Chandelier, page 22
Hugo was unpacking the grocery bags. He set two packages of espresso on the counter, some biscotti, a bottle of aged Modena balsamic. They were things I’d asked him to pick up, so he placed them there like a rebuke: I’ve taken care of your wishes and this is how you treat me. We were at the stage where gestures of affection were played like chess pieces. He went to the fridge and put a wedge of parmesan into the cheese holder. He shut the door and I could almost see his scowl reflected in the brushed stainless steel.
“My fault?”
I was bouncing Georgia furiously on my knee.
“Don’t act stupid, Hugo. This is about reputation and association. The gallery mess, the newspaper takedown. You sticking your head in front of every camera looking for a self-justifying quote. Take your lumps. There’s not much we can do. But advertising yourself as a desperate loser is not going to help. You can’t win that game. Defending yourself in front of the media is wrestling with pigs, you know. You get dirty and they just have fun.”
“It’s a witch hunt.” He liked saying that lately. It had a ring to it, but it didn’t pardon the accusations. The design errors, budget failures and mafia connections were still there, like a priest turned into a newt.
“Whatever it is,” I said, “I’m part of it. I’m in this. My name’s in those reports. This is us. Sotheby’s doesn’t want that kind of garbage connected to one of their salespeople, do they? It’s why I’m sitting here—unemployed.”
“Find something else. With your sales record. Not a problem.”
He was wishing the problem away by saying it wasn’t one. But word would get around. Tainted couple equals bad news. We were bad news now. Only big money could ignore the scent of scandal. And we didn’t have that kind of wealth yet. We were methodically making sure of that.
Georgia made a cartoon gurgle. Hugo was unnaturally silent. I looked at him. His face was red, defeated, almost a husk. The bluster was gone. His failures had squeezed it out of him. The wax had melted and he’d plunged into the sea, mortal in his bespoke dress shirt. I ushered Georgia over to him and he took her. “We’ll be okay,” I said. And I wrapped my arms around them both.
28
Checking outside, I find a blue plastic bucket around the corner of the cabin. It’s upright, full of rainwater: clear, cool and spilling over the sides. There is one green leaf floating on the water’s surface, so crisp it must have dropped from a nearby tree only seconds before my arrival. Slipping my shoes off, I tip half of the bucket over my shins and feet, washing away the mud and dirt as best I can, then centre it again beside the stone flagging. Above me, clogged grey swirls promise more rain, though the sky has softened briefly. There are even scrapings of blue beyond the clouds.
There is Hugo again. I resent his intrusions into my existence. Desolate conditions seem to summon him. I can go months without a thought of what he’s doing and then stress drags me back into his orbit. He attaches to my misery. He smells it and comes loping toward me, like a retriever for a stick. He’ll be off again, on Saturday, on a flight for Barcelona. Some conference he swore is absolutely necessary to attend. He’d given me a courtesy call to say he’ll be gone, should anything come up. “I need to straighten some things out,” he’d said. I held my tongue on that. Deliberation would do no good. Sometimes our marriage counsellor’s words, when we were briefly serious about saving the thing, come back to me. She criticized my sniping, those hurtful attempts to get empty points without aiding growth.
Hugo waited on the other end of the line.
“Then you should do that,” I answered eventually.
“Everything okay with you?” he added. (No, I’m divorced, a serial first-dater, and I’ve just royally fucked up my finances due to some third-rate weasel with two first names.)
“Everything’s super,” I said. “Hope your conference goes well.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Please don’t. I’ll be busy the next few days. Drop me an email when you get back. Okay?”
“We had some good years, didn’t we?” he said.
Oh no. Nothing worse than the sentimental Hugo. The remorseful Hugo. I wish it wouldn’t happen. I can’t go back. The energy it subtracts from my dwindling supply. What is he playing at?
“I should go.”
“I’ll call you.”
I think I sighed. “Okay. Yes, sure.”
* * *
Hugo likes to claim that I cheated on him first, but that’s hardly verifiable. It’s true I was hitting it off with Andrew, a businessman who owned some upholstery and paint stores in Ottawa. Having been rejected from the realty community, I was a few years into my switch to a private home-staging business and Andrew was helpful. He’d agreed to offer deals to my clients who followed my advice about organizing light renos before calling in the realtors. First impressions, all that. I argued for a pressure-wash of siding and driveways. Oiled hinges. A fresh coat of paint on the front door. Studies show you have less than ten minutes to grab the viewer’s attention. Andrew was pleasant, divorced, a diplomat’s son whose boutique renovation stores were doing reasonably well but needed a boost in client base. We worked over several colour systems to brighten rooms. We created illusions of depth by painting one “feature wall” a slightly different shade. There was no great depth to his personality, true, but he was handsome, with well-groomed salt-and-pepper hair and a penchant for skinny-fit suits and subtle aftershave. I was not having sex with him.
One night, at home, I climbed out of bed and went downstairs for a pee and a sip of water. It was shortly past two a.m. and I found Hugo in our study pouring over a thick book in the glow of his desk lamp. Hugo looked up at me, the early sag of middle age in his neck accentuated in the moody light. “What’s that chair called again?” he said, consistent in his annoying custom of assuming everyone was obsessed with whatever he was thinking about. Noticing my blank look, he added: “The one with the metal tubes, the leather . . .” Gesturing helplessly in the air as if his hands were rescuing a collapsed sandcastle.
“Wassily?” I guessed.
He nodded, just barely. “By Loos.”
“No, Marcel Breuer.”
“Yes, yes . . .”
He folded the book closed, one of several about design that I owned.
I glanced around the room. An open bottle of Maker’s Mark. Dirty tumblers. A Hudson’s Bay blanket was jumbled across the sofa. He had been sleeping on it regularly for months.
“Just this article I’m trying to write,” he said without affirming anything in particular. Then: “Was Andrew here?”
I think I might have looked alarmed, but only because I thought he’d meant the study itself, that Andrew had come into it and taken something, or left something—what, I couldn’t imagine. My eyes searched the various surfaces again, ready for an obvious sign of some oddity that could be explained or wondered at.
“To drop off some quotes. Why?” I said.
“He left his watch in the kitchen.”
His what? Oh yes. Andrew’s watch. He’d forgotten it. The Seiko with those unfortunate glow-in-the-dark hands. I’d offered him a cup of tea, then bumped his elbow while handing it over, sending a wide splash down his arm. He’d taken the watch off to clean up, wiping the wristband dry. He went to the sink, ran his forearm under the tap while I dabbed some drips off the table. The soiled paper towels, the cups and teapot on the dishrack: the real unsullied story was all there for Hugo to see. If he just looked. Even the stain of Earl Grey on Andrew’s shirt sleeve could be verified, if Hugo was willing to drive over to Westboro to check.
But surely none of this would be necessary. Reason would triumph. I was about to explain the whole misunderstanding. Except it was actually sounding like one of those frantic, contrived stories that are the stock invention in every affair.
Meanwhile, Hugo persevered. “Is something going on?”
“For heaven’s sake, Hugo. Don’t be an idiot.”
“Are you fucking him?”
Me laughing. “He’s not my type.”
“Otherwise, you would.”
“I’m not talking about this now. It’s the middle of the night.”
“So, you are fucking him . . .”
“I spilled tea,” I started.
Yes, it was already sounding absurd. But I finished the story, under Hugo’s dull, skeptical glare, wherein we entered into the nasty labyrinth of accusation and defence that was a hallmark of our squabbling sessions over the years. The argument lasted an hour. The rage. Like sex, it hotly jabbed and rubbed at the tenderest places, confused as much as cleared the mind, and dissolved in the light of morning.
And, uh, there’s that word again. “Labyrinth.” If I had a nickel. There was a year or two where it’s all Hugo talked about. His book. His prisons. His restricted means of dwelling. His entries and escapes. What did it have to do with putting up a building? He got Georgia involved, getting her worked up on the topic for a section on mythology in her history class. They even built a miniature one out of Styrofoam, the spiralling passageways and hidden ends modelled on a mosaic at Knossos.
“Most directions are wrong,” he said. “But you need to make each corner appear like the right one.”
She brought it to school for a display.
Anyway, poor Andrew. Hugo wouldn’t let it go, insisting I stop using his paint and textiles. I refused. He’d done nothing wrong. I’d done nothing wrong. What is it they say about an irresistible force and an immoveable object? Hugo claimed he trusted me but the marriage was over if I didn’t stop working with Andrew. I told him if he did trust me he’d stop talking all this paranoid garbage. I had no intention of changing a very productive and profitable business relationship.
Then I fucked Andrew.
It wasn’t much fun, actually. I’d met him for a glass of wine in a little neighbourhood bistro near his place. It had been weeks since Hugo’s ultimatum. But I’d continued to work with Andrew on a few upgrade collaborations. You can imagine the tension at home, Hugo arriving late in the evening usually, hibernating in the study, grunting a few essential points of domestic information over the kitchen island in the morning. Georgia observed it all, mismatched pyjamas, dark bangs in her eyes, perched glumly above her granola like a fallen angel condemned to dwell among men. She was disappearing more and more as the months passed, withdrawing her personality from our presence, becoming as invisible as possible in order to fly under our parental radar.
I’d been restricting my meetings with Andrew to the daytime, my one concession to Hugo’s martial law. But a realtor had just called to say a house I’d staged in Rockcliffe—one tarted up by Andrew’s boutique glosses and drapery—had been sold in under two days, initiating a sizeable contractual bonus and, fuck it, I felt like celebrating.
After another argument, Hugo decided on a trip to San Francisco. I don’t know why I called Andrew—there were several girlfriends that would have enjoyed a bottle of wine with me—but I dialled his number and said I was in the neighbourhood.
No.
I do know why, don’t I?
Because Hugo had forbidden it.
That was one thing.
Because I’d done nothing wrong was another, certainly. After all, hadn’t I dragged myself out of the mess he’d made of my career? Perhaps Hugo had unintentionally planted the illicit seed of adultery, an image I couldn’t escape while reviewing order forms, Andrew’s hairy arm brushing my elbow. I really wasn’t attracted in the slightest, but I was angry, hurt and vengeful, and yes, most probably clouded in judgement. But sometimes you clear the weeds with a rake and sometimes you use some gasoline and a match. Whatever was my motive, there I squatted in the darkness, naked and parched beside Andrew’s bed, collecting my bra and tights from the hardwood and preparing a soundless exit.
On the bedside table, glowing off the hands of Andrew’s Seiko, the time showed 2:43 a.m.
* * *
Meanwhile, ever since the gallery scandal, Hugo was flourishing. Having wrestled with the pigs, Hugo then got hired by them. They must have liked how he got dirty. Some media boss was impressed and Hugo was soon writing architectural reviews for magazines and papers. They didn’t care about scandal. The more the better. Tainted and defiant, Hugo was reinvented as the bad boy of urban renewal and architectural design. He even had that thirty-minute television panel for a couple of years. It was late at night but it had a following before the era of YouTube. A season was picked up by PBS. He had discovered the perfect job to satisfy his long-winded need to offer critical judgement while avoiding any practical work. They flew him everywhere. Dinners and drinks and chauffeured viewings. I would get phone calls every few days from Johannesburg, Kagoshima, Brussels . . . Wherever the next exciting building was being raised.
“Not too early, I hope,” he’d say from Helsinki.
“It’s not even dawn. The ringing woke Georgia,” I reprimanded. She was seven or eight then, the age when one first suspects that adults are denying you some hidden excitement. It was hard to get her into bed at a decent hour, and once woken, she was wired.
“Sorry, it’s the first chance I’ve had. Just got back to the hotel and I couldn’t have called in the morning.” The line hiccupped through the distance. His voice, with a delayed, overlapped effect, repeated itself: “In the morning,” the tinny double said.
“She wants to say hi.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea? She’ll get worked up and won’t go back to sleep. (To sleep).”
“She’s up now. She’s right here.”
“Okay (okay),” he sighed. “Put her on. (On).”
I gave the receiver to Georgia. She said hello and curled up on the sofa with the cordless, as if the phone were just another stuffed toy. She was still hazy with sleep. I watched her propped in the half world of dawn, groping for comfort in the bodiless voice of her father. She grunted and nodded, said “yes” and “no” to whatever small talk Hugo was directing from the desk of some boutique hotel room across the Atlantic, innocent of the increasing remoteness of his emotional life. A characteristic frown wiggled across her forehead. Her personality was materializing with every passing day, combative like Hugo, the parental legacies less than gifts. But stop for a second—let me look at her there now. Let time hold her, briefly, and preserve something. Innocent, unaware, her harmless childhood about to fade into the pain of each adolescent year. If I could give it back to her, I would.
When they’d finished their exchange, I took the phone back from her, confirmed Hugo’s return flight number and promised I’d let him know if I could pick him up.
“Daddy is far away,” Georgia mumbled when I lifted her off the sofa.
* * *
Georgia was ten when I kicked him out, or he left, one or the other. It’s hard to see where the thickening fog of bickering and separation really starts. Georgia seemed lost. She watched the wandering pantomime. Hugo continued to make appearances. The house was a ghost limb that niggled at his pain. When he dropped by, it was unpleasant. He grumbled. He pronounced. The further he got from a daily connection to our lives, the more it seemed he wanted to control it. I found Hugo pathetic and annoying but to Georgia he became the enemy. Hugo blamed it on me. He blamed it on travel. He blamed many things.
For a while, he blamed Natalie.
Natalie, the alien life who landed on Georgia’s planet in her teens, brought additional adventures. They started several punk bands. They went topless on family beaches. If someone questioned them, they’d point out all the men doing the same. I was conflicted; Natalie created chaos but she was what Georgia needed. Now Georgia had an accomplice for her rebellion. Because Georgia was an alien too.
“What the hell are you wearing?” Hugo said for the umpteenth time to Georgia during one of his drop-ins. There she and Natalie stood, dressed in camisoles and pleather jeans, half their bangs dyed green.
Once, the two girls were delivered soaking wet by police after a late-night exploit in a car wash. They’d driven my car inside, then got out and danced in the spray of the automated arms. Hugo showed up more drunk than they were. He was livid. He claimed I was letting them run wild.
“Calm down, dude,” Natalie said.
This didn’t help things.
“Get out of my house,” Hugo said.
Georgia: “It’s not your house.”
Later, she stewed. After Hugo and Natalie’s departure, we sat on stools, drinking carbonated water. She was unpeeling a third tangerine from the bowl on the counter. It was three a.m. I was exhausted and wide awake.
“Where are you getting your drugs?”
“What?”
“I’m not stupid, George.”
“It’s just weed.”
“You stink of it.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s not good for you. It messes with your brain patterns.”
In silence she chewed and swallowed a few of the citrus segments, pretending I wasn’t there. In the glass door to the back deck, our reflections tried to outwait each other.
“I guess this is not the time to discuss your grades,” I resumed.
“No,” she said. “I’m way too high.”
29
I wake to a sharp sting, discomfort in my left rib and a rock stadium clamour of birdsong. European starlings. Black-capped chickadees. Opening my eyes, I see my filthy shoes discarded on the floor near the woodstove. I tug them on. The air smells like a wet dog, light fuzzily glowing around the curtain. I groan and sigh and sit up on the creaking side bed where I’d fallen asleep, improbably, last night in the pitch-black cabin. I’m alive in a weird crossroad, the remote details of a childhood place mixed with the disastrous past that led me eventually here via Trevor Brent. And the notable image of my Audi floating off a dirt road into the ditch. Obsessions I entertained before surrendering to exhaustion here in the arse-end of nowhere.
