Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  small wind, ashes) will they burn the boy’s body? (small ash grit)

  into FairGrounds, say hi to Elly

  (my mother’s twelve identical canvases lined up around the room, strict

  economical palette, fishing boat after boat after boat after boat after boat

  after boat after boat after boat boat boat boat—is that twelve yet?—all

  those boats paid the mortgage, who knows how they managed,

  Dad sad in the Barcalounger all night, unable to shift or go up the stairs)

  at least Elly never has that to deal with

  sad smell of his clothes the pity of him eyes closed in late afternoon

  a cup of tea for his throat with whiskey in it

  can’t even look at poor old Jasper now close my eyes against it

  nothing could have made me close Elly’s eyes forever, nothing

  Elly at the counter, who loved me more than anything,

  nothing in her eyes for me now

  how can love be gone, that giant ardent unbearable passionate love, gone?

  the light in her face under the skin when she talks with Nevaeh, smiling as

  she pulls the lever, the scream of the frother covering what she says

  turn away so as not to read her lips, she deserves a private life

  how rough a time she’s having—is the pain only from living, the pity of

  it, or from some failing of mine or Ken’s?

  dear love, the mouth tugging at the breast and smiling, dancing in the

  bedroom, nothing sweeter, so open between us it could never be closed

  and yet here it is, gone

  (hollow piece under the breastbone, how to do that in clay? how to get at

  that pocket of air there.… identical, symmetrical, twelve boats, hull and

  prow laid down in a figure eight, pencil on blue-washed canvas, paint in

  patches, paint-by-number, torn postcard)

  and Ken—where is he really? has he left us?

  never mind never mind

  if he is gone I will have the bed to myself and my thoughts

  what passes for thoughts

  nothing in my head but eyes

  2. FALLING FOR HUGH

  Hugh lives his life in the second person, never quite sure whether it’s Hugh or you. Either one demands, accuses, requires responsibility. You’ll do it—or was that Hugh’ll do it? You/Hugh said everything would be okay. Why did you leave? Where did Hugh go?

  It works the other way, too. Ruth, who works mornings as the gallery assistant (ostensibly so Hugh can spend time at the hospice), answers the phone on speaker, and a man’s voice says, “May I speak to you?”

  “Go right ahead,” she says. A short silence. “Who’s that?” she asks.

  “Uh, Mark, from the Ace?”

  “Well, how can we help you?”

  “I’m looking for Hugh?”

  “Oh! I thought you said you.” Ruth laughs to herself as she moves to the window to yell out to Hugh. He is listening from the porch, where he’s been untangling strings of firefly lights he thought might brighten up the gallery sign.

  The Ace Grill wants their staff awards certificates framed, Mark has a few concerns; Hugh will pick up the certificates, and can you get them done by …? Yes, Hugh can, for Saturday, for sure. The yellowing cream plastic of the receiver is heavy in his hand. The phone is almost as old as Ruth is. It’s after noon already, and she only works mornings. She’s getting her coat on, an old navy pea jacket. She pulls a red knitted hat out of the pocket. Still only October, but she is always cold. Her eyes are huge behind her glasses. He loves and is irritated by her in almost equal halves. He is stuck with her.

  Trotting off for the day’s second visit to the Clothes Closet, she calls back, “You be careful!” Old bat. Hugh taps his teeth together gently to keep from growling. Alternating sides, a bit OCD. His teeth are hurting. He has to shake off this bad temper.

  He reaches to hook the lights over the sign, steps up to the next rung of the ladder, and misses it.

  His foot slams down on nothing.

  He falls.

  Twenty feet, a long time—down onto a slumped bank of cedar chips. Lies on his back, stars (look, pointy stars!) circling in his vision. When he closes his eyes he sees op art, distorted checkerboards melting into Dali, so he opens them again.

  Wind bellowed out of him, he lies there, unable to gasp for the longest time. It becomes clear, in a sunburst of cheap pop epiphany, that he has been this way his whole life: unable to breathe, lying as still as possible to avoid pain.

  An ant on a leaf of grass in front of his opened eye, clouds in the baby blue sky, small people and their children going about the streets on their little paths like ants: all of them in pain all their lives, all dying. Mimi in the hospice, Ruth on her way to the Clothes Closet. How the clouds too can be in pain he does not trouble to sort out.

  Then his ribs creak open like a rusted umbrella and the blood comes drumming into his ears and eyes. A stroke? Fiftyish, he’s about due. Nobody comes to help—nobody could have seen him fall from the ladder perched at the end of the porch.

  For five or ten minutes he lies alone, dying or not dying, in a lot of pain. Then he gets up and puts the ladder in the shed again. Never mind the lights for now.

  His head buzzes or blanks, something electrical wrong in there—he cannot stop thinking about Ruth, out of all the people around him who tremble on the edge of falling, ladders poised over the abyss, nobody to notice when they fall. Ruth, who should not be living alone on the OAS. He does her taxes, he knows she doesn’t have enough money even with what he pays her at the gallery (two hundred a week for five mornings so he can go to the hospice; she’s up early anyway) and the occasional cleaning job. She won’t take his advice, clear out her cluttered house and move into an apartment. She wants to stay independent. Which she’s not, anyway; she’s entirely dependent on him continuing to hire her and pay her, even though she can never remember to say “Argylle Gallery” when she answers the goddamned phone. She is not an ideal employee.

  But the fall is forcing empathy upon him. As he hangs the Back Soon sign in the window he figures out—and this is a real epiphany—that if she moved into a pleasant apartment with less stuff and less to worry about, she would actually be pre-dead.

  He should be picking up the certificates from the Ace. But here he goes instead, ducking into the Mennonite Clothes Closet.

  The trotting tassel of Ruth’s red hat moves through close-packed aisles on the other side of the store. She plans to offer them less than the posted price for a corduroy jacket that has caught her fancy. She’s been checking it every day. Hasn’t quite worked up her nerve to suggest $5 instead of $15. “Strictly speaking,” she told Hugh this morning, “I do not need a jacket. My navy peacoat’s still good—that was a find—but the coppery tone, this wide-wale corduroy, just matches one I had when I was a girl, and I’ve got my wanter turned up loud.”

  No good for Hugh to buy it for her. She would whip out her little purse (pouched pink leather, like her mouth) and pay him back.

  So he sidles down the aisles outside her narrowed peripheral vision, as she pretends to look everywhere but at the jackets. While she examines shoes, Hugh slips a sharp-edged, brown hundred dollar bill into the left-hand pocket of the corduroy jacket, from the opposite side of the musty-smelling rack. Ducks along behind the racks and out of the store.

  Watching from the gallery he is rewarded, ten minutes later, by her squat copper-clad torso swanning along George Street, on her way home. Beyond his hope, he sees her shove her hands into the pockets. He can almost hear the crinkle. She pulls her left hand out, and her look of thrilling glory is enough to fill his cup forever.

  You did it. Good for Hugh.

  3. HUGH BELONG TO ME

  There isn’t really time, but Hugh stops in at the hospice on his way to the Ace. He runs up the shallow steps, nods to the nurse on duty (Judy, not the sourpuss), up the two
flights of steep stairs. He walks down the polished hall, feeling the living strength of his stride under him. Spring even in his fall-jangled legs; the opening and closing of his ribs, still breathing. Unlike these fossils parked in wheelchairs along the hall walls, strings of oxygen whispering into nostrils, glassy-eyed, lopsided stares.

  Mimi’s room. Door ajar: an aide is turning her onto her side, nightgown gaping. Hugh waits. Through the narrow opening he watches the nurse’s burnt sienna hands on his mother’s skin. Alabaster shot with cerulean, lemon; patches of almost alizarin. If you painted her. Poor body.

  The nurse is Nolie Suarta, he sees. She comes out on silent feet. A smile, a little duck of her head to apologize for being in his way. Which she wasn’t.

  Chair by the bed. To sit, sit. Sitting, watching. This is all there is to do.

  Mimi’s hair clouds on the pillow, the white of it a surprise every time. Her hair must always have been what you saw first, Hugh thinks, each time she came back. Abundant chestnut, moving of its own accord, almost like snakes. Part of the exhaustion of being a good son: thinking good thoughts about the mother, keeping thoughts good when you branch off into memory, what was real and what was not. Snakes, ladders.

  Her eyes are shut. She’s had her dose, then. His head hurts, his teeth hurt. Back molars, both sides. Don’t clench. He feels in a pocket for blue gel pills, pops two. Okay, three. The skin under her jaw begins to tremble. What does she dream, inside there? Dreaming of doors, a long corridor, a way out.

  People who are alone sometimes get a dog. So they have a reason to get up. To bathe it feed it talk to it play fetch chase sticks run with, to love.

  If you cannot get love you can at least give it.

  (DELLA)

  holding it off all day Ken—why is he—

  can’t breathe breath gone is he dead?

  has he ceased to love us?

  no there is not much question there

  listen! there’s some explanation

  he’s broken his finger bitten his tongue

  no crying in the grocery store Kleenex in the freezer how kind

  Gerald at the casket he must have loved her

  unless they had run down unless that was the problem

  she killed herself because she was alone was going to be alone

  but Toby, the darling

  chicken, eggs / milk, cheese, yogurt / grapes, raisins

  everything on this list becomes something else

  everything that is becomes something else

  Toby and his mother Hugh and his mother

  no wonder Hugh and Ann were together Ann is like Mimi used to be

  all melodrama just because it’s icy doesn’t mean it isn’t overblown

  how is Jason coping—tough to have

  Ann for a mother anything left to sit on in that house?

  I can’t fix this Elly can’t imagine

  I can’t jump in there with furniture Jason could live with us

  Ann wouldn’t let him, she needs an audience and now she’s got a boarder?

  Elly says there’s never anything to eat in their fridge

  can’t see Ann stoic in the grocery store

  like ever-loving Saint Me

  and Jack gone now gone since Xmas, ten months and Ken

  but even then, Ann has not died of it

  is it the same

  no there is not much question there

  4. HUGH WILL TAKE CARE OF IT

  The basement has to be faced. Climbing the porch steps Hugh sees damp edges on the boards and remembers the night’s rain, the sluicing sound. He goes straight down the cellar stairs, not letting himself pause or turn to paying bills or other also distasteful but less horrible tasks.

  It’s bad. The floor is wet. In the permadusk—have to get a better light down here—dark patches stain the sides of cardboard boxes, tidemark or spongemark.

  Della’s stuff: he moved it up a shelf last time, it’s fine. The Parkers’ boxes, ceramics and soapstone; the stuff will be okay, but they’re heavy, the cardboard will give if he tries to move them. His mother’s extra furniture. Why is it down here, he asks himself unasking. Because the things are too good to give away; because she may still ask, What have you done?

  What has Hugh done? The rosewood Eames lounge-chair ought to be upstairs, but the leather reeks of fifty years of Joy and cigarettes. Hugh hates it. Sell it, then! She’ll never know. He shifts it out of the path of a streamlet shining on dank cement. Boxes of china, old clothes: reshuffle, clear a wider path to the drain.

  At the wall, Hugh’s heart sinks. Mighton’s boxes. Why did you leave them over here? Right in the line of damp down the wall. There will be mould. Awkward—the boxes will have to be opened to repack them. Even knowing Mighton for twenty years, thirty years, it will feel odd to paw through his things.

  To paw, period. To own, to care for. To be a caretaker, to hold on to for others. Hugh steps in water and feels the slick slide of it, falls to one knee—saves himself, hurts his leg. Pants black-smeared. Now he’ll have to climb all those stairs to change. Twenty-eight stairs in all. This, it seems, is what sends him over the edge. He is separately dismayed, outside himself, to hear the sob.

  Della’s long pale face peers down the stairs. “Yoo-hoo!”

  “Don’t come down!” he shouts up. Wiping his face.

  “Hugh? You okay? Hugh?” Della calls down, keeps calling, until he comes to the bottom step. “Did Ken call? Or text? I’m just wondering—I’m supposed to pick up Elle but …”

  He tries to think. Ken. Can’t pull himself away from all this wreckage to remember what he’s supposed to know, supposed to say. Impatience sprouts like mould in his mind, fractalating, pixilating what he was thinking.

  “I’ll be up in a sec,” he shouts. “Don’t come down, it’s a mess.”

  He empties and replaces the buckets that stand under the windows, and goes up to get on the blower, on the horn. Get Dave the fuck over here to do something about the cracks, it’s got to be now, not next spring. Give him a piece of your mind, or get Ruth to. Ruthless.

  As he emerges from the basement Della says, “Have you checked your upstairs phone?”

  It so irritates him that she treats him this way, like a baby brother, like a son who needs reminding about every tiny thing—he can’t even answer. Has no idea what to say, anyway, not knowing whether or what exactly Ken has told Della about wanting to quit—

  Her eyes, beseeching.

  Why is it him who, he who, yoo-hoo, Hugh who has to deal with this?

  “I haven’t done the poster copy,” she says, after a minute’s silence. “Or Mighton’s flyer. I will. Today. I’m going now.”

  He hates that meekness of hers more than anything else.

  But she can’t let it go. “I’m just—Ken—”

  He is already up the stairs, motioning to his black-streaked pants.

  “Have to change!” he calls backward, vanishing around the turn. “I’ll check, I’ll check.”

  (L)

  L leaves FairGrounds to run to school for Studio class—her mom forgot to pick her up, again. Late, going to be late, run. Frick frick, flick flick, legs click off distance, glad to go after too much pulling espresso, ex-presto, perfecto. Frick, school is weird, after homeschool, even only doing art and algebra. But one does need to get into art school next year, to get the hell out of here, and IB marks will make applications easier than a vomiting cascade of parent-based evaluations. Only, even with one’s coterie, getting to/hanging around at school sucks.

  And always always always the panicky urge to go home and work on the Republic. At school she does not talk about it. Only Jason has seen it. She hasn’t even let her mom go through it and she believes, she does believe, her mom would not unless invited. Because it’s her work, her self. Her mom would not. Her dad would, probably, but he’s not that interested in art and probably fears to find what hellish interior thoughts she harbours. The nudes would make him stop looking, even though they ar
e mostly just repro Voynich Manuscript–type ladies. Not all of them drawn from life. Only Nevaeh.

  Last night, Nevaeh—can’t even talk even inside about that. Like fire, like dry ice, wanting to touch it, to see if it will burn you. To touch her mouth. A great canyon gapes between wanting/doing. If one does one small thing, or set of things, in a doze, in a daze, does that mean—? Silk armskin sliding, foreheads touched in fond embrace, is one then—?

  Languid, head lolling over the edge of the bed, Nevaeh’s mouth upside down looks like another, other person’s mouth. Just as beautiful, but lighter, happier. (Onion-skin portrait for the Republic, upside down/right side up, two of them side by side. Or negatives …)

  N—let N stand for the unknown—is what one wants that moment but but BUT. Then could one still talk to her? Or Jason? And Savaya, what about Savaya?

  A wind, and Orion zips up beside L, slowing his silver bike to match her stride.

  “Carry your fucking books, miss?”

  L laughs and shows her empty hands, her douche-pack with brushes and pencils and phone.

  They move on together, Orion balancing, easy. He is the easiest to be with. Knows himself, maybe. Orion is like Newell—who’s back in town, doing the master class.

  “Excited for the master class, and Master—Burton?” she asks Orion.

  “—bation,” he says, in unison. “Yeah. I have to pick up the lady, whoever, Mrs. Lovett. She’s staying at Jason’s.”

  “I’ll go with you. We’re doing the cyclorama for the backdrop, me and Jason.”

  “Art, Art! How lucky we all are,” Orion cries, going into paean mode, a long hand flung out over path and river. “To be at our glorious school—when compared to all other schools, even that ruling-class übermenschhaus Sheridan Tooley went to—really working, learning stuff that will be useful. Assholery and tomfoolery is everywhere, fine, that’s an education in itself. We’re good, we’re so good.”

  Yet he looks keyed up, fearful underneath the joy. Underneath, everybody carries it. This earthcrack the voices come out of, this crater of sadness. Everyone does.