Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  He yanks the fridge door open and pours juice, talking all the time. “Not Tom Cruise—more like Clive Owen, somebody like that. So that’s the credits, then there’s this strange shot where I’m—you know, the main guy—is looking down into the water of the river, down by the water-steps.” Jason’s face tilts to look down onto the tiles. “Creatures, like otters, or, but with fanned tails, stare up at me—at, you know, the person who is watching them.”

  Ann just keeps writing, so Ivy takes her cup to the dinette bench (built in, otherwise there’d be no place to sit in this hollowed-out house) to sit across from Jason, who plunges on: “Everybody starts getting sick, it’s an epidemic. An underwater plague, these, um, intelligent beavers give it to us—they have these—fantails, like mermen—I don’t know. This plague makes people insanely violent, they try to kill themselves and other people. To stop it, you have to hold them tight, like you’re doing the Heimlich manoeuvre on them, and you have to—to love them, to tell them over and over that you love them. Some people are better at this than others, right? But everyone has to do it, you have to love people or die—eaten or clawed to death.”

  Ivy does not have to pretend to be interested.

  “This one guy, the driver from the parking lot—hey, it must have been him who started all the infections, because he was underwater!—he’s really good at it, he’s the first to work out the loving technique. There’s this woman in a restaurant having a plague-fit—it was you! And he stops her. He holds the pressure point and loves her like mad, like crazy, with all his heart, and everybody else sees this happening and they copy it, and the woman he fixed helps too. A little baby is taken with the plague. The guy says, ‘Babies are easier’—he means easier to hold on to, to find the pressure point …”

  “But they really are easier to love too,” Ivy says, loving Jason’s sudden volubility.

  “I think it was Hugh in my dream. Weird. He was hanging on to an old wino for dear life, telling him I love you I love you I love you.”

  Ann has been staring at her tiny printing. When Jason stops speaking she caps her Sharpie and says, “I think leather’s coming back. Mimi had a leather maxi, a Halston, with an asymetrical zipper. I’m going to take my leather coat in and have a skirt made.”

  Ivy says, “That is a weird, good dream, Jason. I love dreams like that.” Because she’s trying not to like him too openly, with his clueless mother right there, the words come out patronizing or condescending, and Jason looks up, disappointed. For a minute, it seems, he thought she was somebody worth talking to. But she’s not.

  Ivy ducks her head in shame. “I love— I get thriller dreams too. I love the love-you thing.” He’s embarrassed now, and she’s a doofus. She takes her cup and goes upstairs, checking her phone. No new text—but email, yes. Happiness rises.

  But falls. It is from Jamie. Her squatter, her tenant, her burden. Flooded, what?

  Dishwasher broken, water— two more frantic emails ping in while she reads. A cold knife of despair stabs her chest. She’s been living in a dream, in a clean empty room with enough money and a true love. Here is the real world.

  Now a text, this time from Alex, shouting in caps:

  > WATER TURNED OFF. FUCKING DISSASTER JAMIE UPSET. NOT COOL. DEAL WITH PRONTO.

  Pronto. Perfect.

  4. HUGH CAN’T IMAGINE

  Gerald is back, flipping through prints. He shouldn’t be, it’s ten in the morning. He has a Saab dealership to run. Hugh watches as he straightens up and wanders through the two long rooms of the gallery, hands locked behind his back. Nosing close to some pieces, standing back from others—the connoisseur at work, determining value and possibly, God knows, cadence.

  Della dives in the back door, straight to the espresso machine. “Want one?” she calls, before she realizes that there’s anyone else in the gallery. Her voice changes, major to minor. “Oh, hi—hi, Gerald. Do you … coffee?”

  Gerald looks up, his eyes not focusing. “No,” he says. “No thanks, no.”

  They regard him.

  “No,” he says. “I’ve had my java for the day. I know my limit. Joe’s a good servant, but a bad master.” Dissociated, almost disembodied.

  Della nods. Gerald nods. He turns and goes out the door. Back to work, perhaps.

  She turns to look at Hugh, who shrugs. “Is that happening often?”

  “Twice yesterday, Ruth says. First time this morning.”

  The grinding noise, the coffee machine starting—Della races to put a cup under the spout for the self-clean cycle. “They were always so happy, it seemed to me. With their last-minute surprise. Maybe it was too much, physically. She was forty-eight when Toby was born.”

  Mimi was twenty-eight when I was born, Hugh thinks. Pretending to be eighteen.

  Della is still talking about Gerald’s wife, whose name Hugh has forgotten. “She was so good, so patient. I just don’t understand it.”

  Hugh says, “Don’t have to understand it, because we are not responsible for Gerald. He’s not a friend of mine. I don’t want any more friends.” Any more grief.

  Della comes back with an espresso in a glass. She raises it, to ask if he wants it.

  He shakes his head. “He keeps coming to the gallery last thing in the evening.”

  “Every day?”

  “If he wants to buy art, as consolation, Hugh am I to say no?”

  She is pulling out her phone, checking, blanking it again. She is always fucking doing that while you’re trying to talk … Hugh stops.

  You can’t be angry, not with Della.

  “I looked at my messages,” he says. He lies. “None from Ken.”

  The phone rings. He stares at it. Ken? Well, he can leave another message.

  But Della picks it up. “Argylle Gallery,” she says, in a professional way; too bad Ruth is not there to hear. Ruth is upstairs giving Hugh’s bathroom a serious clean, her mission for the morning. He fights with her about this, but the bathroom shines—he just deposits an extra cheque in her account. So far, he’s getting away with that.

  Della hands him the phone. “Ann,” she whispers. “On the warpath.”

  Must have figured out about him and Ivy, Hugh thinks, blushing. Into the phone, expansively, he says, “Hi, Ann!” Bracing himself.

  Della rolls her eyes and ducks out the door, goodbye.

  “You have to talk to him,” Ann says. He knows that hysterical note. Talk to Jack? Hugh’s insides twist at the thought. But that’s not it. “I went into Jason’s closet to find my leather coat, and there was a magazine. More than one, a stack of them, all—”

  This is uncomfortable. “You know, that’s what teenage boys do. Look at magazines.”

  “Hugh, you don’t—the degrading—you can’t imagine. Listen, listen to me—some of these are—I can’t tell you— I don’t know where he even got them, they’re old, they’re filthy. Ugh! Playboy, Juggs with two Gs, Modern Man …”

  “Really? I thought that one was—”

  “Twelve issues, in plastic sleeves.”

  “Well—” (Vintage. That figures. He’s a little surprised, in fact, that they are hetero mags. He had wondered which way Jason’s cat would jump.)

  “It’s not, they’re not—the whole— How any boy, any son, can look at those disgusting images, those obscene, filthy, those—”

  She’s going off the deep end, it seems to Hugh. “Ann, Ann, wait—they’re not that bad.”

  “You don’t know. You can’t imagine.”

  “Actually, I can.”

  “My father—my own father— You know, Hugh, you know what this does to me. I have to— I can’t, I need you to talk to him. I need a man to talk to him.”

  “Not this. I can’t do that. I’m not his dad, Ann.”

  Her voice rises to a half-shriek. “And where is his fucking father?”

  “Look, it’s just not something you can do to a teenaged boy, you can’t—”

  “Hugh, you can. Please. Jason needs you,” she says.
<
br />   “What am I supposed say to him?”

  “Tell him that men—that loving, good men who love women don’t need those things, that they’re creepy and disgusting, that pornography is rape, is abuse, that the women in them are slaves to the patriarchy, that—” She stops herself.

  He waits. She can’t keep silent for long.

  “Are you saying no? You won’t?”

  “I can’t. You can’t do that to him,” Hugh says. “It’s a delicate thing. It’s something private. You— I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t have been in his closet.”

  “My coat!”

  “You shouldn’t keep your coats in his closet. You’ve got lots of room in your own—” He stops, remembering that she’s moved out of the master bedroom.

  “You and Della! You think you can come around here and tell me how to live, how to raise my child,” she says, a low, concentrated fury.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Hugh, I need you. I ask you to do this one, this one important thing for me. Because I don’t have anybody else. Because you used to love me.”

  “You have to let him keep his dignity. He’s a teenaged—”

  “You’re all treating me like an air-headed, panicky mom because, because I’ve been making a—making an authentic statement with the house. I’m not—”

  He breathes away from the phone so she won’t hear him sighing.

  “I can tell you, Hugh, there’s not much about porn that I don’t know, I know way more than you do about it, for one thing, and I know this stuff is bad for him.”

  “Listen,” he says. “I know you want to do what’s right. I’m telling you, in this case you don’t—you can’t humiliate him this way. It’s just not fair.”

  “Fuck you, and fuck Della too. Is she listening? Tell her that for me.”

  Hearing the dial tone on her end, he hangs up.

  Phew.

  The bell tings on the door: Gerald, back? Hugh honestly can’t look at him again. No, Newell comes through the door, tinkling the bell again with a graceful swat above his head. “Coffee, need coffee—”

  “That’s FairGrounds you’re looking for. Next door,” Hugh says.

  “Need company. Need you.”

  Ruth comes down the back staircase, always alert to Newell’s ins and outs. She gives him a big smile, but shows Hugh a stoplight hand. “You can’t. Hugh can’t, Newell! You have to see Conrad, Hugh.”

  Fuck me, Hugh thinks. Please. Just hit me on the head again and let me rest.

  “Coffee,” he says, and ushers Newell out. But he throws back to Ruth, because it is not fair to tease her, “Conrad is later, there’s time.”

  He still has the last box of Mighton’s stuff to go through, too. This madhouse.

  (L)

  Jason’s mom texted him, < COME HOME.

  Dunh-dunh-dunhhh.

  When they get to his house after second period, Ann is in the back yard, calling to Jason to come out. L for some reason—oh, wait, could it be experience, or good sense?—stays in the kitchen.

  Ann’s smoking a cigarette, in a lounge chair. She doesn’t smoke. In a psychedelic sixties tea gown—that’s Mimi’s gown. Where the frick did she get that? Wearing a wig, some kind of vintage pageboy thing, the same colour as her hair but not her hair. Weirdly fake-looking, like the later Warhol wigs.

  She’s got a little fire burning beside her in the bowl of the copper Turkish grill. Beside the fire, a stack of magazines. Oh boy. Mammoth set of boobs on the top one.

  L watches, the horror of the moment burning her eyeballs. She can’t hear a thing. Jason bends—for an awful second, L thinks he might be bending over for the strap, but no. He takes the top magazine and flips through it while his mom continues to talk. He’s so brave.

  He looks up, and her mouth moves again. A trap-mouth.

  She’s tricky, L thinks. Especially since Jason’s dad left, yes, but she’s always tricky. She’s why Jason is the way he is. Shy, miserable. Maybe his dad is partly why too.

  Ann lifts her hand and says one last thing, and then Jason starts to feed the fire with the magazines. A small bright fire, in the bright copper grill that Jason gave her for Christmas after his dad left, using $300 of the money he’d been saving for AutoCAD for his laptop. The grill she never used once, all last summer, but just left sitting there in the rain “patinating.”

  L does not let her head show through the kitchen window. She is not going to witness Jason’s shame, and make him even more miserable from now to eternity probably.

  5. HUGH OUGHTA KNOW BY NOW

  Hendy lies back in his office chair, almost prone, fingers tented. He sits up quickly when they arrive, greeting Newell with the easy warmth of longtime associates. To Hugh, he’s cooler. Since Hendy is also Mimi’s lawyer, this makes Hugh feel uncomfortably suspicious about his mother’s will, or maybe he means her estate. What does Hendy know that Hugh ought to know? Nothing to interpret in the lawyer’s lack of expression; his face is flat, his even voice perfectly pleasant.

  Lise Largely sails in. Newell gives her the same impersonally loving hug he gives to everyone. Lise adores Newell, she signals it with her saturated-blue eyes. She’s wearing casual luxury—jeans that cost five hundred dollars and fit like kid gloves, boots with heels. A scarf in muted colours that don’t wash out her ash-streaked hair. If you like that sort of thing, gorgeous: those overblue eyes under heavy lids, heavy lashes. Hugh watched Lise operate with Ian Mighton. Moving into his house while hers was being renovated—then after the reno, oops, her house got sold, so she had to stay in Mighton’s. But he’s finally pried her out. Whatever lever he used must have had a pointy end.

  “Hu-ugh!” She has a habit of drawing one syllable out into two, her head cocked. She gives him a limp paw. Nobody’s ever taught her to shake hands like a human being. “You haven’t been answering my ca-alls. Never mind! This is exciting. Don’t worry, I’m going to look after Jasper! Can’t let him go bankrupt, when responsible development of the property will mean a comfortable old age for the poor old guy.”

  Stiff with dislike, Hugh nods twice, then shakes his head. “Jasper’s friends understand that his shop is his—is his whole world.”

  She makes the sound of a laugh. “Jasper’s an old curio, just like his store.”

  If the price is high enough, Jasper will have to cave. Will Hugh? Mimi is dying, there’s the terrible legacy of her estate. Maybe. Who knows what’s left, after balancing her secret extravagances and secret stashes.

  “We—those of us—” Hugh stops, tries to regroup. “You should understand that Jasper’s friends are ready to support him however we—with whatever makes his life worth living. When the people who—who are your life are in need, you step up.”

  Newell touches his arm, and cuts in gently. “With financial support, in other words.”

  “You step up,” Hugh says, sounding like a nut. Exactly how a pathetic old man is his life seems urgently clear at that moment: Jasper laughing with Ruth by the stove all those years ago, the ivy wallpaper, Hugh and Newell like white mice along the wainscotting.

  He looks up. Newell is watching; but his eyes always look partly desperate. That heartfelt understanding made him a star, that pity for pain. He sits beside Hugh as if his body is ballast.

  Lise has an agenda. Not as in something she wants, but an actual paper agenda in her hand. “I find things go more smoothly if we know what we’re going to address,” she says. A copy for each of them. The heading: Purchase of Retail/Gallery Properties, L. Largely.

  Hugh stares at it. Seems to be a done deal.

  But Hendy has an agenda too, just not on paper. “A few points to take up,” he says, putting down the sheet. “Re: the Statement of Adjustments: credits to the purchaser include arrears in taxes up to and including—” His voice steams on into jargon, regulations, this holder of fee, and that party of the second part.

  Hugh drifts off, a figurehead anyway, only the titular owner of the gallery-half of the building she want
s. He owns nothing. He is perfectly placed to be ousted, in a sea of debt. The Visas alone—the three of them put together add up to $70,000 now. Every sale goes straight to interest; he is behind the proverbial, mystical, physical eight ball.

  But Newell is beside him on the black leather settee, while Lise Largely sits alone on a spindly chair. Hendy goes up one side of her and down the other, his smooth, shuttered face—he’s on Hugh’s side now. Although Hugh cannot fathom how, it seems that he may escape from this business with his hide, with his home. That even Jasper might escape too.

  It’s a short meeting. Hendy rises, flicks Largely’s disused agenda into his recycling basket, and offers a hand to Newell and then to Hugh for a quick, manly shake. Okay.

  Newell turns to Largely, clasps her hand, asks after Mighton. Being cruel? Hugh checks his face, but can’t tell. “He’s coming home this weekend,” Lise says, as if they’re still together. Knowing that’s not true, Hugh feels like he has a slight advantage.

  Which she then takes away: “Before we leave, I need to talk to Hugh.”

  Hugh realizes it’s him she means, not one of the others she’s calling you. Lise’s smile creases her skin in hairline cracks. “I’ve left six messages—of course you’re back and forth to the hospice. Which is why I felt I had to get hold of you. Assuming that your mother—that you—won’t want to extend the lease on her apartment for another year, of course the owner really has to get another tenant in there, whe-en …” Leaving off the when your mother dies.

  A photograph of Mimi swims into Hugh’s mind: in a ballet tutu, eight years old, chin lifted and feet turned out, pink tights casing legs that are so tense they seem to tremble. Her fingers, each blessed finger delicately and artistically bent. Alive, alive in every tendril.