Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  L kisses Mimi’s paper-lidded eyes, not worried about waking her, with all the drugs. Then she goes around the bed and kisses Ruth’s pink cheek. Ruth wakes, eyes opening quickly, and smiles. “Oh, sweetness,” she says. “Don’t be worried.”

  L nods. “About anything, I mean. It’ll be all right, your mom and your dad.”

  L nods again. Ruth turns to find a more comfortable position. Her old-turtle eyes close.

  All righty then. Off L goes. She has an idea for place cards. There’s the hospital snack store, and she has her trusty X-Acto with her.

  (DELLA)

  cottage: empty boat: adrift

  hanging on the closet door his shirt

  over the bed L’s portrait of me on the table lists DO PAY FIX

  read everything read his mind and heart? or agree not to look at that

  he is not with Jenny

  here for some other darker worse thing to kill himself?

  photo stuck to the bathroom mirror us the night we met

  thirty years gone into air windspray

  me the same as rudderless the same me

  as buoyed not buoyed

  where is he

  where are you, my beloved, my only one?

  don’t make me so afraid to see you not to see you

  the ardent man one I fought with he would never have left me

  that Ken the one I love I loved

  the door-spring there he is

  eyes like coals and mine must be the same

  we hate love each other

  always

  I will never forgive him the pain he causes me

  that was him fucking Ann on the coats for all the it wasn’t him it wasn’t

  what is this physical bond this mental bond

  what terrifying joy he is alive

  He says, Hugh says I have to tell you.

  (okay tell)

  I’ve been here all along. I’m trying to—she’s been—

  I couldn’t talk to—

  (meaning: I judge you she thinks you’re great)

  I don’t have any way to—I can’t speak to you—

  (why are we not the only people we can speak to?)

  I try to think what is the worstthing that could happen, that’s why

  I got angry about Mighton—I know it isn’t true

  (you don’t know what I would have done

  except that nothing makes any sense

  no body has any salt but yours)

  I can’t go back I don’t deserve, I

  I deserve for you to be with … I

  I deserve to lose Elle, I, I—

  I, I, I, I make him stop talking like this such a fucking fake fake fake

  garbage of fakeness of false pretending not to know me know us

  stop stop again again

  crack my head against the wall because then it will stop

  crash my head on the wall, to make him see what pain he causes me

  outside pain is easier to bear out out into the woods

  into the empty trees and the rainsoaked leafmold under them

  blind with crying what is the way to get back to my

  he comes run from him

  to get back to my to ourselves in this terrible thundering after me duck

  branch—smack

  it hitting him hitting it shouting

  stop / turn

  hand to eye—torn? is he blind?

  he takes it away red and white not bleeding

  I can’t, he says.

  neither can I so dark so sad it is his turn to talk

  I can’t go back to work. It’s like there is nothing left of life,

  like it is all over for me. Is what I feel.

  Well then don’t. this is all?

  We don’t have the money.

  For you to quit? We’ll sell the house. Elle can get student

  loans, I’ll work, I’ll get a real job.

  Not enough—I can’t—we can’t—

  I’ll sell Mimi’s piano, it’s probably sixty thousand.

  He laughs. That’s nowhere near—And no, I like to hear you play.

  pressing his reddened eye

  two hands both eyes blind

  It’s not the end of the world. Have you already talked to—

  never mind can’t ask, can’t pry can’t know

  should say / can’t say now what the dental insurance didn’t pay for

  on Elle’s teeth and the still cracked windshield on the car from nearly crashing it will have to be fixed, nothing left in the line of credit so how will that be managed … the car bucking beneath me almost going over instead touch his bruise his eye his mouth

  the relief of touch

  it’s all right wait a while

  my own my only my love

  Your eyes are beautiful.

  the woods are wet from all this rain

  these thirty years of rain

  Help me pack up my stuff?

  so we go

  I guess we can go back

  to dinner with Hugh and the others I guess I guess

  (but there is something between him and Jenny)

  (we will just agree not to look at that)

  5. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING HUGH

  Orion sings out the tagline on a glad, ringing note, “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Earnest!”

  And Burton stretches, big old bachelor-cat that he is, and breaks for lunch. Newell raises his eyebrows, pleading with Ivy to stay, but she leaves him to deal with Burton’s emotions alone. Enough for one morning. Faster than the students, she flies down echoing Saturday halls, out into the parking lot—sun! incredible after a week of rain—into the Volvo, down the usual flow of streets, to the gallery. A sign on the front door says Closed, but he’ll be upstairs, getting his party ready. She slides in beside his van, grabs out her suitcases, slams the back door behind her, and runs up the stairs to his crowsnest, treehouse—home. Hugh is pulling a pan from the oven. He looks up.

  “Cake?” Ivy says, hoping. Dense aroma of almonds, golden top, perfect.

  “All cake all the time, tonight,” Hugh says. “This one’s marzipan.”

  He comes to take her tweed coat and suitcases and scarf, hanging them on her hook—hers, already. “Rough day at the salt mine?”

  O balm of fondness! She was so right to come. The gristle of her mood clears, melts. “Maybe I’m a sociopath,” she says, moving with him back to the kitchen. “I just don’t care about anybody—is that it?”

  “What’s the play of the day—do you seek the Bluebird of Happiness?”

  “Not Blue Bird, thank God, but Importance of Being Earnest. Ugh.”

  “Ah.” Hugh puts a small plate in front of her. “Tester?” Two spoons, mounded with gold and yellow gleams. “Lemon curd on the left, what do you think?”

  He regards her with mild anxiety, so she swallows. Even though she has waited so long, it doesn’t taste of licorice. Tart-sweetness, smooth and slightly warm, fills the hungry caverns of her mouth and makes her ears ping. “I think I am in paradise at last,” she says.

  “This one’s blood orange.”

  She swoons, she licks the spoons. Satisfied, he turns back to work, sorting and stemming brown mushrooms. “What’s so bad about Earnest? I thought it was supposed to be his best.”

  “Oh it is, it’s perfect. Very witty.” Sip of tea. The tension of the morning is evaporating. “But here’s where my imagination or my sympathy fails me: I think it’s tedious. Clever, yes, funny in spots. Stephen Fry, et cetera. But why bother?”

  “Too clever? Heartless?” He’s chopping stems, graceful in his knife work.

  “I don’t suppose Wilde was, but the play is. Epigraphs are boring—all substitution, and once you crack the code it stops being funny. And Wilde was horrible to his poor, silly wife. Or maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was witty and kind and gentle with her, when he bothered to go over and pat his children’s heads.
”

  This must be the first time Hugh has seen her being brittle, theatrical. Makes her sad to let him see her working self this way. Tears threaten her eyes again, shit.

  “Come,” he says, putting down the knife.

  He takes her hand and leads her down the hall into his room. Onto the bed. He shuts the door and locks it; when he turns she laughs, seeing what is in his mind. In his heart. He bends to take off her shoes and socks, and takes the tip of one foot in his soft mouth. But his poor head. If she does most of the work, and allows no jarring … She sighs, she pulls her tunic up and off, and lies back on the welcoming bed. This is antidote, reward, this is nourishment and sustenance and life. This is the life.

  The play has seeped into her anyway, dislike it how she might. When they lie still, replete, Cecily’s line comes to her mouth because it is the truth: “How nice of you to like me so much after we have known each other such a comparatively short time,” she says, kissing him. “But I am going to be late—”

  She leaps into her clothes and flies down the stairs and starts the Volvo, still in a dream, in the ecstatic centre of their existential struggle.

  As she backs out of the tight spot she’s in, the side mirror catches on the fence and pops right off, dangling by wires. No time, no time, she rolls the window down and grabs it, yanks it off, and leaves it on the passenger seat. No looking back.

  (L)

  Savaya bounds into the hospital snack shop, forty minutes late. L stows the place-card stuff in a take-away Styrofoam box, layers separated by paper napkins. No jarring.

  The super smooth elevator is big enough for a couple of stretchers but there is only one in here with them, an old woman being wheeled somewhere to something bad. Her eyes pluck at L’s, wanting to be told it will all be okay. Probably it will not. L gives her a half smile and lets her own eyes wander to the keypad. Fourth floor. Okay.

  Savaya says, “4108, 4108,” and they check the signs and veer to the left, a walkway open to the central atrium. Makes L dizzy to look either down or up, so she doesn’t. Savaya stops. “Do you have anything to give her? We can’t go in there with nothing.” She looks around, then picks six lilies from the planter lining the chasm. “Not even plastic!”

  Afraid, L looks up and down the walkway, but nobody seems to notice. Savaya whips the scarf from her ponytail and ties it around the flowers. “There! Nevaeh will be happy.”

  When they find the room, Nevaeh’s head is hanging while her dad delivers a sonorous lecture. But he must be tired; Nevaeh’s tiny mother twitches his sleeve and says they might go find tea, since the friends are here, and Nevaeh’s dad concurs, slowly. He rises and proceeds out, and Mrs. Nev click-clicks down the hall behind him. She wears four-inch heels everywhere.

  “Fuuuck!” Nevaeh whispers/screams. Then she starts to cry. Her eyes are always beautiful, but when she cries the fountains overflow in glorious light. Her eyelids are tight-swollen. Her leg must really hurt.

  Savaya sits on the wider side by Nevaeh’s legs, and L on the narrower. It’s actually quite uncomfortable to sit there, L has to make herself count to twenty to stay put. Savaya keeps jiggling the bed, hugging Nevaeh, patting her giant foot wrapped with high-tech fluoro tape.

  “No dance til June,” Nevaeh says. “They’re putting six pins in it, and I’ll have a cast till Christmas!” Her bonbon voice is thicker, as if she has cried for days and days.

  Savaya might feel loyal about Pink, so L asks. “What did Pink say that set you off?”

  “He stared at me through the crack, I saw him, he’s such a pervert. Pink freaks me out—but it was Jason!” Nevaeh’s nervous arms come up one after the other to wipe the tears off her beautiful, blooming cheeks, to flatten out her eyes and stretch the skin.

  L looks up at that. “Jason, what?” Savaya asks.

  “He looked at me, my arm—I only did it once, to see why people think it works, not because I—” More sobbing. “He cut my sleeve with his scissors, that heavy stuff. He said he wanted to shorten it for the line, but it was to make the scars show,” Nevaeh says. Turning the thin arm outward, so they can see a little set of pinkish lines.

  Not a lot of lines, only six or seven. But that’s not once, either. That’s a few times of testing it out, L thinks. Because Nevaeh is a terrible liar and always will be.

  Savaya smooths her own smooth golden arm over Nevaeh’s, as if she can erase it, the pain or hate or despair. Bending to her shoulder, Nevaeh says, through hiccupping sobs that are still so fucking pretty, “I don’t get how you can hang with him, he’s cold. I hate Orion too, he thinks he’s the shit.”

  Savaya doesn’t say anything.

  L feels pretty stiff herself. Not that Jason needs defending because he didn’t, he wouldn’t, but Nevaeh can’t keep on thinking that.

  “He didn’t mean it like that, Jason didn’t—you overreacted,” L says.

  Nevaeh ignores her and sobs on in Savaya’s arms.

  Because it’s Savaya she loves.

  Well, L can’t sit there anymore, the bed tilting and nobody believing her. She gets up.

  “He did mean it!” Nevaeh twists to touch L’s leg, not letting her go, all pitiful certainty. “He wants his clothes to look edgy—he was exploiting me for the good of—”

  L laughs, her loyalty suddenly decided. “If that was true, he’d have painted scars on you. More than a few test cuts.” She lifts up her skirt and shows them the inside of her thigh. “If you were really doing anything, you’d know not to talk about it. Anyway, good luck exploiting you. You’re the most self-possessed, self-obsessed person I know!”

  She gets up, finds her box, and goes.

  That was unfair. Who cares.

  Adios, amoebas.

  6. MASTER CLASS: GORGON

  “A drawing room romance.” Burton tilts his head, thinks deeply. “But vast forces seethe under the surface of this seeming simplicity, this petal-like perfection. Would that the world itself worked as well as the end of Earnest! Obstacles removed, love triumphant. Transformation! The cloak-room, the bag, Prrrrism herself, no mere educator but revealed as a true artiste, with her failed three-volume romance.” He looks fake-fondly at Ivy, who’d like to smack his smirk on behalf of educators everywhere.

  Don’t hate him. Don’t waste effort and energy on an aging acidity with no power.

  Now Burton is revealing the hidden meanings, the gay subtext. “Take, for example, Jack Worthing’s ward Cecily: a Cecily was contemporary slang for a young male prostitute under the protection of an older man.”

  The students are interested, codes being always cool.

  “The cigarette case they fight over: Wilde gave silver cigarette cases to lovers, when delicacy forbade outright cash payment. In the darkness of the seats, imagine those silver cases sliding out of breast pockets, proffered to companions … in that audience, imagine the undercurrent of secret smiles and whispers, the thrill of the forbidden.”

  Listening to Burton, Ivy feels like she’s been saying “prunes and prisms” to herself for a thousand years: a prim-mouthed, aged and judgemental spinster.

  Burton brings out a new cast list. “So! We’ll read the play again, exploring the substrata by judicious casting. Newell will play Jack this time. Jason, raw as he is, will take Algernon. Orion, you will grace us with the urbane Gwendolyn, Jack’s inamorata. Sheridan, the young Cecily, boy-ward at the country estate of Jack Worthing. I myself, Dame Bracknell, and Ivy, stout Ivy, remains in Miss Prism’s service. The girls: Savaya will chance Chasuble, and Mikayla make hay with Lane and his country counterpart. That’s all, I think? Yes.”

  Savaya seems sulky, understandably; the others look alert, even keyed up. At first, the reading takes on an extra uncomfortable knowingness. But as the boys settle into their roles, as they see what they are saying to each other, the tension in the room gradually calms, replaced by a different tension, the working out of submerged social patterns. There are moments of good comedy: hipster Sheridan as Cecily, telling Ivy, “I don�
��t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.” Ivy has always loved Miss Prism’s reply: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

  Or Newell to Jason, earnestly, “I don’t really know what a gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. She is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.” Burton does not react, but the rest of the company finds it necessary to put hands to mouths for various reasons, a cough, an itch, etc.

  As the lovers Jack and Gwendolyn, Newell and Orion are a dream. The little proposal scene suddenly thrums with meaning, buried joy delicately overlaid by spiky, glancing, sidelong wit. Aware that this is one of those transforming moments that make it worth working in theatre, Ivy wonders, a little dismayed, exactly what is going on between those two. Something serious. Watching Burton watch them, she feels faintly sick.

  “I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present,” Orion says, his whole heart on display, but laughing at himself too.

  And yet, and yet. It is a long, long afternoon.

  After the surprising joy of that proposal scene—his own casting, after all—Burton’s worsening temper taints the room. Orion gets paler and paler, Newell recedes farther back into his chair. Burton, eyes darting around the table, seems to have heat-lines vibrating around his form, like those mad cats Wain painted in the asylum. He is horribly good as Bracknell. In the morning reading Newell did Burton-doing-Bracknell, with a faint malicious lisp; Burton simply inhabits her, engorged eyes bulging from his patty-cake face. Ivy has no difficulty paling and quailing as Burton trumpet-calls, “Prrrism! Where is that baby?”

  Every time Orion speaks, Burton seizes tighter, tauter, his attention pinpointed. False geniality sits like a comedy mask on his face, crookedly hung over rage that darkens as the play winds on. Interesting textual revelations cannot outweigh the strain, which Ivy believes everyone must be feeling. Besides, the male casting is unnecessary. The play exists in its own miraculous atmosphere, straddling both the hetero and gay worlds, the Victorian and the modern. Ivy doesn’t believe her dislike of the play stems from prejudice, even given her growing prejudice against Burton.