Close to Hugh (45 page)

Mimi lies flattened, almost invisible under the sheet. Cheeks old satin, sagged over skull. Thinner than Wednesday, good idea to come today.

The shut eyes look strange without her giant false eyelashes. When her eyes got bad, way back, Hugh screwed a swivel-magnifying mirror to her dressing table. L loved to watch her put them on. Delicate caterpillars. They made her into Mimi; also made her look a little crazy.

Oh Mimi. She was my best friend, when I was little. More than these girls are now.

Ruth stirs, murmurs. She must be Mimi’s friend too. Some way. Weird to think about Ruth looking after Hugh and her mom and Newell. Ruth knows about everybody, and never tells. Ruth was in Sullivan’s when L stole a tube of stripey toothpaste in grade four. The clerk grabbed L by the jacket, but Ruth was there in two seconds. She marched with them up to the pharmacist’s office and made the clerk go away and talked to the pharmacist about when he was a kid, and pretty soon they were out on the sidewalk, and then Ruth gave her a giant talking- to and an ice cream cone at the Dairy Bar. And never told her mom or her dad.

L kisses Mimi’s paper-lidded eyes, not worried about waking her, with all the drugs. Then she goes around the bed and kisses Ruth’s pink cheek. Ruth wakes, eyes opening quickly, and smiles. “Oh, sweetness,” she says. “Don’t be worried.”

L nods. “About anything, I mean. It’ll be all right, your mom and your dad.”

L nods again. Ruth turns to find a more comfortable position. Her old-turtle eyes close.

All righty then. Off L goes. She has an idea for place cards. There’s the hospital snack store, and she has her trusty X-Acto with her.

(DELLA)

cottage: empty                                                               boat: adrift

hanging on the closet door  his shirt

over the bed  L’s portrait of me          on the table lists       
DO PAY FIX

read everything read his mind and heart?       or agree not to look at that

he is not with Jenny

here for some other darker worse thing                            to kill himself?

photo stuck to the bathroom mirror     us                        the night we met

thirty years gone into air               windspray

me the same                            as rudderless                  the same me

as buoyed                     not buoyed

where is he

where are you, my beloved, my only one?

don’t make me so afraid to see you                                  not to see you

the ardent man   one I fought with   he would never         have left me

that Ken                                     the one I love                       I loved

the door-spring                                                          there he is

eyes like coals and mine must be the same

we  hate love  each other

always

I will never forgive him the pain he causes me

that was him fucking Ann on the coats for all the it wasn’t him it wasn’t

what is this physical bond this mental bond

what terrifying                              joy                              he is alive

    He says, Hugh says I have to tell you.

(okay tell)

    I’ve been here all along. I’m trying to—she’s been—

    I couldn’t talk to—
 

(meaning: I judge you she thinks you’re great)

    I don’t have any way to—I can’t speak to you—

(why are we not the only people we can speak to?)

    I try to think what is the worstthing that could happen, that’s why

    I got angry about Mighton—I know it isn’t true

(you don’t know what I would have done

except that nothing makes any sense

no body has any salt but yours)

    I can’t go back I don’t deserve, I

    I deserve for you to be with … I

    I deserve to lose Elle, I, I—

I, I, I, I   make him stop talking like this   such a fucking fake fake fake

garbage of fakeness of false   pretending     not to know me know
us

stop stop                                                          again again

crack my head against the wall because then it will stop

crash my head on the wall, to make him see what pain he causes me

outside pain is easier to bear                            out out into the woods

into the empty trees and the rainsoaked leafmold under them

blind with crying what is the way to get back to my

he comes                                    run                                    from him

to get back to my to ourselves in this terrible thundering after me    duck

branch
—smack

it hitting him hitting it                                                shouting

stop / turn

hand to eye—torn?                                                          is he blind?

he takes it away                            red and white                  not bleeding

    I can’t, he says.

neither can I                                  so dark so sad     it is his turn to talk

    I can’t go back to work. It’s like there is nothing left of life,

    like it is all over for me. Is what I feel.

        Well then don’t.                                                     this is all?

    We don’t have the money.

        For you to quit? We’ll sell the house. Elle can get student

        loans, I’ll work, I’ll get a real job.

    Not enough—I can’t—we can’t—

        I’ll sell Mimi’s piano, it’s probably sixty thousand.

    He laughs. That’s nowhere near—And no, I like to hear you play.

pressing his reddened eye

two hands both eyes blind

        It’s not the end of the world. Have you already talked to—

never mind can’t ask, can’t pry can’t know

should say / can’t say now what the dental insurance didn’t pay for

on Elle’s teeth and the still cracked windshield on the car from nearly crashing it will have to be fixed, nothing left in the line of credit so how will that be managed … the car bucking beneath me almost going over instead touch his bruise his eye his mouth

the relief of touch

it’s all right wait a while

my own  my only  my love

    Your eyes are beautiful.

the woods are wet from all this rain

these thirty years of rain

    Help me pack up my stuff?

so we go

I guess we can go back

to dinner with Hugh and the others I guess                            I guess
 

(but there is something between him and Jenny)

(we will just agree not to look at that)

5. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING HUGH

Orion sings out the tagline on a glad, ringing note,
“On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Earnest
!”

And Burton stretches, big old bachelor-cat that he is, and breaks for lunch. Newell raises his eyebrows, pleading with Ivy to stay, but she leaves him to deal with Burton’s emotions alone. Enough for one morning. Faster than the students, she flies down echoing Saturday halls, out into the parking lot—sun! incredible after a week of rain—into the Volvo, down the usual flow of streets, to the gallery. A sign on the front door says
Closed
, but he’ll be upstairs, getting his party ready. She slides in beside his van, grabs out her suitcases, slams the back door behind her, and runs up the stairs to his crowsnest, treehouse—home. Hugh is pulling a pan from the oven. He looks up.

“Cake?” Ivy says, hoping. Dense aroma of almonds, golden top, perfect.

“All cake all the time, tonight,” Hugh says. “This one’s marzipan.”

He comes to take her tweed coat and suitcases and scarf, hanging them on her hook—hers, already. “Rough day at the salt mine?”

O balm of fondness! She was so right to come. The gristle of her mood clears, melts. “Maybe I’m a sociopath,” she says, moving with him back to the kitchen. “I just don’t care about anybody—is that it?”

“What’s the play of the day—do you seek the Bluebird of Happiness?”

“Not
Blue Bird
, thank God, but
Importance of Being Earnest
. Ugh.”

“Ah.” Hugh puts a small plate in front of her. “Tester?” Two spoons, mounded with gold and yellow gleams. “Lemon curd on the left, what do you think?”

He regards her with mild anxiety, so she swallows. Even though she has waited so long, it doesn’t taste of licorice. Tart-sweetness, smooth and slightly warm, fills the hungry caverns of her mouth and makes her ears ping. “I think I am in paradise at last,” she says.

“This one’s blood orange.”

She swoons, she licks the spoons. Satisfied, he turns back to work, sorting and stemming brown mushrooms. “What’s so bad about
Earnest?
I thought it was supposed to be his best.”

“Oh it is, it’s perfect. Very witty.” Sip of tea. The tension of the morning is evaporating. “But here’s where my imagination or my sympathy fails me: I think it’s tedious. Clever, yes, funny in spots. Stephen Fry, et cetera. But why bother?”

“Too clever? Heartless?” He’s chopping stems, graceful in his knife work.

“I don’t suppose Wilde was, but the play is. Epigraphs are boring—all substitution, and once you crack the code it stops being funny. And Wilde was horrible to his poor, silly wife. Or maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was witty and kind and gentle with her, when he bothered to go over and pat his children’s heads.”

This must be the first time Hugh has seen her being brittle, theatrical. Makes her sad to let him see her working self this way. Tears threaten her eyes again,
shit
.

“Come,” he says, putting down the knife.

He takes her hand and leads her down the hall into his room. Onto the bed. He shuts the door and locks it; when he turns she laughs, seeing what is in his mind. In his heart. He bends to take off her shoes and socks, and takes the tip of one foot in his soft mouth. But his poor head. If she does most of the work, and allows no jarring … She sighs, she pulls her tunic up and off, and lies back on the welcoming bed. This is antidote, reward, this is nourishment and sustenance and life. This is the life.

The play has seeped into her anyway, dislike it how she might. When they lie still, replete, Cecily’s line comes to her mouth because it is the truth:
“How nice of you to like me so much after we have known each other such a comparatively short time,”
she says, kissing him. “But I am going to be late—”

She leaps into her clothes and flies down the stairs and starts the Volvo, still in a dream, in the ecstatic centre of their existential struggle.

As she backs out of the tight spot she’s in, the side mirror catches on the fence and pops right off, dangling by wires. No time, no time, she rolls the window down and grabs it, yanks it off, and leaves it on the passenger seat. No looking back.

(L)

Savaya bounds into the hospital snack shop, forty minutes late. L stows the place-card stuff in a take-away Styrofoam box, layers separated by paper napkins. No jarring.

The super smooth elevator is big enough for a couple of stretchers but there is only one in here with them, an old woman being wheeled somewhere to something bad. Her eyes pluck at L’s, wanting to be told it will all be okay. Probably it will not. L gives her a half smile and lets her own eyes wander to the keypad. Fourth floor. Okay.

Savaya says, “4108, 4108,” and they check the signs and veer to the left, a walkway open to the central atrium. Makes L dizzy to look either down or up, so she doesn’t. Savaya stops. “Do you have anything to give her? We can’t go in there with nothing.” She looks around, then picks six lilies from the planter lining the chasm. “Not even plastic!”

Afraid, L looks up and down the walkway, but nobody seems to notice. Savaya whips the scarf from her ponytail and ties it around the flowers. “There! Nevaeh will be happy.”

When they find the room, Nevaeh’s head is hanging while her dad delivers a sonorous lecture. But he must be tired; Nevaeh’s tiny mother twitches his sleeve and says they might go find tea, since the friends are here, and Nevaeh’s dad concurs, slowly. He rises and proceeds out, and Mrs. Nev click-clicks down the hall behind him. She wears four-inch heels everywhere.

“Fuuuck!”
Nevaeh whispers/screams. Then she starts to cry. Her eyes are always beautiful, but when she cries the fountains overflow in glorious light. Her eyelids are tight-swollen. Her leg must really hurt.

Savaya sits on the wider side by Nevaeh’s legs, and L on the narrower. It’s actually quite uncomfortable to sit there, L has to make herself count to twenty to stay put. Savaya keeps jiggling the bed, hugging Nevaeh, patting her giant foot wrapped with high-tech fluoro tape.

“No dance til June,” Nevaeh says. “They’re putting six pins in it, and I’ll have a cast till Christmas!” Her bonbon voice is thicker, as if she has cried for days and days.

Savaya might feel loyal about Pink, so L asks. “What did Pink say that set you off?”

“He stared at me through the crack, I saw him, he’s such a pervert. Pink freaks me out—but it was
Jason!”
Nevaeh’s nervous arms come up one after the other to wipe the tears off her beautiful, blooming cheeks, to flatten out her eyes and stretch the skin.

L looks up at that. “Jason, what?” Savaya asks.

“He looked at me, my arm—I only did it once, to see why people think it works, not because I—” More sobbing. “He cut my sleeve with his scissors, that heavy stuff. He said he wanted to shorten it for the line, but it was to make the scars show,” Nevaeh says. Turning the thin arm outward, so they can see a little set of pinkish lines.

Not a lot of lines, only six or seven. But that’s not once, either. That’s a few times of testing it out, L thinks. Because Nevaeh is a terrible liar and always will be.