Close to Hugh (43 page)

    Oops! Somebody in here? No rush!

    I’ll do the kitchen first.

water run

run

(ORION)

Light filters into the basement through last summer’s raspberry canes and grass that nobody cut; nobody as in it should have been him. His mother out there in too-short shorts struggling with the eco-friendly blade mower, unsharpened, so noble and so stupid. Who knows where she ended up last night, she wasn’t home when he got in at four.

Unsleeping, unslept, Orion sits at the computer crying over the flash mob symphony at Sabadell,
Ode to Joy
, as it builds—fuck he should have kept on with violin, except that he was never going to be good enough, not good enough, not like these people who live and die for their violins, or their oboe, the beautiful woman playing the oboe. People making things beautiful, working together to make art together, to make that one afternoon …

He blows his nose again and waits for his eyes to calm down, waits for something to happen.

No text.

No text ever anymore?

The mystery of Burton’s value.
Long association
.

In the dark mirror of the computer screen Orion can see himself saying that to some future flashing, ardent boy, about Newell. A vision. He didn’t mind being a secret before. But this is sad, to be rejected out loud
and
in secret. He is so fucked. Newell is. Burton is.

Orion is. Stuck, fuck, this so fucking sucks.

(What is he going to do with this cracked and useless heart? Make art?)

(L)

Jason’s legs lie empty on the floor. One eye open, she sees them: his pants on one side of her, and (without looking, she knows) his body on her other side. Caught between pants and person.

So what
was that
, last night?

Her phone brrrings.

“L, too early, sorry, but I wanted to catch you—” It’s Hugh.

“I remember, boats. I’ll bring them.”

“Okay, no rush.” But there is rush in his voice, because today’s the day of the dinner and he likes everything to be perfect.

“All I want to know is, cake? Will there be cake?”

“You have a sweet tooth.”

“My dad too. And Jason has a whole sweet head.” Jason’s arm flails up and whacks her, not in an angry way, in a
yes cake
way.

“Cake first,” Hugh says. “Cake second. All cake, in fact.”

“Their twenty-what-th?” she says.

“Thirtieth, according to my calculations. And I believe that
is
the Cake Anniversary.”

“Happy times.”

She clicks off. Jason’s arm descends around her, wire and springs, and pulls her back into him while she looks at the bedside table and the clock and the phone in her hand that she is setting carefully on the edge of the bedside table—Jason’s new bossiness: how is that going to work? But weirdly she likes him pulling her in and she likes the new crescent shape they make, their bodies aligned and curved together, the springing smooth silk of his et cetera but they have to she has to they ought to go get those boats and it’s 9:20 already.

9:40 whoo now they
really
have to go.

Downstairs, coming back to life in the blue light of morning, the living room is strange. Pale, foggy blue with hints of grey. The kitchen gets all the sun in the morning. Ann is tying a garbage bag. Stewart sweeps the floor. He looks a lot younger this morning, still in that stupid black outfit, a zit or two burning bright pink on his pallid forehead.

Stewart empties his dustpan into the last of Ann’s garbage bags. He checks his giant technophone. “Right, so Charlaine will be here
stat,”
he says.

Pretty gay for someone who stayed the night. A puzzle: did he sleep with Ann? What happened to the chairs?

Jason runs down behind L and jumps the last four stairs, mid-text. “Orion’s here. We’ll run you over to get the boats and then to Hugh’s. I’m going to the class in case they need me.”

Seems he liked being Feste after all. Oh great.

At L’s house it takes some nerve to go in the back door. Because a) What if her dad is down there? And b) her mom. Nobody there though, the house dead and empty.

Where is everybody?

She picks the best six boats, at least the ones she likes best. Stacks them with paper between.

And then gathers more nerve, to run down the basement stairs. Because it always takes nerve to go down to look at it, to see if it is shit, as so often suspected. The
Republic
that has been her home for so long, two years, three, making and making and thinking, always somewhat thinking about it in the turning gyre of the back of her spacious mind.

And now now will Jason occupy that space—? That can’t be right. A person still has to do her work.

He has work, she has work, they can both work?

Look at her parents, though.

She will have to go see Nevaeh. Does a person have to decide permanently, one way or the other? Is the decision made by glands, or growing, or by that which we know as love?

2. WHISTLE WHILE HUGH WORKS

The hall, the stairs; so many stairs in this life. Unfixable. But if, if you could find the force. Okay, some things are unfixable, but—because it is so short, we are here so briefly!—there must be some way to fix, say, Newell’s life with the toad Burton, or Della’s pain, or at least get L some recognition. Hugh’s heart lightens for no reason, rounding the last corner to his apartment, up to the porch, in, home.

The place smells different—something’s out of whack. Burnt toast, the smell of having a stroke. Hugh climbs the stairs, slow as his head thumps, wondering who he’ll find.

Ken, asleep on the couch, toast-crumbed plate on the floor beside him. Everybody gets to sleep but Hugh. He walks over and stands looking down, wondering what to do. “Everyone knows where you hide your key,” Ken says, muffled by couch cushions. “It’s not break and enter if I use your key.”

“Not calling the police, yet,” Hugh says. He picks up the toast plate, the milk glass.

“Thanks for that.” Ken moves the cushion. Paper crinkles. He shifts, and pulls a small drawing from under his arm. L’s work? He swings his feet down, gropes under the couch—another under there. Pieces from the
Republic
.

Having plundered it without permission himself, Hugh can hardly take him to task.

Ken sees Hugh looking at the drawings: one a small sketchy self-portrait, the other Ken himself. “Do you think she’s good?” he asks. Hugh nods. “I didn’t see it before. I thought she should do law. This walkthrough thing, it’s a surprise.” Ken rubs his creased, sleep-shadowed face. Strain and unhappiness ironed right in. “Got any coffee?”

“Espresso machine, down in the framing room. Want a cup?”

“For the love of God.”

Hugh is unable to gauge exactly what degree of despair Ken is clocking now. “Latte, Americano?” is all he can think to ask. When he comes back with the coffee, Ken is sitting upright in the blankets, pale and stub-bled. Unable to meet Hugh’s eyes.

Okay. Since it seems there will be a dinner after all, better get cracking. Hugh finds his list. Copper bowl, oven 250. He cracks eggs, saving the gold yolks in a turquoise bowl.

“I remember the day Dell’s mom died,” Ken says. Staring into the mass of untidy half-bare branches overhanging the wooden deck, he says, “We went down there daily, when things got as bad as they were by the end. She was torn up. Della.”

“I know.” Cream of tartar … there, behind the vanilla. Salt. Whisk.

“Because she couldn’t be sad. She played the piano all day, that halfsize upright in their parlour, not even in tune. All her mom’s old music books, all day.”

“Playing helps get rid of pain.” Egg whites flick-flick into thickening mindless foam.

“The thing is, Hugh—you never get rid of your mother.”

Has Ken forgotten that Mimi is dying right now? He comes to lean on the kitchen bar, watching Hugh shake sugar spoon by spoon as the egg-whites build and stiffen. Strong-arm, concentrated whipping: another way to shed pain.

Ken says, “You don’t know how much you’ll miss her.”

It feels so lonely when your so-called friends fail to understand anything about you. Makes you wonder if they ever knew you. Knew Hugh. Hugh who?

“Like I said to Della: she won’t ever leave you. In a way.” Ken’s tight, dark-shaded eyes are anxious, searching Hugh’s face.

“I know,” Hugh says. It’s okay. Let him search, let him find. “They’re not gone, it’s like—a whale listening for another whale across the ocean—I understand that.” He slips a silpat mat onto the half-sheet for the meringues. “What I don’t understand is why you’re putting Della through the wringer like this.”

Ken shifts again, moves his hands on the counter—leaving? Not yet.

He pushes away and stands straight. “The trial’s coming up, November third,” he says. “The guy is going to take the stand, he’s going to say … the things he will say. He’s eighty-seven. He’s like Della’s dad, he’s got
that helpless thing. A sweater vest, a
Hang in there!
kitten poster on his classroom door in 1974.”

More than Ken has ever said about the case, in the six years he’s been working on it. He can’t meet Hugh’s eyes. He goes to the couch, can’t sit; he stands there. “Forty-two plaintiffs over eighteen years. I’ll have to talk him through the whole thing. We did a meat chart.”

Hugh puts the bowl down. Pay attention, pay attention. “What’s a meat chart?”

“This age, and this touch, and this number of occasions … a big chart on the wall.”

Something looming, a train, or a tree about to fall. On Della, on himself. On Hugh.

“When we have meetings, the client always says a prayer at the beginning.”

Hugh remembers that once, Ken was Catholic too. “What do you do?”

“We pray with him, and then we go on.”

Hugh wonders if the
we
is Jenny.

“So if it’s coming to trial, then it will be over?”

“There are separate actions; some settled, not all. Some of them want, want their day in court. More than the money.” Ken’s eyelid is twitching. “The trial hasn’t done them any good, it hasn’t given them closure. The machinery of the law prevents us from tearing the guy limb from limb. That’s a good thing, I still believe. I’ve listened to them all those years, taking careful notes, staring at the paper while I write. Not looking up too often, not intruding on their pain. None of what we do does anything for anyone but the insurance company.”

There’s a long, quiet space.

“Okay, but I still don’t get why you aren’t talking to Della.”

No answer. Hugh can’t leave it at that. “She thinks you’re sleeping with Jenny. If you aren’t, you have to tell her. If you are, I don’t know what to say.”

Ken stares at Hugh with panicked intensity, or maybe anger.

Then the door bangs at the bottom of the stairs.

L starts up, singing out, “I got them!”

But Ken shouldn’t see the boats—and L can’t see Ken, not in this state. Not wasting an instant in thought, Hugh takes Ken’s arm and speeds him down the hall. “Bathroom,” he says. “Razor in the cabinet,
towels, get a clean shirt from my closet.” Ken’s out of sight by the time L gets to the top of the stairs, blinded anyway by the big cardboard portfolio she’s carrying.

Hugh says, “Great, let’s take them straight to the framing room.” He bundles her back down the stairs. Being young, she doesn’t grumble.

She’s brought six. “I like this one,” she says, fishing among them—the boat/whale.

It’s hard to swing back to Della’s work, from Ken’s.

Hugh pulls another one around, the boat named
Beyond My Ken
. There’s Ken in the water, thrashing, or is that the foam of his dive? “Oh good,” he says. “This is good.”

L spreads the others across the table. Savaya as mariner-figurehead, now with a tiny brass telescope to her eye, finished, very intricate. One with Della’s mother painting at the tiller—pale, cherubic babies clinging to the rigging above her. “This is Grampa?” L points to an old man trailing along in the dinghy, looking backward, dangling bare legs in the briny foam. Another: a boat laden with a spilling pile of white and brown eggs, and ha! Kindereggs and Easter eggs and turquoise Araucana eggs.

“But this one,” L says, “seemed more cheerful?” It’s an ordinary boat,
State of the Union
painted on the side. Della and Ken float naked near the boat, arms wrapped around each other. Clear portraits, they are happy. Is that a shark’s shadow in the water, or a dolphin? Never mind. Good piece.

“Okay, I’m glad you found this one,” Hugh says. “I was getting worried.”

“I know, right?” she says. “I left
The Jenny
on the sideboard.”

These are more complicated, more complete, than he’d expected. All the same size, that will make the framing faster.

L picks frame-corners, and they experiment until they’re both satisfied: a greyish distressed finish, suggestion of weathered boatboards. Blue-grey linen liner mats, sea-green for
State of the Union
. “I’m happy,” L says.

Hugh is too. But the oven is waiting—there’s work to do upstairs. Hugh takes the stairs first, checking for Ken as his head lifts over the rail: there he is, cleaned up, presentable. Hugh goes to his egg-white bowl. Okay, the meringue has not deflated.

In the living room Ken puts out an awkward hand, but L walks through that to hug her father. She’s a good girl. Meringue mounds gracefully on the Silpat. Hugh hollows yolk-shaped dips with the back of
a gravy spoon and slides the pan into the oven. One task down, eighteen to go.… “Okay, Ken,” he calls. “Help or go. Whichever, be here for dinner at six.”

Ken waffles, moves his arms as if conceding an objection at court.

L says, “Put him to work. He did KP in ’Nam …”

That makes Ken laugh, a rusty sound. “No, no, I have to go find your—” Tries again. “Got to pack, out at—”

He gives up and goes down the stairs, getting shorter and shorter. L reaches over the banister to pat the top of his head as it disappears. Six more trudging steps, then the back door opening and closing.