Close to Hugh (25 page)

Authors: Marina Endicott

Then memory comes back: at first a bud of misery—then blooming, fading, falling out of the pastoral, back to the city. It’s got to be done. If she leaves by ten, she can get back with time to have a good cry and wash her face and get to the master class before three.

She pats for the phone—email? None from Hugh. Three from Jamie, very long, re: the dishwasher and the water damage. (One from Alex, all caps again, delete without reading.) Prickling duty kicks her up and into the shower.

It’s not just fixing the dishwasher. She’s got to get serious with them, get Jamie the heck out of her apartment. Alex promised he’d be sent to Winnipeg by September. This is no good for him, he needs real help. Why do so many people have to be crazy? I must have sought them out, her mind says. And what about Hugh? Who’s to say he’s not crazy too?

Hugh’s to say. She laughs. He is
so not crazy
, so sane. His sanity buoys her up, drowning in indoor rain while outdoor rain sluices down the window that’s over the tub, water in and out, and a view out to the rainy river where water pours into water like the soul pours itself into the world, over and over, looking for home. He said it—
love
—we said.

Whatever we meant by that. Is it lying, not to have told him about Jamie; about Alex, when she knows about Ann? Avoiding, withholding, that’s lying too, yes. Phone on the sink—oh, a text from before! How did she miss that? Sound was off—she flips it on.

< let me know when your eyes open

She answers: > my eyes are open but I do not see you

Half-dressed, she looks at her body in the mirror, how it must have seemed to Hugh last night. It didn’t matter, in the night. Our flesh was made one, as the bishop said to the actress. Breast waist bottom thigh—under Hugh’s hands all golden. One with everything.

Will it matter in daylight?

A gentle horn from the phone: < but you will, you will

And another: < come to the gallery? ten?

Ten is cutting it fine for getting to the city and back in time for the master class. Dress fast: grey pants and tunic, because who the heck knows what mysteries of Burton are on the menu today, whether she will be man or womankind in
Spring Awakening
.

Now to beard the cold-eyed lioness downstairs.

Ivy takes the front stairs without noise, so Ann doesn’t turn from her work: standing on a chair at the front door, she’s writing something over the lintel. Ivy reaches the short landing as Ann steps off the chair. In a perfect arch over the doorway, so anyone going out must read it:

Lying is done with words and also with silence. Adrienne Rich

Perfect. So life in this house is now impossible.

Back up the stairs. It is not unheard of for a landlady to change the locks, for people not to be able to get their stuff out later. There’s not a lot to pack. Ivy leaves her cases under the window, in case she has to climb the ladder to get them later, and puts on her warmer coat. She opens the door and listens. Nothing. She goes to the top of the stairs, pauses—

Right beside her, Jason says, “You okay?”

She jumps, and turns to him. His face is sharp in the ghostlight of the upstairs hall.

“I think your mom …” Feeble. “I was just checking to see if— I guess she’s mad at me.”

“Because of Hugh?”

Ivy nods, guilty. Jason is carrying his shoes, looks the worse for wear. Sneaking in after a night out? He doesn’t seem the tomcat type. He checks the stairs himself.

“She doesn’t, she wouldn’t, get back with him,” he whispers, in a rush. “Don’t worry.”

She nods again.

“Also, L thinks you guys are good. You and Hugh.”

A surging bubble of happiness sings up through Ivy’s whole body from foot to head—joy, joy, that other people know about this amazing, unlikely thing. “Thanks,” she whispers, not able to look at Jason lest he see the light in her face, even in this dark upper hall.

She slips down the stairs, makes the front door, scoots through with her shoulder bag—and beats Ann’s entrance from the kitchen by the kind of quarter inch that gives a person the shudders. Raining still. Ivy dashes for the car, praying it starts.

Reversing down the damp-dark driveway, she sees Ann staring out the open door. Above her head in the doorway, Jason is waving.

(DELLA)

Mighton in the morning might help me forget the disappearing Ken

at the train station too early always either too early or too late

Gerald plodding along where’s he off to? sad head sad body sad sack

the rain station the drops have slowed

is it clearing? glimmering shimmering

thirty years of knowing Mighton I’m so old he’s so famous

what makes one succeed and another not? his exhibit at the AGO

cool, hot, too clever, puzzling boxes, hidden compartments

brilliantine, bits of glass a box himself dark glasses

arrogant, intricate too bright for his boots

surface glitter shallows, no depth

depth, plunging—Ken

his boat half-sunk seen through waves

beyond my ken

train’s early too a miracle—

there’s Mighton always bright monkey-face I like him

long ago dinner at where was that cachaça

no older that night him a thin arrow inside me

streetlight shining in the round window

Hugh & Ann’s it could have been

Hugh and I walked in Ann & (who) on the coats not Mighton

I think it was Ken

Your new piece, can’t wait—let me take that—I’ve got Hugh’s van

he has a concussion, can’t—phew, no ticket!

easy in middle age to be together no self-consciousness only a gleam

intelligence in his work but he himself is a little stupid I always forget

Largely kept the mandarin orange door best thing about his house

Wonderful! I’ll come back—All right, if Lise can give you a ride

to the Argylle? Great!

nice to drive away

best thing about people is driving away from them

I sound like Ken

(L)

Someone’s been sleeping in my bed
. Somebody walked through the
Republic
and tried to cover the traces. Not Hugh. He’d see half the pieces were backwards and fix them. Not Jason. He has a permanent pass for all L’s purlieus—anyway he spent the long night at Savaya’s. How to feel about this?

L wanders through the misplaced maze, smoothing, repositioning.

So her dad is back, but not back. Not here, but here, mouse-feet, moving stuff on the dining room table. And searching through the underworld down here. Poor dad, poor dad.

Four are missing. Why would her dad take them? It’s—count them: the drawing of her mom; onion skins of Newell and Nevaeh; something else, some map, which, where’s the schema … The inner fortress. Well that’s just weird, and if her father has taken away her vagina, that’s a thing that makes L both laugh and want to stomp her feet, thunder them together, drum them on the floor in a fucking tantrum.

No. Always careful, always calm.

We stay very stable in this house. Knowing that any moment, any one fraction of any moment, her father could split apart, husk shedding, and a creature could come out the middle that would frighten you to death. Still her dad, always, always to be relied on. But under that, this problem, such a basic foundation that we’ve built our whole house on it: careful, careful.

For a bad moment L’s hands might stretch out and tear everything down, pull pull rip ruin the whole thing.

But no. On all fours, she crawls out backwards to the door like an olden slave making obeisance, obeised/abased, removing herself from the presence.

Up the basement stairs, coat, bookbag, out. Late for FairGrounds. Will Jason be at school by now? Because she needs some help. She would like to know, for instance, where her dad is sleeping. Why he is not—why her mom is not—dealing with this.

And for this one last year, before she is gone from them pretty much forever, why the fuck the two of them cannot keep it together for just—count them—nine more months until she leaves for good.

3. HUGH CAN SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE DEAD

Hugh takes the inside stairs two at a time up to Mimi’s hall. Racing up is sometimes the only way you can go in. The quietude, the ambient air of death is so thick.

Halt. Ruth’s backing out the door with a tray of dishes, tubes, cloths.

“You missed Newell, he brought flowers. I chased him out, though.”

Hugh takes the tray from her and sets it safely on a cart left in the hall. No crashing, no broken glass this morning.

“She’s not herself,” Ruth says, to warn him.

Ah, but she is, Hugh’s willing to bet. The door is ajar. From inside he can hear a buzzing droning singsong. The litany streams on without pause, as if breath doesn’t pertain. He nods to Ruth, shoulder-clasps her.

In he goes.

“Hugh Hugh Hugh Hugh Hugh Hugh,” his mother is saying, brokenhearted. (Or else, of course, “You you you you you you …”) Tears track down her crepe de Chine cheeks.

Happy time is over, it seems. “What’s the deal, what’s the deal here,” he murmurs, keeps murmuring, a stream of
Yes it’s me, it’s all right, it’s okay
. Heavy scent of Newell’s roses, white hearts opening outward, waterdrop halfglobes on the green table.

Leaning over in the familiar partial kneel, since there’s no room to sit on the bed beside her, Hugh takes Mimi’s hands to stop her fretting with the blankets. Tubes and sticks get in the way, but he is patient. He untangles them all gently, without causing her to cry out.

Today she is not coherent, at least not intelligible. But he’s been listening to this language, this deathspeak, for a while now. He can hear the words—not so different from bad racing manic-anxious times he recalls from childhood. “Thank you Ruth. Thank you. Thank Hugh.” That for some time, bead-telling, rote-repetitive. Then singsong
Mairzy doats and dozy doats
, also for a good while, over and over, never progressing.
Crouch-kneeling by her side, Hugh joggles the needle of her mind in one of the pauses: “…
and little lambs eat Ivy
,” he sings. Nibbling lambs circle Ivy’s green skirt, her small hands patting their heads. Her lamblike hinder end—he almost laughs.

Mimi falls silent. Then begins the whispered recounting that he’s afraid to listen to. One thing that keeps him away from her, away from here. Snatches of memory thrown up from her disintegrating mind, urgent to impart: “She drove us in her little car all the windows open down along the shore he sat beside me our legs touching she told me I was only there to make up to him and no kind of a friend it hurt me so much to have her say that he sat beside me our arms touched all along the upper lengths I shifted on the seat in the heat he’ll never amount to anything she said he only …”

You can’t know another person, can’t know anyone. You are alone, alone. No matter what life you construct, no matter what duty you give them or how you love them. She can never know you, or you her. Huge white roses rise from thick green thorns; heavy glass refracts, magnifies the stems and the thorns.

“I knew
him
that’s why I went I trailed my hand along the tops of the stones grey lichen green moss stubble graveyard dust the horses the horses were buried under that mound he told us then later he climbed into bed with me when no one was about.”

He can hardly bear to hear. It murmurs on and on, so much life to be confessed at last. He thinks and thinks and still she goes on recounting, the tape spooling out of the cassette.

“I pushed him aside I promise I but he was there with me and what was I to I told him I knew all about her and what she’d said it was all so clear, all perfectly all clear I knew I knew it all along I knew it as soon as I saw the blood that they were that I was that it was I who, I did, it was my …”

Hugh bends to kiss his mother’s cheek. Swollen in the early stages, then shrunken; now a soft husk around her bones, not her face that he has always known. But more her face than ever, the face he now knows best of all. He presses his cheek to her cheek. He hums to her along those
mairzy dozy
lines, floating the song along, easing her. “Never mind,” he says to her. “Never mind, never mind, it wasn’t your fault, it’s all done with now, you don’t need to worry now.”

“Now no now no thank you, no thank you Hugh thank you, thank you,” she whispers.

It gives his head more pain to hear her
thanks
—more pain than he can in any way allow,

and since she seems quieter he stands and leaves the room

and there is Ruth outside the door, she nods and trades places with him

and off he goes blind

into the long-stretched wet autumn sunlight

down the hospice steps away

(DELLA)

up the steps to Ken’s office:
insist on information

no Jenny

her assistant says Ken’s assistant has an assistant now

down the steps down the street