Larry's Party

  He’d brought these garments unthinking to his marriage, and it was she, Dorrie Shaw Weller, a policeman’s daughter, who looked after them, who washed, folded, and put them away in the darkness of a dresser drawer. Marriage was full of mysteries, and this was one of them.

  The first Christmas after they were married, Dorrie splurged and bought him an expensive Italian shirt at a designer warehouse in the North End of Winnipeg. It was blue. Indigo, Dorrie corrected him. The shirt was unlike any he’d ever worn, looser in its cut, the sleeves, the yoke, the collarless neck - all these announced a kind of theatricality that embarrassed him. Where would he wear such a shirt? And would he spend the rest of his life tripping over new forms of self-consciousness?

  He pushed the shirt to the back of the closet and hoped everyone would forget about it.

  “Je-suss!” his sister, Midge, said the first time she saw him sporting it - at a family dinner, Thankgiving — “What an absolute beaut of a shirt.”

  And more and more he did wear it, each time protected by a kind of previous inoculation against shock. “Wonderful material,” his mother said. “I’ll bet it irons like a dream.”

  “Looks like you went and forgot to take off your pajamas,” his father said.

  “Where’d you get this?” said Beth some years later. “This is - my God, this is beautiful.”

  Beth doesn’t wash and iron the blue shirt, as Dorrie had once done. She sends it out to be professionally done; “This is the kind of shirt that has to be looked after,” she says, meaning Larry is incapable of doing so himself and so is she, but she does, on the other hand, appreciate quality. She runs her hands along the seams, fingers the stitched flap that conceals the buttons. His special shirt, his non-Larry shirt.

  Both my wives have touched this shirt, Larry thinks.

  The thought is covert and suffused with sly humor, as though the man he is has never quite disconnected from the boy he was.

  At enormous expense Larry and Beth spent a week in Paris. It was February. The room at the Hotel Auber was small, and not really all that warm. When they weren’t walking along the Seine, when they weren’t visiting the Corot exhibition, when they weren’t exhausted from shopping at the conveniently located Bon Marché — where Beth talked Larry into buying a pair of silk pajamas - when they weren’t doing any of these things, they lay on the large, flat bed with their clothes off and laboriously attempted the act of procreation. The track of syllables between them grew shorter and more brutal, as though they’d decided with their simple grunts and cries to consecrate all their energies to this purposeful act. Beth was cold and tense with anxiety, her bio-clock ticking behind her shut eyes. Larry’s eyes, on the other hand, were wide open. “Is this a good idea?” he asked the coved ceiling, the bedside lamp, the bottle of mineral water on the dresser, the imperfectly captured voices of people rising from the street below, shopping, strolling. “Is this what we really should be doing?”

  “I think that was it!” Beth said every time. Or, “I really felt that little ping of connection. That spermy arrow arriving right on target.”

  The silk pajamas from the Bon Marché were colored a deep maroon and made him feel like someone in a porno film. “Manufactured in Bangkok” the label said. The material rippled coolly against his chest, though he seldom wore the bottoms.

  The chambermaid folded these pajamas beautifully each day and put them under his pillow, nesting them there like a secret she and Larry held in common. He found himself tossing them more and more carelessly on to the floor in the morning, and imagining this unseen woman bending to pick them up, then stroking the material smooth, then the perfect arranging of sleeves and buttoned front.

  Was there something perverse about the pleasure he took in this act of imagination? He knew the answer. (These wayward chips of himself are hard to look at, so mainly he doesn’t.)

  He slept badly in Paris, and blamed, first, jet lag, then the slipperiness of the new pajama tops or else a species of suspended regret, so partial, veiled, and colorless he was unable to fix his eye on its center. He switched on the light one night, four a.m., motorbikes squealing in the distance - shouldn’t that be church bells? - and stared at Beth, sleep-drugged by his side. What to do? He fumbled in the drawer of the night table for the Gideon Bible, thinking he might try a page or two to see if its tight dull print would lull him to sleep.

  But there wasn’t any Bible. All he found was a slim, stapled pamphlet which, on examination, turned out to be the telephone book for the town (village? municipality?) of Hancock Mills, New York. He leafed through its twenty or thirty pages. A single phone number was circled: Jas Wolford, 27 Cuttler Ridge Rd, 377 8999.

  The area code listed at the front of the book was 518. The world around Larry shrank, or rather zoomed, to the smallness of 518, a mythical forested kingdom in the eastern United States, and then contracted even further: to Jas Wolford, whoever he or she (Jasmine?) might be. Someone sitting by a telephone, that much was certain, someone like himself, waiting and wondering. And hoping any minute to be called.

  He was going screwy, consoling himself like this with the fixtures of gloom, begging for it. It was time to go home.

  Larry’s mother bought his jockey shorts when he was a boy, half a dozen pairs each year on her annual shopping trip to Fargo, North Dakota. Fruit of the Loom, that majestic trademark, so full of poetry and promise, but no different really than any other underwear.

  She bought all his clothes, in fact — bargain hunting in Eaton’s basement or else the Bay, his school pants, his shirts and sweaters. These clothes were never quite right. Once when he was about twelve she bought him a red-and-black checked wool shirt that gave him “the scratchies,” and which she then laboriously lined with rayon taffeta. Humiliating. His high-school cords were a putrid shade of brown. His jeans were too wide in the seat and too bright a blue, not one of the approved makes, not even close. He hated these clothes, but loved his tireless mother, and wouldn’t have dreamt of showing his disappointment. Chiefly, he didn’t want her to know that he cared about such things. It was her belief that men shouldn’t pay attention to the clothes they wore. Men were above such concerns. They lived outside the secret knowledge of women, of weave and wear, of color, quality and laundry instructions and the small intuitive grasp on buttonhole excellence or failure.

  She did not understand shoes. Or socks. Or the fine points of collars and the way a pair of trousers should fall.

  When Larry was nineteen, though, she talked him into buying a Harris tweed jacket for his graduation. Her face was a mask of twinkly approval. She liked the weight of the English cloth and the fact that it wouldn’t show the dirt.

  He loved that jacket. He wore it for years, living inside its rough, safe embrace, and finding himself for the first time in his life able to walk around the world and knowing he looked like a normal person. The right set of threads at the right time. They saved him.

  For his 1978 marriage to Dorrie he wore that comic costume of young romance, a navy-blue suit. The lapels were hilarious, the pants were flared, the material was shiny. His necktie sat on his chest, wide and red, but blessedly unpatterned. In the photo taken in a corridor just outside the marriage court he is smiling dazedly and appears to have no idea of how badly dressed he is. (Dorrie wears an off-white wool suit with pink roses snugged at her wrist, and you can tell she knows she looks good.)

  For his wedding to Beth - in the ballroom of the Oak Park Arms, 1986 - he wore a tux. He actually bought, rather than rented, this get-up. (A clever salesman at Fields pointed out to him that owning your own tux costs exactly the same as six rental occasions, and this turned out to be good advice.) There are so many pieces to put on, the trousers, suspenders, cummerbund, shirt and studs, the devilish tie, the princely satin-edged jacket — and to his astonishment he has mastered each of these curious inventions. He whistles to himself as he dresses for a formal evening, as though assuring the striped wallpaper and full-length mirror that he is an ordi
nary man after all, and one who isn’t the least intimidated by important threads.

  Like everyone else, Larry’s heard about men who like to dress in women’s clothes. Transvestites. He wonders what it would be like to do this kind of thing, especially how the smooth press of fine-mesh nylon would feel running up against his calves and thighs.

  Years ago, when his father was in the final stages of cancer, Larry came upon him at the hospital wearing a woman’s shiny pink quilted robe. “It’s your mother’s,” his father had grunted apologetically. “She thought it’d be warmer for me.” Larry remembers feeling a flare of anger toward his mother. He had wanted to run to the nearest mall and buy his father a man’s robe, something in a dark, quiet color and simple design, neatly belted and invisible. “Why waste money?” his father said. “I’m not going to be around much longer. I’m used to this anyway, the funny-bunny looks I get.”

  Now it was April, 1994, a cold rainy night, and Beth had recently returned to England after spending a sexually strenuous Easter week in Oak Park. Larry stood naked in his and Beth’s large square bedroom with its air of stale eroticism. It was late, and he was about to go to bed when his eye caught the hem of one of Beth’s flowing nightgowns hanging in the closet, pale icy blue with a sprawl of white flowers, a scoop neck and short sleeves. He slipped it over his head and regarded himself in the mirror.

  His mouth twitched. He allowed himself a lewd wink before taking it off again. What precisely had he felt with the silky fabric swishing around his knees? Nothing much. Shame perhaps. A kind of satisfaction too.

  It was a record, the rainiest spring Chicago had ever had. Larry and his old friend and mentor Eric Eisner were sloshing along side by side down Woodlawn Avenue on a mid-May morning, having just come from a meeting with a wealthy philanthropist who had awarded them a joint commission for the restoration of the old garden surrounding the Humanities Institute.

  Chicago streets feel sorry for themselves in the rain. They cry sooty tears, they squeak and cringe. Dr. Eisner, who was in his seventies, carried the same umbrella Larry Weller carried, the large, black ubiquitous umbrella of the male species. Their raincoats, too, were identical. Larry was somewhat startled to see this, the same threads worn by a man in his forties and one in his seventies. Beige, of course. Tabs at the shoulders. Concealed buttons. That little curved what-do-you-call-it rain reinforcement over the hack shoulders.

  Underneath the two coats a few inches of dark trouser leg showed, four of them to be precise. The same black socks and polished shoes slapped down on the rainy pavement, left, right, left, right. This was frightening, a grotesque doubling of images, and he felt himself suddenly drained of blood, a tattered, thready garment of a man, snagged in a beveled mirror.

  Quickly he breathed in a gulp of comforting air. In one week’s time he would be in England, where, according to Beth, the sun had been shining day after day, a miracle of an English spring, a record for this century. The British breezes were soft and mild, and she’d bought herself a new flowered “frock.” “It’ll do as a maternity dress, too,” she’d said. “In case we get lucky next time.”

  He owns only four pairs of shoes, and he loves these shoes. (Other men have a closetful of shoes, ten or twelve pairs, but Larry draws the line at four.)

  His evening shoes, shining slippers, don’t really count. They’re glossy black, they’re frivolous in a Fred Astaire way, they’ll never wear out, but they continue to wrap around his feet when he needs them, to carry him lightly into evenings that sit starred on the calendar but which fade quickly in the memory.

  The black Oxfords. These are the shoes he was wearing when he looked down and realized Eric Eisner, a man thirty years his senior, was wearing the same: the same cut and make and invisible soles, the same laces neatly looped into bows. If you were allowed only one pair of shoes, you’d probably choose these - they’re generic, they’re shoe shoes, they announce the presence of a man coming forth in all his adult sobriety and good sense and prudence and leather-enriched masculinity.

  His tasseled loafers. He calls them his weekend shoes because he’s embarrassed to mention, or even think, the name of the Italian manufacturer. He’s worn these soft loafers for years on lazy Chicago Saturdays — they match perfectly the red-copper mood of weekend mornings. They’re made of brown calfskin, rich as mahogany, more expensive by three hundred percent than any of the other shoes in his wardrobe. The designer’s name is etched discreetly on the uppers, but Larry cares nothing about this, he really doesn’t. (A former prime minister of Canada owned dozens of pairs of these beauties, before public disclosure and a rapid sinking into shame.) In September Larry wore his tasseled loafers to England. (They make ideal flight wear, since the expensive leather has a yielding forgivingness.) He was wearing these very shoes - in a restaurant in Southampton, Italian food, crowded with good smells and noisy conversation — when his wife, Beth, looking nervously alive and beautiful, leaned across her plate of grilled polenta and Dover sole and announced that she didn’t want to be married anymore. It wasn’t a question of another man. There was no one else in the picture. It was where she was at this time in her life. The dream of mothering a child was gone. The thought of their life together was gone. Oak Park, Illinois, was a dot on another planet with a different set of gravitational rules, and these she no longer comprehended. The loss of sex would be a sorrow to her - he, Larry, had always been the most tender of lovers, really, she meant it - but renunciation has its own excitement, even an erotic excitement, a kind of fascinated suffering, not that she expected him to understand any of that. She hardly understood it herself. But he mustn’t worry, she was happy, yes happy. He might find it foolish, her little white room, that narrow bed of hers, but she’d made her choice.

  His running shoes, Nikes, are ten years old.

  It was funny how everyone in the second half of the twentieth century suddenly started buying these large, lumpy, sculptured, multicolored shoes. It was as though people discovered overnight that their footwear didn’t have to be black or brown, and didn’t need to conform to what was streamlined and quietly tasteful. The traditional shoe was challenged, and it collapsed at the first skirmish. Shoes could trumpet their engineered presence, their tread, their aggressive padding; they could make all manner of wild claims, converting whole populations to athletic splendor and prodigious fitness. Larry’s running shoes are red and white, with little yellow insignias located near the toes. Each of the heels has a transparent built-in bubble for additional comfort and buoyancy when running on hard pavement.

  For Larry Weller the threadiest part of his life is his hair.

  There are men (not Larry) with receding hair who, in defense, grow an informal rat-tail or plume at the back and seem dumbly oblivious to how weedy and wasted this makes them look. Hey, but it’s real hair, they seem to be saying, I can still get hair to grow out of this skull of mine, even if it’s only this wisp, this gesture at having hair.

  Other men, Eric Eisner for instance, clamp a wig on their bald pate, and there it sits, stiffened and thick in the shape of an artichoke. These men can’t see how funny they look, especially from behind, and so they persist in believing they look just fine.

  Larry, whose forty-fourth birthday is coming up, pretends indifference when it comes to his hair, but there isn’t a moment when he isn’t at some level conscious of his various sproutings, his long, sparse leg hairs, the wavier, thicker hair on his chest, his pubic extravagance for which he is endlessly grateful, his underarm thickets, the dark whorls at his wrist nudging his shirt cuff, the light, modest sprinkling on the tops of his hands, the coarse bristle across his face, and, most important of all, his head threads, which are thinning evenly, neatly, all over.

  He thinks of himself as a lucky man in the hair department. He’s had his good hair innings, and that hairy part of himself has given him a richness of enjoyment that he would be reluctant to admit. His wife, Beth, from whom he is separated, would no doubt be ready to offer a range
of theories, psychological and mythical, about male hair and its importance to a man’s self-image, but Larry isn’t interested in any of these theories, not these days.

  His body hair came early, age thirteen, fourteen. It grew in quickly, secretly, a solace, covering the approved areas and convincing him that he had resources he would one day be able to call upon.

  From 1970 to 1978, like every other North American male, he had a headful of shoulder-length hair. He kept it clean with daily shampoos - daily shampooing was an invention of the seventies, or perhaps the late sixties, and no one, it seems, died of it. His folks hated his long hair, though. His father, especially, grumped about hair in the bathroom drains and how he couldn’t tell if his son was a boy or a girl from behind. Larry wondered himself about the pleasure he felt when turning his head quickly and feeling that silken ride of hair kissing his face.

  After the break-up with his first wife he grew a beard. It started with a lazy feeling of sadness - too sad to move around much or talk, too sad to shave. His friends, hesitant about offering sympathy or advice, were given the opportunity, instead, to comment on Larry’s beard, how well it was coming along, how there were glints of surprising red amongst the brown, how some men could wear a beard and others couldn’t. “Jesus Christ himself,” his father commented. Finally, the hay-fever season did Larry in; ragweed pollen moved into his beard and drove him crazy at night. He rose one September morning at five o’clock and shaved himself clean. “Hello there,” he said to the young chin in the mirror, and made a face.