Newell nods, and lopes off between the trees, Orion running after, swinging around a lamppost and hurdling benches in joyful, elastic, springing leaps over the damp grass. Love made visible. No wonder, no wonder. She and Hugh struggle along earthbound making love, bodies held by gravity. How these two in the glory of their strength must spree.
5. HUGH CAN’T LET GO
Narrow. The room, the world. The body narrow in the bed. Replacing the oxygen mask over and over.
A long time ago they promised she would not be in pain. Conrad coming in the darkness promises again, no pain, no pain, but there is pain, there is the pain of leaving.
But there is not any shrieking that would be
that would be
pain we forget so fast we must
We make things up, we tell ourselves the happy story of a life well lived. We must. These things are for a reason, the old people say, Ruth says. They have to say that.
“Nolie, where are you, there is pain, she is—”
Hugh cannot let go of her hand.
this is too hard, his head will
She is laughing, frightened to laugh, at the enormity of this. At the great step on which she perches still, the diving board. Afraid to dive, but there is no way down but death.
After her, nobody can die. Years will go by and he won’t let anyone die, the world will fill up with people. Or at least, nobody he knows—nobody he guards will die. Sometime in the night he sees that Newell must love Burton. So Hugh must let them be who they are, leave it, let it go. Be Newell’s brother, Della’s brother, Ruth’s son. Be Ivy’s: nobody else will die.
Shivering and shivering, fingers nervous on the sheet, skin shining blue and sheets of water coursing down the pane, the night so blue and black.
6. MOLE END
The red door opens onto darkness. Is Jamie sleeping? He’s usually up at night. A clean smell—fresh lumber, plaster dust, paint. Ivy finds the switch and turns it on. She braces herself, not knowing what chaos she may find, and steps around the little alcove wall.
The kitchen is clean. No sign of damage. The floor is clear, unstained—even the counters are clean, and the sink, clean and empty.
“God bless you, Dave, Ruth’s pal,” Ivy says, deep in her heart.
There’s a note propped on the island counter.
All fixed, ceiling downstairs needs a coat of paint, we’ll do it Tuesday. I got my cousin to come & clean while we were working. Took out your garburetor don’t get a new one they’re useless. That guy went to stay with his brother for a couple days, guess the noise was too much for him. I’ll give the bill to Ruth.
Dave C.
Clean. The kitchen is clean. It smells so good.
And the new order goes beyond the kitchen. The big windows are clean—Jamie’s protective foil taken down, glass shiny between interior light and exterior black. The floor, too. Boxes and cases, gone. The computer station denuded, the desk polished clean.
Everybody has trailed in behind her, and now Newell and Orion are at the door. It’s not till then, till she’s bringing them inside, that Ivy looks down at her feet. The beautiful shoes covered with roses: perfectly ruined from the sprinklers and the grass. All is vanity.
L catches Ivy’s cry of sadness, and says, “Oh, your shoes!”
Newell takes one shoe and feels it. “Ruined,” he agrees. And Jason, seeing the roses all muck, says, “That’s the saddest thing. I loved those.”
Their sympathy is enough to snap Ivy out of selfishness. She laughs. “They’re only shoes. Never mind, maybe I can get them cleaned. Okay,” she says, Hugh’s word. “L, take Savaya to the shower, through that door, and find towels for everyone in the bathroom cupboard. I’m going to make us something to eat.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have said that—what’s in the cupboards? Milk in the fridge, a Styrofoam pack of cheap white eggs, frozen garlic bread in the freezer. She’d forgotten Jamie’s thing about white food. Well. Teenagers won’t mind. A dusty can of maple syrup in the pantry that she was supposed to send to an old acting friend in England—that never goes bad. She has flour, salt, yes. Okay, perfect. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, garlic bread: there’s a comforting supper, or rather breakfast. It’s 3 a.m. A long time since Hugh’s trompe l’oeil.
Newell cracks eggs, she whisks pancake batter. The stove warms her. Ivy is happier than she’s been in this place for a long, long time. This is like Mole End, when she played Mole for Young People’s Theatre, bustling to give Rat tea when they stumble on Mole’s old home. Old Ratty. Donald’s dead now. He was so good—the antiretrovirals did not work for long enough. She bends into the fridge to hide her smarting eyes.
Orion is witty at table; Newell expands, talking to him, easy and loving. A relief after watching him always so careful with Burton—what a toxic little partnership that is, and always has been, Ivy thinks. Bugger the age difference, the problem is that Burton is cruel and jealous. Food gets everyone giddy, making jokes; even Savaya. She sings, only partly under her breath, “This bread is thick/just like my dick. Sorry, couldn’t pass up the rhyme there.”
She has cratered. Ivy leads her to the futon couch and flips it flat. Savaya crawls up and is asleep before Ivy finds a duvet to pull over her.
“I’m taking the last two pancakes. Arrest me,” Jason says. “FTP.” It takes Ivy a minute to translate that in her head. Fuck the police. How rude. She laughs, happy to have her counter stools filled with people she likes. When they’re fed and calm, and the dishes loaded into the gleaming, empty dishwasher, she puts them all to bed: L with Savaya on the futon, Jason on the long couch, and Ivy can sleep in her own (clean-sheeted!) bed, alone. Newell says he’ll return Gerald’s car and take Orion home. So Newell can get back to Burton, and Orion to his mother. Newell didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and still hasn’t, at least in Ivy’s sight, taken out a phone to text or check. Burton will be livid. But when, after all, is he not livid? Can’t live with him, can’t seem to ditch him.
“Wait,” she says, at the door. “I told Hugh I’d empty the buckets in his basement!”
“I’ll do it,” Newell says.
“I’ll bring these guys back out in the morning, and get your car back to you, somehow.”
“You’ll find me,” he says, smiling at her. His lovely sculpted arms envelop her. “I’ll be at Mimi’s apartment—we’re packing it up, she’s got to be moved out by five.”
“Oh perfect,” Ivy says. “Perfect. I’ll be there.”
Orion has himself collected, his jacket. “No master class, anyway.” He gives her a wicked look and a smart salute. “Thanks,” he says, and kisses her cheek as he goes past.
(DELLA)
can I let it go? if I had he could never let it go
he sleeps I drive over rain-glossed pavement
my soul thirsts after knowledge
like moths fly into the headlights of my car
what they did when and for how long and how
and how he turned to her and what he said
what she did then and how they got undressed
what way he came inside what they spoke of later
and how his head turned on the pillow
looking for me perhaps in that cool room
go home
maybe I won’t come out of this all right
climb into bed beside him
how can he sleep
as if he never left it
his baseball bat abandoned by the bed would fit the hand vision of
the eye resists that vision but there he is asleep
I could hit him end all this
I am so full of fury I can see him
the fullness of his mouth the liquid motion
don’t think don’t
in the shower in my fucking helmet of purity hatred filling my mouth
washing the sin off me no sin at all but it is him
what is the thing that makes it possible to betray the other how could
he look at her tak
ing off her clothes and think yes yes how could he
7. HUGH ALONE
Hugh wakes, a great gulp of waking, gasping for air because he was drowning. He looks to Mimi.
She was sleeping, and now she is not sleeping.
The mystery of knowing, instantly knowing. How can she not—How can she not be.
He must have faded out. How long?
How long it has been, this year of knowing she was dying, she would die. She’s been dying since he was four. No length of time was long enough.
Everything in the world is empty. Mimi is no longer filling it.
However, there are things to do. So.
Hugh gets up. Her hand, which he lifts, is dead—no sleep can mimic that lack of volition. There is no confusion. No pain, no sorrow, nobody in that body now. He leans over the bed and puts his cheek against hers. Cool, empty.
Still, for a long time she lived in this shell. He kisses it, and runs his hand over the silver hair, pretending she is not gone.
8. HUGH CAN’T TELL
The streets are empty. Strange, on a, what is it …? Sunday morning. So that makes sense.
Hugh walks without intent, automaton, limbs moving/eyes taking in data, unsubjective. Gerald walking along, Gerald too—don’t talk to him right now. Hugh steps into FairGrounds, passes the crowd at the counter, walks along the side wall and out the back door, into the garden beside the gallery. In the back door.
Upstairs, Gareth and Léon will be still asleep, not even eight yet. Can’t talk to them either. You should make them breakfast.
You could sit in the framing room, no Ruth on a Sunday morning. (Can’t tell her, that will be too hard.) But it’s cold in there, as cold as.
Into the gallery, down to the Dark Gates. Mighton. How does he channel, how can he paint like this? Huge block of blue-blackness rages up the wall, pulls the eye from form to form, takes Hugh in so that he wants to grip the edge and walk inside the frame, be among the dead who are waiting there. They stood beseeching on the riverbank/yearning to be the first to be carried across/stretching their hands out toward the farther shore.
A knock on the window.
Gerald, his face close to the glass.
Open the door, of course. You could tell Gerald. Now you are in his club.
They are silent.
The computer clock bings. Nine a.m., too early to open.
“Opening early?” Gerald asks.
Hugh shakes his head. Then stops. His head feels pretty bad.
“I’ll come this evening, the wine and cheese,” Gerald says.
RSVPing. You ought to cancel that. Hugh nods. He puts out a hand and touches the frame. He wants to tell, he has to tell. “My mother—Mimi,” he says.
Gerald nods too.
“I can’t, I can’t,” Hugh says.
Gerald touches the frame on the other side. His hand on the grain of the wood. “I dream every night that they aren’t dead, that they weren’t. I gave up too soon, I shouldn’t have called 911, they were just sleeping and I was too stupid to see it.”
Yes, that the dead would have waked had he not been so fast to call it death. That he was mistaken, that empty hand not empty.
“The other dream I have is that I’m dead, inside the house. While they’re going to sleep out in the garage.”
Hugh stands and listens. You can do that.
“I imagine what it was like, what she said. If she told him what she was going to do.”
You can answer that. “No. She wouldn’t have scared Toby.”
“I know. She struggled, I could see. I mean, I knew. I know, she was having a hard time, she said—”
Oh no.
“Not that she would … She said she wasn’t a good mother. She said sorry.”
Mimi saying sorry, sorry.
Gerald says, “I can’t listen to anybody tell me anything anymore. In case it’s the thing I ought to be listening to, the thing I ought to fix.”
“I don’t know how you could have fixed that. I don’t think you could have.”
“No, maybe. You couldn’t fix your mom, I guess.”
No.
Gerald lets go of the frame. He puts a hand out to the picture, not pointing at any one thing. “So, I’ll come back this evening,” he says. Almost as definite as a promise.
Now you have to do that wine and cheese after all.
Hugh follows him out onto the front porch and stands in the damp cool air. Pulls out his phone. He can’t see the screen properly, but he texts. As he hits send, the moving truck drives past the gallery. In the passenger seat, Ruth waves, catching sight of him.
Right, get that place cleaned out. That’s what he’s got to do.
Hugh steps off the porch and walks, limbs moving just as always, as if nothing has happened, over to Mimi’s apartment.
(L)
Key in lock, scraping, wakes her.
Where? White light, open air, and far away, a ceiling.
A luxury, not knowing where you are. Maybe it’s finally the alien abduction. More noise, keys. Ivy’s place. On the couch Jason sits up, looking around at the door.
Savaya’s arm is heavy on her other arm, she pulls it out, asleep and tingling. Fuck, she slept like a dead thing. It’s—what time is it? Phone—it’s nine. Shit, she never called her mom. Seven texts waiting, oh freaking frick.
>sorry sorry sorry I fell asleep—I’m ok
L texts as quick as her fingers will move. All this time the murmuring at the door, and now knocking—she looks up: not knocking but banging against the chain, like somebody has lost his temper. Because it always (let us face facts, ladies), it always is the gents who lose the tempers.
Good chain. The door won’t open, the guy keeps bang-banging it like he’s going to tear the chain right off, but he can’t. Is this a home invasion? Two voices, out there.
Ivy comes out of her bedroom half-dressed, dressed enough for students, anyway. Pants pulled on, still doing them up, holding a short Japanese robe around her. She heads for the door. “What, what, what?” she’s saying, still mostly asleep, and then she shouts, “Stop it!” She gets to the door and slams it shut. Angry herself, it looks like.
L slips off the futon and runs on bare feet to huddle beside Jason on the couch. Like front row spectators at the fights, they watch Ivy wrestle with the lock and take off the chain.
Two men. A man and a—a boy or something. Not quite. L looks away. She hates this about herself, this retreating from odd people, people with something wrong with them. The two of them come in, both talking. The wormly one blinks, murmurs, repeats, “Hi, Ivy, nice to see you here hi Ivy nice to see you …” The louder, less damaged one says, “Where the hell have you been, and what’s with the chain? Have you gone paranoid too?”
“Hi, Jamie,” Ivy says, giving him a wave of her hand—he flinches backward even though she doesn’t go to hug him. Then she turns to the other guy. “I see you got most of Jamie’s things out already, that’s good. I was going to give you a call to say I’ll need the keys back, but this is—perfect, you can give them to me now.”
The belligerent one rocks on his feet, forward, like he’s going to punch her.
L pinches Jason’s leg, feeling everything go tense. They’ll have to intervene. She thinks they could take him—except, unless the other guy went batshit. This is very awkward.
But the loud guy pulls back, reins in the rage. He must want something from Ivy. “You can’t—The work’s done, so there’s no reason he can’t come back now, right, Jamie? It was just the noise and all the strangers he couldn’t take. We’ve got his equipment in the car, he wouldn’t bring it up unless they were gone.”
“They’re gone now, Alex,” the weird guy says. “They’re gone, Ivy. They’re gone.”
Uncomfortable.
Ivy just stands there, somehow pretty strong in her undone pants and her now-tied robe. “No,” she says. They all listen to that for a minute. “It won’t work anymore,” she says. “He’s got to get some hel
p, you’re going to have to take care of this.” She turns and puts her hand out, not quite touching the limp guy. “I’m sorry, Jamie, but you really do have to go stay with your brother for a while, and see about finding a doctor.”
The guy, Jamie, stares off into the distance, not at Ivy. “I know, you’re right.” Such a sad, apologetic voice that L almost cries. “I’ve really got to get this under—under something. Control, or something.” He shakes his head, ashamed of himself, admitting it all, so sorry.
The brother’s not taking it, though. “Listen, I brought a cheque. I know it was partially Jamie, the you-know, the water, so we talked it over and we’ll pay half.” He digs in his coat pocket and holds out a yellow cheque.
Ivy doesn’t take it, and that sets him off again, raging: “No way he’s moving out!”
“He’s already moved,” Ivy says.
“No fucking way! He’s been here long enough, he has tenant’s rights, you can’t shove him out. My place is too small, you know that.” He’s saying ordinary words but the anger behind the words makes them come out in tufts, in flares. All threat, all of it. His shoulders are bunched. He can’t stop his hands making fists, even though he keeps relaxing them.
Ivy stands where she is. She doesn’t make room for them to come farther inside.
As his brother shouts on and on, Jamie sags against the door like he’s melting through it. He turns side-on to the door, tries to edge it open without his brother seeing—but the brother grabs his arm and says, “Fuck, Jamie, stay put.”
“I can’t do any more, Alex,” Ivy says. “It’s not helping.”
Jamie stretches his arm out, a thin wrist reaching out of his grey jacket. “Here,” he says in a dying-away voice. “Here, Ivy, thank you very much for all this time. You have been a kind and gracious landlady and I know I’ve outstayed my welcome.”
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