Close to Hugh (23 page)

Plates, wineglasses, pouring, nobody’s paying attention to Hugh and Ivy. Newell clicks on music and Burton pulls another cork; one bottle is never enough. “Let’s not,” Burton says, “let’s
not
have salad. Let’s pig ourselves on pure pizza, oozing cheese, everything bad!”

The gas fire springs to light. On a cold October night, sitting with Ivy at the fireplace end of the long couch, death is held in abeyance.

Newell eats like he does everything, with detached joy. Burton with gluttonous dispatch, ferocious bad teeth chomping once, twice, per piece, wine to wash it down, between spates of blather on why “we must remain
flexible
” with the master class.

“Tomorrow, we start
Spring Awakening
,” Ivy tells Hugh, between neat small-toothed bites. “Plenty flexible. They’ll love it.”

Newell lies on the rug, head propped vertical, eyes closed, long and flat. His glamour does not ever shut off, but sometimes, like a tiger, is asleep.

“But what about scripts?” Hugh asks.

“Get them couriered from Toronto,” Newell says, eyes closed. Having had money for a long time, solutions occur to him.

“I have to run in tomorrow morning,” Ivy says. “I have a—a thing—” She drinks, as if wishing she hadn’t brought that up. They wait. “My apartment. The dishwasher broke.”

“Is that lunatic youth still occupying your apartment?”

Lunatic youth?

Burton’s face goes avid when there’s something painful in the air. “Yes, yes, I recall him: Jamie, the boyfriend’s brother. I suppose you can hardly kick the poor fellow out.”

Boyfriend? You know nothing about her, her circumstances—

Hugh turns to take Ivy’s plate and his own to the kitchen, and catches her looking up at him, her face frightened. Frightened! That cures his foolish jealousy. No need to know more than he knows: that against all probability or expectation, somehow she is his. He gives her back look for look, as open-hearted as an out-of-practice, fiftyish man can be.

He calls back, to derail Burton, “What will you do if
Spring Awakening
doesn’t fly?”

That makes Burton pettish. “Don’t be ridiculous, Hugh—
Angels in America
, maybe. Melodrama, but still tediously topical. Or Orton.
Ruffian on the Stair
, remember, Boy?”

Newell laughs. “Try getting that one past Pink.”

“Oh!”
Burton shrieks, suddenly furious. “You never let me do what
I
want to do.”

Newell won’t take that. “Jesus, Ansel, why not go straight to
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom?
None of it has any relevance to kids from Peterborough. Stick with
Spring Awakening
—it’s the only good play you’ve got up your sleeve that you could possibly get away with in high school.”

“They know nothing! Terry! And
Terry!
And that Pink person.” Burton scrambles up, last piece of pizza still in hand, his plump body trembling. His face has gone a strange, bad colour. He sweeps half the
scripts off the table with the empty hand, the other half with the pizza hand, red sauce staining white pages.

Ivy goes still. Hugh says, trying to manufacture calm, “Burton, you’ll get run out of town on a rail if you try to force the gay thing.”

Wait, that won’t help. But it deflects attention: Burton turns on Hugh, staring, the red bloom rising again in his cheeks.
“Hugh!”
Or was that, probably it was
“You!”
All the scorn and disgust of a long life of constant betrayal. Like Mimi, when you went in this morning.

Everything hurts. Hugh closes his eyes and rubs them. What a headache he has got. It’s making him vague and stupid.

Burton laughs, or gloats at him: “I’ll tell Hugh one thing, I won’t be run out this time. Shall we tell them our secret, Boy?”

“Go ahead,” Newell says. His eyes have closed again, Hugh sees. His own eyes open inside the safe cage of his hands.

Burton stands towering squatly over Newell’s full-length body, like a lion hunter, tears in his eyes. “You tell them
, you
tell Hugh,” he orders, and Newell’s eyes open, to stare up at the far-distant ceiling.

“We’re engaged,” he says. “Congratulate me.”

Ivy doesn’t like this development—she hates Burton’s dramatics. But it’s obviously worse for Hugh. He’s stone-still, doesn’t speak. Is it a complete surprise? Looks like it, from his face. And from Newell’s empty eyes staring up at the fabulous wenge-wood ceiling, not looking at anyone at all. Happy times.

“Wow, fabulous,” she says, seeing no alternative. “When did that happen?”

“This very afternoon,” Burton says. Too simple to say he simpers. He’s watching Newell’s quiet face, Newell’s eyes that might be counting planks in the fancy ceiling. “We have discussed the possibility before, of course—of course we have, as one does, as
two do
—but we decided this afternoon.”

Must have been a doozy of a fight, Ivy thinks, whatever happened over that moment with Orion and the pop can.

“When the people who
are your life
are in need, you step up.” Newell says, looking at Hugh. Ivy’s insides clench, because who knows how Burton will take that?

She’s working up some platitude/lie about how great it is when two people who’ve known each other for a long time get together, when the doorbell rings. A noble bell, Zen temple with an overtone of pure, deep money.

“Shall I get that?” Ivy asks.

Hugh still hasn’t spoken. Nobody else speaks either. Ivy gets up.

Her moving shakes Hugh out of silence. He says, without any discernible difficulty, “I’m happy for you both. I’ll—” He balks a bit, there. “I’ll tell Mimi. She’ll be tickled pink.”

Pink
comes out just as Ivy opens the door, and there is Jerry Pink, in the flesh.

He pours through the giant wenge-wood doorway. “Newell! Ansel! Great to see you!” As if it’s been years.

Burton jerks away from the small tableau at the fireplace. His going frees Newell, who gets to his feet in one lithe cat-move, no gasping, no creaks. Ivy admires his strength, and his social grace. His kindness, too. Pink is a stuffed sausage in a bad suit coat, but Newell shows no disdain. He takes Pink’s hand, and as far as anyone would guess, a touch of Pink is just what this place needed.

Ivy leaves them to it, and goes to Hugh. “You okay?”

With Newell’s attention diverted, Hugh does not look good. “None of my business,” he says.

“Well, yes it is. Newell is your friend, you want him to be happy.”

Hugh nods.

The doorbell rings again. Pink is still standing there, and his hand goes out to open the door. A thing Newell doesn’t like: Ivy can see his affability erode.

It’s kids. Savaya first, and the angry girl, N-something, Never? They’ll be very good in
Spring Awakening
. It gives Ivy a bit of a lift to think of that.

Now Orion. When he walks into a room the air practically crackles, she thinks.

She is standing by the long black marble island. There’s a cheese-knife there, stubby and strong-looking. She tests the blade; then pockets it, and looks around for Hugh. It strikes her that it’s time to go. No good can come of all these whirling egos.

13. HUGH GOT TO HIDE YOUR LOVE AWAY

Hugh takes Ivy’s hand, which she has flung out to him like a small life preserver. Time to go.

“Okay,” he says. “I left the van at the Black Cat—I’ll walk you home.”

Jacket. Nothing else? His arms feel empty. Pizza, that’s what he was carrying. Okay. Hugh nods to Newell and they slide away, out the back door to the terrace and the long set of stairs running down to the street.

Newell follows, seeing them out into the rooftop wind in his shirtsleeves. He kisses Ivy and she heads down the stairs, going carefully on those pretty, silly shoes.

Hugh pauses for a moment at the brink, moon blinking through the charcoal drama of overwrought, fast-scudding clouds.

“How’s your mother?” Newell asks, clearly in no rush to go back inside.

Newell: his strength, his health, his glowing human-ness—and all the misery he carries with him. Hugh asks him, “How can the body die? Tell me. How can the person who is here not be here any longer? How is this—how can it be right, even be possible, that this has to happen?”

“I love her.” Newell’s voice is gentle, sweet, ordinary. “I’ll go over in the morning.”

“Okay,” Hugh says. He goes down that long, long flight of concrete steps to where Ivy waits.

They walk through misted streets, avenues, a vanished town, to Ann’s.

In the quiet, Ivy asks, “Are you upset?”

Hugh tests how he feels, probes down into his inmost heart. No answer there, just lava.

“What made you angry? Do you think gays shouldn’t marry?”

“No! They can marry the hell out of each other. It’s nothing like that. It’s just Burton.” Can’t tell Ivy the truth. What you think is the truth.

“I know he’s kind of hateable. But he’s fond of Newell.”

Right.

They walk, they walk.

You just don’t know. You don’t know, you don’t know, what is right, what would be best.
Not Burton
, that’s all Hugh can think. “I’ve known Newell for a long time. I don’t—Burton is not good for him. Newell’s my oldest friend, my Ruth-brother.”

“He loves you,” Ivy says. “What’s the bad part, besides that Burton’s an asshole and will be an expensive husband? Newell can afford it. And I don’t think, you know …” She proceeds a little carefully: “I don’t think Newell does anything he doesn’t want to do.”

Hugh thinks about that, or tries to. All he can see is Newell’s lost face, not helped, not saved. He can’t tell Ivy what he suspects—okay, never mind suspects. What he
knows
. Knew, when he was twelve. The knowledge of what Burton did all those years ago has been buried deep in his head for a long time. Hurts to think about, not allowed. And it is not simple. Burton and Newell have been together on and off for a thousand years, they have grown into each other by now, have worked out some complicated fucking agreement.

And who is he to say what Newell should think or do.

He kicks through a slump of leaves by the curb. He says, “How can I know anything about it?”

“No. Me neither.”

“Hard enough to know about myself.”

There’s a pause. Half a block of silence.

Ivy stops. “I can’t be with you.” She just comes out with it baldly. “In case you were wondering, which I thought you might be.”

“I know,” Hugh says. “I’m too damaged. And my mother is dying. Any day. When she does I’m going to be a mess. You don’t need any of this.”

Ivy laughs at him. “That’s not why!” she says. “All my
own
shit is why.”

“I am used to shit,” he says. “I can take it.”

“You can take it, but you can’t dish it out?”

He nods. He’s too upset to speak.

Ivy pulls at his arm. “You can cope with a mountain of whatever horrors, but I can’t?”

Hugh nods again.

“And your mother— I’m so sorry.” She takes his hand.

They go on walking. Their hands fit. The mist hanging over the streets has caused a compression of sound, a minor slapping echo of shoes on sidewalk.

Or wait, no—it’s somebody following them. Newell, again?

“Hey,” L calls, from behind.

Almost at Ann’s walk, they turn and wait for L to reach them.

“Hi,” she says, breathy from running. “Hi, hi, Ivy. I saw you at the costume room but I didn’t say hi then because we didn’t want to see Jason’s mom; she was on the warpath this afternoon—she went to see Pink, Hugh, about the—”

Hugh closes his eyes. “I know,” he says. “I should have said I’d talk to Jason.”

“Now he’s got to see Mr. Pink tomorrow, and the appointment is for
forty-five minutes
.”

“Where is Jason? Home?”

“I’m not sure—but there’s a party at Savaya’s tonight. We’ll all sleep over there. I’m not telling my mom about the, you know, the magazines. It’s not fair, please don’t tell her.”

“None of my business,” Hugh says. “But I bet Ann already has.”

“Oh shit, right, thanks.” L trots off into the fog.

Ivy hesitates. “I was going to ask you in, but I’m pretty sure there’s no coffee, or even a chair to sit on.”

Hugh is thinking how to answer that when the door opens.

Ann gleams in the hall light. Her sweater, her hair, perfect. The minimalist thing, she’s good at it. “Hey, you.” Is she angry? Or no, that’s
Hey, Hugh
. “I’ve been calling you. Don’t you ever answer the phone?”

“Usually Ruth gets it,” he says, conscious that this is weak-kneed.

He and Ivy move slowly up the walk to the porch stairs.

Ann laughs, sharp as teeth. “I wanted to tell you—Lise Largely says you’re clearing out Mimi’s place. It’s going to be a huge job, poor Hugh. I’m going to go through her clothes for you and decide what to give away and what to sell.”

He’s taken aback. “I don’t think I’ll—”

“Some of those things are valuable,” Ann says.

Something in her eyes warns Hugh to just agree. Something glassy, not blank but breakable. “Absolutely,” he says.