Gerald is back, flipping through prints. He shouldn’t be, it’s ten in the morning. He has a Saab dealership to run. Hugh watches as he straightens up and wanders through the two long rooms of the gallery, hands locked behind his back. Nosing close to some pieces, standing back from others—the connoisseur at work, determining value and possibly, God knows, cadence.
Della dives in the back door, straight to the espresso machine. “Want one?” she calls, before she realizes that there’s anyone else in the gallery. Her voice changes, major to minor. “Oh, hi—hi, Gerald. Do you … coffee?”
Gerald looks up, his eyes not focusing. “No,” he says. “No thanks, no.”
They regard him.
“No,” he says. “I’ve had my java for the day. I know my limit. Joe’s a good servant, but a bad master.” Dissociated, almost disembodied.
Della nods. Gerald nods. He turns and goes out the door. Back to work, perhaps.
She turns to look at Hugh, who shrugs. “Is that happening often?”
“Twice yesterday, Ruth says. First time this morning.”
The grinding noise, the coffee machine starting—Della races to put a cup under the spout for the self-clean cycle. “They were always so happy, it seemed to me. With their last-minute surprise. Maybe it was too much, physically. She was forty-eight when Toby was born.”
Mimi was twenty-eight when I was born, Hugh thinks. Pretending to be eighteen.
Della is still talking about Gerald’s wife, whose name Hugh has forgotten. “She was so good, so patient. I just don’t understand it.”
Hugh says, “Don’t have to understand it, because we are not responsible for Gerald. He’s not a friend of mine. I don’t want any more friends.” Any more grief.
Della comes back with an espresso in a glass. She raises it, to ask if he wants it.
He shakes his head. “He keeps coming to the gallery last thing in the evening.”
“Every day?”
“If he wants to buy art, as consolation, Hugh am I to say no?”
She is pulling out her phone, checking, blanking it again. She is always fucking doing that while you’re trying to talk … Hugh stops.
You can’t be angry, not with Della.
“I looked at my messages,” he says. He lies. “None from Ken.”
The phone rings. He stares at it. Ken? Well, he can leave another message.
But Della picks it up. “Argylle Gallery,” she says, in a professional way; too bad Ruth is not there to hear. Ruth is upstairs giving Hugh’s bathroom a serious clean, her mission for the morning. He fights with her about this, but the bathroom shines—he just deposits an extra cheque in her account. So far, he’s getting away with that.
Della hands him the phone. “Ann,” she whispers. “On the warpath.”
Must have figured out about him and Ivy, Hugh thinks, blushing. Into the phone, expansively, he says, “Hi, Ann!” Bracing himself.
Della rolls her eyes and ducks out the door, goodbye.
“You have to talk to him,” Ann says. He knows that hysterical note. Talk to Jack? Hugh’s insides twist at the thought. But that’s not it. “I went into Jason’s closet to find my leather coat, and there was a magazine. More than one, a stack of them, all—”
This is uncomfortable. “You know, that’s what teenage boys do. Look at magazines.”
“Hugh, you don’t—the degrading—you can’t imagine. Listen, listen to me—some of these are—I can’t tell you— I don’t know where he even got them, they’re old, they’re filthy. Ugh! Playboy, Juggs with two Gs, Modern Man …”
“Really? I thought that one was—”
“Twelve issues, in plastic sleeves.”
“Well—” (Vintage. That figures. He’s a little surprised, in fact, that they are hetero mags. He had wondered which way Jason’s cat would jump.)
“It’s not, they’re not—the whole— How any boy, any son, can look at those disgusting images, those obscene, filthy, those—”
She’s going off the deep end, it seems to Hugh. “Ann, Ann, wait—they’re not that bad.”
“You don’t know. You can’t imagine.”
“Actually, I can.”
“My father—my own father— You know, Hugh, you know what this does to me. I have to— I can’t, I need you to talk to him. I need a man to talk to him.”
“Not this. I can’t do that. I’m not his dad, Ann.”
Her voice rises to a half-shriek. “And where is his fucking father?”
“Look, it’s just not something you can do to a teenaged boy, you can’t—”
“Hugh, you can. Please. Jason needs you,” she says.
“What am I supposed say to him?”
“Tell him that men—that loving, good men who love women don’t need those things, that they’re creepy and disgusting, that pornography is rape, is abuse, that the women in them are slaves to the patriarchy, that—” She stops herself.
He waits. She can’t keep silent for long.
“Are you saying no? You won’t?”
“I can’t. You can’t do that to him,” Hugh says. “It’s a delicate thing. It’s something private. You— I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t have been in his closet.”
“My coat!”
“You shouldn’t keep your coats in his closet. You’ve got lots of room in your own—” He stops, remembering that she’s moved out of the master bedroom.
“You and Della! You think you can come around here and tell me how to live, how to raise my child,” she says, a low, concentrated fury.
“No, not at all.”
“Hugh, I need you. I ask you to do this one, this one important thing for me. Because I don’t have anybody else. Because you used to love me.”
“You have to let him keep his dignity. He’s a teenaged—”
“You’re all treating me like an air-headed, panicky mom because, because I’ve been making a—making an authentic statement with the house. I’m not—”
He breathes away from the phone so she won’t hear him sighing.
“I can tell you, Hugh, there’s not much about porn that I don’t know, I know way more than you do about it, for one thing, and I know this stuff is bad for him.”
“Listen,” he says. “I know you want to do what’s right. I’m telling you, in this case you don’t—you can’t humiliate him this way. It’s just not fair.”
“Fuck you, and fuck Della too. Is she listening? Tell her that for me.”
Hearing the dial tone on her end, he hangs up.
Phew.
The bell tings on the door: Gerald, back? Hugh honestly can’t look at him again. No, Newell comes through the door, tinkling the bell again with a graceful swat above his head. “Coffee, need coffee—”
“That’s FairGrounds you’re looking for. Next door,” Hugh says.
“Need company. Need you.”
Ruth comes down the back staircase, always alert to Newell’s ins and outs. She gives him a big smile, but shows Hugh a stoplight hand. “You can’t. Hugh can’t, Newell! You have to see Conrad, Hugh.”
Fuck me, Hugh thinks. Please. Just hit me on the head again and let me rest.
“Coffee,” he says, and ushers Newell out. But he throws back to Ruth, because it is not fair to tease her, “Conrad is later, there’s time.”
He still has the last box of Mighton’s stuff to go through, too. This madhouse.
Jason’s mom texted him, < COME HOME.
Dunh-dunh-dunhhh.
When they get to his house after second period, Ann is in the back yard, calling to Jason to come out. L for some reason—oh, wait, could it be experience, or good sense?—stays in the kitchen.
Ann’s smoking a cigarette, in a lounge chair. She doesn’t smoke. In a psychedelic sixties tea gown—that’s Mimi’s gown. Where the frick did she get that? Wearing a wig, some kind of vintage pageboy thing, the same colour as her hair but not her hair. Weirdly fake-looking, like the later Warhol wigs.
She’s got a little fire burning beside her in the bowl of the copper Turkish grill. Beside the fire, a stack of magazines. Oh boy. Mammoth set of boobs on the top one.
L watches, the horror of the moment burning her eyeballs. She can’t hear a thing. Jason bends—for an awful second, L thinks he might be bending over for the strap, but no. He takes the top magazine and flips through it while his mom continues to talk. He’s so brave.
He looks up, and her mouth moves again. A trap-mouth.
She’s tricky, L thinks. Especially since Jason’s dad left, yes, but she’s always tricky. She’s why Jason is the way he is. Shy, miserable. Maybe his dad is partly why too.
Ann lifts her hand and says one last thing, and then Jason starts to feed the fire with the magazines. A small bright fire, in the bright copper grill that Jason gave her for Christmas after his dad left, using $300 of the money he’d been saving for AutoCAD for his laptop. The grill she never used once, all last summer, but just left sitting there in the rain “patinating.”
L does not let her head show through the kitchen window. She is not going to witness Jason’s shame, and make him even more miserable from now to eternity probably.