Close to Hugh (11 page)

“This is none of I,”
she thinks. Then, yipes, hears herself saying it out loud.

I am short and eccentric, she says to herself interiorly: yes, old. But that’s no reason to squirm or shrink. Her carriage corrects and she enters the long hall feeling buoyed. Her boots help. Nice little lace-ups, just enough heel to give a person a boost.

The hall is crowded, full of kids writing and painting on the walls. No curse words or blatant nude parts, although from psychedelic-hued mayhem the odd cock-and-balls or parti-coloured breasts emerge, and Dinner Party–type vaginas. Ladders line the long corridor. Ivy is careful of aluminum legs, jutting higgledy-piggledy. Children of various sizes and ages swarm up and down, lithe and loud. A graffiti festival, or impressive mass disobedience?

Here’s the window to the drama lab. Bare fluorescent brilliance. There’s Newell’s head of burnished gold. Perfect. She takes a quick breath to feel air flood into her back, bobs her head like a horse accepting the bridle, and goes in.

Burton on the left, deep in conversation with drama head guy, Terry. Newell on the right, being swooned over by drama sub-head, Terry’s wife, also named Terry.
Terry & Terry
, they used to shout in the dressing room at the Equity Showcase Ivy did with them at Harbourfront in the earliest nineties.
TerryTown! Two-gether, Four-ever!
Not for actual ever,
though, turns out. They’ll be divorced by Christmas, if the paperwork goes through.

Ivy resolves, in the instant before truly entering the room, to have a great day. This skirt really is ideal for Mrs. Lovett. “I love it,” she says, as an affirmation.

“We love it too!” Burton cries in welcome. His punched eye is a putrid shape, a puffed, purple pear. Now he will have no choice but to look askance, so she won’t have to hate him for doing it for effect. “Dear Ivy—already in a garment! But you won’t get to work for quite some time yet,” he says, patting her arm.

Early this morning, lying peacefully awake in the solitary whiteness of her sloping room, Ivy resolved—strongly resolved—to be kinder. To treat everyone around her with respect, to find what good there is in people. So now she brings her gaze to bear on Burton’s puffball eye and thinks kindly and respectfully of Hugh popping in such a solid juggernaut of a punch. She gives Burton a wide, loving smile meant for Hugh and sits at the empty space mid-table, where a folder awaits her.

He-Terry explains the entrance chaos, condescending yet hiply enthusiastic. “Not an insurrection, ha ha. The front half of the school is being demolished next summer, so we’ve got a mural project on to paint it up. A fundraiser, of course.”

She-Terry: “Each and every student is participating, not just the art students, it’s truly,
truly
exciting. They’ve been tweeting the whole thing and the Facebook page has over eighty Likes, and we’ve got CTV coming on Friday to—” Burton’s tidy tamping on the table stops her. She sits, stage-whispering, “
My hobby horse!
” and lets the meeting begin.

Terry Mr. starts it off: agenda, schedule, tech details, pausing for questions from Burton. Terry Mrs. breaks in a couple of times to assert her authority over movement/voice/dance matters. She’s gained and lost a good deal of weight over the last few years, and Ivy thinks (finding the good) that she looks
just great
right now. Misery being the best diet. Even Ivy herself is on the downward slide these days, though technically, factually single. And soon to have her apartment all to herself.

As will Mrs. Terry, unless she keeps the house. Ivy’s seen their house. Leaded panes and a frothy, grownover English garden, which seems to be Terry’s obsession. What he probably calls his
passion
. No doubt Terry will insist on him moving out.

“Do you think?” Burton says, louder, as if he’s said it before. Is that a stink-eye he’s giving her, or just the swelling? Oh, he’s asked her a question. She’s got nothing—not the faintest tinge of an idea what they’ve been talking about. She looks sideways to Newell, but his eyes are downcast. Ah, he’s texting below the lip of the table.

Back to Burton. “Perfect,” she says, nodding, as if after quiet consideration.

That seems to do the trick. They ramble on, this teacher/artist session going till three, when the students will arrive for the first master class.

A very faint crease lines Newell’s cheek, barely deepening. The smallest of smiles curves his perfect mouth, and his fingers work again on the hidden phone.

Burton’s satisfied voice glides on, slippery cadences skating over the polished table. Ivy takes the cap off her highlighter, ticks items on her agenda, starts with well-acted dismay, and checks her bag. She lifts her hand in delicate supplication, and Burton pauses.

Slipping into the pause, almost mouthing it: “Sorry, I’ve left my—in the car—I’ll be—” She’s out the door. She has a gift for mobility, for sudden, courteous vanishings, refined over thirty years of rehearsals and calls and tech dresses and casting conferences.

Out, out, outside, out the side door with the bar on it. Although clearly marked ALARM WILL SOUND, she noticed kids going out this door last night. It opens in silence.

Her car, half a block down, is perfectly safe. Her phone (a mere excuse) is here in her bag. But she has nobody to call, nobody to text or dimple for.

Only Hugh. Dinner. That’s going to be a treat.

Patient, distressed eyes, the plane of his cheek, the open smile that seemed a little under-used. That punch! A gallery.
I don’t know much about art
. But she knows what she likes: she likes Hugh. If I had his number, I’d call, she thinks.

Deeper in her bag, his card.

ARGYLLE (and below, the same letters rearranged, spidery traces showing how)

GALLERY

She laughs as the phone rings.

“Hello?” A woman. Dang.

“May I speak to Hugh?”

“You may!”

Then nothing. What? “Um, is this … the gallery?”

“Oh! Yes,
Argylle Gallery
!” The woman sounds bothered, as if correcting a fault.

“May I speak to Hugh? to Mr., um, Argylle?” Ivy feels her cheeks heat, blushing. Once in high school she called a boy, got his Ukrainian grandmother instead, and couldn’t make herself understood. She is swept back to seventeen.

“To who? To Hugh?”

“Tu-wit, tu-woo!” Ivy says, idiotically. Swept back to seven, now, and Brownies.

A pause. “Hugh’s at the hospice,” the woman says, without reproach. “I could take a note?”

“Perfect. If you could say we’re still on for this evening, that would be— He said the Duck and Cover, but I can’t find it on Google.”

“Oh
hoo-hoo-hoo!
” the woman says, her laugh just like that. “
Hoo-hoo!
No no, that’s the Hooded Falcon, the pub over on George, by the river, but people here …”

“Oh! Right, I’ve seen that sign.”

The woman is still talking. “I could get him to give you a call when he gets back?”

“I’m afraid I’m working and I can’t … It’s all right, now I know it’s the, the Falcon, so if I—” Inside Burton will be coming to the boil. “Goodbye!”

The alarmed door will not open from the outside. Ivy has to go all the way down the block to the front door. But it is a lovely day for a walk. Even Pink, pouncing out of the office to show off the mural, can’t prick her mood’s balloon. She wards off a tiny teenager swinging around a long-legged ladder, and heads back into purgatory.

5. CALL HUGH LATER

The community league is sending flowers to Gerald Felker. That will fix it.

Ruth shows Hugh the sign-up roster for delivering dinners to Gerald, alone in his giant white house, his haunted three-car garage. Hugh says no, no thank you. Ruth writes both their names in several slots anyway.

Hugh can’t argue. He’s ten feet up the indoor aluminum ladder, adjusting the top rail for hanging
Dark Gates
, the new, very large, mixed-media collage that Ian Mighton sent dimensions for, and is bringing with him on the train. Mighton sells instantly; several people are on the list to be informed as soon as any piece comes in. It is—as much as anything can be—surefire; the commission will cover the gallery overhead till December, maybe January. But being collage, it needs a good light.

“Won’t be your turn for three weeks at least, the length of this list,” Ruth says.

“I’m not doing it. I hardly know the guy.”

“You can take him to the Duck if you don’t want to cook.”

So proud of her work. Busybody. And not finished with interfering: “You need to go to the doctor,” she says. “Your eyes are different sizes. Your pupils. I noticed.”

That’s a little alarming. From the cash desk Ruth looks at him. “Was it just that fall down the basement steps last night? That didn’t look too bad.”

Hugh grunts. Refusing, pettishly, to answer her. What she doesn’t know she can’t bug him about.

The phone rings.

“Oh! I forgot,” Ruth exclaims, not answering the phone. Hugh begins to climb down the shuddering ladder. “A lady called for you. English. She said she was meeting you at the Duck, she didn’t know where you meant.”

Inside his trembling, childish, ladder-descending belly, something delicious turns over, a beautiful fish in cool water, a sliver of light. “Not English. She’s an actor.”

He picks up the phone. “Argylle Gallery,” he says pointedly, taking this opportunity to demonstrate for Ruth how to answer a business call.

Not Ivy. It’s Newell.

Hugh’s heart clunks, missing a beat. For a minute he’d forgotten punching Burton.

“Hugh, listen—Lise Largely wants a meeting. You know I have an interest in Jasper’s place. She’s talking to the lawyer, trying to set up a deal for the whole building. Can you face it?” It’s like Newell not to refer to, or seem to recall, last night. His voice is clear and buoyant, with the usual electric charge running under his calm.

An interest in
probably means Newell owns most of it. “I can if you can,” Hugh says.

“That’s what I said to Jasper,” Newell says. “I can if Hugh can.”

“Today?

“Tomorrow, I think—Hendy will let us know when it’s set up. Why she’s so all-fired I don’t know; Hendy thinks she might have another real estate deal on the blocks.”

Surprised to know more than Newell and his fancy-pants lawyer, Hugh says, “She and Mighton broke up in July. She had to move out of his house, he’s coming here to sell it.”

“Wow. She’s been there for years. I’ll tell Hendy, might be useful. We like a lever.”

Hugh bats away Ruth’s sign-up sheet. She is poking it at him, miming an offer to write Newell’s name in. “He’s not doing it either!” Back to Newell: “Ruth’s got a roster for feeding Gerald Felker, the poor guy whose wife—you know. Look, when are you done at the school?”

“Five, today. They just get their toes wet.”

“Listen— Look—” He sounds like an idiot.

Newell waits. Some sensation of a laugh comes over the line.

“I have to come over and apologize to Burton,” Hugh says. He stares out the window at the cedar bed he fell into yesterday morning. His head hurts all over again, a troubling buzz behind the eyes. “I shouldn’t have hit him.”

“Good old Ansel. Can’t live with him, can’t kill him,” Newell says. As warm as if he’s standing beside Hugh, arm round his shoulder. “We’ll be home by six.”

As Hugh hangs up, the gallery door slaps shut.

Gerald.

He comes in, and drifts to the rack where the prints stand, ranged in sliding stacks. Flip, flip, flip, Hugh and Ruth hear. Pause, flip. Pause. Flip, flip.

“I mean it.” Ruth pins Hugh’s eye. Getting her
piece of my mind
voice on. “You need to let Conrad Frey have a look at you.” Their doctor is South African, an Everest climber, a crazy man. Hugh avoids him like the plague he might prevent; only sees him out running late at night, in a trance of bliss, with a strange, lolloping, low-knee gait. He actually wears blinkers when he runs, that can’t be safe. And earphones. After midnight he pads by on the rainy sidewalk below the gallery, a regular tramp-slamp-shuffle of expensive shoes with ten individual toes, running for the river path as if pursued by a slow bear. The bear of age and infirmity and, let’s name it, death.

“Death?” Gerald’s head rises, slow as the moon, above the rack of prints.

Hugh goes back, horrified, over his thoughts—did he say that out loud?

Gerald nods, head dipping, taking great effort to frame the words. “D— Deeth?
Wounded Child
, there was a print here, by Deeth—do you have any more of his?”

“Hers, actually, Ingrid Deeth, local artist,” Hugh says, swinging around the counter to help Gerald. In any way he can. “Large format photo, her take on Hugo Simberg’s
The Wounded Angel
. We might be able to order a giclée print of the original.…”

“I’m making an appointment for you,” Ruth says quietly as Hugh goes by.

He waves a hand at her and gestures Gerald back into the print stacks. To talk about Ingrid Deeth, okay, but not, not about death.

6. ASK ME NO QUESTIONS, I’LL TELL HUGH NO LIES

Hugh looks up at the door-slap: Elle—L and Jason. Semi-drowned, happy.

L pulls a paper out of an inner pocket, unfolds it on the counter and smooths it out, talking all the time to Jason. “They were like, yeah, we’re going to paint the mural in our own blood, and I was
seriously
, people—good thing they’re pulling that wall down.”

“Never have that problem in Fashion,” Jason says. “We are mostly not organic, and hardly ever conceptual.” He goes from piece to piece around the shelves, examining the ceramics gravely.

“From my mom,” L says to Hugh. Della’s mockup for the flyer. “She says if you check the text she’ll get the real one done tonight.”

Okay. Hugh takes it to the window to cast an eye over it, listening to their commentary on the master class. Burton’s eccentricities make them laugh, that’s a relief. The flyer’s type size is small—too small? His eyes don’t want to focus. His head hurts. No Advil left.