Carol Shields - Larry’s Party

Her voice is a low, confidential rumble, but full of little runs and pauses. She knows how to build up to a story, and she knows exactly when it’s time to throw the ball into Larry’s court. “So what do you think, Lare?” What she brings him are bulletins from that layer of the world he seems doomed to miss, the anecdotes she gleans from CHOL’s call-in show or People Magazine exposés. She passes on, generously, with unstoppable authority, such things as cough remedies from somebody or other’s grandmother, the fact that Italians use mums only for funerals, or what can be said out loud these days and what’s verboten. Chinamen are now Chinese people. Indians are natives. And so on and so forth.

Certain topics between them are off limits. For instance, they never, never mention Larry’s wife, Dorrie; Viv, with her strong sense of intuition, probably suspects things aren’t working out too well in that department. On the other hand, she can be surprisingly upfront about herself, making a point, for instance, of keeping Larry up to date on her menstrual cycle. “It’s better you know when I’m having my rag days, kiddo, then you can keep out of my way.” In fact, she’s blessed with a remarkably even temperament, a woman whose running commentary on the world is underpinned by an easy acceptance of whatever comes her way. What she collects in her life is information, and it’s information too valuable not to be shared.

Larry’s grateful. He owes Viv a lot, and yet he hardly knows her. She and her husband, Hector, live quietly in a house in St. Vital. Hector’s older than Viv by a good fifteen years and he’s been married before – this slipped out one day when Viv was sorting through a box of holly at the store – and has fathered a couple of kids who grew up to be whiners and grabbers, which is why he doesn’t want to have any more, and that’s okay-José with Viv. Larry has only been to their house once, a Sunday morning a few years ago when he dropped off some screwed-up billing statements.

He’d never in his life seen such an airy house, everything dusted and polished and in perfect repair, and the pale beige drapes hanging with their pleats just so. Viv, wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, made coffee which she served to Hector and Larry at a shining kitchen table. She was quieter than she was at the store, sitting back and letting the men get acquainted. Afterward, Hector showed Larry the basement where he repaired clocks.

This was his job, not just a hobby. Against one wall stood a long workbench for Hector’s tools. They were astonishingly beautiful, these tools, brass tipped with dark wooden handles and a look of antiquity about them. A metal lathe gleamed, handsome as a museum piece, clean, polished, ready to go. A square of pegboard held drill bits arranged in the shape of a harp. “Every last thing you see here is European,” Hector said proudly. “German, mostly. You can’t beat the Krauts for machinery.”

“Yeah,” murmured Larry, his eyes on the metal teeth of a miniature saw.

Twenty or thirty clocks stood about the room or hung on the walls, some of them disemboweled, and others tagged and ready to be picked up by their owners. Hector explained to Larry, pointing out their burnished edges, how to tell a French clock from an English clock, how certain clocks have a regulator mechanism that allows for the expansion or contraction of their pendulums, and the reasons for the transition of pocket watches to wrist watches. Larry ran his hand appreciatively over the frame of a plain round wall clock.

“That’s a Seth Thomas you’re looking at,” Hector said. “The real thing.”

“Ah,” said Larry, who had never heard of a Seth Thomas.

The two men stood together for a minute in respectful silence. The air was full of the loud busy sound of ticking, and then suddenly – Hector held up a finger to Larry; here it comes! – there was a brief concert of chimes and bongs; twelve noon. “That’s my hourly concert,” Hector said, and Larry could tell it was something he said often and each time with pleasure. “That’s all the music I need.”

Larry looked around, then, at the low-ceilinged room which was dark in the corners but whitely lit under the cone of a green work light. Here was the domain of a man who had his name and trade listed in the Yellow Pages. The pervasive tang of machine oil lay over his ticking, working kingdom, and there in the middle stood Hector Bondurant himself, with his arms folded across his stomach, tapping his elbows, beaming broadly, a monarch in his chosen sphere.

Larry felt a stab of irrational jealousy. For the briefest of moments he wanted to own this space, this spacious house with its neat drapes and its stern white coffee mugs, and he yearned for the daily descent down linoleum-clad stairs to this warm, snug hideaway and its waiting workbench covered with sorted parts and beautifully aligned tools. He wanted all these things, but most of all he wanted Hector’s work, his clockmaker’s hands and the intricate mechanical promise he coaxes from mere wood and metal.

In the same instant, lapping up against Larry’s instant desire to become a clockmaker, was his longing to work side by side with his father down at Air-Rider Coach Works, transforming metal sheets into mobile palaces. The miracle of it, making something out of nothing. The pleasure at the end of the day to see what you’d constructed with your own hands.

And then there was his wife, Dorrie, who sold cars at Manitoba Motors – he’d never thought much about Dorrie’s job, but now he wanted a portion of that too. Himself in a snappy sports jacket with “Call Me Larry” on his lapel button. The lingo, the come-on, the bargains teasingly offered and withdrawn, the intensity of the minute-by-minute shifts, the decisive moment, and the thrill: the final solemnity, of signing on the dotted line and pocketing a fat commission.

There’s no getting around it: the rhapsody of work hums between Larry’s ears, its variables and strategies, its implements and its tightly focused skills. Sometimes he tries to scare himself with thoughts of worklessness, the long, vacant mornings of the unemployed – how would that feel? – and the mingled boredom and sadness of being broke and without accomplishment, without any way to deal with time. In the end, anything’s better than nothing, even the working stiff’s daily grind. Some work is graceless, he knows that. Work can be dirty, noisy, dangerous, degrading, but it’s still work, and that’s what turns the gears of life. He understands this spare, singular fact better than he will ever be able to understand the unguessable secrets of love and happiness.

Years later, when his life was going badly, he came to see work as the only consolation for persisting in the world.

Before Dorrie got married she was a clerk-receptionist in the parts division of Manitoba Motors. The pay wasn’t great, but she had a reputation for getting along with the customers, always commiserating with them over the size of their repair bills, taking their side. They appreciated that. They nicknamed her Dorable. The head of auto parts, a man named Al Leonard, said she was the most efficient employee he’d ever seen. She had a knack for keeping track of details and for remembering what was where and which parts were out of stock. In those days she wore jeans to work and a thick sweater since it was always drafty, what with the door to the repairs garage opening and closing all day long. Besides, she was stuck behind the counter, so what did it matter if she went casual or dressy?

After Ryan was born, she stayed home for three months and earned the odd bit of money by making follow-up calls for repair service. The way it worked, Manitoba Motors sent her out a list of completed repairs once a week, and her job was to phone the clients and ask if they were satisfied with the work. A public relations kind of thing, making the customer feel valued and looked after. She got paid so much a call, and she was able to squeeze in maybe fifteen or so calls while Ryan napped in the afternoon. Even so, the pay was peanuts, and half the time no one was at home or else they chewed her out for disturbing them in the middle of the day.