Close to Hugh (30 page)

Behind stacked set pieces Ivy can see L and Jason, shadows in shadows, watching Orion conjure the leaf-strewn graveyard as Melchior escapes from reform school and comes home to find and fend off dead Wendla, dead Moritz. “I was not bad!—I was not bad!—I was not bad! No mortal ever wandered so dejectedly over graves before.
Pah!
I won’t lose courage. Oh, if I should go crazy—during this very night …”

Ivy is torn between watching the real teenagers and listening to the imaginary ones, fearful for both sets, drawn in (as always) to the pain of the play, its naïve beauty and hopeless frustrated disaster. And conscious of that other pain, real life.

But today Newell phones it in, staring down at his script. Half-asleep for a time, then gusting into bored restlessness that takes the form of striding over to the coffee table and making too much noise there. He has
hardly anything to do, playing all the older men, and as they progress through the script the waste becomes painfully obvious. Only the Man in the Mask (who might be Death, and who laughs at morality) sparks his interest at all, it seems.

At the end of the read-through Burton stands, abruptly breaking the spell.

“I—yes.” He takes in the company, broods, nods to the table. “I—vy.”

Surprised, she looks up again from her script, and he says, briskly, “I’ve listed scenes, and I’d like
you
to start work on them, script analysis, beats and units. I’m going to take Newell away for a confab.”

Newell stands too, and shakes his head in patient reproof.

“A brief consultation,” Burton says. He smiles, all his nasty teeth gritted, the bit between them.

Ivy wonders what exactly is going on. Who is the horse and who the master.

“The list,” Burton says, needlessly, as he hands her the list. He leans confidingly over her at the table, peers somewhere above her ear. He can never just look her in the eyes. “Only an hour left—split them into groups and run through scenes, will you?” He smiles again, those teeth, and murmurs, “It’s all useless. Just busy-work to fill the time. Meet us at the bar, say seven. The Ace, you know it? I’ll have worked things out by then.”

And without another word said, out they go, two giants of theatre. Or rather, one troll of theatre and one giant of the silver screen, side by side. Conspicuously not arm in arm.

(L)

L brings Jason in the back door. “Hello?”

Nobody. She moves last night’s supper plates to the counter, and Jason sinks onto the kitchen table. Advil? Not where they belong … Ah, stuck behind the vitamins. She pours a glass of water from the fridge-door tap and takes it to him. “Drink this, take these.” He obeys, lies back, skinny arm over his eyes. Shit, his mom is doing such a number on him.

Six o’clock. Supper would help. Not much in the fridge. Eggs.

Gravel—a car in the driveway. Jason springs up, hunted, eyes darting like a two-bit crook at bay. “My room!” she says. Backpack, shoes, he races for the stairs. “I bet my mom wouldn’t tell on you anyway.”

He’s gone. L gets the eggs out and cracks them—nobody here but us chickens. Flicks the stove burner on, just making scrambles, la-la-la! Her mouth is nervous, as if Jason is really being hunted. This is so fricking stupid, over eight old
Playboys
. When you think what everybody can get on the internet any time they—

The back door opens, and hokey jeez, it’s her dad. With Hugh.

She stands still, fork arrested in the bowl.

“Hey,” her father says. He looks really bad. Rumpled, his hair not nice. There’s the band across his eyes, a darkening of the skin or just a darkened look—and his eyes slide sideways, won’t look back at her.

“Hey back,” she says.

Everybody stands there. Like somebody will break the ice, eventually.

It’s Hugh who does, of course. “So!” he says. “I met your dad on the doorstep.” Then he runs out of whatever he was going to say.

Her dad drifts off into the dining room. More mess in there. Twelve canvases, still not finished; poster crap all over the table. He hates mess, it gets him all upset. L feels sick deep in her stomach, not throwing-up sick but a deeper horrible pain, the pain of disapproving of her father and his actions.

Hugh puts out a hand. “You okay?” he says, quiet-voiced.

She nods, and is going to tell him about Jason being in her room—but Hugh used to live with Ann, maybe he still has to tell her everything. “More or less,” she says. Not looking at the stairs or at the dining room. Down at the bowl of eggs.

“I took a couple of pieces of your installation, I hope you don’t mind,” he says.

“What? Why? I didn’t know …” Even surprised, she speaks low so her dad won’t hear.

“You weren’t here, and I wanted to—”

But her dad comes back, a black cloud, asking, “Where’s your mom?” Voice jagged, but he keeps the volume down. They’re all practically whispering, cotton wool pressing down from the cotton-white ceiling onto everybody’s head, smothering them all.

Then the front door bangs, and her mom’s bright voice sings out, “Sorry I’m late! Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful—I brought Vietnamese subs, your fave!”

Whatever cheered
her
up won’t last. The two men turn, so that when her mom comes through the louvered doors she staggers back as if they were robbers, Perrier bottle and sub bag clutched to her coat. “Sheesh! You scared the life out of me,” she says, laughing. Fake laughing. She doesn’t look at any one person in the room, like for instance her daughter or her mysteriously absent now strangely returned husband.

Can’t take this, can’t can’t can’t, L thinks. She pours the eggs down the sink and turns off the red-hot element. Time to go!

Just as chicken as she is, Hugh’s managed to get to the back door, hauling it open. “Great, well, you have those subs, I’ll go get Ivy. Don’t forget, dinner Saturday!”

“What? Saturday?” her mom asks. How could she forget? It’s only every year.

Her dad follows Hugh to the door, host habit, and holds it open. They hear Hugh calling back, “Anniversary! All Saints Day.”

The night her parents met; Hugh gives them a party every year. She and Jason are serving, Hugh booked them weeks ago.

He’s gone. While he was noisy, L melted away like snow off the driveway, receding gently up the stairs and behind the turn of the wall. Nobody calls after her. She waits.

Her dad shuts the door, goes back. There’s a pause, no sound from the kitchen.

This is awful.

Then her mom, saying, “Well.”

Her dad: “Here I am.”

Her mom: “I see that.”

“You’ve been managing?” he says. “I see the house is perfect, as always.” Shithead.

“We’ve been—I’ve been pretty worried about you,” her mom says.

He laughs.

A thump, a slide. The Perrier and the bag of subs landing on the counter. “So, what’s up,” her mother says, in a cool, strange voice. Not actually asking.

“I see Mighton’s in town.”

Her mother laughs. “What tipped you off, the photos? I’m late with the flyer for his class, I have to get it to the shop today.” Sounding casual, frozen, angry.

“Handsome guy,” her dad says, all arrows and spears himself. “So—I’m working at Jenny’s for a few days. Final documents for the abuse case—but you’re not interested in that.” Another slap in the face for her mom, who has expressed interest many times in L’s earshot, and always gets shot down for it—she’s not allowed to ask about work because he wants to leave it at the office. Also, her dad: staying at Jenny’s?

It seems her mom is not going to question that. Or she is not surprised.

“So the rappelling thing, that was a lie?”

Oh fuck, fuck, on the other hand. Please, don’t get into it. When her dad first didn’t come home, L searched through the notebook in his bedside table drawer. Because you have to know what’s coming. Page after page of lists of things to do:

• books to read

• what must be fixed around the house

• golf swing

• fly-fishing casts

• woodworking tools needed

And the pitiful ones in lower case, followed by question marks:

• remortgage?

• rrsp penalty?

• cheque to Hendy?

• line of credit?

L can’t bear to know any more about what’s coming. Sicker than ever, fingers in her ears, she turns away.

From the top of the stairs Jason’s white face looks down. She goes up a step to whisper. “Don’t worry. My dad, he’s—my mom—not about you, don’t worry.”

He comes down the stairs beside her and puts a thin, awkward arm around her neck. Not comfortable, but. She hugs his bony forearm closer to her neck, and kisses the smooth skin.

10. I’M SO IN LOVE WITH HUGH

In her asymmetrical tweed coat, the nice one Fern gave her, Ivy swims through the flood of teenagers to the open door, the exodus policed by the janitor. What a waste of time that was. The door clangs behind her, a
Law & Order
sound, chains and detention. Free!

Hugh is waiting in the gathering dark, leaning against the van. She can’t help it, she breaks into a run, trit-trot, gallop-a-trot, straight into his opening embrace.

“Hey!” he says. “You okay?”

“Do you go around the town asking everybody that?”

“Yes,” he says. Not smiling, he’s been somewhere or other.

“Della?” she asks, thinking through the flip-book of these new people. “L?”

“Both,” he says. “Ken’s back from the dead, or from Bobcaygeon. Swing by the gallery, we can leave the van there and go for a drink.”

Strange to assume, stranger to be right in assuming, that we’ll do everything in tandem, she thinks, swinging the van into evening traffic moving riverward. Dark already. Autumn. Another river, of cars: tail lights reddening the right side, headlights whitening the left.

They go in by the framing room door, Hugh calling out, “Ruth?”

Nobody there. In the time it took to park, the lights are off, the front door locked.

Hugh opens it and peers out. “She’s got Jasper in tow, heading up the street to the Ace. She makes him go from time to time, to be sure he eats. Want to try it?”

“Oh! I’m supposed to meet Burton and Newell there later on—good thing you said.”

Ivy’s seen the Ace from outside: fake saloon, long porch and horse-rail, lantern light. Inside, a long L-shaped wooden bar surrounds a pyramid of glittering bottles. Ruth and Jasper sit at the mid-point of the bar, Ruth with
a menu, Jasper addressing a glass of red. Hugh’s pals are scattered at small tables by the leaded windows, too many, she can’t be expected to remember all these people—her head won’t hold them all. They chain together, the way people who have known one another a long time do. She has no chains of her own. Well, work chains: Terry and Terry sit huddled close together in a cozy nook, heads nodding in unison against a mutual enemy. They missed the master class. Sad, they’d have
loved
the circle-jerk scene. How that play got produced in 1906 is one of the mysteries of theatre.

Hugh and Ivy stand at the bar listening to Ruth argue with herself about what Jasper ought to eat. He orders, as apparently he always does, steak frites, and Ruth orders a side salad, no dressing, with berries. “For both of us,” she tells the waitress, waving her finger back and forth from Jasper’s to her own chest. “He needs the greens.”

To Hugh, Ruth says, “Long day in the basement. We emptied buckets for a couple of hours, then Della came by to help. We had to stop when Mighton came along, he needed help with his big crate.” She sends a cutting glance to the end of the bar.

“There’s Mighton—I haven’t seen him yet,” Hugh says. “Come be introduced.”

It’s not till they are right beside Mighton that they see Ann is with him.

She gives them a cool glare and turns pointedly on her stool to talk to the woman on her other side. “Lise Largely, the allergy realtor,” Hugh whispers in Ivy’s ear. He introduces her to Mighton, who sits upright and sneering, like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec: “Ian Mighton, favourite son of Peterborough. At least of the artistic sons—and daughters, like Della.”

“Della.”
Mighton pronounces the name as if it’s Meryl Streep or something. Sainted but fallible, teasable, even laughable; honoured all the same. “She picked me up at the train, I thought she was coming here tonight.”

“Did she show you the flyer for your class? Must not be finished yet.” Hugh shakes his head. “We’re behind—it’s my fault. We’ll sell out anyway, nine spots are booked.”

This brings a lift to Mighton’s falling face. “They haven’t forgotten me?”

“I repacked one of your boxes the other night,” Hugh says. “I found a sketch for that portrait you did of Ann and Della and Newell intertwined. I want a new one of them now.”

Mighton laughs, and his face breaks from self-absorption into something quite different: sharp, lively, sensitive. Maybe he’s just sour because
he’s unhappy. “Where is that thing? But I don’t revisit,” he says. “You do it, Hugh. You’d do a better job—you love them.”

“Not all of them,” Hugh protests, and Mighton sends a sharkish glance to Ann, rapt in conversation with Lise Largely: two fair women pretending (to Ivy’s own shark eye) to be unaware, but listening with all their ears to Mighton and his jabs.

Hugh pulls Ivy’s elbow to find seats of their own, and they go down the long curve of the bar to empty stools at the other end. “What’s his deal?” Ivy asks, nodding back to Mighton.

“He’s not so bad. He’s got Crohn’s disease; gut-ache half the time. Makes him surly, also appealingly vulnerable.”

The waitress brings them water and a single malt, neat, for Hugh. She takes Ivy’s order for a drink (the same, neat, thanks) and Hugh’s for food: calamari for both of them.

“Trust me,” he says. “Best you’ll ever eat.”

Ivy’s happy, sitting beside Hugh on old Windsor bar-chairs in this dark-loud-warm room. No demands being made on her, no need for lipstick or chic-er clothes than her nice coat—for anything but the warmth of Hugh’s arm, the closeness of his leg beside her own beneath the bar. The whiskey comes, and then the calamari, dredged in Cajun spice, perfect as promised.