There are always a couple of assistants around, but they come and go: Wendy, Kerri, Dawn, Sidney, Brenda, Lou-Anne, two or three Jennifers, a big fat guy called Tommy Enns, an endless procession of them, trainees from Red River College, young and confused, eager, stumbling, shrill or shy, it all depended. A new apprentice on an eight-week work stint tends to turn the place really hairy, at least at first, but Larry and Viv hold it steady and fluid with their voices, his, hers – talking, talking, all day the two of them talking.
While they stand at the bench “backing” bridal bouquets or improvising a winter arrangement to deliver to Victoria Hospital’s Palliative Care Unit or unpacking cedars (they come twenty bunches to a box) Larry and Viv discuss Michael Jackson’s stage style or Margaret Trudeau’s maternal instincts or lack thereof. Their fingers move and so do their mouths. Yammer, yammer. About economics they admit their ignorance, and their right to their ignorance. They talk about the penny shortage in the States, the danger of radon in basements, the inflated salaries of professional football players, and about the pros and cons of whooping cough shots – on this particular topic Viv managed to persuade Larry not to have his three-year-old son, Ryan, inoculated after all. The two of them reminisce about the time a guy walked in and ordered a dozen dead roses to send to his ex-wife, and how Vivian took the order, then calmly phoned the police.
They talk about the cost of air conditioners in the States versus the cost in Canada. About draft dodgers, whether they should be sent home. About pimples, whether to pop them or leave them alone. About mothers, their mood swings, their dumb sweetness. About Ronald Reagan, how good-hearted or stupid the man is. How hot it is outside, how rainy, how the back lane is blocked with snow. A whole decade has slid by, its weathers and transports and passing personalities, and all of it crystalized into the words that fly back and forth between Vivian Bondurant and Larry Weller. A million words, a zillion. Note for note, the biggest noise in Larry’s life is the noise that comes out of Viv Bondurant’s throat.
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