Close to Hugh (10 page)

Disturbed to catch himself eyeing Elle’s pretty legs, Hugh recedes into the dining room to study Della’s array. But glances through to the kitchen from time to time. Observing teenagers in the wild.

A girl slams through the back door and leaves it hanging, the screen door bangbanging behind her. The big girl, the blonde from the party last night. “Savaya!” Elle cries, clearing up that small puzzle. So the dark, thin one at the coffee shop is Ne-something, Naraya, Nivea … The blonde is headed for a fall if you ever saw one, and Hugh hates falling, in himself or others.

They chatter as they try things on, Jason pinning and snipping with a pair of lefty scissors. Hugh approves. Saves the fingers, saves the wrist; everyone should have a pair. He wonders when he became such an old maid.

Elle gives Savaya a pair of boots. “The boots you bought at Value Vill
azh
?!” Savaya shrieks, train-in-tunnel, but a melodic, feminine train.

“Too big,” Elle says, tragic. Savaya starts to put them on her bare feet. “Remember there’s that yucky yellow stuff in them that—oh.”

“What yellow stuff?” Savaya asks.

“The stuff that got all over my socks. Now it’s all over your feet, dude.”

“Oh
that
yellow stuff. How cute are these boots!” Hikes her skirt way up, showing shapely gams, then drops it in a series of frills and fillips. She cries, “Oh, see my skirt hoist itself up like that. How embarrassing!” and Elle shouts, à la Harry Belafonte: “
Hoist those skirts up a little higher!
” and they’re all singing “Jump in the Line.”

Flying back in a sleek black suit like Lucifer, or a very
duende
Puck, Orion demands their input: “Hey, in
Streetcar
, do you think Blanche is Tennessee? Or is Stanley him; is he trying to macho up and kill off the weak, crazy part of himself?”

Another girl dances at the door—Elle’s friend, Nev-what? Nevaeh. Sharp angles, soft skin, a sulky or unhappy look. She looks around the
unkempt kitchen, the dishes, the shoes on the counter, and as Elle kisses her she says, “What is
wrong
with your
family
?”

Elle, shocked upright, blanks for a minute, and then says, “We’re just … busy, I guess?”

Orion waltzes the girl away, saying, “Are you
judging
my
friend
, Nevaeh?”

Nevaeh’s laughing. She says, “No, no, that’s what my
father
—ugh, never mind!”

She has long hands, long feet that turn independently; she is a dancer, gravely graceful or giddily gawky, depending on the tempo of the moment. Hugh remembers her: grade eight Kiwanis Remembrance Day art project—Nevaeh ordered to take part by her father, heavy-faced, sombre, a renowned international academic. Hers was an interesting piece, cable typeface on white slips, a chunky blue-grey background, the text some complicated cipher that Nevaeh declined to decode. Second prize, maybe should have been first.

A waltz-dip finish, and Orion says, “Imagine the joy of having an artist mother.”

Jason hands her a blue feathered thing. “Hope.”

Nevaeh sighs and takes it away, plumage trailing behind her careful-stepping feet.

Tiring, youth. Hugh stares at Della’s boats instead. He leans in: yes, Savaya stands at the prow of this one, hip tilted, arms akimbo, almost a figurehead; behind her, sketchy, reaching men and girls. She’s a piece of work, all right. He searches the boats for other people he knows: there’s Ruth, crouched on the rocks above the tidemark, scrubbing a boat clean of barnacles. Some pictures are only roughed in, some beginning to take real shape. In one, an empty boat called
Beyond My Ken
has drifted away from shore.

Conversation comes from the kitchen in snatches as Jason shifts and pins his models, happy and at ease. Tucking up a shoulder seam on Nevaeh’s tight, seams-out bodice, stapling the neoprene, Jason says, “It’s just, Shakespeare is so overrated. I feel like he’s like the Beatles—it was, like, right place, right time.”

As if in answer, maybe continuing an earlier train of conversation, Orion says, “Bikes are like part of my soul. I have a weird romantic love affair with my bike. It’s crazy.”

Jason: “I wish I could ride a bike, but when I was little and I tried to ride bikes I got really frustrated and my dad said to quit.”

“It’s not all that hard—it’s just—you’ve just got to go for it.”

Gesturing with the scissors at Orion, set to trim the bottom edge of his glistening beetle-carapace vest, Jason asks, “But don’t you have to have a little bit of balance?”

“Well actually, I don’t know—I’ve just always known how. I don’t remember learning. It’s the one thing I know I can do brilliantly, no worries, you know.”

They are so serious. In his eavesdropper’s nest, Hugh finds himself on the verge of—what is this, crying? What is wrong with him?

He looks up and sees Della, just outside the screen door.

Her face is so sad. One finger scrapes the bottom of her eyes before she reaches for the handle. So it’s not just him. A rush of kindliness spills upward into his chest, his throat. Old Della. He calls to her across the kitchen, gesturing behind him to the long march of canvases
—“The water is freezing, and there aren’t enough boats!”

Elle doesn’t notice her mother, but that line from
Titanic
is a family joke, and she swirls herself into a figurehead, arms outstretched, calling to Jason, “I’m flying, Jack!”

Della has pulled the screen door open, red leaves of ivy framing her. Hugh sees her eyes close for a measurable beat, and open, and then she turns away before Elle sees her. Down the back steps and out of sight, crying too hard to come in to a teen-full kitchen.

Many things might be the matter. The funeral yesterday upset her. Or Ken—Hugh never did check the messages on the upstairs phone. Or maybe just that Elle is the pearl of Della’s heart, and will take all this happy bustling life wth her when she goes. Very soon.

Last week Della laughed about the pain, how unreasonable it is. “I
want
her to graduate, I want her to go! It’s the best thing in the world that she’s almost ready to leave.” At their regular table in FairGrounds, eyes welling then too. Cold morning sun lit the papery, welted skin around her eyes, small new lines above her mouth. Crying a lot these days.

The kids are going upstairs to look at shoes, but Elle comes to the dining room arch where Hugh still stands, abandoned.

She takes his empty cup. “Like my mom’s boats?”

“I think they’re the best work she’s done in years.”

“Me too. Is she any good, or anything?”

“Elle. You know she is.” It comes out tutelary. He makes a face, as if that will fix it.

Elle says “You know, it’s
L
, the letter L. Not
Elle
. I can hear the
Elle
in your voice, but you can’t seem to hear the
L
in mine.”

At this little note, this slight correction, Hugh feels more abashed than he has for a long time. He nods, doesn’t say “L,” but forms it with his mouth.

She grins, in both forgiveness and apology. “I’m still crabby this morning. Hey, I meant to say, that was a good punch you gave Newell’s old boyfriend last night.” So she saw that. “Orion liked it too. And Jason.”

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Hugh says. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Would you like to see the stuff I’m working on?”

That surprises him. “I’d be honoured,” he says.

She goes first down the basement stairs. Talking, although she’s got her fingers laced across her mouth. “I call it
The Island Republic
,” she says. “It’s just a set of—an atlas or—maps, or it’s just— Shit, I wish I hadn’t asked you …”

They stand at the bottom of the stairs. A sign directs him, under a decorated arrow:

THE ISLAND REPUBLIC OF L BELVILLE
DO NOT ENTER

“You can, though,” L says. Hugh reaches out to the light switch.

The large rec room is festooned, the whole space is occupied by paper, too insubstantial to fill it, exactly: lines strung in a maze, above head height, hung to varying depths with sheets of varying size. Many very small, some foolscap width but longer, a few much larger. Some strands of line are decked with tiny lights, but the room is bright enough to see the drawings, the—maps, L said.

It’s not a maze, exactly, but a shape.

Hugh stands still, looking at the whole thing, and then enters. He moves along the alleys between the paper. Every step makes them shake and move. Lines and colours sharpen, recede as he goes, even though he goes slow.

First: a series of large maps on tissuey translucent paper. Street maps?

Clean drawing on tracing paper, on onion skin or rice paper, sheets taped or sewn together to make larger sheets. Each of these eight or nine
has a title at the top, or a name, in indecipherable script. But as Hugh looks at the first he sees a house emerge and a face in the house—and a street on which the house unfolds, an exploded 3D diagram that has been subtly translated into Della’s face, the planes and angles he knows very well.

Then Ken’s.

Jason, and that one Ann? And Ruth.

This one: dark face, the paper dark, the ink silvery, the house a shadow, only one room truly visible above the eyes/the entrance to the house. An unmade bed.

He was afraid that was Newell, but here’s Newell now. His soul in his eyes, in the sad set of his mouth, glossy box hedge ringing his mansion round.

These are—Hugh feels a bit dizzy. These are strange. This is like—like the first time he watched an art video and saw the point of it. Filmy paper overlays the dark face (Nevaeh?) and Newell’s too. It’s almost transparent. Frail, weightless. Drifts upward in the small breeze of L moving into the maze behind him. This series ends. There is a gap, a blank space on the line where strange symbols have been drawn directly on the wall behind. Two columns, sketched literal meaning on the left, brush-stroke symbol on the right. Like a legend.

Second: the next pieces are small. Drawings, images on white space, unanchored. A girl’s body standing in water, her top half reflected, redoubled. He moves to the next one. A woman floating in clouds, palely outlined. Taupe and blue for the clouds, which are circular suggestions rather than conventional childish billows.

Then the sequence changes back to maps, or diagrams, interspersed with full-blown adventures, almost Bayeux Tapestry in their movement, people and events unrolling like a graphic novel on unwound scrolls. He is walking through a story, or a history.

“I like this—” (pointing to the circular, what, city walls? broken by gates) “repeated …”

“Yeah, it’s not wombs, just so you know. I’m not interested in wombs.”

“I didn’t suspect it.”

“Oh you know, I’m just— Or in feminism by itself. Or political— I don’t want to do the same— It seems so useless, even when I know it’s
not
, but I just can’t. I want to see inside people, people’s lives, and that’s small. I’m not doing the big, you know, I’m not, you know. Fighting Kony and
the Lord’s Resistance Army, stopping hate speech against LGBTQIA and you know, queers in general. Slutwalk. And veal—I don’t know. I hate porn and so on but I don’t mind porn-porn; I mean, I’m using nudes all the time, it’s just the bad stuff … which is everywhere.”

“These are—these are—” Hugh is in the centre of the maze, the map, the world, by now.

He stops talking. He turns in a slow circle, making the forest of sheets around him tremble. He doesn’t speak.

“You have to get out by, sorry, by crawling,” L says, after a while. “Hunker down.” She squats to knee height and walks that way out of the tangle. “I wish— I can’t, but if it was in a show or something, I’d try to make it all swoop upwards when you’ve gotten through to the centre, so it would kind of disappear. I’ve drawn a thing, a machine for how to do it, pulleys, so the pieces all get closer together as they go upward, like the world is whirling away from you in space, all getting smaller, getting smaller, small, small.”

Hugh stands there, silent and looking.

(DELLA)

all I have left undone

and the bank now                      how can I have                spent so much

on nothing on bills                      that I always                we will never

we own nothing

nothing to look forward to but this      for ever

my mother’s unsellable china                  my mother’s linens and chairs

everything she slaved over                  kept perfect for so long

                                          useless in the current crisis

I hate this house and everything in it

and Elly will leave and it will just be us

                  
Ken

            
not us

                  
me

the boats those barren vessels

nothing in my basement but

Elle’s eyes mind heart                            don’t look don’t look

                                                                    let her make her own work

                                                                                    keep doing mine

the basement will empty of her unwinding mind

and these children now not children

and I not myself again or now or ever

me                                                                                          Ken

4. I MASTER THE CLASS

Eerie. The smell of a school still has the power, the power of voodoo, to make Ivy feel like she’s got bad cramps and ugly clothes and no lunch money.

She got up early and dressed with care, but now—semi-costumed in a lantern-shaped black papercloth skirt (forty-eight bucks on eBay!) with a wide black belt, a shawl in her bag to bundle in when they start work—she sees the folly of herself in the double glass fire doors. Tiny squares of wire inside the glass divide her into a plump graph of old and hopeless.