Two a.m. The living room has been abandoned for the fire-pit in the garden, kids letting their smoke wind into the firesmoke and the breeze coming off the river. Ivy plugs her own iPod into the machine and finds some languid Madeleine Peyroux, thinking it might be time to get this wound down … no one but Hugh … And now more ringing at the front door.
She goes, but Newell is closer. Stretching to the end of his rope, he opens the door wide and tells the dark-clad thugs, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” The big shapes look at him for a minute, the arms in the T-shirt, the noose around his neck, and then turn and drift away.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity,” Burton says, tipping his drink. “For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
Jason and L come down the front stairs, laughing together, heads bent over their phones. Hugh heads over and talks into L’s ear, trying to make himself clear over the music. One hand goes to his temple, an unconscious gesture. His head, hurting again. He should be in bed.
Ivy goes over to eavesdrop: Hugh is asking L to get him a couple of Della’s new boat pictures to frame for Saturday. “I’ll bring them over in the morning,” L says. “I’m not at the master class tomorrow. I could help you with dinner.”
Jason raises his eyebrows to Ivy, wondering whether he will be needed at the class.
“No idea,” she says. “Ask the big fella.”
But Burton, bored by the quieter music, is disappearing into the kitchen, trailing Newell’s rope behind him.
Newell, gagging a little, reaches out a hand to control the pull. Burton resists the tug and hauls on the rope, so Newell needs both hands to protect his neck, and Hugh starts after them as if he’s going to tear that rope off Newell single-handed, saying, “Careful!”
That makes Burton change tack and charge back, shouting again: “Turn him away? Such an old and faithful servant!”
The room falls still, kids called to startled attention. Something real happening here?
Ivy pulls on Hugh’s arm. “He’s spouting Beckett,” she says. “He’s just having fun with you.” She begs him, silently, not to lose his temper—“No punching,” she mouths, trying to make him laugh, to take some of the strain out of his face.
At the end of his rope, Burton’s face has gone livid with booze or rage, hard to tell. Newell raises his arms, surrendering to the noose, to the quarrel, mouthing quaquaquaqua.
“What? What is he saying?” Hugh asks.
Burton’s voice is rough, drenched in maudlin tears, lost in some old production. “Beauty, grace, truth of the first water, I knew it was all beyond me.”
“Stop,” Newell says.
Finally, the note in his voice checks Burton, who skips ahead in the script and subsides into pitiful mumbling, “The way he goes on, you’ve no idea, it’s terrible.”
The front door opens, and in comes Ann.
Ivy’s insides jump so hard she thinks she’ll laugh, or die. Standing in the jumbled mass of shoes littering her formerly empty doorway, Ann takes in Hugh and Newell and Burton, their knot of conflict. The iron skeleton of the coffee table. The vanished exhibits, dresses, gloves.
The photographer crowds up behind her, camera slung at the ready. Poser.
“My—” Ann says. “What is this?”
Jason does a brave thing. He detaches himself from L, and says “Hey, Mom. I’m having the class party. Um, a few things got broken.”
Ann turns stiffly to face him, like a dressmaker’s dummy on a swivel.
At that heightened moment, Orion leaps in from the garden. “Call 911,” he says—loud, laughing—“Pumpkin on fire!”
Everyone makes for the French doors in a mass.
Out there beside the small fire pit, a column of flame is shooting into the night sky. One of the jack-o’lanterns, Ivy sees, as her vision adjusts to make out the lumpy shadow beneath the brilliant fire. “Kerosene,” Orion says. “One of the tech guys did a torch effect, but it worked better than he—he burned his eyebrows off, and they can’t get the fire to go out—”
Everyone would be laughing, except there’s a shriek, a real shriek, and one of the girls, Mikayla, runs across the grass to the river, her breasts blinking at the crowd and her feathered tail on fire, flaming feathers shooting out behind her as she runs, tail switching to and fro. Three or four of them run to help her, including Stewart … no, he’s just taking pictures—
And into the river she goes. Ker-splash.
“Hugh?” Ivy takes his arm. “I think we ought to go to bed.”
Newell climbing up from the bottom; Orion coming down, smoke and kerosene washed off his hands. “Can’t cross on the stairs,” Newell says. “Ruth would never forgive us.”
Orion stands, heart thumping in his chest. Leaping.
“I slipped my leash,” Newell says. His eyes are quiet, his spirit shining out of them in a steady light.
Orion laughs, just as quiet. To know somebody loves you, to see delight in his eyes. Orion shines back. He’s been ignoring, suppressing this glorious thing—it washes through him, a painful/exquisite tide of blood. “I—” he says, then nothing more. Newell’s hands come up and his own catch them—in the darkness of the stairwell it is enough to stand hand-clasping. Orion’s mind/soul/heart is racing, he is a giant again.
Wait. Something is still wrong. They separate.
“Listen, don’t be so— Listen,” Newell says. “You have to know that Burton will call, and I’ll go to him.” He looks away, down and to the left. The direction of shame.
Orion’s hand goes out, but he sees the blankness in Newell’s eyes, and the hand cannot reach him. “Why?” Orion asks. No answer. “Why?” he asks again.
Newell’s voice is like water. Serious, honest, pure. “From duty, and love, from long association. I can’t explain it to you, I don’t— I don’t want you to feel this way. But I do. I float, I fly, but Burton is the rope. The anchor.”
Orion stands there, a stair above Newell, forced into looking down on him, not choosing to. “You are so wrong, so wrong to do this.”
“I can’t—” To see the great Newell inarticulate, that is weird and painful. He holds the stair-rail instead of Orion’s arm. “I know it’s not enough. I can’t make it whole.”
Orion’s chest is cracking. He didn’t know this pain would be so physical. He feels elevated, looking down on Newell’s face, still loving him. But seeing that the one he loves is no king after all. The pain in his chest is fierce.
His eyes are filling, that won’t do. Can’t cry at this shit, that is not allowed. He turns as if he will climb slowly out of this, but his feet betray him and he stumbles and falls down the odd-shaped stairs, past Newell, slipping and turning, and he opens the door and—flees.