Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Sometimes he thinks Charlotte loves him, though he may just be reading the flickering shadow of shared boredom. Certainly they haven’t spoken about love, not yet.

  She was curiously maternal in her ways. And, why not? She’d been a mother since she was twenty-five years old. (The thought of the twenty-five-year-old Charlotte, her shy smile, her earlobes innocent of jewelry, swamped his heart.) Some days he objected to her mothering and some days he didn’t. He should take zinc tablets, she suggested. If only Derek had taken zinc. He should try using foam innersoles in his shoes, they made the most remarkable difference. When he had trouble sleeping, all he had to do was imagine he was writing his own name on a velvet blackboard; write it slowly with the pad of your middle finger, thinking each loop and serif in your head; if you make a mistake you can erase it and start over again.

  He feels he must respond by saying something aerobic and jaunty: “Great.” “Terrific.”

  Well, he thinks, maybe this is how it goes between forty-five-year-old lovers. At this age the body needs every available encouragement. Attention to diet and exercise. Recipes for relaxation. Forty-five-year-olds aren’t out rolling in the autumn leaves, for God’s sake, they aren’t making impromptu snow angels in the park or frugging the night away. No. They’re concentrating on improvements to their domestic arrangements; it was time, for instance, that Larry went shopping for some comfortable furniture; the dining table and chairs he’d brought from Chicago were utterly beautiful, Charlotte had never seen anything like them, but the rest of the apartment needed, well, cheering up. She offered helpful hints about window coverings. Also advice on spot removal and invisible mending - that light gray suit of his, though, really should go to Neighborhood Services. He was working too hard, throwing too much of himself into the McCord maze, driving himself toward a deadline that was, when it came right down to it, completely arbitrary.

  Larry listened and nodded. That was the trouble with middle age: you forget what you had at stake. You just plain forget.

  It is not the time, and they both feel this instinctively, to talk about living together. But two or three nights a week they end up in either Larry’s bed or hers. These nights are long and sumptuous. He wakes and watches her, asleep on her heavy side. They both remark, often, about how much better they’re sleeping, how generally more relaxed they feel. Larry even drifted off to sleep one Sunday afternoon on Charlotte’s living-room couch. It was a cool spring day, and Charlotte, seeing him there, covered him with a mohair blanket. (She was a woman devoted to texture and to small exacting shifts of comfort.)

  He felt the feather touch of the blanket as it dropped around his shoulders, and, without quite waking, knew himself to be in the embrace of profound tenderness, that second cousin to passionate love. His breathing deepened, carrying him - with lowered pulse rate, the dim headlights of a dream beckoning- toward the coastline of perfect sleep.

  His dear Charlotte. This is something new. This is sweeter in a way than the lies, theater, and staged manipulation of marriage, but he can’t quite move his bones all the way into it. He’s caught between a rock and a soft place; that’s how he feels when he thinks about Charlotte Angus, whose shame and goodness is her eagerness to please - that softly dropped blanket, her generous mouth and tongue, the way she barges straight through uncertainty, toughing it out. For no reason that he can imagine, she’s reached toward his living body and offered herself.

  Larry’s father, who died in 1988, left instructions to have his body cremated. This surprised everyone, that Stu Weller, a stubborn traditionalist, was capable of forming so progressive and environmentally responsible a decision. Now, October 1996, Larry’s mother, Dot, has joined her husband in death. “A grand old lady,” said the head of the nursing team in Winnipeg. “She was ready to go,” said Midge Weller. “Yes,” agreed Larry’s ex-wife, Dorrie, “those last few months were really terribly sad.” “I suppose she would want cremation?” Larry said. He posed this as a question. “Absolutely,” Midge answered.

  Midge and Larry flew to Winnipeg, row 23, seats A and B, a pair of middle-aged siblings, both stocked with their dead parents’ store of genetic tissue and something of their dead parents’ perpetual confusion. Suddenly they had been orphaned. Midge leafed through a copy of Victoria Magazine, sniffling, red-eyed. The exquisite table settings, the photographs of antique linen, the recipes for violet marmalade reminded her not of her mother, but the distance her mother had always stood from such things. “She was so goddamned plain,” Midge told Larry. “She never allowed herself to swing free. To be extravagant and silly.” Larry, reading the latest Newsweek -more confused threats from the Middle East - felt unworthy of this insight. He had loved his mother, he was certain of that. In fact, what he felt for her went beyond love. A woman of uneven moods, of bursts of physical energy and slow tears, who, late in her life, found peace in the liturgy of the Anglican church and the love of Christ. Dot Weller had given birth to him, he’d nuzzled at her breasts, flesh of her flesh. But these scenes belonged to the background music of Larry’s life - there, but not pressingly there.

  It was decided between Midge and Larry that they would scatter Dot’s ashes the day after the funeral on the waters of West Hawk Lake where their father Stu’s ashes had gone. (Larry’s son, Ryan, gave the eulogy at the simple Anglican ceremony, and Dorrie, who had been with Dot at the end, holding on to her hand, served coffee and sandwiches in her Lipton Street house. And it was Dorrie who lent Midge and Larry her car for their ash-scattering expedition.) They drove eastward. The day was windy, and the fields and rocks had the stubbled, deadened, monochrome look that precedes the first snow and the freezing over of the lake. “We’re just in time,” Midge said.

  “You mean she was just in time,” Larry said.

  His mother had said to him as a child - and this discussion he now musingly recalls - driving along the flat Manitoba highway, the trees stripped of their leaves, the snow fences bundled here and there along the shoulder, soon to be erected for the winter - that human bodies turn to dust. He remembers that he doubted the truth of this statement. Dust was that dry accretion under his bed. A human body rotted, spoiled.

  But dust was what he and his sister carried in the trunk of Dorrie’s car, a box of dust. Larry has recently learned that it takes hours of intense heat to reduce a human body to powder. Even so, there were pieces that refused to break down, hardened bits, bones perhaps or teeth. It was astonishing, the durability of bodily atoms.

  Midge switched on the radio and turned up the heat so that the car became a little cave with its own soothing weather. He knew she was dreading the moment when the two of them would stand by the lakeshore - for one thing, neither of them was sure whether this was a legal act or not - and plunge their hands into the dry remains of Dot Weller, their mother.

  The moment didn’t happen, not that day anyway. Arriving after a two-hour drive and parking at a deserted scenic lookout, Larry opened the trunk of the car and found - nothing. “I thought you put it in,” he told Midge. “I thought you did,” said Midge, weeping openly and hugging herself against the cold.

  “Christ. She’s still back on Dorrie’s front porch.”

  “I can’t bear this.”

  “We don’t have to put her in the lake. It was only an idea. I mean, Dad’s ashes have long since -”

  “It looks too cold anyway.”

  “Those waves.”

  a body as heavy as Larry’s, or two female nurses working together. He had to be carefully placed, his spine aligned, in order to avoid future orthopedic deformities. The function of his joints was maintained by daily motion exercises. An indwelling catheter handled the urine which he continued to produce in his unconscious state, and the digital removal of his stools from his rectum was regularly performed.

  Electronic monitoring recorded his vital signs and attempted to measure his level of consciousness - even though little is understood about coma and its curious halfway position between life and death. Doe
s a comatose body think or dream, does it hear noises and sense the tensions that surround it? His chin and cheeks were shaved, and his fingernails and toenails trimmed. His feet were bound to an L-shaped plastic board in order to provide support. Without this foot board his feet would have “dropped” to a plantar flexion position, permanently shortening the muscles and tendons at the back of his ankles, so that, should he survive, he would be unable to stand upright.

  Hundreds of hands had touched him during the twenty-two-day period of his unconsciousness. The hands of professionals, doing their job, ticked off items on his chart, keeping his blood-filled tissues alive and elastic. His most private orifices, his nostrils, his anus, were kept free and clean. The faces of the strangers who performed these acts are utterly unknown to him, and this seems to him to represent a fundamental imbalance in the world. His two failed marriages, the distance he feels between himself and his dead parents, his inability to understand his son, or to will himself in love with Charlotte Angus - all these failings speak of the separateness of human beings, with every last person on earth withdrawing to the privacy of his own bones.

  But it isn’t true. It is impossible to live a whole life sealed inside the constraints of a complex body. Sooner or later, and sometimes by accident, someone is going to reach out a hand or a tongue or a morsel of genital flesh and enter that valved darkness. This act can be thought of as a precious misfortune or the ripest of pleasures. The skin will break open, or the cell wall, and all the warm fluids of life will be released - whether we wish it or not - to pour freely into the mixed matter of the world, that surging, accommodating ocean. Larry Weller is disturbed by this notion, but oddly comforted, too. He is recovering; in a sense he’s spent his whole life in a state of recovery, but has only begun, at age forty-five, to breathe in the vital foreknowledge of what will become of the sovereign self inside him, that luxurious ornament. He’d like that self to be more musical and better lit, he’d like to possess a more meticulous sense of curiosity, and mostly he’d like someone, some thing to love. He’s getting close. He feels it. He’s halfway awake now, and about to wake up fully.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Larry’s Party 1997

  Before the Party

  Unless your life is going well you don’t dream of giving a party. Unless you can look in the mirror and see a benign and generous and healthy human being, you shrink from acts of hospitality. Which is why Larry Weller has not given a party in some time. He can’t, in fact, remember the last time. Anti-social is what he’s been since his second wife, Beth, left him three years ago.

  But now Beth is going to be in town.

  And so, by chance, is Larry’s first wife, Dorrie - spending a few days here on business.

  Two ex-wives in Toronto on the same weekend. A coincidence.

  Beth faxed Larry from England to say she’d love to see him after all this time. (“It’s been far too long, and I’ve got some wonderful news.”) And Dorrie wrote one of her postcards. “I’ve got meetings all Saturday morning, but the rest of the weekend’s free. Why don’t we try to get together for old time’s sake?”

  “It’s really the perfect occasion to give a party,” said Larry’s friend Charlotte Angus, as though the matter were already settled. “And I promise to pitch in and help.” Then she added, more tentatively, “If you’d like me to, that is.”

  “Of course, I’d like you to. But how? What can we -?” He feels lost in this too sudden social thicket; it’s been so long. “When? What kind of? What time?”

  “Saturday evening? Dinner. Seven o’clock is good. It’s early, but that way you can count on everyone leaving before midnight.”

  “You really think this is a good idea? It seems -”

  How did it seem? He put the question to himself. A forty-six-year-old man (forty-seven in August) hosting a party? You don’t see it happen often, a single man, twice divorced, paying off his social debts, inviting his friends not to a restaurant, but into his own space for an evening of conviviality. A table set. Talk, laughter. Food and drink raining down. Most men in Larry’s position receive rather than dispense hospitality. That’s Charlotte’s opinion. Such men receive and receive and receive. It can go on for years, this social imbalance, before anyone thinks to question it. Some state of emergency must occur to make a reversal seem inevitable.

  And now that moment has come. Two ex-wives arriving on the same weekend and both of them - Larry can’t help but be pleased, even flattered - both writing ahead, seeking his company. This is civilized behavior, this reflects well on him as a man, as a former husband, and so on and so on.

  “What I can’t believe,” Charlotte said to Larry, “is that they’ve never met each other. I mean, wouldn’t you think that once, in all those years, they would have -?”

  “Chicago’s a long way from Winnipeg,” Larry told her, not very convincingly. “They did talk on the phone once or twice.”

  “Politely, I’m sure.”

  “Very.”

  “Both of them right up to the minute on post-marital etiquette, I suppose.”

  Larry had to think about that. He’s seen Beth’s jealous side, how irrationally disparaging she sometimes was about his first wife, and he also remembers Dorrie’s rough edges. Still, that was ancient history, the temperaments of his spouses; he was in his twenties when he married Dorrie, in his thirties when he and Beth got together; his marriages seem far away to him now, inventions of another, younger, less solid self. He knows so much more than he did twenty years ago, at least he likes to think so. A billion bytes of information weigh him down. “I think,” he told Charlotte, “that you can depend on them both.”

  “Good. Because it does hold plenty of potential for — ”

  “I know, I know.” The fact was, he was excited now by the prospect of the party, and excited by his excitement.

  It was over lunch on a Wednesday when he and Charlotte had this conversation. Larry’s noticed lately the way in which restaurant eating enlarges his sense of himself, and how he and Charlotte probe over their small public tables possibilities that they shrink from in private.

  Earlier in the day he had given a short press conference about the launch of the McCord maze, a project that has engaged him for the last two years. In exactly five weeks’ time the maze will be opened to the public. It is a relatively low-key piece of work, but one that Larry nevertheless feels is the most creatively adventurous of his life. He’s pulled the rug out this time, but subtly, softly. Instead of the stiff, formal plantings of traditional mazes - holly, box, yew - he’s employed dozens of dense but informal hedges - such gently sprawling plants as five-leaf aralia (tolerates polluted air well), amur maple, honeysuckle, ninebark, which bears up against wind and cold, winterberry for its bright red berries and dark leaves, Russian olive, rose of Sharon, caragana because of its feathery lightness, winged euonymus, and forsythia. (Garth McCord has gone on record as saying forsythia is too “suburban” a shrub. He made quite a point of it, it was his money after all, but in the end a compromise was reached.) Larry hopes, and this was the view he presented to the press this morning in a prepared statement - that the maze will incorporate the essential lost-and-found odyssey of a conventional maze, but will allow the maze walker to forget that the shrub material is a kind of wall and think of it, rather, as an extension of a dreamy organic world, with the maze and maze solver merging to form a single organism.

  The McCord ravine property, generously donated to the city parks system, slopes toward a small stream, and the maze’s path, downward and then up on the return journey, is intended to mirror the descent into unconscious sleep, followed by a slow awakening. (Three reporters attended the press conference - Larry admits to himself, if not to Charlotte, that he was disappointed at the turnout - and each of them scribbled down the phrase: extension of the dreamy organic world.)

  Larry and Charlotte Angus were seated at an outdoor table in a cafe called the Blinking Duck, off King Street, sharing a seafood salad and di
scussing the still-abstract notion of Larry’s dinner party and glancing up at a curiously blank sky. This is Canada, that cold crested country with its changeable weather and staunch heart. Today, though, is exceptionally warm for April, and Larry had made the mistake of wearing his gray wool blazer and a tie. “Why don’t you slip that off,” Charlotte advised in her thoughtful way, and he did.

  We might have either eight or ten at the table, Charlotte was saying, but why not make it an even ten since the table seats that number beautifully. Simple but elegant food. A light red wine, Italian maybe. An early evening.

  A breeze rolled across the terrace, a thrusting April breeze, lifting the twin points of Charlotte’s scarf by a fraction of an inch. Everything Larry knows about women informs him that she is at a place in her life where a scarf at the neck is presumed to do wonders in the perking-up department. “Actually,” she announced, fingering the scarf’s border, “a dinner party isn’t quite the same as an ordinary party.”

  “Why is that?” He felt his own sleepy smile drift over the pink paper tablecloth. He’s been seeing Charlotte for more than a year now, and they’ve grown easy with each other. At least part of this ease springs from a habit of half-hearted teasing, as though each has made a pact to claim a certain amount of ironic territory from the other.

  “Oh, I don’t know. A dinner party’s safer somehow. It’s more of an event.” Charlotte’s voice had taken on an arc of singing confidence. She is a shy woman, but given to bursts of energy. “A staged event. You can keep a dinner party under control.”

  “With small talk you mean?”

  “Well,” she said, shrugging, “thank heavens, I say, for small talk. Small talk’s better than big talk. Big scary talk. Aesthetics, societal values. And people stabbing you to death by mentioning authors you’ve never heard of. Quoting from Kierkegaard. I mean!”

  Larry’s smile widened. He is not a man given to dinner-table quoting, though he sometimes wishes he had the capability.