Larry’s Party

And that’s when he really knew how cold the wind had got. It puffed his shirt-sleeves up like a couple of balloons, so that all of a sudden he had these huge brand-new muscles. Superman. Then it shifted around quick, and there he was with his shirt pressed flat against his arms and chest, puny and shrunk-up. The next minute he was inflated again. Then it all got sucked out. In and out, in and out. The windiest city in the country, in North America. It really was.

There were plenty of eyes on him, he could feel them boring through to his skin. In about two minutes some guy was going to pull that Harris tweed jacket out of the garbage and put it on. But by that time Larry would be around the corner, walking straight toward the next thing that was going to happen to him.

CHAPTER TWO Larry’s Love 1978 (#ulink_f5c18d5e-ec4b-5b03-8ef4-35d57451b841)

On a Wednesday in winter Larry walked over to a barber shop on Sargent Avenue and asked for a cut. “Just a regular cut,” he told the barber in an unsmiling, muttering tone of voice that was altogether unlike his usual manner. This was after a decade of having shoulder-length hair. He came out of the barber shop half an hour later with hair that was short around the ears and cropped close at the neck. Even the color seemed different – darker, denser, and without shadows, a color hard to put a name to.

He was shivery with cold for hours after his haircut, lonely for his hair, shrunken in his upper body, but he also felt stronger, braver. The new look made him want to bunch his fists like a prizefighter or cross his arms over his chest. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror working on new expressions, moving his mouth and eyebrows around, and trying to settle on something friendly.

Vivian and Marcie who work with Larry at Flowerfolks were both bursting with compliments. Vivian, the store manager, said the new cut made him look “younger and healthier,” and that started Larry wondering about how he’d been looking lately. He was only twenty-seven, which was not really old enough to show up on his face and body – or was it? His own opinion was that he was in pretty fair shape what with all the walking he did to and from work, plus the weekend hikes out at Birds Hill with his friend Bill Herschel. Marcie chimed in then about how the new hairstyle made him look more “with-it” “It’s 1978,” she said. “The sixties are over.”

What would she know, Larry thought – she was only a kid, seventeen, eighteen.

Larry, at twenty-seven, still lived with his parents, Dot and Stu, in their bungalow on Ella Street, but this was his last week; he was set to move out on Friday, at long last. Both Dot and Stu approved of their son’s haircut. Not that they jumped up and down and waved their arms. It was more a case of pretend nonchalance. “About bloody time,” Larry’s father said, and started in about the number of times he’d had to open the bathtub drain and clean out all the hair and muck. “Why, you’re handsome as can be,” Dot said, reaching out and testing the flat of her hand against the new springiness of Larry’s hair. It had been some time since she’d touched the top of her son’s head, years in fact, and now it was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this is Dorrie’s influence,” she said, “then I say more power to her.”

On Friday afternoon – blizzards, high winds – Larry and his folks, and his girlfriend, Dorrie, and her family, went downtown to the Law Courts and got married. Dorrie (Dora) Marie Shaw and Laurence John Weller became the Wellers, husband and wife. And on Saturday morning the bridal couple boarded an Air Canada jet for London, England.

Most of the passengers on the plane were wearing jeans and sweaters, but Dorrie had chosen for her travel outfit a new rose-colored polyester blend suit. Now she regretted it, she told Larry. The suit’s straight skirt was restrictive so that she couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip, and she worried about the hard wrinkles that had formed across her lap. She should have invested in one of those folding travel irons she’d seen on sale. And she’d been a dope not to bring along some spot-lifter for the stain on her jacket lapel. By the time they got to England it would be permanently set. They put dye in airplane food, coloring the gravy dark brown so it looked richer and more appetizing. One of the salesmen at Manitoba Motors, where she works, told her about it. He also told her not to drink carbonated drinks on the flight because of gas. People pass a lot of gas on planes, he’d informed her. It had to do with air pressure. Also, one alcoholic drink on land equals three in the air. This is important information.

If only someone had filled her in about what to wear for a trip like this. She’d never been on a plane before – neither had Larry for that matter – but somehow she’d got the idea that air travel was dressy, especially if you were headed for an international destination, such as London, England. She was all for being casual, as she told Larry, she loved comfortable clothes, he knew that, but wouldn’t you think people would make an effort to look nice when they went somewhere important?

“Not everyone’s on their honeymoon,” he reminded her.

And that was the moment they heard a special announcement over the P.A. system, the pilot’s chuckly, good-sport voice coming at them from the cockpit. “Ladies and gents, we thought you’d like to know we’ve got a brand-new married couple aboard our flight today. How about a round of applause, everyone, for Mr. and Mrs. Larry Weller of Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

A stewardess was suddenly standing next to the bride and groom with a bottle of champagne and two glasses and also a corsage to pin on Dorrie’s shoulder, compliments of Air Canada.

“Ohh!’ Dorrie gave a little shriek. She glowed bright pink. She squirmed in her seat with pleasure. “This is fabulous. How did you know? Baby roses, I love baby roses, and, look, they match my outfit. It’s perfect.”

“I almost died of embarrassment,” Dorrie would tell Larry’s mother two weeks later, back home in Winnipeg. “I bet you anything I was blushing from head to foot. Everyone was just staring at the two of us, and then they started cheering and clapping and peering around their seats at us or standing up so they could see who we were and what we looked like. Was I ever glad I had my new pink outfit on. And Larry with his hair restyled. The newly-weds!”

The champagne sent Dorrie straight to sleep, her feet tucked up under her on the seat, and her head flopped over on Larry’s shoulder. The sweet perfume of the roses, which were already darkening, got stirred in with the drone of voices and the dimmed cabin lights and the steady, sleepy vibrations of the plane as it nosed through the night sky.

A little drunk, stranded between the old day and the new, between one continent and another, Larry felt the proprietorial pleasure of having a hushed and satisfied companion by his side. He and Dorrie had boarded the plane under a weight of anticlimax, worn out after the wedding and the wedding lunch at the Delta and from moving his things over to Dorrie’s apartment. And they were hollowed out too – that’s how it felt – after a long, ecstatic night of sex, then the alarm clock going off at five-thirty, the last-minute packing to do, and Larry’s folks arriving, too early, to drive them out to the airport. It was a lot to absorb. But now this unexpected tribute had come to them, to himself and to his wife, Dorrie. A wife, a wife. He breathed the word into the rubbery patterned upholstery of the seat ahead of him – wife.

A daze of contentment fell over him, numbing and fateful, and he shook his head violently to clear his senses – but in the excitement of the last few hours he had forgotten about his recent haircut. Instead of the movement of soft hair flying outward and then landing with a bounce on his neck, that comforting silky familiar flick against his cheek, he sensed only the abruptness of his cold, clean face, how exposed it was beneath the tiny cabin light and how stupidly rigid.

An hour ago he had felt the tug of drowsiness, but now he pledged himself to stay awake. Grief was involved in this decision, and possibly a crude form of gallantry. Staying awake seemed a portion of what was expected of him, part of the new role he had undertaken a mere thirty-six hours earlier, standing in front of a marriage commissioner at the Law Courts with his family and Dorrie’s family looking on. “Marriage is not to be entered into lightly, but with certainty, mutual respect, and a sense of reverence.” These words had been part of the civil ceremony, printed on a little souvenir card he and Dorrie had been given.

He was a husband now, and his chattering, fretful Dorrie, no longer a girlfriend but a wife, was slipping down sideways against his arm, her face damp, pared-down, and sealed shut with sleep. He felt her shoulder lift on every third or fourth breath, lift and then fall in a catching, irregular way, as though her dreams had brought her up against a new, puzzling form of exhaustion, something she would soon be getting used to.

For her sake he would stay alert. He would keep guard over her, drawing himself as straight as possible in his seat without disturbing her sleeping body. He’d clamp his jaw firmly shut in a husbandlike way, patient, forbearing, and keep his eyes steady in the dark. He would do this in order to keep panic at a distance. All that was required of him was to outstare the image in the floating black glass of the window, that shorn, bewildered, fresh-faced stranger whose profile, for all its raw boyishness, reminded him, alarmingly, of – of who?

His father, that’s who.

“The very image of his mother,” people used to say about Larry Weller. Same blue eyes. The freckled skin. Dot’s gestures. That mouth.

Larry could not recall any mention of a resemblance to his father. He was his mother’s boy. Heir to her body, her intensity, and to her frantic private pleasures and glooms.

But now, twenty-seven and a half years into his life, he found that his father had moved in beneath his bones. That nameless part of his face, the hinged area where the jaw approaches the lower ear – he could see now what his flowing hair had hidden: that his father’s genes were alive in his body. Even his earlobes, their fleshiness and color. What was that color? A hint of strawberry that spread from the ears up the veins to the cheeks, his father’s cheeks, curving and surprisingly soft in a man’s hard face.

His father’s solid, ruddy presence. It arrived, sudden and shocking, and stayed with him throughout the two weeks of his and

Dorrie’s honeymoon. He met it each morning in the shaving mirror of the various modest hotels where they stayed. What kind of trick was this? He’d turn his eyes slowly toward the mirror, creeping up on his face, and there the old guy would be, larger and more substantial than a simple genetic flicker. His father’s flexible loose skin pressed up against the glass, a fully formed image, yawning, hoisting up his sleepy lids, dressed in his work clothes with the bus factory’s insignia on the pocket, Air-Rider, his broad shoulders and back bunching forward under Larry’s pajamas, and his large red hands reaching out, every finger scarred in one way or another from the upholstery work he did at the plant. And Larry could hear the voice too, his father’s high, querulous voice, with the Lancashire notes still in place after twenty-seven years in Canada.

Stu Weller. Master upholsterer. Husband of Dot, father of Midge and Larry.

It was Stu, with Dot’s blessing, who had the idea of giving the young couple a package tour of England. A wedding present, gruffly, unceremoniously offered. “We did the same for your sister when she got herself married.”

Never mind that Midge and her husband got divorced after two years. That Paul turned out to like men more than women.

Dorrie would have preferred a honeymoon in Los Angeles or maybe Mexico, somewhere hot, a nice hotel on the beach, but how can a person say no to free tickets, everything paid for, the plane fare, plus a twelve-day bus trip, Sunbrite Tours, breakfast and dinner, all the way up to the Pennines, then down to Land’s End, the very south-west tip of England, then back to London for the final three days. Stu and Dot had taken a similar package tour a few years back, a twenty-fifth anniversary present to themselves, a “journey back to our roots,” as Dot put it, though the real roots for both of them were in the industrial northern town of Bolton, not the green sprawling English countryside.

And when Larry and Dorrie got there it was green, unimaginably green – a bright variegated green that made Larry think of Brussels sprouts. Everyone back home had said: What? – you’re going to England in March? Are you crazy?

But here they were, carried over England’s green hills, ferried down into narrow green valleys, pulling up in the parking lots of green medieval villages where thick-towered castles threw greenish shadows across their squat Sunbrite coach (they had got over their terror of riding along on the left side of the highway with the traffic thundering straight at them).

The tour began in London and headed north-east. Rain, and then episodes of brilliant slanting sunshine accompanied them as they set off, then rain again, pelting the bare trees and hedges, bringing violent, pressing changes of light, as though the day itself was about to offer up an immense idea. They stopped at the picture-postcard town of Saffron Walden, where they were led on a quick march through the old twisted streets and served lunch in a tearoom called the Silken Cat. Dorrie was staunchly brave about the steak and kidney pie, leaving only a few polite scraps on her plate.

“Take notice of these ceiling beams,” their guide instructed. His name was Arthur, a stout, broad-faced man, a Londoner with a beer-roughened voice and a school teacher’s patient explaining manner. “Late fifteenth century. Possibly earlier.”

Dorrie copied this information into a little travel diary she pulled from her purse – “Late 15th century.”

Larry found his wife’s note-taking touching and also surprising. Where had that diary come from? Its cover was red leather. The narrow ruled pages were edged in gold. One of her girlfriends at Manitoba Motors must have given it to her, a going-away present, something she wouldn’t have thought of herself, not in a million years. It moved him to see his Dorrie in a pose of studentlike concentration, pausing over her choice of words, and keeping her writing neat and small. That she would busy herself recording this chip of historical information – late fifteenth century – record it for him, for their life together, stirred a lever of love in his heart.

But he remembered from school that fifteenth century really meant the fourteen-hundreds, how confusing that could be, and he wondered if Dorrie knew the difference and whether he should clarify the point for her. But no. She had already closed the diary and recapped her pen. Looking up at him, catching his eyes on her, she sent a kiss through the air, her small coral lips pushing out.

The first night the tour group was installed in a hotel in Norwich (sixteenth century, more beams) which was said to have been visited on at least one occasion by Edward VII and a “lady friend.” There were snowdrops blooming in the hotel’s front garden. Flowers in March. This took Larry a moment to register, the impossibility of flowers – but here they were. Back home in Canada it was twenty below zero. “Snowdrops,” Dorrie wrote in her diary when she was told what the flowers were called.

“Snowdrops are only the beginning,” Arthur told Larry and Dorrie. “You’ll be seeing daffodils before we’re done.”

The tour, it turned out, was only half booked. The other travelers were mostly retired New Zealanders and Australians, and an ancient deaf Romanian couple who never let go of each other’s hands. “Everyone’s so old,” Dorrie whispered to Larry. She had a gift for disappointment, and now she was wrinkling up her face. “Everyone’s old and fat except for us.”

It was true. Or close to being true. The eighteen passengers, men as well as women, shared the spongy carelessness of flesh that accompanies late middle age. The white permed heads of the wives, their husbands’ rosy baldness, framed faces that were, to Larry’s eyes at least, remarkably similar, softened, and blurred in outline, with their features melted to a kind of putty.

“I’ll bet we’re the only ones who screw all night,” Dorrie said, looking around. “Or screw at all.”

“Probably.” He smiled down at her.

“Notice I said screw and not fuck.”

“Congratulations.”

“I’m a married woman now. Respectable.”

“Ha.” Still smiling.

“Ha yourself.”