In the kitchen, Hugh finds a beer in Ann’s fridge and slips into its shadow, by the door to the back stairs. Almost invisible, he leans there, picturing Lise Largely’s offer sitting on his desk. Maybe he should take it. Who knows how much Mimi has left after all these months of bills and care, or how much she’s left to him; or how much she had to start with. She has never shown him her will, he could be in for all or nothing. He can’t bear to think about inheritance when she lies there imminent, at the dark gate.
Lise, anyway—he hates her most because of the anagram, because she’ll change his Argylle Gallery into the Allergy Gallery as if it was a joke, as if it wasn’t … his destiny or something, to run the gallery. She’ll one-up him, because Largely. A stupid name. He puts her aside, listens instead to the prattle of the young who have no mortgage, no debt yet.
Orion, clean-lined in that violent black slash of a suit, is laying down the law to a small, quick-eyed girl Hugh doesn’t know: “Everyone confesses their old crushes at a party.”
Savaya says, “They do to you, because everybody in the world has had a crush on you.”
“And couples start disappearing, or fight and make up too much.”
“Good thing we don’t know any couples,” says a lithe young man, who seems to be called Sheridan Tooley. Another slim boy, wearing a frothy black skirt, long black gloves, and quite a lot of eyeliner, shoves Sheridan with his sharp skirted hip. Perhaps they are a couple.
Savaya laughs. “Remember that girl who got drunk and made out with the guy and then she’s crying, crying, I totally made out with Quintin—I shouldn’t have! But people who are drinking a lot for the first time always cry.” She’s about to cry herself, crystals hovering in those bluebell eyes. “Nevaeh and me at Jerrod’s party, in grade nine, we cried all night about how much we loved each other.”
Orion shouts, “Man! Jerrod Schmidt, the person I most wanted to fight ever, he has tricks, like he’ll pull out this big ring of keys, describe them to a girl, what each one opens. He plays guitar so people have to compliment him. When he’s taking a photo, the jerkoff gets out a reflector.”
Hugh wonders what they’re drinking; if he ought to shut this thing down. If he could.
Savaya says, “I like when two guys meet, and one knows he’s cooler than the other guy, but he just loves loves loves the dorkier one. Like you, when was that, Hallowe’en last year? Yelling at fucking Charles Elton, man—”
Orion cuts in, “I said ‘You should a receive a blow job every day’—”
A general chorus: “Because you are a handsome Scandinavian man.”
“Yeah, that was a bit mean,” Savaya says.
“I never talk to the guy now. I can’t stand to be around him.”
Jason comes into the kitchen and Orion calls him Boy, which must be mocking Burton’s name for Newell, and Jason says, “Design Boy, please.” Good to see Jason cocky. And he made that chiton-thing that L’s wearing—straight from Schiavone’s “Marriage of Cupid and Psyche.” Hugh wonders if Jason meant to reference it, or if it is just art coming out in the new age, a pimple on a fresh cheek. The bodice not quite so revealing, mind you. Mind Hugh.
Orion pushes Jason’s shoulder. “Feste-Boy, Fester.”
“Jealous of my prowess in cold reading, Boy?” He and Orion move into a mock-fight, karate moves, clowning in the kitchen archway.
Mikayla tells Savaya she loves Orion. Her quick eyes have gone round and silly.
“Yeah, he likes men,” Savaya says kindly.
“But how much, though?”
Savaya laughs and tells Mikayla to drink one glass of water for every glass of punch.
The young, looking after each other. Hugh moves to the back door, invisible as age has made him. Around the lintel, in Ann’s handwriting:
No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
Simone de Beauvoir
The upstairs hall is littered with people, sitting and standing. L knows none of them. A bunch of people seem to have come out from Trent—as if they didn’t have their own parties to go to. Nobody’s broken into Ivy’s room. There’s a lineup at the bathroom door. L goes into Ann’s room, where people have been piling coats on the bed, and finds the door that looks like a closet but is really a little washroom. She locks the door and washes her hands and face. She coaxes her eyebrows back into shape and stands staring at her own face, at whether or not. What a person should do. She’s had too much to drink. As bad as her mom.
She turns off the light before she unlocks the door. The room light is off too, but she can see people writhing on the bed, on the pile of coats. Yuck, poor taste. Who even is that? Not Savaya. L edges out along the wall, making less noise than the people are making, huffling and moaning. Disgusting, except. Except weird: not pornographic, but suggesting to the primitive lizard mind that it undertake similar action. Except.
Jason is in the hall, organizing the bathroom lineup and tacking a sign on the door: FIVE MINUTES, TOPS / BE CIVILIZED.
Orion watches, applauding. He sees L at the back stair door and comes over. Under the elegant élan, he looks sad, she thinks. Maybe whatever was going on with him and Newell is not going on anymore. Too many people’s hearts get trompled on.
Orion shuts the door behind them and says, in the quieter darkness of the stairwell, “Too many people.” L agrees. “Too many people are stupid,” he says. Halfway down the stairs, at the turn, he says, “Don’t open the bottom door yet, let’s take a break.”
She sits on the wedge-shaped corner stair. “Good plan. It’s too—Everybody is too there there. Too here here.”
He sits above her. “Everyone is so nice,” he says. The saddest voice she’s ever heard from him. “And so fucking stupid.”
And so familiar, that heart-sunken understanding of falseness and stupidity. “I know, it’s like there’s a fiction, like, an agreement, that everyone is equal. Everyone is nice, basically, if you understand them—everyone is decent and they just had, like, a rough time, or were abused, or something went bad in their childhood—they’d be just as smart as you, or as good at stuff, except they had this rough time. But that’s not true, and everybody knows it. We’re different, and some people are just plain—some people are—”
Orion laughs. “Can’t even say it, can you? Programmed! Some people are better than others. More talented, more beautiful, smarter, more worth loving. Don’t say that outside this staircase though.”
L hugs herself, since she can’t hug anybody better. “The terrible part is, the thing about equality, that everybody knows is a lie—it takes away from the true part—that everyone is a human being, a soul, and deserves to be—kinded. Not ‘deserves to be loved’ because some people don’t really seem to deserve that, like Jason’s dad, who’s an asshole. Or my own dad—not that he doesn’t deserve to be loved, but the way he talks to my mom blows the top of my head off. Where do people get the idea it’s okay to be angry? It’s not okay to be angry all the time with the people who love you or depend on you.”
Orion never talks about his dad. “My mom doesn’t get angry, she cries. I respect anger.”
“You don’t get angry. You’re too smart.”
“I might.”
“I’ve never seen you mad. Is that a gay thing?”
He gives a snort. “Have you met Burton? He’s on a permanent boil. A gayboil, that’s what he is, a giant pus-filled pimple, always about to explode.”
Someone at the bottom opens the door and a string of noisy people climb up and over them. The seal on the decompression chamber is broken. They emerge into the dark reaches of the kitchen—three times as many people, ten times the noise.