Close to Hugh (60 page)

The crossroads.

He stops, gets off the bike. Stands there. Not like those guys from
Waiting for Godot
—like Beckett himself, thinking about Godot. That’s the difference. He’s not art, he’s an artist.

Interesting to note that he doesn’t want to lie down on the moon-silvered road and die. So there has to be something to live for.

The moon is high in the split sky, finally clawed out from the clouds chasing around her. Rags of clouds drift off. Cold up there. The moon and all the stars, turning above us all. Distance! We are tiny, unknowable, unimaginably unimportant, far from everything, only close to each other. Alone in lonely infinity.

No cars, no sound of cars. He does lie down, to see the sky whole. Black and grey, giant darkness reaching up or down, limitless, forever. Cold darkness at his back, where he lies connected to the earth by gravity alone, or he might fall up into the dark night sky. And look, there he is, Orion. Already there.

(His mom, what a nutbar to call him that.
Orion
! She thinks he’s so great.)

Road-cold seeps up into his bones and makes him stand—leaping in one rush to his feet—this body, this good steed, so perfect and obedient. Where you lie in the sky, or on the earth, what your place is at the moment.

Accepting that in time it will, it will be in the heavens.

14. HUGH AND I

The climb up the stairs, the last stairs of the day. Takes a while.

“It’s not even eight, but it feels like a million o’clock,” Ivy says.

He’s tired, yes. But will he sleep if he lies down? Maybe the deck.

“You can take a pill, the nurse said.” Ivy goes to get water.

“You fixed the tip?” Ruth does not understand restaurant economy.

“I did, I was discreet.”

“What’s this box?” It’s on the counter.

“The stuff from the cedar closet. Newell brought it. It was in his car when he took you to the hospital.”

What’s in it? The pearls in red leather; a square blue velvet box, garnets or something. Letters, papers. He opens the interleaved cardboard flaps, but can’t bring himself to dig through anything more tonight. Beginning to worry about the morning, he swallows the pill Ivy brings him. She shifts the envelopes to read: “Letters—Gould, Trudeau, here’s one from the Queen!”

“That’s the Queen Mother, some charity ball or something. Just a thank you note. There are a couple of real letters from Kennedys, though. One from Yoko Ono, with little drawings.”

Ivy is looking at him as if she can’t tell if Hugh is confabulating, or it’s real. “What are you going to do with these?”

“Read them, some time. Not give them to Ann, or a university or anyone.” This one box of Mimi’s heart and mind and the company she kept. He sees Ivy watching him. “The people who loved her.”

“You loved her,” Ivy says.

“She drove me so crazy,” he says. “I think my head will burst.”

“Not yet,” Ivy says. “You can last the night. Tomorrow I’ll be the Bride of Frankenstein for you.” She goes to fold the flaps again, and lifts one last big envelope. “This one says Hugh.”

He takes it, fumbling with the flap. Pours out a drift of letters on the
counter. Ivy picks one up:
“To Mimi love your Hugh love love love forever
. These are all letters from you.”

That she kept his letters—Of course. That’s what mothers do.

He goes out onto the deck, not even knowing why. He needs the air, before he goes to sleep this maybe last time. It has stopped raining.

Hugh lies down on the chaise. Ivy sits at his feet and holds his knees.

Around the deck small trees, narrow wrist-span saplings, have sprung up without being asked. They’ll have to be thinned but they’re so pretty now. And above, clouds in tatters streaming away from the moon. A spray of stars far above, revealed again but always there.

We are so small, how comforting. We are not everything. We lose (childish hope) (most loving heart) (everything) but the stars go on.

“The hugeness of everything,” he says, hoping she will understand. How can we feel the pain of others and yet be happy for a moment, an island of happiness in an ocean of suffering, he wants to ask her.

“You’re asleep,” Ivy says, hugging his knees more strongly. “Time to go to bed, I think.”

He goes, obedient, but he has a few things he’d like to get straight. “You won’t leave me, will you? You’ll come and live with me? But keep that apartment, you need it, for working—it’s your … you don’t want to be stuck with me all the time for the next few—you know, while I’m, if I’m sick or, or even if—anyway, maybe I’ll have a hard time with all this, Mimi dying, and the head thing—I don’t want you to stay because you have nowhere else to go.”

“No matter what, I have nowhere else to go now. I have to be with you.”

“Maybe I’d like a pied-a-terre in Toronto. You never think about
my
needs.”

If the gallery goes. Which it still might.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Ivy says, “When you are back in your right mind. I love you.”

“Do you really?” he asks. “Or is it just a story I’ve been telling myself?”

“I asked Conrad, and he said, Love is not an artifact of the disorder.”

“Good.” He turns in the bed to sleep, then turns back. “Will you wait here for me?”

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”

(ORION)

In the shattering flood of clear-sky stars Orion zooms on his bike, a comet, a constellation. Through streets and alleys, down the canalside, up and down to the riverbank, light speed, silver flaring in the fiery wheels of his steed.

To pause, panting, at the bottom of the steps.

“Newell!”

Arc the voice up over the glossy briar-hedge, up to Rapunzel’s window, to where the sleeper lies unsleeping in the glass mountain. Who cares if Burton hears?

“Newell, I am not too young for you. It’s not the same.”

Nothing.

Send it sweetly up once more, once more, as if he’s there, and listening.

“I am—I am yours,” Orion says.

The air stirs, moves in silence. A door, opening?

15. HUGHPHORIA

Hugh lies in his bed, awakened, Ivy sleeping by his side. Not dead, only resting. Phrases from past lives rise in the mind, make you feel better in the middle of the night. When waiting for whatever will happen tomorrow.

Sometimes the breath staggers, thinking about what comes next. Thinking about what came before. Mimi, her eyes, her hand on his, and gone.

You’ll be fine. You have people to look after.

You won’t, Hugh won’t abandon anyone. Newell, Orion, damned Burton, wherever he may roam, in whatever permutation those three work out. Jason, Savaya, poor Nevaeh in the hospital—all to be shepherded somehow—Ruth, Jasper, in their varying degrees. L and Della have to be guarded, Gareth Pindar is a shark. Ken to be kept an eye on in the sharkswim of the law. Ann, Mighton; those two are too much alike. The poor kid who was living at Ivy’s, his jackass brother. Gerald.

All of them. All of us who will be dead, all of us, if the fabric of the world is not kept whole by constant never-ending vigilance. The weft, the web map of the world in L’s
Republic
, strings, a theory of tendrils, connections, onion-skin portraits receding rapidly to some unimaginable ceiling, to godhead.

A saw, or a pick? To make the first, the deepest headcut—maybe a drill?

He shifts, and there is Ivy warm and loving, her arm, breast, leg, her form between him and the formless void. It is better to think of all those people. Ivy will help him think. Turn again, head heavy. It is all up to us, it is all our fault, they are all our responsibility. Saying his prayers like this he might fall asleep, Ivy beside him.

It is not over, not yet, not yet. At least, that is the story you tell yourself.

In the darkness Mimi is sitting on the bed. Not lost. Loved.

“I am always holding your hand,” Hugh says.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This town is a completely imaginary Peterborough—I did once board in a house on the river, with a kayak in the garden, but that was in another century. And this is obviously not the former Peterborough performing arts school, which I hope will re-open. Nothing about
this
school is true of any school I know. All drama teachers are paragons of stability and selfless good sense, and none of them would ever hire Burton.

Unattributed in the text, since we don’t need to tell our friends who wrote the songs we’re humming, Ivy sings a line or two of the Tragically Hip’s song
Bobcaygeon
. Hugh remembers Jane Kenyon’s poem “Twilight: After Haying” and Mighton’s collage piece makes use of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, translated by David Ferry. Della’s MFA gold-leaf installation is borrowed from a beautiful piece Beth Morrow made at the University of Calgary. I’m indebted to my friend Pierre-François of Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, for an illuminating conversation on the inner workings of reputable galleries. Thanks to Dr Mike Peterson for his advice on subdural hematomas, especially his reassurance about artifacts of the disorder.

As well as those necessary acknowledgements, I give thanks to all the usual saints who keep me company on the road: Sara, Glenda, Thyra, Babar, Jeanne, Steve, Mel, Connie, Lynn, Timothy and Emily. I thank Lynn Henry, whose wisdom and experience I value far above rubies, for being such good company on the rocky climb into and through a book. To my dear Tracy Bohan and Jin Auh, thanks for your graceful, intelligent help. Thanks to Kristin Cochrane at Random House, and to Nicola Makoway and Kelly Hill. I am properly grateful to Gil Adamson, whose kindly piercing eye made everything clearer.

Affectionate thanks to all you legmen for doing the field research: Rachel, Patrick, Will and Sindy. And as always, to you who (Hugh who) waits to read: loving thanks to Peter. He carries the moral compass on our long walk.