Close to Hugh (14 page)

At the corner of the river road, ahead, a silver shoe flashes a green gel glint.

The green rises into the still-green grass at the far gate, a path flagged, flared through the rhododendrons.

As if it might be chance, might be accident.

The mist of this strange planet is filling my head with such thoughts …

The loved one.

In secret. What is more intoxicating?

9. I.O.HUGH

The curio shop closes at six, but not the gallery—Tuesday is class night. Old Jasper drifts over, glass in hand, pie-eyed. He’s got someone in tow: Gerald, the widower.

The day has wound down. Hugh is cleaning up the back room before Della’s class.

“Here’s Hugh!” Jasper says.
“Yoo-hoo, You-Hugh!”
he sings. “Come eat with us at the Ace—
I. O. Hugh
, after all!”

“Hey, Jasper.” Then, hating himself for a wet blanket, Hugh asks, “Good day for curios?”

Wrong thing to say. Jasper’s face twists into a familiar knot. “Three people asked my advice about silver and decided not to sell or buy; one of them dropped a Sèvres box and neglected to mention the chip. A man pulled out a phone and bid on a Cattelin music box online, the very one I’d offered to get for him.” Then, pathetically, he turns that frown upside down: “But otherwise, wowzers! A large order for tchotchkes from a show-home designer, and the Byersville museum curator called me
sweet-cheeks
. And she’s a hard nut to crack.”

Gerald sits in the basket chair by the ceramics. He glistens, pearlized with grey sweat. Not okay, after his day back at the dealership. His wineglass is empty. He sets it carefully among the pots. Hugh does not have a single useful thing to say to him. All the time they’ve been acquainted, they’ve never spent ten minutes talking together before today.

He takes the wineglass and sets it on the cash desk. “Long day, Gerald?”

Gerald nods. “Sold a pre-loved to Lise Largely. A sympathy sale, but I’ll take it.”

“Can’t call it sympathy, from that fiend.” Jasper raises his glass in a toast, and settles on the bottom shelf of the magazine rack, folding his legs like an elderly cricket. “She wants my store, Hugh!”

“Okay,” says Hugh. “First, I only know her through Mighton, but she worries me. Wasn’t there some kind of scandal? And second, are realtors allowed to speculate? I thought there were rules.”

“Poor creature, she still has to make a living.” Jasper says with a hiccuping laugh. “But she can’t really realtor, real-itize, since she lost her licence—that’s why she wants the place, to open an allergy/aromatherapy clinic. Largely Allergy.” In case Hugh has missed it, Jasper waves his hands helpfully: “She can just rearrange the letters on your sign!”

Looking up, Gerald says, “Her sister’s a naturopath, the sister’s husband is a chiropractor, and Lise trained in flower essences. She told us all about it, she’s a pal of my—”

He stops, a cliff opening in front of him. “My—wife—” he says, and stops again.

They sit quietly, the room suddenly full of the dead.

“Come, Gerry. To the Ace!” Jasper says, stick legs jerking upright with false spryness. “I’m on your dinner roster, it’s my night.”

Della arrives for class as Gerald pulls himself out of the basket chair, and at the sight of him she gives an involuntary sighing cry. A warble, a
woe-is-me
. He smiles for her and processes carefully out with Jasper as the gallery fills with a parrot-flock of small children for the evening class.

Toby not among them.

How is Gerald supposed to live with this?

Della holds Hugh’s jacket out to him over the flood of children.

“Get out of here,” she says. “You have a date with density.”

(DELLA)

at last

a text:

< I’m all right. Just so you know.

> Any idea when you’re coming—

back
or
home?
erase erase erase erase erase

> I love you

erase erase irrelevant

type again:

> All right. We’re all right.

not the best answer either

which non-existent
we
is that?

me and Elle

me and Ken

phone open again again again

while the children paint

stare at the unblinking screen

10. I PUT A SPELL ON HUGH

The Duck & Cover glows in the twilight, every window golden. Pumpkins crowd the stairs; precarious to climb past them. Stumbling on a tricky step, Ivy wonders whether her expensive new rose-covered shoes really work, as per shoes. But they look so pretty on the hoof, they make her love herself.

Through the glass door she sees midnight blue walls, small tables. The room looks like the interior mind: candles set in the windows, darkness within. That’s all right, darkness is useful for thinking.

Hugh falls up the stairs behind her, sprawled full length this time, like he’s crawling up on his hands and knees. His self-appalled/self-amused, mainly tolerant eyes look up from the long tangle he makes on the pumpkin-riddled stairs, and Ivy experiences a pretty good swoop in the lower regions. Who’d have thought, at this late date?

“Nice of you to drop by,” she says, giving him her hand.

The hostess is Savaya from the master class. Hugh introduces her as L’s friend, but Ivy already knows her. She sits them at a table in a small bay window, shielded from the street by a Japanese maple, leaves like fire in the dusk. Ivy lets Hugh have the door-facing chair she usually takes herself. She doesn’t need time to recognize anyone here.

“Crab cakes?” Hugh suggests. “Fish is good here. They bake their own bread.”

He’s stopped looking at her—he seems to be having an attack of shyness. She sends X-ray eyes through the back of his menu, but he does not move it.

She tilts. “You there? Hugh?”

He looks up, caught, and half his mouth smiles nervously. The waiter comes and they order. Not a bottle of wine, because Ivy says she can only drink one glass.

“It gets worse if I have a hangover,” she says, once the waiter is gone.

“What does?”

“I thought you’d have heard about my—my current—” Oh boy, now she’s stuck.

“Heard from Burton, you mean?” Hugh’s whole face grimaces. “I just took him three dozen yellow roses. But I left before he could get gossipy.”

“Yipes, three dozen! Were you afraid he was going to sue you?”

“Yellow roses, as perhaps you know, are the roses not only of apology, but also of
dying love
and
extreme betrayal
.”

“In fact, I did not know that.”

“No, well, not everyone has the language of flowers at their fingertips. It was on the card at the florist’s.”

“A subtle dig, then. Do you think Burton will perceive it?”

“If it advances his purposes, I’m sure he will.”

The wine comes, the waiter goes again. A private spot, this window seat.

“What is your, your current—?”

Ivy makes a face. “Nothing. I just have a gapping problem. I forget my lines.”

Hugh looks interested rather than pitying.

“I forget things in general, too,” she tells him. He might as well know.

“Yet here you are, at dinner.”

“I remembered you.” Then that seems too intimate a thing to have said. “Mind you, I couldn’t find the restaurant, but that was because you said the funny name.”

“I wasn’t remembering very well myself. That was the second fall of the day—I fell off a ladder yesterday morning.” He blinks, shakes his head quickly. Touches his forehead.

“How far?” Her arms prickle with worry. Weird.

“Maybe fifteen feet. I was trying to put up Hallowe’en lights on the sign at the gallery.”

“What did the doctor say?”

Hugh rubs his eyes. “I haven’t seen him yet. Ruth made an appointment, but I hate going in.”

“Ruth?”

“The woman who took your call. My gallery assistant.”

“She seemed perfect.”

“Gallery assistant is too grand a title. She helps out. She’s okay with
the ladies who come in to buy cards.” Saying that, Hugh looks ashamed. Interesting.

“Where did you find her?”

“She looked after me, on and off, when I was a kid. There’s no getting rid of her.” He drums briefly on the table, pours more wine. Knocks twice on the table to discharge bad luck. “I don’t want to get rid of her,” he says.

“No, I know. I have a mother or two myself.”

“Ha!” But he looks miserable.

She waits for him to begin again. Well, she can carry on. “Who do you eat with usually?”

He looks around the restaurant, as if his friends will materialize. “Newell, when he’s here. When he’s here without Burton. But I ate with the two of them last night, now I think of it. Della and her husband, Ken, but he’s—away right now. Ruth, I guess, not often. Although we sort of ate together too, last night. She was the server at Pink’s place.”

“I remember her, she’s a sweetie!” Perhaps a bit overblown, too much happiness. Ivy tries to explain. “L hugged her. And I met Della today, she’s L’s mother, right? She came to the house where I’m staying. It’s such a relief when I remember people.”

“Your difficulty, does it affect—does it make it hard to work?”

Ah, her turn for misery now. “Since my work is entirely memory-based, yes, it does.”

They sit silent for a moment. Ivy wishes she had not said that so baldly.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not good at talking about it.”

The invisible waiter slides a long plate of crab cakes onto the table, smelling of ocean and a fire on the beach. Hot in the mouth, temperature and spice heat, pico de gallo cold and sharp beside them.

“Sheryl Crow has a benign brain tumor,” Hugh says. “It makes her forget her lyrics when she’s singing.”

Ivy looks down. She fills her mouth with crab again.

“But I suppose she can tape them to her guitar,” he adds. “Awkward with the longer songs. That’s why she doesn’t do
Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s Privateers
.”

She laughs. “Fine! I do not have a brain tumor. I did find the courage to go and see about that. No aneurysm, no Alzheimer’s. It might be, I might have a stress problem, or need, what is it, ginkgo biloba. Or I might just be, well, old.”

“Burton knows? And makes a little hay?”

“Yes, he does. Everybody in theatre knows. I had a big blow-up, a one-woman show, it was a disaster. The show was good. Elizabeth Bishop, I’m perfect for her. But I just couldn’t, I couldn’t. So after a few, after, oh, three bad nights, they found a replacement.”

“Oh no.” He looks honestly empathetic. Usually people are trying not to laugh, because it is pretty funny, the actor’s nightmare.

“Somebody gave me my script and I read from it, the first bad night. After eight or nine terrible pauses. I thought I could keep doing that, reading the script. But eventually, no.”

“Does it matter for film?”

“If I know the line and then I get up and don’t know it, that wastes a lot of money.”

He nods. It’s nice that he’s not saying too much.

“I’m still good for workshopping—I do voicework, audiobooks, anything where you keep the script in front of you. Whatever radio is left, with the cuts. It’s not like it’s the first time in history. Ellen Terry couldn’t remember lines for
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion
. Richard Dreyfus: his London opening kept being delayed, a few years ago. Et cetera. People tell me all kinds of helpful stories. When I was young I worked with an awful old woman. She wrote out her lines and pasted them around the room on the mantelpiece, the picture frames, an antique box of soap. She’d pick it up in the scene and read the lines right off it. I was disgusted with her. Serves me right.”

“No it doesn’t. The young always think the old are pathetic whiners, that’s the deal. Then we gradually find out.”

“I find that so often! Whatever I despise, I eventually have to experience myself. It’s a dark little sidestreet of karma.”

It is satisfying to make him laugh, to talk to him. To feel known. The way his eyes are set in his head, the lines of his mouth, please her.

The fish arrives, with fresh thick bread, and arugula salad.

“Do you have family here?”

Now Hugh looks guarded. New friends: such a process of what to tell, what not to tell—Ivy feels tired, for an instant. But curious.

He says, having thought, “Ruth, she was my foster mother.”

“I heard L’s mother talking about your mother today. I forget her name, shoot.”

“Mimi. Oh—Della, you mean. L’s mother is Della, my—foster sister, I guess. Ruth looked after us all, Della, Newell, me.”

His pinched face says, can she not see that I do not want to talk about this stuff? Yes, yes, but she wants to know, she needs to pull down the social barrier that prevents strangers from asking about your intimate life.

“Mimi—my mother—is in hospital.” He catches himself. “In the hospice wing. Dying.”

“What does she have?”

“Everything. Bone cancer, diabetes, heart disease, pneumonia. In the old days, she had various episodes and excitements. Now, basically, she has death.” His hand rests on the white cloth. “It’s hard to talk about her. I listen to myself, wondering how long it takes to learn how to tell the story of the sick person: what words work, what is a lie, or a fiction.”

“I’m sorry,” Ivy says. “You must be so sad.”

He laughs a little. “I am, but I’m used to it. Della may have told you, my mother was—she suffered from depression, manic episodes. Bipolar, probably, but they could not seem to— Shock therapy in the seventies, et cetera. That made her more careful. She didn’t want to fix it. It’s not a problem, now that she’s immobile.”

Ivy doesn’t ask anything more.

Looking at his plate, Hugh says, “She’s a—she was a lovely person, a fiery … a flame. But not easy, you know. I’m sure I’m, I mean, you can’t be brought up by— Well, I wasn’t. Ruth took me over from time to time, whenever the downslope hit.”