You can bear pain. Hugh can. But you can’t stand to see it in others. It makes your hands and feet hurt. The grey room is full of grey people in various stages of pain. A little party: grouped by the window, sitting on the bed, ten or twelve of them. A woman kneeling by the nightstand says, It’s all up to you, up to Hugh. Her cloudy hair, her dress in tatters. No.
No. It’s a dream.
Eyes open.
Light? No. Three a.m. 3:02.
Okay.
3:07.
Hugh can bear pain. For himself it’s not so bad, sometimes he doesn’t even notice it. Hard when it’s someone you can’t help, though. Your mother. Cloudy hair all wisps and tendrils now. No. Don’t think about Mimi, her hands, the pale phosphorescent skin of her chest, her searching eyes.
If you had a child, could you stand that? There’s a question for you, for Hugh: why didn’t you have a child? Okay, Ann had that abortion in the eighties. But that was somebody else’s baby, Hugh is pretty sure. By then Ann was disconnecting herself from him by connecting with a few other people. You couldn’t blame her, it was the times; women felt they had to be libertines in order to be liberated, and there was a fair amount of cocaine going around. He walked in on Ann once, having sex with some guy on a pile of coats at a party. Humiliating, titillating, to see her riding a set of naked limbs. Lots of reasons for shame. Hugh never even saw who it was—the guy pulled a coat over his face against the sudden light, and Hugh turned and left. That tawdry little pain hits again, a bee-sting of stupidity.
Why remember things at all.
Hugh lies in the dark, listening to the night’s last rain falling straight into the basement of the gallery he lives above. Where valuable things are stored, furniture and boxes he ought to have moved, other people’s art. He’s tired of rain and basements and responsibility.
Della and Ken for dinner on Saturday, with Ruth—he should ask Newell too, but can’t bear the burden of Burton, Newell’s house guest. Della and Ken: that’s a mess.
Think of something else: what to make for Ruth? Trivial, tepid, time-taking thought, a treat for old Ruth. She likes seafood crêpes. Okay, not rolled, but stacked like layer cake. Frozen crab, not that reeking stuff from the truck they had last time. Fresh? Liars! said Ruth.
The first time he was sent to live with her, four years old, confused, he thought they said to call her Aunt Truth. Newell waiting with him, waiting for their mothers to come back: two boys side by side at the long white table, watching Ruth laugh as she stood stirring at the stove, laughing at something Jasper said. Jasper flirting in his peacocky shirt, gesturing with his glass—he didn’t even drink too much, back then. When was that? 1969. Warm and safe in Ruth’s foster-kitchen, those boys, backs against fake ivy-covered bricks on washed-clean vinyl wallpaper. Ivy in pots too, growing, growing, shining green, kind and clean.
Almost asleep again, Hugh wakes. Clean towels, nobody lying, nobody angry, nobody going off the rails. Della waiting with them too, the next year, after her mother’s breakdown. At the kitchen table, Della making a sandwich: square cheese, square white bread. The only thing she would eat at Ruth’s. That time, anyway.
Ken didn’t float into view till they were in university. Floating out again now? Doozy of an anniversary dinner, if so.
Yesterday at their house, Della was playing the piano. Hugh’s mother’s piano, already moved out of what will be, has to be—what turns out to have been her last apartment.
No. Go back. Yesterday, Hugh stood at the bottom of the short flight of stairs in Ken and Della’s front hall, listening. Suspended rippling phrases. Schumann? Getting good again, now she has Mimi’s Steinway. Della staring at the music, head tilted; the face of a dear horse, the same since childhood. From that low angle through the banisters, he could see her daughter, Elle, lying under the grand piano, painting Della’s toenails with bright pink polish.
His empty life. Della and her daughter.
The woman and her little son; the funeral in the morning.
Hugh has pretty much stopped sleeping. He naps in the evening, put down by half a bottle of wine; wakes at midnight. Up for a few hours, naps again around four a.m. The phone alarm shouts him up at six. Every morning he thinks, behind glued-shut eyelids, you should change that setting. Every morning he lies there saying no, no. You have to get up.
There’s the gallery to attend to.
At night the apartment above the gallery is a ship in fog, a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. Wooden shelves and floors, plank deck stretched out over the framing room roof at the back, overhung by trees. In the early morning it’s a form of tree-burial, and he gets out fast.
The espresso machine stands by the sink in the framing room. He gimps down the back stairs on stiff bare feet, pokes the button. A grinding noise. The red light blinks: out of water. Always something. The stupid thing cost more than a fridge, and now he has to keep filling it up. He takes the latte (milk only faintly sour) to his desk and sits staring at the earth’s crust of bills, papers, orders. Dusty red files with pathetic labels like NOW! or DO THIS WEEK.
He has to get moving. At least get dressed. The sun has come out. At FairGrounds, the coffee shop next door, a shining young girl is whacking mats against the porch post, sending dust whirling up into a devil. Della’s Elle? Or one of the friends. She can’t see into the gallery, he hasn’t turned on the lights. But he can see her shadow perfectly: a perfect shadow. Elle, yes. Aureole of pale hair in sunrise, sunrays. Another one joins her—they lean on the railing, nymphs just out of the larval stage. The other one is dark, makes Elle look like a negative. Savannah—no, this one’s Nivea, Nevaya, something invented—it’s Nevaeh (middle name Lleh ha ha). One kisses the other’s cheek. Their limbs are long like the lines of broom and rail. Diagonals, perpendiculars.
Della will be in soon to thrash out the text for January’s class poster. Kids’ classes, et cetera, Introduction to Watercolours. Okay, but Ian Mighton’s collage master class starts next week—get the flyer finished for that. Hugh himself is doing Self-Portrait, again.
And the funeral is at ten.
Well, that’s okay, he hardly knew the woman. The little boy, though. Sad.
The empty room, the cup in front of him, his feet on the worn boards, the blinding window hiding him safe from view, his hermit shell upstairs: Hugh feels dizzy, as if the building is his mind, as if the whole world around him—the dead woman and her little son, Mighton coming, Della’s Elle, non-Elle Nevaeh—all these who ought to be tangible are only instances of his ingenious mind inventing ways to occupy itself.
Last night until it rained he lay out on the deck above the framing room, wrapped in the old afghan Ruth made, under shifting shadows of branches, imagining a painting he will never paint. He can still see, or sense, it: the scale of it, the intricacy of the thinking. But he will not be able to execute it in paint or in collage, or by the xeroxing of the great.
The coffee is gone, it’s eight. Get dressed. Grey tie, jacket.
Ruth’s stomp on the front step, her key in the lock. Hugh is already hidden, hurrying halfway up the stairs. Can’t bring himself to call out good morning.
The funeral, okay. Time to go. Here’s Della, climbing the gallery steps in her good black coat, bright paisley lining firmly unrevealed. Sober, not distressed; black chiffon wrapped round her neck, black hair bound up above it. Fine funereal turnout, for someone they hardly knew. Two years of Saturday parent/child painting classes—the mother seemed very nice.
“Such a bright little spark, Toby,” Della says. “He’d try anything. Not even five yet. Never minded glue on his hands, as some do.” Her expressive face falls into a clowning sadness, but not to mock. She pulls her coat sleeve across the morning-dusty counter, then slaps at the sleeve. “Ken can’t come—he’s team-building, a couple of days rappelling down Elora Gorge or some fool thing.”
Uncomfortable, knowing more than she does, Hugh doesn’t answer.
He flips the sign to Back Soon and locks the door. Ruth has run over to the Mennonite Clothes Closet to check on the coat she wants; they’ll go on ahead. It’s okay, there are no customers.
“How did Gerald find them, did you hear?” Della asks Hugh as they go stride for stride.
“Ruth says he came home from work and opened the garage door as usual. The groceries were still in the back of the car. Melted ice cream.”
“She never seemed anything but cheerful, in class.”
Hugh tries to remember the woman. Brown hair, worried eyes, a tidy little bundle in the back of the classroom, a fond hand on her son’s head.
“They were old,” Della says. “She was nearly fifty. They tried for ages to have Toby, Gerald told me once. He looks terrible, I saw him in Lucky Foods yesterday, wandering the aisles.”
“Ruth cleaned for them—she says it was postpartum, only it never stopped.”
“Gerald had no idea, none in the world.”
“You know him outside of class?”
“We bought the car from him last year, I guess that counts. And he came to class, about half the time. He was so proud of the shared parenting thing. She’s from—she was from Iowa. Missed her family, maybe? Or just tired of always coping …”
They turn up Oak Street.
Della slides her hand through Hugh’s arm. “It might have been an accident … She gets home from shopping and stops for a little nap, forgetting all about carbon monoxide. I did it myself, when Elly was little—sat in the car for a while when we got home, because she was asleep and I knew if I took her out of the carseat she’d wake up and start crying. We just didn’t have a garage to get gassed in—”
She breaks off as they join a small stream of walkers funnelling into the churchyard. Leaning closer to Hugh, she whispers, “He was such a nice little boy. Not difficult at all.”
Inside the church Gerald lurches down the aisle, huge in a grey suit, the too-friendly salesman’s cheer ironed out of his eyes. Sedated, Hugh supposes.
Gerald kisses Della’s cheek, shakes hands. “It would mean so much to her that Hugh came,” he tells Della.
Hooked on his own name, Hugh’s ear checks, then fixes his error: the poor man only said “that you came.”
But his mind sticks on it as he follows Della along a pew. How much would it mean to her? Did she close the garage door thinking, This will be good, Hugh will come. They’ll all come to the church, Gerald will be such a great host …
Stop. They don’t know that she did it on purpose. Maybe she was just tired. Drove into the garage and dozed; didn’t sit there thinking, I can’t, I cannot do this anymore. Maybe she was not in terrible, terrible pain, the kind of pain that cannot be endured, the kind that you beg your son for release from, over and over.
over the lawn beside the gallery (last shadows of last leaves shudder in
small wind, ashes) will they burn the boy’s body? (small ash grit)
into FairGrounds, say hi to Elly
(my mother’s twelve identical canvases lined up around the room, strict
economical palette, fishing boat after boat after boat after boat after boat
after boat after boat after boat boat boat boat—is that twelve yet?—all
those boats paid the mortgage, who knows how they managed,
Dad sad in the Barcalounger all night, unable to shift or go up the stairs)
at least Elly never has that to deal with
sad smell of his clothes the pity of him eyes closed in late afternoon
a cup of tea for his throat with whiskey in it
can’t even look at poor old Jasper now close my eyes against it
nothing could have made me close Elly’s eyes forever, nothing
Elly at the counter, who loved me more than anything,
nothing in her eyes for me now
how can love be gone, that giant ardent unbearable passionate love, gone?
the light in her face under the skin when she talks with Nevaeh, smiling as
she pulls the lever, the scream of the frother covering what she says
turn away so as not to read her lips, she deserves a private life
how rough a time she’s having—is the pain only from living, the pity of
it, or from some failing of mine or Ken’s?
dear love, the mouth tugging at the breast and smiling, dancing in the
bedroom, nothing sweeter, so open between us it could never be closed
and yet here it is, gone
(hollow piece under the breastbone, how to do that in clay? how to get at
that pocket of air there.… identical, symmetrical, twelve boats, hull and
prow laid down in a figure eight, pencil on blue-washed canvas, paint in
patches, paint-by-number, torn postcard)
and Ken—where is he really? has he left us?
never mind never mind
if he is gone I will have the bed to myself and my thoughts
what passes for thoughts
nothing in my head but eyes