Close to Hugh (33 page)

Stewart heads through the arch to the powder room, and Ann turns back.

“Hi,” Ivy says, feeling like a thief, suitcase in hand.

But Ann gives her a sparkling smile. “I hope you’re not moving out,” she says. Then, in a confiding rush: “I used to live with Hugh, did he tell you? I mean, you know how you always think you could go back—you know, maybe you
should
go back?”

Oh, Ivy knows. Seeing Alex at her place yesterday, for a moment it seemed like she never got away, or was doomed to go back to him. And he’s not even a decent, loving, sane-hearted person like Hugh. She sets her case down to rest her arm.

“It was Hallowe’en last year. When Jack told me he wanted out. He left at Christmas.” Ann’s cool blue eyes fill—overfill, spill over—and one corner of her mouth flutters. But she catches herself, as the photographer breezes back from the washroom.

Stewart is too cool to talk to Ivy, but he bends this one time. “We’re doing a feature on Ann and her stunning style. This house, a living statement of her art philosophy. The influence, the legacy of Mimi Hayden, with a TV tie-in. Charlaine and a guy from Farrow & Ball are going to discuss the paint techniques Ann utilizes in her design meditations.”

So Sharpie + rage is a paint technique now?

Up the middle of the living room floor along one plank, toward the fireplace:

Behind almost every woman you ever heard of stands a man who let her down. Naomi Bliven

“The betrayal.” Waving her arm to include the boots, the psychedelia, the pink-slashing gloves, Ann elucidates her aesthetic philosophy to Stewart, though she talks to Ivy. “Mimi wouldn’t have suffered so much if Hugh’s father hadn’t deserted her. Hugh would say so too.”

Ivy doubts that Hugh would say anything at all about that. Does he even know Ann has all this stuff? At the end of the Bliven, the eye runs
on to a new one, picked out along the edge of the mantelpiece under the go-go boots:

These boots are made for walking. Nancy Sinatra

Only it was Ann’s husband who did the walking.

“I’ll let you get back to it,” Ivy says.

Outside the front doorway a black noose dangles from the overhanging roof. Perfect. Hallowe’en tonight. It’s got a tag on it:

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves. Zelda Fitzgerald

(L)

Jason is in L’s bedroom—sleeping/not sleeping, lying on the trundle bed left over from childhood that rolls out from under her bed.

“I don’t understand your mother,” L says.

A foot below her, Jason says, “How the fuck is that any different from Nevaeh saying, ‘What is
wrong
with your
family?’ ”

Fair enough, mothers are not fair game. It’s early morning still, too early for Jason’s mom to come looking for him. L’s mom won’t hear them, she sleeps with earplugs in, and L’s dad—wherever he slept—let’s not think about him, okay? She jumps up in her white pyjamas and pushes the little bed back, forcing Jason to roll out or be trundled under.

She clears the floor of clothes with a few kicks and bows to him, hands together. They do karate kata, running through
pinan sono ni
and
pinan sono go
, which mesh really well, bodies almost colliding but not quite, a punch and a dodge, a block meeting no resistance, kick kick kick in sequence, the lovely twist-footed one. Once, twice to rehearse, then L yells
ki-yai!
and they go for it, as fast as they can.

Then again! It is the best. They should never have quit karate. They wouldn’t have, even, but their good sempai left and the other guy was lame. Jason starts the
Mulan
training song, and L joins him, both as muscled as all get out,
chizuko mae geri-
ing to beat the band:

Be a man!

We must be swift as the coursing river

Be a man!

With all the force of a great typhoon

Be a man!

With all the strength of a raging fire

Orion, climbing in the window, sings too—what’s he here for? More trouble, probably. He has the loudest voice and easily powers over them:

Mysterious as

the dark side of Jason’s ass

3. CRY AND THE WORLD CRIES WITH HUGH

Ruth is waiting at Mimi’s door when Hugh arrives. A bit anxious. “I didn’t want to leave till you came,” she says. “But I thought you people might of made a late night of it.”

He gives her head a tousle. “Not late at all, I fell straight to sleep, too many knocks on the head and too much beer,” he says. Neglecting to mention waking or half-waking, making the love of his life.

Ruth shakes her head. “She’s a very nice person, that Ivy. I took quite the shine to her. You’re a lucky man, even with all that has been happening lately.”

Hugh switches places with Ruth, takes the inside and moves her to the outside. “You need your sleep too,” he says. “What will I do if you—” (sounds like he’s going to say if she dies) “if you don’t take care of yourself? Take today off, okay?”

Ruth bridles, then buckles. “Well, I’ll trot off home and take a nap. Friday afternoons I do Newell’s, and tomorrow Mighton wants me to do his place out good, for selling it. I’m pulling in cleaning jobs hand over fist.”

“Tell me you haven’t been here all night.”

“I ran over early, just to see how she’s getting on. Better, you might say—Conrad took her off that, whatever it was, that was causing the you-know.”

“So no more crazytown?”

“That’s no way to talk about your mother,” Ruth says. “But he says it will calm down.”

“Thank you, Ruth,” he says. Her woes can be fixed with a little cash, now and then. Hugh can do that. What is always holy: patience. The swallowing of selfishness, the gentle tapping of your teeth. He goes in.

The white roses Newell brought are browning along the outer petals. Hugh plucks the brown away.

Patience was his earliest lesson, even before fear and carefulness. Patience whenever his mother recited, as she does now, softly mumbling: “Sorry sorry sorry sorry, for everything I’ve done, I’ve left undone, sorry, sorry …” At a meal, one of the few, making supper
crash bang I’ll show you
, a boiled egg in a teacup, nothing in the fridge but Perrier and a mouldy loaf of Hollywood bread. Going to bed for days. Meanwhile, at Ruth’s, calm: macaroni and cheese, tomato soup, Ruth happy to talk to them when he and Newell and Della ran home from school for lunch. But Mimi needed him. Up all night, running down black streets singing—Hugh on the black streets too, chasing her while she sobbed/sang her woes, talking for her to the police. Or that ugly time with the building superintendent.

“Sorry sorry for you sorry I am sorry Hugh, for when you were alone or when I could not sorry—” Eyes blank, she breaks into counting to stave off panic. “One two three four five six seven nine ten eleven twelve, one two three four …” Ceaseless movement of her hands and feet beneath above the sheets, afraid to stop since stopping was cessation. God, do not let her cease. “Okay, all right, all right,” he says. He says it for hours. The darling one, almost counting right, getting lucid again after those long days of singing. No more crazytown. That’s what you think, Hugh thinks. Between Hugh and Mimi and the gatepost, she can always come up with more crazy.

There she lies.
It was not death, for I stood up, and all the dead lie down
. Emily Dickinson, clear-eyed introvert. If he was scribbling on the walls, he’d write that. Or that old Woody Allen thing,
Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?
How can he laugh, while his mother is unharnessing herself from the earth? How can he endure it without laughing.

A note on the bedside table: Conrad, saying he’ll be in at ten, can he meet Hugh there.
Pleased to meet Hugh, hope Hugh guess my name
. That will be about the new treatment plan, now that they’ve stopped the hallucinatory agent. Or it will be bad news. But there is no worse news, the news is already final. Now it is just the long unspooling of the last of her thread.

Mimi’s eyes open. The pupils move, searching, searching on the ceiling. Hugh makes himself move forward, puts his face in the path of her eyes. Nothing. He’s a ghost. The eyes close.
“Living with ghosts and empties
,” he sings to her. Words of others help you fill the silence of
dying rooms. When you can’t, when Hugh can’t bear it any longer. Maybe that’s why Ann is writing on the walls.

Nolie glides in, adjusts the drip, glides out. In a moment, false night falling, Mimi sleeps. He could go now. But someone’s at the door.

Ann, as if thinking conjured her. Another ghost. Almost panting, she must have run up the stairs. Anxious for Mimi? Affection floods him.

“Hugh! Mimi said I could—” Ann pauses, eyeing the crumpled body in the bed; she turns away. There are tears in her eyes, little sparklers. “I can’t take seeing her like this. I feel too much … I need her to sign a permission waiver, is she even capable anymore?”

Hugh studies Ann’s once-loved face. Hardly seems possible. “Permission?”

“I’m curating an exhibit, the TV guy needs the waiver signed. He’s waiting downstairs. You’ve got power of attorney, right?”

Hugh can’t possibly refuse. You can’t deny a ghost tribute. He signs the form Ann holds out. No need to read, it’s nothing that matters now. She takes it away without another word.

In the quiet he kisses Mimi’s sleeping eyes, the blank cheek, blank cheque.

Ghosts and empties. But here’s a full: Della is waiting for him on the street outside. She’s giving directions to some old homeless guy. Slipping him a ten, looking guilty about it.

“Shut up,” she tells Hugh. “I always used to give people food, refuse to give them money, because they’d just—but I got older. I know he’s going to drink it, but I can’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t.”

“Because he’s an addict. Because it’s bad for his health.”

“So’s sleeping outside when you’re seventy.”

She takes his arm, and they walk down the street, the way the homeless man went loping to his hidden rain-drenched home.

“He’s probably only sixty,” says Hugh.

“Living free and easy, the hobo way to happiness.”

“Free and freezy, under a bridge in constant rain.”

“Whereas Ken is—did I mention this? I think I did—living at Jenny’s.”

“You did mention that.”

Tears bead in her staring eyes, in the slanted corners. For fuck’s sake, is she imagining that Ken’s got something going on with Jenny, now? Honestly. Impatience rises sharply in him—that hamster-wheel mind of hers, obsessing, creating problems where none exist. She’s such an idiot.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Hugh says, stubbornly refusing to get all verklempt with her. “I’m making a very good dinner for you guys tomorrow night, I don’t want it spoiled. Della, really, come on. Give Ken some room to think, let him figure this out. You don’t want him to carry on in a life he hates.”

Della laughs, like a thin glaze of ice cracking.

“God, it’s still early. I’ve got to go back to the hospice at ten,” Hugh says. “Conrad wants to talk about Mimi.”

“I’ll do the gallery for you this morning—I’m sick of my boats, I was up all hours. I don’t know how my mom kept churning them out.”

He meets her hollow eyes, blue-bruised below, new threads of wrinkles stretched around them. Looks like she hasn’t slept for quite some time. “You’ll be too tired. I’ll just close for the day.”

But she shakes her head. “I said I’d meet Mighton there to help him hang his godforsaken masterpiece, and you don’t need to see that. Take Ivy to FairGrounds for a coffee.”

She’s back to her old generous self, sensible again. He kisses her head, where rain is pearling teardrops on her hair. Cry and the world cries with Hugh, it turns out.

(DELLA)

Hugh’s Ivy on the back porch at the gallery      tucked out of the rain

joy in the morning

he is   they are in love             very good

Ruth bustles to the basement   to bail buckets

Jasper a folded grasshopper     on the radiator

bones randomly arranged        coffee in his clutching hand

vodka by the lack of smell

Dad in the Barcalounger   in a daze, a doze

off to school through   turpentine rubble

my mother’s rags and palettes and brushes and boats and boats and and

a freshening wind

it might dry up for trick-or-treat

feed Elly drive her to party at eight  set alarm for that  do this  do that

maintain the household           die

even if my husband                  disdains me for a narrow face smooth hair

candy for tonight      Zellers half price

Mighton blows in               giant piece—too big—Newell will buy it