Stepping back to the kitchen, Hugh almost trips over Conrad’s feet.
“Here, give me a look at these eyes of yours,” Conrad says.
The light is dim, at least.
“I’m fine,” Hugh says. “I didn’t drink. I’m being careful.”
“You nearly fell just then.”
Hugh gives up his face and stares into Conrad’s eyes. Clean, cool blue, bright whites, locking on one eye, then the other, back again. “Head hurt?”
The pounding is so bad. Hugh makes his eyes blink slowly; tilts his head as if he’s checking for ghostly pain, rather than speaking through hammers. “Not to speak of, nothing much. I’m being careful.” Say it often enough and Conrad will believe him.
Gareth comes back down the hall. Hugh puts out a hand. “You’ll stay, you and Léon, won’t you? The guestroom is ready for you,” he says.
Gareth looks over his glasses at Hugh. “Will you still have us if I woo your artist away?”
“Yes,” Hugh says, happy for the first time in a long—wait, okay, since that liquifying lunch with Ivy, five hours ago. He laughs. “Towels in the bathroom cabinet. But listen, this is Conrad Frey, Mimi’s doctor. I’m afraid I’ve got to go back over to her now.”
Noises of sympathy from Gareth, and from Léon, who weaves his arm into Hugh’s.
“It’s been a very long time coming,” Hugh says. “Conrad can tell you. Make yourselves at home. I’ll be back to give you breakfast in the morning.” In the morning—when the moving truck Ruth arranged will be arriving at Mimi’s, when the apartment must be cleared out.
Okay. But Ivy will be back to help. To do the dishes, she said so.
“Listen, I’ll drive you over,” Conrad says, already on the stairs.
Back beyond the other guests, Burton has discovered Newell’s absence. His pug-pouting face uplifted, he’s scouring the deck through the long windows. In a moment he will turn and explode. Fine.
Hugh clasps Gareth’s hand, thanks Conrad, and goes.
The soul’s like all matter:
why would it stay intact,
stay faithful to its one form,
when it could be free?
Louise Glück
1. HUGHTHANASIA
The hospice is entirely still. Long stairs, long corridor. Night light: scallops of creamy light along the baseboards. In the distance the deserted nursing station is lit by one shaded lamp. Not deserted, he doesn’t mean that. The nurse is somewhere, seeing to someone.
Not to Mimi. Her door is almost shut, a fissure of dark interior showing.
Hugh pushes it ajar: a shadowed shape in the bed; Ruth, asleep in the bedside chair. He doesn’t want to wake her, but she will be very stiff in the morning.
No need, she wakes by herself, at some slight noise or movement of air. “No change,” she says. Reassuring him first thing. “She’s been so peaceful tonight, I just drifted off.”
“You should go home.” At her quick head-shake, Hugh shakes his own. “Gerald turned up at the party, looks like Jasper is saddled with him for the night. Might be good if one of us went over there with breakfast in the morning, to check on them.”
Obedient to her twin loyalties (food and caregiving) she gives her eyelids a quick rub and gets up. No complaint over the effort in rising, but she is slower than she was—in the old days she never sat down at all. She’d have been puttering, tidying the room, seeing that everything was shipshape. One arm already in her copper corduroy coat, she pulls the other sleeve on, not quickly. It’s a long day, a long life. Near the end you get a little tired.
Hugh is tired too. Cooking helps you not to think, but there’s a lot he ought to have done.
“I’m sorry to ask, but would you mind calling my place and asking Ken to check the buckets one more time before they leave? They’re all finishing the port up there.”
“That was a lovely treat for Della,” Ruth says. “You’re a good friend.”
Look who’s talking. She buttons her jacket, bends to kiss Mimi’s forehead, and goes.
Silence again.
One a.m. Early for the whole place to be as silent as—not the grave, not that—as church. Hugh sits in the chair, shrugs out of his jacket.
Sits.
The dim light grows as his eyes grow accustomed. He looks around the room, yet again. White roses in a glass jug on the table. The window, pale streetlight behind a pale drawn curtain. Escher print above the bed: stairs everywhere. Duty, tasks not done, misperception, the trickery of the world. He hates those endless, hopeless, pointless stairs, and everything else Escher ever made. Ann had Escher all over her room when they met, where they first made love. One trick pony, one stupid joke. He wouldn’t let her put them up in the house. Which probably started that whole thing, that frustrated/frustrating writing on the walls.
He’s been blaming her unhappiness on selfishness or narcissism. But back then it was his fault they broke up, that she went searching their acquaintances for someone to love her better. Everything about Ann is his fault. He knows this is absurd—but Jason should have been his son. He only loved Ann for a short time, to a small degree; to the same degree that he still loves her, maybe. The problem: not enough love. Because his mother needed him?
And now as her need ends, Ivy arrives.
A sound from the bed. Not as much as a sigh, just an opening of the lips. He leans forward. Mimi’s eyes light, lighting on him. In some sense, she’s back.
He leans closer, finds the water, straw ready-bent by Ruth. Holds it to Mimi’s lips.
She sips.
She smiles, an echo of an echo of her original face. Thrush has spoiled her mouth, makes it another source of pain. He finds the swab and pulls the chair closer in one practised motion. “Swab?” Her eyes nod, her dear mouth opens a crack. The damp swab slides between lips and teeth as she tries to help. Not much mobility left in her jaw or neck, but after the swab’s damping, her lips can move.
“Thank you,” she says, mere breath as voice.
The rain has started again, Hugh hears as he sits back down. Over-sensitive to the sound of rain these days. Beyond the glass it breathes, then rustles into a shattering, chattering rush.
Mimi’s eyes move to the window.
“Wet enough for you?” he asks her. “Your hair will be curly.”
She turns her eyes to him again, as sensitive to kindness from him as he is to the rain. Perhaps because there’s been a lot of it lately.
“I wish I’d been kinder to you, all this time,” he says.
Her eyes fix on his, such dark, searching eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Her hand moves, and he takes it, careful of the tubes.
“You were the best mother in the world,” he says. No falsehood in that, it is not a lie when you mean it truthfully, when you tell the story that she needs to hear.
“Difficult,” she says.
“Well, I was difficult,” he says, to make her laugh one more time. “But I always love you best.” Giving her the gift of what she used to say to him at night, before she went out gallivanting—I always love you best.
That’s too close to home. To distract her, he asks, “Can I lift your bed-head?”
Her heavy head shakes slowly, no.
“Release,” she says. She begs. Give me back my golden arm …
He looks into her drowned, once-beautiful eyes and wonders if the pillow, or a kink in the tube, or—or if he could make himself do those things. If it will come to that.
“Is the pain very bad?”
Her head shakes again, no. She was always very brave.
They look at each other for a long time.
“When you need me to, I’ll try,” he says.
Her eyes close, as if that is release enough for now.
Hugh sits, almost alone.
In the silence, he can hear her breathing. Not frightening yet. Breath—breath, breath—ragged un-rhythm. One of the breaths will be the last one.
Someone
is at the door, a hand entering first to hold the heavy door and make as little noise as possible. Hugh knows that hand: the small nurse Nolie. He feels a rush of kindness toward Nolie too, to everyone who is not dead, not yet. Her head peeps round. She nods to Hugh, but looks at Mimi. Pads in on silent soles, checks the drip bag, taps the line once, twice.
“Dr. Hoek says we are to use the mask tonight,” she tells Mimi softly. Sorrowful things always accompanied by a dimple beside her mouth, offered to take away some pain.
Mimi’s eyes move to Hugh, as if she might ask him for reprieve, then back to Nolie. Who is already attaching the hose to the tank, adjusting the mask’s straps. With gentle fingers she dislodges the small nostril tubes and places the mask over Mimi’s lower face. Her attention brings everything in the room, in the world, down to the little white straps and the mask’s tender hissing, almost masked by the rain. Mimi’s hand moves up to waver near the mask, and then subsides.
Hugh swallows, his throat dry because the rain sounds so cool and damp. It’s clear to him now. He can’t leave her to bear all this alone any longer.
“I’m going to sleep here from now on,” he says to Nolie, as she turns from the bed.
She nods, unsurprised, and says, “I will ask Joseph to bring up a cot. It’s good time.” She gives him a small, contained smile—her approval, or her version of mourning.
Mimi’s hand trembles, and Hugh takes it in his own.
He won’t leave her again. The relief of saying that floods his body, his head. Eases the aching that has dogged him for so long. The gallery can close, people can make their own art for a few days. And if it’s weeks, so much the better.
He texts Ivy: > when you get back, please could you please empty basement buckets please?
There’s a long text from her, why she had to go, but he can’t make his tired eyes focus on it. It doesn’t matter. Everything matters less than you think. Only Mimi’s breath, in and out, from the white bed.
2. TENDER FLOWERS
“How will we find them?” Ivy asks.
Newell stares ahead into the traffic, oncoming headlights gliding over and past his face. “I have Orion on my phone, that app. We can watch him finding her.”
Hm. Having Orion on his phone is not surprising, but that Finder app is more personal than a phone number, it’s a location system. Oh, she has to text Hugh.
> Orion went looking for Savaya in Toronto, very worried.
L and Jason went too. N and I are following to keep them out of trouble. Newell drives fast, this is Gerald’s good car.
I’ll keep you posted. Back as soon as I can.
A text from him, about emptying buckets. She texts back,
> of course
Waits. Nothing more comes. He must be with Mimi.
Oncoming lights flow over the car, a steady stream returning from Toronto, from Saturday night parties. Each sliding beam illuminates the planes of Newell’s cheek, the noble set of his nose. Ivy doesn’t get tired of looking at his profile, because with all its beauty it has sadness in it. Like Paul Newman or Alec Guinness; however amusing things are, awareness of pain is built into those faces. She remembers driving with Newell another time, several years ago, out to Elora Gorge for an awards dinner. She was in the back seat because Burton had the passenger seat, talking non-stop the whole time, nauseatingly witty. Newell, silent and patient, drove like a well-trained bat out of hell down that bad stretch of the 401. How can she remember that whole drive, but not a few lines of dialogue when she needs to?
She says, “You know what makes people funny? Memory. Comics remember better than we do. They remember and reincorporate things from twenty minutes or twenty years ago.”
“Thirty years ago.”
“Thirty minutes from now.”
He drives. He watches the road, but he’s amused, engaged, and that’s flattering. Really, charm is just reciprocity—he finds her charming, so she loves him. “This is like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” she says. “What?”
“Oh come on.”
“I never, never, ever, watch TV. Now you know my dark secret.”
“I know, neither do I, but CCGC, as I like to call it, is on the web.”
“All right then, I will watch it.”
“But what was I saying? Oh, trouble is I can’t be funny now, because I can’t remember.”
“But you are, so obviously you still can, sometimes.”
She laughs. Part of his charm: he induces in her a running giggle.
“Are you really freaked out?”
“Livelihood, man.”
It can’t mean anything to him, that word. He must have made so much money from Blitzed Craig that he never ever has to work again, but he still does work, all the time. And now Catastrophe, another goldmine. Yet here he is, in a condo in Peterborough.
“Are you staying—do you live here, in Peterborough, really?”
“Maybe a third of the year here. When I’m not in production. You know, childhood home, people know me. And they know Ruth will get mad at them if they … oh, make a big deal, cross some kind of line. Nobody thinks I’m that big a shot here, anyway. I’m the kid from high school who talked funny, who got lucky.”
“No performing arts school in those days, I’m guessing.”
“Ha. No. We had a couple of visiting theatre workshops though. That’s why Burton came to town—he came to direct a show; talked to the university about setting up a drama department, but that went nowhere. Then he got a gig doing a workshop at the junior high.”
And that’s where we met, Newell doesn’t say. She wonders what their early relationship was. How they came to be—attached. Co-dependent. Whatever they are. Notice, no more talk about the marriage thing. Not surprising. Burton wouldn’t let Newell damage his career. One thing to be casually, unremarkably gay; another to get married, even now.
Newell says, “I did one myself, a workshop—two years ago, when I came out to finalize the condo. Terry asked me to come in and talk to the kids. I spent the day with the grade ten group.” Which would have been Orion’s class, two years ago. Changing lanes, Newell keeps his gaze on the road. “Then in the summer, after a late-night Catastrophe shoot, I’m walking along in Toronto and there’s Orion standing on the street, down behind Queen’s Park, all strung out. He said somebody had told him that was the place to go for chicken.”
It takes her a minute to process that, switching from dinner to coward to boy prostitute.
“Idiot. Whether or not he actually did anything, got paid for sex— I don’t think so. We talked, and I drove him back out here. So I’ve known him for a while,” Newell says. Gently explaining, not justifying.
Not that he has to justify anything to her. And neither does Orion.
“He was right,” Newell says, after a few miles of silence. “We should be continuing with Earnest. Getting some real work done.”
Maybe. But the cast was wrong, anyway, Ivy thinks. It ought to be Hugh as the worthy Jack and Newell his wilder, rascally younger brother; with me as Gwendoline, Newell’s theatre-cousin. And Orion as Cecily, Hugh’s country ward out in Peterborough. Ivy laughs to herself. Hugh is already a bit over-Earnest, but Newell might become Earnest for the sake of Orion. And Burton, naturally, as the impassable Bracknell bramble-barrier.
Newell says, “At least Ansel never suggested we do Tender Flowers, his play about a leper colony for nuns, and the conflicted gay priest who serves among the women.”
“When you say, his play, you mean Burton’s own?”
“Yes, the play he wrote.” Almost serious, Newell says, “It’s not as bad as you might think. Delicate, moving. He probably ought to have been a writer, with a Tennessee Williams kind of tragic life. Better than fading away as an unhireable has-been.”
Only Newell can say the thing that nobody says about Burton.
He laughs.
“What?”
“Just thinking about it. Tender Flowers.” Newell smiles as he drives, a slight and perfect Budd
ha-statue smile.
(ORION)
All down the DVP Savaya’s blue dot roves the backstreets around Queen’s Park. L watches the phone screen. “Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, the Hepburn Block—what’s in there?” When Orion can look she shows him. “Now up to Wellesley Street, she’s walking up and down in front of St. Joseph’s school.”
Get out of there, you dope. The blue slides along St. Joseph Street as Orion turns, cutting over on College Street. “She’s up to the yellow street,” L says. “Oh, it’s the road around Queen’s Park, and … across, and into the park.”
He can’t just leave Newell’s car on the street, like he would if it was his own. He turns right, right, right again, and finds a lot between the Toronto School of Theology, the Jesuits of Upper Canada, and the Marshall McLuhan building. Theme: Canada’s conflicted soul.
From the back seat Jason hands forward a sheet of paper with ON DELIVERY in very professional black capitals. He holds up L’s eyeliner and says sorry. Orion shoves it in the windshield, not asking what anybody might be delivering in a Saab 9-3.
“Right,” he says. Organizing the troops. Then doesn’t know what to say, how much to tell these guys. “Right, so, I think you’d better—I think—let me—”
L nods. “You talk to her, we’ll just wander around till you need us.”
She takes Jason’s hand. They cross the lawn, then pause for the traffic before loping across the big road, into the darkness of the park. They’re good.
Right.
Orion checks his phone.
Into the woods. The horrible pain of Burton kicking him out comes flooding back for a moment. Rising up like a freak tide from his ankles whooshing up to his hair. It’s not just rage, it’s raging embarrassment; and the realization that he is stupidly arrogant, Burton’s right; then lashing pride and determination to be more arrogant; annoying pity for an old man who’s past it, thrown on the junkyard of theatre history; and misery, and powerlessness.
Flat out running, now, power of the legs at least, following the blue dot on the screen he checks every few seconds. Almost through the park, and she’s still not visible. There’s the other leg of the divided road—where the fuck is she?
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