These last few weeks, late summer, he’s been growing a moustache. It’s only an experiment, to see if he can do it, to see what shape it’s going to take. It’s also a present he’s given himself. No money invested. Just these self-produced hairs popping out of their hidden hair pockets and making themselves known.
His dressed self. The sum of a thousand misunderstandings.
Beth, Beth, you should see me now.
His hand at first traveled frequently to his upper lip, finding reassurance in the roughness there. His moods were diagonal and time-warped. He felt as self-conscious as a boy, but surprisingly no one commented on the pathetic early days of the moustache, the peculiar discolored scruff between nose and mouth that looked, oddly, like an undressed wound. Perhaps hair is no longer a topic of social interest, perhaps it no longer signifies. People do what they want with their hair these days. Anything goes; that booming cliché. The fact is, nothing quite goes.
As the bristles of his moustache grow out they soften into little paintbrushes. He trims it (them?) once a week now, with a kind of love, like pruning shrubbery, like facial sculpture. He’s not sure, though, if he likes what he sees. His mouth has been transformed into a smirk, and now that his house is on the market he wonders if the moustache makes him look shifty and unreliable as a vendor. Would you buy a used house from a man with a ... ?
But under the moustache is the old Larry and also Larry’s sense of touring in his own life adventure: The Larry Weller Story. No one else knows it, but he does, and that’s what matters. And beneath his clothes is Larry’s old body, the body he was born with, the value-added body that’s housed him for forty-four years, his thickening walls of flesh, his thumping conduits of blood and electricity. He’s keeping it cool and secret for now. (Oh, Beth, my dear one.) He’s keeping himself alive in there, his skin, his skull, his dressed-up face with its precisely woven shadows - doing what everyone tells him to do, which is to take care of himself, endlessly pardoning himself as he stands there at the edge of his consciousness, letting himself off with echoes and explanations - we had some good years together, not everyone can say that - and hanging on to the threaded filaments he’s collected along the way, which will either bury him alive or give him a chance to catch his breath.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Men Called Larry 1995
Larry could be someone else, but he’s not. He’s Larry Weller, an ordinary man who’s been touched by ordinary good and bad luck.
Laurence John Weller, forty-five, is a man who shelters under the kicking cadence of a nickname - which is, not surprisingly, Larry. Except for rare occasions - his christening, his two weddings, his various diplomas and awards for landscape design - he has always been known as Larry, and probably always will be.
The world is divided, he sometimes thinks, between the nicknamed and those who remain tied all their lives to their formal designation, the indissoluble Williams, the Andrews, the serenely intact Marys and Marthas. The bearers of nicknames are asked to walk around in the world with their hands in their pockets; they invite themselves to be imposed upon - either that, or they reach out and claim special privileges. Larry’s Oak Park neighbor Ace Hollyard comes to mind: “Call me Ace, as in ace in the hole.” Or Larry’s former client, the Irish showbiz czar “Bacon” Malone.
There are names, of course, that refuse to open up to variation. Larry thinks of his friend and mentor Eric Eisner; what can you do with the name Eric? Or Garth. (Garth McCord, the well-known Toronto industrialist and land developer, has recently - just last week in fact - contacted Larry Weller of Chicago with a major landscape proposal, and Larry is thinking seriously of taking it on, even though it means moving to Toronto for the better part of a year.)
Larry’s late father had a nickname too: Stu, for Stuart; his elderly mother is Dot (Dorothy), and his only sister, Marjorie, has been called Midge (or sometimes Pigeon or Widge) since the day she was born back in the late forties. That tells you something; a whole family surrendering to the diminutive. It suggests that the Wellers are not quite grown-up folks, but more like a diagram - pop, mum, sis, bro - of what a more robustly named family could be.
Larry grew up in Winnipeg (the ’peg) next door to the Herschel family: Hersh and Gert, and their kids, Bill and Toots. It was as though the Herschels, like the Wellers, failed to earn the full dignity that people named Jonathan or Ann-Marie or Clark or Susanna insist upon. On the other hand, you could argue that the nicknamed population possess greater adaptability, turning toward the world their sunny freckledness and their willingness to “go along.” They’re the planet’s guys and gals, they’re hands-on friendly, they let you know just by the nonchalance of their names that they’ve already relinquished a little morsel of their DNA, their panic and their pride. They stand there as though they have no secrets. As though they don’t know how to grow up and leave their oatmeal behind, that special gift bowl with their name incised on the rim.
Being called Larry means that a part of Larry is always going to be that boy hanging around the house on a summer day, waiting in the stopped August light for something to happen. On a piece of paper, out of boredom, that kid will print his name over and over again, Larry Weller, Larry Weller, until it dissolves into nonsense. A pencil’s rough squiggle.
By coincidence, both Larry’s ex-wives had nicknames. His second wife’s name was Beth, short for Elizabeth; she could just as easily have been a Liz, but then she would have been a different person with a different set of arrangements. His first wife, Dorrie, had been christened Dora by her parents, a name that in Dorrie’s opinion reeked of old-maidishness, smelly-footedness, and typing-pool ambitions. As a matter of fact, Dorrie continues to use the name Dorrie, even though she’s recently been appointed chief executive officer of SkyBlue Greetings, the Canadian branch of an international card company. She started out selling cars (Manitoba Motors), then moved to sportswear (Nu-Cloz), working her way up to vice-president in charge of sales, and now, since last December, she’s into stationery products; she’s been moving up the ladder all these years, but dealing, Larry’s observed, with merchandise that is increasingly smaller and lighter and more ephemeral.
Not long ago, Larry happened to catch her on a national TV news show: Ms. Dorrie Shaw-Weller, as she calls herself now, was making a public apology for a tasteless Father’s Day card her firm had produced. The offending card was flashed on the screen, a girl’s flat cartoonish face and a balloon over her head containing the words: “Thanks, Dad, for not drowning me at birth.”
“We do vet our new lines carefully,” Dorrie Shaw-Weller said into the microphone. Her voice was head-shakingly sincere. Her gray eyes held a suggestion of personal distress but were clearly prepared to level with the viewers’ outrage. “We at SkyBlue Greetings are proud of our reputation for being sensitive to women and to minorities, and we deeply regret that this card somehow slipped through our focus group. We have, of course, already withdrawn it from the retail outlets.”
Of course, of course.
Larry had been surprised and even impressed. Had Dorrie prepared this statement herself, then memorized it? Her voice, which might have grown company-cool over the years, was instead packed with warm tones. This was an empathetic person speaking, a person Mr. and Mrs. Consumer out there could trust. He remembered that she’d done a three-week management course in Vancouver a couple of years ago; it’s possible she picked up a few public relations pointers.
“Thank you so much, Dorrie Shaw-Weller,” the twinkly-eyed TV host wound up, “for agreeing to come on the show and offer our viewers an explanation.”
“Thank you for giving me the opportunity,” said Dorrie in her persuasive manner. Her hands rose straight up before her, framing a box of crisp air, then falling open slightly as if offering a shrugging embrace, a gesture that said look, we all make mistakes, so please, please forgive me, all you understanding folks out there.
A lot of people are named after someone, but not the casually disentitled Larry
Weller. His folks just liked the name Larry a lot, that’s all, but they had the good sense to realize it would have to come enclosed in the more formal Laurence - this was back in 1950. Larry was the name they dressed him in. It was sweet, perky. “I just thought it sounded like a real boy’s name,” his mother told him once. “Like Jack. Now that’s another name I like. It’s, you know, masculine. There’s nothing silly about it, but at the same time it isn’t one of those stuffed-shirt names.”
“Are you sure,” his second wife, Beth, asked him, “that you weren’t named after St. Laurence?” Beth had written her PhD dissertation on the early female saints of the church, and was able to describe for Larry the brave deeds of St. Laurence and his fiery death, how the prefect of Rome had demanded to see the treasures of the church, and how Laurence, in response, gathered together the poor and infirm who lived on the alms of the faithful. “Here,” Laurence announced, gesturing at the tattered crowd, “are the treasures of the church.” For his trouble he was roasted over a sort of hibachi; Larry’s seen the nineteenth-century woodcut in Beth’s Pictorial Lives of the Saints. “I’m cooked enough,” the irreverent Laurence is believed to have shouted. “You can eat me now.”
Much as Larry would like to be associated with this hero of legend, he doubts very much that his parents had the early Laurence in mind. They weren’t Catholic, for one thing, and didn’t know diddly-squat about saints. No, he was just one more citizen of the Larry nation, those barbecuers, those volunteer firemen, those wearers of muscle shirts. Men called Larry have to be brave, while other men are allowed lapses.
His middle name, John, was also randomly chosen. “I wanted you to have a middle name,” said his mother, Dot, who had none and deeply resented the blank in her life, “and John had a nice royal ring to it.”
So there he was, Laurence John. Larry. His chance to show the world other sides of himself was curtailed by that fact.
Men, unlike women, live with their family names all their lives. A name settles with all its appropriate weight on their chests, like an X-ray apron, and there it stays. Larry’s second wife, an ardent feminist, wouldn’t have dreamt of changing her name to Weller, and Dorrie, who assumed it automatically back in 1978, has now reestablished her maiden name, Shaw, bolting it with a hyphen to Weller. This sounded strange to Larry at first, but now he’s used to it.
The name Weller itself has two possible origins, as Larry discovered when he looked it up in a book of Beth’s. There are some sources going back to the twelfth century that describe Weller as meaning a “boiler of salt.” A later version, and the one that Larry prefers, has Weller as one who dwells by a stream or spring, a sort of professional water overseer.
Like a lot of people, Larry’s never really liked his first name much; its Larryness has alway seemed an imprisonment, and a sly wink toward its most conspicuous rhyme: ordinary. His middle name, John, is a blank of a name, occupying space. But the name Weller he’s learned to love: one who lives within the sight and sound of running water, a water man, a well man, a custodian of all that is clear, pure, sustaining, and everlastingly present.
There are some men, mostly jocks, who get called by their last name all the time. No one understands how this gets started, calling someone like Bill Jones, say, Jones or Jonesy, and never Bill; it’s a little like those houses where people either use the back door all the time or the front door, and no one knows why.
Larry almost never gets called Weller; when it happens, he wants to laugh. The name shatters against his ear into flakes of grammar: well, weller, wellest. Sometimes his sister, Midge, phoning on a Sunday night will address him, tenderly, as Lare-Bear. Bill Herschel used to call him Square-Lare, but that only lasted a short time and now he calls him Lorenzo. Wary Larry, Beth sometimes called him when he was having trouble making decisions. But mostly he’s just Larry.
Larry, Larry. It’s a word that’s grown a skin of pure transparence. He doesn’t see or hear it anymore. It’s absurd. As absurd as the pointless flowers and trees, the wave action of the sea, the stones and stars that gape at each other through blind air. Useless, all of it. A disordered abundance.
No one gets named Larry anymore. It’s had it as a name. Think of someone called Larry and you automatically conjure up a guy drinking beer in a sixties rec room. He’s wearing polyester pants. He’s watching the ball game on TV and belching softly. Next he’s reaching under his T-shirt and scratching his belly hairs and doesn’t care who sees him do it. He knows he’s at the end of the Larry line, so what the hell. It was Beth who provided this profile of a “typical” Larry type. That was years ago, soon after they met. (“I can’t believe I’m kissing a man named Larry,” he remembers her saying, her voice full of honest wonder and her mouth tight like a fold of paper.)
But there are a lot of leftover Larrys out there. Not as many, maybe, as there are Mikes or Tonys or Als or Gregs, but enough so that no one blinks when you say your name is Larry. No one asks you how you spell it.
There’s Larry on the Larry King show, who’s sneery but oddly sane, and who sometimes shows surprising restraint. There’s Larry Holmes, the boxer. There used to be Larry Olivier, the great actor, but he was really a Laurence at heart; you didn’t get to call him Larry unless you were one of his inner circle, which you weren’t.
Larry Weller of Chicago, soon to pull up stakes and relocate in Toronto - he’s decided to make it a permanent move - knows only three Larrys, personally that is. Larry Liddle from Windows Incorporated comes out to the Weller house with his crew of men on the first Saturday of each April to take down the storm windows and put up the screens. In the fall he comes again and does the whole thing in reverse. He’s a red-faced man with long ropy muscles and a headful of tight solid-gray curls. Every time Larry hands him a check he stares at it for a minute, then gives a little whistle of appreciation. “Hey, another Larry, what do you know!” He seems to find this coincidence exhilarating, something to celebrate, although Larry Weller knows that by next fall Larry Liddle will have forgotten their shared name and that they will go through the whole ritual of recognition, astonishment, and fellow-feeling once again.
Except that there won’t be another fall. He announced this to Larry Liddle last week when he came to take down the storm windows. The house has been sold; he and and his wife are soon to be divorced, and he himself is heading off to Toronto to set up a design office. “That’s up there in Canada, isn’t it?” said Larry Liddle. “Yes,” Larry Weller said, and then added apologetically, “That’s where I come from originally.” “Well,” said Larry Liddle. “Well, well, well.” He stared at the check, seemingly stricken at the thought of Larry’s departure and at a loss for words. Finally he said, “That’s going to make one less Larry around here for company,” which was true enough.
Larry K. Wellington is a Chicago architect who’s widely known for the pink office tower that cantilevers like a stack of cupcakes over Wacker Drive and also for a dozen dazzling summer-houses he’s designed in the Michigan dunes. People get Larry Weller and Larry Wellington mixed up all the time. There have been a couple of misattributions in journals, and clients sometimes phone the wrong number and need to be redirected. The two Larrys met only once, at a fundraising dinner for the soon-to-be-demolished Wardlaw Gardens off Washington Boulevard. Larry Weller loathed Larry K. Wellington from the moment Larry K. Wellington addressed him through his long narrow nose: “So you’re that garden maestro, huh.” The silk knot of his tie stood out criminally. Like a small animal. Like a grenade ready to go off. His handshake was overly long, damp, and probing, and there was a wet look to his chin as though he had dribbled his red wine and couldn’t be bothered to mop himself up. “So,” Larry K. Wellington said with leering familiarity, “it seems the two of us are stuck for life with the same sobriquet. You know what they used to call me in school? Scary Larry. I had this way about me. Even then. The look of success. It made people jealous, see what I mean. They could tell I was going to get ahead and they weren’t. What a
crappy world. It’s all crap in the end.”
It seemed impossible to Larry Weller that such a man was allowed to walk freely on the streets of Chicago. And that his name happened to be Larry.
Thank God for Larry Fine, who lives on Kenilworth Avenue across the street from the Weller house. Larry Fine is a psychologist, or a behavioralist as he’s quick to tell you, who teaches at the University of Chicago. This Larry has thick, thick wrists covered with mats of hair, but he’s a good mile and a half from being a traditional hetero type. He bakes, he wears aprons, he sews his own curtains. Last Christmas he made Larry Weller a shirt out of green linen. He names everything he owns. His kitchen stove is called Eleanor. His car is Jacqueline. His computer is called Gertrude, daughter of a previous Gertrude. Larry Fine is probably a little in love with Larry Weller. They both know this, but it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t stop them from enjoying a beer together on Larry Weller’s screened porch - especially on lonely evenings since Beth’s taken off - and talking about sports, sex, theology, AIDS research, the meaning of garden mazes, and the importance of names.
“We’ll look back on this century,” Larry Fine says, “and we’ll see that one of the big social changes in America was the claiming of our own names. We stopped letting other people name us. You can own your name the same way you own your breath. You can shorten it or beef it up and it’s still yours. Have you seen those ads for the Lois Club? All the women in Chicago named Lois get together.once a month. I don’t know if they bawl their eyes out or perform Lois chants, but they’re dishing straight into their randomly assigned names. On the other hand, you want to look at the evolving nature of the baptism ceremony. Our rituals tell us everything, and the old patriarchal laying on of hands is out the window, there’s no more of this ‘I christen thee Elvis Presley’ or whatever, and expecting it to last. There’s a whole different emphasis now. We get to name ourselves if we want to. There’ve always been a few oddballs who did it, but they were showbiz types or else people on the run. Now it’s as mainstream as the stud in my navel. Did you know that it’s out on the west coast, the frontier, where people go to court the most often to change their names? They want to be something else, and they know they’ve got to get rid of the old moniker for once and for all. For me it’s different. At one time, ten years ago maybe, I was ready to be an Abraham or Ezra, something with a little biblical zing, but I made up my mind I’d hang on to the name Larry. I’d force it, by God, to take a new shape. I’d give it some gender stretch, some fiber, a few brain cells even. It’s a dopey name, let’s face it, but it’s ours and we can learn to love it.”