Walking away from Pink’s party down dark spook-ridden streets, Ivy asks Hugh, “Do we see light and dark differently when we’re little? Or is it just that memory darkens it? Scenes from my childhood are so often poorly lit.”
“All the scenes from my childhood are poorly lit. I don’t remember trick-or-treating.”
Ivy hugs his arm carefully, so his head does not jar. “Sorry for yourself? You can have my childhood: running for dear life over damp lawns in a long trippy skirt, fat pillowcase, banging on a spiderwebbed door for stale taffy handed out by a freaking skeleton.”
“I don’t like dressing up.”
“Me neither. I spend enough time doing it in real life. Spent.” Ivy shivers.
Hugh looks down at her with grave attention. “Do you think you can’t work anymore?”
She looks down herself, at the boot-tops appearing and disappearing under her coat. “I think—I think maybe it’s like my eye-tic, mostly stress. If I calm down, if I get Jamie moved out of my apartment …”
“Or just give it to him and that Alex jackass, and come live with me.”
She beams up at him. “Yeah, well—find some solution.”
“Dave will get the repairs done quick. Do you have the money?”
“I’ll find it. I can borrow from my sister, if I have to. I’m just debating which will be less galling, asking Pink for an advance, or hitting up Fern.”
“Money. Fucking money.”
“Yeah. Fuck money, anyway.”
The wind picks up and pushes them along a little faster, throwing leaves at their feet and shivering around their arms, cold as death. Trotting to keep up, and keep warm, Ivy searches for something to distract him: “What did Della say on the staircase?”
“She doesn’t think Ken will come to dinner tomorrow. I’ll have to go get him. He borrowed his assistant’s cabin out at Bobcaygeon, I know the place.”
“It was in Bobcaygeon, I saw the constellations / reveal themselves one star at a time.” Ivy sings quietly in the darkness. “Drove back to town this morning with working on my mind, I thought of maybe quitting, I thought of leaving it behind.”
“Poor guy. You heard him on the speakerphone. He struggles with depression, and the case he’s been working on for years is appalling. I don’t know how he functions as a lawyer—he can’t make a decision to save his life; Della decides. Good marriage. Except now. Della’s in a state. I guess Ken knows her better than I do—when he was dithering, trying to decide about quitting his job, I said she wouldn’t care, even if they had to sell the house.”
“Are you sure that’s all that’s happening? She looks to me like someone who’s lost—well, not her house, but her life.”
Hugh throws up his hands. “I can’t— Look, nobody else can be sick, nobody else.”
The road has taken them to Ann’s house—every light on, door wide open, music clamouring out. Ivy draws her coat close to her neck. “A party? But Ann was at Pink’s.”
“Must be Jason.”
“Hm, she had a bunch of your mother’s clothes on display this morning,” Ivy says, not knowing how Hugh will take this. “I wonder whether they got put away or …”
Hugh stands looking at the house. “I don’t like to—”
“We’ll pretend I’m coming home.”
They turn up the walk. Ivy wonders if she should ring the bell—but who would hear? And also, actually, she did pay rent. She pushes the door wider.
There’s Jason, dustpan and garbage bag in hand. “Oh!” he says, as if Ivy’s the last person in the world he expected. “We just had a little—”
Words fail him. He dives off with the garbage bag, leaving L to explain: “The guy who broke the coffee table left. I hope it wasn’t expensive. The metal part is still good.”
There’s still glass on the floor, crumbled cubes of tempered safety glass. People have left a wide circle around the skeleton of the table. In the empty space Orion swoops on hands and knees with a dustbuster, which accounts for some of the noise. He stands, shuts it off, phew! And wow—he looks fabulous. Tight black neoprene gleams above assertive wing-tips, a black shirt where the jacket opens, red claw-marks on the belly, and a bleeding shoulder in the back, feathers clinging there, like a wing was torn off.
“Fine,” he announces to the room. “Just move into the kitchen if you don’t have shoes.”
Ivy has shoes. “Where did he get that fabulous suit?” she asks L.
L is proud. “Jason made it! This, too—I had a bird one, but he said it wasn’t right.”
“You’re kidding, he made that? That’s the prettiest thing!” Ivy’s honestly impressed.
Flat-white grosgrain silk in frail folds, held by a belt of braided vines. Persephone, Artemis. L shows off her shoes, too: flowered, with vines lacing round the ankle.
“Like my shoes? Jason embellished them, the vines and flowers.”
“It’s like a wedding dress!”
L bites her lip, a child trying not to smile—she’s as pretty as the dress, suddenly. “Savaya’s, too. And see Mikayla from the master class, by the kitchen door? That’s Nevaeh’s Hope dress. They all have names. Savaya’s was going to be Faith, but after the Streetcar reading Jason changed it to Desire. Then he distressed it and called it Despair, and made Orion’s suit into Desire, with the claw-marks. He calls this one Charity.”
“Which means love,” Ivy says.
L looks at her.
“You know, faith, hope, charity—the greatest of these is charity. Meaning love.”
L looks at Jason, who’s back. Ivy puts out her hand and takes his (as a mother-aged woman can, she tells herself), to tell him these clothes are really, really good.
“Yeah, they were meant to be Faith, Hope, Charity,” he agrees, oblivious in his obsession. “But I kept fiddling with them, so Faith is like, Despair, right? And so is Desire. They’re kind of twins, kind of.” He’s right, Savaya and Orion look more like twins than she and Fern do: same height, stance, same gall.
“You know,” she says, “these clothes are beautiful—but they’re charming too, and funny and I guess horrifying—I haven’t seen anything else like them.”
Jason makes a pleased triangle mouth and ducks his head, trying to meet her eyes.
“I really mean it!” Ivy says, hearing herself a little over-earnest. “You have to go on with this. They’re—well, I wish you would make me something. I’ll commission you.”
Leave it there, nod and drift. Don’t freak him out. And who’s she to say what’s good, what will succeed, anyway? Fashion is hard.
She’s lost sight of Hugh. Maybe he went into the garden for relief? She makes her way out the French doors at the back, to the river-wall. The garden is full too. A fire in the copper grill, people standing around it or sitting and smoking along the stone wall. How many? More than when they arrived, already. Maybe it’s going to be one of those Facebook-announced, police-attending, giant-crowd teenage disasters.