Larry’s Party. Carol Shields

pulled her close to him, rocking her back and forth, patting her hair.

      Startled, he recognized that pat, its cruel economy and monumental detachment. It was the sign of someone who was distracted, weary. A husband’s pat. He’d seen his father touch his mother in exactly the same way when she fell into one of her blue days. Only patting wasn’t really the same thing as touching. Patting a person was like going on automatic pilot, you just reached out and did it. There, there. Looking covertly at his watch. Almost dinnertime. Pat, stroke, pat.

      It calmed her. She collapsed against him. They lay back on the bed, hanging on to each other limply and not saying anything. In ten minutes it would be time to go down to the dining room. He was ravenous.

      A single day remained – and one more major historical site to take in: Hampton Court.

      “This palace is unrivaled,” Arthur said, gathering his charges in a tight circle around him, “for its high state of preservation.” He pointed out Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, the Astronomical Clock (electrified two years ago), the Great Hall, the Fountain Court, the Chapel Royal with its intricately carved roof. “Note the quality of the workmanship,” he said. “What you behold is a monument to the finest artists and artisans in the land.”

      The members of the tour group had taken up a collection, and the evening before they’d presented Arthur with a set of silver cufflinks. He had blinked when he opened the jeweler’s box, blinked and looked up into their waiting faces. “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” one of the Australians sang out, trying to get a round going. The man’s name was Brian. He was large, kindly, and elegantly bald. It was he who had taken up the collection for Arthur and passed around a thank-you card for everyone to sign. But he launched the song in a faltering key that no one could follow.

      Surprisingly, it was Dorrie who moved forward and picked up the melody, drawing in the others with her strong, clear voice. She came from a musical family; her father sang baritone with the Police Chorale; her mother, after a few drinks, belted out a torchy rendition of “You Light Up My Life.” And Dorrie’s voice, despite her size, a mere one hundred pounds, was true and forceful.

      For he’s a jolly good fellow

      Which nobody can deny.

      At that moment Larry loved her terribly. His helpless Dorrie. He froze the frame in his mind. This was something he needed to remember. The upward tilt of her chin as she risked a minor feat of descant on the final words. The way her hands curled inside her raincoat pockets, plunging straight forward into a second chorus, as though she’d been anointed, for a brief second or two, Miss Harmony of Sunbrite Tours.

      Mrs. Edwards had wondered aloud about the appropriateness of cufflinks for Arthur. “He doesn’t look like a man who is particularly intimate with French cuffs,” she whispered to her husband and to Larry and Dorrie. But this morning, following Arthur into Hampton Court gardens, Larry glimpsed a flash of silver at Arthur’s wrist. “Before you,” Arthur said, pointing, “is the oldest surviving hedge maze in England.”

      A what? Larry had never heard of a hedge maze.

      “We’ve got three-quarters of an hour,” Arthur announced in his jolly voice. “If you get lost, just give us a shout and we’ll come and rescue you.”

      Later, Larry memorized the formula for getting through the maze. He could recite it easily for anyone who cared to listen. Turn left as you enter the maze, then right, right again, then left, left, left and yet another left. That brings you to the centre. To get out, you unwind, turning right, then three more rights, then a left at the next two turnings, and you’re home free.

      But on the day he first visited the Hampton Court maze, March 24, 1978, a young, untraveled floral designer from the middle of Canada, the newly married husband of Dorrie Shaw who was four months pregnant with his son Ryan – on that day he took every wrong turning. He was, in fact, the last of the tour group to come stumbling out of the maze’s exit.

      Dorrie in her perky blue raincoat was standing, waiting. “We were worried,” she said to him crossly. Then, “You look dizzy.”

      It was true. The interior of the maze had made him dizzy. It was very early in the morning, a frosty day, so cold he could see his breath as it left his mouth and widened out in the air. It seemed a wonder that the tender needlelike leaves could withstand such cold. The green walls rose about him, too high to see over. Who would have expected such height and density? And he hadn’t anticipated the sensation of feeling unplugged from the world or the heightened state of panicked awareness that was, nevertheless, repairable. Without thinking, he had slowed his pace, falling behind the others, willing himself to be lost, to be alone. He could see Mrs. Edwards ahead of him on the narrow path, walking side by side with Dorrie, their heads together, talking, and Mr. Edwards following close behind. Larry watched the three of them take a right-hand turn and disappear behind a bank of foliage.

      He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.

      “You look lost in thought,” Vivian had said to him on his last day at Flowerfolks, the day before he and Dorrie were married. He had been in the back of the store, staring into a blaze of dyed blue carnations. “I was just thinking,” he told her, and she had floated him a lazy smile. “Communing with the merchandise?” she said, touching the sleeve of his jacket. “I do it all the time.”

      He had been reflecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again.

      And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led.

      In the distance he could hear a larky Australian accented voice – one of their own group – calling “This way, this way.” He shrank from the sound, its pulsating jollity, wanting to push deeper and deeper into the thicket and surrender himself to the maze’s cunning, this closed, expansive contrivance. He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn’t. It sat out in the open like anything else.

      Forty-five minutes, Arthur had given them. But Larry Weller had lingered inside the green walls for a full hour.

      “We were worried,” Dorrie said. Scolding.

      He followed her into the coach for the ride back to London. “How could you get yourself so lost?” she kept asking. The next day they boarded a plane that carried them across a wide ocean, then over the immense empty stretches of Labrador and the sunlit cities and villages of Ontario, an endless afternoon of flight. Frozen lakes and woodlands spread beneath them, thinning finally, flattening out to a corridor of snow-covered fields and then the dark knowable labyrinth of tangled roadways and rooftops and clouds of cold air rising up to greet them.

      A sweet soprano bell dinged for attention. Seat belts buckled, tables up, the landing gear grinding down, a small suite of engineering miracles carefully sequenced. Dorrie gave Larry’s hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they’d chosen or which had chosen them.

      Departures and arrivals: he didn’t know it then, but these two forces would form the twin bolts of his existence – as would the brief moments of clarity that rose up in between, offering stillness. A suspension of breath. His life held in his own hands.