Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  Or he could kiss her. No glass between them now.

  “Hm,” she says, grinning at him like a kid. Then, “Should you answer the phone?”

  “Come in, I’ll make coffee.” He takes her hand to pull her out of the chaise. It’s still going, still—Hugh makes it to the kitchen counter, sure the ring will quit. He hits the speaker button. The ringing stops.

  “Hey, Hugh!” Ken’s voice, distorted by the speaker. Or is he crying? The voice wobbles into the room, too loud: “It’s you! I thought you weren’t there.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Della’s not answering her cell—”

  “Okay,” Hugh says. “Everything’s okay, as far as I know. I know L’s fine.”

  “Della’s phone is turned off, I can’t get through. Is she teaching tonight? I don’t have my calendar, I can’t remember if she teaches Wednesday— I need to get hold of her, she’s—”

  What the hell is all this? “You okay?” Hugh asks.

  Then there’s a silence while Ken breathes. Like a man between bouts of vomiting, breathing to hold off the next painful rush.

  The back door slams downstairs. Hugh sees L’s pale head, Ken’s colouring, at the bottom of the turn. She’s coming up.

  Before his mind even frames the thought, his hand takes the receiver from the stand and hits the speaker button to shut off Ken’s voice. Into his ear, unstoppered, Ken floods a ranting stream, so unlike his usual reserve that Hugh feels some alarm, which he conveys to Ivy by wild eye-rolling—she goes to the top of the stairs, gives L a big happy greeting, and draws her into the living room to look at something on the wall in there, allowing Hugh time to listen to Ken. Which he does not want to do. He takes the phone, nodding to Ivy, and slips off to the bedroom.

  While L wanders around the room touching things, Ivy wonders what Hugh was going to say, or do, before the phone rang. That must have been L’s father on the phone. What’s going on there? Della seems pretty conflicted—her layer of warm calm is like custard skin, gently set over a seething mass beneath.

  L stops jittering around and stands in the middle of the room.

  She says, “I have this, you know—I’ve been making … an installation, I guess you’d have to say, because it’s installed, but that sounds so precious. It’s just a big thing that has to—that needs a lot of space, and it’s like—like this one thing my mom did when she did her MFA exhibit, she did this thing with gold leaves on a huge piece of wall that was so great. You know, it looked really good, but the deal was that each leaf had a tiny red loop of thread glued to the back—she pounded in a thousand tiny tacks all over the wall and we hung all the leaves so whenever anyone moved in the room, the leaves moved—but, but they didn’t just move, they—” Her arms waft, graceful, she cannot keep herself from dancing. “They fell, like fall, like autumn. It was so great, except that, so—so she ended up paying me ten bucks an hour to pick up the leaves and put them back on the little tacks, and it was non-stop, I made like two hundred bucks.”

  Ivy enjoys her babbling and Della’s leaves; and enjoys feeling like they are her friends.

  Hugh comes out of the bedroom. “Well!” Over-jolly, faintly fake. “Great to see you, L! To what do we owe the honour?” He stops, resets his tone. “Lunch?”

  L stares at him, sensing something weird. But she lets it go. We must all be so weird to her, Ivy thinks. How to tell what’s off, in an off world?

  “So I was thinking,” L says, jumping into it, braced. “I wanted you to forget about the thing, the thing I showed you. It’s not—it’s not ready, or anything, I know that. You know, shitted is not painted.”

  Ivy’s face must show surprise. Hugh explains for her: “When Turner showed his work in 1828, another artist sneered, cacatum non est pictum: shitted is not painted. L, L, you’ve been listening in class.”

  L glares out the glass doors to the deck, out to the branches leaning closer.

  Hugh goes over to her. “Your maze, the Republic—” He breaks off, starts again. “I didn’t say enough the other day. I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid I might burst into tears, standing there.” (L stares through the glass even harder.) “Teaching is tiring: it takes a long time of looking before you see something really good, before you find, are shown, the thing you’ve been looking for.”

  “I have been here all along,” L says. Dignified. She’s only young, still.

  Hugh shrugs. “I guess you were too close for me to see.” Giving the side of her face a suddenly wide, unreserved, beaming, face-altering smile. L looks at him, suspicious. But what she sees must ease her fear. She does not turn away again.

  Ivy watches them, the bodies turned toward each other, wondering if L’s work is actually extraordinary, or if it’s just that she’s so pretty. Shocked by a stab of jealousy: this nice girl, daughter of a friend, Hugh looking after her interests. Ivy remembers Burton staring at Orion, herself watching Jason this morning. The older and the younger, the unbearable point of—is it of conquest? Not Hugh—would Hugh? Then she shakes herself, mentally. Nonsense.

  But L’s poor face. This degree of wanting is like pain. For the work.

  Yes, in Ivy’s experience too, work is more important than love.

  “Let me figure it out,” Hugh says. “I want to talk to my pal Gareth Pindar, about your options. The thing is, it’s too good for my gallery, too big, it’s too—” He breaks off. Now it’s Hugh’s turn to stare out at bare branches. A second, another few.

  The pause brings L’s eyes back to him, as Ivy watches. There’s always this problem: the young loving us, briefly, as they launch. Ivy thinks about Orion’s arresting beauty, Jason’s dream.

  “Well, it’s really good.” Hugh turns back to L, who nods, as if this is some kind of contract.

  Ivy’s pleasure and confidence, her connection with Hugh, drains away. The young have all the power, and she is, let’s face it, a dumpy, awkward, nondescript woman with a muddled mind and a tedious past.

  But Hugh says, “Lunch, okay,” and he takes her hand as he goes by, pulling her to the kitchen to help. The pressure of his hand says, Help me, I’m a mess, and she presses back.

  (ORION)

  Orion sits on a high stool in the old Home Ec kitchen in the basement, which nobody besides them ever goes into. “Those old guys were all bent out of shape pretending to be straight, or trying to be. Like Cary Grant. Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando, James Dean.”

  Jason is cutting Orion’s hair with ultra-sharp scissors borrowed from Fashion.

  “Okay, Marlon Brando was not gay.” Savaya is definite about that. Waiting next in line, she uses the countertop for a fulcrum, long legs swinging under the table and back out, hands clutched on the edge to keep her more or less balanced.

  “He was, he was bi.”

  “Don’t move your mouth for a sec,” Jason says. Orion stares up at his pale eyelids, the red lining of his bottom eyelid. Crying all afternoon about his cold and crazy mother finding his fucking porn for fuck’s sake. How is he supposed to grow up, drowning in bile?

  Savaya scoffs. “You always say that. According to you anybody good in the movies was good because he was gay.”

  Mouth stiff, like a ventriloquist, Orion says, “Because he was gay and couldn’t admit it. It’s the tension that creates the dynamic.”

  “Bull, shit,” Savaya says, sings. “Some of them were straight and some of them were gay and art struck them all indiscriminably.”

  “Fred Astaire, probably,” Jason says, judicial with his scissors. “But not Bob Hope.”

  “It’s easier for us. It got better.” Orion turns his head, obedient to Jason’s fingers. “Too better, maybe.” The scissors snick, snick; Orion’s profile poses. Handsome man looks good in anything.

  Savaya swings her legs, light-minded, distractible. “Where’s L?”

  Jason pulls the sheet off Orion, gestures Savaya to the stool. “She had to go to Hugh’s. She freaked out because he saw her Republic install, and he didn’t say
much.”

  “She shouldn’t care so much about what he says,” Savaya says.

  But we do care, the mentor is the arbiter. Until we’re done with him. Orion checks his hair in the black glass of the wall oven.

  Yes. This works.

  8. HUGH MAKE MY DREAMS COME TRUE

  The hospice steps get longer every day. Illusion, illusion. Hugh plods or strides down the hall, eight or eighteen hallways, longer every day. Lise Largely chasing him from door to door, bills in white envelopes flap-flapping just behind his head, Gerald’s hound eyes watching from the lintel of his mother’s door, naked Voynich ladies from L’s maze shrouding every window and peering through the keyholes—

  He’s gone mad, maddening more with every step.

  Here, trapezoidal, as proper in a German expressionist film, looms Mimi’s door.

  Dear mother. Whom he always loves. Who is always holding his hand, who adores and adored him, to whom he is always tied with bloody silver cords and hot pink velvet ribbon.

  Hugh opens the door. Mimi is awake. Her head turns, anger sparkling in the deepsunk eyeholes, in what’s left of her gaze. “You! You come here?” she says, gaze flicking away.

  “Here I am,” he says, not bending to kiss her. She will only pull away.

  “I am disappointed in Hugh,” she tells the wall. “I thought of all things of all people Hugh would not desert me, Hugh of all people.”

  (What is wrong with your family?)

  “I’m here,” he says. At night she is drugged calm, or at least remembers night’s natural state is sleep. During the day she talks in spates, in flourishes, often angry.

  Her eyes are huge when she looks back at him. “Nobody thinks of me, banjo eyes on the ceiling day and night, a burden to myself and others—hands all over me, turning me, patting me when I do not want to be touched. What’s left me if my self my home is gone?”

  Yes, long shadows go out from the bales, and yes, the soul must part from the body: what else could it do? Hugh sits on the bed. “Listen, Mimi, I want you to move in with me. It will be good for both of us. I’ll—no, listen, Dave is coming to fix the basement, there’s room to store your things. I’ll paint the spare bedroom pink, we’ll be cozy up there, like birds in the nest. I don’t want you living on your own anymore. You need company, and so do I.”

  She cries and cries, then. Weeping is hard on her.

  Sometimes it seems like the world is trying to speak to Hugh. Birds appear singly in front of him: one for sorrow. Five or six ones, at intervals. Some people might count cumulatively, tot them up, two-for-joy, but Hugh knows better. What are you trying to say? his mind shouts. As he sets off down the sidewalk, a magpie, most potent bird portent, flies straight at him. He dodges, bruising his arm on a parking meter.

  The world won’t shut up, sending him messages he wants no more than he wants Ken’s. There are things he has not done, things for which he needs to atone. He hasn’t been a good one to love, whether or not he was a good lover. Mostly he was not. Ann, others too. He did not love them except in a selfless, monkish way, knowing they needed love. Which now strikes him as condescending, distant, detached. He does not feel detached about Ivy. Children too: L, needing to be shepherded, to be properly represented. Maybe that lost one of Ann’s was his. Maybe she thinks of that baby when she talks to Jason now. That baby would be old now, thirty, Jesus. Jason—do not talk to Jason about porn, for God’s sake.

  Old errors, new ones. Hitting Burton. Not kissing his mother—not kissing Ivy when he had the chance. Another example: not kind enough to Ruth, who will probably be the one to find him lying in the framing room dead and broken one of these days, when she brings him a badly wrapped, over-mayoed, canned pink salmon sandwich at lunchtime.

  Hugh’s tooth hurts. Maybe it’s jaw cancer. Started the other morning. Don’t think about it. Plus, you’re clearly a hypochondriac. Irritating to be in pain all the time, pain of a tooth, irritating not being able to close the jaw in the ordinary way. Every mouthful pain, every breath, not knowing when it will stop—or really, knowing that it will get worse and worse, that this is the downward slide, the snake. The back right molar is giving up.

  It’s hideous, unbearable, that we age, we fall apart. Just when you know what you want (Ivy! Enough money to get out of this hole! Mimi young again, happy, not crazy!) you are too old to make use of it or can’t get it anyway.

  Back in the framing room Hugh puts on Borodin—not the usual, but a sad winding, clarinet-heavy one, like someone noodling on the organ after church. Then the strings barge in, too sweet. He switches the music off.

  It’s impossible, this thing with Ivy. People can’t do this kind of thing, at this late a date. Find each other. Hook up. Anyway, his obligations.

  Not that Mimi will be moving in upstairs, because she is not moving anywhere. She is dying. She will be dead.

  (L)

  Finishing is the boring part, L hates it. But Jason revels in it, perfectionistly. In his company it’s almost enjoyable. At least here in Fashion they have a serger, a big press, and a good steam iron. Four boards in the alcove; even a sleeve board. And Betty, who talks most of the time, when she’s not going out for a smoke. The costumes are mostly from Stratford, Betty being connected. She used to be head seamstress at Stratford, but then one day—she’ll tell the story—her life fell apart. She went to Toronto to buy fabric and, surprise!, she sees her salesman husband walking along the street in front of her. She calls, but he doesn’t hear her. So she runs after him and turns the corner just in time to see him walk in the front door of a house. She runs up the walk and knocks on the door, not thinking anything but that she’s happy to see him because he travels a lot with his business and it’s been a few days.

  And the woman who opened the door had never heard of Fred, but called into the kitchen to ask Rick, and there he was. Her husband. Fred/er/Rick. Four kids! He’d been married to the woman for eight years. Another whole family. How many other men—her own dad—

  That must have been back in the eighties or something. Now, they’d just get a divorce.

  But there is something going on with her dad. Obviously.

  The iron hisses.

  A brief tap-tap: L’s mom is at the door, trembly fake smile on, ha-ha, like Can I dare come in? Behind the alcove wall, L’s heart or lungs sink. She motions to Jason to be quiet, stay hunkered in this little bunker. Her mom will say something to Betty, too personal or too generous, and if she sees L she always gets weirdly worse, just out of nerves. Jason shrugs, bent over his work, attaching giant, exact eyelashes to the shut embroidered eyes on Nevaeh’s Hope costume. Blind Hope? It looks really good on. Nevaeh’s small high breasts look exactly like protruding, clamped-shut eyes, like for example when you are hoping against hope, praying that your dad has not killed himself or otherwise gone off the deep end.

  “Hey, Betty!” her mom goes. “I promised to help with the Hallowe’en costume sale.” Anyone who leaves their costume until two days before is not really bothering. But the sale is a good way to get rid of stuff—that costume room is a museum of tattered dreams. Her mom says, still apologizing, “Ann came too—she’s looking for some vintage clothes she thinks might have ended up here by mistake.”

  Jason’s mom, too? Shit. Jason has gone invisible, ducking silently under the big press. L takes her hemming and joins him. Nobody needs to know they’re there.

  9. I’VE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO HER FACE

  Burton’s flutiest voice catches Ivy on her cell. He orders her to run down to the basement costume room before the master class. “Shoes, hats, gloves, bags to strew on the table, you’ll know what I want. Silk nightwear, fifties elegance. Tat.”

  Is Burton repositioning Sweeney Todd to the fifties? Ivy does not ask, but trots down the stairs to the cool, aqua, concrete-walled basement. At a bend in the hall, there is Ann, her landlady, at a long mirror beside a rank of padlocked doors. She’s wearing a silvery pageboy wig and an op-art dress that vibrates in the shadowy corr
idor. Ivy’s stomach jumps. Well, for perfectly good reason. Down in this low-lit cement world Ann exudes a powerful ambiance, tension and rage waving off her like too much perfume.

  Placate her: “Love your dress! Fab! Is it vintage?”

  In the mirror, Ann assesses her pink/orange paisley. “It was Mimi’s, Hugh’s mother’s. But she said it looked better on me. She said I ought to have it. When Hugh and I were lovers.” Her voice is aerated, barely audible. Or maybe Ivy just doesn’t want to hear about her being Hugh’s lover, stupid seventies Joy of Sex-type word. Like calling a girlfriend your lady.

  “Mimi had rooms full of clothes. The school borrowed some for a show last year, so I’m getting them back. Hugh doesn’t know what’s valuable.” Ann shakes her head, the too-big wig slipping on her narrow head, a beat behind. “I found these … ugh, these magazines.”

  She seems honestly distressed, unlike with the whole epigram-writing feminist indignation thing, which felt kind of fake. Askew, the wig makes her look sad. She stares at Ivy in the mirror. “I can’t talk about it.”

  Ivy can’t get past her to go into the costume room. “No—perfect. I’m bad with secrets.”

  “Hugh wouldn’t help me,” Ann says. Askew, the wig makes her look sad. “But I’ll help him. I’ll clean out Mimi’s closets. Lise wants her apartment by the first. He’ll need an army to get that done.”

  Not knowing what any of this is about, Ivy decides, in a clean-souled burst of decency, that it is none of her business unless Hugh tells her himself.

  Then Della comes clattering down the stairs, a breath of fresh wind, some good sense. “Betty says it’s all right,” she calls. “Oh, hi, Ivy! Are you helping with the sale?”

  Ivy is quite relieved to see her. “Burton wanted me to find some stuff for class.”

  Della is already busy with the keys. “What are you looking for?”

  “Boudoir stuff, I gathered. Burton said fifties shoes, nightwear …”