Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  Copyright © 2015 Marina Endicott

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Endicott, Marina, 1958-, author

  Close to Hugh / Marina Endicott.

  ISBN 978-0-385-67860-5 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-385-67862-9

  (pbk.).–ISBN 978-0-385-67861-2 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8559.N475H85 2014  C813′.6  C2013-906368-4

  C2013-906369-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images: (ladder) Aleksangel/Shutterstock.com;

  (leaves) HelenStock/Shutterstock.com

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  for Will and Rachel

  everything always is

  Deep in fall,

  my neighbour—

  how does he live, I wonder?

  BASHO

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Monday: Oh, the Hughmanity

  1. Hugh Can Take It

  2. Falling for Hugh

  3. Hugh Belong to Me

  4. Hugh will take Care of It

  5. If I were Hugh

  6. Guess Hugh’s Coming to Dinner

  7. I’ve Been Everywhere

  8. Hugh Gets Eaten

  9. I’ve told Every Little Star

  10. I Only have Eyes for Hugh

  11. Punch Hugh

  12. Hugh be the Judge

  Tuesday: Hugh made me love Hugh

  1. If It Makes Hugh Happy

  2. Hugh Can’t go Home Again

  3. Whirling Away from Hugh

  4. I Master the Class

  5. Call Hugh Later

  6. Ask me no Questions, I’ll Tell Hugh no Lies

  7. Are Hugh my Mother?

  8. Hugh’s Sorry Now

  9. I.O.Hugh

  10. I Put a Spell on Hugh

  11. Hugh Never Can Tell

  12. I’ll NEVER WALK ALONE

  13. Hugh Make Me Feel Brand New

  Wednesday: When Life Gives Hugh Lemons

  1. Hugh Can’t

  2. Hugh Can’t Do Everything

  3. I’ve Got Hugh Under My Skin

  4. Hugh Can’t Imagine

  5. Hugh Oughta Know By Now

  6. Can Hugh Feel It When I Do This?

  7. Hugh And I Both Know

  8. Hugh Make My Dreams Come True

  9. I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face

  10. Master Class: Desire

  11. Hugh And The Night And The Music

  12. I Want To Be Loved By Hugh

  13. Hugh Got To Hide Your Love Away

  14. All I Want Is Hugh

  Thursday: With Or Without Hugh

  1. Hughreka

  2. Every Time I Think Of Hugh I Go Blind

  3. Hugh Can Sleep When You’re Dead

  4. A Bone To Pick With Hugh

  5. I Don’t Want To Lose Hugh Now

  6. I Can’t Tell Hugh Why

  7. Hugh Can Lead A Horse To Water …

  8. A Case Of Hugh

  9. Master Class: Awakening

  10. I’m So In Love With Hugh

  11. Nothing Hugh Can Do

  12… . But Hugh Can’t Make Him Drink

  13. I’ll See Hugh In My Dreams

  Friday: Hughoooooooooo …

  1. I Saturated Hugh

  2. I Rest My Case

  3. Cry And The World Cries With Hugh

  4. If I Didn’t Have Hugh

  5. I Only Want To Be With Hugh

  6. How Is The World Treating Hugh?

  7. Master Class: What You Will

  8. Can’t Buy Hugh Love

  9. Hugh Has Got My Golden Arm

  10. I Get A Kick Out Of Hugh

  11. Hugh Say Party, I Say Die

  12. I Really Mean It

  13. If Hugh Can’t Stand The Heat, Get Out Of The Kitchen

  14. I Know Hugh Now

  15. I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire

  16. Hugh Knew

  17. Never Let Hugh Go

  Saturday: Hugh Can’T Take It With Hugh

  1. She Knows Hugh

  2. Whistle While Hugh Works

  3. Master Class: Earnest

  4. The Very Thought Of Hugh

  5. The Importance Of Being Hugh

  6. Master Class: Gorgon

  7. Fuck Hugh

  8. And The Horse Hugh Rode In On

  9. I Do It For Hugh

  10. All She Needs Is Hugh

  11. Hugh Can Have Your Cake And Eat It Too

  12. Find My Friends

  13. Hugh Will Rescue Me?

  Sunday: Hughtopia

  1. Hughthanasia

  2. Tender Flowers

  3. A Hughlogy

  4. I Can’t Stand The Rain

  5. Hugh Can’t Let Go

  6. Mole End

  7. Hugh Alone

  8. Hugh Can’t Tell

  9. I’m Looking Through Hugh

  10. Hugh Remind Me Of A Lady

  11. If I Ever Lose My Faith In Hugh

  12. I Will Follow Hugh Into The Dark

  13. Whosetopia?

  14. Hugh And I

  15. Hughphoria

  Acknowledgements

  FORMATTING NOTE

  This title contains sections of poetry with special formatting. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in these sections:

  the light in her face under the skin when she talks with Nevaeh, smiling as

  To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  dukkha, suffering,

  or better, a basic unsatisfactoriness

  that pervades all of life.

  entry on Buddhism,

  WIKIPEDIA

  1. HUGH CAN TAKE IT

  You can bear pain. Hugh can. But you can’t stand to see it in others. It makes your hands and feet hurt. The grey room is full of grey people in various stages of pain. A little party: grouped by the window, sitting on the bed, ten or twelve of them. A woman kneeling by the nightstand says, It’s all up to you, up to Hugh. Her cloudy hair, her dress in tatters. No.

  No. It’s a dream.

  Eyes open.

  Light? No. Three a.m. 3:02.

  Okay.

  3:07.

  Hugh can bear pain. For himself it’s not so bad, sometimes he doesn’t even notice it. Hard when it’s someone you can’t help, though. Your mother. Cloudy h
air all wisps and tendrils now. No. Don’t think about Mimi, her hands, the pale phosphorescent skin of her chest, her searching eyes.

  If you had a child, could you stand that? There’s a question for you, for Hugh: why didn’t you have a child? Okay, Ann had that abortion in the eighties. But that was somebody else’s baby, Hugh is pretty sure. By then Ann was disconnecting herself from him by connecting with a few other people. You couldn’t blame her, it was the times; women felt they had to be libertines in order to be liberated, and there was a fair amount of cocaine going around. He walked in on Ann once, having sex with some guy on a pile of coats at a party. Humiliating, titillating, to see her riding a set of naked limbs. Lots of reasons for shame. Hugh never even saw who it was—the guy pulled a coat over his face against the sudden light, and Hugh turned and left. That tawdry little pain hits again, a bee-sting of stupidity.

  Why remember things at all.

  Hugh lies in the dark, listening to the night’s last rain falling straight into the basement of the gallery he lives above. Where valuable things are stored, furniture and boxes he ought to have moved, other people’s art. He’s tired of rain and basements and responsibility.

  Della and Ken for dinner on Saturday, with Ruth—he should ask Newell too, but can’t bear the burden of Burton, Newell’s house guest. Della and Ken: that’s a mess.

  Think of something else: what to make for Ruth? Trivial, tepid, time-taking thought, a treat for old Ruth. She likes seafood crêpes. Okay, not rolled, but stacked like layer cake. Frozen crab, not that reeking stuff from the truck they had last time. Fresh? Liars! said Ruth.

  The first time he was sent to live with her, four years old, confused, he thought they said to call her Aunt Truth. Newell waiting with him, waiting for their mothers to come back: two boys side by side at the long white table, watching Ruth laugh as she stood stirring at the stove, laughing at something Jasper said. Jasper flirting in his peacocky shirt, gesturing with his glass—he didn’t even drink too much, back then. When was that? 1969. Warm and safe in Ruth’s foster-kitchen, those boys, backs against fake ivy-covered bricks on washed-clean vinyl wallpaper. Ivy in pots too, growing, growing, shining green, kind and clean.

  Almost asleep again, Hugh wakes. Clean towels, nobody lying, nobody angry, nobody going off the rails. Della waiting with them too, the next year, after her mother’s breakdown. At the kitchen table, Della making a sandwich: square cheese, square white bread. The only thing she would eat at Ruth’s. That time, anyway.

  Ken didn’t float into view till they were in university. Floating out again now? Doozy of an anniversary dinner, if so.

  Yesterday at their house, Della was playing the piano. Hugh’s mother’s piano, already moved out of what will be, has to be—what turns out to have been her last apartment.

  No. Go back. Yesterday, Hugh stood at the bottom of the short flight of stairs in Ken and Della’s front hall, listening. Suspended rippling phrases. Schumann? Getting good again, now she has Mimi’s Steinway. Della staring at the music, head tilted; the face of a dear horse, the same since childhood. From that low angle through the banisters, he could see her daughter, Elle, lying under the grand piano, painting Della’s toenails with bright pink polish.

  His empty life. Della and her daughter.

  The woman and her little son; the funeral in the morning.

  Hugh has pretty much stopped sleeping. He naps in the evening, put down by half a bottle of wine; wakes at midnight. Up for a few hours, naps again around four a.m. The phone alarm shouts him up at six. Every morning he thinks, behind glued-shut eyelids, you should change that setting. Every morning he lies there saying no, no. You have to get up.

  There’s the gallery to attend to.

  At night the apartment above the gallery is a ship in fog, a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. Wooden shelves and floors, plank deck stretched out over the framing room roof at the back, overhung by trees. In the early morning it’s a form of tree-burial, and he gets out fast.

  The espresso machine stands by the sink in the framing room. He gimps down the back stairs on stiff bare feet, pokes the button. A grinding noise. The red light blinks: out of water. Always something. The stupid thing cost more than a fridge, and now he has to keep filling it up. He takes the latte (milk only faintly sour) to his desk and sits staring at the earth’s crust of bills, papers, orders. Dusty red files with pathetic labels like NOW! or DO THIS WEEK.

  He has to get moving. At least get dressed. The sun has come out. At FairGrounds, the coffee shop next door, a shining young girl is whacking mats against the porch post, sending dust whirling up into a devil. Della’s Elle? Or one of the friends. She can’t see into the gallery, he hasn’t turned on the lights. But he can see her shadow perfectly: a perfect shadow. Elle, yes. Aureole of pale hair in sunrise, sunrays. Another one joins her—they lean on the railing, nymphs just out of the larval stage. The other one is dark, makes Elle look like a negative. Savannah—no, this one’s Nivea, Nevaya, something invented—it’s Nevaeh (middle name Lleh ha ha). One kisses the other’s cheek. Their limbs are long like the lines of broom and rail. Diagonals, perpendiculars.

  Della will be in soon to thrash out the text for January’s class poster. Kids’ classes, et cetera, Introduction to Watercolours. Okay, but Ian Mighton’s collage master class starts next week—get the flyer finished for that. Hugh himself is doing Self-Portrait, again.

  And the funeral is at ten.

  Well, that’s okay, he hardly knew the woman. The little boy, though. Sad.

  The empty room, the cup in front of him, his feet on the worn boards, the blinding window hiding him safe from view, his hermit shell upstairs: Hugh feels dizzy, as if the building is his mind, as if the whole world around him—the dead woman and her little son, Mighton coming, Della’s Elle, non-Elle Nevaeh—all these who ought to be tangible are only instances of his ingenious mind inventing ways to occupy itself.

  Last night until it rained he lay out on the deck above the framing room, wrapped in the old afghan Ruth made, under shifting shadows of branches, imagining a painting he will never paint. He can still see, or sense, it: the scale of it, the intricacy of the thinking. But he will not be able to execute it in paint or in collage, or by the xeroxing of the great.

  The coffee is gone, it’s eight. Get dressed. Grey tie, jacket.

  Ruth’s stomp on the front step, her key in the lock. Hugh is already hidden, hurrying halfway up the stairs. Can’t bring himself to call out good morning.

  The funeral, okay. Time to go. Here’s Della, climbing the gallery steps in her good black coat, bright paisley lining firmly unrevealed. Sober, not distressed; black chiffon wrapped round her neck, black hair bound up above it. Fine funereal turnout, for someone they hardly knew. Two years of Saturday parent/child painting classes—the mother seemed very nice.

  “Such a bright little spark, Toby,” Della says. “He’d try anything. Not even five yet. Never minded glue on his hands, as some do.” Her expressive face falls into a clowning sadness, but not to mock. She pulls her coat sleeve across the morning-dusty counter, then slaps at the sleeve. “Ken can’t come—he’s team-building, a couple of days rappelling down Elora Gorge or some fool thing.”

  Uncomfortable, knowing more than she does, Hugh doesn’t answer.

  He flips the sign to Back Soon and locks the door. Ruth has run over to the Mennonite Clothes Closet to check on the coat she wants; they’ll go on ahead. It’s okay, there are no customers.

  “How did Gerald find them, did you hear?” Della asks Hugh as they go stride for stride.

  “Ruth says he came home from work and opened the garage door as usual. The groceries were still in the back of the car. Melted ice cream.”

  “She never seemed anything but cheerful, in class.”

  Hugh tries to remember the woman. Brown hair, worried eyes, a tidy little bundle in the back of the classroom, a fond hand on her son’s head.

  “They were old,” Della says. “She was nearly fifty. They
tried for ages to have Toby, Gerald told me once. He looks terrible, I saw him in Lucky Foods yesterday, wandering the aisles.”

  “Ruth cleaned for them—she says it was postpartum, only it never stopped.”

  “Gerald had no idea, none in the world.”

  “You know him outside of class?”

  “We bought the car from him last year, I guess that counts. And he came to class, about half the time. He was so proud of the shared parenting thing. She’s from—she was from Iowa. Missed her family, maybe? Or just tired of always coping …”

  They turn up Oak Street.

  Della slides her hand through Hugh’s arm. “It might have been an accident … She gets home from shopping and stops for a little nap, forgetting all about carbon monoxide. I did it myself, when Elly was little—sat in the car for a while when we got home, because she was asleep and I knew if I took her out of the carseat she’d wake up and start crying. We just didn’t have a garage to get gassed in—”

  She breaks off as they join a small stream of walkers funnelling into the churchyard. Leaning closer to Hugh, she whispers, “He was such a nice little boy. Not difficult at all.”

  Inside the church Gerald lurches down the aisle, huge in a grey suit, the too-friendly salesman’s cheer ironed out of his eyes. Sedated, Hugh supposes.

  Gerald kisses Della’s cheek, shakes hands. “It would mean so much to her that Hugh came,” he tells Della.

  Hooked on his own name, Hugh’s ear checks, then fixes his error: the poor man only said “that you came.”

  But his mind sticks on it as he follows Della along a pew. How much would it mean to her? Did she close the garage door thinking, This will be good, Hugh will come. They’ll all come to the church, Gerald will be such a great host …

  Stop. They don’t know that she did it on purpose. Maybe she was just tired. Drove into the garage and dozed; didn’t sit there thinking, I can’t, I cannot do this anymore. Maybe she was not in terrible, terrible pain, the kind of pain that cannot be endured, the kind that you beg your son for release from, over and over.

  (DELLA)

  over the lawn beside the gallery (last shadows of last leaves shudder in