At ten o’clock on those long ago evenings his mother made tea and set out three mugs and a plate of fruitcake or buttered toast. No, they didn’t have an inkling, and, as Bill Herschel liked to say, it takes a thousand inklings to make a clue. As long as Larry could keep his folks in a state of dumb innocence he felt he could get through it himself, this sinking hell, the slow torture of it. After that he would join the grown-up world and spend his time, legitimately, as his parents did, embedded in their cozy weekend evenings, their hobbies and TV shows. That was the future, the way out. This knowledge was stored coldly in his chest.
It seems now a long way back to those Saturday evenings, and Larry has made it a point not to relive his adolescent panics. Tonight, attending his sixteenth high school reunion, standing between Bill and Heather Herschel and joining in the school song - Onward, onward, brave MacDonald— he is stirred and grateful to find himself part of this celebrating crowd of men and women who are dressed for an evening of pleasure, suits and ties, short silky swinging dresses, bringing with them their grown-up regard for each other, and their newly evolved, kinder selves. Larry looks around at the singing faces and robust swaying shoulders, his classmates dwarfed in the tall shadowy gymnasium through whose open windows the fragrance of spring floats in. The old teenage sadness feels at this moment utterly displaced by the thundery weather of love, or, at the very least, good will.
The singing ends raggedly - more than a few have forgotten the words - and then, still standing, they hear from the platform a list of the deceased being read aloud, their dead classmates. Cameron Ford, Bruce Wilkinson, Shirley McGuinty, Clara-Jane Barber, Anita Becherston, Kenny Charles, Bugsy Lambert. Someone, one of the men, moans when Bugsy’s name is mentioned, a cry of shocked surprise, and then the flat unaccented reading of the list continues - Simon Lu, Charlotte Sawatski, Kay Armstrong. The dead, Larry thinks, don’t have to remember names, shake hands, kiss or not kiss, or try to he funny or at ease, yet how could so many have perished in a mere sixteen years - car accidents? cancer? - and why doesn’t the woman reading the names put a little bubble of tenderness around each one as she pronounces it?
Through a haze of sorrow, or was it a kind of respect for those who’d let go of the world so uncomplainingly, Larry only gradually comprehends who it is who’s rattling off the names of the dead as though they were items on a grocery list. It’s Megsy Hicks.
Only she’s Megsy Hicks Clarkson now, according to the program. Tall, bony, shiny-suited. Her round glasses twinkle intelligently under the lights, and her long straight hair holds flashes of gray. Just as she had once triumphed over the wearing of spectacles, Larry sees that she is now soaring above the humiliation of premature gray. There seems something magnificent about this. He feels his insides soften with remembered love and wonders, with a sidelong look in the direction of fate, if he will speak to her before the evening is out.
But the dinner places are assigned, and he finds himself at a table in the far corner of the gym. Seated next to him is Nancy Oleson, an outstandingly pretty girl back in high school, but now, in her mid-thirties, scrawny and sexless in blue stretch pants and a not very fresh cotton shirt. Her fingers play compulsively with her headful of stiffened hair. Divorced, she tells Larry. The guy was an asshole.
Bill and Heather are at the table too, and Larry would bet money that Heather’s hand is resting on Bill’s knee or else Bill’s hand under the table has slipped between Heather’s thighs. They are feeling the weight of their anointment: high school sweethearts, young love. And their faces have grown correspondingly soft, transfigured with nostalgia, radiant.
The heat catches. Skip Hurst, a former nerd like Larry, tells a long, funny story about having a flat tire in Thailand where he now lives. He’s married to a Thai woman, a doctor, and he proudly passes around a photo of her holding their newly born baby. “I don’t know why I came all this way to the reunion,” he says suddenly, cheerfully. His skin has a capillary richness. “I hated every minute of high school.”
“Oh, so did I.” This, surprisingly, from Heather. Then she adds, “Until I met Bill that day in the cafeteria. He dropped his carton of milk on my shoe. The little pointy corner got me on my big toe. Yikes.”
“Anything to get your attention,” Bill says.
“I had a crush on you,” Nancy Oleson tells Skip. She’s on her fourth glass of wine, not drunk exactly, but warming up. “I guess I pretty well had a crush on anything in pants that moved.”
“How about me?” Bill asks.
She gives a nice dirty laugh. “I think it was Larry I had my eye on. Yes, you, Larry Weller. You were so sweet and shy, and one day you lent me your colored pencils in geography. Mr Bailey’s class.”
“I remember,” Larry says. It’s true, he does remember.
“So why the hell didn’t you ask me out, then?”
Everyone laughs. They either know the answer to this question or they don’t, it doesn’t matter.
They’re served a tossed salad, then a plate crowded with chicken, rice, and hard peas, and for dessert a sweetly medicinal-tasting ice-cream concoction. With coffee, a hood of intimacy falls over the table, and the talk moves easily, touching on travel, children, marriage, divorce, work, disappointments. This talk is skewed with the remembrance of an old self-consciousness now banished, at least for this evening, and perhaps - who can tell? - forever. It’s as though they know that the meaning of their lives is not a fact to be discovered but a choice they make, have already, in fact, made. Sixteen years have passed with their gaps and revelations. History has been laid down like paving stones, added up, subtracted, and lightly dismissed. Laughter flows, and Larry, only moderately drunk, feels blessed. If only they could go on like this forever, seated at this floating table with its covering of love. Friends, friends. Isn’t this what he’s longed for all his life, to be in the brimming midst of friends?
Then he feels the shadow of someone standing behind him and turns his head a fraction of an inch. It’s Megsy Hicks. Her hands are actually gripping the rounded back of his folding chair so that he is in a sense in her embrace, doubly blessed on this night of rapture. Now she’s leaning over him into the table’s circle of warmth, her gray flecked hair swinging close to Larry’s face, so close he can smell the spice of her perfume.
“Shame on you guys,” she’s saying, or rather barking out in her one-note student council voice. “We can’t have this now, can we. How about mixing with the others. Moving around a little. Come on now, everybody, up on your feet. It’s mingle time.”
The invasion is so brutal and unexpected that for a moment no one speaks. Larry studies the winking surface of his dark coffee. His scalp freezes.
“I hope,” Heather says carefully, “that you aren’t scolding us, Megsy.”
“I’m just trying—” Megsy snarls, vigorously, righteously, shaking her hair.
“Go fuck yourself, Megsy Hicks,” says Nancy Oleson.
The words come lightly, sweetly, from Nancy’s large droll mouth, but they are enough to blow the bad dream away. Larry is conscious of a displacement of air behind him, and the sound of the silk suit as it swishes from sight. Skip Hurst whistles a single low note. Bill and Heather Herschel turn to each other and stare, and brave, drunk Nancy Oleson has her hand clapped over her teeth. Her eyes are wild and goofy as she turns to Larry Weller, that former adolescent nobody, seeking his approval.
It takes a moment, two minutes, but what they all begin to feel is the welling up of laughter, gathering around the table like a bomb, doubling and tripling. It’s going to burst the room apart when it comes.
Larry’s brain sings, as though he has just worked out a long, difficult mathematical problem. And somewhere else, just out of earshot, he senses that his life is quietly clearing its throat, getting ready, at last, to speak.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Larry’s Penis 1986
Larry loves to see a woman with raindrops in her hair.
And he loves to see a woman walki
ng briskly while eating an apple, piercing the skin with her eager teeth. His first wife, Dorrie, was a daring eater of apples, grasping them firmly and gnawing them straight to their economical cores.
His now-wife - they’ve been married only a month - cuts her apples into wedges, then reassembles them in a Baggie for her lunch. She packs a second Baggie full of raw vegetables, carrots, celery, cauliflower, which she’s washed carefully at the kitchen sink and cut, attractively, on the diagonal. A third Baggie contains a cube of low-fat cheese. These three little still lifes are created afresh each day and snugged in polyethylene covers, and Larry’s wife gives a near-audible mew of satisfaction tucking these packets into her briefcase, substance transformed to abstraction, and abstraction a door to an invisible, orderly world. Things she can’t see draw her closest attention, but she’s vigilant, too, about the immediate details of her ongoing life. She turns and floats Larry a lazy, detached smile. The only child of elderly parents, she’s learned early to take care of her external being, to be good to herself, hence her pristinely packed lunches, hence her well-pressed linen suit and beautiful, expensive shoes.
The name of Larry’s new wife is Beth Prior, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who’s writing her doctoral thesis on women saints.
Goodness is what she’s really in search of, especially feminine goodness, that baffling contradiction. Why, in the centuries when women were denied, ignored, oppressed, and tortured, did they continue to fashion themselves into vessels of virtue? How, considering their ignorance and non-status, was it possible for them to get even a rudimentary purchase on the continuum of goodness and evil, to reflect on its meaning and to direct themselves so purely, so persistently, toward moral perfection?
Was it, Beth asks, that their smaller, more vulnerable body size drove them into wily strategies, so that by arming themselves with holy rectitude they were able to solicit the protection of men? Or, she speculates (speculation is her natural mode, as Larry more and more sees), did wearing a mask of intense goodness signal to these same men a complementary veiled intensity of passion, making these goodly women more desirable as bedmates, and thereby raising their value on the marriage market?
Or maybe - Beth does not discount the notion - women simply long to be good for the sake of goodness; maybe they’re predisposed by evolutionary mapping to commit acts of charity so that a race commanded by men might not implode. For nothing, according to Beth, makes women more resistant to venal temptations than the lack of a penis and its attendant fluid and fluid sacs. Penis owners are more violent, their will more concentrated - that much is indisputable. (At this Larry blinks, but Beth hurries on.) Men are, in this respect, as much slaves to their biology as women, and cannot, therefore, be held to blame. “Don’t you think,” Beth asks her new husband, “that an uncontrollable rush of testosterone would impede the sort of moral deliberation required to, you know, achieve perfect goodness?”
“I’ll have to think about that,” Larry says.
They are having this discussion while lying on their wide white bed in a rented town house in River Forest, Illinois. The weekend sun shines through the sheer curtains, then bounces off the slick sheets on to their naked bodies.
And so, good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear.
Earlier this morning Beth had wakened Larry by murmuring these lines in his ear. “That’s John Donne talking, the horny old hedevil himself.”
“One of your penis owners?” asked Larry, who has never heard of John Donne.
“Emphatically!” says Beth, taking Larry’s penis into both her hands and regarding it with curiosity, as though in search of its heartbeat. “He was a poet of the sacred who also happened to be crazy about the sexual act.”
Waking up to poetry is something new for thirty-six-year-old Larry Weller, and he worries that Beth will grow tired of interpreting the literate world to him. Dorrie, his ex-wife back in Winnipeg, sells cars for a living. Mileage, cruise control, safety features, that’s Dorrie’s poetry. His new wife - his now-wife as he thinks of her - is a scholar, a lecturer in Rosary College’s women’s studies department, a specialist in holy saints and, like the poet she’s just quoted, an avid sensualist-in-training. “Here it comes,” she says to Larry’s stiffening penis. Her voice curls back with childlike surprise. “Oh my, yes, it’s coming, coming, coming, coming. Oh my, hello there!”
A tube of flesh, purplish in hue, veined, hooded, hanging there. Shaft and glans. A nozzle. A rounded snout. A cylinder wrapped like a wonton in transparent skin. Hanging there, always there, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Trunk, stalk, drainpipe, pickle. A wagging horn strung between the legs, sewn into the body on a network of nerves and blood and cushiony scrotum. Lightning rod, rattlesnake, bum splitter. A knob, a swelling, pinky-blue, blood-filled, wormy white, its tip an open hole, leaking. A duct, a conduit, ribbed, fibrous. Dick, dink, ding-dong-bell. The family jewels. Tender, tight. A boner. A jackhammer, a probe, a woodie. A banana in the pocket - now who said that? - someone famous, wasn’t it? Mae West? The cow in the barn, and the barn door open. (Holy embarrassment, Robin!) Cock, pendulum. Phallus. Prick. Engine. Sword, breadstick, crank and hammer. Your Henry, your Johnson, your John Thomas, your Ralph, your Charlie. Your pecker, Peter, your Billy-boy, your one-eyed-monster in his turtleneck sweater. Now damp, now dry, now itchy, now swelling, full of longing, rising, rising again, in search of, in search of what?
Larry Weller’s penis is average in size. At least he thinks it is. It’s widely believed that men using public urinals check out the size of the men standing next to them, but Larry’s found this kind of covert comparison remarkably difficult to accomplish. Men tend to avoid staring at the penises of other men unless they are sending a direct invitational message. The penis of Larry Weller is circumcised; this was done right after he was born. The doctor had spoken to his still sore and swollen mother about male hygiene, about current thinking on the topic. The talk lasted maybe a minute and a half, but Larry will live with the decision forever, a little piece of himself missing, thrown away, returned to dust.
Larry left Winnipeg for Illinois a year ago. He loaded up his Audi 100 - his ex-wife, Dorrie, had got him a deal with one of her rivals - and drove non-stop through the long, bent, bushy state of Minnesota, its white-banked highways skirting a thousand little towns with their water towers and grain elevators shining under caps of fresh snow. He’d quit his job as manager of a Flowercity outlet. No one could believe it, his friends, his family. He’d been there seventeen years, since he was a kid straight out of the Floral Arts course at Red River College. Seventeen years on the job, the seventies, the eighties, while other guys his age were cruising the continent on motorbikes, living like bums, seeing the world.
It was three in the morning when he hit the Minnesota-Wisconsin state line. The bridge at LaCrosse was bathed in mauve light, and he drove across feeling himself a crowned monarch, propelled by the zing of his tires on the frozen bridge surface. He, Larry Weller, had been awarded a commission to build a garden maze in suburban Chicago, a rich man’s toy. He was going to work under Eric Eisner, the renowned landscape architect. No wonder he drove with a sense of his own unannounced splendor, a single car alone on the bridge - his - under the singular cloud-smudged moon. Artie Shaw was on the radio with one of his golden oldies, “Begin the Beguine.” Sexy. Larry’s dad’s favorite tune. A dumb song, but oddly, weepily, stirring. Maybe it was the music or maybe the moonlight or the thought that he was hinging his past to the present, but he felt sexy all over at that moment, even the points at the back of his scalp and under the skin of his fingertips. His penis jumped in his pants. His pisser, his pony, his jack-in-the-box. Why?
Why would anyone leave a perfectly good job, his father said, forgetting that back in the beginning, when Larry first drifted into the flower business, he was the one who was against it. It was girlie work, as he saw it, concocting little arrangements, making bouquets.
Now that Larry’s father is retired, with only his colostomy bag for company - so his daily complaint goes - he mourns the loss of his own work, swearing that the best and richest years of his life were spent in the Winnipeg bus factory where he was employed - and also honored, don’t forget that — as head upholsterer. These days he wanders around the house, watches TV, and periodically rearranges his collection of corkscrews and bottle openers, though with less and less enthusiasm as time passes. Not working is lonely; it’s too goddamned quiet, not working.
Larry’s mother used to be at home all the time, a regular recluse, the family worried about her, but in the last couple of years she’s become a member of the Winnipeg Agape Group, a soup kitchen housed in a nearby Anglican church. That’s where she is every morning from eight-thirty till noon, stirring vats of creamed chicken or Hungarian goulash. She’s ambivalent about Larry’s change of job, unreeling the not very useful impartiality of the busily occupied. “I suppose it’s an opportunity,” she said when Larry told her he’d been asked to design a maze for a Chicago real estate giant, a millionaire with an estate in River Forest. “But it’s a long, long way from home, and it’s another country even.”
“Go for it,” his sister, Midge, said. “Get the frigging hell out of here. I only wish I’d done it when I had the chance and maybe I will yet. And, listen, if you want to hit me up for a loan, just say the word. I can live on my salary, if you call what I do living. God, I’m sick of that gift shop, the claustrophobia, Christ, and all the gifty shit we push on our dumb customers. But look, I’ve got poor old Paul’s money growing mold in the bank, you might as well take a chunk. When he was alive he was such a cheapskate. He’d squeeze a nickel till the beaver shat. But you know something, he’d have wanted to help you out, he had a soft spot for you, you know. You never stopped shaking hands with him like a lot of people did toward the end, scared shitless. You even hugged him that onee — that last week at the hospice. I was out in the corridor, I saw it happen but I didn’t want to say anything at the time, I thought you’d be embarrassed. It’s only money, for God’s sake. You could consider it kind of like a scholarship or something.”
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