Larry's Party (19 page)

Sometimes Larry feels that Beth has taken over the old injuries of his first marriage and made them hers.

But how unjust for one person to unload his grief on to another! It was like the story Beth told him not long ago, how the one-eyed St. Brigid possessed the magic power to pass her chronic headaches along to a minor fellow saint, who willingly assumed them and who became known, for his troubles, as the patron saint of headaches.

“You never answered my question,” Beth said sleepily, turning away from him. She reached around and tucked her hand between his legs. “About boys’ penises. About what penises want to do?”

There were mysteries, Larry knew, snugged in the corners of the universe. No one knows, for instance, what keeps a bicycle vertical when it’s in motion. No one knows why a man needs to show the world different versions of himself, and that one of these versions is the burrowing animal need to touch someone else.

“I’ll have to think about that,” Larry said to the smooth sheen of his wife’s back, shutting his eyes against the sun and against Beth’s ever-questioning voice, protecting her from the ratchety movement of his thoughts, knowing he was falling short of her expectations, and that he would always in one way or another fail her.

At the age of thirty-eight Larry Weller finds himself a member of a rarefied and eccentric profession: he is a designer, and what he designs and installs are garden mazes. A simple maze maker is what he prefers to call himself; the alliteration of the label appeals to him, and so does the artisan directness and the hands-on assumption, even though he’s obliged, every time, to stop and explain what a maze maker
is,
the insiderly scoop, and what he
does.
Larry’s maze specialty twinkles at the edge of his world, often its only point of color; there are fewer than a dozen maze makers in the world; they’re a rare breed.

He admits to anyone curious enough to ask that the North American market for mazes is small, minuscule really, since those who hanker for luxurious garden toys need to be both rich and intellectually quirky. In getting into formal gardening he has caught, entirely by accident, one of the generational updrafts: the realization that there is time at the end of this long, mean, skeptical century for leisure, time for the soul’s adornment. Maze aficionados tend to possess an off-key imagination, a sense of history (be it warped or precise), a love for teasing mysteries or else a desperate drive toward the ultimata of conspicuous affectation. Such people are rare but they do exist. They can be ferreted out, as Laurence J. Weller has discovered, through word of mouth or by means of tiny, boxed, well-placed advertisements in the back pages of
Real Estate Gold or Architectural Digest.

Larry, who grew up in a blue-collar family in Winnipeg, Canada, is still uneasy in the company of the rich, though he’s dependent on them now for his livelihood. That was one of the points he and his wife, Beth, had to consider when he officially hung up his shingle last year. He’s become a person adept in the dodge-and-feint department. (Yes, Mr. Barnes. Of course, Mr. Barnes.) A learned shamelessness is the cloak he puts on, having mastered the art of listening deferentially, head to one side, one eyebrow richly attentive, ready to absorb some new and astounding counter-proof-
absolutely
, Mr. Barnes.
He is obliged to explain, patiently, pad and pencil in hand, such things as maze mathematics, maze aesthetics and conventions, possible maze construction, and finally, breaking the news as quietly as possible, the high cost of maze maintenance. Is this going to be his life, he wonders, articulating to the rich the particular ways in which they can part with their cash?

He’s noticed that the heft of money makes the bodies of the wealthy more dense, more boldly angled and thus threatening, even when suited, dressed, coated - and wrapped in the soundlessness of their immense, padded, and luxuriously ventilated office spaces. The rich are underpinned by ignorance, he’s noticed. They know nothing of the authentic scent of dust and dowdiness. They never knew a time when people bought winter tomatoes in little cardboard cartons, four of them lined up beneath a cellophane roof, twenty-nine cents, and how thrifty housewives - like Larry’s mother, for instance - used only half a tomato for the family salad each night, so that the box lasted eight days, just over a week. The rich - except for the self-made rich - believe they’re biting at the apple of life just because they know enough to appreciate pre-Columbian art and handpieced quilts. They’re out of touch, they’re out to lunch, they breathe the dead air of their family privilege.

Larry can’t yet speak the many-branched language of money: the dizzying vocabularies of
commodities, equities,
or the running phrases that spill from the mouths of the moneyed and then hook into a thick mesh of entitlement - what they want, what they expect. “This will all have to be done over,” said Larry’s most recent client, Phillip Jasper of the Jasper Foundation (tobacco, sportswear, plastics, cancer research). “The green of those hedges is too green-green. What I want is a blue-green. Deeper, more European like. A religious green, if you know what I mean. Oceanic. Big. But intimate too.”

“Completely done over. You don’t mean
completely—”
“Cost? Don’t worry about it. This is heritage we’re talking about. What I’m leaving behind. A lasting monument. But it’s also something I want my very, very dear friends to enjoy in the here and now.”

“If you’re absolutely sure -”

“Right. So, we’re on, Mr. Weller? Terrific. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a meeting in exactly three minutes and -”

“I could show you some samples of the amur privet that has a dark-green leaf and does well in compacted soils -”

“I’ll leave it to you, okay? You’re the expert, Mr. Maze. Hey! How about that for a name! Mr. Maze!”

 

Larry now has nine completed projects in his portfolio, though he supposes he can’t really count his first maze, which was a crude experiment in his own yard back in Winnipeg. He thinks of it often, though, even after all these years. The angled alignment of shrubs had completely surrounded the little house on Lipton Street, the mixed greens of cotoneaster, caragana, and alpine currant, hearty northern shrubs all of them, and it had driven his first wife wild. She wanted a lawn like other people had, not a bunch of snaky bushes running all over the place and giving her the heebie-jeebies.

Larry had copied the overall plan for that first effort out of a book of mazes he’d borrowed from the library, a design created by a sixteenth-century Italian architect named Serlio. Of course, he’d had to simplify the center of the plan, where his and Dorrie’s two-bedroom house stood with its wooden siding and concrete block foundation. According to the diagram, the hedge corners were supposed to be crisply squared, but Larry, in those days, was always behind on the pruning, and his second-hand gasoline-powered hedge-trimmer was awkward to hold. “It’s like living in a leaf pile,” Dorrie said. “I’m ashamed for people to know I live here.”

After supper on summer evenings Larry loved to take his small son, Ryan, by the hand and lead him from the maze “opening” at the front gate of his house to the “goal,” which was next to the side door, a small grassy square where in the future he hoped to install a mechanical fountain. (When he had the time. When he’d saved up enough dough.) Ryan, already bathed for the night and in his pajamas, toddled by Larry’s side, running his free hand across the top of the growing hedges, singing as he went and learning by heart, even at the age of three or four, the secrets of the various turnings. Turn on the first right, take the next two lefts, then right from then on. A classic formulation.

It may be that Larry has romanticized this particular memory. The soft kiss of the evening sun, the dizzy, unalarming purr of mosquitoes in his ear, his little boy’s hand in his, Dorrie wearing shorts and a T-shirt glancing up from the front steps where she sat with the newspaper spread on her lap, the fragrance of grass and leaf, color and calm, an occasional car drifting by. He can scarcely believe, looking back today, that such innocence ever existed. And he can’t imagine why he hadn’t felt himself the happiest man in the world.

 

One day back in Winnipeg when Larry was still working in a florist’s shop, he got a phone call from a man called Bruce Sztuwark, who said he wanted to build a garden maze out on his West Kildonan property. He’d heard about Larry through the grapevine, a mutual friend actually, and he’d heard good things. Was Larry interested in a commission? Great!

Larry, remembering how hard it had been to keep his own hedge corners in trim, especially the ferny caragana, designed a maze for Bruce and Erleen Sztuwark that was mostly circular lines and which employed as its principal planting stock the hedge maple
(Acer campestre),
which requires only light pruning. He worked the Sztuwark maze up from the ancient plan - another library book — of a man named Androuet du Cerceau, who was Catherine de Medici’s architect, but added a few extra curves and teasing half-circles, his own invention, so that the whole plan undulated before the eye. There were beguiling shadows, or at least there would be when the plantings had had a chance to grow, but there were no long views, no
allées—
something most landscape architects feel is vital in maze design; Certainly Eric Eisner, the granddaddy of America’s great landscape artists, believes the
allée
to be the
essence
of the formal labyrinth.

But the rich Sztuwarks were not formal people. They liked the relaxed circular plan. Larry did try to explain to them, taking his time, that every classical maze contains at its heart a “goal.” This is the prize, the final destination, what the puzzling, branching path is all about. The goal can be a small mound or an ornamental tree or a topiary figure, or it can be a modest statue or fountain or even a reflecting pool. The famous Hampton Court maze has at the center two bench seats, each shaded by a tree. The choices are limitless, but there is always
something
to reward the patience of those who have picked their way through the maze’s path and arrived at the chosen place.

Bruce, a lawyer and owner of a local radio station, and his silent, sullen wife, Erleen, listened carefully to what Larry had to tell them, and then they announced, or rather Bruce announced, that they had already decided on a “goal.” It was to be a barbecue pit large enough to accommodate the big outdoor gatherings they liked to throw in the summertime.

Well, why not, Larry was able to say after a minute, after he’d sucked in his breath and got a grip on the situation.

Whatever the client wants. It was part of the deal, and Larry Weller, Mr. Maze himself, learned that lesson early.

The Sztuwark maze caught the attention of a local journalist-photographer, Mark Mosley, who tracked its construction from first plowing to the third year of growth. An exhibition of the Mosley photographs was held in Winnipeg’s ACE Gallery, and
Maclean’s Magazine
picked it up, running a feature article titled, not very accurately, BALD PRAIRIE, TRANSFORMED TO QUAINT ELIZABETHAN GARDEN. There was a photo of Larry, too, looking taller and leaner than he was in real life, standing under a tree and poring over a set of plans. And no doubt about it, it was the
Maclean’s
coverage that brought in his next client, the Saskatchewan Provincial Fair Board.

The Saskatchewan maze, dismantled at the end of the fair season, was constructed entirely from bales of hay stacked one on one to a height of seven feet and forming a meandering hay-fragrant tunnel that drew over one hundred and fifty thousand tourists toward its center, which was a wheel of earth tilted slightly forward and planted with prairie wildflowers, vibrant pie-shaped sections of blooming color.