Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  Through the midnight grove he passes shadows, strange lumps and humps of bodies, singly and in clusters. A clutch of workmen bending together in the grass. He’s close, warmer, closer. He stops, swirls, emo batshit—checks the phone again: blue dot, stopped. Like a stupid movie.

  There’s her red-cased phone, lying on the ground.

  “Savaya!” he shouts, not even meaning to.

  The darkness under the trees is quiet, nothing echoes, no one answers. Even the traffic has quieted. It only—the dot was moving, a minute ago.

  He sits on the steps of the monument to WWI or something, South Africa—his own phone buzzes.

  The voice says, “We’re getting there.” Velvet, loving. “Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

  “Right,” Orion says. He puts his phone away, and stands. He’ll go round the park again, L and Jason are down there at the south end somewhere, maybe they’ll—

  Savaya slides around the big stone block of monument, above him.

  “I don’t even know how,” she says, skinny arms blue-white in the night air. “Check my privilege, I can’t even work out what to say to somebody. Or a car—how do you get a car to even stop? How do they tell you’re up for it?”

  “Good thing you can’t figure it out.” Orion’s heart only starts pounding now, with the effort and the relief. “I’m sure if you were like, starving, you’d do it. But not—it isn’t a thing to, to be prying into when you don’t need to for survival. Maybe for a part, for research,” he adds, to be fair. “Otherwise it’s dilettante-ism.”

  “If that even is a word.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Fuck-liar.” She climbs down the stone shelves to his level.

  “Fuck-wipe.”

  That makes her laugh, and then crumples her face. “Only not, as it turns out.”

  He’s angry with her now that the relief has eased, but he’s not going to let that out. She’s shivering and hiccuping and there’s a lot wrong; it’s no time to be scolding someone for drunkenness. She’s more slurry than ever, her orthodontically altered bite making her speech sweetly stupid, when she is so smart. “I’m such a fucking mess.” She wipes her nose with the inside hem of her short, stupid, frilly dress, and sees her phone on the ground.

  “Hey,” she says, “I dropped my phone.” She bends to pick it up, like a kid, like Ophelia bending for flowers in the stream. Maybe she’ll go and kill herself too now.

  “So what’s this about Terry?” Orion pulls her down and sits beside her on the cold stone. “And BT-dubs, Terry-He or Terry-She?”

  Savaya hiccups again and says, “I was fooling all you guys with Pink. I did a good job, huh? Terry and I, and me, are going to get married. Once they get divorced … I totally think we are. But I am not too sure, because they are getting back together.”

  She is so drunk, so totally plastered, and on top of weed, smells like.

  “Have you talked to him about that? Or to her?”

  “Yeah, I talked to Nevaeh, that was my first mistake.”

  “Nevaeh’s spinning too fast to listen. She just can’t because her family—”

  “She hates me so much now.” Savaya starts to cry again, fumbling with her phone, looking for some heartbreaking text or other. “It was hard enough before.”

  Orion takes the phone and puts his arms around her, wanting with all his heart to make her feel all right. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Any of it. Terry, Nevaeh, anything. You can just stop for a while, wait for a while, till you can handle it better.”

  “Yeah, same to you,” she says. Bleary, sodden voice. “You don’t know my life.”

  “I was just bullshitting, when I told you about going to the chicken walk. I never did anything. I shouldn’t have told you. I was just fucked up, being stupid.” She’s not listening. “Did you come in your parents’ van?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s so strange. I have slept with some majorly revolting people, you’d think I could easily— I mean, this one guy yelled something out the window at me and I was telling him to fuck off before I even thought.”

  “How did you get in to the city?”

  “Hitched.”

  “Right, but hitching is as dangerous as hooking, you know that, right?” It sweeps over him that she’s a baby, such a gigantic, mewling baby, and what does that make him? Exactly the same. He cringes inside, his stomach squeezing to think of Newell finding him that night, walking the streets and trying so hard to be so fucking hard. A baby, as bad as Savaya. Newell must have laughed.

  “At least I know how to hitch,” she says. “I got a ride right away, in a Jaguar.”

  “You’re so stupid.”

  He takes off his jacket and puts it over her shoulders because she’s actually shaking now.

  “Get up, walk,” he says. “You can walk it off and we’ll get some coffee or something. Plus, L and Jason are here looking for you too.”

  Savaya gets up, and they go into the park, toward the centre where it looks safer. She doesn’t speak, she just lets her mouth open a little and keeps on crying. Damp soaking rain coming straight out of her eyes. Who knew there was that much water in a person.

  “I heard Newell talking about me tonight,” he says, offering other misery to distract her. “At Hugh’s. I left when Burton got there, but then I went back and climbed the tree by Hugh’s roof deck and listened. Newell said, he said he likes me.”

  Savaya squeezes his arm, says, “That’s good though.” The distraction is working, she’s stopped shaking.

  But it means he has to think about it. “Like is for Facebook. He said I fed his ego.”

  “Who was he talking to? Maybe he couldn’t talk honestly with them.”

  “Hugh. Who else is he going to talk to? He told Hugh he thought he might be of some help to me.” Now I can’t even talk to him, Orion thinks blankly, bleakly. Or be in the same room with him, ever again.

  “It’s the same with me,” Savaya says, and the fountain of tears starts again.

  It’s nothing like the same, he doesn’t say.

  She blubbers through the tears, “Terry said that, be of help. Like, with what—auditioning for National Theatre School or some fucking thing? It’s nothing, it was just something to say. Like I’m such a puppy, all I need is help and not, like, an actual human relationship.”

  She shudders all over, like she’s going to throw up—then she tears off his jacket as if it’s choking her and runs like a mad thing, racing to get somewhere private before— Whoop, there she goes. Puking and puking, poor kid. Coming up too late, he tries to hold her hair out of the spray. Fuck, that’s a lot of intake volume. Where’d she get all that?

  Savaya staggers away from the mess and tries to run again but she can’t. He takes her arm to help her. She lies down—they’ve strayed off the path into dark grass, away from other people, all the crouching shapes in the darkness. She sinks, and slumps over, and lies on the dry old grass, burying her face. He stands over her like some Greek hero over a sleeping maiden. Like fucking Perseus and what’s her name with the dragon. They need fucking Medea to make it go to sleep. There’s a play he’ll never read now. And now here come L and Jason, traipsing along holding hands, all Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Behind them, who?—Ivy. So is Newell here too? Orion’s stomach grips again.

  But no, it’s just Ivy. He holds out a hand so they don’t come too close and freak Savaya out. “Hi, guys,” he says. “She’s taking a rest. She might have had a few pops or something.” Not being sure how cool Ivy is with weed.

  “What’s going on?” L takes a step but stops, she stays outside the dragon’s reach. “Is she hurt?”

  “She’s okay. Just fucked up and also drunk.”

  L stares at him. “Did her parents find out about Nevaeh?”

  “Terry. Not Pink,” Orion says, trying to convey the news without giving it to Ivy.

  “Holy,” Jason says.

  As if it’s any of her business, L cries, “Shit,
another one?”

  “Another what?”

  L doesn’t speak.

  “Another?” Orion asks her. “Another stupid kid with a crush on a teacher?” Lightning is racing up and down through his body. He could leap and fly with rage. How could they—even Jason, standing there doughfaced. Don’t speak to them, don’t justify—but it comes anyway, bursting, electric, unpleasant, unstoppable: “Nobody seems to realize, I love him. This isn’t a PR plan or some star-fucking thing. I know him, and I—”

  They’re all staring at him, in the fitful tree-blown lamplight, moonlight.

  Fine, stare! “If I was a girl, nobody would have the slightest problem with this—you’d all be saying oh about time Newell left that old hag he’s been saddled with for so long, and how much more suitable a match this is, a young woman who loves him—if it was Savaya, you’d all be going oh quite understandable, that rogue Newell, heh heh, but of course, that’s the way it should be. Like you were with her and Pink, you can’t deny it.”

  They’re all staring at him, like he’s doing them some fucking injustice.

  Then out of nowhere comes water, a violent, drenching spray hurtling from everywhere at once, a raging dragon of cold rain.

  Orion hauls Savaya up, and they run.

  3. A HUGHLOGY

  Joseph the porter carries the comforting, nostalgic tang of tobacco. Once he’s finished setting up the cot against the window wall, Hugh has an absurd impulse to put his arms around him, but tamps it down. Just gives him a gentle shoulder-clap. Joseph claps him back, as one of the men who look after others, and goes.

  Hugh lies down. It’s not comfortable, per se, but it is almost long enough. He gives himself up to not-thinking. Not-writing her eulogy in his head. Eulogy, schmulogy. Élégie, who wrote that? Massenet. Mimi used to play it.

  L, sitting under Mimi’s piano last week while Della played. Himself, crouched there as a small child, the man playing for his mother. In his empty room he sang under his breath. Gould, ghouled, haunted and driven like a leaf. Like Mimi was too.

  Maybe enough of the crazies now, for a while, for a lifetime. (What do you think, Ivy? Could we be sane together?) Gould sang in his nose as he played, a distracting noise because he was not a good singer. Under the piano you could just listen to the music, not the weird man. Mimi played Schumann, Von fremden Ländern und Menschen, and Gould laughed. Hugh liked her playing, not at all expert, better than his. Naturally. You liked everything she did. Her wild face, the vitality that snapped from her fingertips on a good day. Her sadness and exhaustion on a bad day. Because he was her child Hugh loved and wept for her misery, the flatness, the hatred that poured out of her eyes from time to time. Nothing she did was wrong. Of course it was, later. Not wrong, just herself. Lying in the cot under the window’s greyish illumination, Hugh wonders if maybe he could not have loved Ivy unless his mother was dying. Making room in the world for Ivy. Does that mean he wishes Mimi dead?

  He has wished her dead for a thousand years; he wants her to live for a thousand years more. Those two being two sides of the coin of adoring love. Perhaps he will try not to adore Ivy. He will warn her not to adore him. Well, wait—he wakes a little from this dream state, humility or ordinary modesty returning—he won’t have to warn her about that.

  A noise, a movement. Hugh is up from the cot and beside the bed. Mimi’s hand searches her face, pulling at the mask. She takes it off and stares up into his eyes.

  Hugh touches her hand, her hands. He says, “Hey, little mama, what you doing there? Let’s put this back on.”

  He sits beside her, and she takes off the mask again. He puts it on.

  She pulls at the mask, fretting it, but leaves it on.

  He moves the roses on her table, and a scent releases. The petals are like heavy cream, drawn through the fingers. Her eyes close.

  Mask-hiss, machine-hum, monitor ticks. The hours.

  Later, her hands pluck, pluck at the blankets, searching for something she has lost. It’s not a myth, that plucking of the sheets. She takes off the mask.

  He pulls his chair closer, takes her hands in his own, and kisses the fingers. “I loved it when you played for me,” he says. “When you played at night, while I was going to sleep. You played so beautifully—it was wonderful. I’ve never heard a recording or a concert that was half as good.” Talking, he puts the mask back on, her eyes watching his mouth. One hand comes up to trace his lips, and he stays still, stops talking.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Hugh, sorry.”

  “No, no, don’t be sorry—nothing, nothing to be sorry for. This is unhappy now, but we were often happy,” he tells her. Willing her to remember it so.

  “Often happy,” she repeats, obedient to his will.

  “I always loved you best,” he says.

  “Hugh best …” She looks into his face. Seeing Hugh?

  In this extremity, you can’t be sure.

  The cot is too far away. Hugh finds a way to rest his aching head, cheek cool on the clean sheets, letting his arm fall on the sheet along her poor thin leg. Lying like that, arm extended, he feels himself extending, expanding, overblowing—a rose opening out into the wilderness, into the world—what Mimi must have felt on her glorious days. He feels himself broadening out, embracing the whole world—the open feeling of loving Mimi without restraint (which Ivy has made possible), the slow unbinding of loving Ivy without fear.

  The headache, present all the time for days now, seems to bloom too. Pricking his scalp from the inside like rose thorns. He is unaccountably sleepy. Maybe not unaccountable: how much sleep has he not had in these last few—in a week, in a year, a lifetime of not sleeping?

  Hugh dreams that Burton is dead. You must have killed him, yes, Hugh pushed him down the long concrete stairs at Newell’s place, head swollen, broken, blood, and there’s a funeral procession: Ann hand in hand with Gerald, walking through golden leaves; Ken and Della, reconciled, riding swingboats in the park, her work selling at a Mary Poppins gallery in the FairGrounds; teenagers mysteriously dancing in the cupola in pretty dresses, long evening gloves—that’s how Hugh can tell, how you can tell it’s a dream.

  The funeral procession winds through the park, Newell strewing flowers in front of the casket-catafalque, looking happy. Looking relieved, his burden finally set down. Thank you, Hugh, you are all singing.

  4. I CAN’T STAND THE RAIN

  They all run from the stinging spray—what is it? what’s—oh! the sprinklers have started, all over the park. Horrifying at first, an attack of freezing bees, but then it’s—well, you can’t help laughing, it’s pretty funny, all the drama doused and drenched, all the faces gaping. Ivy gets a bad case of laughter, the helpless kind that makes her snort—so humiliating, older-ladyish, snort—she stops behind a tree, which blocks some of the water coming at her, and bends to try to release her diaphragm. Snort! Oh dear.

  The others find her, and the sanctuary of the big tree’s girth, all huddling there as the water changes to a regular cyclic spat, spat, spat, spat, calming from the first fervour.

  “They must be blowing the lines,” Jason says. “Like they do with our underground sprinklers in the fall, before it freezes. There’s just way more water to clear out.”

  Looking around the tree again, Ivy sees Newell coming through the park, dodging the spray. Shit, it’s cold, being wet on a windy night. She pulls back into the lee of their tree. L and Jason are huddled together; Orion holds Savaya close to him, trying to warm her up. Doesn’t anybody wear a jacket anymore? It’s almost winter.

  Fury bristles off Orion like a charge; he is still accusing L and Jason of prejudice. He’s practically split himself in two, one half still comforting Savaya, the other spitting at L like a sprinkler: “I know, Burton, other people, you name it. It doesn’t—it doesn’t take away from, from love.”

  Ivy ought to intervene, re: people are just worried about you, power dynamics, position of influence, etc. “Everybody has just heard too many bad stories,” s
he forces out, being careful, aware of Newell coming closer, listening.

  Orion is too busy ranting to notice. He shouts, “It is not the same thing! I’m the one who wants—in the old days things were different. Now it’s—different. My mother kept me safe, even though she was such a wack job, hovering around the dressing rooms at dance class, never fucking leaving me alone for a minute.”

  “Well, we worry,” Ivy says. Taking the blame for all the mothers, though she is none. Newell gives her a thumbs-up, quietly coming closer.

  The water eases again, the stinging spray subsiding.

  Orion, calmer, says, “I’ve been perfectly well aware of myself, who I am, all my life. I tried out the other just in case I was bi because that would be so handy, but I’m not.”

  “I vouch for that!” Savaya lifts her drowned face to laugh.

  From Jason’s coat, L says, “Sorry, Orion, sorry, I didn’t mean that at all, I was being mean about Savaya, not you. I meant another, um, like another Pink, I think—I hate my saying that, it’s just what came up from my—”

  Everybody has a flooded basement in their mind, Ivy thinks.

  “It’s okay,” Orion says. He’s tired, his voice is cracking. Ivy has to get them all home somehow.

  Newell appears around their tree, a jacket in his hand.

  A rippling shift of dissipating tension. Orion says, reaching out, “Hey, that’s my jacket. It’s got our phones in it.”

  Newell hands it over. “How I found you. That and the shouting.”

  Orion laughs, what a good sound to hear.

  Perfect, but how will they all cope now? Ivy says, “We can’t get in Gerald’s car like this, we’ll ruin it.”

  “I’ll get him another one.” The sweetness of Newell’s smile is a little weird—Ivy often finds it so. Lots of money makes a person strange.

  “We can’t drive back to Peterborough all wet. My apartment isn’t far—we can dry out and then go home. How about I take these guys in Gerald’s Saab—I don’t dare drive yours—and you two follow along?” Ivy appropriates Savaya’s freezing hand. Leaving Newell to take Orion. As seems right to her, never mind the rules.