Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  “No, I know. I have a mother or two myself.”

  “Ha!” But he looks miserable.

  She waits for him to begin again. Well, she can carry on. “Who do you eat with usually?”

  He looks around the restaurant, as if his friends will materialize. “Newell, when he’s here. When he’s here without Burton. But I ate with the two of them last night, now I think of it. Della and her husband, Ken, but he’s—away right now. Ruth, I guess, not often. Although we sort of ate together too, last night. She was the server at Pink’s place.”

  “I remember her, she’s a sweetie!” Perhaps a bit overblown, too much happiness. Ivy tries to explain. “L hugged her. And I met Della today, she’s L’s mother, right? She came to the house where I’m staying. It’s such a relief when I remember people.”

  “Your difficulty, does it affect—does it make it hard to work?”

  Ah, her turn for misery now. “Since my work is entirely memory-based, yes, it does.”

  They sit silent for a moment. Ivy wishes she had not said that so baldly.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not good at talking about it.”

  The invisible waiter slides a long plate of crab cakes onto the table, smelling of ocean and a fire on the beach. Hot in the mouth, temperature and spice heat, pico de gallo cold and sharp beside them.

  “Sheryl Crow has a benign brain tumor,” Hugh says. “It makes her forget her lyrics when she’s singing.”

  Ivy looks down. She fills her mouth with crab again.

  “But I suppose she can tape them to her guitar,” he adds. “Awkward with the longer songs. That’s why she doesn’t do Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s Privateers.”

  She laughs. “Fine! I do not have a brain tumor. I did find the courage to go and see about that. No aneurysm, no Alzheimer’s. It might be, I might have a stress problem, or need, what is it, ginkgo biloba. Or I might just be, well, old.”

  “Burton knows? And makes a little hay?”

  “Yes, he does. Everybody in theatre knows. I had a big blow-up, a one-woman show, it was a disaster. The show was good. Elizabeth Bishop, I’m perfect for her. But I just couldn’t, I couldn’t. So after a few, after, oh, three bad nights, they found a replacement.”

  “Oh no.” He looks honestly empathetic. Usually people are trying not to laugh, because it is pretty funny, the actor’s nightmare.

  “Somebody gave me my script and I read from it, the first bad night. After eight or nine terrible pauses. I thought I could keep doing that, reading the script. But eventually, no.”

  “Does it matter for film?”

  “If I know the line and then I get up and don’t know it, that wastes a lot of money.”

  He nods. It’s nice that he’s not saying too much.

  “I’m still good for workshopping—I do voicework, audiobooks, anything where you keep the script in front of you. Whatever radio is left, with the cuts. It’s not like it’s the first time in history. Ellen Terry couldn’t remember lines for Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Richard Dreyfus: his London opening kept being delayed, a few years ago. Et cetera. People tell me all kinds of helpful stories. When I was young I worked with an awful old woman. She wrote out her lines and pasted them around the room on the mantelpiece, the picture frames, an antique box of soap. She’d pick it up in the scene and read the lines right off it. I was disgusted with her. Serves me right.”

  “No it doesn’t. The young always think the old are pathetic whiners, that’s the deal. Then we gradually find out.”

  “I find that so often! Whatever I despise, I eventually have to experience myself. It’s a dark little sidestreet of karma.”

  It is satisfying to make him laugh, to talk to him. To feel known. The way his eyes are set in his head, the lines of his mouth, please her.

  The fish arrives, with fresh thick bread, and arugula salad.

  “Do you have family here?”

  Now Hugh looks guarded. New friends: such a process of what to tell, what not to tell—Ivy feels tired, for an instant. But curious.

  He says, having thought, “Ruth, she was my foster mother.”

  “I heard L’s mother talking about your mother today. I forget her name, shoot.”

  “Mimi. Oh—Della, you mean. L’s mother is Della, my—foster sister, I guess. Ruth looked after us all, Della, Newell, me.”

  His pinched face says, can she not see that I do not want to talk about this stuff? Yes, yes, but she wants to know, she needs to pull down the social barrier that prevents strangers from asking about your intimate life.

  “Mimi—my mother—is in hospital.” He catches himself. “In the hospice wing. Dying.”

  “What does she have?”

  “Everything. Bone cancer, diabetes, heart disease, pneumonia. In the old days, she had various episodes and excitements. Now, basically, she has death.” His hand rests on the white cloth. “It’s hard to talk about her. I listen to myself, wondering how long it takes to learn how to tell the story of the sick person: what words work, what is a lie, or a fiction.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ivy says. “You must be so sad.”

  He laughs a little. “I am, but I’m used to it. Della may have told you, my mother was—she suffered from depression, manic episodes. Bipolar, probably, but they could not seem to— Shock therapy in the seventies, et cetera. That made her more careful. She didn’t want to fix it. It’s not a problem, now that she’s immobile.”

  Ivy doesn’t ask anything more.

  Looking at his plate, Hugh says, “She’s a—she was a lovely person, a fiery … a flame. But not easy, you know. I’m sure I’m, I mean, you can’t be brought up by— Well, I wasn’t. Ruth took me over from time to time, whenever the downslope hit.”

  It’s heavy going, Ivy can see that. But she can’t do anything to help except sit with him.

  He smiles at her, sudden sun through clouds. “It’s probably good to love your mother. Even if she was batshit crazy half the time, she was always a beautiful nut. She’s finished with acting up now. And since I’ve looked after her for the last few years, I don’t even have to feel guilty, right?”

  At this point, feeling Fate’s cartwheels trundling over her chest, Ivy’s chief sensation is dismay. What fresh trouble is she getting into here?

  “Right, right,” she says. Her hand crosses the table to touch his fingers. Straight, smooth-skinned, plain, over-sensitive. Such a nice hand.

  (L)

  Hope. L letters it carefully, behind the muffin case. Tuesday night is always dead. Thinking of Nevaeh’s beauty in the black-and-blue Hope dress, stalking off to change again because Jason didn’t like the way the crest emerged. He’s fussy about the lettering too, and L’s already thrown away too many of these little cards he made for dress labels. Perfectionist. But in her opinion there is not enough perfectionism in this world. People having the gall to decide to make things properly, to insist on things being right.

  Nevaeh leans on the counter drying cups. Superimposed, L sees her leaning on her bedroom chair, explaining just how it came about that she and Savaya were necking. How Savaya got a text and said, Wait, that’s Jerry, I’ve got to go; how it would always be that way, and how it hurt her so much. And how she needs, needs, what? Maybe me, maybe?

  But it is not real. What is between them, what delicate things they, delicately—oh, swoop, the rush of feeling comes once again. But still not real. It was not good enough that night, it is not now. There is some barrier, some dissonance, not between them, maybe, but where they come from. Money, partly, Nevaeh being rich; Nevaeh’s famous, ferocious father, scary slow-speaking guy, asking “What is wrong with your family?” L’s own father being basically the opposite of ferocious.

  Maybe solitude is best.

  She could talk to Orion—but Orion’s distracted, off on a stratagem; making the best of Newell and managing Burton very well. An education just to watch him. It’s a strange burden, to look at him. Newell has the sa
me quality. Draws the eye, and shakes it off.

  Maybe I am too much of a perfectionist and there is no perfect, only a sequence of making do. What is attraction, anyway? The dent over Nevaeh’s upper lip, her collarbone, the slender turning of her upper arms. Her wide-open, flame-throwing heart. Or Newell’s wide-spaced eyes, is that it? Or else it is how sad he always, always is, beneath the charm.

  Orion is not sad, not yet. But his mother, hokey jeez, she’s a mess. And my mother too. And where is my dad?

  Into the labyrinth, lost like I am, in The Island Republic of L.

  11. HUGH NEVER CAN TELL

  Ivy is the kind of person you can talk to. Hugh can. You tell her things you should keep quiet about: “It’s the automatic actions that worry me. For instance, I didn’t mean to punch Burton. My arm just came out. I hate him so much.”

  “Why?” He looks at her. “I do myself,” she adds quickly, “but why do you hate him? He doesn’t tease you like he does me, and he doesn’t have any power over you.”

  He adjusts the candle, which is guttering. “I don’t like … how he is with Newell.”

  “Jealous?” She blinks, as if wishing she hadn’t gone that far. “I mean, I only mean, yes, Newell is the best. And you’re obviously very good friends. It’s hard to have to share him.”

  “I’ve known Newell all my life. All my conscious life. I’ve known Burton as long as Newell has. And he’s—”

  A brief silence.

  Ivy smiles at him. “You can tell me. I’m safe, because I forget everything.”

  Some cautious or honourable streak stops Hugh from spilling his suspicions of Burton. Or some desire to protect Newell. But he says, shamefaced for himself, “Newell said today that maybe I just don’t like gay people.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  “No.”

  “No hidden prejudice? Nothing in your subconscious’s, um, closet?”

  “No!” He laughs this time. “I just really don’t like Burton.”

  “Well, that’s a big club, you can share my annual membership.”

  “I would like to belong to all your clubs,” Hugh says. “If you will have me as a member.” That came out a little forced, a little lame. He sighs to himself and tries to smile.

  She is looking thoughtfully at her butter knife. She polishes it on her napkin, and puts it in her purse. Is this part of her forgetfulness, he wonders, or kleptomania?

  Purse shut, Ivy looks up into his eyes. Her own are surprising, liquid and bright in the candlelight. She asks, “So here’s a question for you, for Hugh: is life a submitting to fate? Or do we have to decide, have to choose what to do?”

  “You have to live the life you have,” Hugh says. “Except I haven’t.” He has done nothing, nothing good.

  “I always want to be somebody else,” Ivy says, ashamed too. “But it’s good for work.”

  Except she can’t work now, he thinks. Terrifying. “Okay, how about improv—lines don’t matter there, right?”

  “Yes, except some days I can’t remember what people were just saying.” Ivy leans her head on her hand. “Can’t follow a conversation.”

  He looks at her sane, sad face.

  “Well, never mind,” she says, straightening up. “Tell me about your life, your lives.”

  “I had a couple of other lives, yes, away from here. A couple even while I was here, going back and forth between my mother—crazy, glamorous—and Ruth—ordinary. I went to art school; then I came back here and lived with a woman for four years while I taught art at Lakefield, and tried to paint. That didn’t work. We split up. I went out west to be an artist full time. Didn’t work. I’m just not that good, I’m better at teaching. So then I took over a small-town hotel in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Whole other life, hardest I’ve ever worked.”

  Her mouth can’t seem to stay straight while he reels off his CV. But as far as he can tell, she is not laughing at him. Happy to be here, or something. That makes him happy.

  “After ten years without a day off I sold it, went to California, made jewellery with a silversmith from Peru; I painted portraits on the beach for a year. Twenty bucks for a single, fifty for the whole family. Not good portraits. I lived in a strange motel, full of druggists. Not weed or cocaine—pharmaceutical dispensers, cheap drugs from Canada and the UK. People trooped up and down the halls all day getting their Dilaudid and their blood pressure pills. Okay—then I came back to Canada; I cooked for a while, short order not haute, wrote an art criticism column for the Halifax paper; on the side I did some book design and worked for an auction house—”

  “You’re like one of those invented author bios on the back flap: ‘Neville has been a brain surgeon, lumberjack, car thief, tango dancer and cowpoke.’ ” She makes him laugh, internally, a pleasurable effervescence. “Are you a good cook?”

  “More cook than cowpoke. I cooked breakfast at the Waegwoltic, posh country club in Halifax. I make the best omelette you’ll ever eat. After noon, I mostly eat out.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “At the Duck? It’s after noon.”

  She cocks her head, patient, and he laughs.

  “Okay, Peterborough. Ten years ago my mother got sick, and I came back here and opened the gallery.” That sentence covers an awful lot of ground. He won’t be fool enough to unpack it for her tonight. He can’t even talk about Mimi, her present state.

  “My parents are eighty, still going strong,” she says, as if understanding that he’s done in. “My twin sister lives next door to them in Thornhill, so it’s like I never left at all. She gets a medal when they croak, boy.” Her eyes are agate-coloured, dark grey-brown. Grey-green? Shining in the candlelight. “They’re self-sufficient, interesting people; gave me everything and so on. Both lawyers. They wear the same clothes.”

  He laughs. “Always Toronto?”

  “Mostly. School, theatre school, et cetera. I travel around for work, a lot, I guess. I have an apartment, College and Spadina, a loft!” Proud of it. Then her face twists up, she is sad. “But I haven’t been—well, somebody’s living there. Jamie, a friend’s younger brother. Sort of looking after the place while I’ve been in Banff, and up north.” Her voice peters out.

  “Parked on you?”

  “The poor guy, he’s not very well, it’s complicated. I don’t know how to go back.”

  “If you can’t live there, where do you live?”

  “Oh, with my sister. Or I house-sit, or I get another gig. Like this one.”

  “You don’t seem like a twin. You seem like yourself.”

  “Well, that’s not really how it worked with us, but I will take it as a compliment—”

  Catching his eye, she looks down, and the heavy creamy lids stay lowered. She looks at her plate, adjusts the knife and fork to less-perfect parallel. The fork crosses the knife, tines engaged. Like legs entwined. The dark eyes come up again. Her mouth twists, she knows his mind. But there is still coffee to come. “Well then, tell me about your childhood. Your earlier childhood,” she says.

  “My parents separated when I was three. Divorced a year later. Which may explain her really difficult breakdown when I was four. I went to Ruth’s for a year or so. My mother would never speak about him again.”

  She looks troubled, sorry for him.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t really remember him. From time to time I used to get an urge to Google him, but I suppressed it.” (Over and over, feel and stop feeling.) “A lot of stuff in life seems to be like that—like being an alcoholic. Or eating too much.” He pushes the bread basket away, signals to the waiter for another of the red.

  Ivy says, “Aldous Huxley said most of life is one prolonged effort to stop thinking. Is he still alive?”

  Hugh doesn’t pretend it’s Huxley she means. “No.”

  The waiter fills his glass and goes.

  Hugh hasn’t thought about his head for a while. The ache is still there. “Okay, there were a few of him on the internet.” He puts his glass
down.

  His father, somewhere in the world, not ever thinking of Googling Hugh. Hugh is filled with knives and pieces of glass; furious with Ivy for making him dip down into childish disappointment. “Once I found an obit in the Vancouver Sun—died in 1987. Two daughters, wife, extended family, Rotarian Award. Dry cleaning business.” (Where’s your specialness now?) “So for a long time I thought he might be dead. There were others, a Henry Argylle the right age in New Brunswick. One in New Jersey, two in the UK.”

  She’s watching him. Her mouth is a pleasing line, her face open. A loving face.

  “But in fact I was sent ten thousand dollars from his insurance money last month. He died in Winnipeg, he’d been living with a married stepdaughter and had no other family left. She wrote me a letter.”

  “Maybe kind of a relief?” As if she can’t even tell he’s angry. Or is choosing not to let him stay angry. “You don’t have to talk to him, now. And you won’t have to stop yourself from looking him up all the time.”

  “Either I was the dry cleaner’s boy, or I am my self.”

  She looks at him, autumn-eyed. She says, “You are your self. You are Hugh.”

  12. I’LL NEVER WALK ALONE

  They walk home in the cool night. Fall sharpening into winter. Glad of her warm coat, Ivy tucks her arm into Hugh’s without even thinking, without wondering if she should. His good, warm arm.

  As they pass the gallery they hear a grating thunk: L, locking the door of FairGrounds. She and the thin dark girl from behind the counter embrace—then with a wave of one long arm the other girl slips into the passenger seat of a waiting car. Getting off work at ten. Late for a school night, going to walk home alone now? L’s mother’s name has slid out of Ivy’s mind again; that makes her fist bunch tight inside her jacket pocket.

  “Hey, Hugh!” L says. “Oh, hi, Ivy—I mean, Ms. Sage.”

  “Oh, Ivy, please, Ivy,” says Ivy. Besides liking L for herself, Ivy loves girls at this age, girls going wild, going like roller derby girls, each one a firecracker, a graceful, mad bacchante flying toward you in a violent swirl of eyes and arms. They make her think of the girls she hung out with, nights in swimming pools behind rich people’s houses, sneaking from yard to yard all night, each new pool still as heaven, blue-lit from below. They make her remember dancing, and walking through dark streets with people you didn’t know. Being in hot smoky places, never going home, being up all night at a party with hot knives cooking in the kitchen at the Delta Phi. Various, oh various, various people, and never any reason why not to. Delta Phi, Della, L’s mom is Della. Phew.