The lowering sun behind them lends a false glow to the countryside. Twice, they pass fields piled with the last pumpkins, too late for the truck. Tomorrow is Hallowe’en. Ivy worries about Hugh’s pumpkin-head. What pleasure is it to become connected to someone, when it means we have to worry about my entanglements, and the state of his head?
They could stop and make wild life-affirming love in the harvest fields, if it was dusk. They would be ghosts, in their pale nakedness. Her cheeks heat, thinking the word naked, because after all she is not such great shakes without her clothes on. But the joy of skin/skin, the memory of that comes back to her and she shivers, driving down the straight undangerous highway, so that the van wobbles and Hugh looks up.
She glances left, changes lanes busily so he won’t know she’s blushing. Inside, skinside. A long time since she … No, she has never felt this. Being transported, transcending—even inside the mind, no useful words for all that. Hugh puts his hand on her leg, and the shiver runs through her again. As if she was not a middle-aged woman but a living, ecstatic, conjoined being.
So it’s hard to go in to the master class. Doesn’t help that she’s fourteen minutes late.
Burton! His face is burst-tomato red. Beige eyes lost in swollen flesh under grizzled hair. He usually keeps himself so exquisite—today’s sweater is wrinkled, and unpleasantly recalls a flesh-coloured crayon. He leaps up from the table to display plaid golf pants that might be a good joke in another setting, in another mood.
“At last.” His sharpest voice cracks like a whip over the heads of the company. “Now that Miss Sage has deigned to grace us with her presence—”
But now Ivy sees the source of his snark: she’s only the latest of the late. Newell, eyes grimly down, is still pulling the lid off his coffee. And in the corner where the coats are shed, Orion is tweaking his own sweater into perfection.
They all shuffle to their seats; the agony begins. Ivy knows Spring Awakening well, and this is a bad translation. She suspects Burton downloaded it from Gutenberg—the text has a sloggy fake-Germanic feel, unlike the sharp Bond version she’s worked on before. Never mind: the twisted unhappiness of the children is freshly astonishing, freshly awful. She, of course, plays all the mamas.
None of the students have seen the modern musical version or read the play; nobody has any inkling of what is to come, except (it seems to Ivy) Orion. Who through some agency or diligence—or insider info—knows exactly what to expect and revels in the rudeness of it. From time to time, rising from the script, his eyes seem to seek out someone or other, but never do more than brush along the company.
It’s a good play for teenagers. Orion makes a waking dream of Melchior, his tenderness and wit, the horror and excitement of sex transmogrifying into determination, passion. Savaya sets aside her rampant tigress and puts on Wendla’s little girl dress and persona. A new kid, Sheridan Tooley (rejoining the company after his paying gig in Toronto fell through), squeak-squawks Melchior’s friend Moritz’s lines with the Wedekind whine, griping and grovelling. Orion disdains him, Ivy is amused to see, when not reading; but in their scenes they’re bosom companions. The beautiful black girl, Nevaeh, underused so far, reads the wild artist’s model Ilse with intelligent abandon.
Behind stacked set pieces Ivy can see L and Jason, shadows in shadows, watching Orion conjure the leaf-strewn graveyard as Melchior escapes from reform school and comes home to find and fend off dead Wendla, dead Moritz. “I was not bad!—I was not bad!—I was not bad! No mortal ever wandered so dejectedly over graves before. Pah! I won’t lose courage. Oh, if I should go crazy—during this very night …”
Ivy is torn between watching the real teenagers and listening to the imaginary ones, fearful for both sets, drawn in (as always) to the pain of the play, its naïve beauty and hopeless frustrated disaster. And conscious of that other pain, real life.
But today Newell phones it in, staring down at his script. Half-asleep for a time, then gusting into bored restlessness that takes the form of striding over to the coffee table and making too much noise there. He has hardly anything to do, playing all the older men, and as they progress through the script the waste becomes painfully obvious. Only the Man in the Mask (who might be Death, and who laughs at morality) sparks his interest at all, it seems.
At the end of the read-through Burton stands, abruptly breaking the spell.
“I—yes.” He takes in the company, broods, nods to the table. “I—vy.”
Surprised, she looks up again from her script, and he says, briskly, “I’ve listed scenes, and I’d like you to start work on them, script analysis, beats and units. I’m going to take Newell away for a confab.”
Newell stands too, and shakes his head in patient reproof.
“A brief consultation,” Burton says. He smiles, all his nasty teeth gritted, the bit between them.
Ivy wonders what exactly is going on. Who is the horse and who the master.
“The list,” Burton says, needlessly, as he hands her the list. He leans confidingly over her at the table, peers somewhere above her ear. He can never just look her in the eyes. “Only an hour left—split them into groups and run through scenes, will you?” He smiles again, those teeth, and murmurs, “It’s all useless. Just busy-work to fill the time. Meet us at the bar, say seven. The Ace, you know it? I’ll have worked things out by then.”
And without another word said, out they go, two giants of theatre. Or rather, one troll of theatre and one giant of the silver screen, side by side. Conspicuously not arm in arm.
L brings Jason in the back door. “Hello?”
Nobody. She moves last night’s supper plates to the counter, and Jason sinks onto the kitchen table. Advil? Not where they belong … Ah, stuck behind the vitamins. She pours a glass of water from the fridge-door tap and takes it to him. “Drink this, take these.” He obeys, lies back, skinny arm over his eyes. Shit, his mom is doing such a number on him.
Six o’clock. Supper would help. Not much in the fridge. Eggs.
Gravel—a car in the driveway. Jason springs up, hunted, eyes darting like a two-bit crook at bay. “My room!” she says. Backpack, shoes, he races for the stairs. “I bet my mom wouldn’t tell on you anyway.”
He’s gone. L gets the eggs out and cracks them—nobody here but us chickens. Flicks the stove burner on, just making scrambles, la-la-la! Her mouth is nervous, as if Jason is really being hunted. This is so fricking stupid, over eight old Playboys. When you think what everybody can get on the internet any time they—
The back door opens, and hokey jeez, it’s her dad. With Hugh.
She stands still, fork arrested in the bowl.
“Hey,” her father says. He looks really bad. Rumpled, his hair not nice. There’s the band across his eyes, a darkening of the skin or just a darkened look—and his eyes slide sideways, won’t look back at her.
“Hey back,” she says.
Everybody stands there. Like somebody will break the ice, eventually.
It’s Hugh who does, of course. “So!” he says. “I met your dad on the doorstep.” Then he runs out of whatever he was going to say.
Her dad drifts off into the dining room. More mess in there. Twelve canvases, still not finished; poster crap all over the table. He hates mess, it gets him all upset. L feels sick deep in her stomach, not throwing-up sick but a deeper horrible pain, the pain of disapproving of her father and his actions.
Hugh puts out a hand. “You okay?” he says, quiet-voiced.
She nods, and is going to tell him about Jason being in her room—but Hugh used to live with Ann, maybe he still has to tell her everything. “More or less,” she says. Not looking at the stairs or at the dining room. Down at the bowl of eggs.
“I took a couple of pieces of your installation, I hope you don’t mind,” he says.
“What? Why? I didn’t know …” Even surprised, she speaks low so her dad won’t hear.
“You weren’t here, and I wanted to—”
But her dad comes back, a black cloud, asking, “Where’s your mom?” Voice jagged, but he keeps the volume down. They’re all practically whispering, cotton wool pressing down from the cotton-white ceiling onto everybody’s head, smothering them all.
Then the front door bangs, and her mom’s bright voice sings out, “Sorry I’m late! Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful—I brought Vietnamese subs, your fave!”
Whatever cheered her up won’t last. The two men turn, so that when her mom comes through the louvered doors she staggers back as if they were robbers, Perrier bottle and sub bag clutched to her coat. “Sheesh! You scared the life out of me,” she says, laughing. Fake laughing. She doesn’t look at any one person in the room, like for instance her daughter or her mysteriously absent now strangely returned husband.
Can’t take this, can’t can’t can’t, L thinks. She pours the eggs down the sink and turns off the red-hot element. Time to go!
Just as chicken as she is, Hugh’s managed to get to the back door, hauling it open. “Great, well, you have those subs, I’ll go get Ivy. Don’t forget, dinner Saturday!”
“What? Saturday?” her mom asks. How could she forget? It’s only every year.
Her dad follows Hugh to the door, host habit, and holds it open. They hear Hugh calling back, “Anniversary! All Saints Day.”
The night her parents met; Hugh gives them a party every year. She and Jason are serving, Hugh booked them weeks ago.
He’s gone. While he was noisy, L melted away like snow off the driveway, receding gently up the stairs and behind the turn of the wall. Nobody calls after her. She waits.
Her dad shuts the door, goes back. There’s a pause, no sound from the kitchen.
This is awful.
Then her mom, saying, “Well.”
Her dad: “Here I am.”
“You’ve been managing?” he says. “I see the house is perfect, as always.” Shithead.
“We’ve been—I’ve been pretty worried about you,” her mom says.
He laughs.
A thump, a slide. The Perrier and the bag of subs landing on the counter. “So, what’s up,” her mother says, in a cool, strange voice. Not actually asking.
“I see Mighton’s in town.”
Her mother laughs. “What tipped you off, the photos? I’m late with the flyer for his class, I have to get it to the shop today.” Sounding casual, frozen, angry.
“Handsome guy,” her dad says, all arrows and spears himself. “So—I’m working at Jenny’s for a few days. Final documents for the abuse case—but you’re not interested in that.” Another slap in the face for her mom, who has expressed interest many times in L’s earshot, and always gets shot down for it—she’s not allowed to ask about work because he wants to leave it at the office. Also, her dad: staying at Jenny’s?
It seems her mom is not going to question that. Or she is not surprised.
“So the rappelling thing, that was a lie?”
Oh fuck, fuck, on the other hand. Please, don’t get into it. When her dad first didn’t come home, L searched through the notebook in his bedside table drawer. Because you have to know what’s coming. Page after page of lists of things to do:
• books to read
• what must be fixed around the house
• golf swing
• fly-fishing casts
• woodworking tools needed
And the pitiful ones in lower case, followed by question marks:
• remortgage?
• rrsp penalty?
• cheque to Hendy?
• line of credit?
L can’t bear to know any more about what’s coming. Sicker than ever, fingers in her ears, she turns away.
From the top of the stairs Jason’s white face looks down. She goes up a step to whisper. “Don’t worry. My dad, he’s—my mom—not about you, don’t worry.”
He comes down the stairs beside her and puts a thin, awkward arm around her neck. Not comfortable, but. She hugs his bony forearm closer to her neck, and kisses the smooth skin.