Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Fucking was her sole word for the act of love, and she was able to pronounce that charged, heated monosyllable with a calm neutrality, exactly as she pronounced such other activities as shopping or driving. How many other men had there been? He was always, before their marriage, and during, on the edge of putting the question to her, but when the subject loomed, some sharp movement on her part, a dismissive shake of her head, warned him to hold off. She kept her secrets, and he half admired her for leaving him to pluck them out by guesswork.

  They made love in his father’s car, on the floor in the backroom of the florist’s where he worked, on the grass at Birds Hill Park, in an upstairs bathroom at Bill and Heather Herschel’s, where they went to a housewarming party, in eleven different freezing hotel rooms during their honeymoon in England, on an airplane coming home to Canada, struggling under the Air Canada blanket and trying to keep their breathing inaudible. When they came together they were intense and silent, as though they’d been born to an age ignorant of the discourse of love. Endearments, curses, complaints closed themselves off when their bodies joined, a light switch doused. Only at the end of their marriage did Dorrie sometimes bark into his ear a command to hurry, that he was taking too long, and that was one of the ways he knew it was over between them.

  Larry doesn’t like to think of himself as being prim or prudish, not at all, and yet he never really got used to the way Dorrie said fuck instead of making love.

  Plunge, prick, thrust, ram, split, screw, stab, and throb. Pulsate, stroke, bang, pummel. Hot beef injection. Slam, pierce, penetrate. Skewer, poke, drill, pop. Enter, entering into the darkness, the body, losing yourself in fire, in silence, in love.

  When Larry was in his late teens he started jogging in the early evening after supper. “Ha,” Larry’s dad said with a lazy wink, “I’d rather do my jogging between eleven and twelve at night.” As far as Larry knows, this was the only instance in which his father had referred to the act of sex.

  But Mr. Herschel, next door, was full of sexual innuendo. An extroverted twinkly neighborhood man, a planner of block parties, the possessor of a full head of hair, pale-eyed, tie-clipped, he liked his jokes broad and raw and was always ready with a variation. “When the weather’s hot and sticky,” he recited, “That’s no time for dipping dickie. When the frost is on the pumpkin, that’s the time for dickie dunking.”

  Were penises funny then? Or such a serious business that they had to be roughly masked in backyard humor. Was a penis an event? Was it history? Was it sacred or profane? As a boy Larry didn’t know. And at age thirty-six he still doesn’t know. The business of sex holds these questions in its mesh, like sequins or tiny beads.

  How does a penis taste? He’ll never know.

  All he knows is that his penis is with him forever, doing more or less what a penis is meant to do. It’s his to wash and tug at and dust with talcum powder and look after and use, and his to witness as it grows old along with the rest of his body. His partner in life, this extension of flesh, so creaturely, blind, and blundering, so friendly and willing in its puppyish moods, but which, in the future - he has no doubt about it - will be ready to betray him.

  “Just tell me this,” Beth Prior asked her new husband. “Did you love her? Or should I even be asking this question?”

  “You know you have every right to ask that question.”

  “Well?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean yes?” Her fingernails were flat and clean like little stained-glass windows.

  “I loved her. But that was then. This is now.”

  “And there’s nothing left, you swear?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Is that your best answer?”

  “I think so.”

  “Shall I turn out the light?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Three years ago, when Larry’s father started having pains in his gut, his wife, Dot, made him go to the doctor. Some tests were ordered, but the results were inconclusive. It was decided after some consultation that he should have a CAT scan.

  The machine was a miracle but at the same time a disappointment. A big humming beer can, Larry’s father had been led to believe. He thought he was going to feel like rolling into a science fiction story, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was - well — like normal. Except that there in the silent half-darkness his body was chopped into transverse slices and photographed. A slice of pancreas, a slice of liver, a slice right through his lower colon where the cancer was eventually discovered. The sealed human body was, after all, a knowable country, with its folded hills and valleys laid open to view.

  This is how Larry thinks of his life. He was born in the year 1950, and, given extraordinary luck, it’s possible he’ll live for a hundred years, right into the middle of the next century, in fact — ending his life in the year 2050. This span of years feels lucky to him and almost mystical in its roundness and balance.

  But when he looks at that allotted time and the self he’s been assigned, he is unable to focus. The sequential years shatter the minute he sets his glance in their direction. They lose their meaning, and fall instead into CAT-scan slices, brilliantly dyed and intricately detailed: his work, his friends, his family, his son, his love for his two wives, his bodily organs - and the few small bits of knowledge he’s managed to accumulate so far.

  His brain is always busy, and he wonders if other people live their lives in the same state of unfolding thought; it’s as though a little man lived inside his head, a dancing stick figure who gestures and darts just behind the wall of his forehead, a loose-jointed professor jumping up and down with excitement, debating, questicuning, and never sleeping except when Larry sleeps.

  For the last few years he’s been thinking of the how of mazes. How to design and install them, what shrubbery to select, how to maintain and control growth. Now, under the direction of Dr. Eric Eisner, he is thinking of the why of the subject. Ur. Eisner - sixtyfive years old, bald, slit-eyed, portly - rejects, on the whole, the theory that the medieval garden maze constituted a holy pilgrimage in microcosm, a place where a pilgrim might wend his way to the maze’s secret heart and therein find sanctuary and salvation. “It’s an awful cute theory,” Dr. Eisner tells Larry in his south Chicago accent, “but a little too neat.” No. According to Dr. Eisner, the underlying rationale of the maze is sexual - this from a man who lives alone in a high-rise apartment and appears to have no sexual impulses whatever. A labyrinth, Dr. Eisner says, twists through the mystery of desire and frustration. It doubles back on itself, relishing its tricks and turns. It’s aroused by its own withholding structure. In the center, hidden - but finally, with a burst, revealed - lies sexual fulfillment, heaven. “Or as close to heaven,” Dr. Eisner concludes breezily, socially, “as any mortal man can come.”

  That’s where Larry is now. At the site of that heaven. Forget the past, forget the future, the real music is spilling out of now, out of here. It’s crashing on his eardrums. It’s the lozenge on his tongue, the swelling of his penis, the shapes of women’s eyes, the outreaching limbs of trees, the suck, the sniff, the savor of this minute — which will not come again.

  Beth Prior, Larry’s now-wife, likes to claim she’s a third-wave feminist, which means she’s anxious to understand the mysteries of men as well as women.

  She’s fond of quoting what Toni Morrison says about “the other” that Americans fear and envy and anguish over. Only it was never race for me, Beth says. It was men who were “the other.” Who were they really? What did they want?

  “Now let me get this straight,” she asks Larry. (It’s Sunday afternoon; they’re lying naked except for a coating of sunblock, in the blaze of the enclosed deck off their townhouse on Harlem Avenue. She has her nose in a terry beach towel, and her fingers are tapping a tune on Larry’s warm chest.) “When teenage boys go around having erections and daydreams and masturbating all over the place and suffering, wh
at is it they actually want? I mean, do they just want to stick their penises into something?”

  “You mean like in a knot-hole? Or a jar of liver?”

  “I’m serious. I need to know these things.”

  “I don’t think so. That’s not all of it, not just sticking it into something.”

  “Or ramming it into something.”

  “You mean like punching someone in the nose?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I used to go around wanting to punch someone in the face—”

  “You, Larry? I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Who did you want to punch?”

  “It wasn’t a who. It was - just the whole world.”

  “You’re talking about ordinary male anger and aggression.”

  “Maybe. I grew up with a dad who was mad, remember.”

  “A mad dad. I don’t see your father that way. What was he mad at?”

  “At the government. His gas mileage. And, I don’t know, he was mad at the newspaper, mad at the weather. Mad at everything. It could be I caught it from him.”

  “Like a virus.”

  “Or it could be just - just wanting to be noticed.”

  “And do you still want to punch someone in the nose?”

  “Sometimes. Not as often, but sometimes. How did we get on this subject?”

  “I was asking you why boys want to stick their penises into things.” She propped herself up on her elbows, her face peering at him sideways, earnest and avid and smiling into his eyes. “Tell me.”

  The rapture of another body, of a woman’s body - that was it, he wanted to tell her, or the largest part of it. Wanting to know another body and knowing your own was never going to be enough. But to say this to Beth was to risk her feeling she was only a portion of a larger female tide that washes over him and makes his existence bearable.

  And there’s something else that Beth can never be told, which is that the wholly unexpected happiness of Larry’s second marriage has created within him a new tide of love toward his first wife, Dorrie. During his and Dorrie’s brief marriage the feeling between them had never been more than a ragged, stunted, starved impulse; the two of them lacked the imagination to bring anything more to life, and at the time of the separation he had come close to hating her. But now, since meeting Beth, he’s been conscious of a rapid and steady mending of his old faulty attachment. In the mist of his subconscious his now-wife, Beth, and his then-wife, Dorrie, merge: a pair of sea creatures, sisters, all skin and clefts and tender seeking hands. The old resentments and angers of his life with Dorrie have faded from view, leaving a circle of radiance behind: their young, uncertain bodies, their heartbreakingly dumb silence, their wordless arrival at states of ecstasy, and the long sleep that followed, the happy, enviable, reassembling unconsciousness of children.

  Sometimes Larry feels that Beth has taken over the old injuries of his first marriage and made them hers.

  But how unjust for one person to unload his grief on to another! It was like the story Beth told him not long ago, how the one-eyed St. Brigid possessed the magic power to pass her chronic headaches along to a minor fellow saint, who willingly assumed them and who became known, for his troubles, as the patron saint of headaches.

  “You never answered my question,” Beth said sleepily, turning away from him. She reached around and tucked her hand between his legs. “About boys’ penises. About what penises want to do?”

  There were mysteries, Larry knew, snugged in the corners of the universe. No one knows, for instance, what keeps a bicycle vertical when it’s in motion. No one knows why a man needs to show the world different versions of himself, and that one of these versions is the burrowing animal need to touch someone else.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” Larry said to the smooth sheen of his wife’s back, shutting his eyes against the sun and against Beth’s ever-questioning voice, protecting her from the ratchety movement of his thoughts, knowing he was falling short of her expectations, and that he would always in one way or another fail her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Larry Inc. 1988

  A/MAZING SPACE INC.

  Laurence J. Weller — Landscape Architecture Specialty: Garden Mazes

  982 Lake Street, Suite 33, Oak Park, 11. 91045

  Telephone: 312 999 2888

  Fax: 312 999 8884

  At the age of thirty-eight Larry Weller finds himself a member of a rarefied and eccentric profession: he is a designer, and what he designs and installs are garden mazes. A simple maze maker is what he prefers to call himself; the alliteration of the label appeals to him, and so does the artisan directness and the hands-on assumption, even though he’s obliged, every time, to stop and explain what a maze maker is, the insiderly scoop, and what he does. Larry’s maze specialty twinkles at the edge of his world, often its only point of color; there are fewer than a dozen maze makers in the world; they’re a rare breed.

  He admits to anyone curious enough to ask that the North American market for mazes is small, minuscule really, since those who hanker for luxurious garden toys need to be both rich and intellectually quirky. In getting into formal gardening he has caught, entirely by accident, one of the generational updrafts: the realization that there is time at the end of this long, mean, skeptical century for leisure, time for the soul’s adornment. Maze aficionados tend to possess an off-key imagination, a sense of history (be it warped or precise), a love for teasing mysteries or else a desperate drive toward the ultimata of conspicuous affectation. Such people are rare but they do exist. They can be ferreted out, as Laurence J. Weller has discovered, through word of mouth or by means of tiny, boxed, well-placed advertisements in the back pages of Real Estate Gold or Architectural Digest.

  Larry, who grew up in a blue-collar family in Winnipeg, Canada, is still uneasy in the company of the rich, though he’s dependent on them now for his livelihood. That was one of the points he and his wife, Beth, had to consider when he officially hung up his shingle last year. He’s become a person adept in the dodge-and-feint department. (Yes, Mr. Barnes. Of course, Mr. Barnes.) A learned shamelessness is the cloak he puts on, having mastered the art of listening deferentially, head to one side, one eyebrow richly attentive, ready to absorb some new and astounding counter-proof- absolutely , Mr. Barnes. He is obliged to explain, patiently, pad and pencil in hand, such things as maze mathematics, maze aesthetics and conventions, possible maze construction, and finally, breaking the news as quietly as possible, the high cost of maze maintenance. Is this going to be his life, he wonders, articulating to the rich the particular ways in which they can part with their cash?

  He’s noticed that the heft of money makes the bodies of the wealthy more dense, more boldly angled and thus threatening, even when suited, dressed, coated - and wrapped in the soundlessness of their immense, padded, and luxuriously ventilated office spaces. The rich are underpinned by ignorance, he’s noticed. They know nothing of the authentic scent of dust and dowdiness. They never knew a time when people bought winter tomatoes in little cardboard cartons, four of them lined up beneath a cellophane roof, twenty-nine cents, and how thrifty housewives - like Larry’s mother, for instance - used only half a tomato for the family salad each night, so that the box lasted eight days, just over a week. The rich - except for the self-made rich - believe they’re biting at the apple of life just because they know enough to appreciate pre-Columbian art and handpieced quilts. They’re out of touch, they’re out to lunch, they breathe the dead air of their family privilege.

  Larry can’t yet speak the many-branched language of money: the dizzying vocabularies of commodities, equities, or the running phrases that spill from the mouths of the moneyed and then hook into a thick mesh of entitlement - what they want, what they expect. “This will all have to be done over,” said Larry’s most recent client, Phillip Jasper of the Jasper Foundation (tobacco, sportswear, plastics, cancer research). “The green of those
hedges is too green-green. What I want is a blue-green. Deeper, more European like. A religious green, if you know what I mean. Oceanic. Big. But intimate too.”

  “Completely done over. You don’t mean completely—” “Cost? Don’t worry about it. This is heritage we’re talking about. What I’m leaving behind. A lasting monument. But it’s also something I want my very, very dear friends to enjoy in the here and now.”

  “If you’re absolutely sure -”

  “Right. So, we’re on, Mr. Weller? Terrific. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a meeting in exactly three minutes and -”

  “I could show you some samples of the amur privet that has a dark-green leaf and does well in compacted soils -”

  “I’ll leave it to you, okay? You’re the expert, Mr. Maze. Hey! How about that for a name! Mr. Maze!”

  Larry now has nine completed projects in his portfolio, though he supposes he can’t really count his first maze, which was a crude experiment in his own yard back in Winnipeg. He thinks of it often, though, even after all these years. The angled alignment of shrubs had completely surrounded the little house on Lipton Street, the mixed greens of cotoneaster, caragana, and alpine currant, hearty northern shrubs all of them, and it had driven his first wife wild. She wanted a lawn like other people had, not a bunch of snaky bushes running all over the place and giving her the heebie-jeebies.