Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  L jumps up to sit on the counter. “Sheridan Tooley was hanging around waiting for his ride to Toronto—what a poser that guy is, even more now that he’s got a gig. I showed him the costumes on your Instagram and Sheridan goes, I don’t have Instagram, I’m off the grid.”

  “He doesn’t even know what that means.” Jason scorns both Luddites and posers.

  Hugh hands the poster back. “Nothing wrong with that,” he says, going with them to the door. Rain dashes down, making endlessly reborn, re-widening circles on the rain-soaked sidewalks. Jason and L stand looking out, forlorn and skinny, overburdened with neoprene, until Hugh offers them a ride. A reason not to go to the hospice.

  At Jason’s house, he goes in with them out of habit.

  They dart up the stairs, nothing but a floating Thanks! behind them.

  Well, of course. It’s not like he’s a friend of theirs. Too bad it was Jason who had to go home. At L’s house, he could go down and look again at her—what is it?—installation. He wants and doesn’t want to think about it. About what he ought to be doing, talking to Gareth Pindar about getting her in to his gallery. Stop thinking. The paint smell is strong in here.

  Hugh stands there, blank-headed, in the living room.

  Seems like there’s a lot of stuff he isn’t allowed to think about. His head hurts.

  Where’s Ann? He hasn’t seen her for a while, he should at least say hello.

  The empty house rings. She’s gotten rid of a shitload of stuff, you could swing a lion in here. The vacant walls make his eyes yearn for something to rest on. A line of black squiggles, there, snaking along the top of the freshly white mantel, down the line of wood to the white baseboards. Step closer:

  no lies no lies no lies no lies no lying no lies no more lying no lies none no lies no lies no lies no

  Black Sharpie, looks like. Small printing. It takes a while for the shape of the words to resolve into sense. No lies. He and Ann haven’t talked about anything but Jason for years. He wonders why Jack left, what he was lying about. Just the girlfriend?

  A noise, light tap of shoes: Ann, back. Hugh’s thoughts feel as loud as words. He turns to the window to hide them.

  “I’ve been clearing the space,” Ann says behind him. “Energizing.”

  “I like the—the—space,” Hugh says, wanting to cheer her up without entangling himself in responsibility for her cheerfulness, or for Jason’s safety. Except he feels sorry for Jason, because Jack is an asshat. “It’s elegant. Suits you.”

  She almost, almost smiles. “I needed a change. This whole house, just me and Jason? So I took a boarder. I gave her our old room, with the ensuite.”

  Does that our mean hers and Jack’s, or hers and Hugh’s? Because this house, this place was his and Ann’s once, thirty years ago. Twenty-five, even. That wide, low-ceilinged, open-windowed bedroom was their room. Her hand on the slanted ceiling over the bed, pressing there as they made love. He shuts his inner eye.

  “I haven’t slept in there since Jack left anyway,” Ann says. She’s staring at him. Her eyes like hooks. Seeing that same moment? A shudder passes over his mind: that she might, she might be thinking—she could not be thinking that they could, that she and Hugh could … that you can sometimes pick things up, old loves. Or you think Hugh can.

  “Good, good,” he says inanely, to no point at all, trying not to be unkind. “Good to get yourself some company.” He is as big an ass as Jack.

  There’s a space of silence. “Nobody loves me now,” Ann says.

  Oh for pity’s—for fuck’s sake. Hugh’s inner eye sees a black-and-white photo of his mother, shadows of bare branches on her dress, lying in a chaise longue in the backyard at the house here in Peterborough. Although you can’t see it in the photo, a word bubble comes out of her mouth: Nobody loves me now.

  A tear falls out of one of Ann’s diamond-shaped, diamond-sharp eyes. Unfair—she’s been a brittle barb for years and years, and now she’s vulnerable? But she’s got a Sharpie in her hand. She flicks the tears away and kneels to write along the baseboard:

  Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences. Isadora Duncan

  Watching the angular script form, Hugh thinks, what’s Jason doing with all this?

  I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. Martha Gellhorn

  You do not owe him anything, Hugh tells himself.

  I saw that nothing was permanent. You don’t want to possess anything that is dear to you, because you might lose it. Yoko Ono

  Okay, maybe some—not responsibility exactly, but some—fellow feeling. Jason could have been his son. Interiorly, Hugh debates. Let him have the spare room at the gallery.

  “Why don’t you guys, you and Jason, come to dinner on Saturday?” he asks Ann, wishing he was not asking her. “It’s Della and Ken’s thirtieth anniversary—you know, the dinner I do for them every year.”

  Ann is crying now. Her pale lips clamp, an effort of control. “Yeah, sure, fun,” she says. Six or seven pulled Kleenexes lie on the floor beside the baseboard. She blows her nose with one, then pots it into the empty fireplace grate. “I’ll bring champagne.”

  “No need to—” Okay. “Maybe flowers?”

  She blows again, the small, pointed nose he knows as well as his own. “Yes, yes, great! A big bouquet of blood-red roses to celebrate their wonderful constancy and love. Why didn’t I think of that myself?” Her voice is rising, pitching, as Jason runs down the stairs, L beside him. “I love to celebrate the longevity of marriage, the faithful fucking husband.”

  Jason heads for the front door. Not to run away. He holds the door to let L and Hugh escape; with a courteous little salute, he shuts it behind them.

  Hugh stands outside the door for a moment, unable to turn from the spectacle of his own adolescence replayed; then he walks down to stand with L by the van. They’re silent, listening to what might be going on inside the house.

  After a while L asks, in a quiet voice, “Couldn’t she just Facebook all those quotes?”

  7. ARE HUGH MY MOTHER?

  Ivy gets home early. At the master class Burton went straight to work with surprisingly little bombast, assigning scenes: all young lovers and Sweeney. He gave Ivy a fairy-wand wave: “Goodnight sweet prince, stand not upon the order of your going, when shall we three meet again? Two tomorrow, the drama lounge.”

  Dismissed. Perfect. Home by four, with time to wash her hair.

  But Ann is in the living room. Paint pot in hand, uncapped Sharpie abandoned on the floorboards, she is frescoing the stair wall with a small brush. She reminds Ivy of the paperback cover of Famous Last Words, the Findley book where the guy writes his tale all over the wall. A tale that was, as she recalls, a sordid tabloid royalty-gay-BDSM exposé. That can’t be fair, she thinks, I’ll have to go back to that one—Mottyl the Cat in I of O’s psychedelic Not Wanted on the Voyage being her favourite role ever, after all. The play, the movie, and ten years later the opera. I was famous, once. Back then.

  Ann straightens up and smiles politely, vaguely. Black lines of text run along the walls.

  “May I read?”

  Ann nods, and stands back, almost shy. She tucks in a strand of hair and the brush stripes her cheek with black. The first is standard-issue feminist rhetoric:

  When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. Adrienne Rich

  Oy. It’s going to be a long month.

  The second is odder:

  Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow,

  A herb most bruised is woman. Euripides, Medea

  The last one (at least, the one Ann has just finished) makes Ivy laugh: a pair, written on the doors of the cupboard under the stairs, so the two are framed together.

  The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a wom
an want?” Sigmund Freud

  I want to drink your blood. Dracula

  A laugh spurts out before Ivy gets her guard up, but it’s all right. Ann lets slip a short, tart smile. “I’m being filmed this weekend for a magazine. My decorative aesthetic,” she says, smile growing though she tries to stay cool. “Challenging the hierarchy through minimalism.”

  It would be kind to sit on the floor, to enter into the spirit of all this and help Ann look up quotes (as she evidently has been, laptop open on the empty floorboards). But Ivy wants to keep herself to herself. To stay open to Hugh, just for tonight, in case. In case there’s something, some quiet, blue, Bunsen-burner flame that might have been lit.

  “I got off early, I’m going out for dinner—I thought I’d take a shower?”

  Ann’s face goes blank. “It’s your bathroom,” she says. She kneels again.

  A breeze. Ivy turns to shut the front door tight, but it’s someone coming in. A tall woman with deep-set vivid eyes high up in a long, kind face. From the party last night. “Hey, Ann,” the woman says.

  Ann gives her a cool look and carries on with her paint pot.

  To Ivy, the woman says, “I’m Della Belville.” Her dark hair slips from a low-knotted chignon, too calm a style for the disorder she carries: restless eyes, the suspicion of a tic. But kind, yes. “You gave my daughter, Elle, a lift last night?”

  “Oh, L! She’s lovely.”

  “I think so too! Friends for life, then,” Della says, taking Ivy’s hand.

  Ann shifts along the line of writing, then grunts and rocks back from her knees. “Shit, I knelt on the Sharpie. Shit, that hurts.”

  Della goes to look at the lettering on the wall. She reads in silence, no reaction on her face. Like an art teacher, Ivy thinks, waiting till she has seen before she speaks. The contrast between Della’s exterior face (stable, thoughtful) and her perfectly visible interior self (torn, wild-eyed, mobile) fascinates Ivy.

  “Nice,” Della says, in the considering way that makes a student keep working. “Love the Dracula. And the Medea.” She turns to look at Ann, takes a breath. “But you’re not actually bleeding, right? Or a ‘herb most bruised’?”

  Oh dear. Tension. Ivy makes a delicate move for the stairs. Della sees and nods, releasing her; Ivy nods too, and is up the first flight almost instantly. That acquired gift for going.

  Ann sits up on her heels. “Don’t—”

  “Because Jason …” Della says. Dogged, intent.

  “Don’t,” Ann says again.

  Ivy rounds the landing bend and vanishes. But at Della’s next words she stands still, halfway up to the second floor, curiosity wrestling with cowardice.

  “I can’t help but think of Hugh’s mother.”

  Silence.

  “Seeing you down there, so taken up with the work. A bit obsessed.”

  “Shut up,” Ann says. There’s movement—Ann getting up?

  “I’m just saying,” Della says. “Let me know, I’ll get Conrad to do a house call.”

  “Don’t.”

  “The thing is, Jason looks like death on two sticks. Last night at the party I thought, now who does he remind me of? Oh, right—Hugh, when he was a kid.”

  Ivy sits on the bare wooden step, very quiet. Hearing Della’s deep, unemotional voice break higher—crack, almost, with the effort to be calm—Ivy holds her knees to keep the papercloth skirt still. Taking (forgive me, God) acting notes, getting important clues to Hugh and the reason for his sad mouth.

  After a silent moment, Ann says in a reasonable voice, “That’s mean. Mimi’s crazy. I’m just, I’m just mad.”

  “I know.” Della half-relents. “And sad. I’m sorry, I know. But I think it’s time to cheer up. It’s hard on boys to see their mothers so sad—”

  “Quit saying that! You don’t know Jason, what’s happening with him. He’s fine.”

  “Elly’s worried about him. About you. I came to see if you’re okay.”

  “I’m good. I’ve got a magazine shoot on Saturday, I’m famous. I’m really so, so good.” Ann is losing the reasonable tone. Ivy leans forward to see down to the landing, to Ann’s hunched back, arms wrapped around herself, Sharpie clenched in one hand. Is she crying?

  “Funny,” Della says gently. “Because you don’t seem really good.”

  Into her elbow, muffled by her arm, Ann says, “Don’t say I’m like her.”

  Della sits close, touches Ann’s bone-sharp shoulder. “Honey, no, she was bananas half the time. You’re not crazy—that’s why I thought I could talk to you.”

  This is painful and private. Ivy ought to go away. And yet, fascinating. She stays put.

  Ann says, “She saw ghosts. I don’t.” Tears shine on her cheek.

  “Not necessarily ghosts.”

  “Visions, whatever. The people who would come and sit on her bed at night.”

  “I mean, not necessarily dead. People she knew, I think,” Della says, matter-of-factly. “They had parties in her room sometimes. Just dreams.”

  Ivy’s interested in this: the same thing happens to her from time to time. Visitors, she calls them to herself. She is careful not to mention them to others.

  Ann wipes her face with her sleeves. “Anyway, it scared the shit out of me. The whole time Hugh and I lived together, all four years, we only stayed with her once. She was shouting and walking around all night.”

  “Poor Mimi. She told me that the people asked her whether she wanted to live or die, and she said, I’ll live. But she had to keep remembering what the right answer was, each time.”

  “I’m not like her,” Ann says. “Not in every way.”

  “You’ve had a rough year.” Della is all warm good sense, one arm easing around to comfort Ann. “Jack’s a jerk, that’s all. You’re not wrecked,” she says, stable and kind. Ivy wants to lean on Della too for a while.

  Weeping, weeping, Ann says, “Hugh loves her so much.”

  “Yes, he does. You want Jason to love you like that, so it’s—a burden?”

  “No, no—I’m so much like her, though, I am. She was more my mother than my real mother ever was, and now she’s dying—” Ann bursts out again, real carrying-on sobs now. She catches herself back from hysterics and grabs one of the loose Kleenexes lying around on the floor. Which she provides herself with in advance because she knows she’s going to woo-hoo-hoo within a few minutes of settling anywhere. A sad, semi-freddo state of affairs.

  She blows her nose, and Ivy can see her strain away from Della’s kindness, brittling up again; but Della’s arm stays firm. “Honey, I hate to ask, but where’s all the furniture?”

  Ann says nothing. Then—this is strange—she laughs. “I’m just trying to figure out how to carry on here, and I’m not at all happy.”

  Ivy wants to laugh too, but at the same time she knows that state, that stretched-out time of not being at all happy, not ever, no matter how much cake you eat.

  “Nobody is,” Della says sadly.

  And that snaps Ann’s fragile temper. “Oh, fuck off.”

  Della straightens up herself, sits apart. Seems like she too felt a need for bracing. “For example, Ken—”

  But Ann is on her feet, and flying up the stairs. “I don’t want to hear a word about what Ken says, you wife!” she flings back at Della—and almost falls over Ivy, whose knees unfold too slowly to get out of the way.

  Ann grabs the banister to steady herself and stands, staring at Ivy. The pause, or the surprise, gives her back some poise. She calls lightly down to Della. “Or what you say either. Look at Ken. How happy is your own husband?”

  Self-contained again, she glides up the last steps and down to the end of the hall, to her new un-master bedroom; she does not even slam the door.

  Oh, impossible. Ivy hopes with all her heart that Della has not seen her hiding there. Humiliating, to be caught eavesdropping, and when she liked her so much, too. She hears Della clamber to her feet and stand, breathing, in the living room.

  On t
he stairs, Ivy stays still, waiting her out, invisible.

  8. HUGH’S SORRY NOW

  It has to be done, but Hugh can’t make himself shut up the gallery and walk over to Burton’s. To Newell’s, he corrects himself. But no: Newell’s place no longer.

  He hates Burton. The feeling shocks him. Come on. He’s just an old guy, just an old—

  An old molester. Stop. You can’t keep thinking like this unless you’re planning to do something about it. And there is nothing to be done.

  A relief to see Della climb the steps, one hand rising automatically to stop the bell from tinkling. “Hey,” she says. “I thought you might still be here.”

  “It’s like you’re psychic,” he says, his mood improved. Della gives him the opposite of the heebie-jeebies. Her eyes are red, but she seems to be over her earlier spasm of sadness, or whatever drove her away from the teenage costume try-on. Is Ken being a jackass? Then Hugh will have to punch him too, which would be sad because he likes Ken.

  “Thanks for proofing the flyer text,” Della says, giving him a sideways look, a fond horse, examining.

  “Come for a walk?” he asks her.

  “At your service,” she says. “Elle’s out with her peeps and Ken’s still away.”

  “But not dinner.”

  “No, so I gather. Ruth tells me,” she says, lightly, “that you are having dinner with Mrs. Lovett. Some people might hesitate.”

  “She’s not doing the cooking,” he says.

  “I met her. She seems very nice.”

  “That’s tepid.”

  “Just careful of you, that’s all. Assessing the minefield.”

  “How did Ken’s rappelling go?” (Speaking of minefields, Hugh thinks.)

  “I guess they’d have told me if he fell off the cliff.” Her tone, her face, precludes chat re: Ken. “How’s Mimi today?”

  “Pretty good, we talked about you, the piano—then she went to pieces.”

  “I’ll go over at dinnertime, keep her company.”