Larry's Party (2 page)

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 with your finger, the way the four quadrants of leather crossed over and over each other, their edges cut wavy on the inside margin. These waves intersected in the middle, dived down there in a dark center and disappeared. A black hole in the button universe. Zero.

Quadrant
was a word Larry hadn’t even thought of for about ten years, not since geometry class, grade eleven.

The color of the jacket was mixed shades of brown, a strong background of freckled tobacco tones with subtle orange flecks. Very subtle. No one would say: hey, here comes this person with orange flecks distributed across his jacket. You’d have to be one inch away before you took in those flecks.

Orange wasn’t Larry’s favorite color, at least not in the clothing line. He remembered he’d had orange swim trunks back in high school, MacDonald Secondary, probably about two sizes too big, since he was always worrying at that time in his life about his bulge showing, which was exactly the opposite of most guys, who made a big point of showing what they had. Modesty ran in his family, his mum, his dad, his sister, Midge, and once modesty gets into your veins you’re stuck with it. Dorrie, on the other hand, doesn’t even shut the bathroom door when she’s in there, going. A different kind of family altogether.

He’d had orange socks once too, neon orange. That didn’t last too long. Pretty soon he was back to white socks. Sports socks. You got a choice between a red stripe around the top, a blue stripe, or no stripe at all. Even geeks like Larry and his friend Bill Herschel, who didn’t go in for sports, they still wore those thick cotton sports socks every single day. You bought them three in a pack and they lasted about a week before they fell into holes. You always thought, hey, what a bargain, three pairs of socks at this fantastic price!

White socks went on for a long time in Larry’s life. A whole era.

Usually he didn’t button a jacket, but it just came to him as he was walking along that he wanted to do up one of those leather buttons, the middle one. It felt good, not too tight over the gut. The guy must be about his own size, 40 medium, which is lucky for him. If, for example, he’d picked up Larry’s old jacket, he could throw it in the garbage tomorrow, but at least he wasn’t walking around Winnipeg with just his shirt on his back. The nights got cool this time of year. Rain was forecast too.

A lot of people don’t know that Harris tweed is virtually waterproof. You’d think cloth this thick and woolly would soak up water like a sponge, but, in actual fact, rain slides right off the surface. This was explained to Larry by a knowledgeable old guy who worked in menswear at Hector’s. That would be, what, nine, ten years ago, before Hector’s went out of business. Larry could tell that this wasn’t just a sales pitch. The guy — he wore a lapel button that said “Salesman of the Year” - talked about how the sheep they’ve got over there are covered with special long oily hair that repels water. This made sense to Larry, a sheep standing out in the rain day and night. That was his protection.

Dorrie kept wanting him to buy a khaki trenchcoat, but he doesn’t need one, not with his Harris tweed. You don’t want bulk when you’re walking along. He walks a lot. It’s when he does his thinking. He hums his thoughts out on the air like music; they’ve got a disco beat: My name is Larry Weller. I’m a floral designer, twenty-six years old, and I’m walking down Notre Dame Avenue, in the city of Winnipeg, in the country of Canada, in the month of April, in the year 1977, and I’m thinking hard. About being hungry, about being late, about having sex later on tonight. About how great I feel in this other guy’s Harris tweed jacket.

Cars were zipping along, horns honking, trucks going by every couple of seconds, people yelling at each other. Not a quiet neighborhood. But even with all the noise blaring out, Larry kept hearing this tiny slidey little underneath noise. He’d been hearing it for the last couple of minutes. Whoosh, wash, whoosh, wash. It was coming out of the body of Larry J. Weller. It wasn’t that he found it objectionable. He liked it, as a matter of fact, but he just wanted to know what it was.

He whooshed past the Triple Value Store, past the Portuguese Funeral Home, past Big Mike’s where they had their windows full of ski equipment on sale. The store was packed with people wearing spring clothes, denim jackets, super-flare pants, and so on, but they were already thinking ahead to next winter. They had snow in their heads instead of a nice hot beach. That’s one thing Larry appreciates about Dorrie. She lives in the moment. When it’s snowing she thinks about snow. When it’s spring, like right now, she’s thinking about getting some new sandals. That’s what she’s doing this very minute: buying sandals at Shoes Express, their two-for-one sale. Larry knows she’s probably made up her mind already, but she told him she’d wait till he got to the store before buying. She wants to make sure Larry likes what she decides on, even though sandals are just sandals to him. Just a bunch of straps.

Dorrie knows how to stretch money. She saves the fifty-cents-off coupons from Ponderosa — which’ll give you a rib eye steak, baked potato and salad, all for $1.69. Or she’ll hear a rumor that next week shoe prices are going to get slashed double. So she’ll say to the guy at Shoes Express, “Look, can you hold these for me till next Wednesday or Thursday or whatever, so I can get in on the sale price?”

It comes to Larry, what the noise is. It’s the lining of his jacket moving back and forth across his shoulders as he strolls along, also the lining material sliding up and down against his shirt-sleeves. He can make it softer if he slows down. Or louder if he lifts his arm and waves at that guy across the street that he doesn’t even know. The guy’s waving back, he’s trying to figure out who Larry is -
hey, who’s that man striding along over there, that man in the very top-line Harris tweed jacket?

Actually no one wears Harris tweed much anymore. In fact, they never did, no one Larry ever knew. It’s vintage almost, like a costume. What happened was, Larry was about to graduate from Red River College (Floral Arts Diploma), just two guys and twenty-four girls. The ceremony was in the cafeteria instead of the general-purpose room, and dress was supposed to be informal. So what’s informal? Suits or what? The girls ended up wearing just regular dresses, and the two guys opted for jackets and dress pants.

Larry and his mother went to Hector’s, which she swears by, and that’s where they found the Harris tweed, this nubby-dubby wool cloth, smooth and rough at the same time, heavy but also light, with the look of money and the feel of a grain sack, and everywhere these soft little hairs riding on top of the weave. The salesman said: “Hey, you could wear that jacket to a do at the Prime Minister’s.” Larry had never heard of Harris tweed, but the salesman said it was a classic. That it would never go out of style. That it would wear like iron. Then his mother chimed in about how it wouldn’t show the dirt, and the salesman said he’d try real hard to get them twenty percent off, and that clinched it.

Larry wears the Harris tweed to Flowerfolks almost every day over a pair of jeans, and it’s hardly worn out at all. It never looks wrinkled or dirty. Or at least it didn’t until today when Larry put on this other jacket by mistake. So! There’s Harris tweed and Harris tweed,
uh-huh.

It was an accident how Larry got into floral design. A fluke. He’d been out of school for a few weeks, just goofing off, and finally his mother phoned Red River College one day and asked them to mail out their brochure on the Furnace Repair course. She figured everyone’s got a furnace, so even with the economy up and down, furnaces were a good thing to get into. Well, someone must have been sleeping at the switch, because along came a pamphlet from Floral Arts, flowers instead of furnaces. Larry’s mother, Dot, sat right down in the breakfast nook and read it straight through, tapping her foot as she turned the pages, and nodding her head at the ivy wallpaper as if she was saying, yes, yes, floral design really is the future.

Larry’s father, though, wasn’t too overwhelmed. Larry could tell he was thinking that flowers were for girls, not boys. Like maybe his only son was a homo and it was just starting to show. In the end, he did come to Larry’s graduation in the cafeteria but he didn’t know where to look. Even when Mrs. Starr presented Larry with the Rose Wreath for having the top point average, Larry’s father just sat there with his chin scraping the floor.

Larry was offered a job right off at Flowerfolks, and he’s been there ever since. Last October he got to do the centerpieces for the mayor’s banquet. It was even on television, Channel 13. You saw the mayor standing up to give his speech and there were these sprays of wheat, eucalyptus branches, and baby orchids right there on the table. Orchids! So much for your average taxpayer. But Flowerfolks has a policy of delivering their flowers to hospital wards if their clients don’t want them afterwards, so it’s really not a waste. They’re a chain with a social conscience, and also an emphasis on professionalism. They like the employees to look good. Shoulder-length hair’s okay for male staff, but not a quarter inch longer. A tie’s optional, but jackets are required. That’s where the Harris tweed comes in.

Larry can’t help thinking how this new, new jacket will knock their eyebrows off down at work.

Or maybe not, maybe they won’t even notice. He hadn’t noticed himself when he picked it up, so why should they? What happened was he went up to the counter to order his cappuccino. Not that he had to order it. He takes the same thing every day, a double cappuccino. He used to go to a bar for a few beers after work, but Dorrie got worried about all the booze he was soaking up. She was convinced his brain cells were getting killed off. One by one they were going out, like Christmas lights on a string, only there weren’t any replacements available.

“Why don’t you switch to coffee?” she said, and that’s when Larry started dropping into Cafe Capri, which is just around the corner from Flowerfolks. A nothing place, but they’ve brought cappuccino to this town. Nobody knew what it was at first, and some people, like Larry’s folks, still don’t. Larry’s tried it, and now he’s on a streak with double cappuccinos. They start making it when they see him come through the door at five-thirty.

He likes to put on his own cinnamon. He likes it spread out thin across the entire foam area, not just sitting in a wet clump in the middle. You take the shaker, hold it sideways about two inches to the right of the cup and tap it twice, lightly. A soft little cinnamon cloud forms in the air - you can almost see it hanging there - and then the little grains drift down evenly into the cup. Total coverage. Like the dust storm in Winnipeg last summer, how it coated every ledge and leaf and petunia petal with this beautiful, evenly distributed layer of powdery dust.

Lots of coffee places have switched over to disposable plastic, but Cafe Capri still uses those old white cups and saucers with the green rims. You put one of those cups up to your mouth and the thickness feels exactly right, the same dimensions as your own tongue and lips. You and your cup melt together, it’s like a kiss. Customers appreciate that. They’re so grateful for regular cups and saucers that they carry their own empties up to the counter on their way out. That’s what Larry must have done. Taken his cup back up, put his fifty-five cents by the cash, and picked up a jacket from the chair. Only it was someone else’s chair. Or maybe the other guy had already made off with Larry’s jacket at that point. A mistake can work both ways. Larry was probably busy thinking about meeting Dorrie, about the movie they were going to see that night,
Marathon Man,
their third time, and then coming back to her place after, his prick stirring at the thought.

When they first started going together they’d be lying there on top of her bed and she’d say, “Let’s fuck and fuck and fuck forever.”

“Do you have to say that?” Larry said to her after he’d known her a couple of months. “Can’t you just say ‘making love’?”

She got her hurt look. Parts of her face tended to lose their shape, especially around her mouth. “You say ‘fuck,’” she said to Larry.

“You say it all the time.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Come off it. You’re always saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.’”

“Maybe. Maybe I do. But I don’t say it literally.”

“What?” She looked baffled.

“Not
literally.”

“There you go again,” she said, “with those college words.” Larry stared at her. She actually thinks
flower
college is
college.

It was sort of a mistake the way they got together. Larry had taken another girl to a Halloween party at St. Anthony’s Hall. She, the other girl, had a pirate suit on, with a patch over the eye, a sword, the whole thing. And she’d made herself a moustache with an eyebrow pencil or something. That bothered Larry, turning his head around quick, and looking into the face of a girl wearing a moustache. A costume is supposed to change you, but you can go too far. Larry was a clown that night. He had the floppy shoes and the hat and the white paint on his face, but he’d skipped the red nose. Who’s going to score points with a red nose? There was another girl, Dorrie, at the table who’d come with her girlfriends. She was dressed like a Martian, but only a little bit like a Martian. You got the general idea, but you didn’t think when you were dancing with her that she was some weird extraterrestrial. She was just this skinny, swervy, good-looking girl who happened to be wearing a rented Martian suit.