Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  “Go sit on Hugh’s back porch,” she says. “The bench along the wall, where it’s hidden, till I’m done. Come to Studio with me, then we’ll watch the master class from the back, and you can stay at my house.” Maybe he wouldn’t want to? “Or at Orion’s.”

  Jason nods again. She goes around the counter and takes his hand, trembling in the fingers, and leads him back down the kitchen hall, scooping a magazine out of the basket. She gives his hand a quick squeeze and shoves him out the back door. “Sit tight and look at Vogue,” she says.

  (ORION)

  In another part of the forest, Orion lies back on leaves, leafmulch, leaf-sand, littered. Left.

  The look in his eyes, the release, the loving gaze. I am the king and the queen and the boss of him. He loves me.

  Green on the yellow leaves: a long piece of jade on a cord. His.

  Narrow and smooth, dark as his dark green eyes.

  The most noble, most talented, kindest and wisest, best, only.

  You are not the only, though. No secret about that.

  (That’s his honour, that’s how true he is, that he has to tell me no, it can never be more than this. And it’s his honour too that tells him I’m too young.)

  Orion slips the cord around his neck, lets the jade slide into place on his bare chest, under his shirt.

  8. A CASE OF HUGH

  The outskirts of the city flounce away as the van speeds on through the slant-shining rain-impending late afternoon. Hugh asks Ivy, “What does that Carr guy do?”

  “Picks up a patchy living, writing online articles about gaming and surveillance. And his mother sends him cheques.”

  “No, I mean the brother.”

  “Oh. He’s a comic.”

  Hugh laughs.

  Ivy laughs too. “I know! It’s the grouchiest profession in the world. He’s a grouser. He does Yuk Yuks, Comedy Club, goes round the circuit, you know, gets no respect, et cetera. I left him because—oh, because it was stupid. We didn’t love each other, never had. The last straw was when he lost his temper at a dinner party and threatened to slug my friend.”

  She stops talking. Changes lanes, mouth shut in a cool line.

  Doesn’t like slugging. Noted. Nothing more to be said, then. Don’t do that again. Okay, Hugh didn’t intend to anyway. His head doesn’t hurt, he’s at peace. Miles go by, the endless grey of Highway 401, waiting for the diversion, angling north to Peterborough.

  It hasn’t been an awkward silence, but she breaks it. “I know this road by heart, but I always have to watch carefully for that exit.”

  There it is, Hugh points: Lindsay/Peterborough 2 km—then the exit, the underpass.

  Ivy settles herself. “Okay, so how did you and your mother end up in Peterborough?”

  “A friend, a girl she knew from boarding school, lent us a farmhouse in the country near Port Hope. Beautiful place, front porch looking out over farmland. We stayed there several times when I was a kid, peaceful weeks without anyone—”

  Without anyone hurting me, he almost said.

  “Alone, without anyone else. One of those times, she hit the wall. She went into a frenzy, a manic episode, rearranging all the furniture, boiling jam, trying on all the friend’s clothes, tearing everything off. Then she shut down. I couldn’t get her to answer me.” The smooth road unspools. “The old woman at the farmhouse nearby had a garden. I knew there were things to eat there, so I walked down the road. I was four.”

  Ivy stays quiet, drives without urgency.

  “She found me eating peas.” Pea-pod, you still feel the edged mouth of its little unzipping purse, the pea-pearls hung inside there. “I stayed with her while they took my mother to the hospital. Later they arranged for Ruth to take me. Ruth wasn’t a permanent foster mother, just did favours, babysat. Her husband died young, and she had no children of her own.”

  Kaleidoscope of places, the Yorkville apartment, various hotels and houses, the farm—then Ruth’s house in the country town, one piece of calm in the changeable world. Dear Ruth. He ought to be with her, up in Mimi’s room.

  “Did it go on and on? Your mother, I mean?”

  “In and out. Breakdowns, manic depression. Various treatments.” He stops there. “Out and in. Often out. I lived more with her than with Ruth.”

  “Do you ever—did you ever talk to anybody yourself? Or—I don’t know, get help to work through all that?”

  “Not then. I don’t think I need help now,” Hugh says. “I seem sad, I know, but I’m fine really, better and better. Once Mimi dies I think I’ll be— Okay, I’ll go into a tailspin, but only for a few weeks. I’m good.” But your dear one is dying.

  But we all die.

  Looking out at the passing countryside, grey ash, grey ground, he says that: “We all die. All of us, and that’s a very depressing thing.”

  Ivy nods. “But also not, at the same time. I mean, since we all die, you know, since that’s the deal, a) let’s have a party first, and b) oh well, we had a very good party.”

  “That’s a very grasshoppery way to live.”

  “Yes, it is. I am the original grasshopper, fiddling in the summer sun, beginning to creak and worry now that autumn is here. Are you telling me you’re an ant?”

  “No. You don’t find many ants around these days.”

  “I’ve noticed that. Must be the banking crisis.”

  “Gareth is an ant. I admire that about him. He might be the only genuine ant I know—it’s not anal or irritating in him, it’s comforting and trustworthy, stable. It’s good to see those guys. I love them, their long marriage, their finicky ways. We’ll have dinner with them next time—they frequent the best restaurants in the city. Léon is a very fine illustrator, does a lot of work for newspapers; he won some big award last year for a kids’ book.”

  “Léon Feldman? I love that book—Loon Moon.”

  “That’s the one. They are old friends of mine. I’m glad I met Fern.”

  “She’s an old friend of mine. As well as my sister.”

  “Della’s my sister, as well as my friend,” Hugh says. “I’m dropping the ball there.” He stares out at the passing scrub, the blur of motion and inevitability.

  “What’s the deal with her?” Ivy asks lightly, as if thinking he might not want to answer.

  Which he doesn’t. “Oh, her husband’s a mess. Too sensitive for law, probably. He’s been working on a long case involving sexual abuse at a school, a nasty case from thirty years ago. Settlements, multiple claimants. Ken’s acting for the school’s insurance company, deciding how much money for a touch on the breast, how much for a feel, for the thirteen-year-old girl who had an abortion; it’s had him in despair for years. Outside the office, Della takes care of him, manages things so he’s not bugged. He’ll be fifty this winter. Like me.”

  For a moment, Hugh can’t remember if Ivy knows how old he is. Will fifty seem too old?

  She doesn’t look fazed. “Della has that lovely stability,” she says. “But there’s something tragic going on in her face.”

  “Only lately, I think.” Or have they been in trouble for a long time?

  “I haven’t met Ken?”

  Hugh half laughs, then groans. “He swore me not to tell Della—he took a week off to figure out whether, when, how to quit his job.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m having a dinner party for them on Saturday, their thirtieth anniversary. You have to come,” he says.

  “Yes, I’ll come,” she says.

  She turns her head to beam at him, regardless of traffic, of the long-falling light, the long day, whatever fray may come. Then looks back to the road and drives.

  (DELLA)

  back from Bobcaygeon

  sharp hill down from the turn onto 23

  eating almonds from a tupperware container starving gobbling

  —the tub slips hand catches the steering wheel the car is going—

  —veers onto the shoulder into the gravel skewing this way that—

 
; HOW THESE THINGS HAPPEN

  brake when the brakes will help—steer stop stop stop stop

  hazard lights open the door take off the seatbelt

  almonds fallen on the mat

  nobody in the other lane

  the car didn’t roll down the bank the relief of death

  never tell anybody Ken is not here to tell

  if Elly had been in the car

  Jenny on the gravel pad trim legs

  brown hair swinging at the shoulder blade Diet Dr Pepper

  white/red revelation

  buckle up, drive off

  what could I not have done? not driven out there

  not spied on Ken on them

  Elle would come home not find me not know

  go to sleep without knowing

  in the morning Ruth would come then the police

  to say that I was killed I need Hugh

  no van—he must be with Mimi Ruth will be here

  Mighton might be my chest cannot break open

  while I smile and smile

  in the back door Ruth’s cheeriness is not a thing to bear

  emptying buckets it is a blessing

  do certificates snick the glass back in work eases nerve strain

  mat paper backer

  bend the shims done 6 to go

  9. MASTER CLASS: AWAKENING

  The lowering sun behind them lends a false glow to the countryside. Twice, they pass fields piled with the last pumpkins, too late for the truck. Tomorrow is Hallowe’en. Ivy worries about Hugh’s pumpkin-head. What pleasure is it to become connected to someone, when it means we have to worry about my entanglements, and the state of his head?

  They could stop and make wild life-affirming love in the harvest fields, if it was dusk. They would be ghosts, in their pale nakedness. Her cheeks heat, thinking the word naked, because after all she is not such great shakes without her clothes on. But the joy of skin/skin, the memory of that comes back to her and she shivers, driving down the straight undangerous highway, so that the van wobbles and Hugh looks up.

  She glances left, changes lanes busily so he won’t know she’s blushing. Inside, skinside. A long time since she … No, she has never felt this. Being transported, transcending—even inside the mind, no useful words for all that. Hugh puts his hand on her leg, and the shiver runs through her again. As if she was not a middle-aged woman but a living, ecstatic, conjoined being.

  So it’s hard to go in to the master class. Doesn’t help that she’s fourteen minutes late.

  Burton! His face is burst-tomato red. Beige eyes lost in swollen flesh under grizzled hair. He usually keeps himself so exquisite—today’s sweater is wrinkled, and unpleasantly recalls a flesh-coloured crayon. He leaps up from the table to display plaid golf pants that might be a good joke in another setting, in another mood.

  “At last.” His sharpest voice cracks like a whip over the heads of the company. “Now that Miss Sage has deigned to grace us with her presence—”

  But now Ivy sees the source of his snark: she’s only the latest of the late. Newell, eyes grimly down, is still pulling the lid off his coffee. And in the corner where the coats are shed, Orion is tweaking his own sweater into perfection.

  They all shuffle to their seats; the agony begins. Ivy knows Spring Awakening well, and this is a bad translation. She suspects Burton downloaded it from Gutenberg—the text has a sloggy fake-Germanic feel, unlike the sharp Bond version she’s worked on before. Never mind: the twisted unhappiness of the children is freshly astonishing, freshly awful. She, of course, plays all the mamas.

  None of the students have seen the modern musical version or read the play; nobody has any inkling of what is to come, except (it seems to Ivy) Orion. Who through some agency or diligence—or insider info—knows exactly what to expect and revels in the rudeness of it. From time to time, rising from the script, his eyes seem to seek out someone or other, but never do more than brush along the company.

  It’s a good play for teenagers. Orion makes a waking dream of Melchior, his tenderness and wit, the horror and excitement of sex transmogrifying into determination, passion. Savaya sets aside her rampant tigress and puts on Wendla’s little girl dress and persona. A new kid, Sheridan Tooley (rejoining the company after his paying gig in Toronto fell through), squeak-squawks Melchior’s friend Moritz’s lines with the Wedekind whine, griping and grovelling. Orion disdains him, Ivy is amused to see, when not reading; but in their scenes they’re bosom companions. The beautiful black girl, Nevaeh, underused so far, reads the wild artist’s model Ilse with intelligent abandon.

  Behind stacked set pieces Ivy can see L and Jason, shadows in shadows, watching Orion conjure the leaf-strewn graveyard as Melchior escapes from reform school and comes home to find and fend off dead Wendla, dead Moritz. “I was not bad!—I was not bad!—I was not bad! No mortal ever wandered so dejectedly over graves before. Pah! I won’t lose courage. Oh, if I should go crazy—during this very night …”

  Ivy is torn between watching the real teenagers and listening to the imaginary ones, fearful for both sets, drawn in (as always) to the pain of the play, its naïve beauty and hopeless frustrated disaster. And conscious of that other pain, real life.

  But today Newell phones it in, staring down at his script. Half-asleep for a time, then gusting into bored restlessness that takes the form of striding over to the coffee table and making too much noise there. He has hardly anything to do, playing all the older men, and as they progress through the script the waste becomes painfully obvious. Only the Man in the Mask (who might be Death, and who laughs at morality) sparks his interest at all, it seems.

  At the end of the read-through Burton stands, abruptly breaking the spell.

  “I—yes.” He takes in the company, broods, nods to the table. “I—vy.”

  Surprised, she looks up again from her script, and he says, briskly, “I’ve listed scenes, and I’d like you to start work on them, script analysis, beats and units. I’m going to take Newell away for a confab.”

  Newell stands too, and shakes his head in patient reproof.

  “A brief consultation,” Burton says. He smiles, all his nasty teeth gritted, the bit between them.

  Ivy wonders what exactly is going on. Who is the horse and who the master.

  “The list,” Burton says, needlessly, as he hands her the list. He leans confidingly over her at the table, peers somewhere above her ear. He can never just look her in the eyes. “Only an hour left—split them into groups and run through scenes, will you?” He smiles again, those teeth, and murmurs, “It’s all useless. Just busy-work to fill the time. Meet us at the bar, say seven. The Ace, you know it? I’ll have worked things out by then.”

  And without another word said, out they go, two giants of theatre. Or rather, one troll of theatre and one giant of the silver screen, side by side. Conspicuously not arm in arm.

  (L)

  L brings Jason in the back door. “Hello?”

  Nobody. She moves last night’s supper plates to the counter, and Jason sinks onto the kitchen table. Advil? Not where they belong … Ah, stuck behind the vitamins. She pours a glass of water from the fridge-door tap and takes it to him. “Drink this, take these.” He obeys, lies back, skinny arm over his eyes. Shit, his mom is doing such a number on him.

  Six o’clock. Supper would help. Not much in the fridge. Eggs.

  Gravel—a car in the driveway. Jason springs up, hunted, eyes darting like a two-bit crook at bay. “My room!” she says. Backpack, shoes, he races for the stairs. “I bet my mom wouldn’t tell on you anyway.”

  He’s gone. L gets the eggs out and cracks them—nobody here but us chickens. Flicks the stove burner on, just making scrambles, la-la-la! Her mouth is nervous, as if Jason is really being hunted. This is so fricking stupid, over eight old Playboys. When you think what everybody can get on the internet any time they—

  The back door opens, and hokey jeez, it’s her dad. With Hugh.

  She stands still, for
k arrested in the bowl.

  “Hey,” her father says. He looks really bad. Rumpled, his hair not nice. There’s the band across his eyes, a darkening of the skin or just a darkened look—and his eyes slide sideways, won’t look back at her.

  “Hey back,” she says.

  Everybody stands there. Like somebody will break the ice, eventually.

  It’s Hugh who does, of course. “So!” he says. “I met your dad on the doorstep.” Then he runs out of whatever he was going to say.

  Her dad drifts off into the dining room. More mess in there. Twelve canvases, still not finished; poster crap all over the table. He hates mess, it gets him all upset. L feels sick deep in her stomach, not throwing-up sick but a deeper horrible pain, the pain of disapproving of her father and his actions.

  Hugh puts out a hand. “You okay?” he says, quiet-voiced.

  She nods, and is going to tell him about Jason being in her room—but Hugh used to live with Ann, maybe he still has to tell her everything. “More or less,” she says. Not looking at the stairs or at the dining room. Down at the bowl of eggs.

  “I took a couple of pieces of your installation, I hope you don’t mind,” he says.

  “What? Why? I didn’t know …” Even surprised, she speaks low so her dad won’t hear.

  “You weren’t here, and I wanted to—”

  But her dad comes back, a black cloud, asking, “Where’s your mom?” Voice jagged, but he keeps the volume down. They’re all practically whispering, cotton wool pressing down from the cotton-white ceiling onto everybody’s head, smothering them all.

  Then the front door bangs, and her mom’s bright voice sings out, “Sorry I’m late! Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful—I brought Vietnamese subs, your fave!”

  Whatever cheered her up won’t last. The two men turn, so that when her mom comes through the louvered doors she staggers back as if they were robbers, Perrier bottle and sub bag clutched to her coat. “Sheesh! You scared the life out of me,” she says, laughing. Fake laughing. She doesn’t look at any one person in the room, like for instance her daughter or her mysteriously absent now strangely returned husband.