“You’re kind. She— I’d be glad.” Hugh flips the sign and twists the key, and they walk along the early evening street in good companionship, through the misty air.
“I was at Ann’s this afternoon,” Della says. “Interfering.”
“Hard to imagine,” he says, and she swats him.
“Telling her off. I didn’t intend to, but she’s covering her walls with black marker.”
“I saw.” Hugh slips up onto a low stone wall to avoid a sidewalk puddle.
Della takes the low road, down into the street. “Marker is a bitch to paint over, that’s all I know. But I didn’t say that.”
“Old Ann. Can’t live with her, can’t tell her anything.”
The spines of yellow leaves show red against the concrete sidewalk. From square to square the markings vary, official stamps or twig-dragged lines; very occasionally, a small handprint. Hugh could draw a map showing all the handprints in town. One day jackhammers will tear them out for something new, moving sidewalks or jetpacks or hydraulic tubes to swoop you from place to place like in old department stores, everything old new again.
“I’m a fogey now,” he tells Della. “I call everybody Old So-and-so, now. Like goddamn Holden Caulfield or something.”
“Makes you sound like Newell. It’s just a tic, or a phase.”
“Or aphasia. Brain rust of some kind. I’ve got to go apologize to Burton.”
“What are you going to say?”
Hugh wheels their formation to the left, into the Bloomsday flower shop. “Here are some nice flowers, Burton.”
“Good plan.”
They pick through the stock. While Della buys some dried orange lanterns, Hugh ponders roses and their meaning. Yellow, according to the card, conveys friendship, jealousy, infidelity, apology, a broken heart, intense emotion, dying love, extreme betrayal.
“Okay,” he says, and takes three dozen.
It’s only another block to Deer Park, Newell’s condo.
Della refuses to come up, but she takes his hand. “They get along pretty well, don’t be so mad,” she says. “Look at Ann—an object lesson on how not to take a breakup. Don’t you be the lesson on how not to take a hookup.”
“You see things so clearly,” Hugh says. Respect for her good sense in his heart, even if it doesn’t make it into his tone.
“Wish I could see Ken so clearly.” She turns down to the river with her arms full of orange bells. “Wish you could.”
A tickle of worry scratches Hugh’s ear. He brushes it away.
Up the long flight of private stairs to Newell’s shining kingdom. Glossy hedge like a maze shunts him along the wall of glass, great panes flaming in the setting sun. Hugh can’t see whether anyone is watching from inside as he comes forward with his suitor’s gift.
In fact it’s easy enough. Burton has worn pale yellow to accentuate the brilliant blue-black of his eye, swollen to magnificence. Hugh schools himself to civil contrition, unless there’s talk of suing him for assault, but the plum-black mess of that eye makes the words honest: “Burton, you look— I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry, I am really sorry.”
There’s a pause, just long enough for Burton to measure the truth of that, to judge it. Then he swings an arm wide, and takes the flowers. “For me!” He smiles, showing all his yellowy teeth for once; by that Hugh can tell he really is pleased. “You are a rascal, first to use your fists, instead of your words, and then to bribe me so magnificently. You know, as not everybody knows, that a mere dozen is stingy. Let me see to these right away. I feel, dear Hugh— an increased friendliness toward you after our altercation, as those who engage in prizefighting tell me is quite common.”
Not much of an altercation, Hugh can’t help thinking as he moves with Burton to the sink in the jet-black island. All that happened was I knocked you down.
But he doesn’t let that loose, and Newell comes back with a bottle and three glasses. “Almost as if you knew Hugh was coming,” Burton cries archly. Or maybe that was “… as if you-know-who was coming!”
Newell is in running gear. Burton displays him: “Boy’s off to do his daily ten K. The obligations of success. You could do with a K or two yourself, or do you scorn the physical entirely, Hugh?”
Nothing to say to that, Hugh thinks. A) it’s true, and B) he’s still on sufferance, being re-accepted into the circle of intimate inferiors to whom Burton doles out pinpricks.
But A) it’s certainly true. He sits in his slackness.
They give Hugh the rundown on the master class: how little talent there is, from Burton; from Newell, how surprisingly good the kids are. Burton rails about the impossibility of musical theatre. “Not a voice among them! I’m seriously thinking Streetcar, an avant-garde imagining, thirteen ways of looking at desire—a tantalizing one-two, a switcheroo.”
Newell looks patient and partly amused.
“None of them can sing, Boy! I can’t, I cannot spend a whole month working with clodhoppers who can’t dance, don’t ask them, who will not open their mouths, and couldn’t hold a tune with a pair of filigree sugar tongs.”
“Aren’t you contractually obligated?” Hugh asks.
“I’m changing the scenes, that’s all. We do have some talent—the boy Orion, for example—although not, dear God, in the musical theatre line. Light years from what these children should be working toward. Glee’s an aberration. There’s not the smallest chance that any of these tykes will be asked or expected to sing or God knows dance in their future lives, whether packing groceries for the A&P or in some regional summer repertory theatre troupe-slash-commune in Pisspassthequodit, Maine.”
“We are contractually obligated,” Newell says. “Yes.” He ties his gel-packed, light-filled silver-sided running shoes, a B-list god, going for a run.
Burton puts a loving arm around Newell’s bent neck and squeezes, hard. “Streetcar—I’ve got such a vision! We could do these students some real good.”
Hugh thought those same words last night, that Newell could do Orion some real good. But not Burton— who’s getting excited, enlisting Hugh in the new idea. “To explore what Tom was really getting to the root of!” (Calling him Tom, not Tennessee, as if he knew him. Maybe he did, he’s old enough.) “I’m thinking of an X’d cast, you know: male Blanche, Stella—that giant girl Savaya, what is she, six-two? Contemplate the violence inherent in that system!”
Perhaps there’s something actually wrong with Burton, Hugh thinks. Beyond the usual psychosis; maybe he’s sick. There’s a weird dark smudge across his eyes, his temples. Or else, okay—that’s probably bruising from the punch. Hugh drains his extremely good scotch in one swallow, and gets up to go. “Appointment,” he explains, not wanting to say more.
Newell must have heard him talking to Ivy last night, but says nothing.
Burton, though—damned Burton never misses a trick. “An appointment! Well! Give the lady our best regards, and make sure to ask about her recent performances. I understand there was a request for a remount of her one-woman I of O show, an Elizabeth Bishop bio-epic, at the National—ask her how that went.” No attempt on Burton’s part to disguise his own tone: malicious, leering, greedy for the mortification of others.
Hugh has no idea what he’s talking about, but doesn’t need Newell to say, “Leave it alone, Ansel.”
Burton giggles and leaps up to rearrange the yellow roses in the great square crystal vase. Friendship, jealousy, infidelity, apology, a broken heart, intense emotion, dying love, extreme betrayal.
“Okay,” Hugh says. His apology is over. “I’ll be sure to report back any personal agony she may confide.” He kept his shoes on, he can walk straight out.
Newell follows him onto the terrace, though.
Now, out of Burton’s gravitational pull, Hugh is ashamed. But won’t apologize again. “Don’t bother excusing him,” he says. “I don’t like people who like humiliation.”
It’s a short walk across the sifted stones.
�
��Everybody has hard stuff,” Newell says. “Everybody is stupid sometimes.”
Hugh reaches the stairhead.
Newell tries again. “Everybody has bruises. Not just him, me too. And look at you! Your mother when you were a kid—even now! That didn’t get better, but you’ve never cut her loose, have you?”
“She is my mother,” Hugh says. (Not my molester, he wants to shout. But still, always, knows he must not say.) He starts down the stone steps.
Newell stands there at the top of the stairs. “Maybe you just don’t like gay people. Did you ever consider that?”
That hurts Hugh. “I don’t know how you even dare to suggest that. For example, however little at the moment, I like you.”
“But you only like the parts of me that don’t seem really gay.”
Hugh says, stiffly: “I like the parts of you that are human. I don’t care about your sexuality.”
“Weirdly, all of me is human. Including my—sexuality.”
Hugh is almost at the bottom of the stone steps. “I like everything about you, I always have. I just—don’t—like—Burton.”
“Well, you’ve got to,” Newell says. His voice is not raised, but its skill and beauty carry it down the stairs to nestle in Hugh’s ear, beside the gadfly Della set there earlier.
Got to like Burton, can’t like Ken.
(ORION)
Down along the grey path by the river, tiny pebbles moving sliding underfoot, the best bike in the world and the long ride, mind into rapture, everything in the body awake and moving, mercury sliding, bones and sinew triumphant. No boss can best this breasting of the autumn air. Leaf mould, water, silver air that slips through cells, the whole body breathing fall, fall, fall—
At the corner of the river road, ahead, a silver shoe flashes a green gel glint.
The green rises into the still-green grass at the far gate, a path flagged, flared through the rhododendrons.
As if it might be chance, might be accident.
The mist of this strange planet is filling my head with such thoughts …
The loved one.
In secret. What is more intoxicating?
9. I.O.HUGH
The curio shop closes at six, but not the gallery—Tuesday is class night. Old Jasper drifts over, glass in hand, pie-eyed. He’s got someone in tow: Gerald, the widower.
The day has wound down. Hugh is cleaning up the back room before Della’s class.
“Here’s Hugh!” Jasper says. “Yoo-hoo, You-Hugh!” he sings. “Come eat with us at the Ace—I. O. Hugh, after all!”
“Hey, Jasper.” Then, hating himself for a wet blanket, Hugh asks, “Good day for curios?”
Wrong thing to say. Jasper’s face twists into a familiar knot. “Three people asked my advice about silver and decided not to sell or buy; one of them dropped a Sèvres box and neglected to mention the chip. A man pulled out a phone and bid on a Cattelin music box online, the very one I’d offered to get for him.” Then, pathetically, he turns that frown upside down: “But otherwise, wowzers! A large order for tchotchkes from a show-home designer, and the Byersville museum curator called me sweet-cheeks. And she’s a hard nut to crack.”
Gerald sits in the basket chair by the ceramics. He glistens, pearlized with grey sweat. Not okay, after his day back at the dealership. His wineglass is empty. He sets it carefully among the pots. Hugh does not have a single useful thing to say to him. All the time they’ve been acquainted, they’ve never spent ten minutes talking together before today.
He takes the wineglass and sets it on the cash desk. “Long day, Gerald?”
Gerald nods. “Sold a pre-loved to Lise Largely. A sympathy sale, but I’ll take it.”
“Can’t call it sympathy, from that fiend.” Jasper raises his glass in a toast, and settles on the bottom shelf of the magazine rack, folding his legs like an elderly cricket. “She wants my store, Hugh!”
“Okay,” says Hugh. “First, I only know her through Mighton, but she worries me. Wasn’t there some kind of scandal? And second, are realtors allowed to speculate? I thought there were rules.”
“Poor creature, she still has to make a living.” Jasper says with a hiccuping laugh. “But she can’t really realtor, real-itize, since she lost her licence—that’s why she wants the place, to open an allergy/aromatherapy clinic. Largely Allergy.” In case Hugh has missed it, Jasper waves his hands helpfully: “She can just rearrange the letters on your sign!”
Looking up, Gerald says, “Her sister’s a naturopath, the sister’s husband is a chiropractor, and Lise trained in flower essences. She told us all about it, she’s a pal of my—”
He stops, a cliff opening in front of him. “My—wife—” he says, and stops again.
They sit quietly, the room suddenly full of the dead.
“Come, Gerry. To the Ace!” Jasper says, stick legs jerking upright with false spryness. “I’m on your dinner roster, it’s my night.”
Della arrives for class as Gerald pulls himself out of the basket chair, and at the sight of him she gives an involuntary sighing cry. A warble, a woe-is-me. He smiles for her and processes carefully out with Jasper as the gallery fills with a parrot-flock of small children for the evening class.
Toby not among them.
How is Gerald supposed to live with this?
Della holds Hugh’s jacket out to him over the flood of children.
“Get out of here,” she says. “You have a date with density.”
(DELLA)
at last
a text:
< I’m all right. Just so you know.
> Any idea when you’re coming—
back or home? erase erase erase erase erase
> I love you
erase erase irrelevant
type again:
> All right. We’re all right.
not the best answer either
which non-existent we is that?
me and Elle
me and Ken
phone open again again again
while the children paint
stare at the unblinking screen
10. I PUT A SPELL ON HUGH
The Duck & Cover glows in the twilight, every window golden. Pumpkins crowd the stairs; precarious to climb past them. Stumbling on a tricky step, Ivy wonders whether her expensive new rose-covered shoes really work, as per shoes. But they look so pretty on the hoof, they make her love herself.
Through the glass door she sees midnight blue walls, small tables. The room looks like the interior mind: candles set in the windows, darkness within. That’s all right, darkness is useful for thinking.
Hugh falls up the stairs behind her, sprawled full length this time, like he’s crawling up on his hands and knees. His self-appalled/self-amused, mainly tolerant eyes look up from the long tangle he makes on the pumpkin-riddled stairs, and Ivy experiences a pretty good swoop in the lower regions. Who’d have thought, at this late date?
“Nice of you to drop by,” she says, giving him her hand.
The hostess is Savaya from the master class. Hugh introduces her as L’s friend, but Ivy already knows her. She sits them at a table in a small bay window, shielded from the street by a Japanese maple, leaves like fire in the dusk. Ivy lets Hugh have the door-facing chair she usually takes herself. She doesn’t need time to recognize anyone here.
“Crab cakes?” Hugh suggests. “Fish is good here. They bake their own bread.”
He’s stopped looking at her—he seems to be having an attack of shyness. She sends X-ray eyes through the back of his menu, but he does not move it.
She tilts. “You there? Hugh?”
He looks up, caught, and half his mouth smiles nervously. The waiter comes and they order. Not a bottle of wine, because Ivy says she can only drink one glass.
“It gets worse if I have a hangover,” she says, once the waiter is gone.
“What does?”
“I thought you’d have heard about my—my current—” Oh boy, now she’s stuck.
“Heard from Burton, you mean?” Hugh’s whole face grimaces. “I just took him three dozen yellow roses. But I left before he could get gossipy.”
“Yipes, three dozen! Were you afraid he was going to sue you?”
“Yellow roses, as perhaps you know, are the roses not only of apology, but also of dying love and extreme betrayal.”
“In fact, I did not know that.”
“No, well, not everyone has the language of flowers at their fingertips. It was on the card at the florist’s.”
“A subtle dig, then. Do you think Burton will perceive it?”
“If it advances his purposes, I’m sure he will.”
The wine comes, the waiter goes again. A private spot, this window seat.
“What is your, your current—?”
Ivy makes a face. “Nothing. I just have a gapping problem. I forget my lines.”
Hugh looks interested rather than pitying.
“I forget things in general, too,” she tells him. He might as well know.
“Yet here you are, at dinner.”
“I remembered you.” Then that seems too intimate a thing to have said. “Mind you, I couldn’t find the restaurant, but that was because you said the funny name.”
“I wasn’t remembering very well myself. That was the second fall of the day—I fell off a ladder yesterday morning.” He blinks, shakes his head quickly. Touches his forehead.
“How far?” Her arms prickle with worry. Weird.
“Maybe fifteen feet. I was trying to put up Hallowe’en lights on the sign at the gallery.”
“What did the doctor say?”
Hugh rubs his eyes. “I haven’t seen him yet. Ruth made an appointment, but I hate going in.”
“Ruth?”
“The woman who took your call. My gallery assistant.”
“She seemed perfect.”
“Gallery assistant is too grand a title. She helps out. She’s okay with the ladies who come in to buy cards.” Saying that, Hugh looks ashamed. Interesting.
“Where did you find her?”
“She looked after me, on and off, when I was a kid. There’s no getting rid of her.” He drums briefly on the table, pours more wine. Knocks twice on the table to discharge bad luck. “I don’t want to get rid of her,” he says.
Close to Hugh Page 10
