In her asymmetrical tweed coat, the nice one Fern gave her, Ivy swims through the flood of teenagers to the open door, the exodus policed by the janitor. What a waste of time that was. The door clangs behind her, a Law & Order sound, chains and detention. Free!
Hugh is waiting in the gathering dark, leaning against the van. She can’t help it, she breaks into a run, trit-trot, gallop-a-trot, straight into his opening embrace.
“Hey!” he says. “You okay?”
“Do you go around the town asking everybody that?”
“Yes,” he says. Not smiling, he’s been somewhere or other.
“Della?” she asks, thinking through the flip-book of these new people. “L?”
“Both,” he says. “Ken’s back from the dead, or from Bobcaygeon. Swing by the gallery, we can leave the van there and go for a drink.”
Strange to assume, stranger to be right in assuming, that we’ll do everything in tandem, she thinks, swinging the van into evening traffic moving riverward. Dark already. Autumn. Another river, of cars: tail lights reddening the right side, headlights whitening the left.
They go in by the framing room door, Hugh calling out, “Ruth?”
Nobody there. In the time it took to park, the lights are off, the front door locked.
Hugh opens it and peers out. “She’s got Jasper in tow, heading up the street to the Ace. She makes him go from time to time, to be sure he eats. Want to try it?”
“Oh! I’m supposed to meet Burton and Newell there later on—good thing you said.”
Ivy’s seen the Ace from outside: fake saloon, long porch and horse-rail, lantern light. Inside, a long L-shaped wooden bar surrounds a pyramid of glittering bottles. Ruth and Jasper sit at the mid-point of the bar, Ruth with a menu, Jasper addressing a glass of red. Hugh’s pals are scattered at small tables by the leaded windows, too many, she can’t be expected to remember all these people—her head won’t hold them all. They chain together, the way people who have known one another a long time do. She has no chains of her own. Well, work chains: Terry and Terry sit huddled close together in a cozy nook, heads nodding in unison against a mutual enemy. They missed the master class. Sad, they’d have loved the circle-jerk scene. How that play got produced in 1906 is one of the mysteries of theatre.
Hugh and Ivy stand at the bar listening to Ruth argue with herself about what Jasper ought to eat. He orders, as apparently he always does, steak frites, and Ruth orders a side salad, no dressing, with berries. “For both of us,” she tells the waitress, waving her finger back and forth from Jasper’s to her own chest. “He needs the greens.”
To Hugh, Ruth says, “Long day in the basement. We emptied buckets for a couple of hours, then Della came by to help. We had to stop when Mighton came along, he needed help with his big crate.” She sends a cutting glance to the end of the bar.
“There’s Mighton—I haven’t seen him yet,” Hugh says. “Come be introduced.”
It’s not till they are right beside Mighton that they see Ann is with him.
She gives them a cool glare and turns pointedly on her stool to talk to the woman on her other side. “Lise Largely, the allergy realtor,” Hugh whispers in Ivy’s ear. He introduces her to Mighton, who sits upright and sneering, like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec: “Ian Mighton, favourite son of Peterborough. At least of the artistic sons—and daughters, like Della.”
“Della.” Mighton pronounces the name as if it’s Meryl Streep or something. Sainted but fallible, teasable, even laughable; honoured all the same. “She picked me up at the train, I thought she was coming here tonight.”
“Did she show you the flyer for your class? Must not be finished yet.” Hugh shakes his head. “We’re behind—it’s my fault. We’ll sell out anyway, nine spots are booked.”
This brings a lift to Mighton’s falling face. “They haven’t forgotten me?”
“I repacked one of your boxes the other night,” Hugh says. “I found a sketch for that portrait you did of Ann and Della and Newell intertwined. I want a new one of them now.”
Mighton laughs, and his face breaks from self-absorption into something quite different: sharp, lively, sensitive. Maybe he’s just sour because he’s unhappy. “Where is that thing? But I don’t revisit,” he says. “You do it, Hugh. You’d do a better job—you love them.”
“Not all of them,” Hugh protests, and Mighton sends a sharkish glance to Ann, rapt in conversation with Lise Largely: two fair women pretending (to Ivy’s own shark eye) to be unaware, but listening with all their ears to Mighton and his jabs.
Hugh pulls Ivy’s elbow to find seats of their own, and they go down the long curve of the bar to empty stools at the other end. “What’s his deal?” Ivy asks, nodding back to Mighton.
“He’s not so bad. He’s got Crohn’s disease; gut-ache half the time. Makes him surly, also appealingly vulnerable.”
The waitress brings them water and a single malt, neat, for Hugh. She takes Ivy’s order for a drink (the same, neat, thanks) and Hugh’s for food: calamari for both of them.
“Trust me,” he says. “Best you’ll ever eat.”
Ivy’s happy, sitting beside Hugh on old Windsor bar-chairs in this dark-loud-warm room. No demands being made on her, no need for lipstick or chic-er clothes than her nice coat—for anything but the warmth of Hugh’s arm, the closeness of his leg beside her own beneath the bar. The whiskey comes, and then the calamari, dredged in Cajun spice, perfect as promised.
That peaceful time ends soon enough: Burton and Newell, emerging from an alcove around the corner, see her before she sees them. Newell puts an arm around her shoulders.
“Sorry we abandoned you,” he says. “Burton had a few—notes.”
I bet he did, Ivy thinks.
Burton acknowledges Hugh in his usual fractured way, half knowing smirk, half sneer of hatred, and turns to Ivy. “I presume the afternoon proceeded apace, with muffled giggles at every mention of sex or masturbation? Spring Awakening is a bust, Hugh.”
Mighton comes down the bar and claps Newell on the back. “I saw the musical in New York last year,” Mighton says. “Lots of angsty wailing over not much, I thought.”
Not giving Newell time, Burton answers. It’s unclear to Ivy whether he knows Mighton or just senses and rises to the next-biggest ego in the room. “Glorification of wanking, plus a searing portrayal of sexual awakening et cetera, yes. It is a good play—but problematic: the circle-jerk, we wouldn’t get that past Pink. And it’s hard to do bare butts in real life, for a company as young as this.”
Newell speaks into his glass, behind Burton’s bobbing head. “That’s the true thing Wedekind catches: shame, and the ignorance it rises from. How shame defiles us, ruins us.”
Ivy is perturbed by that, but Burton rides over him: “German stuff—that S&M scene where Melchior whips Wendla, that’s the key. One must be beaten into acknowledging one’s earthy bestial nature.” He pronounces it beast-ial, Ivy can’t help noting.
Newell’s face is distant, thinking, detached from everyone, one arm along Hugh’s chair-back. Newell is a sad man, but in these last few days she likes him more than ever.
Mighton asks Ivy over-interested questions about the class, which seems to annoy Hugh as much as Burton’s pomposity does. Interesting. “I did the mamas, all of them,” Ivy says, to briefly answer him.
“We all have to kill the mother, don’t we, Hugh?” Burton lets fly, a random shot.
Hugh doesn’t seem distressed. “You can’t kill Mimi,” he says. “At least this Hugh can’t.” Then to Newell: “Ruth booked movers for Monday—but maybe a meteorite will hit the earth and I won’t have to deal with it.”
“Maybe Hendy can find a loophole in the lease,” Newell says.
Hugh shakes his head. “She won’t be going back—just as well to get it done. I have to deal with it some time.”
“I’ll help,” Newell says. Burton darts him a look, and at the other end of the bar, Ivy sees the Largely woman’s head lift. Like a cat scenting the air, catching a wingflutter of bird or breath of mouse.
Hugh stands and flags the waitress. “I’ve got to run over to Mimi,” he tells Ivy. “Wait for me? Or—here.” He gives her his keys, speaks into her ear. “If I’m not back when you want to leave, go up to my place, I’ll find you there.” His hand clasps hers, and he goes out.
Mighton slips into Hugh’s chair and prepares to lay heavy siege to Ivy, which makes her laugh at his bravura, and his complete folly.
“I’m not laughing at you,” she says, at his affront. “It’s just funny because I’m so in love with Hugh.”
He looks up, startled, and she says, “I mean, in love with Hugh. With Hugh Argylle.”