Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  What’s that around his neck? A rope?

  At least he’s on his own.

  But no, he’s not. Burton sweeps in the door, in a pair of loud-checked yellow Rupert Bear pants and the red generalissimo jacket from the wardrobe room. In a psycho-bullhorn voice that stops the ordinary racket, he shouts, “I am Pozzo!” Nobody dares to speak. Even people who are not in the master class know about him. “Pozzo!” (A pause.)

  From the fireplace, where she is tracking Jason’s mother’s quotes, Ivy raises her beer to them and says, “Bozzo? Bono …”

  Newell tugs at his neck, loosening the leash like he’s tired of playing Burton’s game. “Hard to find a drink in this dark wood.”

  Orion slips into the kitchen, snags a couple of beer. He takes one to Newell, and one to Burton, who’s coiling up that rope.

  “Ah, Ganymede,” Burton says, accepting the bottle as his due.

  Burton never looks him in the face anymore, just gazes around him. Orion takes the other beer to Newell. Who does not look at him properly either, so Orion lowers his own eyes. Burton coils the leash, pulling it tauter and tauter. It’s not a leash, it’s a noose.

  Orion doesn’t like it. He goes to the French doors, where Jason and L are shoring up the door posts, one in, one out in the garden. Sensible positioning for vigilance.

  “What the fuck with the noose?” he asks L quietly.

  “They’re those guys, you know? From the middle of Waiting for Godot.” L has seen a ton more plays than he has. His mother made him waste too much time on dance. “Master/slave—Pozzo’s the boss, and Newell is the silent one. Pozzo drags him around, makes him carry stuff. He doesn’t speak except for one long rant at the end of act one.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. Freedom?”

  “Burton looks like Pink, dressed like that,” Jason says.

  Savaya has come out of the dark garden. She turns around, gold dress slithering along her sides and legs. “I’m thinking of fucking Pink,” she tells them in a trickling whisper.

  “Ergo, you haven’t yet, ergo he is a slimebucket but not a molester nor open to prosecution,” Orion says. “Do not do that stupid thing.”

  “So I just dangle him along? I thought that was bad.”

  “Not with him,” L says.

  Savaya pouts. “I would definitely pass Math, though,” she says.

  She does not know about love, Orion thinks. Not a single fucking single fucking thing.

  (L)

  L roams the increasing chaos. Down by the riverbank the tech guys are drinking Stuntman shots around the firepit: snort salt, drink tequila, squeeze the lime in your eye. L doesn’t have too much to do with them. She’s supposed to work on the set—except now there won’t even be a performance. Burton gave that to Ivy, like a present. He’s stupid and cruel, then he’s all-knowing and sensitive. You never know which will pop out.

  Sheridan Tooley’s sister Cameron, third-year Environmental at Trent, turns up as an organ-grinder with a stuffed monkey, her priceless childhood treasure. Sheridan and his boyfriend kidnap it; it’s got long Velcro arms, and they keep playing literal monkey in the middle with her. Then Sheridan sticks the monkey’s long hands into his pants, which is rude; then the boyfriend in the long gloves puts the monkey in the oven. That’s a tasteless joke.

  Some witch in the Trent bunch has a magic wand showering glitter—the glitter is getting in everybody’s eyes, and in the splits between the floor boards. That’s what finally takes down Sheridan: he gets a grain of glitter in his eye and makes a big deal of it, take me to the hospital, etc., and his sister, who still has tears in her own eyes from the fun they made of her monkey, carts him off. The boyfriend, whose name turns out to be Leveret, goes too.

  Mikayla has had way too much to drink—who saw that one coming. She moans to L about alcohol poisoning, leaning on one of the folding tables in the kitchen with her (Nevaeh’s, really) breast-eyelashes drooping. “That isn’t it,” Savaya says, coming in from the river. “When you get cold and blue, that’s when it’s bad.” But Mikayla looks pretty bad.

  And how long is Jason’s mom going to stay out? L finds herself shivering too. She gives Savaya a waggling eye, and Savaya kindly takes the hint. “Hey, Mikayla,” she says. “Come on outside. There’s a fire going, the fresh air will do you good. You can sit on the wall, then if you have to puke you can do it in the river.”

  Jason comes up as they go. “Maybe I should get that dress off her.”

  “When’s your mom going to get home?”

  He shrugs. “Ideally, Monday or Tuesday.”

  Oh good, here comes more Trent people, more beer, more noise.

  Jason takes L’s hand and pulls her to the kitchen stairs. He pushes her up in front of him and closes the door behind them. The dark comes down, the noise recedes, it’s so peaceful.

  L sits, breaths out a long straggling sigh. She fishes the phone out of her bra and hits the button. “Let’s go old school. See who’s Facebooking the party.” Jason puts out a hand to fix the neckline of her chiton. His fingers give her shivers everywhere. I ought to be living my life, doing my work, she thinks, while her fingers work the phone. Instead I’m stuck being seventeen, stuck here, unable to figure out what, how, who.

  “Ha!” he says, looking at her screen.

  “What?”

  “Look, Sheridan put ‘in a relationship with Leveret.’ Whoever that is.”

  “The glove guy. Good for Sheridan, if obviously a little late.”

  “You should put that we are.”

  L laughs. “We are what, ‘it’s complicated’?”

  Jason has whipped out his own phone and is changing his status as she watches. “Put ‘relationship,’ we’ll shock people—then we can get divorced or you can be a widow.”

  “Don’t!” She doesn’t like that. But it is funny. “It’s not even April Fool’s.”

  “We can have April Fool’s whenever we like—are we slaves to the mere calendar?”

  The phone pings, that was fast. Six likes. Seven. Nine. A comment from Nevaeh, who must be bored out of her mind at the hospital. > oh my god you guys of course you are!

  Jason laughs at that. “Told you so.”

  Another ping: from Savaya, out at the river. > it’s like, when are they going to realize?

  Nevaeh: > inorite! like like like!

  Fifteen likes. Twenty-seven. Forty. They look at each other in the almost-darkness, laughter bubbling up in both of them, springing, springing up. On L’s post, a comment from Savaya appears:

  > my mom knew months ago.

  Nevaeh: > yr mom always has the widsom.

  15. I DON’T WANT TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE

  Two a.m. The living room has been abandoned for the fire-pit in the garden, kids letting their smoke wind into the firesmoke and the breeze coming off the river. Ivy plugs her own iPod into the machine and finds some languid Madeleine Peyroux, thinking it might be time to get this wound down … no one but Hugh … And now more ringing at the front door.

  She goes, but Newell is closer. Stretching to the end of his rope, he opens the door wide and tells the dark-clad thugs, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” The big shapes look at him for a minute, the arms in the T-shirt, the noose around his neck, and then turn and drift away.

  “The tears of the world are a constant quantity,” Burton says, tipping his drink. “For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

  Jason and L come down the front stairs, laughing together, heads bent over their phones. Hugh heads over and talks into L’s ear, trying to make himself clear over the music. One hand goes to his temple, an unconscious gesture. His head, hurting again. He should be in bed.

  Ivy goes over to eavesdrop: Hugh is asking L to get him a couple of Della’s new boat pictures to frame for Saturday. “I’ll bring them over in the morning,” L says. “I’m not at the master class tomorrow. I could help you with dinner.”


  Jason raises his eyebrows to Ivy, wondering whether he will be needed at the class.

  “No idea,” she says. “Ask the big fella.”

  But Burton, bored by the quieter music, is disappearing into the kitchen, trailing Newell’s rope behind him.

  Newell, gagging a little, reaches out a hand to control the pull. Burton resists the tug and hauls on the rope, so Newell needs both hands to protect his neck, and Hugh starts after them as if he’s going to tear that rope off Newell single-handed, saying, “Careful!”

  That makes Burton change tack and charge back, shouting again: “Turn him away? Such an old and faithful servant!”

  The room falls still, kids called to startled attention. Something real happening here?

  Ivy pulls on Hugh’s arm. “He’s spouting Beckett,” she says. “He’s just having fun with you.” She begs him, silently, not to lose his temper—“No punching,” she mouths, trying to make him laugh, to take some of the strain out of his face.

  At the end of his rope, Burton’s face has gone livid with booze or rage, hard to tell. Newell raises his arms, surrendering to the noose, to the quarrel, mouthing quaquaquaqua.

  “What? What is he saying?” Hugh asks.

  Burton’s voice is rough, drenched in maudlin tears, lost in some old production. “Beauty, grace, truth of the first water, I knew it was all beyond me.”

  “Stop,” Newell says.

  Finally, the note in his voice checks Burton, who skips ahead in the script and subsides into pitiful mumbling, “The way he goes on, you’ve no idea, it’s terrible.”

  The front door opens, and in comes Ann.

  Ivy’s insides jump so hard she thinks she’ll laugh, or die. Standing in the jumbled mass of shoes littering her formerly empty doorway, Ann takes in Hugh and Newell and Burton, their knot of conflict. The iron skeleton of the coffee table. The vanished exhibits, dresses, gloves.

  The photographer crowds up behind her, camera slung at the ready. Poser.

  “My—” Ann says. “What is this?”

  Jason does a brave thing. He detaches himself from L, and says “Hey, Mom. I’m having the class party. Um, a few things got broken.”

  Ann turns stiffly to face him, like a dressmaker’s dummy on a swivel.

  At that heightened moment, Orion leaps in from the garden. “Call 911,” he says—loud, laughing—“Pumpkin on fire!”

  Everyone makes for the French doors in a mass.

  Out there beside the small fire pit, a column of flame is shooting into the night sky. One of the jack-o’lanterns, Ivy sees, as her vision adjusts to make out the lumpy shadow beneath the brilliant fire. “Kerosene,” Orion says. “One of the tech guys did a torch effect, but it worked better than he—he burned his eyebrows off, and they can’t get the fire to go out—”

  Everyone would be laughing, except there’s a shriek, a real shriek, and one of the girls, Mikayla, runs across the grass to the river, her breasts blinking at the crowd and her feathered tail on fire, flaming feathers shooting out behind her as she runs, tail switching to and fro. Three or four of them run to help her, including Stewart … no, he’s just taking pictures—

  And into the river she goes. Ker-splash.

  “Hugh?” Ivy takes his arm. “I think we ought to go to bed.”

  (ORION)

  Newell climbing up from the bottom; Orion coming down, smoke and kerosene washed off his hands. “Can’t cross on the stairs,” Newell says. “Ruth would never forgive us.”

  Orion stands, heart thumping in his chest. Leaping.

  “I slipped my leash,” Newell says. His eyes are quiet, his spirit shining out of them in a steady light.

  Orion laughs, just as quiet. To know somebody loves you, to see delight in his eyes. Orion shines back. He’s been ignoring, suppressing this glorious thing—it washes through him, a painful/exquisite tide of blood. “I—” he says, then nothing more. Newell’s hands come up and his own catch them—in the darkness of the stairwell it is enough to stand hand-clasping. Orion’s mind/soul/heart is racing, he is a giant again.

  Wait. Something is still wrong. They separate.

  “Listen, don’t be so— Listen,” Newell says. “You have to know that Burton will call, and I’ll go to him.” He looks away, down and to the left. The direction of shame.

  Orion’s hand goes out, but he sees the blankness in Newell’s eyes, and the hand cannot reach him. “Why?” Orion asks. No answer. “Why?” he asks again.

  Newell’s voice is like water. Serious, honest, pure. “From duty, and love, from long association. I can’t explain it to you, I don’t— I don’t want you to feel this way. But I do. I float, I fly, but Burton is the rope. The anchor.”

  Orion stands there, a stair above Newell, forced into looking down on him, not choosing to. “You are so wrong, so wrong to do this.”

  “I can’t—” To see the great Newell inarticulate, that is weird and painful. He holds the stair-rail instead of Orion’s arm. “I know it’s not enough. I can’t make it whole.”

  Orion’s chest is cracking. He didn’t know this pain would be so physical. He feels elevated, looking down on Newell’s face, still loving him. But seeing that the one he loves is no king after all. The pain in his chest is fierce.

  His eyes are filling, that won’t do. Can’t cry at this shit, that is not allowed. He turns as if he will climb slowly out of this, but his feet betray him and he stumbles and falls down the odd-shaped stairs, past Newell, slipping and turning, and he opens the door and—flees.

  16. HUGH KNEW

  Hugh and Ivy carry cans and bottles to the kitchen where Burton is washing glasses, red jacket hung on the doorknob, up to his elbows in soapy water. Easy to clean up empty rooms, turns out—Hugh begins to see method in Ann’s madness. It’s late, he’s tired.

  In the lull, a rush: Orion bolts out the back stairs door, a knife in flight.

  An instant later Newell emerges, looking like hell.

  Orion halts at the back door, turns and tells the room, “I’ll go check the—the riverbank, make sure the fire, the others—” A brave stand, a fair recovery of dignity. He smiles, almost an honest smile, and almost-bows to Burton—of all people—before he goes.

  You can’t blinker yourself forever, bury your head up your own ass. Hugh can’t. Burton isn’t a danger to the fledgling Orion. Newell is. Your dear friend, your brother.

  Burton offers Newell the rope. Newell puts the noose around his neck and starts to dry the dishes.

  Ivy leads Hugh out of the kitchen and up the stairs, taking him to bed. Why didn’t she take him earlier? His head hurts. The right side pounds and sings, causing a kind of blindness. The living room is empty, empty again; crazy. The writing on the walls makes no sense, he can’t get his eyes to focus on it.

  Then what is Newell doing to Burton—how can that be justified? By rights, should Hugh want Orion and Newell to get together? His head hurts. No solution. Sleep will be surcease.

  Ivy is fiddling with the locked door, doing something, and after a blank space he is in the dark familiar bedroom, crawling in beside her, and asleep.

  (L)

  Not even 3 a.m. and the garden is empty. The fire truck arriving cleared off the frayed ends of the crowd. Orion ran past L and Jason, said he was going for eggs to make his famous after-party scrambles, but he was crying. So probably lying about the eggs.

  Jason’s mom is not mad; she’s relieved that for once he has a social life. Even about the broken table; she wanted better glass anyway. She asks about Mimi’s clothes, and Jason tells her they’re locked safely in Ivy’s room—then she says she has to get some sleep because TV lady Charlaine is arriving in the morning and Jason says he’ll get up and help, which placates her completely. Or else she’s distracted by Photog Guy, who is hepped on himself for both getting good pics and putting out the fire with the lid of the pumpkin, he’s all whoop-de-doo I’m the man etc. Jason’s mom is finding that pretty charming.

  The photographer
turns out to be called Stewart, which for some reason makes Jason and L laugh so hard, so they pretend to be clearing up bottles and cans, blue recycling bags carried high to hide the hysterical giggling. They fill one bag each, leave them propped up in the kitchen, and drift off up the back stairs.

  Taking off her chiton, L hands it to Jason so he can fold it properly. She pulls on one of his T-shirts, stacked by colour and fiber content on his orderly closet shelves.

  The thing is, autonomy. She’s unwilling to give up her personhood, her autonomy to another person, Nevaeh or anyone. Orion might be worth giving it up for, she can see that, or Newell—there, you see, that’s how women (and men) get themselves into trouble. Better to be with Jason who is an extension of herself than to be with the Other who will rule her. But some people choose differently.

  He turns off the light, and they get into his big bed, as they have done since the earliest time she can remember.

  In the darkness, Jason says, “You know that word charity means love, right?”

  That makes her heart stop beating, makes her throat unable to take in, to breathe. Then sweet air comes in flooding again.

  “Sometimes I want you to touch me,” she says.

  Oh, the humiliation, if he says no.

  (DELLA)

  everyone else does I might might I one might Mighton

  Ken isn’t/won’t be home Elle isn’t/won’t be nothing to go home for

  Mighton needs help carrying sword and shield 3 a.m.

  he can drive he hardly drank unlike me mandarin orange door

  Come in, come see what damage Lise has wreaked …

  copper pots hangledangle from a grid over the island

  Mighton’s helmet clangs a sauté pan