it’s not her skill with a knife that holds his attention. No, it’s her eyes, those wide, remembered gray eyes, that seem to be tipping the whole room in her direction. Her neck rising out of the collar of her dark dress and that wide strip of silver at her throat - has she any idea how she looks?

“Are we talking about young men?” Beth asks. “Or men who grew up convinced they belonged to the dominant culture?”

“I think,” Midge says, “that we’re talking about the men at this table.”

Beth sits back in her chair, registering delight. She has already cleared her plate of vegetables. “In that case, who’s going to go first?”

“This question. Do you mind - my English is so slow - do you mind saying again this thing, this question you have asked.”

Contentedly, Beth laces her hands across her abdomen. “We want to know what it’s like being
you,
at this time in
our
history.”

She’s happy tonight. Larry remembers that she always loved parties, that she had grown up with parents who hosted a dinner party every week or two. Beth, when he married her, took for granted a chest of family silver, enough for twelve. Also several sets of china, and individual saltcellars, each with its own tiny spoon. She sailed into married life with a calm regard for well-cooked, traditional food, immense roasts carved into thick slices and accompanied by the passing of a silver gravy boat. These were the very parties she always talked about giving, she and Larry in their Oak Park house. That, after all, was why they’d bought the house, and the table with its ten beautiful chairs, a table whose edge she is now fingering through the heavy cloth, perhaps calling up its smooth grain and luster.

These parties, though, hardly ever took place. She was too busy with her dissertation, her lectures, too preoccupied to dive into serious arrangements, the phone calls or written invitations, the menu, the kitchen work. Besides, she’d given up meat, and found the thought of preparing fish for eight or ten too daunting. “We owe everyone,” she used to moan to Larry, but with a sly catch of amusement in her voice. “We’ll never catch up.”

“Lima beans,” Garth McCord says happily. “I haven’t had lima beans since was a kid at school.”

“In France they ”

“In our family we never had leans. It’s a long story.”

“More wine, Marcia?”

“Lovely wine. It reminds me of the time Garth and I -”

“This table. If you find you don’t really need it, Larry, I wouldn’t mind having it back.”

“Being a man at this moment of history means—”

“Go on, Ian. What does it mean?”

“It means — are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes!”

“Well, we’re certainly no longer providers and guardians. That went years ago.”

“For the most part, not for everyone—”

“And we don’t belong to male lodges anymore. That used to be part of the male support system. The Elks, the Moose, the Lions, the Rotarians.”

“I can’t picture you belonging to—”

“And hunting and fishing? — forget it. Women sneer when we men talk about hunting and fishing.”

“That’s not true, Ian. I love it when you go fishing.”