Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  In her hollowed-out, hallowed-up bedroom, the empty space, the holy, Ivy sits on the bed for a little while—planning, in spite of herself, what to put on the empty shelves.

  Next, back to the school office to sign forms and get keys. She walks along reading Arms and the Man, for relief from Sweeney Todd. A car horn blats beside her, and she jumps.

  It’s the school principal—Rosy, Jeep, Cherry—Jerry Pink. “Want a lift?”

  “Oh, thanks,” Ivy says. “That would be—perfect.” She feels sad to leave the leaf-strewn sidewalk. “Pretty town,” she says, with some idea of flattering Mr. Pink by extension.

  “Full of divorcées.” Eyes on her, not on the road. He laughs. “You always read a book while you’re walking? Better not let our parents see you doing that.”

  Ivy does not need to ask why not: it looks weird. She doesn’t mind.

  “Party at my house tonight, after Meet the Teacher—we hand out the teaching awards from last year. Newell is coming, and the great Ansel Burton, all you drama types. Come along and get acquainted. I’ll send a kid to pick you up.”

  He swings into the drive by the portables. Pats her leg, staring to see if that causes trouble. Ivy stares back at him using her Downs’ syndrome face, borrowed from her last gig, an interactive improv workshop production for the differently abled, one of the best things she’s ever done in her life. I am completely unaware of you as a man, and therefore not prey, her face says. Plus, see? I am ugly. She steps out of the car.

  He laughs again. “No more reading books while you walk!” he shouts as he pulls away.

  The world is so full of men, no wonder there are so many divorcées.

  Ivy walks home in the late afternoon. A long walk in sprinkling rain; she should have taken her car after all. The woman (Ann, Ann is her name; and Jay?—no, the son is Jason) is moving a big armoire out of the living room. The last piece of furniture left in there. With a mat under one end, Ann is yanking it along foot by foot.

  Ivy can’t get up the stairs until the thing is shifted. “Do you need help?”

  “I learned how after the divorce,” Ann says. “You can move anything you want to by yourself.”

  “Where are you putting it?”

  “Out.”

  Ivy steadies the other end and pushes. Not too much, so she’s not butting in and helping. They make some headway.

  The son—Jason, yes—blows in like leaves drifting through the front door. He slides through the armoire gap and up the stairs, completely silent, dragging a gym bag, a naked dressmaker’s judy, and two neon-orange puffed down jackets. The kind that make Ivy look like a cozy beach ball.

  “I cleaned out a shelf of the fridge for you,” his mother says.

  Jason ignores her, rounds the stair-turn, vanishes. Are he and Ann not talking? Oh, wait—she means for Ivy, for her food. Ivy has not bought any yet.

  “Where’s the store?”

  “Three blocks west to the Lucky Dollar, or drive to the mall for Superstore.”

  “I’ll shop tomorrow,” Ivy says. Feeling forlorn.

  “Eat with us tonight, if you want.”

  Ann is not asking very nicely, but Ivy says thanks, perfect—then goes up to her room to look at her empty shelves. The lovely emptiness, bare wood, clean walls. So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen. The thought of her apartment, and its tenant, makes her feel sad and sick.

  When Ann calls up the stairs, “Dinner! Jason?” there’s no answer from the boy’s room. Ivy sticks her head out into the hall and waits. Smells like spaghetti down there.

  No response, nothing.

  “Jason!” Ann’s voice comes shrilling up again. Then, “Ivy? Will you tell him dinner? He’s got his headphones on.”

  Ivy slips down the hall and knocks on Jason’s door, too lightly. Again, louder, to penetrate the headphones. Still nothing.

  She hesitates, not wanting to find him in an embarrassing situation, then turns the knob and opens it into a blizzard of white, a floating storm of airy nothing swirling away from the door’s gust of air. Jason gapes, delighted, head up and mouth open as if to catch a snowflake of down.

  “It just—it just—!” He pulls the white lines and pops his earbuds out, trying to tell her.

  “Exploded?”

  “Explo—! I just, I slid the knife—” He motions with an X-Acto knife along the orange nylon of a jacket, and another eddy of down swoops up in the breeze the motion makes. “I didn’t know—I didn’t think it would do this!”

  For the first time he looks alive. Down begins to settle on his dark mink hair, on the brightness of his suddenly open face, and Ivy cannot help but be uplifted.

  8. HUGH GETS EATEN

  Hugh walks over to Meet the Teacher with Newell and Burton, although it nearly kills him. Strung up with the strain of dinner and Newell’s announcement, he finds it hard to endure Burton’s self-important spiel to the drama students’ parents, all seeking reassurance that the master class is worth the after-school hours and the two hundred dollar fee. A précis of the brilliance of Sondheim, the use of Stanislavskian ensemble in musical theatre, tra la la, history of Burton’s brilliance, theatres he’s graced, actors privileged to have worked under him, more on Burton’s brilliance. Questions?

  Parent after parent stands to ask if their offspring will have a significant role, or a solo, apparently not listening to Burton’s repetitive ramble re: emphasis on company, collaborative philosophy, exploratory work, and “nothing set in stone.”

  Newell is not contracted, except as eye candy, for this parent event. Once he’s been introduced, and has waved and grinned for the crowd, he slides away and stands with Hugh in the shadows by the back wall. Just like junior high. “He’s happy,” Newell says.

  “In his element,” Hugh says. It’s hard, but vital, not to sulk.

  “You surprised?”

  What can you say to that? Hugh tries, “I hadn’t realized he was looking for a harbour.” Even that sounds petulant.

  Newell leans closer. “He’s had a rough couple of years. His lover, a—well, they went to Bali for treatment, but it didn’t work. Not AIDS, some kind of cancer.”

  Hugh assumes that Newell helped to finance that.

  “It went very badly at the end and they were stuck there because, oh you know, all the shit and horrors. He died in June. It was a fish cure or something spiritual.”

  Newell’s brown leather bomber jacket smells good. Old, real, like himself. The Hermès cologne nobody else wears. Alexander the Great also smelled good, apparently. After he died men fought over his clothes. At least, so Plutarch says. Newell is fastidious and definite about his person, but not vain; the cleanest human being Hugh’s ever known.

  “Anyway. He’s happy now.” Newell knocks the wood panel behind them.

  Hugh ought to have said that. He ought to agree with it. His teeth are bothering him; his tongue searches for a lodged scrap of wagyu beef.

  At last, speeches over, they proceed to Principal Pink’s palace. The streets are dark, heading into the older, richer neighbourhood along the riverbank. Cold late October wind cuts the evening air and from time to time Hugh catches a gold leaf falling from the maples overhead. It’s quiet here, empty, Monday night.

  He ought to be with Mimi at the hospice. Turn left at this corner.… But he trudges straight along anyway, beside or behind Newell and Burton.

  Mincing on subtly heeled boots, zipped up tight in an unbecoming black leather jacket (which—here’s one consolation—is too ill-chosen to have been a gift from Newell), Burton is elevated, excited to be the Master of the Class. His old conceited self, only more so. Burton sucks up intimacy. It’s not enough for him to walk with his arm through Newell’s, he has to be in on every moment of conversation, vitally involved, or else he pouts and pulls away—but he pouts without letting go that arm, so Newell still has to soothe him. All the walks with Burton Hugh can remember. When they were boys at drama camp, Burton the Artist in Residence. Even then. Burton in th
ose days gleaming, hard-bodied, like a shining tropical turtle, knowing and talented and bold, on his way up. Before the Public, and the thing at Yale.

  “The history of the world, my sweet, oh, Mr. Todd, ooh, Mr. Todd,” Burton carols, crack-tenored, zimming along the leaf-strewn sidewalk, “is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat!” He skips. “Won’t we have a magnificent month,” he says, clasping Newell’s arm tighter as they turn up the walk of a large Victorian house.

  Pink’s place: peach paint, picked out in peony, and yellow gingerbread.

  Hugh stays out on the veranda for a few minutes, hoping his temper will cool down. It’s hard not to think that Burton ought to be killed. But of course that’s not a useful thought, so you stop yourself. Hugh stops.

  9. I’VE TOLD EVERY LITTLE STAR

  Jason goes to answer the doorbell, bowl of spaghetti in hand. Ivy guesses he doesn’t dare put it down or his mother will clean it away. He looks like he never gets enough to eat.

  A boy he calls Orion comes back with him. Orion is courteous, explains himself: sent to escort Ivy to the drama party. He must be one of them. Touchingly good-looking, in an unfinished, over-exposed way. Flax-blond hair cut over his ears to odd effect. A princeling.

  “Orion, like the constellation?” He nods, politely patient, and Ivy is sorry she asked. She might have joked about his belt; that would have been worse.

  All the boys are tall these days, she feels like a pigeon walking among them. But having recently realized, at the age of forty-six, that she looks like Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, she decides to feel good about that. A jewelled pigeon on a mild strut.

  Jason tells his mother, “We’re supposed to help at Pink’s for work experience.”

  “Oh.” Ann looks put out. “I guess. I’ll pick you up at nine.”

  “Might be later. Elle’s going too.”

  “You have a bio quiz tomorrow.”

  “Ten.”

  Ivy finds this telegraph bargaining fascinating: the longest stretch of words she has yet heard them exchange. Ann concedes. Her head bows over her spaghetti. She twines two strands on her fork, threading round, round, round, without lifting it to her mouth.

  Jason flies up the stairs. Ivy follows, needing a better coat. Not for warmth, for armour. Ansel Burton doesn’t like her, and besides, he’s crazy, maybe even psychotic. Newell is kind, but only an acquaintance. Not a night she’s looking forward to. Not a month she’s looking forward to. But the four thousand bucks, yes—more godsend than windfall. And the solitude. She could stay up in the empty room, say she’s sick. A migraine. She closes the closet door on her few things and looks around at the nothing that is not there. The nothing that is.

  Three teenagers fill the car, a battered Civic hatchback, pretty much to bursting. Jason gives her a quick glance as she opens the door; the other two stare straight ahead. The young know: eye contact contaminates.

  “Perfect—so, I think I’ll take my own car,” Ivy says. “I’ll follow you.”

  All three of them nod. Then the girl in the front (Elle?) unfolds herself, plucks a bag from between the seats, and scrambles out. “I’ll go with you, so you don’t get lost.”

  More good manners. Ivy is a bit surprised, but nods. “I’m Ivy Sage,” she says.

  “I know,” the girl says. “I’m L. The letter L.” She looks around for the car.

  Ivy points to her very old Volvo, slumped beside Ann’s new Subaru. “Are you wearing anything precious?”

  L looks down to check her clothes. “Guess not,” she says. But she is in unrelieved black.

  “Because the dog hair is dreadful. I have to get it cleaned out. I was dog-sitting all summer and I still haven’t faced up to it.”

  After a look at the fur-snowed seat, L takes off her black wool coat and puts it on inside out, cream satin lining gleaming in the streetlight. She waves to the boys and slides, or satin-glides, in beside Ivy.

  “The letter L, that’s unusual.”

  L looks blank. Bored? Ivy can’t tell. She snaps her seatbelt buckle, waits for L to snap hers. They trundle off in convoy down the street, and L’s nice manners reassert themselves. “My mother—her name’s Della—called me Ella, as in Cinder, but that seemed like an error in judgement, so then for a while she said I was named after Elle Macpherson. Which is crazy. I used to say it was El, short for Electra.”

  “At least in the morning,” Ivy quips. Then, at L’s raised eyebrow, “Mourning Becomes Electra, a play I did when I was young. Never mind.” Sad to be old, Ivy thinks. Nobody gets her jokes. Well, they are not good jokes. She drives.

  L points. “Down here, left at the lights—so anyway, my mother’s crazy.” She gives an indulgent hoot for her crazy mother. (Ivy laughs too, in honour of her own.) “So we sent away to have it changed officially, but it turns out she never registered me properly at the hospital, so I’m Baby Girl Belville. Talk about a stripper name. I’m tempted to leave it like that.”

  “Well, yes! Are you in drama?” she asks L.

  “Orion is. Jason and I are painting the sets. We’re in visual.”

  Too bad. Ivy needs a few friends. Burton is such a weasel. Four thousand bucks.

  “That’s the house,” L says. A big old pillared place, front porch bulging out. Too many cars already parked along the street. Orion zips the Civic into a dubious spot, half-over someone’s driveway.

  Ivy pauses for L to hop out, saying, “You go in with the guys. I’ll find a spot.” She drives happily down the block into the dark. A few extra minutes before she has to be public.

  (L)

  “Maybe she needs to toke up or something hippie,” Orion says, watching the tail lights of the Volvo diminish. “Chew nicotine gum. Chant.”

  “Light a sweetgrass, do a mantra, man.”

  The boys think they are very funny. “I like her,” L says.

  “Ivy, though?” Jason says. “Like, Soulcalibur.” Orion laughs, loud in the darkness.

  L bats at the dog hair on her coat lining and turns it right side out. Black again, she climbs the half-moon porch steps, not kicking the pumpkins all to hell, though that would feel good.

  Orion and Jason trip along behind her on big feet, gawky. L is so glad not to be male.

  Newell Fane is coming, he’s probably already there. She doesn’t want the flutter in her belly when she thinks about him, it’s juvenile. She’s always known him, he’s best friends, like, brother and sister with her mom and Hugh; there’s nothing to flutter about. There he is, Newell, haloed in the hall light. His hair. But it’s his eyes, tired and kind, that kill her. Knows all your flaws and loves you anyway. He’s like thirty years older than she is, plus actually gay, everybody knows, although he doesn’t make a public deal of it. But that doesn’t always—look at Orion. Gay, except that Savaya experiment. And look at Savaya. It’s a continuum, a spectrum, a raiiin-bow connection, right. Anyway she herself probably likes Nevaeh best of anybody, but that doesn’t mean you don’t flutter flutter flutter. The problem of love. She starts a butterfly thing in her mind, a paper thing, mobile, to work with the ladies in pots from the Voynich, fluttering from their chrysalides to the light-haloed, shadow-eyed face of him.

  Hugh’s hanging around on the veranda, as if he didn’t want to go in. But it’s cold. Hugh hugs her, then Jason. He salutes Orion, who’s been in pretty much every art class Hugh ever gave. Jason too, and L, because of not taking her mom’s classes. Every class for ten years, ever since Hugh came back from wherever, some other life he’d been living. He is probably her mentor, if you have to give it a name. But she has not shown him the Republic.

  10. I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR HUGH

  Parked beside the pumpkin punchbowl, Hugh holds a half-glass cupped in his hand. Students and teachers hover, waiting for the old prank where some joker kid adds bottomless bottles of vodka. Maybe it’s already been done. You’d have to taste the punch to know, and Hugh can’t bear to. Such a headache. Can’t be the wine, must be the fall from the ladder this morning.
Stand up straight, man. You ought to head for the hospice. Or wait till the awards are over, then go. She won’t know Hugh, she’s been wandering in crazyland for days; harder to go there than to stand watching Newell’s progress around the room, with Burton as tug.

  Jason and Elle—unexpected treat, to see them here. Their set design, a painted cyc, a gobo London Bridge from die-cut Mylar: he takes their word for it. Elle says Della’s coming. Hugh feels some relief. Burton is easier to bear when there’s someone to mock him with.

  Here’s Jerry Pink. Tight, rose-tinged asshole that he is. Hugh wishes he was at home, climbing the wooden hill to his treetop house and pulling the stairs up after him, alone. It’s not lonely if you like being alone. Jerry Pink is all hail-fellow et cetera; Hugh endures it. The school gets their certificates framed at the Argylle Gallery and they won’t if Pink takes a pet. Pink is in plaid, he’s a joke of a guy. One arm round a student, Savaya or Nevaeh, Hugh can’t remember which the tall blonde one is. Pink’s other arm snakes out to snag a woman, a shortish, plumpish person. Thick eyebrows give her a look of surprise, or attention, when she turns her eyes on you. She turns her eyes on Hugh.

  A nice look, actually. That’s a nice face. Intelligent, sweet. Exotic but plain.

  This must be the I of O actor Newell brought in for the master class scene work. She looks back at him, straight back; their eyes focus and lock crosshairs, as if they were spy cameras. Actually seeing each other, on first meeting, in all this punch-drunk crowd.

  Ivy likes this person. His height and breadth fit the imaginary stencil in her mind: “Man.”

  Out of her league, of course, because she is dumpy and hidden and nobody ever knows her at first. She always has to translate herself, insert herself into people’s consciousness. Then they like her.

  But here, look: at first blow, first glance, this person, this man looks back at her and sees her true self. Nice.

  Then Burton, sensing something happening that he’s not in on, bustles over. “Eye, Vee.” he says, two words in all. He holds her off and looks her up and down. “How sweet. Mrs. Lovett as the Queen Mum.” That’s the worst of Burton—he has a sixth sense for everybody’s conceits. Ivy feels herself blushing. Or maybe this is a hot flash, because she is getting old, very old, it’s true.