Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  Can’t take this, can’t can’t can’t, L thinks. She pours the eggs down the sink and turns off the red-hot element. Time to go!

  Just as chicken as she is, Hugh’s managed to get to the back door, hauling it open. “Great, well, you have those subs, I’ll go get Ivy. Don’t forget, dinner Saturday!”

  “What? Saturday?” her mom asks. How could she forget? It’s only every year.

  Her dad follows Hugh to the door, host habit, and holds it open. They hear Hugh calling back, “Anniversary! All Saints Day.”

  The night her parents met; Hugh gives them a party every year. She and Jason are serving, Hugh booked them weeks ago.

  He’s gone. While he was noisy, L melted away like snow off the driveway, receding gently up the stairs and behind the turn of the wall. Nobody calls after her. She waits.

  Her dad shuts the door, goes back. There’s a pause, no sound from the kitchen.

  This is awful.

  Then her mom, saying, “Well.”

  Her dad: “Here I am.”

  Her mom: “I see that.”

  “You’ve been managing?” he says. “I see the house is perfect, as always.” Shithead.

  “We’ve been—I’ve been pretty worried about you,” her mom says.

  He laughs.

  A thump, a slide. The Perrier and the bag of subs landing on the counter. “So, what’s up,” her mother says, in a cool, strange voice. Not actually asking.

  “I see Mighton’s in town.”

  Her mother laughs. “What tipped you off, the photos? I’m late with the flyer for his class, I have to get it to the shop today.” Sounding casual, frozen, angry.

  “Handsome guy,” her dad says, all arrows and spears himself. “So—I’m working at Jenny’s for a few days. Final documents for the abuse case—but you’re not interested in that.” Another slap in the face for her mom, who has expressed interest many times in L’s earshot, and always gets shot down for it—she’s not allowed to ask about work because he wants to leave it at the office. Also, her dad: staying at Jenny’s?

  It seems her mom is not going to question that. Or she is not surprised.

  “So the rappelling thing, that was a lie?”

  Oh fuck, fuck, on the other hand. Please, don’t get into it. When her dad first didn’t come home, L searched through the notebook in his bedside table drawer. Because you have to know what’s coming. Page after page of lists of things to do:

  • books to read

  • what must be fixed around the house

  • golf swing

  • fly-fishing casts

  • woodworking tools needed

  And the pitiful ones in lower case, followed by question marks:

  • remortgage?

  • rrsp penalty?

  • cheque to Hendy?

  • line of credit?

  L can’t bear to know any more about what’s coming. Sicker than ever, fingers in her ears, she turns away.

  From the top of the stairs Jason’s white face looks down. She goes up a step to whisper. “Don’t worry. My dad, he’s—my mom—not about you, don’t worry.”

  He comes down the stairs beside her and puts a thin, awkward arm around her neck. Not comfortable, but. She hugs his bony forearm closer to her neck, and kisses the smooth skin.

  10. I’M SO IN LOVE WITH HUGH

  In her asymmetrical tweed coat, the nice one Fern gave her, Ivy swims through the flood of teenagers to the open door, the exodus policed by the janitor. What a waste of time that was. The door clangs behind her, a Law & Order sound, chains and detention. Free!

  Hugh is waiting in the gathering dark, leaning against the van. She can’t help it, she breaks into a run, trit-trot, gallop-a-trot, straight into his opening embrace.

  “Hey!” he says. “You okay?”

  “Do you go around the town asking everybody that?”

  “Yes,” he says. Not smiling, he’s been somewhere or other.

  “Della?” she asks, thinking through the flip-book of these new people. “L?”

  “Both,” he says. “Ken’s back from the dead, or from Bobcaygeon. Swing by the gallery, we can leave the van there and go for a drink.”

  Strange to assume, stranger to be right in assuming, that we’ll do everything in tandem, she thinks, swinging the van into evening traffic moving riverward. Dark already. Autumn. Another river, of cars: tail lights reddening the right side, headlights whitening the left.

  They go in by the framing room door, Hugh calling out, “Ruth?”

  Nobody there. In the time it took to park, the lights are off, the front door locked.

  Hugh opens it and peers out. “She’s got Jasper in tow, heading up the street to the Ace. She makes him go from time to time, to be sure he eats. Want to try it?”

  “Oh! I’m supposed to meet Burton and Newell there later on—good thing you said.”

  Ivy’s seen the Ace from outside: fake saloon, long porch and horse-rail, lantern light. Inside, a long L-shaped wooden bar surrounds a pyramid of glittering bottles. Ruth and Jasper sit at the mid-point of the bar, Ruth with a menu, Jasper addressing a glass of red. Hugh’s pals are scattered at small tables by the leaded windows, too many, she can’t be expected to remember all these people—her head won’t hold them all. They chain together, the way people who have known one another a long time do. She has no chains of her own. Well, work chains: Terry and Terry sit huddled close together in a cozy nook, heads nodding in unison against a mutual enemy. They missed the master class. Sad, they’d have loved the circle-jerk scene. How that play got produced in 1906 is one of the mysteries of theatre.

  Hugh and Ivy stand at the bar listening to Ruth argue with herself about what Jasper ought to eat. He orders, as apparently he always does, steak frites, and Ruth orders a side salad, no dressing, with berries. “For both of us,” she tells the waitress, waving her finger back and forth from Jasper’s to her own chest. “He needs the greens.”

  To Hugh, Ruth says, “Long day in the basement. We emptied buckets for a couple of hours, then Della came by to help. We had to stop when Mighton came along, he needed help with his big crate.” She sends a cutting glance to the end of the bar.

  “There’s Mighton—I haven’t seen him yet,” Hugh says. “Come be introduced.”

  It’s not till they are right beside Mighton that they see Ann is with him.

  She gives them a cool glare and turns pointedly on her stool to talk to the woman on her other side. “Lise Largely, the allergy realtor,” Hugh whispers in Ivy’s ear. He introduces her to Mighton, who sits upright and sneering, like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec: “Ian Mighton, favourite son of Peterborough. At least of the artistic sons—and daughters, like Della.”

  “Della.” Mighton pronounces the name as if it’s Meryl Streep or something. Sainted but fallible, teasable, even laughable; honoured all the same. “She picked me up at the train, I thought she was coming here tonight.”

  “Did she show you the flyer for your class? Must not be finished yet.” Hugh shakes his head. “We’re behind—it’s my fault. We’ll sell out anyway, nine spots are booked.”

  This brings a lift to Mighton’s falling face. “They haven’t forgotten me?”

  “I repacked one of your boxes the other night,” Hugh says. “I found a sketch for that portrait you did of Ann and Della and Newell intertwined. I want a new one of them now.”

  Mighton laughs, and his face breaks from self-absorption into something quite different: sharp, lively, sensitive. Maybe he’s just sour because he’s unhappy. “Where is that thing? But I don’t revisit,” he says. “You do it, Hugh. You’d do a better job—you love them.”

  “Not all of them,” Hugh protests, and Mighton sends a sharkish glance to Ann, rapt in conversation with Lise Largely: two fair women pretending (to Ivy’s own shark eye) to be unaware, but listening with all their ears to Mighton and his jabs.

  Hugh pulls Ivy’s elbow to find seats of their own, and they go down the long curve of the bar to e
mpty stools at the other end. “What’s his deal?” Ivy asks, nodding back to Mighton.

  “He’s not so bad. He’s got Crohn’s disease; gut-ache half the time. Makes him surly, also appealingly vulnerable.”

  The waitress brings them water and a single malt, neat, for Hugh. She takes Ivy’s order for a drink (the same, neat, thanks) and Hugh’s for food: calamari for both of them.

  “Trust me,” he says. “Best you’ll ever eat.”

  Ivy’s happy, sitting beside Hugh on old Windsor bar-chairs in this dark-loud-warm room. No demands being made on her, no need for lipstick or chic-er clothes than her nice coat—for anything but the warmth of Hugh’s arm, the closeness of his leg beside her own beneath the bar. The whiskey comes, and then the calamari, dredged in Cajun spice, perfect as promised.

  That peaceful time ends soon enough: Burton and Newell, emerging from an alcove around the corner, see her before she sees them. Newell puts an arm around her shoulders.

  “Sorry we abandoned you,” he says. “Burton had a few—notes.”

  I bet he did, Ivy thinks.

  Burton acknowledges Hugh in his usual fractured way, half knowing smirk, half sneer of hatred, and turns to Ivy. “I presume the afternoon proceeded apace, with muffled giggles at every mention of sex or masturbation? Spring Awakening is a bust, Hugh.”

  Mighton comes down the bar and claps Newell on the back. “I saw the musical in New York last year,” Mighton says. “Lots of angsty wailing over not much, I thought.”

  Not giving Newell time, Burton answers. It’s unclear to Ivy whether he knows Mighton or just senses and rises to the next-biggest ego in the room. “Glorification of wanking, plus a searing portrayal of sexual awakening et cetera, yes. It is a good play—but problematic: the circle-jerk, we wouldn’t get that past Pink. And it’s hard to do bare butts in real life, for a company as young as this.”

  Newell speaks into his glass, behind Burton’s bobbing head. “That’s the true thing Wedekind catches: shame, and the ignorance it rises from. How shame defiles us, ruins us.”

  Ivy is perturbed by that, but Burton rides over him: “German stuff—that S&M scene where Melchior whips Wendla, that’s the key. One must be beaten into acknowledging one’s earthy bestial nature.” He pronounces it beast-ial, Ivy can’t help noting.

  Newell’s face is distant, thinking, detached from everyone, one arm along Hugh’s chair-back. Newell is a sad man, but in these last few days she likes him more than ever.

  Mighton asks Ivy over-interested questions about the class, which seems to annoy Hugh as much as Burton’s pomposity does. Interesting. “I did the mamas, all of them,” Ivy says, to briefly answer him.

  “We all have to kill the mother, don’t we, Hugh?” Burton lets fly, a random shot.

  Hugh doesn’t seem distressed. “You can’t kill Mimi,” he says. “At least this Hugh can’t.” Then to Newell: “Ruth booked movers for Monday—but maybe a meteorite will hit the earth and I won’t have to deal with it.”

  “Maybe Hendy can find a loophole in the lease,” Newell says.

  Hugh shakes his head. “She won’t be going back—just as well to get it done. I have to deal with it some time.”

  “I’ll help,” Newell says. Burton darts him a look, and at the other end of the bar, Ivy sees the Largely woman’s head lift. Like a cat scenting the air, catching a wingflutter of bird or breath of mouse.

  Hugh stands and flags the waitress. “I’ve got to run over to Mimi,” he tells Ivy. “Wait for me? Or—here.” He gives her his keys, speaks into her ear. “If I’m not back when you want to leave, go up to my place, I’ll find you there.” His hand clasps hers, and he goes out.

  Mighton slips into Hugh’s chair and prepares to lay heavy siege to Ivy, which makes her laugh at his bravura, and his complete folly.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” she says, at his affront. “It’s just funny because I’m so in love with Hugh.”

  He looks up, startled, and she says, “I mean, in love with Hugh. With Hugh Argylle.”

  11. NOTHING HUGH CAN DO

  Hugh walks the long linoleum hall in the nightlight-yellow glow. Some doors are open. Old people sitting on beds, relatives visiting. Only occasional sobs. At Mimi’s door, he pauses, gathering courage. Relinquishing Ivy’s warmth, preparing to bear his mother’s deathly cold.

  He pushes open the door and sees Della, standing by the window like a ghost.

  “She’s out. The morphine’s working,” she says. “I came to spell Ruth off. Come talk for a minute?”

  He’s downcast. Anticlimactic—sacrifice not required. He goes into the dusk-draped room and stands by the window, close enough for Della to whisper.

  But then she doesn’t. “What’s up,” he finally has to ask.

  Another minute. “I saw Ken. I saw where he is, out at Sturgeon.”

  “I know.”

  “No, he’s been there all this time.”

  Hugh takes a deeper breath. “I know.”

  Della looks at him. “What do you know?”

  “I know he went there instead of to the Elora Gorge thing. He told me he was going out to Bobcaygeon, he asked me not to tell you about it.” In the grey night-window light Della’s eyes are painfully large, painfully dark, great shadows around them. Hugh feels worse about this than he even imagined he would. “He said he needed a few days to think things through—I saw him coming out of Conrad’s office, that’s the only reason he told me.”

  “Told you—what?” Her unnatural stillness makes him think she might fall over, faint.

  “Breathe,” he says.

  She obeys, but only barely.

  “He told me he was having trouble deciding what to do, that’s all. That he couldn’t go on, he had to make a change, and wasn’t sure how you would take it.”

  Della sits on the window ledge, as if her legs won’t hold her.

  Hugh touches her shoulder, her arm. “Della, don’t—it’s not the end of the world, it’s just—Listen, he was afraid to tell you. He knows it will mean a huge change in your life, he needed a few days to find his courage. I couldn’t say no.”

  She looks away, almost laughs. “You could have.”

  He’s surprised she’s taking this so hard. She never wanted Ken to be a lawyer, after all. Wouldn’t she’d rather he teach, or whatever he’s intending to do, consult?

  “I know you want his happiness—when he talked to me, I thought it might even be a case of his life.”

  She shifts on the ledge. She looks as old as she is. As old as he is too.

  “When someone wants so badly not to be—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Dell. I should have told you anyway.”

  “You promised,” she says, looking down into the hands abandoned in her lap. “He might have changed his mind, or something. Better if we

  didn’t, if I didn’t know. It won’t make much difference for Elly, she’s leaving anyway.”

  “I’m sure he’s figured out the finances, how you can manage.”

  “Hugh,” she says. Her face is flat white. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  He’s beginning to lose patience with her, always crying poor. Everybody’s poor. “Look, if it’s going to mean hardship, I’ll help—we can do more classes, raise the fees.”

  He stops. Della is shaking her head, tears falling into her loose-cupped hands. He sits, he puts his arm around her.

  She takes a couple of hard breaths, then stands. “Thanks. Ken won’t talk, can’t talk. I’ll—I’ve got to go and think about what to do.” She turns and is out the door, made mobile by some awful collision of time and emotion.

  Emotion everywhere, exhausting. Ken looked terrible.

  Hugh goes to Mimi’s bed, to the chair that waits there, his predestined seat. Try not to move from it for an hour. Just in case she comes to life again, out of the sleep that is close, but not close enough, to death.

  (ORION)

  Sheridan’s implement: Sheridan Tooley sent away in the mail for some kind of mast
urbation aid that arrived yesterday, and he talked about it all through Spring Awakening in class. Excellent, apparently. Alone at home, Orion contemplates masturbation, but it’s so lonely, so stupid. Like sucking your thumb. Plus he has heard, not that he believes it, that it desensitizes a person. Instead of porn, he shifts the screen to eavesdrop on people he knows, to Facebook and Twitter, finding nothing. Instagram, Tumblr. There’s Jason’s vidblog from the beginning of term. Half-naked, fake-funny, his soul exposed in the worst way. Wandering around some bedroom, looks like L’s. How can you ever help the people around you to not be asswipes?

  VidBlog, Jason the Egonaut

  “I’m the first person in my class to get their own project. It’s down. Working with down. I’m down with that.” [Strikes black-culture pose, unsuccessfully.] “So, I’m looking at a slim-line take on the ski jacket. It saves on down, it’s wearable in all kinds of climes. Also I know some chunkier girls.”

  [A pop can hits him in the head, L’s arm in frame for an instant; the camera turns on Savaya and Nevaeh: they are twined together on L’s trundle bed. While Jason talks, offcamera, they mouth extremely rude things.]

  “I’ve taken the plunge and gone for purple. I figure black is great but … But there’s room in this world for purple. It’s pretty ugly actually. It was all they had left that would keep the down in. I’ve got a line on that bathing suit stuff, neoprene.”

  Boring, boring boring. Every person, every thing, every molecule in this world is boring.

  Unless part of, attached to, cellularly integral with the loved one.

  Orion leaps up the stairs and silent, silent, so as not to wake his zonked-out mother who never does awaken, out the door and onto his bike.

  12… . BUT HUGH CAN’T MAKE HIM DRINK

  Knowing Ann is safely at the bar, Hugh deviates down the road that runs by her house. Ivy can’t go back there, it’s ridiculous. He sets the ladder up once more against the wall. Jason probably uses headphones, but Hugh is quiet anyway. At the top of the ladder he pushes the window up, holds on—hands sweating suddenly, because his head really does hurt, a lot—reaches in and gropes for Ivy’s duffel in the darkened room. Not too big. It’s got a shoulder strap, thank God. He mangles it out the window, steadies himself again, ducks his head through the shoulder strap, and braces as the weight slides down his back.