Close to Hugh (5 page)

Ivy takes a breath.

She’s so lucky to get this, a broad, airy bedroom in a pleasant house by the river. For a month-long artist residency, the school won’t keep her in a hotel. The other offer is the drama teachers’ spare room, but their marriage is coming apart and Ivy can’t bear fighting. This place is perfect. An old family house built in the thirties, substantial, stained glass, inlaid floors, front and back staircases. But only two people living in it, a woman and her son, in grade twelve at the school.

The woman, the owner of the house—
Ann
, and Jason is the son—Ann walks to the window and tries to open it; for air, or to show Ivy a silver knife of river coming up beside the house, but it seems stuck. Ivy’s window (hers already) looks over the short driveway. The tree outside has lost half its leaves, but the black branches are pretty. The glass is spotless.

Perfect, Ivy thinks. Her ill-arranged life back in Toronto is dirty, upsetting, and crammed full of stuff. This is so clean and bare—an empty bookshelf, an empty dresser, an empty bed.

“There’s an ensuite,” the woman—
Ann, Ann
—says. She opens the door to display white tiles, a bevelled window over the bathtub. “This used to be the master. Before. Jason’s dad left us, last Christmas, but we’re getting over it.” She’s blonde, a bob cut straight across and dragged behind her ears. Minimalist hair. “He was in management at the Quaker plant, he ran off with his secretary. Like a fifties movie.”

She draws her thumb along her bottom lip to lock her mouth closed. Then she says, “It’s a new mattress.”

“Well, that’s—perfect,” Ivy says. “Ann.”

Ann takes her cheque and goes away.

The inlet of river spears right up into the side garden. Here, close by the window, Ivy can see it lapping, happy at the brink. Yellow kayak belly-down against a silvered old stepladder, black steps cut into the green bank of grass. The boy must use it. Or maybe that’s Ann’s shirt flung to dry across the yellow. Ivy tries the window again, but nope. It is painted stuck, three inches up. A flap in the storm window lifts to reveal three round ventilation holes, a slight breath of air. Ivy presses her face against wavering glass to see the real river’s edge. Railway ties brace the bank; the river floods every year, Ann said. Perfect, Ivy tells herself. If it floods, the kayak will float up to my sill—I need a chisel to pry this window open—and I’ll paddle away. Somehow managing to screw myself into the kayak without flipping upside down.

She lets the curtain fall and listens. Down the hall, the boy, the son is laughing, cackling. Sounds like he’s practising laughing. Not much to laugh about in this strange vacant house. The living room downstairs is entirely empty. No chairs, not even a carpet. Bare fireplace, hearth and innards stark black. Not one picture. Ann’s aesthetic “embraces austerity.”

In her hollowed-out, hallowed-up bedroom, the empty space, the holy, Ivy sits on the bed for a little while—planning, in spite of herself, what to put on the empty shelves.

Next, back to the school office to sign forms and get keys. She walks along reading
Arms and the Man
, for relief from
Sweeney Todd
. A car horn blats beside her, and she jumps.

It’s the school principal—Rosy, Jeep, Cherry—Jerry Pink. “Want a lift?”

“Oh, thanks,” Ivy says. “That would be—perfect.” She feels sad to leave the leaf-strewn sidewalk. “Pretty town,” she says, with some idea of flattering Mr. Pink by extension.

“Full of divorcées.” Eyes on her, not on the road. He laughs. “You always read a book while you’re walking? Better not let our parents see you doing that.”

Ivy does not need to ask why not: it looks weird. She doesn’t mind.

“Party at my house tonight, after Meet the Teacher—we hand out the teaching awards from last year. Newell is coming, and the great Ansel
Burton, all you drama types. Come along and get acquainted. I’ll send a kid to pick you up.”

He swings into the drive by the portables. Pats her leg, staring to see if that causes trouble. Ivy stares back at him using her Downs’ syndrome face, borrowed from her last gig, an interactive improv workshop production for the differently abled, one of the best things she’s ever done in her life. I am completely unaware of you as a man, and therefore not prey, her face says. Plus, see? I am ugly. She steps out of the car.

He laughs again. “No more reading books while you walk!” he shouts as he pulls away.

The world is so full of men, no wonder there are so many divorcées.

Ivy walks home in the late afternoon. A long walk in sprinkling rain; she should have taken her car after all. The woman (Ann,
Ann
is her name; and Jay?—no, the son is Jason) is moving a big armoire out of the living room. The last piece of furniture left in there. With a mat under one end, Ann is yanking it along foot by foot.

Ivy can’t get up the stairs until the thing is shifted. “Do you need help?”

“I learned how after the divorce,” Ann says. “You can move anything you want to by yourself.”

“Where are you putting it?”

“Out.”

Ivy steadies the other end and pushes. Not too much, so she’s not butting in and helping. They make some headway.

The son—
Jason
, yes—blows in like leaves drifting through the front door. He slides through the armoire gap and up the stairs, completely silent, dragging a gym bag, a naked dressmaker’s judy, and two neon-orange puffed down jackets. The kind that make Ivy look like a cozy beach ball.

“I cleaned out a shelf of the fridge for you,” his mother says.

Jason ignores her, rounds the stair-turn, vanishes. Are he and Ann not talking? Oh, wait—she means for Ivy, for
her
food. Ivy has not bought any yet.

“Where’s the store?”

“Three blocks west to the Lucky Dollar, or drive to the mall for Superstore.”

“I’ll shop tomorrow,” Ivy says. Feeling forlorn.

“Eat with us tonight, if you want.”

Ann is not asking very nicely, but Ivy says thanks, perfect—then goes up to her room to look at her empty shelves. The lovely emptiness, bare wood, clean walls.
So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen
. The thought of her apartment, and its tenant, makes her feel sad and sick.

When Ann calls up the stairs, “Dinner! Jason?” there’s no answer from the boy’s room. Ivy sticks her head out into the hall and waits. Smells like spaghetti down there.

No response, nothing.

“Jason!” Ann’s voice comes shrilling up again. Then, “Ivy? Will you tell him dinner? He’s got his headphones on.”

Ivy slips down the hall and knocks on Jason’s door, too lightly. Again, louder, to penetrate the headphones. Still nothing.

She hesitates, not wanting to find him in an embarrassing situation, then turns the knob and opens it into a blizzard of white, a floating storm of airy nothing swirling away from the door’s gust of air. Jason gapes, delighted, head up and mouth open as if to catch a snowflake of down.

“It just—it just—!” He pulls the white lines and pops his earbuds out, trying to tell her.

“Exploded?”

“Ex
plo—!
I just, I slid the knife—” He motions with an X-Acto knife along the orange nylon of a jacket, and another eddy of down swoops up in the breeze the motion makes. “I didn’t know—I didn’t think it would do this!”

For the first time he looks alive. Down begins to settle on his dark mink hair, on the brightness of his suddenly open face, and Ivy cannot help but be uplifted.

8. HUGH GETS EATEN

Hugh walks over to Meet the Teacher with Newell and Burton, although it nearly kills him. Strung up with the strain of dinner and Newell’s announcement, he finds it hard to endure Burton’s self-important spiel to the drama students’ parents, all seeking reassurance that the master class is worth the after-school hours and the two hundred dollar fee. A précis of the brilliance of Sondheim, the use of Stanislavskian ensemble in musical theatre, tra la la, history of Burton’s brilliance, theatres he’s graced, actors privileged to have worked under him, more on Burton’s brilliance. Questions?

Parent after parent stands to ask if their offspring will have a significant role, or a solo, apparently not listening to Burton’s repetitive ramble re:
emphasis on company
, collaborative philosophy, exploratory work, and “nothing set in stone.”

Newell is not contracted, except as eye candy, for this parent event. Once he’s been introduced, and has waved and grinned for the crowd, he slides away and stands with Hugh in the shadows by the back wall. Just like junior high. “He’s happy,” Newell says.

“In his element,” Hugh says. It’s hard, but vital, not to sulk.

“You surprised?”

What can you say to that? Hugh tries, “I hadn’t realized he was looking for a harbour.” Even that sounds petulant.

Newell leans closer. “He’s had a rough couple of years. His lover, a—well, they went to Bali for treatment, but it didn’t work. Not AIDS, some kind of cancer.”

Hugh assumes that Newell helped to finance that.

“It went very badly at the end and they were stuck there because, oh you know, all the shit and horrors. He died in June. It was a fish cure or something spiritual.”

Newell’s brown leather bomber jacket smells good. Old, real, like himself. The Hermès cologne nobody else wears. Alexander the Great also
smelled good, apparently. After he died men fought over his clothes. At least, so Plutarch says. Newell is fastidious and definite about his person, but not vain; the cleanest human being Hugh’s ever known.

“Anyway. He’s happy now.” Newell knocks the wood panel behind them.

Hugh ought to have said that. He ought to agree with it. His teeth are bothering him; his tongue searches for a lodged scrap of wagyu beef.

At last, speeches over, they proceed to Principal Pink’s palace. The streets are dark, heading into the older, richer neighbourhood along the riverbank. Cold late October wind cuts the evening air and from time to time Hugh catches a gold leaf falling from the maples overhead. It’s quiet here, empty, Monday night.

He ought to be with Mimi at the hospice. Turn left at this corner.… But he trudges straight along anyway, beside or behind Newell and Burton.

Mincing on subtly heeled boots, zipped up tight in an unbecoming black leather jacket (which—here’s one consolation—is too ill-chosen to have been a gift from Newell), Burton is elevated, excited to be the Master of the Class. His old conceited self, only more so. Burton sucks up intimacy. It’s not enough for him to walk with his arm through Newell’s, he has to be in on every moment of conversation, vitally involved, or else he pouts and pulls away—but he pouts without letting go that arm, so Newell still has to soothe him. All the walks with Burton Hugh can remember. When they were boys at drama camp, Burton the Artist in Residence. Even then. Burton in those days gleaming, hard-bodied, like a shining tropical turtle, knowing and talented and bold, on his way up. Before the Public, and the thing at Yale.

“
The history of the world, my sweet, oh, Mr. Todd, ooh, Mr. Todd
,” Burton carols, crack-tenored, zimming along the leaf-strewn sidewalk,
“is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat!”
He skips. “Won’t we have a magnificent month,” he says, clasping Newell’s arm tighter as they turn up the walk of a large Victorian house.

Pink’s place: peach paint, picked out in peony, and yellow gingerbread.

Hugh stays out on the veranda for a few minutes, hoping his temper will cool down. It’s hard not to think that Burton ought to be killed. But of course that’s not a useful thought, so you stop yourself. Hugh stops.

9. I’VE TOLD EVERY LITTLE STAR

Jason goes to answer the doorbell, bowl of spaghetti in hand. Ivy guesses he doesn’t dare put it down or his mother will clean it away. He looks like he never gets enough to eat.

A boy he calls Orion comes back with him. Orion is courteous, explains himself: sent to escort Ivy to the drama party. He must be one of
them
. Touchingly good-looking, in an unfinished, over-exposed way. Flax-blond hair cut over his ears to odd effect. A princeling.

“Orion, like the constellation?” He nods, politely patient, and Ivy is sorry she asked. She might have joked about his belt; that would have been worse.

All the boys are tall these days, she feels like a pigeon walking among them. But having recently realized, at the age of forty-six, that she looks like Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, she decides to feel good about that. A jewelled pigeon on a mild strut.

Jason tells his mother, “We’re supposed to help at Pink’s for work experience.”

“Oh.” Ann looks put out. “I guess. I’ll pick you up at nine.”

“Might be later. Elle’s going too.”

“You have a bio quiz tomorrow.”

“Ten.”

Ivy finds this telegraph bargaining fascinating: the longest stretch of words she has yet heard them exchange. Ann concedes. Her head bows over her spaghetti. She twines two strands on her fork, threading round, round, round, without lifting it to her mouth.

Jason flies up the stairs. Ivy follows, needing a better coat. Not for warmth, for armour. Ansel Burton doesn’t like her, and besides, he’s crazy, maybe even psychotic. Newell is kind, but only an acquaintance. Not a night she’s looking forward to. Not a
month
she’s looking forward to. But the four thousand bucks, yes—more godsend than windfall. And the
solitude. She could stay up in the empty room, say she’s sick. A migraine. She closes the closet door on her few things and looks around at the nothing that is not there. The nothing that is.

Three teenagers fill the car, a battered Civic hatchback, pretty much to bursting. Jason gives her a quick glance as she opens the door; the other two stare straight ahead. The young know: eye contact contaminates.

“Perfect—so, I think I’ll take my own car,” Ivy says. “I’ll follow you.”

All three of them nod. Then the girl in the front (Elle?) unfolds herself, plucks a bag from between the seats, and scrambles out. “I’ll go with you, so you don’t get lost.”