Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Charlotte was not finished with the subject. “Have you ever imagined how silent the world would be if we couldn’t talk about the weather or the price of real estate? Or about the squirrel nuisance in our backyards? What if we didn’t have our vacations to babble on about? Or what our children are doing? My God!”

  “Even that’s not a safe topic.” Larry took in Charlotte’s mobile mouth and swinging earrings, remembering that his own son, Ryan, had recently been accused of doping up before a race, steroids, that the matter was under investigation.

  “And another thing,” Charlotte went on, “you can’t ask people what kind of work they do. It’s considered intrusive nowadays. I mean, what if they happen to be out of work? Or what if they work for some company that makes porno films or sanitary napkins or something? It’s all right for you, Larry, you work with lovely green living things.”

  “So,” Larry said, “you think a dinner party’s safe? In terms of conversational neutrality.”

  Charlotte’s eyebrows go up. “Well, keeping control’s somewhat important, isn’t it? I mean, the dynamics. It might be, you know -” She sliced a hand through the air in front of her.

  A pause followed. Larry couldn’t have said whether it was a long pause or a short pause. He glanced about and saw that the restaurant was beginning to fill up with young couples, most of whom looked like lovers. Twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, their hands meeting over the table tops, little sexual wavings of their fingertips.

  “I’m a rotten cook,” Larry said, shaking his head and thinking about his friend Bill Herschel, who smokes his own trout and regularly bakes bread for his family. “Beth used to insist we take turns doing dinner -”

  “Really? You never mentioned that.”

  “It was one of her things.”

  “As a feminist, you mean.”

  “But all I could do was pasta.”

  “Pasta? Hmmmm. No, I don’t think so. Not for ten people.”

  “Then we’re in trouble.”

  “I did promise to help.” Charlotte was speaking more loudly now that the noise level has risen. “But, look, how exactly would you, you know - introduce me to the ex-wives? I mean, what words would you use?”

  “We-ll.” He paused, uneasy, warning himself to put on his safety brakes, knowing how sensitive Charlotte could be. “I’ll just say we’re friends.”

  “And we are, aren’t we, Larry?” Her eyes met his, making a pledge. Or asking, it seemed to him, for a heightened confirmation.

  “We’re good friends.” He kept his gaze guarded, tapping light as a fingertip on the word good, but it seemed to satisfy her.

  “Maybe,” she said, wrinkling her forehead, “we should have eight instead of ten. Or better yet, nine. That way we can talk asymmetrically around the table. Asymmetry always brings a better focus to the conversation.”

  How does she know such things? “Are you sure that’s what we want? Focus?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Instead of a nice out-of-focus blur? Like that French movie we saw, where we didn’t know what was going on?”

  “We can buy some of the stuff for the dinner already made,” Charlotte hurried on, taking a small notepad out of her bag. “Dessert, for instance. Everyone does nowadays. Yes, definitely a bought dessert. Something chocolate. From Dufflet.”

  “Speaking of dessert -”

  “Exactly what I was thinking. Why don’t we split a slice of cheesecake. The almond looks good.”

  “Why not.”

  They’ve fallen into the habit in recent months of sharing portions of food - some insufficiency in their appetites, Larry thinks, or else the geriatric equivalent of holding hands. He regarded her fondly. The bravery of her lipstick banner. Her eyes. Placating, eager eyes; how did she manage to keep such eagerness alive? (A gleam of green eye-shadow, expertly applied. Quizzing brows. The droop of one eyelid when she was tired.) Her bright silk scarf evoked blazing images of Central America, but Larry knows she bought it in Provence - or was it Spain? - last summer. It must be hot, he reflected, having something like that tied around your neck.

  Charlotte’s a woman who always “does her best,” who “throws herself into things,” and perversely it is this, he thinks, that keeps him from loving her with the same warmth she directs toward him. Something - perhaps the death of her husband five years ago, perhaps her genetic make-up - compels her, it seems to Larry, to bite harder than most at the biscuit of life. To bite and to keep on biting.

  “If you decide on lamb,” Charlotte Angus said to Larry one week before his dinner party, “you really ought to serve beans.”

  “Why beans? No one likes beans. At least no one I know.”

  “That’s how they serve lamb in France. Very rare, pink in the middle, and with white beans. It’s traditional. Or those little lima beans. You can buy frozen ones.”

  “Beans are indigestible.”

  “Big piles of beans are indigestible. You’re absolutely right. The thing is to serve just a few beans alongside the meat. More of a garnish, really, than a serving.”

  “How many is a few? Twelve beans? Twenty?”

  “You’re lying on my arm, love. There, that’s better.”

  “So we get some beans to garnish the lamb. Does that mean we don’t have to garnish the beans?”

  “A little parsley sprinkled on. Or fresh sage. They have it at St. Lawrence Market. Sage would do very nicely now that I think of it.”

  “And to garnish the sage?”

  “You know what, Larry? You’re being awkward and jocular. Male jocularity at this hour isn’t -”

  “Appropriate,” he supplied. Beth, too, had objected to jocularity.

  “Exactly.”

  “When is the proper time for male jocularity?” He fitted his body to hers, drew a leg up around her soft hip.

  “Never. I thought you knew. There’s a new by-law. Oh, God, look at the time. I’ve got to be at work early this morning. Meetings. The trauma team’s doing a presentation.”

  “What do you mean I’m being awkward?”

  “Did I say you were awkward?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you’re - you’re trying to trap me into saying things that are wifely and trivial and presumptuous. So that I’ll look like a domestic bully when all I am is the girlfriend who’s trying to help you out.”

  “1 love the way you say that. ‘The Girlfriend.’ With capital letters.”

  “More like italics. 1 mean, at age forty-six, anything associated with the word girl is completely incongruous and - good God, just look at this skirt of mine. What comes over me when I spend a night at your place? - at home I hang up my clothes, I look after myself. I’m going to have to press this, and fast. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as distilled water on the premises?”

  “I’ll buy some today. When I’m out buying the lima beans.”

  “You’ll need about three packages. For nine people that should just do it nicely.”

  “Is it nine? I’ve lost track.”

  “You know very well we said nine. Why all of a sudden are you trying to make this party seem all my idea? And, Larry, look, if you want to serve the lamb with the bone out, and I do recommend it, you’d better order it now. Today, I mean. Olliffe’s does a gorgeous job. They’ll marinate it too. Olive oil. Lemon. Rosemary. Lovely.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, you could - no, that’s enough girlfriendly advice for this morning. Although maybe, on second thought -”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Will I see you tonight?”

  She paused and gave him a look. An unreadable look, but he knew there was punishment in it somewhere. “How about tomorrow night instead,” she said. “At my place.”

  Beth abandoned Larry, finally, in 1994, leaving behind in their Oak Park house a closetful of soft clothes and a bathroom cluttered with high-tech hairbrushes and miniature perfume bottles.

  Otherwise she
left him carefully, tactfully, psychologically. There was her first calm face-to-face announcement in a Southampton restaurant, followed a few days later by an expansive letter.

  Darling Larry,

  All this will be easier for you if you think of life as a book each of us must write alone, and how, within that book there are many chapters. I think we both know that our chapter, yours and mine, has contained pages of ecstasy, of reciprocal growth -

  On and on it went. He found the prose hard to follow, as though it had been written during a bout of drunkenness, but that was impossible since Beth never touched anything stronger than spring water - her allergies, her fear of gaining weight. The closing paragraph went:

  Your spiritual signature, sweet Larry, has illuminated mine, and I like to think that our combined epigraph has sent shooting stars, sexually as well as intellectually, across the synapse of our stitched together leaves, igniting the kind of authenticity that lives on after separation. I do feel it is time, though, to get going on a fresh sheet of foolscap, as it were, and write our way to understanding and forgiveness.

  Dear bossy, pedagogical Beth. Heartbrokenly he read this letter, at the same time feeling his face ease into a smile.

  Wait a minute. Whoa there. Healtbrokenly smiled? Surely not. Perhaps he smiled around his heartbreak. Under it, through it.

  Larry, more and more the observer, the critic, stepped back and watched himself picking up his wife’s letter and attacking it with a surgical red pencil. C-minus. And that was being generous.

  Understanding and forgiveness, uh-huh! So that’s what she prescribed. Was that all?

  When Beth left him, not for another man but for a teaching job in England, he had been close to his forty-fourth birthday, a man in his mellow season, or so romantic fools would have him believe. Understanding and forgiveness should have come easily. Like rolling off a log. With the softened shrug of an unmuscled shoulder. Where, after all, is it written that love is more potent than a fresh career opportunity? “My adorable Larry,” his smooth-skinned Beth had penned in a postscript, freshly oxygenated it would seem by the transports of her own rhetoric. “You have been translator to my unformed soul, attentive reader to my body and mind, and lastly, editor and publisher of my fumbling love. Let’s you and me together, turn over our separate pages. And read on!”

  Yes, well. What else was there to do?

  Unless a man has himself abandoned a wife, he will be unable to understand-and-forgive. Instead he’ll see those twinned verbs as miniature implements - spade, hoe - on a woman’s charm bracelet, fanciful and decorative, and not stop to consider for a minute the immensities of charity they demand. Nor - sweet Christ! - the seesaw of guilt they bounce into view.

  Larry and his first wife, Dorrie, had been married for five years when he left her. Five years, one child, a house in the process of renovation, a fully occupied width of time — and yet he has trouble remembering what their life had been made of. The two of them came together, it always seemed to him, back in the time of the old poetry, 1977, when the world rhymed and chimed and the ceilings were higher or, even if they weren’t, the possibility of height was felt.

  “What was she like?” Charlotte Angus asked Larry once; this was after an episode of lovemaking in Charlotte’s white and cream bedroom.

  “Who?”

  “Dorrie. The first.”

  “You won’t believe this, but I can’t remember.”

  “Was she terrific in bed?”

  “Hmmmm. Hard to put into words.”

  “Meaning you’d rather not say. Meaning it’s none of my business.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m the one who’s sorry. My big mouth.”

  “She could be funny. She’d do imitations of her boss at the Toyota dealership. And of my dad, too. She was good at it. Before everything fell apart.”

  “And did everything really fall apart?”

  “Everything. Well, everything except Dorrie.”

  “Why didn’t you go to a marriage counselor?”

  “It wasn’t in our vocabulary.”

  “Did you think there was a stigma attached to -?”

  “Not a stigma, not that. It really was a question of vocabulary.”

  “If Derek and I had had problems, I’m sure we would have sought out professional help. It would have been the most natural thing in the world.”

  Mention of Derek, Charlotte’s dead husband, tended to make Larry feel slightly sick. “Maybe you and Derek had that kind of vocabulary,” he said carefully.

  “Are you sure you mean vocahulary? You honestly didn’t know what a marriage counselor was?”

  “We knew that. Everyone knew that.”

  “Well then?”

  He thought of his mother, who had been depressed for long stretches of her life, but had never dreamt of seeking psychiatric counseling. “I didn’t know the words around the words,” he told Charlotte. “How to get there.”

  “Sometimes, Larry, you say something and I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know either,” he said.

  It seemed to him that what he swallowed was the bitterness of his own essence. He was not the man he started out to be. He’s richer and sadder now, and he’s lost the trick of keeping track of himself.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “Looks nice. The tablecloth was a good idea.”

  “It pulls everything together, doesn’t it? And I’m glad you thought of those dark green candles, Larry. White candles look churchy.”

  “Thanks for bringing flowers.”

  “I remembered,” Charlotte said, “what you said once - about not having roses on a dinner table, the smell getting into the soup.”

  “My days as a florist!” He let out a sigh. “We must have learned that in the first term. It’s with you forever.” He looked around at the set table, the gleam of forks and knives, the shining wine glasses, the dining chairs standing at attention. “It’s all with you forever, isn’t it. Every bit of it.”

  “You’re not going to get maudlin, are you, Larry?”

  “I might. I’m beginning to have doubts about this whole — ”

  “It’s nerves, not doubts. And it’s perfectly normal. When Derek and I used to have dinner parties, I always panicked at the last minute. Like maybe I’ll burn the main course, maybe nobody’ll come, that sort of thing. You did hear from everyone, though, didn’t you?”

  “Both the wives faxed.”

  “How odd.”

  “That’s what I thought. Midge phoned. She and Ian are going to be a few minutes late. And Sam Alvero left a message - he might be a few minutes early, something about picking up his car at the body shop.”

  “The McCords?”

  “His secretary phoned. She wanted to know if it was black tie or what. I said casual.”

  “Now, that’ll be interesting. I wonder what he thinks casual means. Speaking of which, are you going to change?”

  “Don’t you like this sweater?”

  “I do. You look all wrapped up and safe.”

  “That was the idea.”

  “Whereas I feel exposed as hell in this dress. Exposed to the gaze of the ex-wives. Their darting little eyes. Inquisitive. I was going to wear a scarf but — ”

  “You look perfect.”

  “Not too mysterious or menacing? Here she is, folks - Larry Weller’s new woman friend. Hmmm. Now who might she be, how does she fit into the picture? Not exactly a spring chicken, is she? Oh my God, I’m babbling.”

  “Nerves.”

  “Hold on to me a minute.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “That’s better.”

  “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Actually I can smell the lamb, can you? Heavenly, heavenly garlic. I hope they’re all hearty garlic eaters. Well, too bad for them if they’re not.”

  “I can’t smell anything.”

  “That’s because you’ve been here all afternoon. And you got th
e carrots ready, I see.”

  “And the soup. But maybe you’d better taste it.”

  “We’ve still got half an hour. We could do place cards.”

  “I don’t know. That sounds awfully -”

  “Formal? Maybe you’re right. Well, let’s at least figure out the seating. Commit it to memory.”

  “Why don’t we just let everyone sit where they want -?”

  “We can’t do that, Larry! What if the two wives ended up next to each other? I mean, we want to keep this informal, but having them side by side might be asking for” - she paused - “for trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble? They’re not going to pull each other’s hair out. It isn’t as though they’re rivals.”

  “Oh, Larry!”

  “What do you mean—‘Oh, Larry’?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes you’re such an innocent.”

  “The two of them occupied completely separate slices of time. No overlap at all. I don’t see how they can be rivals. They’re really - I don’t know - fellow escapees.”

  “Oh, Larry,” Charlotte said again, shaking her head. “You don’t - you don’t get it, do you?”

  “I guess not.” In a way, though, he did.

  “Anyway, they’re going to be here any minute and we really should put some thinking into the seating strategy.”

  “Well,” Larry said, “we could put one wife at each end - that way they’d be as far from each other as possible.”

  To his surprise she took this seriously. “Hmmm. Too obvious maybe. And not really correct. They’re the guests of honor, remember.”

  “And you and I certainly don’t want to be at the ends, playing Mum and Dad. At least I don’t.”

  “No, I chucked that idea right away. Too self-conscious and hierarchical. As though we were out to control the evening.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I thought your sister and Ian could take the ends. Keep it in the family kind-of-thing. As a matter of fact, I hope you don’t mind, Larry, but I made this little sketch while I was at work today, a sort