The hospice steps get longer every day. Illusion, illusion. Hugh plods or strides down the hall, eight or eighteen hallways, longer every day. Lise Largely chasing him from door to door, bills in white envelopes flap-flapping just behind his head, Gerald’s hound eyes watching from the lintel of his mother’s door, naked Voynich ladies from L’s maze shrouding every window and peering through the keyholes—
He’s gone mad, maddening more with every step.
Here, trapezoidal, as proper in a German expressionist film, looms Mimi’s door.
Dear mother. Whom he always loves. Who is always holding his hand, who adores and adored him, to whom he is always tied with bloody silver cords and hot pink velvet ribbon.
Hugh opens the door. Mimi is awake. Her head turns, anger sparkling in the deepsunk eyeholes, in what’s left of her gaze. “You! You come here?” she says, gaze flicking away.
“Here I am,” he says, not bending to kiss her. She will only pull away.
“I am disappointed in Hugh,” she tells the wall. “I thought of all things of all people Hugh would not desert me, Hugh of all people.”
(What is wrong with your family?)
“I’m here,” he says. At night she is drugged calm, or at least remembers night’s natural state is sleep. During the day she talks in spates, in flourishes, often angry.
Her eyes are huge when she looks back at him. “Nobody thinks of me, banjo eyes on the ceiling day and night, a burden to myself and others—hands all over me, turning me, patting me when I do not want to be touched. What’s left me if my self my home is gone?”
Yes, long shadows go out from the bales, and yes, the soul must part from the body: what else could it do? Hugh sits on the bed. “Listen, Mimi, I want you to move in with me. It will be good for both of us. I’ll—no, listen, Dave is coming to fix the basement, there’s room to store your things. I’ll paint the spare bedroom pink, we’ll be cozy up there, like birds in the nest. I don’t want you living on your own anymore. You need company, and so do I.”
She cries and cries, then. Weeping is hard on her.
Sometimes it seems like the world is trying to speak to Hugh. Birds appear singly in front of him: one for sorrow. Five or six ones, at intervals. Some people might count cumulatively, tot them up, two-for-joy, but Hugh knows better. What are you trying to say? his mind shouts. As he sets off down the sidewalk, a magpie, most potent bird portent, flies straight at him. He dodges, bruising his arm on a parking meter.
The world won’t shut up, sending him messages he wants no more than he wants Ken’s. There are things he has not done, things for which he needs to atone. He hasn’t been a good one to love, whether or not he was a good lover. Mostly he was not. Ann, others too. He did not love them except in a selfless, monkish way, knowing they needed love. Which now strikes him as condescending, distant, detached. He does not feel detached about Ivy. Children too: L, needing to be shepherded, to be properly represented. Maybe that lost one of Ann’s was his. Maybe she thinks of that baby when she talks to Jason now. That baby would be old now, thirty, Jesus. Jason—do not talk to Jason about porn, for God’s sake.
Old errors, new ones. Hitting Burton. Not kissing his mother—not kissing Ivy when he had the chance. Another example: not kind enough to Ruth, who will probably be the one to find him lying in the framing room dead and broken one of these days, when she brings him a badly wrapped, over-mayoed, canned pink salmon sandwich at lunchtime.
Hugh’s tooth hurts. Maybe it’s jaw cancer. Started the other morning. Don’t think about it. Plus, you’re clearly a hypochondriac. Irritating to be in pain all the time, pain of a tooth, irritating not being able to close the jaw in the ordinary way. Every mouthful pain, every breath, not knowing when it will stop—or really, knowing that it will get worse and worse, that this is the downward slide, the snake. The back right molar is giving up.
It’s hideous, unbearable, that we age, we fall apart. Just when you know what you want (Ivy! Enough money to get out of this hole! Mimi young again, happy, not crazy!) you are too old to make use of it or can’t get it anyway.
Back in the framing room Hugh puts on Borodin—not the usual, but a sad winding, clarinet-heavy one, like someone noodling on the organ after church. Then the strings barge in, too sweet. He switches the music off.
It’s impossible, this thing with Ivy. People can’t do this kind of thing, at this late a date. Find each other. Hook up. Anyway, his obligations.
Not that Mimi will be moving in upstairs, because she is not moving anywhere. She is dying. She will be dead.
Finishing is the boring part, L hates it. But Jason revels in it, perfectionistly. In his company it’s almost enjoyable. At least here in Fashion they have a serger, a big press, and a good steam iron. Four boards in the alcove; even a sleeve board. And Betty, who talks most of the time, when she’s not going out for a smoke. The costumes are mostly from Stratford, Betty being connected. She used to be head seamstress at Stratford, but then one day—she’ll tell the story—her life fell apart. She went to Toronto to buy fabric and, surprise!, she sees her salesman husband walking along the street in front of her. She calls, but he doesn’t hear her. So she runs after him and turns the corner just in time to see him walk in the front door of a house. She runs up the walk and knocks on the door, not thinking anything but that she’s happy to see him because he travels a lot with his business and it’s been a few days.
And the woman who opened the door had never heard of Fred, but called into the kitchen to ask Rick, and there he was. Her husband. Fred/er/Rick. Four kids! He’d been married to the woman for eight years. Another whole family. How many other men—her own dad—
That must have been back in the eighties or something. Now, they’d just get a divorce.
But there is something going on with her dad. Obviously.
The iron hisses.
A brief tap-tap: L’s mom is at the door, trembly fake smile on, ha-ha, like Can I dare come in? Behind the alcove wall, L’s heart or lungs sink. She motions to Jason to be quiet, stay hunkered in this little bunker. Her mom will say something to Betty, too personal or too generous, and if she sees L she always gets weirdly worse, just out of nerves. Jason shrugs, bent over his work, attaching giant, exact eyelashes to the shut embroidered eyes on Nevaeh’s Hope costume. Blind Hope? It looks really good on. Nevaeh’s small high breasts look exactly like protruding, clamped-shut eyes, like for example when you are hoping against hope, praying that your dad has not killed himself or otherwise gone off the deep end.
“Hey, Betty!” her mom goes. “I promised to help with the Hallowe’en costume sale.” Anyone who leaves their costume until two days before is not really bothering. But the sale is a good way to get rid of stuff—that costume room is a museum of tattered dreams. Her mom says, still apologizing, “Ann came too—she’s looking for some vintage clothes she thinks might have ended up here by mistake.”
Jason’s mom, too? Shit. Jason has gone invisible, ducking silently under the big press. L takes her hemming and joins him. Nobody needs to know they’re there.