Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

but Elly and I does not exist anymore

  small homely sound chick of the back door knob her step

  Elly blue cascading over her neck and arm

  I could paint that her stance flexible slashing blue

  Forgot my coxcomb, I had to come back.

  I wasn’t—I didn’t—hear anything.

  dear liar worse than anything

  she has to pity me smile for her at least

  Right, see you later, sweetheart, pick you up at FairGrounds

  it’s in my phone.

  she runs

  Elly at 2 sleepwalking what damage did we do fighting so long?

  at our bedroom door

  he’s walking out say it before he leaves

  I tried to—it’s the end of the month, I have to pay the Visas

  and the bill for the new windshield—can you transfer

  something into the chequing account?

  his arm waves backwards dumping everything back on me

  to the ruin of everything, everything

  it is all my fault always always

  NO

  no more

  where is he going fuck you

  where has he been all week your suffering your despair

  I hate you with all my heart

  whatever is going on

  whatever you’re angry about

  it’s not this repeating spread Mighton’s arrogant face

  not Mighton teeth on thigh

  hopeless

  all the goddamn photos I haven’t made the flyer with which fatuous identical face pick one this one exacto tape to the cutting board grab the ruler hands shaking cut one wrecked it does not matter Glenlivet on the sideboard alcohol is good for shock push the ruler hard slide slide fine motor control regained glue to dull unsatisfactory text add head photocopy leave flyers at FairGrounds at Jasper’s

  everyone will be satisfied

  there! was it so hard?

  one crossed off the list

  Hallowe’en candy Zellers fifty percent off after noon

  (L)

  In Studio class, last stool to the left, L watches the nude model rearrange her pose. Like that old photo of naked women with blue paint on them—the man spreading blue on their pale skin, their breasts and sides, the women laughing from the cold of the paint, from being allowed in to the art, if only as paint rollers. In grade ten, the first year she came in to do AP Visual at school—Mr. Goffer, the teacher then, kind of despisable, but that morning he was pinning a watercolour to the door. A long thing, pale colours on heavy watercolour stock: a lily so beautiful so perfect so meticulously delicately painted she about fainted with joy.

  Only it wasn’t real. No, it was real. It was a real lily, Goffer had run a real lily through the printing press between two sheets of watercolour paper. And then tossed it in the garbage, where it lay splat ruined dead, a lily like a bulldozed glove. Men and manipulation, men copying from nature, with nature, men with women as brushes. A life in art, men and women, what will that mean? Savaya slept with Goffer, also she says with Gordon Lightfoot, yucky because he’s like, a hundred. Bones and leather. She might be lying about Lightfoot.

  Nevaeh on Hallowe’en last year, crying because she couldn’t make herself eat candy. Listening to the parents fighting. Don’t think of that. L thinks of Jason lying in the trundle bed, his yielding nature, how he needs to be protected. She draws a set of algebraic diagrams on the paper before her:

  L is to J as K is to D? Or as D is to K? Let N be the variable.

  Savaya slides in behind L’s easel, a minute before the master class, urgent emergency whisper in her ear: “Nevaeh got taken to the hospital after you left to go home. An ambulance came to school and took her away, people are saying she tried to kill herself or she was cutting or something.”

  L puts down her charcoal and rips off the paper before she runs, because she is always careful about what she leaves lying around. Even if it is in code.

  (ORION)

  Everybody knew it was coming, anyway—she’s been a disaster hankering to happen for the last six months. Why today, what sent her teetering, tottering over the edge on those too-high heels?

  “It wasn’t you,” Jason says, not just to Orion. To Savaya and L and any random others who might hear, milling at the office door. He is usually more contained. His voice tight, blame-dry: “I was pinning her sleeves, I wanted to make one shorter, and she flipped out and ripped the dress right off.”

  “So it’s your fault? She’s been doing the cutting, the stupid girl.”

  “Orion!” Savaya pinches his arm.

  “I call ’em as I see ’em,” Orion says. “She’s a stupid stupid girl to mutilate herself and she’s stupid not to have come to us a long time ago, she’s stupid not to have hidden it better—I’m not saying she’s crazy, she’s just been very stupid.”

  Nevaeh, Savaya, L, Jason, who is going to take care of all of them? Only Orion himself has the necessary cool, uncluttered, sociopath’s mind to do it. “From now on, everybody has to pass their problems by me,” he says. Only one-third joking.

  They will be late. “Come on,” Orion says, pulling Savaya with him, fingers, hand, arm, away from the rubbernecking grade nine tourists, who aren’t going to get any information out of the office anyway.

  He still has to brace himself for the master class, for Burton. The risk—Burton’s eyes, flat stones in yellow tea, his nose, those pits, the redness. His ugliness that repels/attracts, fascinating to watch, especially if he might attack you. Why does Newell protect him?

  And this is my story, as you can plainly see,

  Never let a sailor put his hand above your knee.

  7. MASTER CLASS: WHAT YOU WILL

  Ivy senses the seething crisis-juice flooding the halls, but can’t see what caused it. Students scatter like frightened mice, here-and-thereing without sensible purpose. She hugs her bundle of scripts to avoid dropping it; the photocopier was out of staples and she does not want to spend an hour on her hands and knees repaginating.

  They’ve all come to the workshop room in a mass. At the door, Orion is saying to Jason, “Also, the party was at her place and now it can’t be, so your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out where else we can have it. Your penance.”

  “Not my place,” Savaya says. Her eyes are pink with tears, pretty in pain. “My dad’s still frothing at the mouth from Wednesday night.”

  Burton arrives. “Company, company!” he cries, clapping his plump seal paws. “Desist, take your seats, we are well met by fluorescent light, fair tintinnabulations.”

  The students scatter and reform instantly at their chairs. The discipline of the class now known to them. Seeing no scripts on the table, they turn their heads to Burton, like flowers to a ghastly sun-lamp. “A frolic Hallowe’en treat, except Hallowmas was for alms-gathering in Shakespeare’s day. This post-Christmas holiday, the Feast of Fools, was for disguise, passion, the turning of tables. I’m sure you all know the play: Twelfth Night.” He pauses. “Or, What You Will. As we continue our examination of the plays that inform the Western canon.” Flimflam, thank you, man.

  At his arm’s wave, Ivy distributes the scripts, enjoying the little stroll around the table.

  “We’ll read through scenes without explanatory remarks from me, to see what you people understand of the language of the Bard. Orion!”

  Orion jumps.

  Ivy puts the script in front of him. Not as cool as he hopes, young Orion.

  “You will play Sebastian, and his alter-ego Viola, in both manifestations.” Burton waggles his eyebrows meaningfully. There’s a little frisson of energy at that, but not much. They know their Burton by now. “Animus, Anima. Yin-slash-Yang. With a nod to the rich Shakespearian tradition of boys playing girls, of course. As well as the boy playing the girl, you’ll be the girl playing the boy, and the boy she plays at being.”

  Ivy completes her circuit with a script for Newell and one for herself, and sits, ready to accept the
rôle of tedious Maria with equanimity.

  Burton swivels his eye from Orion to Newell. “Newell will give us His Eminence the Duke, and Savaya—”

  “Oh, sorry! I have to take this text—” Savaya jumps up from the table, leaving Burton fish-mouthed. Perhaps no one has ever done such a thing to him before.

  She stops dead in the middle of the room, staring at the screen, and turns to address them all, breast-breath hovering, shimmering; eyes brimming with dew. “Nevaeh’s okay! I mean—she broke her ankle really badly, falling down the school steps, her dad is going to sue, and they’re operating to put pins in. That’s all it was!” How lovely to be young and ardent and full of joy, Ivy thinks. Or full of relief.

  Burton, prim: “If you feel able to rejoin us?”

  Savaya dances back to her chair, glowing at him.

  “Where were we—ah. Savaya, you will read the Countess Olivia. Of her household, Sheridan Tooley will read Aguecheek, the foolish palsied knight, and Ivy—dear Ivy, so flexible, a director’s dream, will give us Toby Belch.”

  Ivy keeps her face perfectly cordial, serene in knowing that whatever happens here will only last one goddamned day. She will pull out all the stops, belch the alphabet at his behest.

  “Since it seems Nevaeh will not be gracing us with her presence …” Burton’s eyes move over the assembled company, searching, discarding. He lights on a grade eleven girl, pretty and bright. “Mikayla, you take Maria. I will myself—” Burton pauses, to regain their whole awestruck attention: “—assay Malvolio. I flatter myself I was born to play the part.”

  He has thrust the greatness on himself. Newell looks down at his script, the edges of his mouth moving in an ungovernable smile. His hand brushes Ivy’s: we are in this together thank God someone else has a sense of humour. No gesture could be more different from Jerry Pink’s hand-brush, that said I am stalking you, woman-bug.

  Burton accepts the silent awe of the assemblage as his due, and finishes. “You all, in the scenes we read today, will create Feste—not tout ensemble, but as a horde, a juggle of jesters. Read line by line as I point to you.” Which puts everyone nicely on edge, Ivy thinks. No counting ahead to your next lines. Not that she hasn’t done much the same thing, mentally—Belch is only in the Malvolio scenes Burton has chosen. Still, it will be fun to poke fun at ol’ Burton’s malevolent major-domo. She cheers up a bit. They start: Viola, washed up on shore, disguises herself as a boy to enter the service of the Duke.

  But Ivy is distracted. The mystery of Orion and Newell lies underneath every word, every disguised or protective glance. “I have unclasp’d to thee the book even of my secret soul,” Newell says down the long table to where Orion sits exiled, close to Savaya.

  How can Burton sit and listen, wearing that tiny smile? The innuendos and inside jokes of the script conspire: “They shall yet belie thy happy years that say thou art a man: Diana’s lip is not more smooth and rubious …” The Duke cannot help flirting with him/her/him, with everything, everyone, making every person love him. Extra meaning conspires, even: Newell smiles to tell Orion, “I know thy constellation is right apt for this affair.”

  Yet Orion’s purity of purpose, his clever boy’s ambition, has its own morality. He is pure, compared to the jaded Duke, whose jade piece knocks gently against his creamy shirt at every gesture. And Newell is the Duke—“For I myself am best when least in company.” That inner solitude, that remoteness is infinitely attractive, Ivy thinks. Dean, Brando, all those strange lonely thinkers who become romantic heroes.

  Then it’s the rascals. Mikayla manages Maria’s antique jokes and wordplay far better than Burton deserves from a random choice. She has nice flat eyes and another kind of inner solitude, seeming to be not of the main acting clique, but complete in herself.

  The Feste-crowd follows Burton’s dreadful pointing finger, but the sense is lost on them and Burton soon stops them with a quick-flashing hand. His eye ranges the table again, coldly, discarding choice after choice. He refocuses beyond the table to where Jason sits at the back wall, hunched over, watching. “You, design boy,” Burton says. “You’ve been listening, what’s your name? Jason—come and take part. From, Take the fool away …”

  Ivy experiences a painful lurch, half worry that Jason will be afraid, half fear that Burton might have lighted on new prey.

  Jason unfolds himself obediently. He finds a chair beside Mikayla, not visibly anxious. “Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the lady,” he says, his voice a dry, shy, fluting echo of Savaya’s—unexpectedly funny. He catechizes her on her brother’s death and confounds her, lovingly —“The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen” —until she must call upon Malvolio for support.

  Yipes, the electric charge of Burton reading Malvolio: upsetting and hilarious, authority upturned. Ivy enjoys it very much. This work is dangerous! Burton shows them all how it’s done: his greed constrained, his egotistical hunger heightened, made monstrous—then made pitiful by Olivia’s delicate distance from Malvolio.

  The intimacy between Savaya and Orion lends the first Viola/Olivia scene such free flowing pleasure of instantly recognized love that Ivy thinks of Hugh, of seeing him in the parlour at Pink’s and—seeing him. Being seen.

  At the end of the little scene there’s silence in the room. Burton, even, was caught in the silken net. What a lovely thing acting is, theatre is. Playing at life so well that we believe, we do believe.

  Burton calls out page numbers to push the Malvolio plot scenes together. He’s right, he was born for this small greatness. The part presents his vast ego like a heart surgeon cuts open a chest: there is Burton’s tiny, choked, empurpled, wizened heart, furiously beating. It’s not at all fair, what they do to him, but very funny; and Sheridan Tooley turns out to be a heck of a guy, willing to throw himself into poor Aguecheek, to shiver himself silly. So much of the work is seeing what could be—what actors might be capable of, will be, what beauty and transcendence might happen if everything conspires, agrees, conflates. Not that they are good right now, but that they will be, could be. This is the kind of day that makes people spend their lives in theatre, Ivy thinks.

  Over too soon. Terry and Terry come in promptly at six to hand out Hallowe’en candy and send the students spinning off into the darkening afternoon, with a reminder that Saturday’s day-long workshop starts at ten.

  Orion murmurs to Savaya as they tidy their scripts; Ivy watches Savaya slip casually down the table to stop by Newell. Burton is consulting some script-note.

  Savaya checks to make sure Terry and Terry are out of earshot. “We’re, the students are having a party tonight—it was supposed to be at Nevaeh’s house, but now …”

  Jason, reading ahead to the rest of Feste, looks up. “Have it at my house,” he says. At the arrested looks of his friends, and of Ivy, he laughs. “Why not? Nothing left in there to break.”

  8. CAN’T BUY HUGH LOVE

  The Mighton has shifted. (Shifted is not painted.) Hugh puts out a hand to adjust it, not wanting to climb even the stepstool. The room reels around him as he stretches up his arm. Popping Advil all day, but the headache rises like a wave from time to time anyway. It’s the stress, the impossibility of keeping the gallery going—will upping classes help? Largely’s offer weights his desk, vibrates at the edge of his eye. He hasn’t opened the envelope. Hendy emailed: Newell wants to assume the gallery mortgage at a lower rate. He’s a prince, but there is no lower rate, it’s already prime minus one, nobody can do better than that. There’s no solution except for Mighton to push out vast collages the way Della’s mother used to push out identical boats, twelve in a row, so Hugh can sell them all at a fifty percent commission. Who to? Half to Newell, half to Gerald.

  Summoned by the power of his name, Gerald walks in. Five-thirty, he must have left his staff to sell. “Like the look of this,” he says, hovering at the Mighton.

  “A large piece,” Hugh says. “Overpowering—not ea
sy to live with.”

  Gerald steps toward it, backs away, attempting judicious distance. Hugh’s heart sags. “My—we—” Gerald’s throat works to produce a sound, fails. Hard to watch. Then nothing.

  Hugh rushes in. “It’s an investment piece, no question—but steep, at ninety. I wonder, Gerald, if you might be happier with something from Gareth Pindar’s gallery, something a little less demanding.”

  Night and day the dark gates stand open, the plaque reads. Around the blazing, ferocious crack of blue-white light down the middle, the dark gates gape. Thousands of shards and fragmentary details woven and soldered into those giant gates, open but not wide open, nothing generous about them. The blue glare down the middle is very hard to take.

  Gerald is staring too. Head a-tilt. The patron’s stare that after all these years still irritates Hugh—evaluative, cow-eyed pretend-thinking. But maybe Gerald is not-thinking of his wife, or of Toby. Hugh feels tears start into his eyes and turns quickly away, terribly embarrassed. It’s his head, the unsteadiness of everything. He’s all right when Ivy’s there, but otherwise he falls to pieces. All the thousand faces in the gates.

  He ought to be with Mimi.

  Gerald stands stubbornly planted, silent, staring. Hugh goes back to the desk. He sits holding his head with one cupped hand until a shuffling noise at the communicating door between the stores catches his attention. Jasper. Wisps of white hair straight up on one side, matted flat on the other, like he’s been asleep on his desk.

  He pokes a full glass through the crack at Hugh. “Care for a taster? A cheeky Malbec.”

  “No, thanks. Conrad says no booze till my head gets better.”

  “Your loss, your loss. Here’s looking up your old address!” Jasper is well-to-do, as they used to say about drunks. Three sheets to the wind.

  Hugh returns the salute, raising his coffee cup.