Close to Hugh (17 page)

“Whatever eldritch thing any of that means, I will not sign over the building this morning.”

“I don’t like that woman. There’s something
off
about her.”

“Yes, there certainly is.” When Ruth’s prejudices agree with his own, Hugh doesn’t mind them. “I went in to check on Mimi this morning.”

“Aren’t you the early bird! And was she well?”

What’s the answer to that? He turns away, to make coffee and go back down. Concrete, cardboard, Mighton’s boxes are easier to deal with than his mother.

And he wants to text Ivy.

(DELLA)

Mimi’s piano                            she remembers I loved her

loved her playing Elly won’t wake

Ken not here to wake

Mimi’s note:
Chopin often saved me when I couldn’t cope
,

I hope he will you too
.

Schumann                            saves me when I cannot cope Satie, sometimes

I could finish a boat or twelve

stand looking at them blind cross-eyed double-visioned

deal with this today               go to his office;           see my lawyer ha ha ha

Jenny sitting there                            his assistant she must know must be arranging

makes blood run loose in my veins

she must know

he isn’t speaking to us                            to me

maybe she’s gone too maybe she needed a kidney

Ken too shy to say anything too noble

team building                            rappelling in Elora Gorge

and then—a sickening—

fall and they not telling me

but that is not it because he texted us

< I’m all right. I’ll let you know.

we I texted back                            we me there is

no we now

> all right

up, go, go

running water helps a little

shower hot as can be borne

hotter

3. I’VE GOT HUGH UNDER MY SKIN

Pearly early light wakes Ivy. She pats a hand on the bedside table for her phone. It’s 6:52.

Hugh. Hmm. The window is open, cool morning air. The top of the ladder no longer shows above the sill.

Text? Email? Nothing. Half-propped on the pillow, her chin feels uncomfortably doubled, but nobody can see. She hits refresh and a text appears. From him, from him.

< awake yet?

One eye shuts, to help her focus. She types with one finger,

> coffee?

< sorry, meeting, then doctor—lunch?

So Ivy goes down the back staircase (claustrophobic doors at the top and bottom) to the empty kitchen. Not entirely empty. Ann stands by the back door holding a cup of hot water with lemon. Honestly. But the smell is not lemon—putting on her glasses, Ivy sees that Ann holds an uncapped Sharpie; now she’s writing something on the door in a cramped hand. Letters too small to read from this distance.

Hoo-boy, Ivy thinks. Everywhere. I wonder if I should try to get her some help?

Jason comes running down the back stairs, hair gelled up in a quiff, à la Tintin. He jumps the last two stairs and grabs a clean glass as he goes by the gaping dishwasher. “I had the weirdest dream, it had you in it,” he tells Ivy. “It was, like, a thriller, you know—starts with this truck going down an underground parking ramp—it’s full of water but the truck keeps on going, the guy drives really well, it’s, like, the beginning of a thriller movie.”

He yanks the fridge door open and pours juice, talking all the time. “Not Tom Cruise—more like Clive Owen, somebody like that. So that’s the credits, then there’s this strange shot where I’m—you know, the main
guy—is looking down into the water of the river, down by the water-steps.” Jason’s face tilts to look down onto the tiles. “Creatures, like otters, or, but with fanned tails, stare up at me—at, you know, the person who is watching them.”

Ann just keeps writing, so Ivy takes her cup to the dinette bench (built in, otherwise there’d be no place to sit in this hollowed-out house) to sit across from Jason, who plunges on: “Everybody starts getting sick, it’s an epidemic. An
underwater
plague, these, um, intelligent beavers give it to us—they have these—fantails, like mermen—I don’t know. This plague makes people insanely violent, they try to kill themselves and other people. To stop it, you have to hold them tight, like you’re doing the Heimlich manoeuvre on them, and you have to—to
love
them, to tell them over and over that you love them. Some people are better at this than others, right? But everyone has to do it, you have to love people or die—eaten or clawed to death.”

Ivy does not have to pretend to be interested.

“This one guy, the driver from the parking lot—hey, it must have been him who started all the infections, because he was underwater!—he’s really good at it, he’s the first to work out the loving technique. There’s this woman in a restaurant having a plague-fit—it was you! And he stops her. He holds the pressure point and loves her like mad, like crazy, with all his heart, and everybody else sees this happening and they copy it, and the woman he fixed helps too. A little baby is taken with the plague. The guy says, ‘Babies are easier’—he means easier to hold on to, to find the pressure point …”

“But they really are easier to love too,” Ivy says, loving Jason’s sudden volubility.

“I think it was Hugh in my dream. Weird. He was hanging on to an old wino for dear life, telling him I love you I love you I love you.”

Ann has been staring at her tiny printing. When Jason stops speaking she caps her Sharpie and says, “I think leather’s coming back. Mimi had a leather maxi, a Halston, with an asymetrical zipper. I’m going to take my leather coat in and have a skirt made.”

Ivy says, “That is a weird, good dream, Jason. I love dreams like that.” Because she’s trying not to like him too openly, with his clueless mother right there, the words come out patronizing or condescending, and Jason looks up, disappointed. For a minute, it seems, he thought she was somebody worth talking to. But she’s not.

Ivy ducks her head in shame. “I
love
— I get thriller dreams too. I love the
love-you
thing.” He’s embarrassed now, and she’s a doofus. She takes her cup and goes upstairs, checking her phone. No new text—but email, yes. Happiness rises.

But falls. It is from Jamie. Her squatter, her tenant, her burden. Flooded, what?

Dishwasher broken, water— two more frantic emails ping in while she reads. A cold knife of despair stabs her chest. She’s been living in a dream, in a clean empty room with enough money and a true love. Here is the real world.

Now a text, this time from Alex, shouting in caps:

> WATER TURNED OFF. FUCKING DISSASTER JAMIE UPSET. NOT COOL. DEAL WITH PRONTO.

Pronto. Perfect.

4. HUGH CAN’T IMAGINE

Gerald is back, flipping through prints. He shouldn’t be, it’s ten in the morning. He has a Saab dealership to run. Hugh watches as he straightens up and wanders through the two long rooms of the gallery, hands locked behind his back. Nosing close to some pieces, standing back from others—the connoisseur at work, determining value and possibly, God knows, cadence.

Della dives in the back door, straight to the espresso machine. “Want one?” she calls, before she realizes that there’s anyone else in the gallery. Her voice changes, major to minor. “Oh, hi—hi, Gerald. Do you … coffee?”

Gerald looks up, his eyes not focusing. “No,” he says. “No thanks, no.”

They regard him.

“No,” he says. “I’ve had my java for the day. I know my limit. Joe’s a good servant, but a bad master.” Dissociated, almost disembodied.

Della nods. Gerald nods. He turns and goes out the door. Back to work, perhaps.

She turns to look at Hugh, who shrugs. “Is that happening often?”

“Twice yesterday, Ruth says. First time this morning.”

The grinding noise, the coffee machine starting—Della races to put a cup under the spout for the self-clean cycle. “They were always so happy, it seemed to me. With their last-minute surprise. Maybe it was too much, physically. She was forty-eight when Toby was born.”

Mimi was twenty-eight when I was born, Hugh thinks. Pretending to be eighteen.

Della is still talking about Gerald’s wife, whose name Hugh has forgotten. “She was so good, so patient. I just don’t understand it.”

Hugh says, “Don’t have to understand it, because we are not responsible for Gerald. He’s not a friend of mine. I don’t want any more friends.” Any more grief.

Della comes back with an espresso in a glass. She raises it, to ask if he wants it.

He shakes his head. “He keeps coming to the gallery last thing in the evening.”

“Every day?”

“If he wants to buy art, as consolation, Hugh am I to say no?”

She is pulling out her phone, checking, blanking it again. She is always fucking doing that while you’re trying to talk … Hugh stops.

You can’t be angry, not with Della.

“I looked at my messages,” he says. He lies. “None from Ken.”

The phone rings. He stares at it. Ken? Well, he can leave another message.

But Della picks it up. “Argylle Gallery,” she says, in a professional way; too bad Ruth is not there to hear. Ruth is upstairs giving Hugh’s bathroom a serious clean, her mission for the morning. He fights with her about this, but the bathroom shines—he just deposits an extra cheque in her account. So far, he’s getting away with that.

Della hands him the phone. “Ann,” she whispers. “On the warpath.”

Must have figured out about him and Ivy, Hugh thinks, blushing. Into the phone, expansively, he says, “Hi, Ann!” Bracing himself.

Della rolls her eyes and ducks out the door, goodbye.

“You have to talk to him,” Ann says. He knows that hysterical note. Talk to Jack? Hugh’s insides twist at the thought. But that’s not it. “I went into Jason’s closet to find my leather coat, and there was a magazine. More than one, a stack of them, all—”

This is uncomfortable. “You know, that’s what teenage boys do. Look at magazines.”

“Hugh, you don’t—the degrading—you can’t
imagine
. Listen, listen to me—some of these are—I can’t tell you— I don’t know where he even got them, they’re old, they’re filthy. Ugh!
Playboy, Juggs
with two Gs,
Modern Man
 …”

“Really? I thought that one was—”

“Twelve issues, in plastic sleeves.”

“Well—” (Vintage. That figures. He’s a little surprised, in fact, that they are hetero mags. He had wondered which way Jason’s cat would jump.)

“It’s not, they’re not—the whole— How any boy, any
son
, can look at those disgusting images, those obscene, filthy, those—”

She’s going off the deep end, it seems to Hugh. “Ann, Ann, wait—they’re not that bad.”

“You don’t know. You can’t imagine.”

“Actually, I can.”

“My father—my
own father
— You
know
, Hugh, you know what this does to me. I have to— I can’t, I need you to talk to him. I need a man to talk to him.”

“Not this. I can’t do that. I’m not his dad, Ann.”

Her voice rises to a half-shriek. “And where is his fucking father?”

“Look, it’s just not something you can do to a teenaged boy, you can’t—”

“Hugh, you
can
. Please. Jason needs you,” she says.

“What am I supposed say to him?”

“Tell him that men—that loving, good men who love women don’t need those things, that they’re creepy and disgusting, that pornography is rape, is abuse, that the women in them are slaves to the patriarchy, that—” She stops herself.

He waits. She can’t keep silent for long.

“Are you saying no? You won’t?”

“I can’t. You can’t do that to him,” Hugh says. “It’s a delicate thing. It’s something private. You— I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t have been in his closet.”

“My coat!”

“You shouldn’t keep your coats in his closet. You’ve got lots of room in your own—” He stops, remembering that she’s moved out of the master bedroom.

“You and Della! You think you can come around here and tell me how to live, how to raise my child,” she says, a low, concentrated fury.

“No, not at all.”

“Hugh, I
need
you. I ask you to do this one, this one important thing for me. Because I don’t have anybody else. Because you used to love me.”

“You have to let him keep his dignity. He’s a teenaged—”

“You’re all treating me like an air-headed, panicky
mom
because, because I’ve been making a—making an authentic statement with the house. I’m not—”

He breathes away from the phone so she won’t hear him sighing.

“I can tell you, Hugh, there’s not much about porn that I don’t know, I know way more than you do about it, for one thing, and
I know
this stuff is bad for him.”

“Listen,” he says. “I know you want to do what’s right. I’m telling you, in this case you don’t—you can’t humiliate him this way. It’s just not fair.”

“Fuck you, and fuck Della too. Is she listening? Tell her that for me.”

Hearing the dial tone on her end, he hangs up.

Phew.

The bell tings on the door: Gerald, back? Hugh honestly can’t look at him again. No, Newell comes through the door, tinkling the bell again with a graceful swat above his head. “Coffee, need coffee—”

“That’s FairGrounds you’re looking for. Next door,” Hugh says.

“Need company. Need you.”

Ruth comes down the back staircase, always alert to Newell’s ins and outs. She gives him a big smile, but shows Hugh a stoplight hand. “You can’t. Hugh can’t, Newell! You have to see Conrad, Hugh.”

Fuck me, Hugh thinks. Please. Just hit me on the head again and let me rest.

“Coffee,” he says, and ushers Newell out. But he throws back to Ruth, because it is not fair to tease her, “Conrad is later, there’s time.”

He still has the last box of Mighton’s stuff to go through, too. This madhouse.

(L)

Jason’s mom texted him, < COME HOME.

Dunh-dunh-
dunhhh
.