Real Life (18 page)

Hugo said, “I guess I'd better do the dishes.” He stood and gathered up the plates, humming to himself.

“Is that one of Nina's songs?”

“Oh—I guess it is,” he said, blushing again. “I didn't even know I was humming it.”

Like hell, she thought. “Hugo?” He turned, and his resemblance to her father caught Dorrie's heart. “You can have the kitten if you really want it.”

His face lit up. “Oh, that's great! That is so great.”

“You promise to take care of it? Keep it fed, and don't let it wander?”

“I promise.” He stood up and began to pace around the kitchen, too elated to sit still. “I've always wanted a cat or a dog. We used to have this dog at Rose's, named Tiger. I loved him so much, and then he got run over and I really missed him. We had a funeral and everything. For years and years whenever I thought of him I'd cry.” He smiled slightly and sniffed. “I'm starting to cry now, even. I can't believe it.”

“I used to have a cat,” Dorrie said. “When I first got out of college. He was a really sweet cat, named Hodge.”

“Why Hodge?”

“My boyfriend was writing a dissertation on Samuel Johnson. Eighteenth-century English writer. Johnson had a cat named Hodge.” She could see it surprised him: the boyfriend.

“What happened to Hodge?”

“Feline leukemia.” She had nearly forgotten Hodge, who used to try to crawl into the refrigerator whenever she opened it, and who slept on her bed, a warm, soft mass behind her knees. Mark used to bring him catnip. “I really missed Hodge too,” she said.

“Why didn't you ever get another one?”

“The old story, I guess. I didn't want to go through that another time. Losing it.” He nodded solemnly, surprised again—that she not only had boyfriends but felt pain at the death of a cat. “It'll be nice to have a cat,” she said.

“It'll be a good cat. I'll try not to let it sleep all over the furniture and stuff.”

She laughed at his scrupulousness. “Hugo, does this look like the kind of place where anyone cares about cat hair on the furniture?”

He looked around the kitchen and snickered. “I guess not.” Then he sobered and said, as if it had just occurred to him, “Oh—I was wondering if I could go over tonight and visit my cat. Nina gets there about seven to feed Listerine.”

“That's the mother cat?”

“Listerine the Purring Machine.”

“I guess you can go.” She wished she could caution him not to, to avoid his sullen popsy for his own good, to stick with the unattainable babes on
Upton's Grove
. He stood there smiling at her, perfectly, purely happy, with bits of cookie between his teeth. Hugo. She hadn't yet absorbed it, the fact that he had a friend, much less a girlfriend. And maybe it wasn't even true. Maybe she was imagining his devotion, projecting onto Hugo what she was unable to feel herself. She faked a smile back at him and asked, “Was it okay at the Garners'?”

“They were really nice to me.” He carried the plates to the sink and said, with his back to her, “They let me have some wine at dinner.”

She sensed that this was a confession, and that he made it because he was grateful to her about the cat. “That's all right, Hugo. I assume they didn't let you get soused.”

“I only had a little.”

“And did they treat you well?”

“I really love the Garners,” he said, and the pang of jealousy she felt startled her.

“They're awfully nice people.” She drained her beer. “I think I'll take a walk down to the pond while you do the dishes.”

“Do you want to play a game of Scrabble after that?”

“I don't think so, Hugo. It's too damned hot.”

She walked over the burned grass to the water, took off her shoes, and sat on the end of the dock. The sun beat down on her head. This is going to give me a headache, she thought, and immediately it did. She wished it was tomorrow, that she was up early, and it was cool, and she was at her wheel. She had come away from the show with a dozen ideas. She lay back on the warm wood and closed her eyes, giving in to the headache, listening to the absolute silence. No: not absolute. There was a cardinal's tireless whistle, and from the Verranos' the faint whoosh of the waterfall, and behind her on the grass an insect buzzing. And then, from the house, the sound of the phone and Hugo's voice calling her. Don't let it be Alex Willick, she thought.

But it was. “You're home,” he said. “Good. Suppose I drive down there tomorrow afternoon and take you on a picnic.”

“You said the weekend.”

“Your enthusiasm is infectious.”

“I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound—I mean, I usually work on weekdays.”

“So do I, but I decided I'd rather see you.”

She felt, for a moment, disoriented. What was he saying? Was she imagining this? She remembered his hand on her leg. Her head pounded, her chest felt tight, her breath came short, as if she were about to be sucked into the mucky bottom of the pond. “Okay,” she said. “The hell with work.” She took a deep breath. “I'd rather see you too.”

Part Two

5

Hugo and Nina were sitting on a blanket down by the pond. It was a hot Sunday in August. They had spent the morning with the kittens—Daisy and Dolly they were called, still too young to leave their mother—and then eaten a lunch of root beer and potato chips down by the waterfall. Dorrie was out of town—“in Boston with her weird paramour” was how Nina put it—and after lunch Hugo and Nina walked along the pond to the white house and took over the deck. They idled through the days, now, like this—together, aimless, in the sun, sometimes in Nina's backyard in East Latimer, more often at the Verranos' or at Dorrie's when she was away, so they could take the boat out on the pond.

Hugo had had a series of fierce sunburns; his skin was blotched and peeling. He had taken to wearing jeans all the time, for protection, and to slopping suntan lotion on his vulnerable arms and the back of his neck. He had his bottle of Coppertone beside him on the blanket, and he waited for the day Nina would offer to apply it to his back.

The afternoon was hot and quiet, the pond wavy blue glass, shimmering in the heat. Nina was singing her “missing people” song, the one she had written for Hugo. “You gave me the idea,” she said, “and you'll get half the profits when I'm famous and it's published.” It was a prospect that saddened him—Nina's fame—implying as it did their separation. What use would a rich and successful Nina have for him? Imagine Dolly Parton still hanging out with the fat neighborhood kid she used to know when she was sixteen.

Nina sang, in the strange shrill voice he had grown used to and begun to love:

“They're not missing, they're gone to Jesus,

To that Missing Persons Bureau in the sky;

You don't need no passports, you don't need no visas,

‘Cause we'll all be missing persons by and by.”

It saddened him also that he didn't like Nina's song. “Missing Persons Bureau” wasn't, to say the least, what he had had in mind when he devised his “missing people” pun. He had thought the song would be, somehow, about his father and his mother and his grandparents, something that would cheer him up when he was down because it said what he felt, and it had been his idea. But Nina's song seemed to him just another country-and-western tune, the sort of thing that most of her stuff was better than. He hummed along with her at the end, though, and when she said, strumming chords on her guitar, “This is the song that's going to put you through college and send you to Europe and buy you a Rolls-Royce,” he nodded and agreed. “No doubt about it.” She beamed at him, and he felt his love for her like a hunger pang deep in his stomach. He would never confess to her, ever, that her song didn't please him.

“Tell me some more about your parents, Hugo,” Nina said. She sat as she always did, cross-legged, with her guitar slung across her middle. He wondered if it was there to keep him away. He wondered if she was his girlfriend—if, in the unlikely event that he ever again had to introduce her to someone, he could say, “This is my girl, Nina.” He wondered if you could call someone you had never even kissed your girlfriend. Most of all, he wondered if the idea was absurd: if he introduced her as “my girl, Nina,” would she laugh, or throw up, or scream in horror?

She said she had never had a boyfriend—had hardly ever had a friend, even, except for a girl named Mary Lou who had been her best friend from seventh grade to ninth grade but who had moved to New York to do television commercials. “She was in a Skippy peanut butter commercial a couple of years ago,” Nina told him. “The one where the kids are gathered around the table for lunch and the mother can't find the peanut butter and they refuse to eat anything she hauls out and then one of the kids pulls a jar of Skippy out of her backpack—did you ever see it? That was Mary Lou, the one with the backpack.”

Hugo vaguely recalled the commercial, though not the girl with the backpack. “Was she your only friend?” he asked.

“Except for my cousin Courtney, in Michigan. She tried to commit suicide once, or so she said. Over some boy. She took ten aspirin. I don't know if that counts as a suicide attempt, but I guess her parents were really scared. I don't consider her a true friend, though. She's too strange—but she's strange in a sort of ordinary way. Do you know what I mean?”

She was always wanting to hear about his parents, or about his years with Rose or his grandfather, or about the Catholic school Rose used to send him to. She liked people to tell her things. She sat happily listening for long stretches of time, her face raised to the sun and a slight smile on it. “My life is so dull,” she would moan. “I love to hear about yours. Yours is so full of characters. What material! If I'd had your life I would be the greatest songwriter in the world—instead of about the fourth greatest.” He loved her grin; he loved the jokes she made about her talent that he knew weren't really meant to be jokes. “I have had the most depressingly regular childhood,” she would go on. “I have the world's most normal parents, the world's dullest sister; all my schools have been just regular old schools—I mean, it's all so
nice
. Mary Lou might be in New York playing people in TV commercials, but I've
lived
like someone in a TV commercial. All those super-normal people with nice neat kitchens and concerned moms and no troubles in the world except what kind of peanut butter to buy. Miss Average American—that's me.”

Hugo doubted this. He had met her family—her eye-doctor father, and her million-dollar salesperson mother, and her sister, Susan, and Susan's husband, Peter, even her grandmother, old Mrs. Slaughter, who went to Florida every winter and whose only distinction was that she wore a red wig—and their nice ordinariness made him ache with longing. But Nina herself was another story: he couldn't imagine what a commercial with her in it could be selling.

He was flattered by the way she glamorized his sad past. “What were they like?” she asked him. “That's what I want to know. I don't want facts, I want feelings, Hugo.”

“How do I know what they were like? My mother died when I was a baby. All I know is what Rose told me. Nobody else ever talked about her. And my father died when I was eight. I've told you everything I remember about him.” He had told her how the inability to remember tortured him, and how often he had tried to gather together what fragments of his childhood he could—of his father and Rose and Tiger the dog and his grandparents—making lists to hold in his mind like a book on a shelf he could browse through whenever he wanted. He didn't tell her, though, how he worried that at some future time these afternoons they were spending together, this blanket beneath his elbows, this film of gnats flitting around their heads, the flat green water and Nina's wild hair and the peeling skin on her nose and the sun polishing her guitar to the color of maple syrup—all this would be nothing but memories, or, worse, might be gone, unrecallable, nonexistent. He frowned with the intensity of the effort to seal it into his brain, to forget nothing, to keep it alive: that was his mission, his purpose in life.

Nina said, “I wonder why no one ever talked about your mother.”

Hugo shifted uneasily on the blanket. “Because it was so tragic, what happened to her. I suppose.” But he had wondered that too. She had hardly ever been spoken of, even by Rose, her sister. He had scarcely anything of her to put into his mental collection.

“You'd think they'd give you pictures of her, at least. I would expect you to have a framed photograph of her next to your bed. Or letters from her to your father. Or stuff like her old report cards and her graduation picture. That sort of thing.”

“Well, I don't have anything,” Hugo said irritably. Nina seemed to be reproaching him for his lack, as if he hadn't cared enough about his mother to seek out a memento. He took the cap off the Coppertone, poured some into his palm, and rubbed it on his forearms. “Just the picture of her and my father. I showed you that.”

“Big deal,” Nina said. “There must be more, somewhere. People just don't disappear without a trace. I'll bet your aunt has stuff. I'll bet she just doesn't show it to you. She probably thinks it's morbid. Or it could be sheer meanness on her part. I wouldn't put it past her.”

Hugo began to feel uncomfortable. Was it his fault that Nina disliked Dorrie so? He was always trying to remember what he had told Nina when they first met to make her so down on his aunt. He couldn't think of anything, but he must have implied by his tone of voice or the expression on his face that she was an ogre. Dorrie was all right, really, he liked her fine a lot of the time, and Nina's attitude disturbed him—but it was also exciting: Nina and Hugo against the adults. Nina was working on a song about Dorrie, she said. He couldn't wait to hear it, even though he knew it would make him feel awful.