On the whole he’s in decent shape. His body is an upright walking labyrinth, and he feels the miracle of it. In his earlobe there are capillaries that connect to his heart. On the surface of his skin live nerves so sensitive that his brain knows the instant a microscopic insect lands on the back of his hand.
There are things he’ll never know about human bodies, particularly that side of the world that’s tipped away from him and curtained in darkness: menstruation, birth, certain jokes and griefs and hormonal explosions. There are men who stuff their fists up other men’s assholes - he’ll never know how that works or how it feels.
Temperamentally he seems to have settled for a convivial melancholy, the rather lumpy psychic matter of perplexity; the problem is, he doesn’t know how to be the person he’s become, but this could change tomorrow. For the moment, there he sits behind his own face. He’s dressed, he’s on time. What a surprise. What a bad surprise too. The parts of life that used to offer comfort more and more seem an illusion or a deep difficulty. This is what Larry’s old friend Eric Eisner calls the paradox of plenitude. It seems that once there’s enough money, enough recognition, enough love - not that he loves Charlotte Angus, exactly - then there’s nothing to look forward to except the next minute.
Larry got sick. It was summertime. He was sitting in his air-conditioned office on St. Clair Avenue, talking to a subcontractor on the telephone. They were dickering back and forth, but in a friendly way, about the cost of globosa seedlings for the McCord project. Larry felt he was entitled to a more substantial discount for so large an order, and he attempted to put this into words. Instead he felt a river of nonsense gush past his lips. It seemed more of a tune than a sentence, more of a joke than a serious counter-proposal. His voice, even to his own ears, held the quacky noise of a cartoon creature; where had this come from? “Are you all right, Mr. Weller?” he heard from the other end of the line. He felt a stirring of nausea which was accompanied by fading light. Then he collapsed. A recently hired part-time secretary heard the thud of his body on the carpeted floor and came running.
Three weeks later, a noise like a tractor passed through his brain. (But no, it was only the dinner trays being wheeled down the hospital corridor.) Other images swam into view and then quickly fled. Once, making an enormous effort, he lifted his arm sideways and encountered an object that was both familiar and strange. A rectangle, cardboard, sharp cornered - a Kleenex box, in fact, though he couldn’t have named it. He pulled out a tissue, and felt, with a spasm of surprise, its clean rasp against the cardboard slit. He let it drift to the floor, a white floating bird, beautiful, though he viewed it with detached curiosity, knowing what it was and not knowing. Then he pulled out another and then another. The scratching sound of the tissues through the opening told him he was alive, and he felt his wrist fall into a circular rhythm, into a kind of dance. A buzzing sensation of joy accompanied each pull, until finally a hundred tissues, the total contents of the box, lay in a heap by his bed, a drift of soft snow. Voices swam through the air around him - he’s moved, he’s waking up - then throbbed into silence.
These twitches, these nightmares - this is who he is.
He opened his eyes. He was alone in a hospital room, flat on his back, frozen into a primordial stiffness. There was an astringent smell in the air like corn cooking. The rectangle of hard light from the window smacked his eyes, which felt peculiarly dry. He moved experimentally on the sheets, only to find that his arm, his nose, his penis were socketed into plastic piping. Then someone rushed a cold cloth to his face.
Three weeks had passed. He couldn’t believe it. Yes, his sister, Midge, said. Twenty-two days. We thought you were done for. My baby brother in a coma. A deep coma.
The decision was made, after Larry’s collapse, not to alert his elderly mother in Winnipeg; why worry an old woman who was semi-comatose herself and half the time couldn’t remember her son’s name? Larry’s two ex-wives, of course, were contacted, and Larry’s seventeen-year-old son, Ryan, flew to Toronto from the University of Pennsylvania where he was enrolled in the summer track-and-field Champ-Camp. Midge reported to Larry, with dampened eyes, how the boy had sat by his father’s bedside for six straight days, talking to him continually, trying to call him back.
It seemed almost indecent to ask, but Larry had to know: what were the exact words that had come out of Ryan’s mouth during this period of one-sided intimacy? Words of encouragement? A serenade? Reminiscences? Words of love? A lullaby? “Well, what he did was, every day he read you the newspaper from end to end,” Midge told him. “The Toronto Star. Everything but the obits. It took him all day to get through it.”
Ryan, his son. It was unimaginable, even shocking. Once a mere flake of consciousness, the boy had been recast into this ghostly benevolent presence by his father’s bed, stumbling through the editorials, the sports scores, the stock-market report - this was the same blameless little boy Larry had walked out on when he and Dorrie split up back in 1983. And now this kid had actually - no, Larry couldn’t bear to think of it. Not for the moment anyway, not in his present state of weakness. (Several times a day he finds himself inexplicably close to tears.)
What is a coma exactly? Sick unto death, according to Midge, though the patient sometimes survives. A state of profound unconsciousness caused by - but at first no one knew the cause. Encephalitis was suspected and later confirmed. Probably carried by a mosquito. That weekend he’d spent fishing with Ian Stoker at Rice Lake. There would have to be tests. Brain damage, yes or no? The situation was unclear. More tests.
The two ex-wives had not rushed to his bedside. Beth, of course, was in England, but he would have thought Dorrie might have made the trip from Winnipeg, especially since the two of them have been on amicable terms in recent years. There were, however, wifely cards, wifely flowers, faxes and notes. The dozen roses that Beth sent through Interflora had bloomed and died before Larry got around to waking up. Dorrie’s more practical potted mums were doing well, sitting on the TV that Midge had rented after the great day of awakening, July 20th, 1996.
The great day of awakening - that’s how Larry thinks of it. No one can explain why or how, but a switch had flipped in his numbed brain: time to wake up, buddy. For the first few days he suffered from headaches and confusion, those tractors again, patrolling the corridor and sliding up the snake of his central nervous system, giving off little yaps and cabooms. His body felt inexpressibly exhausted after his long sleep, his joints sore as an old man’s. “Can’t you remember anything?” visitors asked. Their faces made it clear that they found Larry’s fall into the void incomprehensible. He had journeyed to “the other side.” There must have been something he brought back. Dreams? Lighted tunnels? Booming voices? Some memory surely slept there, like a white dwarf in his brain.
No, there was nothing. And this confirmed what Larry had always believed, that there were no final instructions attached to death, not even to this near-death.
“Charlotte sat up with you almost every night,” Midge told him. “She slept in that chair, or at least she tried to sleep. She didn’t want you to be alone when you woke up.”
“But I was alone,” Larry said. He wondered if he sounded petulant.
“She’s a remarkable woman.”
“Yes.”
“A ve-ry loving woman.” Midge’s tone was affectionate, yet flinty. Two years older then Larry, she was having one of her big-sister days.
“I know, I know.”
“Just reminding you.”
He was alive. And it began to look as though he was not going to suffer permanent damage. How to clothe his naked relief? The sudden fissure in his life had closed over, joined smoothly by the bright daily thread of renewed consciousness. His appetite picked up. The trays of mashed potatoes and slabs of onion-flavoured beef seduced him back to life. Appetite, fullness. His ongoing Larry self. Yes, said the particle accelerator chamber of his brain: feed me. The newspapers, so immense and pungent, were overflowing with thril
ling surprises, and the best of these surprises was that the world was continuing in its usual plugging-along pace. Yeltsin persevered with his impersonations, the killing in Ireland started up again, the miniature theater of Bill and Hillary opened for another muddied round, and Bob Dole grumped from the TV screen and showed his sorrowing, baffled face to the nation. All this felt freshly miraculous to Larry, and everyone, including the neurologist, told him how lucky he was, how fortunate that prompt medical assistance had been available, how unstinting the efforts of the coma team had been, and how the wonders of anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids had preserved his living tissues.
He was grateful, he really was. But something tugged at him in those quiet minutes just before or following visiting hours, some filament of desire. He knew what it was and he resisted it. He yearned to go back to the silent, unreachable place he couldn’t remember, to cradle his consciousness in a nest of softness. Safety, sleep, insensibility. He wanted to embed himself in that channeled obscurity, which he dully recognized as his true home. Darkness. No, not darkness. More like the color of rainy daylight. A maze without an exit.
No, he will not be torn loose from his life this easily.
It was the Olympic Games, finally, beamed from Atlanta, Georgia, that saved him. The feverish down-south clamor burned up the days and nights of his convalescence. Running, jumping, splashing, it went on and on, a carnival of muscle and precision, crude salutes and embracing coaches, while all the while he lay back on his pillows, absorbed, transfixed. His old friend Bill Herschel flew in from Winnipeg to spend a few days with him. They could have talked; they’d seen little of each other over the years other than rushed visits, and there were all sorts of things they might have said, but instead the two of them huddled by the hour in Larry’s hospital room, the multi-hued TV screen bringing them the hectic grunting drama of diving, gymnastics, weight lifting, rowing, volleyball, soccer, wrestling; these curious human flailings blended, it seemed to Larry, and became one immense game, an invented supersport composed of rushing air, gravel, and water, possessing stringent rules and a series of bizarre obstacles that had to be overcome, the contrived hurdles, the hoops and crazed dangers of novelty. Music swelled toward applause and back again; thick-sounding buzzers and starting guns punctured the air, and all the while the moving, tilting, straining, leaping, sweating men and women delivered him, at last, back to his own body.
Not wanting to miss anything, he and Bill channel-hopped madly. Watching Donovan Bailey run the hundred meter dash and take the gold medal, they filled the room with little yips of joy. Bill whipped off his T-shirt, waving it like a flag over his head, and performed a mad hopping dance at the foot of the bed, two hundred pounds of gesticulating male flesh, and Larry, still connected to his tubes and wires, felt the bright juice of euphoria surge through his deadened tissues. Breath, beginnings. He was on the mend, as his mother would have said. The moment overflowed with itself, its massed perfection. The air in front of his eyes became tender. He was alive again in the housing of his skin and blood, and for the moment that was enough.
He’d met Charlotte Angus soon after he moved his office from Chicago to Toronto. It was not, he discovered, at all difficult for a single man, even a single man in his mid-forties with two divorces on the books and carrying ten extra pounds of belly fat, to meet women. Available women abounded; everyone he knew kept a list of attractive, intelligent single females who were eager to find a male partner. But where were the attractive, or even unattractive, middle-aged single men? “They’ve either gone gay,” says Larry’s sister, Midge, “bless their dithery dinks. Or they’ve hooked up with younger women. Or, number three, they’re selfish jerks you wouldn’t want to foist on anyone.”
She herself, after one sad early marriage, has ended up living in North Toronto with a man called Ian Stoker, a fifty-year-old designer of sidewalk hoardings, who works, at least when work is available, out of his basement office. They’ve been together eight years now, riding the vertical grooves of a so-so relationship. “Perfect is not what I’m after,” Midge has confided to Larry. “I know that at my age there’re bound to be compromises. For one thing, I never really fancied pressing my tender lips up against a moustache, and by the way, I’m glad you’ve got rid of yours, Larry. You look younger and cleaner without it. Actually, though, there’s not all that much pressing between Ian and me these days. Of any kind. I don’t think he’s seeing anyone else during the day, but I wouldn’t rule it out. How do I stand not knowing? Because I’m busy as hell down at the store, that’s how. I get home from work, and Ian’s got something in the oven, usually something decent, and he’s got the table set, sort of, and I can, you know, put my feet up. He’s not about to go bowling or drinking, not him, it’s not in his genes. He’s already patted out our potato patches on the couch and we just fall into them for the evening, a kind of TV trance that isn’t as bad as you might think. At least he isn’t forever switching channels, that’s one thing in his favor. And what else? - let me think. Oh, God, what else? He goes fishing now and then so that I get the house to myself, and is that ever heaven! He has a shower every morning. I’d rather he showered at night, but what can you do. He doesn’t go in for strong-smelling toiletries. Ten points for that. Hmmmm. When he’s got money he spends it. One tight-fisted man was enough for me. You remember what Paul was like. I did love the guy though, especially toward the end. And in the beginning. Lordy! Ian, on the other hand, understands the worth of a good bottle of wine. He knows chocolate from chocolate. He doesn’t gobble peanuts or pretzels, any of that stuff, and he gets his teeth attended to twice a year. Now that’s enough to build a relationship on, don’t you think? In my opinion he does good work. His hoardings for the Smithsite Building were a lot more interesting and lively than the building itself. Everyone said so. He doesn’t talk mean about his ex either. All he says, and this is only now and then, is that she was always burning toast and blaming the wiring in the apartment. This toast business was sort of symbolic. Like she had this habit of redirecting the blame for every small disaster. When she lost her job she blamed the alarm clock. Honestly, she went and threw it in the garbage. When she had her miscarriage she blamed Ian, she actually said his indifference must have made the fetus ‘nervous.’ I admit he’s no Adonis. That chest of his, yikes. Those round shoulders. Nothing to sing about. But I’ve been looking around and I’ve noticed there really aren’t that many good-looking men anymore. Not over the age of, say, forty. Men get the sags pretty early in life. Whereas women! Women look after themselves. I mean, look at Charlotte. Mid-forties and she’s a peach. Her skin, her manicure, that funny laugh of hers. She has a very, very positive attitude. And good taste in scarves, also hair coloring. I just hope you appreciate what you’ve got, and I mean that, Larry.”
Charlotte is a widow. Her husband, Derek, an accountant, died four years ago of prostate cancer and left her reasonably well off. She doesn’t have to work, but how else is she going to fill her time? - that’s what she says. Especially with the two boys grown up, one in Alberta, the other on the coast. Besides, she has her diploma in counseling; it would be a waste not to use it.
She and Larry met at a dinner party given by mutual acquaintances. Everyone else around the table was part of a couple, and it was clear from the forced exuberance of the conversation that match-making was in the air: a good woman on her own, and, that rare thing, an available single man. The two of them were seated side by side, and so closely that Larry’s elbow, cutting into his roast chicken, slid silkily against the sleeve of Charlotte’s blouse. “Sorry,” she said, smiling down at her plate and withdrawing her pink swathed arm. (She was, he later learned, devoted to shades of pink and rose, as well as the softer reds.) The talk at the table was general, but it tended to flow strongly, Larry noticed, in the direction of the two unattached guests, himself and Charlotte Angus. Did he like Toronto? How did it compare to Chicago? Had Charlotte seen Showboat? No? What about you, Larry? You really shouldn’t pass it u
p. Either of you.
A week later they were in bed together. That first night - they went to Larry’s apartment rather than Charlotte’s house in Deer Park - they were both shy as virgins. Larry had not had a night of sex since his wife, Beth, left him, and for Charlotte it had been years. In fact, she confided - this was later - that she’d only ever had one partner. She and Derek had married young and they’d both been old-fashioned when it came to monogamy. At least she had been.
Her skin had the powdery softness of a cared for but unexercised body. “Oh,” she said, drawing in her breath sharply, as if pierced by an old recollection, “oh, oh.”
He was not so much excited as at home in her flesh, its willing tenderness, and that chorus of reassuring, breath-filled “oh’s.” She had not wanted the light left on. “Please,” she’d said, gesturing toward the lamp,
Darkness covered them like a cool sheet. He prized it, drank its richness in. As for Charlotte, she was trembling, her arms and legs, a luxurious shudder he reached out to embrace.
It’s happened before in his life, lying at attention beside the body of a lovely woman - midnight, a summer breeze at the screen, crickets stitching up the darkness, the rumble of occasional traffic in the street - and always he’s felt a flood of gratitude so sharp, so sudden and powerful that it resists the confines of language or gesture or even the rough and tentative modeling of thought. What is this paradise? Touching. Being touched. The unburdened self, half-conscious once again of primitive melodies playing offstage. The unearned privilege of a human hand on his human body. A willing caress, that leaping increment of knowledge locked in the skin, yes, oh, yes. His throttled, misshapen, and discontinuous life might yet be rescued. As it was this very minute by a woman called Charlotte Angus. When he least deserved it.
Larry's Party Page 26