Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  “The turf wears away,” Larry explained, “so the chalky ground becomes the path and the turf the divider.”

  “You’re sounding pedagogical, Larry. You’re sounding like me.”

  The foot-shaped Bicton maze in Devon was the creation of Randoll Coate and Adrian Fisher, the genius of contemporary maze design, and Larry and Beth traced their way through each toe of the foot, and arrived breathless and full of delight at the roundabout in the heel, where they were spun toward the maze’s solution. “So this is what mazes are about,” Beth said. “You kept telling me they were about love or sex or death or God. But really they’re just fun.”

  “I told you they were fun. You’ve forgotten.”

  This seemed to him something that had happened often. Beth had a way of reconstructing their life together, reassembling their conversations, their various arrivals and departures and chapters of marital history. It worried him, but only occasionally. Half the time he thinks how fortunate a man he is to be married to a woman of imagination. A flag of persistent untruth flutters in his head, but he chooses to ignore it.

  In August Larry and Beth went to France, where they were joined for two weeks by Larry’s son, Ryan, who was thirteen now. He arrived at Roissy airport, it seemed to Larry, with a new lanky look about him. (It was one of Larry’s own secret sorrows that he would never himself be described as being lanky, having passed directly from weedy adolescence to full-fleshed adulthood.)

  Their first stop was the Jardin des Plantes in Paris itself to see the recently restored eighteenth-century maze, with its central summerhouse and bell. Then they drove (a rented Renault 19) to Chartres to have a look at the pavement maze in the great cathedral. “This floor design,” Larry said to his son, more loudly and teacherly than he intended, “happens to be the oldest surviving medieval Christian labyrinth in the world.”

  “You’re supposed to look at the windows too,” Beth said. She was an uneasy stepmother, and never knew quite what tone to take.

  This gift to his son, this sight, this slice of holy silence, struck Larry as a rare privilege. How often are we able to give openly the treasure of surprise? But Ryan was busy staring at a couple kissing behind a statue of Saint Joseph. “Tonsil hockey,” he murmured to himself, or perhaps to his father and his father’s wife, who were standing a few feet away.

  “This particular maze is from the thirteenth century,” Larry continued. It seemed important to make the boy understand the unicursal marvel he was looking at, that this wasn’t just a piece of hopscotch on the floor, though, in fact - and he couldn’t resist explaining further - the game of hopscotch is based on cathedral architecture. “That’s back in the twelve hundreds.”

  “The treizième siècle,” said Ryan, as nonchalantly as though he were blowing out a balloon of bubble gum.

  Larry’s ex-wife had insisted on registering Ryan in the French immersion stream of his school, right from the age of six. Now, at thirteen, he was startlingly fluent, able to interpret for his father and stepmother, inquiring about the price of postcards, making table reservations in hotels, and even, in one case, talking a policeman out of a parking violation in Aix-en-Provence, where they’d gone to see the magnificent three-hundred-year-old Chateauneuf le Rouge maze. Beth has a formal understanding of French grammar, and Larry remembered a few phrases from high school, but neither of them could comprehend the language as it was spoken on the street, much less spout it back in the slangy, unselfconscious manner that Ryan assumed.

  At Chateau de Villandry (something of a disappointment), at Madame Arthaud’s maze in Rennes, at Chateau de Balleuil where a modem maze was planted as recently as 1989, at La Commanderie de Neuilly en Oise (circular, hornbeam hedges) - at each of these historic stops or the maze trail, thirteen-year-old Ryan took the lead, asking directions, translating pamphlets, and, if there was a guide, doing a shrugging, half-embarrassed precis of the official spiel.

  Always before, the vacations he’d spent with Larry and Beth had been awkward. Visiting the Oak Park house during spring vacation or at Christmas, he tended to fall silent - or sullen, according to Beth - unable, it seemed, to relate to either of them in a natural, spontaneous way; but now, here in this strange country, he quickly made himself part of a three-way ongoing irony, the twist being that two helpless adults were being led by a cunning young kid across the bewildering hexagon of France.

  Beth relaxed for the first time with the boy. They even exchanged jokes.

  “So what do you call a man who loves another man?” Ryan demanded.

  “Duh, I dunno,” Beth gave him back.

  “A Christian.”

  Was this funny? Beth looked uncertain, but then laughed uproariously. “Who told you that?”

  “Pierre.”

  “Who’s Pierre?”

  “My mom’s boyfriend.”

  “I thought it was David,” Larry said carefully.

  Ryan looked confused. “That was way back. Pierre’s her boss. More of a boss than a boyfriend.”

  “But he tells good jokes?” Larry persisted. He knew better than to pursue this. Careful.

  “Yeah.”

  “Know any more?”

  “Oui, mon père, mais en français.”

  Mon père; the words struck Larry in the heart. The lighter-than-air mateyness, the straight-in-the-eye punch. This was more than he deserved, much more. With a stab of love he watched his son watching him - a grown man who stumbled, fell into error, got lost, made a fool of himself, but was willing, at least, to be rescued. Something good was bound to come of this.

  Beth loved Madrid. Its sunshine and bright disorder and, especially, the dozen or more Annunciations she found at the Prado. Fra Angelico’s was dazzling, so simple, curved and direct, so suffused with tender piety that Beth stood helpless for a moment before it, swept with doubt about the validity of her enterprise, and its mocking thrust. The El Greco was a whirling triumph, with Mary eccentrically posed on the left instead of the right as though the artist had cocked his brush at the world and said: dare me. (Beth scribbled all these thoughts rapidly into her spiral notebook.) The fifteenth-century Mateu was just plain weird and almost as enchanting in its way as the Sopetran. The Picardo, early fifteenth century, was a gem, possessing not just a single book for the Holy Virgin to read, but a whole bookcase. (“As if they had bookcases in Nazareth,” Beth murmured.) Dieric Bouts, the Dutch painter, depicted Mary overcome with humility, her eyes closed in the best saintly manner. In the Morales, sixteenth century, Mary was pretending not to hear the angel, who had a ribbon of speech emanating from his right hand, destined straight for her ear.

  But Beth’s favorite was the fourteenth-century Robert Campin painting in which Gabriel is standing outside Mary’s chamber preparing to enter. Mary, for once, is really reading, her not-yet-holy eyes fixed to the page, absorbed, composed, happy, with not the faintest idea of what is about to burst in on her.

  In Barcelona Larry and Beth spend a whole morning wandering through the Laberint d’Horta where they are the only tourists. The old gardens are romantic, even sentimental. There is even a corny, fake facsimile of a farmworker’s shelter, and near it, a false cemetery. “All the furniture of the romantic imagination,” Beth commented approvingly. “Poverty and death made pretty and cute.”

  The labyrinth itself was closed. A short, stout man, whom Larry and Beth took to be the head gardener, hurried toward them in his crisp, slightly mismatched green pants and shirt, and gestured with chopping hands toward the workers inside the maze, busy with their shears and clippers.

  Larry made a motion of supplication, bowing slightly, the palms of his hands brought humbly together, and the gardener smiled abruptly in response, shrugged, and waved them through the cypress archway. He held up the fingers of his two hands. “I think he means ten minutes,” Beth warned.

  The deep green cypress walls rose all around them to a height of two meters plus, and led with relative ease toward the goal, which was a circle surrounded by eight
leafy arches, and at the center Eros himself, gleaming whitely in the mottled Spanish sunlight, about to release an arrow of love.

  “I’m glad you persevered,” Beth said afterwards. “I’m glad you did that thing with your hands. I’ve never seen you do that before.”

  They would travel in the following weeks to the mirror maze in Lucerne. The richly enigmatic Scandinavian mazes lay ahead of them; Finland alone had over a hundred stone-lined labyrinths. In the spring of the following year, they would find themselves in Japan’s teasing, contemporary wooden mazes, and then on to Australia. So many wonders to see, and so much of it destined to blur and soften in Larry’s memory.

  But he would remember, always, walking through Barcelona’s Laberint d’Horta, where he and Beth had been given gracious permission to enter, how still the morning had been, how the good, clean, single-minded offering of cypress perfume rose to meet them, how musical was the splashing fountain and the sound of manual clippers all around them and the brooms of the workers resettling the gravel paths, and how Beth had reached out and stroked with her hand the smooth marble skin of Eros, turning toward him then with a look of perfect wonder in her eye.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Larry’s Threads 1993-4

  Innocence is a slippery substance. It seems you can’t possess it and at the same time know you possess it. Yet Larry Weller feels himself to be an innocent man, and one who has little aptitude for irony. Which is why, he suspects, people trust him, hire him, pay him, and remember him with words of thanks and with mild greetings carried back and forth by distant friends or former clients. If his life were a stage, its wings would be airy, capacious, and open to the light. His cross-hatched look of bewilderment is half his charm - he knows this, but persuades himself, and others, that he doesn’t. The worse that can be said of him is that at age forty-four both his marriages have failed. Is this, then, a man incapable of holding a woman’s love?

  The series of events that led to the end of his second marriage began on the March morning (’93) when Larry’s wife, Beth, received a phone call from the University of Sussex in England, inviting her to apply as head of their Women’s Studies department. Larry remembers that she laughed out loud at the thought. Impossible, that hoot of hers said. She and Larry owned a house in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, a house with seven spacious rooms and a garden that, with its newly planted shrubs and ornamental fruit trees and perennial beds, was on the very cusp of becoming “established.” Larry had his office just around the corner on Lake Street, ten minutes’ walking distance, and Beth, besides teaching part-time at Rosary College, was trying like crazy to get pregnant.

  Nevertheless, she packed her bags and crossed the Atlantic to see what was being offered.

  “It’s a terrific place,” she said, phoning in the middle of the night and waking Larry from a sound sleep. (She’s never been good at working out international time differences.)

  “The salary’s not bad. God, it’s amazing, in fact. And the benefits! I wouldn’t be expected to do any teaching at all, unless I specifically wanted to, which I’m mulling over. Secretarial staff of three. Three! And five teaching staff plus four cross-appointments. They think my religious studies area will bring a needed balance to the department. Everyone here’s read my book, the whole committee, I mean, and they ask intelligent questions. I’d forgotten there were articulate beings in this world. The housing market here is steep as hell, but—well, what do you think, Larry?”

  “It’s the middle of the night here. Can I call you back tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll be in London. They want me to talk with the former head, she’s retired, a real sweetheart, living in Hampstead, writing a book about women mill workers at the turn of the century and the deprivations they suffered under — ”

  “Call me Sunday then.” He knew how hysterically fluent she was about to become. An image of her hot brown eyes radioed straight through to his optic nerve.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, but -”

  “But what?”

  “But let’s not rush into anything, Beth.”

  By Sunday she had accepted the job. (“This kind of thing doesn’t come along all that often.”)

  They would commute. Lots of couples did these days, Larry knew that perfectly well, though he’d never heard of a cross-Atlantic marriage and had his doubts. They could try it for one year and then put everything on the table for discussion. If Larry timed his UK visits with Beth’s fertile periods they’d be winners all around. They’d have cash in the bank, a bun in the oven, and a glittering set of opportunities before them. For example, they could spend seven months in England and five in the States; they could work it out.

  October. Larry packed a week’s clothes in a carry-on bag. His duds. His threads. (It was his boyhood friend Bill Herschel who used to say threads, a term he must have lifted from old motorcycle movies or maybe a Harold Robbins paperback - and after all these years Larry never folds a shirt or a pair of pants without Bill coming to mind, and the larky, back-street, cool-talk word: threads.)

  “Business or pleasure?” the immigration officer asked at Heathrow. “Stud duties,” Larry thought of saying, but instead murmured, “Pleasure.” Pleasure after two celibate months, pleasure after knocking around his and Beth’s half-furnished house - those long cloud-streaked evenings - and eating pick-up meals at the Calypso Cafe on Marion Street. Pleasure.

  He was shocked when he saw the place Beth had rented. He’d expected it to be small, since they had agreed to economize. But this was spartan. A third-floor flat with no elevator. A cupboard for a kitchen. The only bedroom was tiny, white, and windowless, and contained a narrow white bed. A nun’s bed. “There’s the fold-out couch in the living room,” Beth offered, apologetic, flustered.

  She had acquired a wardrobe of nun’s clothes too. A severe black suit. A smart black wool dress. A rippling black silk tunic-kind-of-thing that she wore over black tights. A long-sleeved white Viyella nightgown. Her new threads.

  “I hope you brought a suit,” she said to him. “The vice-chancellor and his wife are having us to dinner, they’re dying to meet you.”

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t.”

  “Oh, Lord, then we’ll have to go and buy you one.”

  They settled quickly on a solid dark-gray double-breasted suit, laughably expensive. The woolen material was heavy and the weave exceptionally tight. The jacket, and the trousers too, fit more closely to his body than he was accustomed to, so that when he moved he felt the nagging tug of restraint. He was obliged to go back twice to the shop to have the necessary adjustments made, and these were done by a fox-terrier of a boy/man who sighed through his nose when taking Larry’s measurements. Larry looked in the mirror and thought: a burial suit. Grave clothes.

  “Smashing,” said Beth. “And you’ll get all kinds of wear out of it.”

  In fact, he never wore it again. He carried it back to America on a hanger, sheathed in black plastic with the shameful words Gentlemen’s Own Choice displayed diagonally across both sides.

  November. One week after winning the State of Illinois Award for Creative Excellence, and for all practical purposes clinching the Midwest Pride-in-Accomplishment Medal, Larry Weller packed his threads once again - his stone-washed jeans, perfect for a man feeling stone-washed and stone weary - and climbed aboard a 727 for Boston, where he was to meet with the mayor of that city to discuss a million-dollar landscape project which would never come into being.

  Beth, when he phoned to tell her, was understanding. Maybe it was just as well, in fact. A blessing in disguise. She’s been invited to join a group of pilgrims who were walking from Guildford to Norwich to visit the famous Julian shrine.

  “Who’s he?” Larry asked.

  “It’s a she, and she’s a sort of saint, only not a canonized saint. Fourteenth century, I told you about her before.”

  “There’s always December. You are still planning to come home for Christmas?�
�

  “You sound testy, Larry, or else this is a bad connection.”

  “I’m not testy. I’m lonely.”

  “It won’t be long till December. We can copulate daily for a whole month. Nightly too. Egg and sperm in joyful, continuous union.”

  He resented the cajoling tone in her voice. He resented her need to ripen her soul on a pilgrimage. “Right,” he said.

  “But you are managing. I mean, you’re feeding yourself sensibly. You’re looking after your laundry and so on.”

  And so on and so on.

  His first wife, Dorrie, had done all the laundry. They never discussed this arrangement; she just did it.

  Those were simpler times, the late seventies. People fell more easily and with less rancor into traditional roles. Dorrie carried his soiled underwear down into the black cobwebby basement of their little Winnipeg house and dumped it in with the whites. (Today he has a wardrobe of black, red, and bright blue underpants, but in those days he would never have imagined anything but white touching his lower body.)

  Dorrie slung these same laundered jockey shorts on to the length of clothesline Larry had strung between the water pipes - no need for clothes-pegs, gravity did the trick- and there they dried stiffly in the heat from the furnace. She collected them quickly after a day or two, plucking them down from the line and tossing them into the plastic laundry basket she held under one arm. With a kind of wonder he watched her do this: it was like harvesting, so speedy and essential. Later she sorted the underwear on their tufted bedspread, her own pile of nylon briefs and bras, and his jockeys, smoothing them quickly with the flat of her hand, and folding them into neat thirds. He found this act of hers almost unbearably intimate, despite the fact that her movements were swift, economical, unhesitating, and devoid of emotion.