Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Larry’s ex-wife, Dorrie, took the news fairly calmly. She was thinking of making a change in her life too, leaving the car sales business and getting into retail clothing. A major chain had approached her; she was mulling it over. You could move sideways in her line, that was the beauty of sales. As for Ryan, he was eight years old now, old enough to be put on a plane and go down to Chicago for holidays with his dad. And there was always the phone. Rates before seven a.m. were a bargain; they could phone back and forth every day if they felt like it.

  Flowercity, about to be taken over by Flower Village, a Japanese conglomerate, accepted Larry’s resignation coolly, presenting him with a small severance payment and a lapel button in sterling silver, an enameled rose embedded in its surface. “You going to wear that thing?” Larry’s father asked.

  Big Bruce Sztuwark hosted a farewell banquet for Larry out at the West Kildonan Country Club, and all Larry’s friends were there: Bob and Fiona Buxtead, Gene and Liz Chandler, Larry’s mum and dad and sister, Midge, Bill and Heather Herschel and their two kids, Lucy Warkenten, Jim and Jenny Carmody, Sally Ullrich (formerly Sally Wolsche) and poor falling-down-drunk Cubby Ullrich, on and on, even Larry’s ex-wife, Dorrie, and little Ryan, all dressed up in a blazer and his first honest-to-goodness necktie. Thirty-five people sat down to roast beef and trimmings. Bruce, as emcee, delivered in his wet belchy voice what everyone afterward referred to as a eulogy. (“You’d of thunk you’d gone and died!” Sally whispered.) Larry Weller heard himself praised for his loyalty, his steadfastness, his honesty. “And I want to say,” Big Bruce wound up, “that this man sitting here before you is a genius. You’ve all seen the maze he’s installed out at our place, and that my wife, Erleen, and myself are so thrilled to death with. You’ve seen the photos in the paper and the colour spread in Maclean’s. Well, my friends, this here is the guy who created it all. Let’s have a toast, ladies and gents, to our great pal who’s an artist of the true ilk. I give you Larry Weller, master maze maker and a good egg too!”

  “Well,” Sally said at the end of the evening. “Talk about being the celebrity of the night! I’ll bet you had a double erection taking all that in. I’ll bet you were in orgasm heaven.”

  Sally Wolsche was Larry’s first. His first lay, his first fuck, though he never thinks of her in such terms - he’s always been too tenderly grateful, too dazed at his good fortune. That she would look at him at all seemed an act of kindness, that she would offer him a course in sexual first aid seemed a miracle. He thinks of Sally as a random force, a zephyr, who by chance crossed his path and - with purpose, pity, giggling a little as she unzipped his pants - rescued him from shame. There he was, a mere boy at eighteen, unkissed, untouched, unfucked, numbly average, bashfully unexamined. He’d scarcely ever talked to a girl. How this happened he didn’t know. His skin was moderately good, which should have been something to trumpet in the trough of adolescence, but his body worked against him, that spindly trunk, those jointed legs and arms with their concavities, their long, mournful uncertainties.

  After high school he’d registered for the Floral Arts Diploma, and because of his mediocre marks was accepted on probation. “You’ll have to show us you can keep up with the curriculum,” his advisor told him the first day of the course. Her hair was white and lustrous, as befits a floral arts teacher, and she transfixed Larry with a stem smile. Twenty-four women and two men were enrolled, although Larry didn’t think in terms of their being men and women. He felt himself still a boy, and Marty Ross, with his stutter and his blue tractor hat plastered to the back of his head, was, if anything, even more of a boy. The girls, though, the twenty-four randomly shaped, differently scented girls, with their massed hair, their flowing bluedenimed bodies, their loose-leaf notebooks shifting on their sweet shadowy laps - these girls brought a rollicking ease into the classroom that was exuberantly, intoxicatingly feminine. Was it their sense of their own overwhelming numbers that released the brakes? Whatever it was, Larry had never been exposed to such continuous wavelets of girlish laughter. Everything made them laugh, their instructors, their textbook illustrations, their own ineptitude as they struggled to put together those early flower arrangements. The sound of rising girlish laughter pleated the classroom air, charging the atmosphere with a rippling female power, and stunning the two male members of the class, who found themselves assigned, suddenly, to the not dishonorable role of class mascots, vaguely comic, poked and teased and helplessly adored.

  Of all those girls Sally stood out as the prettiest. At nineteen she was a year older than Larry, but miles ahead in sexual experience. She fell into conversation with him at the first get-together party, an event advertised as “ah opportunity to mingle with your peers.” The evening consisted of coffee, donuts, and an enthusiastic greeting from Mrs. Starr, who urged them to linger and “develop a sense of your mutual concerns as young neophytes in our field.”

  “So how did you decide on the Floral Arts course?” Sally said, plumping herself down beside Larry in the general-purpose room where the party was being held.

  He hadn’t recognized this as a merely social question, and so he fell silent and serious, trying to recall why actually he had registered on the course, and wondering whether to tell Sally that it had been his mother’s idea, and that this decision, like almost everything in his life, had presented itself without any easily available alternatives.

  “You like flowers or what?” Sally put it to him more directly.

  What should he tell her? His breath ran fast around his head. It had never occurred to him to take a position on flowers, to like them or not like them. He hadn’t really thought much about flowers, their forms, their uses. A few months ago he’d finished high school, ingloriously, a C average, and now he was forced to ponder the question of how to earn a living. All this had happened faster than he’d imagined. His father was leaning on him to apprentice in sheet-metal work at the bus factory. His mother had got a bee in her bonnet, though, about floral design.

  “Well,” Sally said, crossing her long legs and tracing a lazy circle in the air with her foot, “I personally think flowers are the future. Like we’ve got all the basic stuff, people I mean. We’ve got houses and furniture and cars and groceries. So what we need is something to stick on top of all those basics. We need something non-essential. Something, you know, beautiful to look at. I’ve thought a lot about this. Another thing, I think people need something in their life that’s perishable, so that when it dies you just go out and buy some more. You always know there’s more out there to be had, and that feels good. See what I mean?”

  She wore wide brown fringed pants and a vest edged in the same silky fringe. Larry found himself staring at the front of the vest, the way it tied over a white ribbed T-shirt. “Artificial suede,” she said suddenly, as though this was something he needed to know. “Washable.” Then she said, “I’ve got my mom’s car. You want a lift home after the party?”

  “Let’s drive through Assiniboine Park,” she said when she was behind the wheel. “And see if anything’s going on.”

  Later, her car parked in the moonlight by the entrance to the English Rose Garden, the window cracked to let in the soft, smoky autumn air, she said, socially, “Hey, you know something? - you’ve got all the luck. Two guys in the class and a bevy of girls.”

  Bevy. He wondered what that meant.

  “I mean, you can have your pick. Just point your little lordly finger and she’s yours. And you know what else? You could have Marty Ross too.”

  “Marty?”

  “I see him giving you the eye. The come-on.”

  “Really?”

  “Didn’t you know he’s queer as a kipper?”

  “Well,” he hesitated, “I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.”

  “I can always tell,” Sally said. “I look at a man’s ass and I can figure out right away which way he swings.”

  In the darkness of the car Larry felt his face heating up and his penis glowing like a flashlight
inside his dress pants. Sally Wolsche had looked at his ass. She had appraised his ass. He wondered what his ass looked like. He’d spent a lot of time thinking about his penis, its appearance, its relative size, how it responded to the pressure of his fingers whenever he thought of Megsy Hicks from back in high school, how it betrayed him with its sudden eruptions while he slept, how his best friend, Bill Herschel, referred to his own penis cheerily as a friendly trouser snake, a third leg, a turkey neck. It was baffling: when he looked at himself in the mirror it seemed his penis and testicles were heavy and gloomy, yet they felt the lightest, hottest part of him - why was that?

  But he’d never considered his ass as worthy of attention. Two tight cheeks packed in clean white underpants and blue cords, hidden from the world, but not it seemed from Sally Wolsche, who had looked, judged, and was now wiggling out of her pants and placing Larry’s hand to the folded darkness between her legs, assuring him she’d been on the pill since she was fifteen.

  Of course, he blew off too soon that first time - you stupid prick, he said to himself — but Sally only held him in her smooth, decent, girlish arms and told him in teacherly tones that it was okay, that it happened all the time, that next time she’d show him a way to hang on to it.

  Next time! The words burned behind his eyes. When?

  Sally paused, considering. “I’ve got a real busy week ahead,” she said. “Other commitments. How about right now? If you can get it on, that is.”

  She gazed into the whiteness of his lap, and then, to his astonishment, ducked forward and flicked the tip of her tongue against his limp still-wet penis, bringing it instantly to life, so that he found his body all at once too glad to think, and too close to its melting point to remember afterward what it was he felt. He knew there was utility in this act of hers, a problem-solution briskness that sat on a different shelf than the act of love. Nevertheless he loved her, his sweet Sally, his beloved. (All his life he would be sexually aroused by the grayed air of autumn.)

  And he was grateful, grateful. His excited heart beat like a floppy fish in a body that felt suddenly upended, emptied out, lost in a shrug of ecstatic ease. Acting out of curiosity, boredom, or some uncredited school of charity, Sally Wolsche had taken his puny, unamplified self and unlocked the door to his body and to that greater mystery of where he stood on the planet. He had touched the silken skin of a woman’s inner thigh and had, with a little encouragement, placed his tongue inside a woman’s mouth. His penis (his pistol, his wand, his root and rudder) had tumbled out into the world just as it was supposed to do and found itself an answering vessel, its first ride, its first rich wonderlandish satisfaction. In one night he’d gone from first kiss to first breast touch, and then he’d been taken “all the way,” as people said in those days and maybe still do. He hugged himself for joy. Everything in his life could be revised now, given the hard waxed shine of pertinence and good faith. He could do what his fellow human beings did, what they were meant to do. He was like other people, he was going to be able to live in the world in the same way other people lived.

  One week later Sally came to class with a diamond ring on her finger. She and a young man called Cubby Ullrich, a student in the Furnace Repair course, were planning on a spring wedding. “I guess it’ll be like going steady for life,” she told Larry, giving a helpless little shrug of apology and a not-quite wink.

  “It is not exactly a thing of beauty,” Beth said of her husband Larry’s penis. “Now, breasts are beautiful. And lips. Even vaginas are nice and compact, all folded up so neatly, not showing off. But penises! I don’t mean just yours, Larry, I mean penises in general. Their color and texture - you can’t forget for a minute that they’re made of veins and crepey flesh. And it’s always there, hanging there. Dangling. Or poking out like a frying-pan handle. Don’t you ever wish you could have a vacation from it? A day or two off?”

  “It’s not like that, ” Larry assured her. “If you’ve always had it, you don’t even think of it that way.”

  “What’s odd is that you’re obliged to use the same” - she paused - “the same system for peeing and for sperm delivery. Like a Swiss army knife, if you see what I mean. It’s got these totally different functions. There must be a little brain in there, a little morsel of cerebral tissue anyway that says, okay, pay attention, it’s insertion time. Or else, don’t get excited, this is only a urination stop.”

  “It figures it out.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I thought you said it was ugly.”

  “The concept is beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful, Beth.” He meant it. He said it again, overwhelmed - “You’re beautiful” - against the hemstitched pillow case, under the shaded lamp that beamed a spotlight of heat on her bare shoulder. He loved her depths and mysteries, the sudden stretch of her smile, the sight of her quick oval face turning toward him, her head with the cutting contour brightness at the hairline, tapering to a point on the back of her neck. He wanted to sink his teeth into that point. Sometimes she sat on his chest, and he reached up with his thumbs, smoothing the place where her hairline sliced its clean way against the white of her neck.

  When he was introduced to her at the Barnes’ reception his first week in Chicago, he had been taken by the shaped hollow of her wrists. Later he came to love the knife-edged angle of her shoulder blades too, and her shadowy throat, her shoulders with their cool shelf of bone, her bent knees, the dark wedge of hair between her legs, the lovely lanky sprawl of her in bed. “Beautiful, beautiful.”

  He was always telling her she was beautiful.

  “You know what St. Brigid had to say about beauty,” she said to Larry abruptly one evening, catching his eyes on her body as she drew a sweater up over her head.

  “Brigid?”

  “Sixth century, Irish. Kind of a country girl, milkmaid type, but very beautiful, also extremely devout. She prayed to be made ugly so she could fend off her suitors.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted to marry God. Or Jesus, rather. And her prayers were answered. One of her eyes grew enormously big and the other one disappeared, so her father said all right, you can be a nun.”

  “A one-eyed nun.”

  “And then there was St. Lucy. Third century, late third century, but I’d better check on that. She was so sick of being told she was beautiful that she plucked out her eyes and threw them in her lover’s face.”

  “I guess that showed him.”

  “What these women wanted was spiritual purity. Of course, they were probably a little crazy and some of them were anorexic and dying to die. The shortest route to heaven was a quickie divorce between the body and the spirit.”

  “So sex was out of the picture.”

  “Was she beautiful?”

  “Who?”

  “Dorrie? Your first wife?”

  Larry blinked. This seemed a trick question, arriving without preamble.

  “Well, was she?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Why, Larry?” Beth’s voice bent sharply, and her eyes stared hard at the bony plate in his chest. “It seems to me that’s something you would have noticed in five years of marriage, whether or not your wife was beautiful.”

  “She could be attractive.”

  “Fat or thin?”

  “Skinny.”

  “A skinny car saleswoman. Wait, I’m getting an image. Lots of jangling jewelry?” She said this cruelly, which was not her usual way.

  “Lots.”

  “Gobs of blue eye shadow?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Oh God, why am I jealous of her? Will you explain that to me please?”

  “You shouldn’t be. There’s no reason.”

  “I’m mean. I’m pathetic.”

  “You’re not.”

  “There is a reason, though.”

  “What?”

  “Because you told me once, way back when we first met, that she was sexy.”

  “Did I say
that?”

  “You said sex was the only part of your marriage with Dorrie that worked.”

  “Well, except for the end, the last few months. At the end nothing worked.”

  “Oh, Larry, love, I shouldn’t have brought this up. You look so tragic and sad all of a sudden. You look like you’re going to cry.”

  Larry met Dorrie Shaw at a Halloween party in 1975. He came as a clown; she was a Martian. The Martian suit, with its spiky green antennae and pointed shoes, made her look full of sparks and suppressed laughter. Her breasts were small and round, and, he guessed, hard as tennis balls. When she danced she swerved her hips wildly, her feet moving like flints, but she held her upper body stiff with her elbows tucked in close. The effect was unexpectedly elegant. And sexy.

  A week later he phoned her at work - she’d let slip that she was employed by Manitoba Motors - and asked her out to a movie. “I’m the clown guy,” he reminded her. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “You’re the one who works in a flower store.”

  A few days later he was in her bed, sweetly, plumply, satisfyingly fucked. Dorrie had her own apartment on Lorraine Avenue, a miniature living room, a strip kitchen, and a surprisingly large bedroom with a double bed. Larry could tell she’d put some thought into the bedside lighting, which was soft and pinkish in tone.

  He was twenty-five and had been to bed with five different women since his first encounter with Sally. Not a large number, but not a shameful zero either. At this time in his life he began to suspect that there was more ongoing sex in the world than he’d been led to believe, though he wasn’t sure about Dorrie’s sexual past. She was secretive, careful, clean, and skillful. Her personal contradictions kept him off guard; she was a distracted woman but one who possessed the gift of fierce concentration. She kept her eyes squeezed tight when she made love, her whole body taking him in its grasp and, afterwards, falling asleep under the dead-weight of happiness, the peace of the well-fucked - as she herself would have put it.