So Sharpie + rage is a paint technique now?
Up the middle of the living room floor along one plank, toward the fireplace:
Behind almost every woman you ever heard of stands a man who let her down. Naomi Bliven
“The betrayal.” Waving her arm to include the boots, the psychedelia, the pink-slashing gloves, Ann elucidates her aesthetic philosophy to Stewart, though she talks to Ivy. “Mimi wouldn’t have suffered so much if Hugh’s father hadn’t deserted her. Hugh would say so too.”
Ivy doubts that Hugh would say anything at all about that. Does he even know Ann has all this stuff? At the end of the Bliven, the eye runs on to a new one, picked out along the edge of the mantelpiece under the go-go boots:
These boots are made for walking. Nancy Sinatra
Only it was Ann’s husband who did the walking.
“I’ll let you get back to it,” Ivy says.
Outside the front doorway a black noose dangles from the overhanging roof. Perfect. Hallowe’en tonight. It’s got a tag on it:
It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves. Zelda Fitzgerald
(L)
Jason is in L’s bedroom—sleeping/not sleeping, lying on the trundle bed left over from childhood that rolls out from under her bed.
“I don’t understand your mother,” L says.
A foot below her, Jason says, “How the fuck is that any different from Nevaeh saying, ‘What is wrong with your family?’ ”
Fair enough, mothers are not fair game. It’s early morning still, too early for Jason’s mom to come looking for him. L’s mom won’t hear them, she sleeps with earplugs in, and L’s dad—wherever he slept—let’s not think about him, okay? She jumps up in her white pyjamas and pushes the little bed back, forcing Jason to roll out or be trundled under.
She clears the floor of clothes with a few kicks and bows to him, hands together. They do karate kata, running through pinan sono ni and pinan sono go, which mesh really well, bodies almost colliding but not quite, a punch and a dodge, a block meeting no resistance, kick kick kick in sequence, the lovely twist-footed one. Once, twice to rehearse, then L yells ki-yai! and they go for it, as fast as they can.
Then again! It is the best. They should never have quit karate. They wouldn’t have, even, but their good sempai left and the other guy was lame. Jason starts the Mulan training song, and L joins him, both as muscled as all get out, chizuko mae geri-ing to beat the band:
Be a man!
We must be swift as the coursing river
Be a man!
With all the force of a great typhoon
Be a man!
With all the strength of a raging fire
Orion, climbing in the window, sings too—what’s he here for? More trouble, probably. He has the loudest voice and easily powers over them:
Mysterious as
the dark side of Jason’s ass
3. CRY AND THE WORLD CRIES WITH HUGH
Ruth is waiting at Mimi’s door when Hugh arrives. A bit anxious. “I didn’t want to leave till you came,” she says. “But I thought you people might of made a late night of it.”
He gives her head a tousle. “Not late at all, I fell straight to sleep, too many knocks on the head and too much beer,” he says. Neglecting to mention waking or half-waking, making the love of his life.
Ruth shakes her head. “She’s a very nice person, that Ivy. I took quite the shine to her. You’re a lucky man, even with all that has been happening lately.”
Hugh switches places with Ruth, takes the inside and moves her to the outside. “You need your sleep too,” he says. “What will I do if you—” (sounds like he’s going to say if she dies) “if you don’t take care of yourself? Take today off, okay?”
Ruth bridles, then buckles. “Well, I’ll trot off home and take a nap. Friday afternoons I do Newell’s, and tomorrow Mighton wants me to do his place out good, for selling it. I’m pulling in cleaning jobs hand over fist.”
“Tell me you haven’t been here all night.”
“I ran over early, just to see how she’s getting on. Better, you might say—Conrad took her off that, whatever it was, that was causing the you-know.”
“So no more crazytown?”
“That’s no way to talk about your mother,” Ruth says. “But he says it will calm down.”
“Thank you, Ruth,” he says. Her woes can be fixed with a little cash, now and then. Hugh can do that. What is always holy: patience. The swallowing of selfishness, the gentle tapping of your teeth. He goes in.
The white roses Newell brought are browning along the outer petals. Hugh plucks the brown away.
Patience was his earliest lesson, even before fear and carefulness. Patience whenever his mother recited, as she does now, softly mumbling: “Sorry sorry sorry sorry, for everything I’ve done, I’ve left undone, sorry, sorry …” At a meal, one of the few, making supper crash bang I’ll show you, a boiled egg in a teacup, nothing in the fridge but Perrier and a mouldy loaf of Hollywood bread. Going to bed for days. Meanwhile, at Ruth’s, calm: macaroni and cheese, tomato soup, Ruth happy to talk to them when he and Newell and Della ran home from school for lunch. But Mimi needed him. Up all night, running down black streets singing—Hugh on the black streets too, chasing her while she sobbed/sang her woes, talking for her to the police. Or that ugly time with the building superintendent.
“Sorry sorry for you sorry I am sorry Hugh, for when you were alone or when I could not sorry—” Eyes blank, she breaks into counting to stave off panic. “One two three four five six seven nine ten eleven twelve, one two three four …” Ceaseless movement of her hands and feet beneath above the sheets, afraid to stop since stopping was cessation. God, do not let her cease. “Okay, all right, all right,” he says. He says it for hours. The darling one, almost counting right, getting lucid again after those long days of singing. No more crazytown. That’s what you think, Hugh thinks. Between Hugh and Mimi and the gatepost, she can always come up with more crazy.
There she lies. It was not death, for I stood up, and all the dead lie down. Emily Dickinson, clear-eyed introvert. If he was scribbling on the walls, he’d write that. Or that old Woody Allen thing, Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered? How can he laugh, while his mother is unharnessing herself from the earth? How can he endure it without laughing.
A note on the bedside table: Conrad, saying he’ll be in at ten, can he meet Hugh there. Pleased to meet Hugh, hope Hugh guess my name. That will be about the new treatment plan, now that they’ve stopped the hallucinatory agent. Or it will be bad news. But there is no worse news, the news is already final. Now it is just the long unspooling of the last of her thread.
Mimi’s eyes open. The pupils move, searching, searching on the ceiling. Hugh makes himself move forward, puts his face in the path of her eyes. Nothing. He’s a ghost. The eyes close. “Living with ghosts and empties,” he sings to her. Words of others help you fill the silence of dying rooms. When you can’t, when Hugh can’t bear it any longer. Maybe that’s why Ann is writing on the walls.
Nolie glides in, adjusts the drip, glides out. In a moment, false night falling, Mimi sleeps. He could go now. But someone’s at the door.
Ann, as if thinking conjured her. Another ghost. Almost panting, she must have run up the stairs. Anxious for Mimi? Affection floods him.
“Hugh! Mimi said I could—” Ann pauses, eyeing the crumpled body in the bed; she turns away. There are tears in her eyes, little sparklers. “I can’t take seeing her like this. I feel too much … I need her to sign a permission waiver, is she even capable anymore?”
Hugh studies Ann’s once-loved face. Hardly seems possible. “Permission?”
“I’m curating an exhibit, the TV guy needs the waiver signed. He’s waiting downstairs. You’ve got power of attorney, right?”
Hugh can’t possibly refuse. You can’t deny a ghost tribute. He signs the form Ann holds out. No need to read, it’s nothing that matters now. She takes it away withou
t another word.
In the quiet he kisses Mimi’s sleeping eyes, the blank cheek, blank cheque.
Ghosts and empties. But here’s a full: Della is waiting for him on the street outside. She’s giving directions to some old homeless guy. Slipping him a ten, looking guilty about it.
“Shut up,” she tells Hugh. “I always used to give people food, refuse to give them money, because they’d just—but I got older. I know he’s going to drink it, but I can’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t.”
“Because he’s an addict. Because it’s bad for his health.”
“So’s sleeping outside when you’re seventy.”
She takes his arm, and they walk down the street, the way the homeless man went loping to his hidden rain-drenched home.
“He’s probably only sixty,” says Hugh.
“Living free and easy, the hobo way to happiness.”
“Free and freezy, under a bridge in constant rain.”
“Whereas Ken is—did I mention this? I think I did—living at Jenny’s.”
“You did mention that.”
Tears bead in her staring eyes, in the slanted corners. For fuck’s sake, is she imagining that Ken’s got something going on with Jenny, now? Honestly. Impatience rises sharply in him—that hamster-wheel mind of hers, obsessing, creating problems where none exist. She’s such an idiot.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Hugh says, stubbornly refusing to get all verklempt with her. “I’m making a very good dinner for you guys tomorrow night, I don’t want it spoiled. Della, really, come on. Give Ken some room to think, let him figure this out. You don’t want him to carry on in a life he hates.”
Della laughs, like a thin glaze of ice cracking.
“God, it’s still early. I’ve got to go back to the hospice at ten,” Hugh says. “Conrad wants to talk about Mimi.”
“I’ll do the gallery for you this morning—I’m sick of my boats, I was up all hours. I don’t know how my mom kept churning them out.”
He meets her hollow eyes, blue-bruised below, new threads of wrinkles stretched around them. Looks like she hasn’t slept for quite some time. “You’ll be too tired. I’ll just close for the day.”
But she shakes her head. “I said I’d meet Mighton there to help him hang his godforsaken masterpiece, and you don’t need to see that. Take Ivy to FairGrounds for a coffee.”
She’s back to her old generous self, sensible again. He kisses her head, where rain is pearling teardrops on her hair. Cry and the world cries with Hugh, it turns out.
(DELLA)
Hugh’s Ivy on the back porch at the gallery tucked out of the rain
joy in the morning
he is they are in love very good
Ruth bustles to the basement to bail buckets
Jasper a folded grasshopper on the radiator
bones randomly arranged coffee in his clutching hand
vodka by the lack of smell
Dad in the Barcalounger in a daze, a doze
off to school through turpentine rubble
my mother’s rags and palettes and brushes and boats and boats and and
a freshening wind
it might dry up for trick-or-treat
feed Elly drive her to party at eight set alarm for that do this do that
maintain the household die
even if my husband disdains me for a narrow face smooth hair
candy for tonight Zellers half price
Mighton blows in giant piece—too big—Newell will buy it
help with the ladder slab of concrete wall over his fireplace
the darkness of that room
internal affliction under his beautiful face
Of course I can! Got it, yes, got it, handle in the frame, yes, hup!
up the ladder, this is higher than—the last step wobbles—whoa!
safe—Mighton’s hand so warm—not safe
his bright black eyes looking up: we know each other well we do
his hand moves up
he moves forward pushing up the skirt his head darts in his mouth
he bites my leg
he bites
warm bare flesh above the stocking shocking is this what Ken feels?
4. IF I DIDN’T HAVE HUGH
One thing about Burton, Hugh thinks: he is an expert of emotion, having it and digesting it, Sturm und Drang. Sated by crisis/catharsis, in sprawling chairs set before the fireplace at FairGrounds, he and Newell recline. The debacle of last night? As if it never happened.
Hugh does not let himself imagine the argument or the making up about the jade—whatever that tantrum was about, Newell dropping the thing in the discarded scripts. The jade’s cord shows under Newell’s linen shirt, as usual. Burton holds forth, also as usual; Newell drinks coffee with medicinal focus. Hugh’s head hurts.
No L at the counter this morning: Savaya and Nevaeh, rapt in low-voiced discussion, arms threaded around each other’s tiny waists until Ivy gives a cheerful hey! and they detach. Nevaeh takes their order; Savaya adds a log to the fire, then goes back into the kitchen to ferry their muffins forward, tray shoulder-high, shield-maiden Valkyrie.
Burton is burbling about his class. “The Greeks, the original goat-song. Antigone—”
Newell stretches out a long arm to set his cup down, and says, “No.”
“Eumenides, then.”
Newell smiles at Hugh. “Hughripides, Hughmenides,” he says, and Burton laughs immoderately, latte foam daubed on his loose upper lip.
Stop hating him. Ivy gives you that relief: no need to hate anyone in the world.
He has to go back to Mimi’s to hear Conrad’s bad news. He can. He rises, floats out of his chair, leans to give Ivy a kiss. “I’ll be back. I have to check on my mother.”
Can’t think when he last said those words my mother out loud.
No excuse to go with him. Ivy’s own head hurts, without even falling off a ladder. Partly the drama last night: the undoing of someone’s love/life is no fun. Not sure what to think about Newell now, or about Orion. Plus, is she directing those Spring Awakening scenes or what? She’s done zero work on them and doesn’t want to waste time if Burton has something else in mind. Original goat that he is.
Newell downed his coffee fast and asked for another. He has the New York Times open, scanning the Arts for dear life. How long can he stick it out in the wilds of Peterborough? He’ll have to go back to work soon, if only to maintain Burton’s appetite.
Two white chocolate scones disposed of, Burton holds his fat black fountain pen poised over a Moleskine. The Intellectual. “Think, Boy. I won’t go back to Spring Awakening; the whole play is too much on the nose. Something brilliant, Ivy. Plenty of characters, not a musical, not a tragedy …” Burton’s eyes light. “La Ronde!”
Ivy’s least favourite play: ten depressing two-handed sex scenes, lovers trading around the circle. Right up Burton’s back alley. He could un-hetero some of the pairs.
“No,” Newell says, not looking up from the Times. “Not even for a reading. None of us can do La Ronde again, after AIDS. It’s empty, vapid Vienna froth.”
Burton is hard to quell, but that stops him. He sighs. “Well, I don’t say you’re wrong.”
Fine. Ivy will have to think. “Kennedy’s Children?”
“It’s not as hideously depressing as Swados’s Dispatches—” Burton half-agrees.
Newell stretches his elegant legs. “I’ve always wanted to play Sparger. Perfect timing: ‘I started out the year playing the fixed star Regulus in an astrological Hallowe’en pageant in an abandoned garage—I always start the year with Hallowe’en, I’m a realist.’ ”
At the counter behind them Savaya laughs, and quickly turns back to the steam-wand.
“You did the other guy, the shell-shocked Vietnam vet, in that Toronto production in the eighties.” Ivy saw it four times, star-struck and longing to heal his terrible pain.
“Yeah, but Sparger has all the lines.”
“I’ve
always wanted to do Mother Courage—I feel I’m the natural heir to Judi Dench.”
“You’re too kind for Courage, and too original for Dench.”
She preens, foolishly pleased.
Burton shakes his head. “Brecht! Beyond these plebeian children.”
“A Chorus Line!” Ivy cries, jazz hands, but she’s going too far in the other direction.
Burton practically stamps his foot. “No music! No music!”
“How about with the music pared away? No—there’s not much left, is there? Wait, we could do Les Mis, only from the book! Let them develop the script.”
“I have even less desire, if a negative of infinity is possible, to ‘develop a script’ with donkeys for a solid month.”
There’s silence, after this definitive statement. Nevaeh seems to have gone off shift, but Savaya leans on her elbows at the counter, listening with both ears up. Burton hits the paper with his pen repeatedly, making a series of black dots.
Try again. “Cloud 9,” says Ivy. “If you don’t double, there are lots of parts …”
Burton shakes his head. “Cross-dressing is built right into it. And Churchill, ptah. I’m not interested in rehashing someone else’s ideas,” he says.
Ivy shuts her eyes, in case they’re rolling. She is so bored by Burton’s bullshit. Why does she have to be here? Any decision will be his, possibly with Newell’s puppeteering. If it was up to her they’d be doing a new play, finding a playwright to come in and work with them, or— No point in stretching the mind to the possibilities, because that won’t happen.
“Howard Barker’s The Possibilities,” she says. Throwing it out like a bad card in poker.
Newell’s eyes light up; Burton scowls.
“Im-Possibilities,” Newell says, sorrowing. “We couldn’t do it with these kids. Nobody could. They couldn’t be coached—it’s too hard.”
Like a fish, gills rippling, rising in green water, Burton says, “Well, it’s not impossible—it’s just always badly done.”
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