Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  As he talked to Larry, he rocked his magisterial chest rhythmically back and forth. “We don’t need a contract,” he said when they got together a second time to discuss the construction of the maze. “We’ve got friends in common. We can trust each other, right?”

  Now Larry’s spending his evenings drawing up plans, and as his 2H pencil moves over the drafting paper he’s feeling himself coming alive again. The apartment he’s rented on Westminster Avenue is a dump, but he likes the neighborhood of worn-down early-century houses and small shops and brick duplexes. Across the street is the Tall Grass Bakery, where he buys warm bread and the city’s best cinnamon rolls and where the gentle-voiced staff know him by name. Hiya, Larry, what’ll it be today? Just like they’ve known him forever. Just like friends.

  It was really Bob Buxtead, not Larry, who won the table decoration trophy at the Provincial Florists Association playoffs. Larry paid the registration fee and offered encouragement, and sat in the front row watching Bob, who stood in a glare of light on the stage at the Convention Center along with the other contestants. They were each given thirteen flowers to work with, a handful of dark glossy twigs, and a plug of florist’s foam. An hour and fifteen minutes later, following a dramatic drum roll, Bob was declared the winner; the judges were unanimous, and now he’s going off to Toronto next week for the nationals.

  Bob Buxtead started out at the store two years ago as a temporary holiday replacement, just a kid, but he was so good that Larry decided to keep him on permanently. He has a long oaken older-man’s face, a square jaw carefully shaved, and a rich, strenuous way of concentrating on what his rather squarish hands are doing. He hums little encouragements to himself as he progresses on a piece, and this humming abruptly stops as he pauses to reach for a flower, a leaf, a width of ribbon, whatever he needs - and then resumes. The hum of creation. He’s weird at times. Once he remarked to Larry that he saw flowers as a branch of poetry, and Larry hadn’t known what to say or where to look.

  Bob Buxtead brought a blue teapot to work and a box of mixed herbal teas, and he brings Larry a cup of lemon zinger or raspberry leaf in the middle of the afternoon instead of the usual bitter coffee, sitting in its pot all day. “Some people find caffeine a depressant, not a stimulant,” he tactfully offered. Sports hold no interest for him - he admits it - and in fact he seems to have no aptitude at all for male joshing, for rough teasing or ongoing jokes. He arrives on time in the morning, works diligently on his orders, eats a packed lunch at noon, and breaks only for his three o’clock cup of tea. There are some days when he and Larry exchange only a few dozen words.

  And yet, when Bob Buxtead announced that he was getting married to his girlfriend, a nurse at Winnipeg General, he asked Larry to serve as best man. “I can’t think of a better friend,” he said simply.

  If friendship is a question of picking up the tune, then Larry has far from perfect pitch. But perhaps it was true that the two of them had become friends. The atmosphere at Flowercity has changed since Bob Buxtead arrived. Things are calmer, even on the busiest days, and in a curious corkscrewy way that Larry can’t begin to articulate, sweeter.

  Lucy Warkenten is one of Larry’s good friends, although they’ve only known each other for a couple of years. Forty-one years old, unmarried, a bookbinder by profession, she balances a tender sense of courtesy with an impulse to lunge, lurch, and barge into the affairs of her friends, of which she has dozens. And yet, when she and Larry go off for their weekly Tuesday movie (half-price tickets for the early show) she is able to make him feel that he’s her only friend, and that she is privileged to be seated next to so agreeable a person. Their after-movie pizza is accompanied by discussions on such subjects as social expectations, censorship, gardens, Egyptian labyrinths, papermaking and its place in the culture, the harm parents do their children, the futility of psychoanalysis, and the difficulties of battling grief and depression, those twin shadows. All these subjects are new to Larry, at least the expression of them, but Lucy has the ability, as he sees it, to place resonant phrases in his throat and the accompanying impulse to nod enthusiastically and say in her floating, forthcoming, ribbony voice “Exactly!”

  “So, you’re seeing a woman then?” Larry’s mother said a few weeks ago, speaking shyly.

  “Not the way you think,” Larry told her.

  When he’s with Lucy, thoughts of age, sex, and failure slip away, and his own ignorance too. A curtain of transparency ripples between them, and he sees their friendship as a kind of enchantment he’s fallen into, and knows enough to prize it. Between them they never speak of his marriage and divorce, nor of Lucy’s living alone and the likelihood that she will go on living alone.

  A pact between exiles?

  Well, maybe.

  Larry doesn’t think of his folks as friends exactly, but in a way they are. He sees them once or twice a week, dropping in after work or bringing Ryan over for Sunday supper. They’ve been pretty good about the divorce, not butting in, and not coming down too hard on Dorrie. “She knows how to manage money,” Larry’s dad said, “that’s one thing. She won’t be bleeding you royal for the rest of your bloody life.” Larry’s mother, Dot, did say once, rather sourly, that she’d rather be a dot than a door, meaning she’d never thought much of Dorrie. “She’s such a tight wound-up little thing.”

  Well, yes, Larry could see how she got that impression. Dorrie’s squirrely little body seemed to be made of bundled wire. She was a natural keeper of strict schedules and hard budgets. A tireless seeker of bargains. Pitiless. (Who said that about being pitiless? Some friend of Larry’s, but he can’t remember who.) Once, in the midst of making love, she caught her breath and said to Larry, “Hurry up, can’t you I’ve got to be at work early tomorrow.”

  Larry’s sister, Midge, who’s been through the marital wars herself, is direct about Dorrie. “She’s a total bitch. I mean! And on top of that she’s brainless. And she tricked you into getting married. Why the hell wasn’t she on the pill like every other woman in the universe? Because she’s dumb, that’s why. Dumb like a fox. Honestly, Lare-snare, you’re well out of it. Good riddance, I say.”

  His son, Ryan? — is Ryan a friend? Fathers and sons are supposed to be pals. But Ryan’s a little boy. He still cries when he’s frustrated or frightened, and this ability to cry - and Larry’s ability to comfort, at least in part - means that they’re not quite friends. The footing’s not equal.

  He loves his child. But he was the one who walked out and left this small boy behind. That’s what the crying’s really about. That’s another reason they aren’t friends.

  “A three-year marriage that doesn’t pan out isn’t a tragedy,” said Larry’s long-time friend Jim Carmody over a drink following the provincial floral competition. Jim is a flower consultant for Weddings Unlimited.

  “Actually it was five years,” Larry said.

  “Well, whatever.”

  “To tell the truth, I used to wonder what you saw in her,” said Sally Wolsche Ullrich, a woman who works in dried plants and flowers, and has been a friend of Larry’s for some years. “Of course, no one ever understands other people’s marriages, it’s like those marriages are shielded from us, such terribly, terribly private arrangements when you think of it. But still! You and Dorrie always seemed to run on different gears, know what I mean?”

  “Sort of,” Larry said.

  Ben Shaw, Dorrie’s oldest brother, ran into Larry out at St. Vital Mall not long ago and said, “Hey, buddy, listen. I’m sorry as hell how things’ve worked with you and Dor. God only knows, she’s not the easiest gal in the world - well, what woman is! Ha. Life’s a bitch and then you marry one. But look, let’s not let this get in the way of us being friends or anything dumb-ass like that, okay?”

  Larry, who has never once thought of his brother-in-law as a friend, said, “Sure, yeah, I’m with you. Okay, Ben, okay.”

  “It’s a rotten time,” said Michael Kelly, one of Larry’s neighbors on Lipton Street. Michael, who
works as a stage carpenter, has just split up with his live-in partner, Scott Allyson, after twelve years. “Like, every relationship has conflict, and Scott and I hung on all this time because we were able to integrate our conflict. On the other hand, you’ve got to keep saying to yourself that it’s damaging to live with someone who isn’t the right person. A kind of poison creeps in, it can kill you in the end. I didn’t know your wife all that well, but the one or two times we got together, well, she seemed kind of on another wavelength. Like another planet almost.”

  “Yeah,” Larry nodded, “that’s true.”

  “You loved her,” Bill Herschel said right after the break-up. They were in Bill’s car, which was piled to the roof with Larry’s clothes, and they were on their way to the newly rented Westminster Avenue apartment. Larry was crying. He’d lost his son, his wife, his place on the planet.

  The houses in old, narrow-streeted Winnipeg were often built in groups of three. Sister houses, they were called, double-story models whose cheap, plain identical architecture was varied only by a gable or a veranda railing or a piece of gingerbread trim. The Herschels’ house had been sistered with Larry’s boyhood house, and between the two growing boys there had always been the airy accident and ease of friendship, which has continued into their adult life. Theirs is a friendship mitered and nailed down, and requiring not a word of analysis or effort of maintenance. Each would have been embarrassed to describe the bond between them, a bond that stretched easily over absence or confession and even, as on the day Larry left Dorrie, tears.

  The crying started with nothing, just a sting behind his eyes as Bill’s car pulled away from the curb, then a full-scale unstoppable propulsion of tears, and the next minute he was drowning, his throat, his lungs filling up. He was making a fool of himself, noisy and gulping for air like those heroes in movies who clutch each other in the big emotional scenes and sob out loud with their big hunky shoulders heaving. You were supposed to cry yourself watching those scenes, but Larry tends to squirm instead. And now, here he was, weeping his eyes out as the car spun on to Broadway Avenue, and here was Bill with one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on Larry’s sleeve and he was saying, “You did love her. That’s something you’re going to want to remember. It’ll make all this seem worthwhile in the long run, the fact that you really did love her in the beginning.”

  The final assault and mop-up of his marriage seems a blur to Larry, and he knows he has his friends to thank. His sadness was curbed, and surprisingly quickly, by the small gifts and kind words of those friends. His gratitude, though, was hobbled by the fact that he distrusted slightly the state of his own wretchedness, which felt mechanically induced and inflated, like something from a TV show. He eyed his responses skeptically, and found himself shaken by the fear of artifice, in much the same way he had been wracked by the slipperiness of his love for Dorrie during their English honeymoon, dismayed to find that love so freshly pledged and publicly sworn could keep rising up and then disappearing.

  And so he wonders, looking back to the days following his leaving Dorrie, if his grief wore a kind of stage make-up that gave him away. His confusion, except for his grief over Ryan, felt bejeweled, unearned. Bill found him a lawyer, who got things rolling right away. Other friends lent him furniture, invited him to meals and football games, praised him for his so-called adjustment and offered cheerful unmocking compliments about his new growth of beard, the first serious beard of his life. Almost no one asked for the details of the break-up, and Larry was grateful for that, since he knows, even at age thirty-three, that discovery wears people out, and repetition has a way of enlarging the half-rehearsed acts that make up sad marriages.

  Sometimes at night he woke from bizarre dreams and whispered to himself, “Careful, careful.” Be careful of chaos, of silence, of words, of other people, of myself, that stranger Larry Weller. Sometimes, too, he felt he needed lessons in how to be a grown-up man. How do you learn to deal with the daily calendar, a new red number every day, pushing you into the tunnel of an ever-receding future?

  It’s come as a surprise to Larry, considering the gaping hole at the center of his life, that so many of his old routines continue as before. Here he is, suddenly a single guy, a divorced man, living not in a house but in a one-bedroom apartment, but he nevertheless spends the same eight hours every day working in the same old florist establishment, taking telephone orders for the same bridal bouquets and centerpieces, and tallying up the bills at the end of the week. Flowers, their intricate waxy petals, keep him from thinking about wanting the life he wants. He still has Sunday supper sitting in his mother’s padded breakfast nook, the unvarying roasted meat and potatoes and Brussels sprouts in their blue-and-white serving dish. Shame attends him, and loneliness, but there are days when he wants to say, “I’m in love,” meaning in love with his new arrangements. On Saturdays he and Bill Herschel drive out to Birds Hill to spend an hour or two on the hiking trails. They’ve done this since they were young boys, telling each other dirty jokes, beneath which lay unlit embers of sex, what they needed to know or pronounce out loud. To Birds Hill they took a cheap Boy Scout compass and a map, and there they willed themselves to become lost, so that they could arrive, heroically, at a state of being found. It was a game; they’d invented it, its theatrics and rewards. You took a stream, you followed it closely; it would lead you somewhere; you could count on it. Larry sometimes felt that his body’s essence, his sense of who he was, drained away between the bookends of those weekend walks.

  Now they take their children along, Larry’s son, Ryan, and Bill’s two girls. Bill wears a pair of binoculars around his neck, and Larry carries a small and beautiful spiral notebook in his back pocket.

  This notebook was a gift from Lucy Warkenten, she who believes so ardently in the power of books and their registered messages. “You just might want to jot down your feelings from time to time,” she’d suggested shortly after the separation. “People under stress sometimes find they can discharge their feelings if they get them down on paper.” This was just one of the many pieces of helpful advice Larry has received from his friends.

  So far he’s written only two words in the notebook, and these are on the first page. “Dorrie. Dorrie.”

  Often he hears of a divorced couple who become friends, and he finds himself wondering from time to time if this will ever happen to him and Dorrie. He doubts it. Some extravagant meltdown would be necessary first. Or a prolonged period of rainy stillness, leading to accidental laughter or a shared impromptu meal or an emergency of some kind or an old joke recalled, or perhaps the photographs from their English honeymoon brought out.

  He’s going on with his life, but at the same time he’s deeply distressed, he knows he is. He reasons that being friends with Dorrie might take the edge off the panic he continually feels. But that’s not going to happen; he feels pretty sure of that.

  Something happened to Larry back in high school; some fever of discouragement came over him. His other, earlier self, the brave little boy standing at the edge of the playground and hugging the elbows of his woolen sweater - he had loved him better. That photograph self, posed against the green unfallen world.

  But adolescent Larry Weller, that mediocre student at MacDonald Secondary in west Winnipeg, only son of Dot and Stu Weller, brother of Midge Weller — that Larry had found himself slipping backward and was too stupidly feeble to put up a defense, and too addicted to the luxury of dreams to wake up. He was condemned to daily humiliations — of not knowing how to position his feet under his desk in study hall, of accidentally slurping his soup in the cafeteria, and what made it worse was that he understood precisely how widespread, how dull, how ordinary these adolescent lapses were.

  He had the wrong nose, the wrong shoulders. Once begun, the momentum of failure increased incrementally, and he was saved from real despair only by the certainty that the excruciating awe, pity, and embarrassment of his life would someday come to an end. He knew this without believing i
t, in the same way you know but can’t believe the center of the earth is molten material. Maybe that’s why he walked around wanting to punch someone in the nose. Anyone.

  And yet, Bill Herschel had found his way out, why shouldn’t Larry Weller? Bill had a girl, someone he took to movies, someone he kissed and whose sweater front he was allowed to touch. He’d found a way to warm his freezing limbs. Meanwhile, on Saturday nights, when his fellow students were out at a rock concert or gathered in someone’s rec room to smoke, drink beer, and make out, Larry was at home reading old copies of Popular Mechanics or watching television with his parents, either the hockey game or the Saturday night movie. The living-room curtains were pulled snug; the furnace hummed. He felt his loneliness become a kind of embarrassment, and that embarrassment was eating his self away. Neither his mother nor father seemed to have any inkling about their son’s failure to connect with the world, and, enclosed in the shell of their bland unawareness, he was safe, at least temporarily. Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence.