Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  The next day there was a second envelope from the Foundation, this time for Larry. His application had been approved, the letter said, and hearty congratulations were offered.

  “You didn’t tell me you’d applied,” Beth said stiffly. “You never mentioned it once.”

  “I didn’t think I had much of a chance.”

  “It isn’t as though you’ve actually published anything.”

  “And I certainly don’t have a PhD.”

  “Damn, damn, damn, damn.”

  “Look, Beth -”

  “It isn’t fair. Even you can see it isn’t fair.”

  “No,” Larry said. It pained him to look at her trembling hands. “It isn’t fair, you’re right. But we can share it. Who was it who said two can travel as cheaply as one?”

  “That’s ridiculous. And I wish you’d stop trying to cheer me up. It’s making me crazy. I find it—” She stopped herself.

  “What?”

  “Humiliating.”

  “Why humiliating?”

  “That you would have done this behind my back.”

  “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “A breach of trust. That’s what it really amounts to.”

  “I’m sorry. You know I’d never—”

  “No, I don’t know that. And I’m not sure you’re sorry.”

  “It isn’t as though I lied about it.”

  “You have to admit, Larry, that what you did doesn’t exactly represent full disclosure on your part. And full disclosure is what we’ve based our whole—”

  “I just thought -”

  “What did you think? I’d be interested in knowing.”

  “You seemed to want to go so terribly much.”

  “It wasn’t just the going, Larry. God! It was — I don’t know - the having.”

  “But in a way we’re both having.”

  “You just don’t get it, do you?”

  Maybe he didn’t. He saw that now. There was so much that he didn’t “get.” And he wasn’t sure he believed in the possibility of full disclosure either. He thought of Dorrie. He thought of his mother and father. The gaping silences. The missing wire of connection.

  “Look,” he said. “If we got busy we could be in England in a month’s time.” This came out, he realized, in the practiced, oily, diverting tones of a fond uncle. “Or how about we just pack our bags and go tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s not possible. How could we possibly -?”

  “Next week, then.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course we’ll go.”

  “Anyway,” she paused, “it’s a good thing I listed the house. You wanted me to wait, remember? I told you we should go ahead.”

  “We’ll have a terrific time.”

  He said this loudly into the air, speaking in a falsely ringing male voice that cantilevered, it seemed to him, over a swamp of dishonesty - but whose, his or Beth’s? The balance between himself and his wife had shifted subtly, that much was clear. He had in some way betrayed her. And she would be a long time forgiving him.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered into her knife-like hands. Cursing him.

  They landed at Shannon, rented a bright blue Ford Fiesta and headed off to see the the original site of the Hollywood stone, the oldest dateable labyrinth in the British Isles, 550 AD. Rain poured straight out of a blackened sky, and silvered the sides of their little bouncing car. “I feel damp right to the middle of my American corpuscles,” Beth said, shivering in the front seat. Twenty minutes later the sun came brightly to their rescue, leaving the green cultivated Irish countryside glistening all around them. “Like top-of-the-market broccoli,” Beth observed with a wave at the hedgerows.

  What was important, Larry explained, was the location of the Hollywood stone. It had been discovered some years earlier at the beginning of a circuitous fourteen-mile pilgrims’ path through the Wicklow Mountains, the start of an approach to Glendalough, an early Celtic monastic community.

  The Christian maze so clearly incised on the rounded, brownish lump of stone suggested two conjoined messages. One of those messages informed travelers that the road to the Celtic sanctuary was convoluted and difficult, much as today’s generic zig-zag road signs give warning of hairpin turns ahead. A more profound reading of the maze related to the difficulty of life and life’s tortuous spiritual journey.

  That this double message could be conflated into one symbolic sign seemed wonderful to Beth. “It’s like a naive form of perspective,” she marveled. “No absolute rules and no worry about the confusion between the elemental and the spiritual.”

  Her face was flushed with happiness, as it always was when she was in the proximity of holiness. An avowed agnostic, believing the sacred has been taken over by psychology, she nevertheless was someone who melted toward the vision of God’s grace, seeing it as a storm of sunlight, the most powerful force in history.

  The Hollywood stone itself, unfortunately, was no longer in its original position beside St. Kevin’s Road, but had been moved to the Museum of Antiquities in Dublin where Larry and Beth saw it later that day.

  “It’s a rotten shame,” Beth murmured against the glass case, “to take something sacred away from where it belongs. A sign for pilgrims. Encouragement for the road ahead.”

  “Or discouragement maybe.”

  “That too.” She has been in an agreeable, speculative mood all day, though both she and Larry were wobbly with jet lag.

  “Its surface would be rubbed away in no time,” Larry reminded her. “By tourists like us. Or by the rain and wind.”

  “You’re right,” Beth sighed, her good humor vanishing. “We do have to make the necessary compromises, don’t we?”

  In England the weather was exceptionally fine. The time was late June. Lilacs bloomed all over London, over the doorways of houses, in public parks and squares, and Beth was awed by the thought that this once smoky old city, with its layers of history and pollution, could support so delicate and fragrant a flower, and in such profusion. The sharply sweet fragrance entered the window of their hotel in Pembridge Gardens in Notting Hill. They breathed in its druggy, weighted scent, and spoke again and again about how fortunate they were to be in this peaceful, green, beflowered city, so far from the scorched flatlands of Illinois where (as they had seen on last night’s news) a drought was threatening this year’s corn crop.

  Immediately after breakfast each morning Beth travels by tube to the National Gallery or to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is her intention to see and take notes on every representation of the Annunciation she can find. Almost always the composition of this sacred encounter is the same. Mary on the right of the tableau is calmly seated with an open book before her. At the left stands, or rather crouches, the angel Gabriel, with his feminine, overly saccharine face and flowing locks, and immense, gaudily painted, backfolded wings, holding in his arms a strongly shaped phallic lily. Between the two figures lies the artist’s blurred suggestion of a civilized society, a tower or two or else a stone archway leading into an enclosed garden, that symbol of virginity, and always, somewhere in the blue air, a bird with his beak pointed sharply toward Mary, delivering the tumultuous news: she, of all women, has been chosen.

  Beth writes these details down in her spiral scribbler and later enters them into her laptop. She watches for variations, rejoicing when they occur. Such anomalies represent to her ruptures in the traditional narrative, and indications of interpretive privilege - a privilege she intends to avail herself of once she begins her new book. A book written under the aegis of a Guggenheim Fellowship; aegis, this is how she more and more often thinks of it.

  Larry, searching his way through the wonderful and beautiful mazes of Europe, did Hampton Court first, to get it over with. He was among the earliest at the gate on a soft, breezy Tuesday morning, and he walked through the corridors of the maze in twenty minutes flat, reciting the classic formula to himself, right, left, left, et cetera, and taking the t
urns on automatic pilot. Birds twittered overhead in the morning light; the glossy banked hedges of yew were still damp with moisture, giving off the air of expensive upholstery, rigorously propped up.

  In the last few years he’s seen several American reproductions of the Hampton Court trapezoid: at Deerfield in Pennsylvania where thousands of six-inch boxwood seedlings have grown slowly to maturity, and are brilliantly set off by azalea borders. Then there is the maze at Williamsburg, executed in holly with geometric topiary and pleached hornbeam; a smaller version of Hampton Court, it was a little jewel.

  He had anticipated that the Hampton Court pilgrimage would turn a significant key in his consciousness, filling him with the bloom of recollected happiness or else nudging at failure. This was the place, after all, where he and his first wife, Dorrie, had come on the final day of their honeymoon, fourteen years earlier, and where he had undergone between the teasing avenues of yew what he supposes he must call a transformative experience. He has never been able to identify what happened to him during the hour he wandered lost and dazed and separated from the others, but he remembers he felt a joyous rising of spirit that was related in some way to the self’s dimpled plasticity. He could move beyond what he was, the puzzling hedges seemed to announce; he could become someone other than Larry Weller, shockingly new husband of Dorrie Shaw, non-speculative citizen of a former colony, a man of limited imagination and few choices.

  But today, turning the hedge corners briskly and appraising the tricky dead-end shadows, he remained stubbornly unmoved. Sixteen nodes, sixteen branches; it seemed a little too neat. He noticed that the old plant stock was in need of thinning. He felt the strengthening sun and wished he’d worn a hat. A party of schoolchildren had arrived, and the voice of their teacher attempting to keep them in check was full of hard, braying, authoritative tones. He observed the essential monotony of the ancient maze - if 1690 could be termed ancient - and the way in which the twin trees at the center seemed, somehow, out of scale and rather prim and silly, as though the maze traveler were being taunted instead of rewarded. Important design possibilities had been overlooked, he saw, though he supposed he should admire the innovative “island” that lay within the perimeter hedge, something that had not been fully appreciated in its day. He paused to take a deep breath, inviting a wave of strong feeling, but none came. Two schoolgirls stood giggling at the end of a shrubbery wall and casting curious, flirtatious looks in his direction.

  He caught the first bus back to London.

  The Leeds Castle maze, set on two islands in the middle of a lake, was something else. Beth, who was quickly growing tired of her Annunciation project - too many vapid virginal faces, too much male presumption on the part of the painters who immortalized them - joined Larry for a day at Maidstone in Kent. The maze, designed and executed just four years earlier, was stunning in its intricacy and verve, and Larry, working his way through the clever passages, recovered something of his old sense of a maze’s connection with more elementary human scramblings. “A maze,” he told Beth, quoting from something he’d read not long ago but whose source he’d misplaced, “is a kind of machine with people as its moving parts.”

  “But,” Beth asked, “surely we don’t want to be part of a machine?” Her old quizzing curiosity had revived wonderfully after weeks of insomnia and gloomy note scribbling in the British Library. Only yesterday she’d exclaimed to Larry how happy she was to be a woman who’d chosen not to run with the wolves. Today her face glowed with the afternoon’s heat, and the expensive pumpkin-colored sundress she’d bought in a London boutique showed off her slender, sharp shoulders - so that Larry was thinking already of their hotel room back in London, the wide double bed and its cool, uncreased sheets.

  Beth repeated her question. “Do you honestly think people want to be a part of a machine?” More and more her face has the stretched look of someone trying to stay “interested.”

  “Yes,” Larry said, surprised at the speed of his response. “At least I do.” He waved a hand toward the crowds of holidaymakers pressing around them. Children. Lovers with their arms linked. Families. Groups of Boy Scouts, smart in their uniforms but reassuringly unruly. There were immense touring parties of tentative Japanese moving rapidly to and fro like starlings, and chuckling Germans with cameras at their bellies and bottled water in their backpacks. Americans drifted by in groups of three or four. “Pretty snazzy,” one of these elderly Americans pronounced.

  “A maze is designed so that we get to be part of the art,” Larry told Beth.

  “So you think this is an art, do you?” She gestured broadly. Her tone was only half mocking.

  He ducked the question; the word art made him nervous. “The whole thing about mazes,” he said, “is that they make perfect sense only when you look down on them from above.”

  Beth took this in. “Like God in his heaven, you mean. Being privy to the one authentic map of the world.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what kind of a God wants us to get confused and keep us in a state of confusion?”

  “Isn’t that what we’ve always had? Chaos from the first day of creation? But mazes are refuges from confusion, really. An orderly path for the persevering. Procession without congestion.”

  “You read that somewhere.”

  “Probably.”

  “At least they provide a way out.”

  “One exit anyway.”

  “Salvation or death? Or more confusion. An unsolvable maze has got to be invalid.”

  “Some people would say there’s amusement in confusion.” More and more, lately, he lets his thoughts come out in words, these same thoughts he’d once kept shyly locked up in his head.

  “Would you say that, Larry? That confusion is fun?”

  “Not fun exactly, but a little time off. And God knows we all need time off.”

  “You aren’t by any chance trying to tell me something, Larry.”

  “You’re working” - he looked for the words - “awfully hard.”

  “Too ambitiously, you mean.”

  “Not that exactly. Too -”

  “Desperately?” she supplied.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  They’d reached the underground grotto by now. All around them were walls decorated with sea shells. Grinning statues and cascades of water. A fun fair with the fun twisted grotesquely sideways, and something larger and more primitive hinted at.

  “I just think,” Larry went on, “that we need little stopping places now and then to crawl into. It’s our scared animal selves pushing forward. Making burrows and then trying to find our way out again.”

  “Who was it who said life is mostly a matter of burrows?”

  “I don’t know,” Larry said. “Did someone say that?”

  “Auden, I think.”

  Larry only vaguely divines who Auden is - his hideous ignorance! A poet? He nodded noncommittally.

  “Or maybe it was Camus.”

  They had arrived in an underground passage ninety feet below the maze hedges. A flooded cave stood before them, and also the maze’s goal, the seat of the nymph. They’d come this far, part of a wave of other maze walkers, and there was a sense that they were about to ascend into the sunlit world once again where struggle and confusion ceased, at least momentarily.

  Beth, turning suddenly, reached over and gripped Larry’s hand hard in both of hers. “I’m glad we’re living inside the same burrow,” she said, speaking in an intense, urgent whisper.

  “Me too.” His wet voice. He could hear himself swallow. His treasonous saliva. His thundering ardor dissolving in its own juices.

  “And sharing the same Guggenheim too.” Her tone had turned arch. She gave Larry a quick look to check his expression.

  He smiled down into her eyes, and then into the parting of her crisp dark hair, and felt himself, temporarily, forgiven.

  They settled in, renting a small Wandsworth flat and buying their own groceries. A certain amount of pe
ace came with this decision, since both of them were domestic by disposition.

  They never lost, though, the sense of being travelers. All around them they could see similar men and women; the modern inhabitants of the world were wanderers, pilgrims, and the labyrinth was their natural habitat. Each weekend Larry and Beth went mazing, as they called it, starting off with the largest hedge maze in the world at Longleat House in Wiltshire, 380 feet by 175 feet, composed of yew and a series of six wooden bridges. Designed and built in 1978, the maze employed spiral junctions and a species of psychological teasing that directly addressed and manipulated the visitors’ compulsion to conserve time and energy. “A beauty,” Larry said at the end of the day. “My feet are killing me,” said Beth, “and my brain’s going to need a week in traction.” (Her Annunciation work was once again progressing.)

  They visited, on various sunny or rainy weekends, the brick pavement maze at Kentwell Hall, the symbolic hedge maze at Blenheim Palace, a yew construction at Hever Castle in Kent with structured buttresses, the serious-sounding Environmental Maze in Wales (rhododendron, birch, and oak), a massive battlemented hedge at Knightshayes Court with alcoves for statuary, and the turf maze at Saffron Walden. “I’ve got a feeling I’ve been here before,” Larry said when he and Beth arrived at the picturesque main street. “Not the maze, but the town.”

  “So what’s this supposed to be for?” Beth asked about the turf maze, which was a series of circles cut into the ground back in medieval times. The Saffron Walden design was Christian and traditional, but it was thought, Larry said, reading from his guidebook, that the maze provided a kind of bawdy sport for young men and maids. “Marvelous,” Beth breathed. “You can imagine them, can’t you, racing around after each other, tripping on their petticoats, stealing kisses.”