Close to Hugh (26 page)

he does not have another wife in Toronto and four children

he is not with Jenny, he could not have kept that from me

he is in pain                                              distraught

—having a nervous breakdown—

in the middle of the night                           no matter who I am now

how I have failed in everything I’ve set my hand to he pulls me to him

to kiss my mouth and body                  no erasing that for him or me

he loves me                                        he is such a fool

—Echo Bay Road, left at the windmill—

here is a nice leafy road a quiet place to park

I’ll sit and listen to the birds

look there is Jenny driving in trim tidy car

trim tennis figure bending to the trunk

pulling out groceries a carton of Diet Dr Pepper

no one else drinks that

so there is where he is

Jenny armsful at the cottage door:

      Hey, I’m back! Lunch!

the snap the buckle of the screen such long brown hair, sweet-eyed face

a lovely person, intelligent, kind, on her way up in the law

axe in the head axeblade in the belly where it hurts the most

4. A BONE TO PICK WITH HUGH

Hugh comes to himself again ringing the bell at Newell’s big glass door. But the squat shadow strutting across to answer is not Newell. Of course not. Burton’s glass-blurred hand fumbles with the lock. His bruise reminds you to be kind—yellow now, a jaundiced eye.

“Hey, Burton!” Hugh says, fake cheer/light beer. “I’m looking for Newell.”

Of course. “Of course,” Burton says, drawing back to let Hugh in. His sourness may not be personal. The huge Paris clock on the kitchen wall says it’s nine, early for Burton. His robe is just the right rich purple to pop that yellow eye. (Wouldn’t it be nice to pop that eye again. Sick feeling of fist again on bruise.) To atone for internal loathing, Hugh attempts a smile.

Burton waits. He is a cat. Hugh: mouse or dog?

“I brought Mimi’s lease for him to pass along to Hendy,” Hugh says. Trying, he is trying, honestly. Head aches, pulses. “Is he out for a run? I could wait.”

“I am not quite sure …” Burton is careful with the words, “exactly where he is.”

“Oh.” Now what? “Mind if I—?” Hugh gestures toward the washroom.

“Be my guest,” Burton says. And then, “An espresso? I was just about to grind.”

Surprise. “Sure, thanks. Be right back.”

Huge apartment. High ceilings, all the surfaces hard. Shoes sound down the hall. Past the many pieces Hugh has sold Newell. There’s Mighton’s portrait, him as Hamlet—not as old as the entwined Newell/Della/Ann thing that Hugh remembers. Wherever that now is.

In the powder room pale glass reaches the zenith. Glass sink, glass tiles on floor and ceiling; like being inside an aquamarine. An
aquamarine submarine. He’s tired, elation deflated by Mimi’s sad condition. Yet she carries on. So you will have to too. Hugh will.

The flush is loud. He shuts the door to contain it; stands for a while in the hallway. The bookcase built into the end of the hall is full now. Burton’s books. Hugh looks along the shelf. Pulls out a—oh. Another. Yes. Well. Jason might find these interesting. Hugh is not disturbed by porn, whatever turns the crank. He doesn’t (does he?) despise Newell? No, he never could. But he shudders still, however blinkered, bigoted, wrong he is, imagining Burton’s crank. Trying to imagine what bond it is that he and Newell— Stop. You can’t.

Not your business
. How often you’ll have to say that. As, presumably, long years go by. In fact, Newell is lost to you. Lost to Hugh. Friendship will be impossible with Burton always here.

Burton is watching from the end of the hall. “Espresso, Americano?” Archness: “Or would you rather browse?”

Hugh puts down the last book. Stupidly quickly. “Coffee, yes. I’ve been visiting Mimi.” Playing the death card, to get out of feeling smutty. He follows Burton to the vast kitchen.

“Bali taught me the art of coffee,” Burton says, attending the copper-swathed machine. “
That
is the place to repair the soul. A tarot reader I consult in Ubud—and I very much subscribe to that sort of thing—warned me that the soil in Canada is too new. I need to root myself in ancient soil.”

Hugh takes the tiny, perfect espresso from Burton’s outstretched hand. He sips. Delicious. Anything he can like about Burton he’d better practise liking.

A wave of Burton’s plump palm at the papers and books lying on the black slate counter: “Remounting my one-man Swinburne show for the Edinburgh Fringe—refining my verses.”

“Much of a market for Swinburne?”

“Well, it wouldn’t play the
Edmonton
Fringe, no!” Burton laughs loudly, Newell not being there to keep him reined in. Vile teeth peep between flexible purplish lips; you don’t often see those teeth in the first world. He has an unsavoury habit of allowing his tongue to lie forward on the bottom teeth, his mouth slightly open. “But I have to make my own way in the world, unlike you, dear Hugh. No longer really employable, you know—the school only wants me because Newell is part of my package.”

Everything Burton says has a taint. Hugh takes a second sip of espresso.

“We have the privilege of perfect understanding,” Burton says.

(
We
, Burton and Hugh? Or Burton and Newell?)

“We have, we’ve
always
had, an open, mutually supportive relationship.”

(Ah. Burton and Newell.)

“And we’ve had our vicissitudes!” A modest
moue
of the mouth: “We won’t get married, in case you were worrying. That was a gesture, an emotional exchange. We have no need of marriage. You hate me, Hugh, and that’s all right because I mostly hate you too, but here’s the thing you don’t take into account: I really do love Boy. I always have. I always have. He and I are all in all to each other. Whoever may, from time to time, come between us.”

Hugh drains the cup, welcoming bitter distraction. He can’t answer this.

Burton stares at him, waiting. Then gives a bitter chuckle.

“You know,
Hugh
know, there’s really something very beautiful in the relationship of an older to a young man—stretching back into ancient history. A rootedness—a way of bringing the young forward into the world and introducing them—not only to the physical, don’t think I mean
only
that—to the whole life of the mind, of the soul and heart. A friendship more than ordinary, one that elevates the junior into the society to which he aspires. It is the basis for so much in art, so much in philosophy. Well, the Greeks!”

Hugh looks down into his cup. The dregs. He wants Newell to come home. Burton doesn’t spout this kind of shit with Newell in earshot.

“That boy—Orion—he is a very talented young man.”

Oh, that’s it. Burton is justifying himself, posturing against the long window that looks out over the river.

“A mentor.
You
know—better than I! Every young artist needs a mentor who recognizes talent, who sees the possibility in a young mind and heart and body, whose experience and vision grant the generosity to sponsor—”

Hugh can’t listen to any more. He pretends to drink from his empty cup, so he does not have to nod or disagree, or look at the purple dressing gown flapping over Burton’s grey old chest, satin clinging to each roll of pompous pitiable belly and butt.
Don’t hit him again
, some small voice sings, back behind Hugh’s ears. Which are ringing, slightly.

Burton giggles. “I know, some say polyamory is poly-agony! But I refuse pigeonholes. We are what we are, the world can go fuck itself.” His
yellow-ringed eye wanders, squints. Then zooms in, intense, on Hugh. “
I
lay no blame. I will permit none to be laid by you.”

Hugh puts the cup down on the black countertop, where a playscript lies open. Words leap to his eye:
I will kiss thy mouth.…

Burton sees him reading. “Orion is extraordinary, after all. That skin—”

“Don’t,” Hugh says. It comes out quite softly.

“Ah, you don’t like to think of it. Even when he is our dearest friend, we can never think of the older man kindly, objectively, in this day and age.”

How can Burton justify himself with this shameless self-serving bullshit?

“But I tell you, Hugh, no one comes into their full glory without a teacher, without being
initiated
into the mysteries. This whole dirty business—well, nobody pretends that it’s a nice way to live.”

He’s gone mad, Hugh thinks. Tears well up—hold on. You can’t cry here!

“
Show
business!” An Ethel Merman explosion. Then Burton sweetens, sentimentalizes. “I do understand, I
do
. Orion needs the guidance only an older man can give a younger. I think the good example of Newell’s and my continuing—what would you say?—partnership—attests to the value of that.”

Where’s the lease? Jacket pocket. “I’ll leave this,” Hugh says. “I can’t. Wait.”

Burton’s puckered neck purples. His age, his sheer old age! He cries after Hugh, “A most intricate, most important relationship—I am his rock, his centre.”

But Hugh is out the door.

The light is blinding again. It’s rained so long, Hugh can’t take in this much light.

Refracted by tears, the world is cellular, universe-huge, distorted. At the brink of the stone stairs he stalls, dizzy, trying to find the van. There, in the shade of the hedge. Okay, railing. Don’t fall, don’t fall, hold on.

He gets the van door open, and himself inside. Afraid of being sick, of dying of grief—honestly, honestly, stop. You are overreacting. Are you so bound by convention?

Oh no, no matter what the benefit, or whether Orion is old enough to make his own choices, no matter what—this is—this has to be— What is Burton, fifty years older?

Sit still.

The dizziness eases. The sickness. Newell’s
whole life
—no—it’s none of your business. Newell, Burton—it’s not up to you to dictate or judge other people’s lives. Orion, even.

Here comes Newell, up the long incline from the river. Loping the last leg of his long-reaching miles. Hugh sits motionless in shadow until Newell has passed, has leapt up the flight of stairs and moved behind the glossy hedgerow.

Then he starts the van.

5. I DON’T WANT TO LOSE HUGH NOW

Ivy dawdles along the riverbank with a coffee, waiting for Hugh, feeling the pressure of time. She’s got to head for Toronto by ten if she wants to get back in time for rehearsal.

The river is not in a hurry, it walks along beside her at the same pace, unruffled. Her unreliable memory sends up a clarinet note: a poem she did at a cabaret at I of O in the nineties, a fundraiser for the suicide hotline.

The calm, cool face of the river

asked me for a kiss
.

That’s it, the whole poem. Langston Hughes, “Suicide’s Note.” Then she had a long scene with—who? With Bruce what-was-his-name, the second of two Bruces in the show. He had to lift her down from a tree where she was going to hang herself, and he made heavy weather out of the lifting, the stupid old jerk with his tiny girlfiend. Never mind, she won’t have to work with Bruce again, because he died of blood poisoning from a sword wound, making a movie in Tunisia. Is it a consolation, being old, that one is safe from some old pain? And some old jerks, because they’ve moved out of this current vale of tears, into the next.

Thinking of old pains she watches a grey Ford Transit van come along the river side of the road, too close to the curb—hey! It clips a parking meter and the passenger-side mirror flips up into the air, a bright flash, and clangs on the metal arm of a bench facing the river. Ivy runs to pick it up. Pale letters on the unbroken glass:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
. She turns to wave the mirror at the driver: no seven years’ bad luck.

The van has stopped. Hugh gets out.

“Hey,” she says. “It’s you! It didn’t break!” Life zings through her
chest again, at the sight of his dear head, dear body—but then she sees that he’s upset. “Are you all right?”

“I can’t—” He stops walking, puts a hand over his eyes.

“Is it your headache? Too much exertion last night, climbing the ladder?”

“I’m all right, I just got dizzy.”

“Sit down,” she says, and he does, right there on the grass. “I was waiting for you,” she says. “I have to go to Toronto, some stupid stuff—how about I take you to the hospital first?”

He looks up, shading his eyes. “It’s the light. Not the hospital, but would you take me to the city? I can’t—I have to take some of L’s, a couple of drawings from her installation. I called my gallery friend and said I’d come in today, could you drop me there?”

“I’ll take you anywhere you like.” He’s worrying her a lot.

“Okay,” he says. He closes his eyes again, and presses the heels of his hands on his eye sockets to rest them. “Can we go now?” His voice urgent, anxious; his face hidden.

“My car’s at the gallery.”

“Can you drive the van? Do you drive stick?”

“Yes, yes, but do you have pills, or anything?”

He shakes his head once, stops. “I had a run-in with Burton and I’m—I don’t know how to deal with him, he was trying to tell me things I don’t want to know.”

Oh, Burton. That explains the wild driving. Burton must have been ranting about Newell and Orion.

Hugh pulls his hands down from his eyes. “Ivy,” he says, his voice entirely calm again. “You are making me so happy.”

She touches his head, his cheek, checking for fever.

(L)

Every shift she adds a little a little a little. Under the FairGrounds cash register L’s sketchbook hides another fragment of the
Republic
. Semi-contaminated now by the thought of her crazy father, roaming through there while she’s at work. Empty body feeling.