Larry's Party by Carol Shields

Author:Carol Shields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

“I understand what you’re going through,” Beth said to him some months ago after they had almost, but not quite, made love. A razor blade of moonlight streamed in from a crack in the curtains, neatly bisecting their queensize bed and its handmade (Appalachian) quilt. She kept her hand on Larry’s collapsed penis, stroking it as one might a small woodland creature. “I blame myself for foisting that surprise party on you. Who wants to announce forty to the world. We should go into a cave at forty and meditate along with the hanging bats. Learn their echoing, reverberative secrets. Figure out how to live on the quiet side of ecstasy, just, you know, how to be at home in our environment, how to adapt. Forty’s the age when we know we’ve already had half of what we’re going to get, that’s if we’re lucky. You look down the tunnel and you see more of the same, and it’s frightening, I can understand that.”

Stop, stop, stop.

Larry’s wife, Beth, is not yet forty; in fact, she won’t be forty for another seven years, and a part of Larry resents her swift and accurate diagnosis of his condition. She accepts the Christian notion that darkness surrounds and threatens every glimmer of common happiness. She’s oddly apologetic about it, as though she holds at least some partial responsibility. In a minute she’ll be telling the story of some obscure Celtic saint with an unpronounceable name and the power to reverse sexual inadequacy. Yes, here it comes. Her intake of breath against his pajama-sleeve announces her strategy. Larry braces himself and thinks: she means to be kind, to be helpful, supportive, et cetera, a saintly wife with a statistically average mate.

“Well,” Beth says, swerving into her narrative voice, its stretched vowels and pauses, “his name was St. Guignolé, sixth century or thereabouts.” (This vagueness, this thereabouts, is simulated; Larry recognizes it as a ploy to defuse the consoling and positive message she is about to deliver.) “So,” she continues, “there’s this ancient wooden statue of St. Guignolé in a church in France, in Brest, I think” - more rationed vagueness, that carefully inserted I think - “and thousands of visitors of both sexes have made pilgrimages over the years in order to whittle away at St. Guignolé’s upright member, carrying home the sawdusty bits, which they boil up in their broth and drink for supper.”

“Go on,” Larry says, knowing she will go on.

“Well, there are so many visitors scratching away that poor old Guignolé’s dingie-thingie -”

“His dingie-thingie?”

“His prick, then.”

“Oh, that.” He loves the puckery, faintly acidic way Beth pronounces the word prick, as though, in fact, it pricks the roof of her mouth just to say it.

“Well, his wooden prick, his member, had to be replaced every twenty years or so. A new one had to be carved and stuck on. The priests finally got so exasperated that they encased him in plaster, only to find that the pilgrims scraped away at the plaster casing and carried that home.

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