Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Well, don’t you think—?”

  “He knows. I know he knows. There’ve been hints. Questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Like why we got divorced.”

  “What do you say to that one?”

  “I said I was too dumb to be married at that time in my life.”

  “So was I. Christ. A regular doofus.”

  “No, Larry. We were both dumb, but I was also stupid and also—”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  “—and also crazy. But then I got sane. I figured it out, after you left, all those years, I figured out how to stop being a coupon cutter and get sane and stay that way. One of the things I figured out was that you don’t have to know every single particle of everything. Not every last shred has to be dragged out in the open. And I don’t want Ryan to think - to think we had to, you know, get married, that we were forced to—”

  Larry remembers suddenly how she used to stutter when she cried.

  “We loved each other, Dorrie. That’s the real reason we got married.”

  “Did we?”

  He can’t judge her tone, whether it’s bitter or beseeching. “Yes, we did,” he says, bringing a firmness to his voice. “I may have forgotten a lot, but I remember that for sure.”

  She’s sniffling now, between her words. “He’ll be all right, Larry. He can handle this by himself. He doesn’t have to be told straight out.”

  “You were the one who used to worry about explaining things to him.”

  “I was younger then, I hadn’t got myself together yet.”

  “But don’t you think it would help if—?”

  “This one thing he can manage. Just this one thing. Please, Larry. Trust me on this one.”

  He lets a moment of silence go by, then says, “If you’re sure—”

  “I’m sure.”

  “He’s turning into a great kid.”

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “You too.”

  “I shouldn’t keep you.”

  “Bye, Larry.” Tears in her voice; he can hear them.

  “Night.”

  Larry feels it the instant he puts down the phone: a guilty relief. And then, without warning, a potent electric shock of happiness so violent it seems to slice his body open from end to end. For a minute or two, all his senses are wired into this state of simple rapture. Dorrie’s voice, its dying vibrancy. His tender white-limbed wife asleep upstairs. And his beloved child, whose name, for no reason he can recollect, is Ryan. He’ll own this mysteriously bestowed name forever.

  And what else? Larry asks himself. His own good luck, his dangerous history, his mistakes and promises, this dark silent capacious house, and the secrets and compromises that lie - serenely enough - beneath its roof.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Larry’s Search for the Wonderful and the Good 1992

  At the age of forty-two Larry Weller, a landscape designer with an office in suburban Chicago, gives the appearance of having found tranquility and ease in his life. He’s not interested in breaking through the power firmament. He’s already, in fact, come further along in the world than he ever expected to. Everything about him announces a man in a state of reasonable good fortune. His business card with its nicely enigmatic logo. His paid-up Visa bill. His tax receipts, which are squared, stapled, and neatly filed in a place where only Larry or his wife can find them. His clothes, his jeans, sweaters, his wide and narrow leather belts, his sports shoes and crisp socks - all these modestly wrap, enhance, and decently accommodate Larry Weller’s middle-aged bones and attendant psyche, the relaxed apparel of good but not exclamatory quality. Moreover, his bodily flesh, his average face with its look of tightly woven canvas, his benign, slightly thickening trunk and limbs - these enable him to assume and maintain, when he chooses, a physical position of rare stillness, and his wife, Beth (his second wife, actually), has noted Larry’s postural feats with a measure of pride: the way he can sit for an hour or more without twitching or scratching, composing his limbs so that he becomes a benign, amiable statue - at a backyard barbecue, for instance, or at a public lecture, it doesn’t matter which - without crossing and uncrossing his legs in the tiresome way that more nervous, more self-conscious, and more appeasing men do, and how Larry is able to lean with just the right degree of incline into a gathering of people, his head angled forward, his frame subtly poised and attentive and eager to catch the least verbal breeze; he’s endlessly appreciative, or so it appears, of what he’s being offered, those scattered buds of suburban insight, or an obscure and mutually flattering joke, or perhaps an anecdote that wanders hither and thither across the sociological divide, but which Larry Weller, as signaled by his relaxed body messages, is anxious to absorb and applaud.

  No one’s taught him these things; it’s just happened. You could call it Larry’s good luck, the result of a few jointed behavioral neurons sewn into his spinal cord, unique as his blood type or fingerprint whorls. The curious rarefactions of his body - its stillness, its unconscious geniality — are always there, insistently present, along with the patient, subcutaneous question - have these been printed in his genes or did he imprint them himself?

  His voice, too, radiates an impression of calm, seasoned good will. Low tones predominate and respectful pauses, and these are generally, and generously, attributed to Larry’s Canadian Background, since it’s well known among his and Beth’s good friends that he was born and brought up in the Canadian city of Winnipeg. Just where this city is located is less well known: somewhere up there, somewhere northerly, a representative piece of that polite, white, silent kingdom with its aging, jowly Queen and snowy mountain ranges and people sugaring off and drinking tea and casting for trout and nodding amicably - much as Larry Weller nods at his neighbor across a backyard patio in Oak Park and sips his glass of California Chablis, and casts his glance fixedly up at the arch of maple boughs when asked for his views about the intentions of George Bush or about the exorbitant cost of National Public Radio. As for the politics of a universal health care plan, Larry is noticeably silent. A topic best avoided. Ah, but (changing the subject) the Canadian wilderness, the famed train journey across the western continent - this is everyone’s dream, is it not? Would Larry agree? Yes. Emphatically. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Someday Beth and I hope to...”

  Is Larry cool? No, impossible. His genes are bright and lively enough, but his social conditioning keeps him suspicious of coolness. He’s recently filled out a pop culture quiz and scored in the “young fogey” category.

  A comfortable man, comfortably settled, yet Larry himself would say, if asked - but no one so far has asked - that he’s been parachuted into a life whose contours are monumentally out of whack with those he once knew. His Winnipeg childhood was inexpressibly uneventful — though perhaps no one’s childhood can be described in such terms. He’d grown up the second child of a factory worker and a stay-at-home mother, whose primary leisure activities were attending Saturday morning garage sales in their immediate neighborhood or the occasional football game at the Winnipeg Stadium. As a child, Larry was enrolled in public schools, and had, in fact, been ignorant, as were his parents, of any other kind of schooling. His marks were no better than average, and sometimes worse. After limping through MacDonald Secondary, he spent a year at a local technical college - no one, given his problems with math and the mess he made of exams, suggested he apply to the university. At Red River College he earned a Diploma in Floral Arts, and after that began a slow, spiraling drift: upward to manager of a Winnipeg florist outlet - and southward, eventually, to Chicago where he’d studied landscape design for a year under the great Eric Eisner and then made his way to the tight green parceled-out, shadow-strewn spaces of genteel and progressive Oak Park - ending up, much to his surprise, a qualified landscape designer (honorary) with a specialty in garden mazes. (In point of fact, he’s done only
one maze this year, for the Children’s Museum in Muncie, Indiana, but he’s been swamped by clients, especially from the American sunbelt, who want an Elizabethan knot garden crammed into their backyards, a squared lump of greenery and historic suggestion between the swimming pool and tennis court; a New Yorker, on the other hand, demanded a faux meadow on his Manhattan rooftop.)

  He is, at forty-two - another surprise! - more or less solvent. He’s getting along in the world, he and Beth.

  But perpetually - every minute of every day, in fact - he prepares himself for exposure and ruin: he has no university degree to fall back on or boast about, he has never read Charles Dickens or Ralph Waldo Emerson, he’d be more than half-stumped if asked to locate the state of Nebraska on a map, he has next-to-zero brain-vibes on the subject of the American Senate, its contribution to American governmental stability or its menacing echoes of elitism. So how is it he projects such an air of confidence when, at the same time, living a fraction of an inch from public humiliation? Do other people exist this close to the flame of extinction? (Hidden there, on the back wall of his retina, is a quizzing caption in a flowing script, his own handwriting most likely, which asks: how did I get here? how did this happen?)

  He has a mortgage, fairly sizable, on a seven-room house on Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park. Three bedrooms! - as though a childless couple like himself and Beth could possibly need three bedrooms! The street he and Beth live on presents a sober stone and stucco frontality, though Larry knows how quickly the backs of these buildings dissolve, like movie locations, into weeds and garbage cans and evil-smelling alleys. (The word alley is not used in Canada; these not-quite streets are known instead as lanes— a beautiful word, Larry thinks, calling up a false image of quaint cobbled surfaces bordered by rows of sculptured evergreen plantings, miniature avenues which are insouciant, leafy, undeclared, and unnamed, and which lead inevitably to a distant moss-covered church, and couples wandering arm in arm toward declarations of love. Yes. Forever, yes. He is, has always been, a romantic, though it’s only recently he’s been able to identify and label the signs.)

  And what else about Larry Weller? He is the middle-aged husband of a scholarly wife - “What does she see in me?” the querying script behind his eyes demands - who is a few years younger than himself, a woman whose specialty is women’s studies (sub-specialty: religion), an area of inquiry that mildly perplexes Larry; he would like to understand more precisely the range and purpose of women’s studies, but it seems he’s left the question too late. When he first met Beth she was still working on her doctoral thesis on women saints; she was more lighthearted in those days about her chosen field; she seemed always to have one eyebrow raised above the other, signaling that what she “did” with her saintly women was part of a vast joke and not to be taken seriously. Lately she’s changed, grown more hungry and avid, and certainly more anxious for publication. If her left eyebrow goes skyward now, it’s more likely to express frustration: no one cares, no one pays attention, academic success is a game of roulette or else vicious back-stabbing.

  His life has changed since his early, capsized marriage. Today, he and Beth spend long, settled, lamplit American evenings in their cozy back-of-the house den, baking their ankles before a newly installed gas fireplace; a kind of anxious boredom occasionally visits them as they read, sip decaffeinated coffee from flowered mugs, and now and then tune into Masterpiece Theater or else watch a rented video, and he knows now how, out of boredom, men and women nudge at their happiness in order to revive the intensity of early love. Glancing up from his book (something new off the press, perhaps, about formal gardens), Larry is most often swamped by the golden unreality and goodness of the scene he and his wife occupy, the shelves of stacked magazines that surround them, his wife’s hands, slim as knives skimming over her lapful of manuscript pages. And of the other scene that is socketed directly into this one, himself and Beth later in the evening, climbing the stairs to their large square bedroom, the sheets tumbled crazily on the queensize bed, the walls tipped sideways, the only sound their hard breathing and tender, yet occasionally selfish, efforts, and later the moist gliding of her skin on his, coming heavily to rest, along with her muffled moaning of his name, oh Larry, my Larry. (“How did this happen?” a voice whispers inside his brain. “How do I deserve such recognition?”)

  Often, of course, they’re out for the evening. He and Beth regularly attend performances of the Chicago Symphony, since Beth’s parents, Belford and Ruth Prior - “Bells” was in securities before he retired to Hawaii, Ruth practiced tax law — send Beth and Larry a pair of season tickets every Christmas. Of course Beth and Larry go, despite the terrible parking problems in the Loop and despite the worry about leaving an unattended car, and despite the fact that Beth is curiously bored by music and quite often falls into a doze halfway through the evening.

  What does Larry Weller, formerly of Winnipeg, Canada, make of the concert series? To be truthful, he finds the symphonic strains largely opaque, he who grew up without ever once attending an evening of classical music, though a wealth of resources were readily available in that city, had he only known. On the other hand, the alternating rhythms of the symphonic movements are oddly, eerily familiar. They crash on his ears, loud and soft, ripply and smooth, sliding and stopping. These musical variations echo his own life: now happy, now sad, dipping, rising, fast and slow, up and down. Is it always going to be like this, he wonders, and is this all there is?

  In January of last year Larry’s wife at long last published her book about early women saints: Happy Enough by Dr. Beth Prior, based on her doctoral thesis of the same name; University of Illinois Press. $29.95. Illustrated.

  A handsome, oversize book, it can be found turned outward on the shelves of all good bookstores, at least in the Chicago area, showing off its handsome, slick green-and-blue cover with the stunning portrait of St. Agatha (3rd century AD) holding forth a platter on whose shining surface are arranged her two breasts, nipple side up, which have been forcibly detached from her body as a punishment for zealous piety. The creaminess of these breast mounds reminds Larry of the cups of baked custard his mother used to prepare for him and his sister, Midge, when they were children. “It’s good for what ails you,” his mother used to sing mysteriously, setting the little glass cups down on the kitchen table, her tone at once apologetic and proud. A sprinkle of golden nutmeg was strewn across the top, and he and Midge scraped this damp, dimpled crust away in a flash, popping it on to their tongues and grinning at each other as though they had somehow outwitted their mother.

  The reviews of Beth Prior’s book were uneven, as they tend to be for such academic studies, but generally positive. “Dr. Prior has the good sense not to mock the excesses of early Christian ecstatics, but to view them in the context of their female powerlessness in early Western societies” (Northwestern Arts & Letters, Vol. XVI, May 1992, pp. 24-5).

  On the strength of the Northwestern review and also a favorable mention in the April issue of the Women’s Book Review (“learned, humane, innovative”), Beth has applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, knowing that they - whoever they are - wouldn’t dream of turning her application down. She has youth on her side, after all; she has a fresh new-minted (almost) PhD; she’s widely read in a number of areas, she’s committed and clear-eyed, and, furthermore, the feminist/deconstructionist revamping of history is a hot topic at the moment. She can’t miss.

  The thought of obtaining such a fellowship was exciting to her - this much was clear to her husband, Larry, who observed the intensity with which she filled in the forms, pushing her pen down feverishly into the allotted squares and agonizing over which of her colleagues she could count on for a letter of recommendation: Dr. Rosemary Stanley from U.I.C.? - no, too conservative. Felix Zuegler, who’d written an introduction to Happy Enough? - he was perhaps too closely connected with the project to be thought objective. Whoever she thought of was too important or else not important enough. A whole night’s sleep was lost
over this matter of supporting letters, though in the morning she announced to Larry that she didn’t think the letters would carry much weight after all, not when set beside her curriculum vitae, that fifteen-page closely spaced document (soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture, as Larry likes to say).

  It worried him a little to see his wife counting on the fellowship so much - her fever of intelligence was once something else - and he wondered what he could do to cushion the blow, should it come. It was important to have an alternate plan, he told himself; he would have to put his mind to it; he would have to think sideways, perhaps even apply for a grant himself, not that there was much chance of getting one.

  It’s my turn, Beth said blithely, as if temporal justice accompanied the presentation of awards. A Guggenheim, she explained to Larry, is almost a guarantee of a tenured position, a tenured life, and she’s been bouncing around long enough from one post-doc post to the next. It also carries sufficient cash for a whole year of travel and research, and perhaps the promise of another book, this time a contemporary study of the feminist perspective on the Annunciation, that moment, historical or mythical, when the angel Gabriel announced to the Holy Virgin that she was chosen to be the Mother of the Messiah. “The greatest imposition ever perpetrated on a woman,” declared Beth Prior, aged thirty-five, beloved and baffling second wife of Larry Weller.

  “You could always shut down the office for a few months,” she told him, “and join me halfway through. You know you’ve always wanted to see the European mazes. And, listen, Larry, I think we should list the house with a good rental agency right now. You have to start early with these things, you have to plan ahead.”

  When the letter from the Guggenheim Foundation came, informing her that she had not, unfortunately, been awarded a fellowship - “An unprecedented number of applications were received this year” - she went quiet; the bones of her face froze sharp as stone, than collapsed to tearful rubble. She wept and raged, slamming her hands on the oak coffee table so that it rattled on its legs. She reviewed her qualifications. She railed against the application process, then against the ignorance of the jury who were, she suspected, all men, white European men, with men’s circumscribed and testosterone-limited bias; the Guggenheim game was infamous for favoring male candidates; she should have known she’d get shoved aside. Screwed, shafted.