How much does the external world bear on Larry Weller? Wars, plagues, racial injustice, third world poverty, the oppression of women? Is this what wakes him in the darkness of his and Beth’s bedroom? He wishes it were true; he would like to be a man who wrestles with giants. He would admire that man.
So far his anxiety seems merely to vibrate in tune with a saddened world. What he grapples with is the question of where he is in his life so far.
It’s a safe enough game, a counting game, simple arithmetic: numbers set on that imagined squared-off grid. He needs to concentrate on the numbers, but he also needs to look at them sideways, through eyes that have been brought together in a squint. Too much truth, the same truth, becomes cheap. (He hopes this exercise isn’t in the same category as “stocktaking” or, worse, “soul-searching.”)
So. He has one parent, one sibling, two wives, one child.
He has a Diploma in Floral Arts (1969) from a Manitoba technical college, and a more recent and far more distinguished Diploma (honorary; Lasalle University) in Landscape Design.
He’s lived in two cities, Winnipeg and Chicago. Make that two countries.
He’s never missed a child support payment. His own hopefulness keeps him faithful to his self, that intermittently flickering self with its winking, provisional set of driving lights.
He’s owned two Toyotas, an old tan Corolla that he traded in for a semi-new Camry. After the Camry came the deep silver Audi, and now the two-door Honda Accord. These cars are the clothes he puts on after he puts on his primary clothes. That’s it in the wheels department. So far.
Houses. Three. The house he grew up in, a bungalow with a chainlink fence around its tiny rectangle of a yard, his boyhood bedroom (knotty pine) leading off the kitchen. Then the Lipton Street house, a fixer-upper, where he and Dorrie lived during their five years of marriage, and where she and Ryan continue to live. And now the Oak Park house, solidly two-story, gumwood trim in the hall and stairway, heavily mortgaged and in need of work - especially the garden which, so far, he hasn’t touched - not quite a case of the shoemaker’s children, but close. He’s thinking of letting it go wild, flowers, grasses, but imagines trouble from the Neighborhood Association. In between owning the three houses there have been some apartments and townhouse rentals, mostly forgettable, mostly forgotten - those heartbreaking, desperate, intermediate addresses: 566 Calonia, 312 MacNair, 22 Ciscoe Bay, 2236 Harlem Avenue.
Health. Over the years he’s smoked the odd bit of dope, but not any longer. He plans to start running again any day now. Cut down on caffeine. A mole on his back - is it growing? That rope of fat just below his belt. And the current middle-of-the-night insomnia. And that other thing. Had he ever been what the world calls a sexy man? Christ. He doubts it, it can’t possibly be true, and he knows that no matter what evidence is brought forward he will continue to doubt it. You could call forth the first - sweet accommodating, generous Sally, and the five that followed, those rescue ships with their pantyhose, their jeans and mini-skirts, and then Dorrie, their ardent, private, rancorous, intense history, and then, after the separation, those two or three others - how careless not to know exactly! - and then, Beth, a safe harbor, a blessing, a continuance. This was his history, but none of it, it seemed, reflecting him. Was he a sexy man? Question unanswerable. Who is he, this shadowy, temporary self?
Hobbies. How can people think of hobbies when their bodies are disintegrating and when their histories are in disarray.
Religion. If he’d ever believed in God, that Being has long since shrunk into the shadows of hedgerows. On a plane not long ago he sat next to a young man who was reading a crisp new Bible, pipelining straight to God, while Larry made do with the latest McMurtry. Once he heard the singer Curtis Mayfield performing a certain number on the car radio - he forgets which song it was - and felt a ripple across his flesh and wondered if that was what people meant by a spiritual experience. Making love, the sexual spasm - is that a part of religion? His dad’s old joke was that church was for sinners. And that they were out to grab your dollars. His mother, though, has started going to Sunday services in recent years, but he’s never heard her mention, either on the telephone or in a letter, the names of God or Jesus, the two main players. It looked for a time as though her sadness would last all her life, in the same way that furniture and china endure, but no, it began to crumble. She grew fervent and peaceful. He wonders if she prays. Praying must be like talking to the fairies, he’s always thought, and yet he’s done it the odd time himself - Make this stop, make this go away, just let me have one more hard-on before I die, let me sleep, Jesus H. Christ.
Once Larry heard a woman say: “I believe in silver. Sterling silver.” His father believed in a clean basement. His mother, Dot, believes, it seems, in guilt and salvation, and his sister in colonic irrigation. What shadow of the insubstantial brushes against Larry and instructs him to believe?
It’s really when entering a previously unknown maze, especially a hedge maze, that Larry is brought to a condition which he thinks of as spiritual excitement. The maze’s preordained design, its complications, which are at once unsettling and serene, the shifts of light and shade, the pulsing vegetal growth which is encouraged but also held in check - all this ignites Larry’s sense of equilibrium and sends him soaring.
For his fortieth birthday (August 17th) his mother sent him a check for twenty dollars enclosed in one of those masculine birthday cards featuring a richly colored montage of armchair, pipe, highball glass, and Irish setter. He wonders how she imagines his life, his and Beth’s. “Have yourself a celebration” she wrote in her near-illegible hand. And “Take it from me, life really does begin at forty!”
Beth gave him a handsome reprint of an eighteenth-century book, Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening, 1728, which contains a number of extraordinary maze designs.
Lucy Warkenten, an old friend from Winnipeg, sent him a set of subtly marbled postcards she’s made herself, and with a calligraphy pen she’s written the single word “Onward!”
Bill Herschel faxed a surprisingly solemn message. “Let’s promise to celebrate the next one together.” (When they’d been boys back in Winnipeg they’d given each other on their birthdays dribble glasses or plastic dog poop.)
Larry’s sister, Midge, and her latest live-in, Ian Stoker, sent a jokey card with a play on the word forty. Four-T. Taste. Talent. Technique. Testosterone.
Ha.
Larry’s son, Ryan, sent, as usual, a necktie, which Larry knows has been selected, paid for, wrapped and mailed by his ex, Dorrie. These neckties have marched straight up the scale over the years. The fortieth birthday tie is Italian, deep-blue variegated silk, beautiful, in an all-over pattern which Larry, peering carefully, identifies as being based on the ancient Shandwick maze. Where had she found it, and had she realized?
The real surprise is a birthday card from Dorrie herself. There have been few cards or gifts or even letters between them since their divorce - Dorrie never was one for writing letters, and there was a six-month blackout period of angry non-communication just after he left her. Nowadays she and Larry see each other occasionally when Larry’s in Winnipeg, and they talk frequently on the phone, conferring about their son, Ryan. His marks at school. His allergy to peanuts, and an emergency rush to the hospital last year. Orthodonture, yes or no. Travel arrangements for Ryan’s three-times-a-year-trip to Chicago. Ryan’s passion for athletics - was this a cause for concern? No, Dorrie thinks. Yes, says Larry, who has only a passing interest in sports himself.
They’re on amicable enough terms after all these years, but the truth is they’re really strangers to each other. Larry, looking at Dorrie’s birthday card - a curling wreath of dark greenery with the raised number 40 in the middle - was startled to see that he had forgotten what her handwriting looked like, how small and fine and girlish it was, and how neatly it lined itself up. “Here’s to being older and wiser,” she’d written with what looked like a fountain pen, and then
, “affectionately, Dorrie.”
Affectionately. Such an after-dinner mint of a word. Affectionately smacked his heart. Not love, no, not love. Well, who expects love from an ex-spouse?
And then, just yesterday, he was struck by the thought that Dorrie, his Dorrie, would turn forty herself in a matter of weeks: September 24th. Impossible. Dorrie’s firm, energetic flesh, now softened and creased and quietly discoloring. No. Never. Her small, talky, bossy breasts sagging and tinged with blue. He can’t imagine it. Does she wake up in the middle of the night, does she sit rigidly on the edge of the bed, stare out the window at the chipped moon, and wonder at which moment her life began to drain away?
He blinked the image away, holding the lids of his eyes open against exhaustion, and letting those eyes fill with slow sadness. Getting older was to witness the steady decline of limitless possibility. That’s all it was.
Emaciated, old Laura Latimer Moorhouse of the Milwaukee Latimers made an appointment to see Larry in his Lake Street office. He took her coat - some kind of lustrous fur — and offered her one of his rattan chairs, which she collapsed into, breathing hard and clutching the head of her cane.
Ancient, Larry thought. And in terrible health. Her chin had the tufted look of velveteen. Her skin was yellow.
“Are you comfortable enough?” Larry asked.
She nodded briskly, but the teased blond hair didn’t move.
She wanted a hedge maze built in the grounds of the Milwaukee Memorial Children’s Hospital. The design was entirely up to him. She’d heard excellent reports of his work, and she’d already consulted with members of the hospital board. The cost, of course, would be borne by herself. She was prepared to spend a good deal of money for the maze, and for the ensuing upkeep, since her time on earth was nearly over and she’d come to the realization that she had lived a stupid and thoughtless and selfish life.
“I’m sure you—” Larry felt compelled to protest.
“Stupid, thoughtless, and selfish,” she repeated. Her mouth became a crumple.
“But we all -” Larry began.
“No. Most people live sensible and thoughtful lives. It’s a fact. It’s something I’ve noticed. Except for hardened criminals, most people manage to form meaningful attachments. They take care of one another. I’ve never had that opportunity, you see, to form a genuine attachment. My two husbands - what can I say? - they were perfect heels. And no, Mr. Weller, I have not had children of my own. Trouble in the woman department, and probably just as well. I was fat all my life. A fat girl, a fat woman. My mother would have loved me more if I hadn’t been fat, I’m one hundred percent sure of that. She gave me a girdle when I was eight years old and made me wear it. What kind of a mother does that! You can imagine. My skin under the girdle was a mass of eczema, that was from the rubber probably. I was fat until one year ago when my cancer was diagnosed, stomach, liver, everywhere - that’s why I’m thin and ratchety for the first time in my life. What you see before you is only half the person I was, only one-third of the old Laura Moorhouse, as a matter of fact. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Three hundred pounds, that’s what she was, and now she weighs in at ninety-nine. Call me perverse, but I’m proud to he a ninety-nine-pound woman. I’m brimming over with pride. Another sin, but a consolation too. Why a maze, Mr. Weller? I knew you’d ask. Because I’ve always loved mazes. Now, this may sound whimsical, but I’ve felt all my life that I was a kind of maze myself, my body I mean. There was something hidden in the middle of me, but no one could find it, it was so deeply concealed, and I don’t just mean by fat cells. Why a children’s hospital? A good question. Not because I love children. I don’t think I do, really. It’s because I long to be a child, even a sick child, a very sick child. I want my mother, my daddy. I want them standing next to my bed, one on either side, holding on to me, reaching out and putting their hands to my forehead, checking to see if I have a fever, soothing me, taking turns, first one, then the other. They love me so. You must excuse me. I’m trying not to go hysterical on you, Mr. Weller, and usually I don’t, but it isn’t often I speak out like this so frankly. Never, in fact. It could be the medication I’m on that’s loosened my tongue. I’ve never told anyone this, that I long to have someone place a hand on my forehead and just hold it there. Pressing. Really, it isn’t much to ask, is it? I’ve never discussed this longing, never expressed it, that is. How could I? I mean, it doesn’t come up in ordinary conversation, does it? But then, how often does anyone have a real conversation, just talking back and forth the way we’re talking, you and I, sitting in this little room of yours. Just these white walls. These green plants. With nothing getting in the way. Nobody putting a finger to my lips and saying stop, stop, enough, you’re embarrassing me. Well, I can’t say that it’s ever happened to me before. No, not even once.”
Two years ago, when Stu Weller was close to death, Larry flew to Winnipeg to be by his side. By his father’s side, that scented phrase with its promise of resolution. What he actually felt when he reached the hospital was the helpless unease that the healthy experience in the presence of the profoundly ill.
His father’s mouth looked large and lippy beneath the fleshy cave of his nose. The thick rind of a male body was still there under the hospital sheet, but inside was stinking rot. Larry could have sworn his father cringed as he entered the room and presented his preposterous healthy face. So it’s you.
“He tires easily,” Larry’s mother said. Meaning, there will be no resolution. Larry immediately grasped that fact. No embrace. No prayers. Nor confessions. Nor blessings. Well, it was dirty pool to grill the dying, asking them to betray their secrets when they were down and out, and when they’re about to go even further down.
To be alone, sick and unvisited, would be preferable, Larry thought, to the parade of visitors, neighbors, friends, and family who arrived at St. Boniface Hospital, all wanting a piece of final satisfaction from Stu Weller, critically ill, dying of cancer, smelling of shit, sucking in the gas of his last hours, already, in fact, out of reach.
“All I wanted,” said Larry’s sister, Midge, who had flown in from Toronto, where she owned a costume shop, “was to have one conversation with the old bugger.” She was blubbering cold leaky tears. “We never did, you know, not once.”
Larry dug in his pocket and found a Kleenex. “He wasn’t much for words.”
“Except to complain. Except to bitch at Mum because she was out at her Agape group all the time. It was different for you. He took you to all those football games when you were a kid. Hockey too.”
“Hey, that’s right.” Larry was taken by surprise. He’d forgotten those outings. “That was a helluva long time ago.”
“So did you do the father-son thing? Did you, like, really talk when you were sitting there in the stands, the two of you?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe ‘Great play.’ Or ‘Lousy block.’ That was pretty much the extent of it.”
“It figures.”
“Once he asked me if I was in love with Dorrie. Before we got married.”
“Really? He said it like that? ‘In love’?”
“I couldn’t believe it. The word ‘love’ coming out of his mouth.”
“So what did you say back?”
“What do you mean, what did I say?”
“About being in love with Dorrie. Did you say you were or you weren’t?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Yeah, I bet.” She gave him a look. “Leave it to dopey Dorrie to get herself pregnant—”
“It’s water over the dam, Midge. Jesus.”
“Some dam. Ha. Anyway you got a great little kid out of the deal.”
“Right.”
“Even if you hardly ever see him.”
“I know, I know.”
“Anyway, I hope when you do see him that you talk. Really talk, I mean. I myself find it impossible to believe that a father would not once have a conversation with his only daughter. Even when Paul got AIDS, when he was in the hosp
ice dying, our dear father Stu never once, he didn’t even, he just - oh, Christ, why’d you get me started?”
“That’s the way he was. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have the deepest feeling of—”
“I could kill him. No one should be allowed to be that inarticulate. People who won’t talk to their own children should be put in jail.”
“It’s a generation thing.” There was pain in this conversation with his sister, but Larry wanted it to continue. “Communication wasn’t such a big priority in the folks’ generation -”
“Do you think he and Mum ever had a conversation? I bet they didn’t. I bet they just lived inside their dumb silence. All those years, eating, sleeping, looking after the house and yard, with never anything passing between them. At least Paul and I — but the two of them!”
“We can’t know—”
“What do you mean you can’t know? What’s that supposed to mean? Do you honestly believe they had one genuine conversation in their whole married life?”
“It’s possible,” Larry told her. “Not that I could prove it.”
Lately Larry’s sad most of the time. Even when he’s signing contracts or eating or laughing out loud or attempting to make love to Beth he feels the undertow of something missing. He’d like to shrink back to his old life, but the noisy amplitude of these recent years has to find someplace to go. And he’s tired - tired of his name, tired of being a man, tired of the ghostly self he’s chained to and compelled to drag around. He can’t avoid the shame of his awful hopeful voice as he answers the telephone, too patently constructed to be a real voice, a voice to stay away from if you’ve got any sense. His mannerisms, his little ways, get on his nerves, his habit of placing a finger on the knot of his tie when he’s under stress or clearing his throat unnecessarily before speaking. Here I am: a serious, likeable man scrolling through the flow of my life. A man—surely you can detect this - in a state of personal crisis. Oh, that!