Eerie. The smell of a school still has the power, the power of voodoo, to make Ivy feel like she’s got bad cramps and ugly clothes and no lunch money.
She got up early and dressed with care, but now—semi-costumed in a lantern-shaped black papercloth skirt (forty-eight bucks on eBay!) with a wide black belt, a shawl in her bag to bundle in when they start work—she sees the folly of herself in the double glass fire doors. Tiny squares of wire inside the glass divide her into a plump graph of old and hopeless.
“This is none of I,” she thinks. Then, yipes, hears herself saying it out loud.
I am short and eccentric, she says to herself interiorly: yes, old. But that’s no reason to squirm or shrink. Her carriage corrects and she enters the long hall feeling buoyed. Her boots help. Nice little lace-ups, just enough heel to give a person a boost.
The hall is crowded, full of kids writing and painting on the walls. No curse words or blatant nude parts, although from psychedelic-hued mayhem the odd cock-and-balls or parti-coloured breasts emerge, and Dinner Party–type vaginas. Ladders line the long corridor. Ivy is careful of aluminum legs, jutting higgledy-piggledy. Children of various sizes and ages swarm up and down, lithe and loud. A graffiti festival, or impressive mass disobedience?
Here’s the window to the drama lab. Bare fluorescent brilliance. There’s Newell’s head of burnished gold. Perfect. She takes a quick breath to feel air flood into her back, bobs her head like a horse accepting the bridle, and goes in.
Burton on the left, deep in conversation with drama head guy, Terry. Newell on the right, being swooned over by drama sub-head, Terry’s wife, also named Terry. Terry & Terry, they used to shout in the dressing room at the Equity Showcase Ivy did with them at Harbourfront in the earliest nineties. TerryTown! Two-gether, Four-ever! Not for actual ever, though, turns out. They’ll be divorced by Christmas, if the paperwork goes through.
Ivy resolves, in the instant before truly entering the room, to have a great day. This skirt really is ideal for Mrs. Lovett. “I love it,” she says, as an affirmation.
“We love it too!” Burton cries in welcome. His punched eye is a putrid shape, a puffed, purple pear. Now he will have no choice but to look askance, so she won’t have to hate him for doing it for effect. “Dear Ivy—already in a garment! But you won’t get to work for quite some time yet,” he says, patting her arm.
Early this morning, lying peacefully awake in the solitary whiteness of her sloping room, Ivy resolved—strongly resolved—to be kinder. To treat everyone around her with respect, to find what good there is in people. So now she brings her gaze to bear on Burton’s puffball eye and thinks kindly and respectfully of Hugh popping in such a solid juggernaut of a punch. She gives Burton a wide, loving smile meant for Hugh and sits at the empty space mid-table, where a folder awaits her.
He-Terry explains the entrance chaos, condescending yet hiply enthusiastic. “Not an insurrection, ha ha. The front half of the school is being demolished next summer, so we’ve got a mural project on to paint it up. A fundraiser, of course.”
She-Terry: “Each and every student is participating, not just the art students, it’s truly, truly exciting. They’ve been tweeting the whole thing and the Facebook page has over eighty Likes, and we’ve got CTV coming on Friday to—” Burton’s tidy tamping on the table stops her. She sits, stage-whispering, “My hobby horse!” and lets the meeting begin.
Terry Mr. starts it off: agenda, schedule, tech details, pausing for questions from Burton. Terry Mrs. breaks in a couple of times to assert her authority over movement/voice/dance matters. She’s gained and lost a good deal of weight over the last few years, and Ivy thinks (finding the good) that she looks just great right now. Misery being the best diet. Even Ivy herself is on the downward slide these days, though technically, factually single. And soon to have her apartment all to herself.
As will Mrs. Terry, unless she keeps the house. Ivy’s seen their house. Leaded panes and a frothy, grownover English garden, which seems to be Terry’s obsession. What he probably calls his passion. No doubt Terry will insist on him moving out.
“Do you think?” Burton says, louder, as if he’s said it before. Is that a stink-eye he’s giving her, or just the swelling? Oh, he’s asked her a question. She’s got nothing—not the faintest tinge of an idea what they’ve been talking about. She looks sideways to Newell, but his eyes are downcast. Ah, he’s texting below the lip of the table.
Back to Burton. “Perfect,” she says, nodding, as if after quiet consideration.
That seems to do the trick. They ramble on, this teacher/artist session going till three, when the students will arrive for the first master class.
A very faint crease lines Newell’s cheek, barely deepening. The smallest of smiles curves his perfect mouth, and his fingers work again on the hidden phone.
Burton’s satisfied voice glides on, slippery cadences skating over the polished table. Ivy takes the cap off her highlighter, ticks items on her agenda, starts with well-acted dismay, and checks her bag. She lifts her hand in delicate supplication, and Burton pauses.
Slipping into the pause, almost mouthing it: “Sorry, I’ve left my—in the car—I’ll be—” She’s out the door. She has a gift for mobility, for sudden, courteous vanishings, refined over thirty years of rehearsals and calls and tech dresses and casting conferences.
Out, out, outside, out the side door with the bar on it. Although clearly marked ALARM WILL SOUND, she noticed kids going out this door last night. It opens in silence.
Her car, half a block down, is perfectly safe. Her phone (a mere excuse) is here in her bag. But she has nobody to call, nobody to text or dimple for.
Only Hugh. Dinner. That’s going to be a treat.
Patient, distressed eyes, the plane of his cheek, the open smile that seemed a little under-used. That punch! A gallery. I don’t know much about art. But she knows what she likes: she likes Hugh. If I had his number, I’d call, she thinks.
Deeper in her bag, his card.
ARGYLLE (and below, the same letters rearranged, spidery traces showing how)
GALLERY
She laughs as the phone rings.
“Hello?” A woman. Dang.
“May I speak to Hugh?”
Then nothing. What? “Um, is this … the gallery?”
“Oh! Yes, Argylle Gallery!” The woman sounds bothered, as if correcting a fault.
“May I speak to Hugh? to Mr., um, Argylle?” Ivy feels her cheeks heat, blushing. Once in high school she called a boy, got his Ukrainian grandmother instead, and couldn’t make herself understood. She is swept back to seventeen.
“To who? To Hugh?”
“Tu-wit, tu-woo!” Ivy says, idiotically. Swept back to seven, now, and Brownies.
A pause. “Hugh’s at the hospice,” the woman says, without reproach. “I could take a note?”
“Perfect. If you could say we’re still on for this evening, that would be— He said the Duck and Cover, but I can’t find it on Google.”
“Oh hoo-hoo-hoo!” the woman says, her laugh just like that. “Hoo-hoo! No no, that’s the Hooded Falcon, the pub over on George, by the river, but people here …”
“Oh! Right, I’ve seen that sign.”
The woman is still talking. “I could get him to give you a call when he gets back?”
“I’m afraid I’m working and I can’t … It’s all right, now I know it’s the, the Falcon, so if I—” Inside Burton will be coming to the boil. “Goodbye!”
The alarmed door will not open from the outside. Ivy has to go all the way down the block to the front door. But it is a lovely day for a walk. Even Pink, pouncing out of the office to show off the mural, can’t prick her mood’s balloon. She wards off a tiny teenager swinging around a long-legged ladder, and heads back into purgatory.