Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

“More lamb?”

  “It’s absolutely delicious.”

  “It’s the marinade.”

  “All I meant to say is that men and women at the end of our century should treat this period of uncertainty as an experiment. We can try things out. Men can cook up a batch of soup if they want and not have to give up their penises.”

  “They can even stir it with their penises.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I don’t believe this! We’re back on the subject of soup.”

  “And penises.”

  “I only meant it as a metaphor.”

  “If only we could live our lives backwards, taking advantage of our accumulated knowledge. Wasn’t it Kierkegaard who said -?”

  “Who?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure, I’d have to look that up.”

  “I have to agree with Beth. In the company I work for - we make greeting cards -”

  “Dorrie’s being modest. She heads up this company that -”

  “ — we’re trying to move toward a less gendered kind of thing. Our baby cards, for instance. The old pink and blue standards are giving way to yellows and greens. A baby’s a person, not a he or she. And as for valentines, we’re attempting to enlarge the market for women-to-men cards. Or cards for the gay sector.”

  “Who?”

  “More wine, Marcia?”

  “Just a little. Just half. I have to be careful not to—”

  “That’s certainly the way I intend to bring up this child of mine when it’s born. I hope to treat it like a person right from the beginning. And by the way, it’s a boy. I had the test. A boy who’s going to grow up to be a man, whatever that means. He’s pencilled in for all that raw male aggression and rage - ”

  “I don’t know that that’s true, that men -”

  “Well, I distinctly remember Larry telling me when we were first married that he spent great swaths of time wanting to punch people in the nose.”

  “Swaths? Did I say that? Maybe now and then, but not -”

  “I don’t think, as a man, that I’ve ever wanted to punch people out -”

  “That’s what you say, Ian, but why is it when you’re at a traffic light and the light turns green, you insist on being the first car off the mark?”

  “Not the same thing as a nose punch.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “In my country we never—”

  “Is it just testosterone or something even more embedded? I mean—”

  “Oh, my God, the secrets men keep from women. And women from men.”

  “It breaks the heart.”

  “But does it really? I mean really?”

  “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  “A man’s journey is different than a woman’s—”

  “Anyway, this baby of mine is going to be a person first and a man second.”

  “Good luck. But let me warn you, it’s like trying to climb up a grass blade to achieve what you’re looking for.”

  “What an anxious society we are. Anxious about politics, about gender roles, about—”

  “Tell us about — about your - your baby, Beth.”

  “You mean who the father is?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Sperm bank. I’ve wanted a baby for years, as Larry knows. But, well, it didn’t happen. And so last year I decided to apply for, for technological assistance.”

  “Amazing what they do these days - but how, how does one go about choosing?”

  “You get a little catalogue with all the donors listed. It describes racial background, height, education, one or two special interests, and so on.”

  “Just imagine if we applied for marriage partners like that.”

  “Go on, Beth.”

  “The first one I applied for was out.”

  “Out?”

  “Out of stock.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope you people won’t mind if I put my head down on the table for a few minutes, I’ve got an excruciating headache.”

  “Marcia’s had a rotten week.”

  “Don’t give me that suffering squint - pu-lease.”

  “Maybe you’d like to lie down. In the bedroom.”

  “No, no, the table’s fine.”

  “At least let me move your plate out of the way.”

  “Out of stock, you said.”

  “So I found another donor I liked almost as well.”

  “But won’t you always wonder what that other would have produced?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll be too busy to think. That’s what everyone tells me.”

  “To bring up a child alone, well, that can not be so very easy. In my country, we -”

  “At first I thought I could handle it. I was invincible. Then I started to wonder.”

  “Second thoughts. That’s certainly understandable.”

  “But I can’t really allow myself second thoughts, can I? I have to think of workable strategies now that I’m getting into the motherhood business.”

  “Larry says you’re here for meetings.”

  “In a way. But I’ve got an interview on Monday morning. At the University of Toronto.”

  “Really?”

  “They’re looking for someone in Women’s Studies.”

  “So you mean - you mean you’d actually consider leaving England and moving to Toronto?”

  “It’s a beautiful city.”

  “Fabulous.”

  “Why’d you come here, Larry?”

  “My sister. Midge.”

  “I didn’t know that, Larry. You moved for me?”

  “And you?”

  “I wanted to open my own costume shop, and this seemed the perfect place.”

  “—everyone wandering around in costumes, that’s for sure.”

  “I was born here. My father was born here.”.

  “But, Beth, wouldn’t you be, well, lonely in a new city?”

  “I’d have Larry.”

  “Oh.”

  Larry is surprised how loud that “oh” sounds. And surprised he’d been the one to utter it. It rolls like a small marble across the sudden silence at the table and falls among the scattered plates and bread-crumbs, the half-eaten leg of lamb on its pool of dull-glazed jus, then bumps against the bent sleeping head of Marcia McCord, with her tide-line of make-up snaking across the side of her long, thin, elegant neck.

  This, Larry thinks, is a party in its ruins. An idea that should never have come into being. If this party were a play the curtain would come down. If this were a movie there’d be a fade-out. Right this minute. Now.

  But no. He knows the evening isn’t finished. There’s more to come.

  He’s been waiting all evening for that something more, without knowing what it is, but now he sees across the table that Dorrie is smiling directly at him. What is she saying with that old, wise smile, its utter knowing and familiarity?

  Indecipherable, but nevertheless he smiles back, a smile full of messages: here we are, the two of us.

  Something has happened in the room, he understands that; there are two densities present, suspended one inside the other, and the air around the table, candlelit, soft, breaks up into shimmering bars of heat. A perceptual accident perhaps, a mirage, but here they are, suddenly, Larry and Dorrie, the Wellers, husband and wife. This is their party. They are, in this alternate version of reality, partners in a long marriage, survivors of old quarrels long since mended. The journey they appear to have taken separately has really been made together. After all, after all. So this is what has happened. Their parents are dead, the years have flown, and they themselves are parents of a beloved son who is in difficulty. It is they, Dorrie and Larry, who have brought this evening into being, and here, arrayed around them as though in a holographic image, are their friends and family, warmly invited, encouraged to talk, comforted with food and wine, adored, embraced.

  The hour is winding down. Soon the ol
d friends will be gone. Soon they will have only each other. Evening’s end. An engulfing dream, dissolving. A vision, a blur of what rightfully is theirs.

  The chocolate cake is perfection. That’s what Charlotte deems it - perfection! She would be mortified to know that a smear of chocolate has parked itself at the left-hand corner of her upper lip, making her look unbalanced. Wicked, in fact.

  Señor Samuel Alvero has just declared that he will not speak on behalf of the male sex and how it defines itself to itself. “I am, after all, the stone guest tonight. Do you know this phrase? Invatado de piedra. From Convidado de Piedra. Perhaps it is only for Spanish people. A stone guest is one who is invited to occupy a place at the table, to fill a slot. He is not expected to say much. Or do much. He is just—”

  “Just there.”

  “Precisely.”

  “A stone.”

  “I’m feeling like a stone myself,” Beth says. “After all I ate.”

  “Gorgeous cake,” says Marcia McCord, who has revived and is now patting her hair smooth. “It reminds me of the time Garth and I went to this place in Vienna and I had three pieces of chocolate cake for lunch, psyching up my courage to have my ears pierced.”

  “In Spain we always -”

  “You know, I’ve never had my ears pierced,” Beth announces with a note of awe.

  “Because of your political principles?”

  “Because I’m a total coward. So it’s clip-ons or nothing.”

  “And clip-ons kill!”

  “Tell me, why would an intelligent women want to mutilate her -?”

  Midge Weller begins a long story about being fourteen years old and sneaking off to a shopping mall in Winnipeg where free ear piercings were being offered, and how she’d spent that night with her head wrapped in bath towels and her earlobes bleeding freely and fiercely.

  “I was forty when I got around to my ears,” Charlotte tosses in, her voice droll and aslant. “Which is late, late, late, but I thought, what the hey, I have to celebrate this event somehow.”

  “A small puncture for womankind.”

  “Two small punctures.”

  “Ha!”

  “My own mother did mine at home,” Dorrie contributes. “I was about twelve. She got me down on the couch and started in with a hot needle. I fainted after the first ear, and the minute I revived she went for the second.”

  “Did you ever forgive her?”

  “Of course. But then I’m at a place in my life where I’ve forgiven everyone. Except myself maybe.”

  “In my country it is the custom to -”

  “Why is it we never forgive ourselves?”

  Larry looks up. Who is it who’s said this? who? It’s Marcia McCord. She’s staring straight into the side of her second slice of cake, and Larry sees that her eyes are crowded with tears.

  He’s always known he was a man with a few loose parts: a brain, for instance, with a hinge he can flip open. And now he thinks: Oh, these women, these beautiful women. He regards them with wonder. These women are separate selves, but also part of Larry’s self. And it seems they are in league together, attempting around this simple rectangular table, suddenly, to refloat the evening with their generous mouths and gesturing hands. He loves them all - he does! His bossy, loyal, suffering, unpredictable sister with her salty tongue. His two magnificent wives — just look at them! They are brilliantly alive in the flickering candlelight, in a way he never would have guessed — graceful, articulate, earnest, kind. And his gentle Charlotte, yes. And he loves even Marcia McCord, who has just this minute parted her bitten lips and launched into a description of Garth’s true opinion of Austrian hotels - cute, dull, expensive, flat, and flavored with burnt milk.

  The voices of these women form a cloud of lightness over the table. Now they’re talking about the importing of unpasteurized cheese. Now they’ve switched to the benefits of train travel over air, to the national breast cancer movement, to David Cronenberg movies, to Karen Kain’s retirement. This is a kind of intricate dance they’re conducting, or else it’s a spider’s web. Where would his life be without women? A stone guest at his own party. That’s the truth of the matter. Filling a slot.

  The men around the table are silent for the moment, characters observed by a badly managed camera — digesting the rich cake, Larry thinks, or listening, or else pondering — pondering that unanswerable question that they’ve so carefully avoided - what is it like to be part of the company of men at the end of our millennium? What do they want once their names are inscribed in the book of life? Wait a minute - there isn’t any book of life.

  Men. These curious upholstered assemblages of bones, the fearful mortality that attends them, the clutter of good luck and bad, the foolish choices, the seeds of the boys they’d all been — and those seeds sprouting inappropriately even as their hair thins and their muscles slacken. Fighting for a little space in the world. Needing a little human attention. Getting it up, getting it off. When does it stop? Does it ever stop?

  Larry recalls a photo someone had taken of him as a very young child. He is propped up in a rather elaborate highchair and is staring straight ahead, his infant face full of hurt and knowing. Is it his future as a man he’s seeing? That stumbling being who knows now that every single day something will be taken from him, and that one day it will be too much?

  Some twenty years ago it was different. Yes - it would be almost twenty years ago, the end of April, a cold night just as this. Walking alone on a Winnipeg street, twenty-six years old, he’d seen, perhaps for the first time, the kind of man he could be. He’d felt the force of the wind, and impulsively he’d whipped off his tweed jacket, offering himself up to the moment he’d just discovered, letting it sweep him forward on its beguiling currents. Love was waiting for him. Transformation. Goodness. Work. Understanding. The enchantment and liberation of words. The discovery of his own clumsy body and how it yearned to connect. And children, too, if he were lucky, but he was going to be lucky, that question was no longer in doubt. The wind that blew against his exposed body informed him of his good fortune. All he had to do was stand still and allow it to happen.

  “I am so sorry about your wife,” Charlotte is saying to Samuel Alvero. They have carried their coffee cups into the living room and are sitting near the bay window on two rather stiff chairs. “My own husband, Derek, it was the same thing for him. Sleeping pills. An overdose.”

  “Perhaps an accident -”

  “He left a note.”

  “But I thought you said - did you not say it was a cancer that—?”

  “It was being treated. He was doing fine. But he was too sad. Or mad at the world. Or maybe at me. I haven’t told very many people.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “I haven’t said anything to Larry. I don’t want him to know.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “I can tell from your eyes that I can trust you.”

  “And I can tell from your eyes that - ”

  “Did Larry tell you how much I loved Spain?”

  “So! You have visited my country!”

  “We started in Madrid, three terrific days and then—”

  “The weather, it was good?”

  “It rained one evening, the fattest raindrops I’d ever seen. Not many, just a few, but each one was so full and perfect, and they fell on my bare arms. It was heaven in a way.”

  “My therapist,” Marcia McCord says to Ian, “has this theory that I act out because I feel I’m doomed to act out.”

  “You mean like a self-fulfilling prophecy kind-of-thing?”

  “I know nobody likes me. People can’t stand me, and that’s a fact. And so I make sure they really and truly can’t stand me.”

  “I like you.”

  “But the way you say that. Men are liars, aren’t they? And they’re always making women glue the little emotional pieces together for them.”

  “Relax, why don’t you?”

  “All right. I will. Oh, Jesus!”
>
  “You’re crying.”

  “Not really, it’s the smoke.”

  “No one’s smoking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let me take your hand for a minute. Let me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re trembling.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not true that I’m never embarrassed,” Garth McCord tells Beth. He stirs his coffee with great thoroughness, even though he’s taking it black. “I’m embarrassed as hell all the time.”

  “But why do you -?”

  “I love her. She’s - difficult. She’s had problems all her life. I knew that when we got married. She needs a lot of, a lot of — tending. But I love her.”

  “You’re lucky then.”

  “And it seems you’re lucky too.”

  “You mean - this? The baby?”

  “You’ve made a real choice. This didn’t just happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re thinking about moving to Toronto.”

  “Thinking, yes, but there are so many considerations. Like, would it be awkward for Larry if the baby and I were in the same city?”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “I suppose I thought that maybe we could, you know, even reach a new understanding. The two of us? But, of course, I didn’t know about the existence of Charlene -”

  “It’s Charlotte.”

  “And I don’t have an inkling about how serious their relationship is. You can see what a mess I’m in.”

  “And it’s so easy to do damage. Take my word for it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Damage.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  Larry is walking around the room refilling coffee cups, bending, pouring, taking in snatches of conversation. Midge and Dorrie sit crowded together on the small sofa by the artificial fireplace, and Dorrie is explaining why she is in Toronto for the weekend.

  “I’m apartment hunting,” she says into Midge’s ear, but Larry, bending forward, hears too.

  Midge puts down her cup. “I can’t believe it. That you’d ever leave Winnipeg.”

  “I’ll hate giving up the house. All those memories.”

  “But why?” Larry asks.