Close to Hugh (3 page)

But the fall is forcing empathy upon him. As he hangs the
Back Soon
sign in the window he figures out—and this is a real epiphany—that if she moved into a pleasant apartment with less stuff and less to worry about, she would actually be pre-dead.

He should be picking up the certificates from the Ace. But here he goes instead, ducking into the Mennonite Clothes Closet.

The trotting tassel of Ruth’s red hat moves through close-packed aisles on the other side of the store. She plans to offer them less than the posted price for a corduroy jacket that has caught her fancy. She’s been checking it every day. Hasn’t quite worked up her nerve to suggest $5 instead of $15. “Strictly speaking,” she told Hugh this morning, “I do not need a jacket. My navy peacoat’s still good
—that
was a find—but the coppery tone, this wide-wale corduroy, just matches one I had when I was a girl, and I’ve got my wanter turned up loud.”

No good for Hugh to buy it for her. She would whip out her little purse (pouched pink leather, like her mouth) and pay him back.

So he sidles down the aisles outside her narrowed peripheral vision, as she pretends to look everywhere but at the jackets. While she examines shoes, Hugh slips a sharp-edged, brown hundred dollar bill into the left-hand pocket of the corduroy jacket, from the opposite side of the musty-smelling rack. Ducks along behind the racks and out of the store.

Watching from the gallery he is rewarded, ten minutes later, by her squat copper-clad torso swanning along George Street, on her way home. Beyond his hope, he sees her shove her hands into the pockets. He can almost hear the crinkle. She pulls her left hand out, and her look of thrilling glory is enough to fill his cup forever.

You did it. Good for Hugh.

3. HUGH BELONG TO ME

There isn’t really time, but Hugh stops in at the hospice on his way to the Ace. He runs up the shallow steps, nods to the nurse on duty (Judy, not the sourpuss), up the two flights of steep stairs. He walks down the polished hall, feeling the living strength of his stride under him. Spring even in his fall-jangled legs; the opening and closing of his ribs, still breathing. Unlike these fossils parked in wheelchairs along the hall walls, strings of oxygen whispering into nostrils, glassy-eyed, lopsided stares.

Mimi’s room. Door ajar: an aide is turning her onto her side, nightgown gaping. Hugh waits. Through the narrow opening he watches the nurse’s burnt sienna hands on his mother’s skin. Alabaster shot with cerulean, lemon; patches of almost alizarin. If you painted her. Poor body.

The nurse is Nolie Suarta, he sees. She comes out on silent feet. A smile, a little duck of her head to apologize for being in his way. Which she wasn’t.

Chair by the bed. To sit, sit. Sitting, watching. This is all there is to do.

Mimi’s hair clouds on the pillow, the white of it a surprise every time. Her hair must always have been what you saw first, Hugh thinks, each time she came back. Abundant chestnut, moving of its own accord, almost like snakes. Part of the exhaustion of being a good son: thinking good thoughts about the mother, keeping thoughts good when you branch off into memory, what was real and what was not. Snakes, ladders.

Her eyes are shut. She’s had her dose, then. His head hurts, his teeth hurt. Back molars, both sides. Don’t clench. He feels in a pocket for blue gel pills, pops two. Okay, three. The skin under her jaw begins to tremble. What does she dream, inside there? Dreaming of doors, a long corridor, a way out.

People who are alone sometimes get a dog. So they have a reason to get up. To bathe it feed it talk to it play fetch chase sticks run with, to love.

If you cannot get love you can at least give it.

(DELLA)

holding it off all day                                                      Ken—why is he—

can’t breathe breath gone                                                         is he dead?

                                                                          has he ceased to love us?

                                                           no there is not much question there

listen! there’s some explanation

he’s broken his finger                                                bitten his tongue

no crying in the grocery store                    Kleenex in the freezer how kind

Gerald at the casket                                               he must have loved her

unless they had run down                           unless that was the problem

she killed herself because she was alone                   was going to be alone

but Toby, the darling

                
chicken, eggs / milk, cheese, yogurt / grapes, raisins

                     everything on this list becomes something else

                        everything that is becomes something else

Toby and his mother                                                  Hugh and his mother

no wonder Hugh and Ann were together          Ann is like Mimi used to be

all melodrama just because it’s icy doesn’t mean it isn’t    overblown

how is Jason coping—tough to have

Ann for a mother
    anything left to sit on in that house?

I can’t fix this                                                               Elly can’t imagine

I can’t jump in there with furniture                        Jason could live with us

Ann wouldn’t let him, she needs an audience   and now she’s got a boarder?

Elly says there’s never anything to eat in their fridge

can’t see Ann stoic in the grocery store

like ever-loving Saint Me

and Jack
gone now gone since Xmas, ten months                          
and Ken

but even then, Ann has not died of it

                                                                                         is it the same

                                                        no there is not much question there

4. HUGH WILL TAKE CARE OF IT

The basement has to be faced. Climbing the porch steps Hugh sees damp edges on the boards and remembers the night’s rain, the sluicing sound. He goes straight down the cellar stairs, not letting himself pause or turn to paying bills or other also distasteful but less horrible tasks.

It’s bad. The floor is wet. In the permadusk—have to get a better light down here—dark patches stain the sides of cardboard boxes, tidemark or spongemark.

Della’s stuff: he moved it up a shelf last time, it’s fine. The Parkers’ boxes, ceramics and soapstone; the stuff will be okay, but they’re heavy, the cardboard will give if he tries to move them. His mother’s extra furniture. Why is it down here, he asks himself unasking. Because the things are too good to give away; because she may still ask, What have you done?

What has Hugh done? The rosewood Eames lounge-chair ought to be upstairs, but the leather reeks of fifty years of Joy and cigarettes. Hugh hates it. Sell it, then! She’ll never know. He shifts it out of the path of a streamlet shining on dank cement. Boxes of china, old clothes: reshuffle, clear a wider path to the drain.

At the wall, Hugh’s heart sinks. Mighton’s boxes. Why did you leave them over here? Right in the line of damp down the wall. There will be mould. Awkward—the boxes will have to be opened to repack them. Even knowing Mighton for twenty years, thirty years, it will feel odd to paw through his things.

To paw, period. To own, to care for. To be a caretaker, to hold on to for others. Hugh steps in water and feels the slick slide of it, falls to one knee—saves himself, hurts his leg. Pants black-smeared. Now he’ll have to climb all those stairs to change. Twenty-eight stairs in all. This, it seems, is what sends him over the edge. He is separately dismayed, outside himself, to hear the sob.

Della’s long pale face peers down the stairs. “Yoo-hoo!”

“Don’t come down!” he shouts up. Wiping his face.

“Hugh? You okay? Hugh?” Della calls down, keeps calling, until he comes to the bottom step. “Did Ken call? Or text? I’m just wondering—I’m supposed to pick up Elle but …”

He tries to think. Ken. Can’t pull himself away from all this wreckage to remember what he’s supposed to know, supposed to say. Impatience sprouts like mould in his mind, fractalating, pixilating what he was thinking.

“I’ll be up in a sec,” he shouts. “Don’t come down, it’s a mess.”

He empties and replaces the buckets that stand under the windows, and goes up to get on the blower, on the horn. Get Dave the fuck over here to do something about the cracks, it’s got to be now, not next spring. Give him a piece of your mind, or get Ruth to. Ruthless.

As he emerges from the basement Della says, “Have you checked your upstairs phone?”

It so irritates him that she treats him this way, like a baby brother, like a son who needs reminding about every tiny thing—he can’t even answer. Has no idea what to say, anyway, not knowing whether or what exactly Ken has told Della about wanting to quit—

Her eyes, beseeching.

Why is it him who, he who,
yoo-hoo
, Hugh who has to deal with this?

“I haven’t done the poster copy,” she says, after a minute’s silence. “Or Mighton’s flyer. I will. Today. I’m going now.”

He hates that meekness of hers more than anything else.

But she can’t let it go. “I’m just—Ken—”

He is already up the stairs, motioning to his black-streaked pants.

“Have to change!” he calls backward, vanishing around the turn. “I’ll check, I’ll check.”

(L)

L leaves FairGrounds to run to school for Studio class—her mom forgot to pick her up, again. Late, going to be late, run. Frick
frick
, flick
flick
, legs click off distance, glad to go after too much pulling espresso, ex-presto, perfecto. Frick, school is weird, after homeschool, even only doing art and algebra. But one does need to get into art school next year, to get the hell out of here, and IB marks will make applications easier than a vomiting cascade of parent-based evaluations. Only, even with one’s coterie, getting to/hanging around at school sucks.

And always always always the panicky urge to go home and work on the
Republic
. At school she does not talk about it. Only Jason has seen it. She hasn’t even let her mom go through it and she believes, she does believe, her mom would not unless invited. Because it’s her work, her self. Her mom would not. Her dad would, probably, but he’s not that interested in art and probably fears to find what hellish interior thoughts she harbours. The nudes would make him stop looking, even though they are mostly just repro Voynich Manuscript–type ladies. Not all of them drawn from life. Only Nevaeh.

Last night, Nevaeh—can’t even talk even inside about that. Like fire, like dry ice, wanting to touch it, to see if it will burn you. To touch her mouth. A great canyon gapes between wanting/doing. If one does one small thing, or set of things, in a doze, in a daze, does that mean—? Silk armskin sliding, foreheads touched in fond embrace, is one then—?

Languid, head lolling over the edge of the bed, Nevaeh’s mouth upside down looks like another, other person’s mouth. Just as beautiful, but lighter, happier. (Onion-skin portrait for the
Republic
, upside down/right side up, two of them side by side. Or negatives …)

N—let N stand for the unknown—is what one wants
that moment
but but BUT. Then could one still talk to her? Or Jason? And Savaya, what about Savaya?

A wind, and Orion zips up beside L, slowing his silver bike to match her stride.

“Carry your fucking books, miss?”

L laughs and shows her empty hands, her douche-pack with brushes and pencils and phone.

They move on together, Orion balancing, easy. He is the easiest to be with. Knows himself, maybe. Orion is like Newell—who’s back in town, doing the master class.

“Excited for the master class, and Master—Burton?” she asks Orion.

“—bation,” he says, in unison. “Yeah. I have to pick up the lady, whoever, Mrs. Lovett. She’s staying at Jason’s.”

“I’ll go with you. We’re doing the cyclorama for the backdrop, me and Jason.”

“Art, Art! How lucky we all are,” Orion cries, going into paean mode, a long hand flung out over path and river. “To be at our glorious school—when compared to all other schools, even that ruling-class übermenschhaus Sheridan Tooley went to—really working, learning stuff that will be useful. Assholery and tomfoolery is everywhere, fine, that’s an education in itself. We’re good, we’re so
good
.”

Yet he looks keyed up, fearful underneath the joy. Underneath, everybody carries it. This earthcrack the voices come out of, this crater of sadness. Everyone does.

5. IF I WERE HUGH

At four p.m. Hugh pours himself a glass of wine, a civilized thing to do at a small gallery without much hope of selling anything on a Monday afternoon. Maybe he should get back on the ladder, do those lights.

Ruth walks in. Outside her working hours.

“Look what was in here,” she says, pulling a gloved fist out of her pocket. There’s that bright brown hundred. “I’m going to have to take this back. It’s too much to keep—I’d be stealing it from the Clothes Closet. Those Mennonites do such good work.”

Hugh pours a little more malbec and offers to make Ruth a coffee. He drains his glass, standing at the espresso machine in the framing room.

“Nice jacket,” he calls back into the office.

“Well, it does fit,” she says, smoothing her cuff. “Lucky day already, even without the extra.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think you ought to keep that.” Spurs his sputtering brain to think of why. “It’s like it was meant. You’ve been looking at that jacket for so long … It was your luck, waiting for you.”

“Lucky for the Clothes Closet it was me that bought it, because
some
of the people in there would not think of giving that money back, and you know who I mean.”