Close to Hugh (6 page)

More good manners. Ivy is a bit surprised, but nods. “I’m Ivy Sage,” she says.

“I know,” the girl says. “I’m L. The letter L.” She looks around for the car.

Ivy points to her very old Volvo, slumped beside Ann’s new Subaru. “Are you wearing anything precious?”

L looks down to check her clothes. “Guess not,” she says. But she is in unrelieved black.

“Because the dog hair is dreadful. I have to get it cleaned out. I was dog-sitting all summer and I still haven’t faced up to it.”

After a look at the fur-snowed seat, L takes off her black wool coat and puts it on inside out, cream satin lining gleaming in the streetlight. She waves to the boys and slides, or satin-glides, in beside Ivy.

“The letter L, that’s unusual.”

L looks blank. Bored? Ivy can’t tell. She snaps her seatbelt buckle, waits for L to snap hers. They trundle off in convoy down the street, and L’s nice manners reassert themselves. “My mother—her name’s Della—called me Ella, as in Cinder, but that seemed like an error in judgement, so then for a while she said I was named after Elle Macpherson. Which is crazy. I used to say it was El, short for Electra.”

“At least in the morning,” Ivy quips. Then, at L’s raised eyebrow, “
Mourning Becomes Electra
, a play I did when I was young. Never mind.” Sad to be old, Ivy thinks. Nobody gets her jokes. Well, they are not good jokes. She drives.

L points. “Down here, left at the lights—so anyway, my mother’s crazy.” She gives an indulgent hoot for her crazy mother. (Ivy laughs too, in honour of her own.) “So we sent away to have it changed officially, but
it turns out she never registered me properly at the hospital, so I’m Baby Girl Belville. Talk about a stripper name. I’m tempted to leave it like that.”

“Well, yes! Are you in drama?” she asks L.

“Orion is. Jason and I are painting the sets. We’re in visual.”

Too bad. Ivy needs a few friends. Burton is such a weasel. Four thousand bucks.

“That’s the house,” L says. A big old pillared place, front porch bulging out. Too many cars already parked along the street. Orion zips the Civic into a dubious spot, half-over someone’s driveway.

Ivy pauses for L to hop out, saying, “You go in with the guys. I’ll find a spot.” She drives happily down the block into the dark. A few extra minutes before she has to be public.

(L)

“Maybe she needs to toke up or something hippie,” Orion says, watching the tail lights of the Volvo diminish. “Chew nicotine gum. Chant.”

“Light a sweetgrass, do a mantra, man.”

The boys think they are very funny. “I like her,” L says.

“Ivy, though?” Jason says. “Like,
Soulcalibur
.” Orion laughs, loud in the darkness.

L bats at the dog hair on her coat lining and turns it right side out. Black again, she climbs the half-moon porch steps, not kicking the pumpkins all to hell, though that would feel good.

Orion and Jason trip along behind her on big feet, gawky. L is so glad not to be male.

Newell Fane is coming, he’s probably already there. She doesn’t want the flutter in her belly when she thinks about him, it’s juvenile. She’s always known him, he’s best friends, like, brother and sister with her mom and Hugh; there’s nothing to flutter about. There he is, Newell, haloed in the hall light. His hair. But it’s his eyes, tired and kind, that kill her. Knows all your flaws and loves you anyway. He’s like thirty years older than she is, plus actually gay, everybody knows, although he doesn’t make a public deal of it. But that doesn’t always—look at Orion. Gay, except that Savaya experiment. And look at Savaya. It’s a continuum, a spectrum, a
raiiin-bow connection
, right. Anyway she herself probably likes Nevaeh best of anybody, but that doesn’t mean you don’t flutter flutter flutter. The problem of love. She starts a butterfly thing in her mind, a paper thing, mobile, to work with the ladies in pots from the Voynich, fluttering from their chrysalides to the light-haloed, shadow-eyed face of him.

Hugh’s hanging around on the veranda, as if he didn’t want to go in. But it’s cold. Hugh hugs her, then Jason. He salutes Orion, who’s been in pretty much every art class Hugh ever gave. Jason too, and L, because of not taking her mom’s classes. Every class for ten years, ever since Hugh came back from wherever, some other life he’d been living. He is probably her mentor, if you have to give it a name. But she has not shown him the
Republic
.

10. I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR HUGH

Parked beside the pumpkin punchbowl, Hugh holds a half-glass cupped in his hand. Students and teachers hover, waiting for the old prank where some joker kid adds bottomless bottles of vodka. Maybe it’s already been done. You’d have to taste the punch to know, and Hugh can’t bear to. Such a headache. Can’t be the wine, must be the fall from the ladder this morning. Stand up straight, man. You ought to head for the hospice. Or wait till the awards are over, then go. She won’t know Hugh, she’s been wandering in crazyland for days; harder to go there than to stand watching Newell’s progress around the room, with Burton as tug.

Jason and Elle—unexpected treat, to see them here. Their set design, a painted cyc, a gobo London Bridge from die-cut Mylar: he takes their word for it. Elle says Della’s coming. Hugh feels some relief. Burton is easier to bear when there’s someone to mock him with.

Here’s Jerry Pink. Tight, rose-tinged asshole that he is. Hugh wishes he was at home, climbing the wooden hill to his treetop house and pulling the stairs up after him, alone. It’s not lonely if you like being alone. Jerry Pink is all hail-fellow et cetera; Hugh endures it. The school gets their certificates framed at the Argylle Gallery and they won’t if Pink takes a pet. Pink is in plaid, he’s a joke of a guy. One arm round a student, Savaya or Nevaeh, Hugh can’t remember which the tall blonde one is. Pink’s other arm snakes out to snag a woman, a shortish, plumpish person. Thick eyebrows give her a look of surprise, or attention, when she turns her eyes on you. She turns her eyes on Hugh.

A nice look, actually. That’s a nice face. Intelligent, sweet. Exotic but plain.

This must be the I of O actor Newell brought in for the master class scene work. She looks back at him, straight back; their eyes focus and
lock crosshairs, as if they were spy cameras. Actually seeing each other, on first meeting, in all this punch-drunk crowd.

Ivy likes this person. His height and breadth fit the imaginary stencil in her mind: “Man.”

Out of her league, of course, because she is dumpy and hidden and nobody ever knows her at first. She always has to translate herself, insert herself into people’s consciousness.
Then
they like her.

But here, look: at first blow, first glance, this person, this man looks back at her and sees her true self. Nice.

Then Burton, sensing something happening that he’s not in on, bustles over. “Eye,
Vee
.” he says, two words in all. He holds her off and looks her up and down. “
How
sweet. Mrs. Lovett as the Queen Mum.” That’s the worst of Burton—he has a sixth sense for everybody’s conceits. Ivy feels herself blushing. Or maybe this is a hot flash, because she is getting old, very old, it’s true.

Newell, strolling along behind, grins at her beautifully and lifts his hands in apology. “Really good to see you, sweetheart, I’m so glad it’s you. Un
bear
able,” he says into her ear, hugging her, “if it had been anybody else.”

Oh, why did she agree to do this? Newell’s pity is almost more than she can take. He must know about her trouble.
Four thousand, four thousand
, she says to herself, and she smiles at Burton with just the degree of respect tinged with challenge that he tells himself he likes. Actually, he likes you to kowtow, but he wants to pretend that he’s an equaller equal among equals. It wearies her very much to know so well how to pander to his measly soul. He’s spouting off about
his
Mrs. Lovett—how he wants her: solid, fleshy, gap-toothed, definitely middle-aged. Which is so flattering. Plus, she is not gap-toothed.

Newell interrupts Burton. He hands Ivy a small pie and a glass of punch. “
Mrs. Lovett, how I’ve lived without you all these years I’ll never know
.” She’s forgotten that trick of his memory, knowing all the lines, using them in conversation to create intimate understanding, trusting that you will know both the surface meaning and the lurking ironic undertone, undertow. Trust is Newell’s coin.

“Anyway, one thing I
can
promise you,” Burton says, grabbing their attention, annexing Newell’s untouched pie. “No performance! We won’t stage this for an audience, I’ve made that clear to Pink. Master class means just that,
class. No
performance. All righty?”

Ivy’s bite of pie was a mistake. Barbecued duck, when she thought it was cherry. But it allows her not to speak, to put up a hand to cover her mouth. She smiles and nods over the hand, coughs, looks around for the bathroom. “Under the stairs,” Newell says, and she bolts.

“
That’s
Ivy Page, Hugh,” Burton says behind her, perfectly audible. “Not entirely …”

“Ivy Sage,” Newell sings, over whatever Burton was going to say.

Across the hall, under the stairs—first door opens to steep stairs, basement. Next one, there we are. As the door closes behind her, Ivy hears Burton: “
Blank page
, I must have been thinking.”

In the tiny bile-green washroom the mirror gives her back a flat white face. Small eyes and a sorry expression. She spits the pie into the sink, then cups up the whole mess in her hand and flushes it down the toilet. The taps gush a stream of hot water to clear the dribs out of the sink, but she can’t wash her face for relief. Her mascara (pathetic attempt) would make a mess of her face and the towel. She leans against the door for a while. Like in an airplane washroom, she can’t bear to go back to her seat, a middle seat too far back, between oily, patting Cherry Pink and that poisonous duck Burton.
Four thousand, four thousand
. Money is a bugger. If she wasn’t so weak and stupid and broken she wouldn’t be doing this, she’d have gone to law school, or gritted her teeth, gotten her goddamn MFA, and be teaching in some cozy university on the other side of the country.

Hugh drinks punch. It doesn’t seem to be affecting him, in terms of making it easier to be here, but his teeth have stopped bothering him. He tried to leave after Burton was stupid about Ivy Sage, but Newell looked at him and smiled, and he can’t leave Newell. Is that what Newell would say about Burton? But Hugh loves Newell.

The punch might be getting to him after all. Obviously Newell loves Burton in some way, some awful Stockholm syndrome way. People are
the death of each other all the time. The funeral was this morning. He ought to be at the hospice, not that Mimi will miss him.

“I don’t have a lot of time for that Burton,” someone says, right behind him.

It takes Hugh a second to shift contexts: Ruth, here at Pink’s. She’s setting another tray of hors d’oeuvres on the table, making room, clearing up. Copper coat off, white blouse and black slacks. Server uniform. It kills him that she’s still working all these jobs.

“Are you getting paid for this?”

“I am, don’t fuss. Fifty for the evening, and Jerry Pink had it catered! Everything came from the Ace, all I have to do is set out and refresh.”

“If you’re going to be late, take tomorrow morning off,” Hugh says. He loves to give her days off. The morning gallery is so peaceful without her.

“No need! I’m out of here by ten, I told him that, it’s a school night and he has no business letting the party go long. Did you bring the certificates?”

“Took them to the school on Friday,” Hugh says. He needs and appreciates her nagging.

Ruth gives him a nod and sweeps up three scrap-littered platters. She marches off to the kitchen. Fifty bucks, for what, five hours? Okay. As long as it’s cash and she doesn’t have to declare it. But if Hugh knows Jerry Pink, he’ll have a school cheque for her with her SIN number on it. Anal asshole. That makes Hugh laugh to himself, ha. Can’t it be time to leave? He looks through the crowd for Burton’s mauvery, thinking Newell will be near.