He’s disciplined. So the wild phone call, the fractured voice, the—breakdown, it sounds like, when Hugh lets himself think about it at all—is more disquieting. To think that Della is, that Ken is, in trouble. It ought to be fixable.
Everything should be. It should be possible to build Utopia. Hughtopia. At least among our friends, in one limited place, like L’s Republic in the basement. What would fix things for Della? They are careful never to talk about cash—maybe money is what makes her face so white? Money would fix old Jasper and Ruth, who are both essentially happy (business woe makes Jasper crawl inside the bottle, but the bottle creates the woe). Not Newell. Newell has plenty of money, he just lacks … peaceful love, or freedom from Burton. But there is nothing you can do about goddamn Burton.
Hugh can’t fix Ann’s disappointment, her marriage, or the built-in narcissism that makes her so discontented; can’t tell young Jason that porn is evil. Can’t keep Orion safe.
You can’t bring Gerald’s wife and son back to life.
L, help L. Talk to Gareth Pindar. Take a piece of L’s to show him, without telling her, so that if Gareth laughs she won’t be crushed.
From the piano: Kinderszenen, Della will be busy for a while. Hugh backs out of the dining room and cat-foots down the basement stairs—then stops, and almost bows before entering L’s Republic. Fool. Photos the installation with his phone, flash and no flash.
Okay, take the portrait of Newell on rice paper; the roughed-in sketch of Nevaeh. That map of the inner fortress too: intricate, brain-like. He rolls them up together, thinking.
Sound upstairs. The back door opening. Hugh waits for L to come down …
Footsteps cross the kitchen, instead. Reprieved!
He heads quietly up the stairs, not wanting L to catch him thieving. Three long steps to the back door. He glances to the dining room arch, his eye caught by a flash of tweed jacket, an elbow—not L, it’s Ken, he’s back. About to call hello, Hugh catches himself.
Ken stands by the table, staring at the mess of Mightons while the music flows on and on, Von fremden Ländern und Menschen. Tense shoulder, neck: he lifts a photo, two more. Flicks them aside like cards being dealt.
You should go in, be glad to see him—find out how he’s doing, what’s going on. But you can’t possibly be there when Della turns and sees him, when they start whatever fight they will have to start.
In the driveway, mist. Hugh tucks L’s drawings carefully under his coat. Dizzy, or tired, or is it just sad? He needs some supper.
(ORION)
Staring at his blank-screened phone. No message.
Fuck it anyway.
Give up, go to Savaya’s party? Fuck, hard to know. Hard/not hard/not impossible/I can do it. I can rise above, ride into the sunset, the blood-orange sun going down on darkness. On silver wheels—a night Phoebus pulling the moon across the sky.
Orion stands on his back deck, waiting for supper, for something, whatever his mom might pull together when she stops freaking out on the phone to someone about something that happened in The Department, or alternatively the NDP’s slide in the polls, and the plight of the Palestinians and what she said to Jerry Pink about the master-bation class. When she finally blows her nose and wipes her soft, red eyes and digs in the fridge for the last edible undead vegetable and the organic, free-range nest-laid eggs and calls it fritatta.
It might rain before the party.
Bike to the party or drive?
He’s no Stella.
He calls softly into the darkness at the end of the yard, “I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be the truth. If that’s a sin, then let me be damned for it!”
Lit by the last orange stab of sun through gunmetal-grey clouds, Orion shoots up onto the railing, launches from the deck, and flies for a long moment, everything balanced in air.
He lands by his bike, and goes.
12. I WANT TO BE LOVED BY HUGH
Hugh sits with the windows rolled down in the parking lot of Black Cat Pizza, hoping damp wind will blow his brain into better sense. Waiting for his supper. Disconsolate because of Ken and Della. Also, inappropriately hurt—Ivy hasn’t texted. Maybe working still. Maybe he assumed too much.
Stupid head. Tooth hurting again; chew carefully when the pizza’s ready. Back molar on the right-hand side: death is waiting for you, first in the falling out of the teeth and the falling out of the hair and then, following, in the incremental death of the rest of the body.
Or else he’s just hungry. He checks his phone again. As bad as Della.
Clotted with clouds, grey sky reflects in the grey window where the men are cooking. On the wall-mounted TV inside the grey kitchen, Dorothy has landed in Oz—don’t worry, here comes Glinda the Good to solve everything! That other witch, ruby feet sticking out. Now Dorothy’s got the shoes, she’s setting off. Oz is the only colour in the place: grey steel grey windows grey tiles grey fluorescence white aprons black T-shirts on the pizza guys. Dorothy’s brilliant blue-red smile repeats the Open sign, red, blue. Grey-white pizza boxes. The men argue among themselves whether a pizza is done, pushing in and pulling out of the red-hot oven with their long-handled peels.
A car door opens near Hugh, and out climbs Newell. That’s not—oh, it’s Burton’s car. Somehow that vintage of Passat is always a little Euroslime, Hugh thinks. Prejudice.
Newell sticks his head in the passenger-side window.
“Pizza for dinner?” Hugh asks.
“One with everything. Bring yours to my place.” At that my, Hugh thinks he might go. “Ivy’s there,” Newell adds, luring him. “Burton kept her working.”
Hugh stares at the grey window, the grey men.
“Come,” Newell says. “Please come—Ansel’s buggered up the master class, they’re having a meeting, we might all be fired. It’s fraught, but we’ll have a party. Come?” He reaches in the window and touches Hugh’s arm.
Newell chooses to be kind to Burton, and that is none of Hugh’s beeswax.
“Okay,” Hugh says. They walk in to pick up the pizzas.
At the condo, Ivy and Burton sit at the long dining room table in drifts of playscripts and student lists. Ivy looks up as Newell and Hugh blow in on a gust of rainy wind.
“It’s you!” she says, heavy eyebrows arching in pleasure. “I mean, it’s Hugh!”
Her face is open. Honest and clear. He has been looking for her for so long.
Burton adds his own exclamations of Hugh! HYou! Ha-ha. His eyes take on a greedy-dog fix as Newell opens the pizza boxes. Anchovies and truffle oil—got to be Burton’s. Spinach & feta, Ivy’s; one with everything (Newell’s invariable order, only half Buddhist joke); double cheese, pepperoni and green olives (Hugh’s). Too much pizza, but Burton will wolf down whatever’s left over. His appetites are famous. Stop, Hugh thinks. Look at Ivy instead.
She’s looking at him. Not secretly or shyly but with every door, every gate thrown wide.
Hard to be depressed when someone you recognize has recognized you back, when you understand the unlooked-for luck of that. Hugh crosses to her and puts his arms around her, right there, in front of Newell. In front of Burton. Fuck him, anyway.
Plates, wineglasses, pouring, nobody’s paying attention to Hugh and Ivy. Newell clicks on music and Burton pulls another cork; one bottle is never enough. “Let’s not,” Burton says, “let’s not have salad. Let’s pig ourselves on pure pizza, oozing cheese, everything bad!”
The gas fire springs to light. On a cold October night, sitting with Ivy at the fireplace end of the long couch, death is held in abeyance.
Newell eats like he does everything, with detached joy. Burton with gluttonous dispatch, ferocious bad teeth chomping once, twice, per piece, wine to wash it down, between spates of blather on why “we must remain flexible” with the master class.
“Tomorrow, we start Spring Awakening,” Ivy tells Hugh, between neat small-toothed bites. “Plenty flexible. They’ll love it.”
Newell lies on the rug, head propped vertical, eyes closed, long and flat. His glamour does not ever shut off, but sometimes, like a tiger, is asleep.
“But what about scripts?” Hugh asks.
“Get them couriered from Toronto,” Newell says, eyes closed. Having had money for a long time, solutions occur to him.
“I have to run in tomorrow morning,” Ivy says. “I have a—a thing—” She drinks, as if wishing she hadn’t brought that up. They wait. “My apartment. The dishwasher broke.”
“Is that lunatic youth still occupying your apartment?”
Lunatic youth?
Burton’s face goes avid when there’s something painful in the air. “Yes, yes, I recall him: Jamie, the boyfriend’s brother. I suppose you can hardly kick the poor fellow out.”
Boyfriend? You know nothing about her, her circumstances—
Hugh turns to take Ivy’s plate and his own to the kitchen, and catches her looking up at him, her face frightened. Frightened! That cures his foolish jealousy. No need to know more than he knows: that against all probability or expectation, somehow she is his. He gives her back look for look, as open-hearted as an out-of-practice, fiftyish man can be.
He calls back, to derail Burton, “What will you do if Spring Awakening doesn’t fly?”
That makes Burton pettish. “Don’t be ridiculous, Hugh—Angels in America, maybe. Melodrama, but still tediously topical. Or Orton. Ruffian on the Stair, remember, Boy?”
Newell laughs. “Try getting that one past Pink.”
“Oh!” Burton shrieks, suddenly furious. “You never let me do what I want to do.”
Newell won’t take that. “Jesus, Ansel, why not go straight to Vampire Lesbians of Sodom? None of it has any relevance to kids from Peterborough. Stick with Spring Awakening—it’s the only good play you’ve got up your sleeve that you could possibly get away with in high school.”
“They know nothing! Terry! And Terry! And that Pink person.” Burton scrambles up, last piece of pizza still in hand, his plump body trembling. His face has gone a strange, bad colour. He sweeps half the scripts off the table with the empty hand, the other half with the pizza hand, red sauce staining white pages.
Ivy goes still. Hugh says, trying to manufacture calm, “Burton, you’ll get run out of town on a rail if you try to force the gay thing.”
Wait, that won’t help. But it deflects attention: Burton turns on Hugh, staring, the red bloom rising again in his cheeks. “Hugh!” Or was that, probably it was “You!” All the scorn and disgust of a long life of constant betrayal. Like Mimi, when you went in this morning.
Everything hurts. Hugh closes his eyes and rubs them. What a headache he has got. It’s making him vague and stupid.
Burton laughs, or gloats at him: “I’ll tell Hugh one thing, I won’t be run out this time. Shall we tell them our secret, Boy?”
“Go ahead,” Newell says. His eyes have closed again, Hugh sees. His own eyes open inside the safe cage of his hands.
Burton stands towering squatly over Newell’s full-length body, like a lion hunter, tears in his eyes. “You tell them, you tell Hugh,” he orders, and Newell’s eyes open, to stare up at the far-distant ceiling.
“We’re engaged,” he says. “Congratulate me.”
Ivy doesn’t like this development—she hates Burton’s dramatics. But it’s obviously worse for Hugh. He’s stone-still, doesn’t speak. Is it a complete surprise? Looks like it, from his face. And from Newell’s empty eyes staring up at the fabulous wenge-wood ceiling, not looking at anyone at all. Happy times.
“Wow, fabulous,” she says, seeing no alternative. “When did that happen?”
“This very afternoon,” Burton says. Too simple to say he simpers. He’s watching Newell’s quiet face, Newell’s eyes that might be counting planks in the fancy ceiling. “We have discussed the possibility before, of course—of course we have, as one does, as two do—but we decided this afternoon.”
Must have been a doozy of a fight, Ivy thinks, whatever happened over that moment with Orion and the pop can.
“When the people who are your life are in need, you step up.” Newell says, looking at Hugh. Ivy’s insides clench, because who knows how Burton will take that?
She’s working up some platitude/lie about how great it is when two people who’ve known each other for a long time get together, when the doorbell rings. A noble bell, Zen temple with an overtone of pure, deep money.
“Shall I get that?” Ivy asks.
Hugh still hasn’t spoken. Nobody else speaks either. Ivy gets up.
Her moving shakes Hugh out of silence. He says, without any discernible difficulty, “I’m happy for you both. I’ll—” He balks a bit, there. “I’ll tell Mimi. She’ll be tickled pink.”
Pink comes out just as Ivy opens the door, and there is Jerry Pink, in the flesh.
He pours through the giant wenge-wood doorway. “Newell! Ansel! Great to see you!” As if it’s been years.
Burton jerks away from the small tableau at the fireplace. His going frees Newell, who gets to his feet in one lithe cat-move, no gasping, no creaks. Ivy admires his strength, and his social grace. His kindness, too. Pink is a stuffed sausage in a bad suit coat, but Newell shows no disdain. He takes Pink’s hand, and as far as anyone would guess, a touch of Pink is just what this place needed.
Ivy leaves them to it, and goes to Hugh. “You okay?”
With Newell’s attention diverted, Hugh does not look good. “None of my business,” he says.
“Well, yes it is. Newell is your friend, you want him to be happy.”
Hugh nods.
The doorbell rings again. Pink is still standing there, and his hand goes out to open the door. A thing Newell doesn’t like: Ivy can see his affability erode.
It’s kids. Savaya first, and the angry girl, N-something, Never? They’ll be very good in Spring Awakening. It gives Ivy a bit of a lift to think of that.
Now Orion. When he walks into a room the air practically crackles, she thinks.
She is standing by the long black marble island. There’s a cheese-knife there, stubby and strong-looking. She tests the blade; then pockets it, and looks around for Hugh. It strikes her that it’s time to go. No good can come of all these whirling egos.
13. HUGH GOT TO HIDE YOUR LOVE AWAY
Hugh takes Ivy’s hand, which she has flung out to him like a small life preserver. Time to go.
“Okay,” he says. “I left the van at the Black Cat—I’ll walk you home.”
Jacket. Nothing else? His arms feel empty. Pizza, that’s what he was carrying. Okay. Hugh nods to Newell and they slide away, out the back door to the terrace and the long set of stairs running down to the street.
Newell follows, seeing them out into the rooftop wind in his shirtsleeves. He kisses Ivy and she heads down the stairs, going carefully on those pretty, silly shoes.
Hugh pauses for a moment at the brink, moon blinking through the charcoal drama of overwrought, fast-scudding clouds.
“How’s your mother?” Newell asks, clearly in no rush to go back inside.
Newell: his strength, his health, his glowing human-ness—and all the misery he carries with him. Hugh asks him, “How can the body die? Tell me. How can the person who is here not be here any longer? How is this—how can it be right, even be possible, that this has to happen?”
“I love her.” Newell’s voice is gentle, sweet, ordinary. “I’ll go over in the morning.”
“Okay,” Hugh says. He goes down that long, long flight of concrete steps to where Ivy waits.
They walk through misted streets, avenues, a vanished town, to Ann’s.
In the quiet, Ivy asks, “Are you upset?”
Hugh tests how he feels, probes down into his inmost heart. No answer there, just lava.
“What made you angry? Do you think gays shouldn’t marry?”
“No! They can marry the hell out of each other. It’s nothing like that. It’s just Burton.” Can’t tell Ivy the truth. Wh
at you think is the truth.
“I know he’s kind of hateable. But he’s fond of Newell.”
Right.
They walk, they walk.
You just don’t know. You don’t know, you don’t know, what is right, what would be best. Not Burton, that’s all Hugh can think. “I’ve known Newell for a long time. I don’t—Burton is not good for him. Newell’s my oldest friend, my Ruth-brother.”
“He loves you,” Ivy says. “What’s the bad part, besides that Burton’s an asshole and will be an expensive husband? Newell can afford it. And I don’t think, you know …” She proceeds a little carefully: “I don’t think Newell does anything he doesn’t want to do.”
Hugh thinks about that, or tries to. All he can see is Newell’s lost face, not helped, not saved. He can’t tell Ivy what he suspects—okay, never mind suspects. What he knows. Knew, when he was twelve. The knowledge of what Burton did all those years ago has been buried deep in his head for a long time. Hurts to think about, not allowed. And it is not simple. Burton and Newell have been together on and off for a thousand years, they have grown into each other by now, have worked out some complicated fucking agreement.
And who is he to say what Newell should think or do.
He kicks through a slump of leaves by the curb. He says, “How can I know anything about it?”
“No. Me neither.”
“Hard enough to know about myself.”
There’s a pause. Half a block of silence.
Ivy stops. “I can’t be with you.” She just comes out with it baldly. “In case you were wondering, which I thought you might be.”
“I know,” Hugh says. “I’m too damaged. And my mother is dying. Any day. When she does I’m going to be a mess. You don’t need any of this.”
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