Close to Hugh (21 page)

Placate her: “Love your dress! Fab! Is it vintage?”

In the mirror, Ann assesses her pink/orange paisley. “It was Mimi’s, Hugh’s mother’s. But she said it looked better on me. She said I ought to have it. When Hugh and I were lovers.” Her voice is aerated, barely audible. Or maybe Ivy just doesn’t want to hear about her being Hugh’s
lover
, stupid seventies
Joy of Sex
-type word. Like calling a girlfriend your
lady
.

“Mimi had rooms full of clothes. The school borrowed some for a show last year, so I’m getting them back. Hugh doesn’t know what’s valuable.” Ann shakes her head, the too-big wig slipping on her narrow head, a beat behind. “I found these … ugh, these
magazines
.”

She seems honestly distressed, unlike with the whole epigram-writing feminist indignation thing, which felt kind of fake. Askew, the wig makes her look sad. She stares at Ivy in the mirror. “I can’t talk about it.”

Ivy can’t get past her to go into the costume room. “No—perfect. I’m bad with secrets.”

“Hugh wouldn’t help
me
,” Ann says. Askew, the wig makes her look
sad. “But I’ll help him. I’ll clean out Mimi’s closets. Lise wants her apartment by the first. He’ll need an army to get that done.”

Not knowing what any of this is about, Ivy decides, in a clean-souled burst of decency, that it is none of her business unless Hugh tells her himself.

Then Della comes clattering down the stairs, a breath of fresh wind, some good sense. “Betty says it’s all right,” she calls. “Oh, hi, Ivy! Are you helping with the sale?”

Ivy is quite relieved to see her. “Burton wanted me to find some stuff for class.”

Della is already busy with the keys. “What are you looking for?”

“Boudoir stuff, I gathered. Burton said fifties shoes, nightwear …”

Della opens the big sliding doors. Inside—lights clicking on as a powdery scent floats out—is an Ali Baba cave of clothes. Shelves and racks stretching into the distance. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than looking at feminine trappings. Net gloves, feathered hats; purses and parasols; shoes of every era. White go-go boots, gorgeous chunky heels.

“Out of period,” Ivy sighs. Back on the shelf.

Ann takes the boots down again. “I think these were Mimi’s.”

Ivy asks Della, “Pearls, powder puffs, peignoirs—where will I find the Ps?”

“Hugh’s mother had a peignoir and negligée set we loved,” Della says, moving down a packed aisle. “Powder blue with ecru lace. Newell wore one and I wore the other, to be twins. She never minded us dressing up. Mimi loved, loved clothes. She knew everybody, all the designers, and she had such lovely things.”

An aisle away, clicking through hangers, Ann says, “I was thinking about that leather Halston skirt with the assymetrical zipper—and remember the Afghani velvet patchwork dress with little mirrors all over it?”

Della sketches it in the air, tiny bodice, flowing arms. “And she smelled so good.”

“Here’s that long purple Halston!” Ann cries. “I forgot that one. It’s disgraceful that Betty didn’t get these back to us. The clothes are all we’ve got left of Mimi now—but her career lives on, I got nowhere with the
Ontario Living
editors until I mentioned her.”

“Did she work?” Ivy asks.

Della laughs. “Constantly! However sad or sick she was, she hardly ever stopped working. She was an actress first, and a pop/op artist; she spent a couple of months at the Factory, you know the kind of thing. Long, shiny hair like Millie the Model. Crossed with Edie Sedgwick. She sang a little too. In the seventies she was a television interviewer, a star more than a journalist—you’d know her, of course you would: Mimi Hayden.”

“Oh,
her
! I was thinking Argylle—of course I do. Micro-mini, white boots, white lipstick—I remember her on TV, down at city hall, demonstrating how to smoke a joint. And being a pretty witch on
Mr. Dressup
.”

“Damage control after that joint-smoking thing, I bet. She did
Sesame Street
too. She was the young exciting one on the afternoon show, and she still acted sometimes. She dated Trudeau; she was pals with Glenn Gould before he died—he helped her buy her piano. When she was working she’d take us to shows or into the city to go to the Ex—I can’t believe they let us go with her! She drove like a bat out of hell, in a little yellow Karmann Ghia, smoking all the time.” Della sounds happy, remembering. “In between the crazy she was so great—funny and sweet. She sprung herself from whatever clinic and came to Ruth’s one night, and made us stay up to watch the moon landing. She said we’d have to tell our grandchildren about the first moment humans escaped from Earth, she couldn’t let us miss it. Ruth made Jiffy Pop popcorn on the stove.”

Ivy laughs. “That silver flower-bulb, bloating and blooming!”

“We were happy.” Ann is referring to a completely different
we
. “Hugh and I. It was a good time. I sometimes wonder,” she tells Della, wide eyes fixed on her, “if Hugh and I should get back together.”

After one quick glance at Ivy’s face (which is as perfectly vacant as she can contrive), Della rushes on, “Hey, I promised to go see Mimi today—I’d better get going.”

Unable to be left alone with Ann, Ivy says, “Yipes, I’m late—” And in fact, it is three.

She stuffs white marabou mules beside the negligée in her bag, and runs.

10. MASTER CLASS: DESIRE

Burton’s wearing a cape. Following along the hall, Ivy swings her eyes away from his sway-skirted figure. Since she has to laugh, she stops, hand over mouth—never let Burton see you laughing at him—and gives her eyes the great refresher of the whole hot mess of the mural: student angstlove slathered on concrete block wall.

Newell arrives beside her. Does Newell really see Burton? Or is he all angstlove for his old pal, old mentor, old ruination? He is quietly laughing. “We’re in Capetown tonight, my darling Mrs. Lovett—and I think you may find yourself Mitch-ing
mallecho
after all.”

Ivy’s eyes lift.
Twelfth Night?

His smile is famous because it is beautiful. “It’s got a bee in its bonnet.”

So all that work on Mrs. Lovett’s scenes was wasted. Oh well. Four thousand dollars, her innermost mind murmurs, again. They follow on.

“I’ve given this a great deal of thought,” Burton says, to the assembled masses: twelve students and Terry and Terry. “
Sweeney
is a wonderful opus, Mr. Sondheim’s wondrously complex score—its energy, razor wit, and of course the psychological insight. But I think that for this group,
this
cast—for
this
process—another script is needed. I have spent hours in thought, and I emerge, butterfly-like—” (here Burton swings his cape-wings open) “with the conviction that it is Williams we wequire.”

Ivy shakes her head, not letting herself laugh, and Burton glares. She nods earnestly.

He continues:
“Streetcar.”

Then stops, for a considerable time. Nobody moves.

“No more discussion!” (As if there’d been any.) “I don’t want us to over-think this, but plunge right in. We’ll read scene after scene, as I call them out, and see what pearls emerge.”

Burton hands his stack of scripts to Terry, who splits them with Terry, and they dole out the stapled sheets, as per the names scrawled on the top
page in Burton’s purplest pen. Burton, meanwhile, drapes stockings and filmy silks and slippers along the centre of the table.

Ivy is for a moment overtaken with real joy to be here, witnessing this nonsense. Even in this world of death and pain, we can still sit in a room and connive together to make nonsensical, joyous swipes at something approaching art, with a bunch of students, and somehow,
somehow
—don’t leave this out—get paid for it!

Burton orders them into place at the long table so they will be able to look into each other’s eyes during the readings: Newell halfway down the table on one side; Ivy on the other, with Savaya on her right. Beside Newell, Orion.

As they all look through their scripts (in the Mitch—Stella scene, as Newell predicted, Ivy’s name is purpled in beside Mitch) Burton gives a précis of the reading ethos.

“Of course we ask for commitment and energy during the reading. We are testing to see what will come once we are on our feet … And yes,” he adds, now that they’ve all registered who they are reading. “Yes, you’ll see—there’s a bend in it.”

Terry and Terry don’t have scripts. None of the students say anything, although Orion does glance quickly up, across the table to Savaya.

Interesting, Ivy finds, to watch Orion’s body slightly adjusting, relaxing—conforming—to, which? Blanche or Stella? He melts a little more, lolls slightly in his chair, smiles a secret, pregnant smile. Stella. Anyway, only Newell could do Blanche. There are other pairings: down at the end of the table giggles break out, kids elbowing other kids and pointing silently to the scripts. Burton stops all that.

“We ask you”—his eye is ferocious—“to take this reading seriously, to honour the text. Cast as a murderous barber, or a woman who cooks people into pie, you would throw yourself into that. Do the same here, even if you find yourself playing against gender.”

They read. Burton ignores the tittery end of the table and starts with the beginning of the play, Newell—Blanche coming to find Stella—Orion in the tenement on a street called Elysian Fields. It works, weirdly. Orion is tender; Savaya, six feet tall, broad and flat across the shoulders, is a lovely, taut Stanley. They know each other well enough, Ivy sees, to construct (in the ghostly architecture of rehearsal) an entire marriage, a web of compliance and adjustments, a contract between them of strength and sex. But in comes trouble: Newell, with a lightly raised eyebrow,
questioning the quality of everything, seeming at first as pure and clean as a bar of fine milled soap.

STELLA:
He smashed all the lightbulbs with the heel of my slipper.

BLANCHE:
And you let him? Didn’t run, didn’t scream?

STELLA:
Actually, I was sort of thrilled by it.

Orion’s sturdy enough to do this, to stand up against the older sister, have an opinion of his own; he’s soft enough to still, always, love Blanche. And interestingly, he captures that mysterious superiority that Stella has: the power of knowing that her lover loves her.
He’s not just a pretty face
, Ivy finds her mind saying, in just those old-fashioned words.

But it’s hard to watch Newell.

Ivy is familiar with that difficulty. The way the eye slides off those who are damaged. She could never watch Michael Jackson either. Or—who else—Lindsay Lohan, combusting; Judy Garland, Marilyn. People who have been broken in public, who are suffering badly, right out in the open. Even the camera’s eye seems to glide away.

Now it’s Ivy’s turn: Mitch meeting Blanche. It’s horrible. The hope, the possibility of love, and knowing how it will be dashed, like babies’ heads are dashed against the pavement in the Psalms. Men she’s known flood through her working mind, fragments of how they spoke or moved that might be useful. Kind plumbers, serious car mechanics, those who help, who are kind. As Mitch ought to be, can be, until that last scene where he has to attack. She herself is Mitch-like—and there’s something else in the character, something a bit like Hugh.

Once they’re talking to each other, she can look at Newell. Then he gives himself to her. He’s a genius, he’s an angel to work with, and here’s his secret: he knows that you know he’s ruined, and he trusts you enough to let you in. He breaks her heart.

They stop, they take a merciful break.

It’s absurd, of course, for Burton to have done this, but Ivy can’t be sad. Painful, remarkable, to watch the play being made true once again, twisted (or untwisted?) to serve Burton’s ends—it’s good. Can’t do these students any harm to listen to this, she thinks.

Burton thinks so too. He’s the Serious Artist, all furrowed brow and deep thought.

“It’s so
human
. Wonderful. That was
wonderful
,” he says to Orion, as the students disperse to get drinks from the table at the back. Orion blushes. He’s very young.

The Terrys don’t seem to agree with the
wonderful
. He-Terry stares at the table, maybe bracing himself to object; Her-Terry approaches Burton, clipboard loaded with sponsors’ phone numbers: “We do have a responsibility toward those who have so generously—”

Burton forestalls her: “I know, I tossed and turned all night last night. I have great purple circles under my eyes, as do you, dear Terry. Perhaps you too were plagued by the idea that something—something vital—was missing from the master class. But here I believe we have one solution. Perhaps not the
only
 …” By now, Him-Terry has worked up the courage to join his wife, and Burton folds him into the conversation, waving aside a weak mention of rights negotiations. “Let us fulfill this process—just for today—and see whether it is conceivable that something important may be discovered here—you see, Terry,
It Gets Better
.”

Inside her cheek, Ivy laughs at how shamelessly sensible Burton is: twisting the internet campaign meant to console gay teens to his very practical end. Even Terry cannot fight the power of YouTube. Neither can Terry. They confer over folders, darting glances back to the table, more united against Burton than they have been for years. So a little good has been done, Ivy supposes.

Savaya, returning with a bright pink can of cream soda, bursts in with a paean to Dan Savage’s genius and his husband and son, his suffering, and
how many people’s lives
are being saved by the project to
stamp out bullying
.

Savaya’s eyes are sparkling clean, her mouth full of clean sparkling teeth, enthusiasm and animal spirit undamped, unmuffled. Ivy wonders if in fact she might be a “Polack,” like Stanley Kowalski. Ivy asks, “What does Savaya mean? Is it a name from your heritage?” (How convolutedly we’ve learned to ask that question!)