Close to Hugh
Authors: Marina Endicott
Copyright © 2015 Marina Endicott
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House of Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Endicott, Marina, 1958-, author
Close to Hugh / Marina Endicott.
ISBN 978-0-385-67860-5 (bound).–ISBN 978-0-385-67862-9
(pbk.).–ISBN 978-0-385-67861-2 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8559.N475H85 2014 C813′.6 C2013-906368-4
C2013-906369-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover images: (ladder)
Aleksangel/Shutterstock.com
;
(leaves)
HelenStock/Shutterstock.com
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company
v3.1
for Will and Rachel
everything always is
Deep in fall,
my neighbour—
how does he live, I wonder?
BASHO
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
6. Guess Hugh’s Coming to Dinner
9. I’ve told Every Little Star
Tuesday: Hugh made me love Hugh
6. Ask me no Questions, I’ll Tell Hugh no Lies
13. Hugh Make Me Feel Brand New
Wednesday: When Life Gives Hugh Lemons
3. I’ve Got Hugh Under My Skin
6. Can Hugh Feel It When I Do This?
8. Hugh Make My Dreams Come True
9. I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face
11. Hugh And The Night And The Music
12. I Want To Be Loved By Hugh
13. Hugh Got To Hide Your Love Away
Thursday: With Or Without Hugh
2. Every Time I Think Of Hugh I Go Blind
3. Hugh Can Sleep When You’re Dead
5. I Don’t Want To Lose Hugh Now
7. Hugh Can Lead A Horse To Water …
12… . But Hugh Can’t Make Him Drink
13. I’ll See Hugh In My Dreams
3. Cry And The World Cries With Hugh
5. I Only Want To Be With Hugh
6. How Is The World Treating Hugh?
7. Master Class: What You Will
13. If Hugh Can’t Stand The Heat, Get Out Of The Kitchen
15. I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire
Saturday: Hugh Can’T Take It With Hugh
5. The Importance Of Being Hugh
8. And The Horse Hugh Rode In On
11. Hugh Can Have Your Cake And Eat It Too
11. If I Ever Lose My Faith In Hugh
12. I Will Follow Hugh Into The Dark
Acknowledgements
FORMATTING NOTE
This title contains sections of poetry with special formatting. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in these sections:
the light in her face under the skin when she talks with Nevaeh, smiling as
To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.
dukkha,
suffering
,
or better, a basic unsatisfactoriness
that pervades all of life
.
entry on Buddhism
,
WIKIPEDIA
1. HUGH CAN TAKE IT
You can bear pain. Hugh can. But you can’t stand to see it in others. It makes your hands and feet hurt. The grey room is full of grey people in various stages of pain. A little party: grouped by the window, sitting on the bed, ten or twelve of them. A woman kneeling by the nightstand says,
It’s all up to you, up to Hugh
. Her cloudy hair, her dress in tatters. No.
No. It’s a dream.
Eyes open.
Light? No. Three a.m. 3:02.
Okay.
3:07.
Hugh can bear pain. For himself it’s not so bad, sometimes he doesn’t even notice it. Hard when it’s someone you can’t help, though. Your mother. Cloudy hair all wisps and tendrils now. No. Don’t think about Mimi, her hands, the pale phosphorescent skin of her chest, her searching eyes.
If you had a child, could you stand that? There’s a question for you, for Hugh: why didn’t you have a child? Okay, Ann had that abortion in the eighties. But that was somebody else’s baby, Hugh is pretty sure. By then Ann was disconnecting herself from him by connecting with a few other people. You couldn’t blame her, it was the times; women felt they had to be libertines in order to be liberated, and there was a fair amount of cocaine going around. He walked in on Ann once, having sex with some guy on a pile of coats at a party. Humiliating, titillating, to see her riding a set of naked limbs. Lots of reasons for shame. Hugh never even saw who it was—the guy pulled a coat over his face against the sudden light, and Hugh turned and left. That tawdry little pain hits again, a bee-sting of stupidity.
Why remember things at all.
Hugh lies in the dark, listening to the night’s last rain falling straight into the basement of the gallery he lives above. Where valuable things are
stored, furniture and boxes he ought to have moved, other people’s art. He’s tired of rain and basements and responsibility.
Della and Ken for dinner on Saturday, with Ruth—he should ask Newell too, but can’t bear the burden of Burton, Newell’s house guest. Della and Ken: that’s a mess.
Think of something else: what to make for Ruth? Trivial, tepid, time-taking thought, a treat for old Ruth. She likes seafood crêpes. Okay, not rolled, but stacked like layer cake. Frozen crab, not that reeking stuff from the truck they had last time.
Fresh? Liars!
said Ruth.
The first time he was sent to live with her, four years old, confused, he thought they said to call her Aunt Truth. Newell waiting with him, waiting for their mothers to come back: two boys side by side at the long white table, watching Ruth laugh as she stood stirring at the stove, laughing at something Jasper said. Jasper flirting in his peacocky shirt, gesturing with his glass—he didn’t even drink too much, back then. When was that? 1969. Warm and safe in Ruth’s foster-kitchen, those boys, backs against fake ivy-covered bricks on washed-clean vinyl wallpaper. Ivy in pots too, growing, growing, shining green, kind and clean.