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Larry’s Party
Carol Shields
Contents
CHAPTER ONE: Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977
CHAPTER TWO: Larry’s Love 1978
CHAPTER THREE: Larry’s Folks 1980
CHAPTER FOUR: Larry’s Work 1981
CHAPTER FIVE: Larry’s Words 1983
CHAPTER SIX: Larry’s Friends 1984
CHAPTER SEVEN: Larry’s Penis 1986
CHAPTER EIGHT: Larry Inc. 1988
CHAPTER NINE: Larry So Far 1990
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Larry’s Search for the Wonderful and the Good 1992
CHAPTER TWELVE: Larry’s Threads 1993–4
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Men Called Larry 1995
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Larry’s Living Tissues 1996
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Larry’s Party 1997
Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries
About the Publisher
For Joseph, Nicholas, and Sofia
With thanks to a few men who have offered suggestions in the writing of this book: David Arnason, Tommy Banks, Tony Giardini, Jack Hodgins, Robin Hoople, Don Huband, Steve Hunt, Dayv James-French, the late Jim Keller, Joseph Krotz, Jake MacDonald, Brian MacKinnon, Don McCarthy, Bill Neville, Mark Morton, Doug Pepper, Gord Peters, John Ralston Saul, Donald Shields, John Shields, Ray Singer, Harry Strub and Max Wyman.
Thanks, too, to Maggie Dwyer and Jane Gralen and to the staff at the Winnipeg Public Library.
What is this mighty labyrinth – the earth, But a wild maze the moment of our birth?
(“Reflections on Walking in the Maze at Hampton Court” British Magazine, 1747)
CHAPTER ONE Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977
By mistake Larry Weller took someone else’s Harris tweed jacket instead of his own, and it wasn’t till he jammed his hand in the pocket that he knew something was wrong.
His hand was traveling straight into a silky void. His five fingers pushed down, looking for the balled-up Kleenex from his own familiar worn-out pocket, the nickels and dimes, the ticket receipts from all the movies he and Dorrie had been seeing lately. Also those hard little bits of lint, like meteor grit, that never seem to lose themselves once they’ve worked into the seams.
This pocket – today’s pocket – was different. Clean, a slippery valley. The stitches he touched at the bottom weren’t his stitches. His fingertips glided now on a sweet little sea of lining. He grabbed for the buttons. Leather, the real thing. And something else – the sleeves were a good half inch longer than they should have been.
This jacket was twice the value of his own. The texture, the seams. You could see it got sent all the time to the cleaners. Another thing, you could tell by the way the shoulders sprang out that this jacket got parked on a thick wooden hanger at night. Above a row of polished shoes. Refilling its tweedy warp and woof with oxygenated air.
He should have run back to the coffee shop to see if his own jacket was still scrunched there on the back of his chair, but it was already quarter to six, and Dorrie was expecting him at six sharp, and it was rush hour and he wasn’t anywhere near the bus stop.
And – the thought came to him – what’s the point? A jacket’s a jacket. A person who patronizes a place like Cafe Capri is almost asking to get his jacket copped. This way all that’s happened is a kind of exchange.
Forget the bus, he decided. He’d walk. He’d stroll. In his hot new Harris tweed apparel. He’d push his shoulders along, letting them roll loose in their sockets. Forward with the right shoulder, bam, then the left shoulder coming up from behind. He’d let his arms swing wide. Fan his fingers out. Here comes the Big Guy, watch out for the Big Guy.
The sleeves rubbed light across the back of his hands, scratchy but not too scratchy.
And then he saw that the cuff buttons were leather too, a smaller-size version of the main buttons, but the same design, a sort of cross-pattern like a pecan pie cut in quarters, only the slices overlapped this little bit. You could feel the raised design
