Close to Hugh by Marina Endicott Read Free Book Online Page A

Mrs. Lovett as the Queen Mum.” That’s the worst of Burton—he has a sixth sense for everybody’s conceits. Ivy feels herself blushing. Or maybe this is a hot flash, because she is getting old, very old, it’s true.
    Newell, strolling along behind, grins at her beautifully and lifts his hands in apology. “Really good to see you, sweetheart, I’m so glad it’s you. Un bear able,” he says into her ear, hugging her, “if it had been anybody else.”
    Oh, why did she agree to do this? Newell’s pity is almost more than she can take. He must know about her trouble. Four thousand, four thousand , she says to herself, and she smiles at Burton with just the degree of respect tinged with challenge that he tells himself he likes. Actually, he likes you to kowtow, but he wants to pretend that he’s an equaller equal among equals. It wearies her very much to know so well how to pander to his measly soul. He’s spouting off about his Mrs. Lovett—how he wants her: solid, fleshy, gap-toothed, definitely middle-aged. Which is so flattering. Plus, she is not gap-toothed.
    Newell interrupts Burton. He hands Ivy a small pie and a glass of punch. “ Mrs. Lovett, how I’ve lived without you all these years I’ll never know .” She’s forgotten that trick of his memory, knowing all the lines, using them in conversation to create intimate understanding, trusting that you will know both the surface meaning and the lurking ironic undertone, undertow. Trust is Newell’s coin.
    “Anyway, one thing I can promise you,” Burton says, grabbing their attention, annexing Newell’s untouched pie. “No performance! We won’t stage this for an audience, I’ve made that clear to Pink. Master class means just that, class. No performance. All righty?”
    Ivy’s bite of pie was a mistake. Barbecued duck, when she thought it was cherry. But it allows her not to speak, to put up a hand to cover her mouth. She smiles and nods over the hand, coughs, looks around for the bathroom. “Under the stairs,” Newell says, and she bolts.
    “ That’s Ivy Page, Hugh,” Burton says behind her, perfectly audible. “Not entirely …”
    “Ivy Sage,” Newell sings, over whatever Burton was going to say.
    Across the hall, under the stairs—first door opens to steep stairs, basement. Next one, there we are. As the door closes behind her, Ivy hears Burton: “ Blank page , I must have been thinking.”
    In the tiny bile-green washroom the mirror gives her back a flat white face. Small eyes and a sorry expression. She spits the pie into the sink, then cups up the whole mess in her hand and flushes it down the toilet. The taps gush a stream of hot water to clear the dribs out of the sink, but she can’t wash her face for relief. Her mascara (pathetic attempt) would make a mess of her face and the towel. She leans against the door for a while. Like in an airplane washroom, she can’t bear to go back to her seat, a middle seat too far back, between oily, patting Cherry Pink and that poisonous duck Burton. Four thousand, four thousand . Money is a bugger. If she wasn’t so weak and stupid and broken she wouldn’t be doing this, she’d have gone to law school, or gritted her teeth, gotten her goddamn MFA, and be teaching in some cozy university on the other side of the country.

    Hugh drinks punch. It doesn’t seem to be affecting him, in terms of making it easier to be here, but his teeth have stopped bothering him. He tried to leave after Burton was stupid about Ivy Sage, but Newell looked at him and smiled, and he can’t leave Newell. Is that what Newell would say about Burton? But Hugh loves Newell.
    The punch might be getting to him after all. Obviously Newell loves Burton in some way, some awful Stockholm syndrome way. People arethe death of each other all the time. The funeral was this morning. He ought to be at the hospice, not that Mimi will miss him.
    “I don’t have a lot of time for that Burton,” someone says, right behind