Close to Hugh (34 page)

help with the ladder           slab of concrete wall over his fireplace

the darkness of that room

internal affliction under his beautiful face

Of course I can! Got it, yes, got it, handle in the frame, yes, hup!

up the ladder, this is higher than—the last step wobbles—
whoa!

safe—Mighton’s hand so warm—not safe

his bright black eyes looking up: we know each other well     we do

his hand moves up

he moves forward  pushing up the skirt  his head darts in  his mouth

he bites my leg

he bites

warm bare flesh above the stocking shocking    is this what Ken feels?

4. IF I DIDN’T HAVE HUGH

One thing about Burton, Hugh thinks: he is an expert of emotion, having it and digesting it,
Sturm und Drang
. Sated by crisis/catharsis, in sprawling chairs set before the fireplace at FairGrounds, he and Newell recline. The debacle of last night? As if it never happened.

Hugh does not let himself imagine the argument or the making up about the jade—whatever that tantrum was about, Newell dropping the thing in the discarded scripts. The jade’s cord shows under Newell’s linen shirt, as usual. Burton holds forth, also as usual; Newell drinks coffee with medicinal focus. Hugh’s head hurts.

No L at the counter this morning: Savaya and Nevaeh, rapt in low-voiced discussion, arms threaded around each other’s tiny waists until Ivy gives a cheerful
hey!
and they detach. Nevaeh takes their order; Savaya adds a log to the fire, then goes back into the kitchen to ferry their muffins forward, tray shoulder-high, shield-maiden Valkyrie.

Burton is burbling about his class. “The Greeks, the original goat-song.
Antigone
—”

Newell stretches out a long arm to set his cup down, and says, “No.”

“
Eumenides
, then.”

Newell smiles at Hugh. “Hughripides, Hughmenides,” he says, and Burton laughs immoderately, latte foam daubed on his loose upper lip.

Stop hating him. Ivy gives you that relief: no need to hate anyone in the world.

He has to go back to Mimi’s to hear Conrad’s bad news. He can. He rises, floats out of his chair, leans to give Ivy a kiss. “I’ll be back. I have to check on my mother.”

Can’t think when he last said those words
my mother
out loud.

No excuse to go with him. Ivy’s own head hurts, without even falling off a ladder. Partly the drama last night: the undoing of someone’s love/life is no fun. Not sure what to think about Newell now, or about Orion. Plus, is she directing those
Spring Awakening
scenes or what? She’s done zero work on them and doesn’t want to waste time if Burton has something else in mind. Original goat that he is.

Newell downed his coffee fast and asked for another. He has the
New York Times
open, scanning the Arts for dear life. How long can he stick it out in the wilds of Peterborough? He’ll have to go back to work soon, if only to maintain Burton’s appetite.

Two white chocolate scones disposed of, Burton holds his fat black fountain pen poised over a Moleskine. The Intellectual. “Think, Boy. I won’t go back to
Spring Awakening
; the whole play is too much on the nose. Something brilliant, Ivy. Plenty of characters, not a musical, not a tragedy …” Burton’s eyes light.
“La Ronde
!”

Ivy’s least favourite play: ten depressing two-handed sex scenes, lovers trading around the circle. Right up Burton’s back alley. He could un-hetero some of the pairs.

“No,” Newell says, not looking up from the
Times
. “Not even for a reading. None of us can do
La Ronde
again, after
AIDS
. It’s empty, vapid Vienna froth.”

Burton is hard to quell, but that stops him. He sighs. “Well, I don’t say you’re wrong.”

Fine. Ivy will have to think.
“Kennedy’s Children?
”

“It’s not as hideously depressing as Swados’s
Dispatches
—” Burton half-agrees.

Newell stretches his elegant legs. “I’ve always wanted to play Sparger. Perfect timing: ‘I started out the year playing the fixed star Regulus in an astrological Hallowe’en pageant in an abandoned garage—I always start the year with Hallowe’en, I’m a realist.’ ”

At the counter behind them Savaya laughs, and quickly turns back to the steam-wand.

“You did the other guy, the shell-shocked Vietnam vet, in that Toronto production in the eighties.” Ivy saw it four times, star-struck and longing to heal his terrible pain.

“Yeah, but Sparger has all the lines.”

“I’ve always wanted to do
Mother Courage
—I feel I’m the natural heir to Judi Dench.”

“You’re too kind for Courage, and too original for Dench.”

She preens, foolishly pleased.

Burton shakes his head. “Brecht! Beyond these plebeian children.”

“A Chorus Line
!” Ivy cries, jazz hands, but she’s going too far in the other direction.

Burton practically stamps his foot. “No music!
No music!
”

“How about with the music pared away? No—there’s not much left, is there? Wait, we could do
Les Mis
, only from the book! Let them develop the script.”

“I have even
less
desire, if a negative of infinity is possible, to ‘develop a script’ with donkeys for a solid month.”

There’s silence, after this definitive statement. Nevaeh seems to have gone off shift, but Savaya leans on her elbows at the counter, listening with both ears up. Burton hits the paper with his pen repeatedly, making a series of black dots.

Try again.
“Cloud 9
,” says Ivy. “If you don’t double, there are lots of parts …”

Burton shakes his head. “Cross-dressing is built right into it. And Churchill,
ptah
. I’m not interested in rehashing someone else’s ideas,” he says.

Ivy shuts her eyes, in case they’re rolling. She is so bored by Burton’s bullshit. Why does she have to be here? Any decision will be his, possibly with Newell’s puppeteering. If it was up to her they’d be doing a new play, finding a playwright to come in and work with them, or— No point in stretching the mind to the possibilities, because that won’t happen.

“Howard Barker’s
The Possibilities
,” she says. Throwing it out like a bad card in poker.

Newell’s eyes light up; Burton scowls.

“Im-Possibilities,”
Newell says, sorrowing. “We couldn’t do it with these kids. Nobody could. They couldn’t be coached—it’s too hard.”

Like a fish, gills rippling, rising in green water, Burton says, “Well, it’s not
impossible
—it’s just always badly done.”

Newell feeds the fish, a casual casting of crumbs: “I’ve always wanted to—but no. Torture, terrorism—timely, but the
Kiss My Hands
piece, that’s just too difficult.”

Ivy is full of admiration for Newell. “I have a copy,” she says, idly. Gentle tickle of worm-fingers, luring the fish. “I don’t like it much myself, it’s too dark.”

Newell’s sidelong eye caresses her. (No wonder Orion loves him, she thinks. I do myself. Everybody, everybody does.) Burton’s purple lips purse, considering.

But before he can bite, Hugh comes in the door, back from Mimi’s, and Ivy jumps up to meet him and take his hand, checking his eyes for news on Mimi’s condition.

“Could be any day,” he says, without visible distress. “Conrad’s taken her off whatever was giving her the jim-jams, so she’s calmer, more lucid. She can stop eating now, that’s a relief. He’s upping the morphine, though, so she’ll have fewer periods of … I need another coffee,” he says. “Savaya, can you make me a—”

Savaya finishes it: “Quad long-shot Americano, three-quarters full.”

He puts a ten in the tip jar. “That’s the stuff.”

“Yikes,” Ivy says. “I’ll make your coffee, for that kind of money.”

“Will you, every day?”

They look at each other with pleasure, long enough for Savaya to set the coffee on the counter. Hugh pulls Ivy into the biggest chair with him,
one for two more to curl up in
, his comforting leg beside hers. Expecting Burton to shoot it down, she says, “Canadian?”

“Hm.” Burton ponders.
“Crackwalker?
Ivy cut her teeth on that one, Hugh.”

“And then I spent the next five years playing all the broken girls.”

“Culminating in a very good Laura in
Glass Menagerie
, as I recall.” It’s the only compliment Burton has ever paid her. Ivy puts up a hand to one burning cheek. She likes that Hugh heard Burton say that. Foolish and immodest heart.

“You could do
Taming of the Shrew
backwards,” she says. “A woman taming a spoiled-brat boy, a reality-show comedy. Or—or, you could take it seriously. Play it straight, look at domestic violence, what husbands have always been allowed, encouraged, to do to wives.” Ivy’s scalp prickles, thinking—always a good sign.

Burton purses his lips, and his ankle rotates, the tell that he’s engaged. But he has to dismiss the idea, because she thought of it. “I’m thinking about
Twelfth Night
. Full of disguise and deception, and we could double-load it: Orion as Viola and Sebastian, Savaya a corrupt young Duke, you for Olivia, Boy.
Lots
of nice stuff there.”

Is he not even conscious, Ivy wonders—has he been able to wash the whole Orion thing out of his mind so well? Or maybe he can compartmentalize it.
Work/love separate. Or perhaps he’s so doctrinally aligned with not-faithfulness that he cannot allow betrayal to bother him for more than the initial hurt, the first outrage.

Burton’s pen moves across the paper. “And for Malvolio, hm …”

“Some have greatness thrust upon them,”
Newell says. He reaches out one long hand to Ivy’s shoulder, and gets up. Session over.

(L)

Down in the Home Ec kitchen, Jason runs a frenzied bee of sewing and stapling before the costume parade at noon. Between writing up labels for each dress, L takes photos and video of the milling, half-dressed bodies. Cut off their heads and they’d fit the Voynich strand of the
Republic
. Nevaeh’s torso, tense in neoprene, strains as she raises her hands to tie the string behind her rope-tight neck. All her movements are tight today. She’s angry with Savaya because of Pink, and taking it out in lightning strikes on everyone.

L loves/hates N.

She could write that on a bathroom wall, but she can’t put it into the
Republic
, why? Because her mom might see? Nevaeh’s pink mouth makes her own mouth itch makes her fingers touch her own lips but but but, but
—let N be the unknown number
.

It is a problem. For example, Savaya is obviously super hot in the slutty Desire dress, but to L’s eyes, just funny, nothing bothersome. Whereas Nevaeh is prickly, heartbroken, remote. Putting on a thick coat of MAC Lovelorn. Something wild about her, ragged, like she knows about the pit, the worst things—except come on, she’s perfectly middle-class, even rich. Nevaeh’s father is a big Marxist guy at the university; she lives in the fanciest house they know. Kind of a dichotomy. He’s a massive, arrogant, slow-moving thinker; N’s tiny mother jitters around the edges. Her brother is doing a Fulbright; she’s going to have to do something amazing in dance. Or else. She could never tell her parents the truth.

But neither could L, her stomach in a fist at the prinking thought of saying anything about Nevaeh, about knowing her, seeing her beauty and her inside sadness, her lovelorn mouth that is just as beautiful upside down, her tortured heart, her shyness.

Jason is still getting Nevaeh tied into the thing with feathers, fixing the eyelashes curled below one breast and above the other—one eye is open now, Hope half-blind or winking. Where’s the Sharpie?
“
EMILY DICKINSON”
Maybe he’s doing this quote thing in case his mom comes to see the show. She’s prancing around in Mimi’s old clothes today, some skeezy photog following her around town. There has to be some way to still like Jason’s mom because it is too sad if she’s just a narcissist. That’s not fair: she’s
freaked, she’s still crying all the time because Jason’s dad left last year. What was feminism even for, if not to make it so you don’t collapse without a man? She can be fun, she used to be. L’s mom still hangs out with her, sorry for her probably. Hugh’s kind to her too. At least she didn’t get
him
to talk to Jason about porn, because that would have been the last straw for Jason. L’s stomach-fist clenches again, thinking about it.

The party being at Nevaeh’s house tonight also fills L with foreboding. The fancy floors, the swimming pool. There’s no way Nevaeh’s dad will be leaving the premises, and he’s scary, with the verbal prowess and the rock-carved face that says: remember, I am an international intellectual. Around him Nevaeh gets nervous, off balance. She needs help or reassurance—so over-needy that L steps back, recedes.