Close to Hugh (41 page)

Sheridan is semi-drunk. “Do you want to see all of it?”

As if thrilled, Savaya says, “Duh, yeah!” And he pulls it out.

Time to go. Orion hooks Jason and L by the elbows and propels them through the arch, into the living room. The flood of bodies has mostly drifted out the French doors. People are standing in clumps in the darkness, the music has hit a soft spot, it’s getting late. Midnight.

There’s banging on the front door. Jason jumps, and they all do, thinking it’s the police. The door swings inward and a large shape looms in from the darkness. Newell.

How the heart leaps up, no matter what, how it quickens —even if …

Not the best but not the worst either, to see the love object. He’s laden with stuff, a folding chair and a basket, a suitcase, a shabby overcoat, looks like he picked it up at the Mennonite Clothes Closet. Ragged T-shirt shows off his arms and shows, too, how stupid ol’ Burton was to cast Savaya as Stanley Kowalski, good as she was, because Newell would have been even more—he makes your legs shake, he’s so—

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.