Close to Hugh (40 page)

Hugh stands looking at the house. “I don’t like to—”

“We’ll pretend I’m coming home.”

They turn up the walk. Ivy wonders if she should ring the bell—but who would hear? And also, actually, she did pay rent. She pushes the door wider.

There’s Jason, dustpan and garbage bag in hand. “Oh!” he says, as if Ivy’s the last person in the world he expected. “We just had a little—”

Words fail him. He dives off with the garbage bag, leaving L to explain: “The guy who broke the coffee table left. I hope it wasn’t expensive. The metal part is still good.”

There’s still glass on the floor, crumbled cubes of tempered safety glass. People have left a wide circle around the skeleton of the table. In
the empty space Orion swoops on hands and knees with a dustbuster, which accounts for some of the noise. He stands, shuts it off, phew! And wow—he looks fabulous. Tight black neoprene gleams above assertive wing-tips, a black shirt where the jacket opens, red claw-marks on the belly, and a bleeding shoulder in the back, feathers clinging there, like a wing was torn off.

“Fine,” he announces to the room. “Just move into the kitchen if you don’t have shoes.”

Ivy has shoes. “Where did he get that fabulous suit?” she asks L.

L is proud. “Jason made it! This, too—I had a bird one, but he said it wasn’t right.”

“You’re kidding, he made that? That’s the prettiest thing!” Ivy’s honestly impressed.

Flat-white grosgrain silk in frail folds, held by a belt of braided vines. Persephone, Artemis. L shows off her shoes, too: flowered, with vines lacing round the ankle.

“Like my shoes? Jason embellished them, the vines and flowers.”

“It’s like a wedding dress!”

L bites her lip, a child trying not to smile—she’s as pretty as the dress, suddenly. “Savaya’s, too. And see Mikayla from the master class, by the kitchen door? That’s Nevaeh’s Hope dress. They all have names. Savaya’s was going to be Faith, but after the
Streetcar
reading Jason changed it to Desire. Then he distressed it and called it Despair, and made Orion’s suit into Desire, with the claw-marks. He calls this one Charity.”

“Which means love,” Ivy says.

L looks at her.

“You know, faith, hope, charity—the greatest of these is charity. Meaning love.”

L looks at Jason, who’s back. Ivy puts out her hand and takes his (as a mother-aged woman can, she tells herself), to tell him these clothes are really, really good.

“Yeah, they were meant to be Faith, Hope, Charity,” he agrees, oblivious in his obsession. “But I kept fiddling with them, so Faith is like, Despair, right? And so is Desire. They’re kind of twins, kind of.” He’s right, Savaya and Orion look more like twins than she and Fern do: same height, stance, same gall.

“You know,” she says, “these clothes are
beautiful
—but they’re
charming too, and funny and I guess horrifying—I haven’t seen anything else like them.”

Jason makes a pleased triangle mouth and ducks his head, trying to meet her eyes.

“I really mean it!” Ivy says, hearing herself a little over-earnest. “You have to go on with this. They’re—well, I wish you would make me something. I’ll commission you.”

Leave it there, nod and drift. Don’t freak him out. And who’s she to say what’s good, what will succeed, anyway? Fashion is hard.

She’s lost sight of Hugh. Maybe he went into the garden for relief? She makes her way out the French doors at the back, to the river-wall. The garden is full too. A fire in the copper grill, people standing around it or sitting and smoking along the stone wall. How many? More than when they arrived, already. Maybe it’s going to be one of those Facebook-announced, police-attending, giant-crowd teenage disasters.

13. IF HUGH CAN’T STAND THE HEAT, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN

In the kitchen, Hugh finds a beer in Ann’s fridge and slips into its shadow, by the door to the back stairs. Almost invisible, he leans there, picturing Lise Largely’s offer sitting on his desk. Maybe he should take it. Who knows how much Mimi has left after all these months of bills and care, or how much she’s left to him; or how much she had to start with. She has never shown him her will, he could be in for all or nothing. He can’t bear to think about inheritance when she lies there imminent, at the dark gate.

Lise, anyway—he hates her most because of the anagram, because she’ll change his Argylle Gallery into the Allergy Gallery as if it was a joke, as if it wasn’t … his
destiny
or something, to run the gallery. She’ll one-up him, because Largely. A stupid name. He puts her aside, listens instead to the prattle of the young who have no mortgage, no debt yet.

Orion, clean-lined in that violent black slash of a suit, is laying down the law to a small, quick-eyed girl Hugh doesn’t know: “Everyone confesses their old crushes at a party.”

Savaya says, “They do to you, because everybody in the world has had a crush on you.”

“And couples start disappearing, or fight and make up too much.”

“Good thing we don’t know any couples,” says a lithe young man, who seems to be called Sheridan Tooley. Another slim boy, wearing a frothy black skirt, long black gloves, and quite a lot of eyeliner, shoves Sheridan with his sharp skirted hip. Perhaps they are a couple.

Savaya laughs. “Remember that girl who got drunk and made out with the guy and then she’s crying, crying,
I totally made out with Quintin—I shouldn’t have!
But people who are drinking a lot for the first time always cry.” She’s about to cry herself, crystals hovering in those bluebell eyes. “Nevaeh and me at Jerrod’s party, in grade nine, we cried all night about how much we loved each other.”

Orion shouts, “Man! Jerrod
Schmidt
, the person I most wanted to fight
ever
, he has tricks, like he’ll pull out this big ring of keys, describe them to a girl, what each one opens. He plays guitar so people have to
compliment
him. When he’s taking a photo, the jerkoff gets out a
reflector.”

Hugh wonders what they’re drinking; if he ought to shut this thing down. If he could.

Savaya says, “I like when two guys meet, and one knows he’s cooler than the other guy, but he just loves loves loves the dorkier one. Like you, when was that, Hallowe’en last year? Yelling at fucking Charles Elton, man—”

Orion cuts in, “I said ‘You should a receive a blow job every day’—”

A general chorus:
“Because you are a handsome Scandinavian man.”

“Yeah, that was a bit mean,” Savaya says.

“I never talk to the guy now. I can’t stand to be around him.”

Jason comes into the kitchen and Orion calls him Boy, which must be mocking Burton’s name for Newell, and Jason says,
“Design
Boy, please.” Good to see Jason cocky. And he made that chiton-thing that L’s wearing—straight from Schiavone’s “Marriage of Cupid and Psyche.” Hugh wonders if Jason meant to reference it, or if it is just art coming out in the new age, a pimple on a fresh cheek. The bodice not quite so revealing, mind you. Mind Hugh.

Orion pushes Jason’s shoulder. “Feste-Boy, Fester.”

“Jealous of my prowess in cold reading, Boy?” He and Orion move into a mock-fight, karate moves, clowning in the kitchen archway.

Mikayla tells Savaya she
loves
Orion. Her quick eyes have gone round and silly.

“Yeah, he likes men,” Savaya says kindly.

“But how much, though?”

Savaya laughs and tells Mikayla to drink one glass of water for every glass of punch.

The young, looking after each other. Hugh moves to the back door, invisible as age has made him. Around the lintel, in Ann’s handwriting:

No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.

Simone de Beauvoir

(L)

The upstairs hall is littered with people, sitting and standing. L knows none of them. A bunch of people seem to have come out from Trent—as if they didn’t have their own parties to go to. Nobody’s broken into Ivy’s room. There’s a lineup at the bathroom door. L goes into Ann’s room, where people have been piling coats on the bed, and finds the door that looks like a closet but is really a little washroom. She locks the door and washes her hands and face. She coaxes her eyebrows back into shape and stands staring at her own face, at whether or not. What a person should do. She’s had too much to drink. As bad as her mom.

She turns off the light before she unlocks the door. The room light is off too, but she can see people writhing on the bed, on the pile of coats. Yuck, poor taste. Who even is that? Not Savaya. L edges out along the wall, making less noise than the people are making, huffling and moaning. Disgusting, except. Except weird: not pornographic, but suggesting to the primitive lizard mind that it undertake similar action. Except.

Jason is in the hall, organizing the bathroom lineup and tacking a sign on the door:
FIVE MINUTES, TOPS / BE CIVILIZED
.

Orion watches, applauding. He sees L at the back stair door and comes over. Under the elegant élan, he looks sad, she thinks. Maybe whatever was going on with him and Newell is not going on anymore. Too many people’s hearts get trompled on.

Orion shuts the door behind them and says, in the quieter darkness of the stairwell, “Too many people.” L agrees. “Too many people are stupid,” he says. Halfway down the stairs, at the turn, he says, “Don’t open the bottom door yet, let’s take a break.”

She sits on the wedge-shaped corner stair. “Good plan. It’s too—Everybody is too there there. Too here here.”

He sits above her. “Everyone is so nice,” he says. The saddest voice she’s ever heard from him. “And so fucking stupid.”

And so familiar, that heart-sunken understanding of falseness and stupidity. “I know, it’s like there’s a fiction, like, an agreement, that everyone is equal. Everyone is nice, basically, if you understand them—everyone is decent and they just had, like, a rough time, or were abused, or something went bad in their childhood—they’d be just as smart as
you, or as good at stuff, except they had this rough time. But that’s not true, and everybody knows it. We’re different, and some people are just plain—some people are—”

Orion laughs. “Can’t even say it, can you? Programmed! Some people are
better than others
. More talented, more beautiful, smarter, more worth loving. Don’t say that outside this staircase though.”

L hugs herself, since she can’t hug anybody better. “The terrible part is, the thing about equality, that everybody knows is a lie—it takes away from the
true
part—that everyone is a human being, a soul, and deserves to be—kinded. Not ‘deserves to be loved’ because some people don’t really seem to deserve that, like Jason’s dad, who’s an asshole. Or my own dad—not that he doesn’t deserve to be loved, but the way he talks to my mom blows the top of my head off. Where do people get the idea it’s okay to be
angry?
It’s not okay to be angry all the time with the people who love you or depend on you.”

Orion never talks about his dad. “My mom doesn’t get angry, she cries. I respect anger.”

“You don’t get angry. You’re too smart.”

“I might.”

“I’ve never seen you mad. Is that a gay thing?”

He gives a snort. “Have you met Burton? He’s on a permanent boil. A gayboil, that’s what he is, a giant pus-filled pimple, always about to explode.”

Someone at the bottom opens the door and a string of noisy people climb up and over them. The seal on the decompression chamber is broken. They emerge into the dark reaches of the kitchen—three times as many people, ten times the noise.

14. I KNOW HUGH NOW

Ivy finds Hugh, lost in the shadows beside the back door. A stream of kids passing, ignoring him. But she spots him—the shape of his head now printed on her mind’s eye.

Hugh looks very tired. Should she drag him home through cold windy streets, or put him straight to bed in her room here? He looks terrible, from this distance. She slides between large young people packed like olives in a jar. Hugh is lost in thought, quiet in the uproar.

“Hi,” she says, calling him back from far away. She can just tuck in beside him in the narrow alcove. “Did this little space hold shelves or a phone stand or something?”

“I think so—it was twenty-five years ago that I lived here.”

“Crazy-emptying Ann! Does she know about this little party?”

“I doubt it. It’s not the sort of thing they do.”

They’re half-shouting at each other. Hugh points with a jerk of his shoulder at the back stairs. “Care to go up? I haven’t been up those stairs for a long time.”

They dodge out of the alcove and up the first flight. Hugh shuts the door behind them and the sudden relief of peace is astonishing.

“Oh, let’s just stay here for a while.” Ivy pulls Hugh down beside her on the wedge-shaped stair and puts an arm around him. With the other hand she touches his closed eyelids, using her cool fingers to soothe his tired face.

“Lise Largely has put in a decent offer for the gallery,” Hugh says. He looks at Ivy in the faint light draining in from the cracks in the doors. “Should I even fight her?”

Even last night she thought he shouldn’t lose it; here, in the shuffled-off old house he lost, it seems to Ivy that the gallery is his home, his true place.

“You should fight. I think you should.”

(ORION)

The party has lost its zing, and it’s only midnight. Parties are fucked that way. You’re on top of the world—then without missing a beat, without taking a drink, or not taking one, suddenly it’s flat.

Jason comes down the back stairs to the kitchen, wringing his hands in a towel. “I hate parties,” he says. “I had to put my finger through the puke in the bathroom sink to get the drain to unplug—” He picks up, opens, and drinks a hard lemonade in one gulp.

In the archway, Savaya is taking on Sheridan Tooley. What is he, in those gold shorts, the body builder from
Rocky Horror
? Every word that comes out of the guy’s mouth is a lie. An advantage in the working world. Savaya is flattering him, mocking him. She says, with the bright flicker in her eye that makes Orion love her and distrust her, “Wow, I can see almost your whole penis through those spandex shorts.”