Real Life (24 page)

“Another thing, Hugo,” she said. She would get it all over with now, once and for all. She was hating the conversation as much as he was. “It's going to be too cold before long for you to sleep out in the garage.” He did look up at her then, stricken. She laughed. “Well, it happens every year, doesn't it? Winter. Right on schedule.” Her laughter was a fake; she was angry with him, her sympathy on hold for the moment. Was it that bad, moving back into her house? “Snow and frost and sleet and white bloody Christmas.” Christmas, she thought, and her heart sank—trying to imagine Hugo trimming a tree, opening presents. She put it out of her mind. Surely, by Christmas, this would have been resolved. “It was below zero around here for most of last January,” she said.

Hugo wore his death-sentence face—the appalled, desperate look that she recalled from the day, years ago, when she and her parents had gone to take him away from Rose. “How about a sleeping bag?” he said in a voice severely under control. “I could manage with a sleeping bag, one of those down-filled things. I think I have enough money left to get myself one.”

“Hugo.” She put her hand on his arm, and removed it quickly, so that it was almost like a slap, though she hadn't meant it that way. Or had she? She felt her anger turning to hysteria. This wasn't going to work. Why even try? Call the Department of Youth Services, find him a foster home. “No,” she said, and took a deep breath. This was an absurd conversation. What kind of kid wanted to sleep in an unheated garage during a New England winter? “You're not sleeping in the garage anymore. It's back to the alcove, like it or not. There's an old door somewhere that goes on the opening. I'll put it up so you'll have some privacy.”

She thought with despair of her weekends with Alex. Would they have to go to a motel to make love? Or stay at his place in Boston, leaving Hugo to God knows what? Or sneak out to a down-filled sleeping bag in the garage? It was like one of the wacky situations in a Rachel Nye story, only Rachel would probably have the three of them end up in one bed eating take-out Chinese.

“I know it's hardly an ideal solution, Hugo, but for six months of the year it certainly won't kill you.”

He hesitated. He was obviously reluctant to talk to her, and yet this was a subject on which things needed to be said. He couldn't just say sure and shrug his shoulders. “It's awfully small,” he said finally. “It makes me feel sort of closed in, sort of—”

“‘Claustrophobic' is the word.”

“Yeah. But I mean—what else is there? Right?”

She sighed. “This is a tiny house, Hugo, with the shop and studio taking up so much of it. It really only holds one person with any comfort. Or—” A couple, she didn't say. Alex and me. “I was thinking maybe next summer we could build an addition. On the side, off my studio. A nice big space, all yours.”

“Yeah, that'd be great.” He spoke without enthusiasm, and again she felt her anger rise. What more did he want? What else could she do? And did he have any idea what it cost to add on a room? Daisy put her head back and yawned, and Hugo smiled down at the kitten and stroked her under the chin. Then his smile faded, and he heaved a sigh. “So I guess it's the alcove or nothing.”

“I'm afraid so, for the moment.” She stood up. His bent head, his false humility and resignation irritated her. Alex was right: he was a spoiled brat. “Damn it, Hugo, it could be worse. You could be out on the street, you could be in an orphanage,” she said, and she went out into the kitchen to start dinner, cursing herself. How could she say such a thing? How did matters get to this point?

It occurred to her as she fried potatoes and snipped the ends off the beans that this was a crisis in her life and she didn't know how to deal with it. There would come a time, years from now, when she would look back on her taking over of Hugo and see how what she did was either just fine or all wrong, depending on what happened in the next few months. She needed advice. She wished for that tearful moment that she could ask her father. Or that Alex would be more help. It frightened her that, beyond getting a meal on the table, she had no idea what she should be doing.

When dinner was ready, she called Hugo. He was still sitting on the sofa with the cat. His eyes were pink around the edges. Full of remorse, she let him have seconds on everything.

Two days later, in the midst of the bills and the junk mail and the new
Ceramics Monthly
, there was a letter in her mailbox from Mrs. Wylie. How odd, she thought, walking up to the house with it, sitting out on the porch with it in her lap. She sat there a while contemplating it, until it occurred to her that she was afraid to open it. She acknowledged to herself that she had, at some secret level, wished this: an appeal from the Wylies for the return of Hugo. And now what? There was Hugo's laundry on the line; there was Daisy the kitten stalking something in the grass; there were the sunflower stalks, their flower heads picked clean by the birds, outside Hugo's loft window. She looked at her watch: in two hours she would hear the school bus roar into the turnaround up the road, soon after that Hugo's shuffling steps on the porch, then his retreat to the alcove to do his homework. She would make him take down his laundry and put it away. She would ask him about his social studies test. She would wait in vain for something more, something unasked, and it wouldn't come, and eventually they would eat their supper, with a news program on the radio to keep the silence from embarrassing them both.

And here was this letter she feared to open. The envelope was pink and lineny, the handwriting the tortured backslant she recalled from last spring when Hugo's school records had arrived in a manila envelope, like a school application. She hadn't felt very kindly toward the Wylies when they had dropped Hugo off in such a hurry, en route to the Cape—or was that only because of her own panic, her desire that they keep Hugo just a little longer, just for the summer? It seemed years ago, that innocent panic. She thought back to Barbara Wylie, a smarmily oversincere woman who spoke psychotherapists' jargon, and her husband Maxwell, who spoke hardly at all. And little David, of course—skinny, bespectacled, suffering, tongue-tied, a parody of the oversensitive nerd. He wrote poetry, Hugo had told her. The Wylies had three televisions, and an electric garage-door opener, and a computer. Mrs. Wylie had the birdhouse Hugo made in shop. He's never given me anything, she thought. She looked down at the letter she owed it to Hugo to open. It's probably something else entirely, she thought, and ripped into the pink linen paper.

Why I'm writing you a letter about this I don't know. I suppose I'm afraid to call you about it, it's such a terrible thing to ask. What will you think of us? To put it as simply as possible, we would love to have Hugo come back to us, at least temporarily. David has been such a problem since Hugo left. Except for Hugo, he has never made friends easily, and now he really has no one, and is alone too much. Maxwell and I are dreadfully worried about him. He's not bright like Hugo, he seems to have no interests besides writing his very strange poetry that no one can make head or tail of, his schoolwork is suffering, Hugo would make such a difference. Of course, it's bound to be awkward at this time of year, school having just begun, but on the other hand it might be best to do this now before Hugo gets too settled in his new environment. God knows what you must think of me for asking, but we're pretty much at our wits' end with this and I only hope you—

Dorrie let the letter fall. It wasn't right for prayers to be answered so promptly and efficiently. There was too much good luck in her life lately: her affair with Alex was enough to make her suspicious of fate, and now this. Why was she to be spared pain with such ease? She read the letter again, looking for the catch. Barbara Wylie didn't sound smarmy, she sounded unhappy and desperate and well meaning. Presumptuous, maybe. As if Hugo were an aspirin or something the Wylies wanted to borrow. No mention of what it would cost Dorrie to give up Hugo. Well, what would it cost her? Hugo's laundry flapped in the breeze. After school, when she asked him to bring it in, his obedience would be immediate, not because he was so obliging but because it saved conversation with his aunt. He had, for some reason, begun to hate her. All it would cost her, if he left, was the chance to retrieve him.

Daisy followed her into the house, and Dorrie watched while she ate some Kitten Chow, crunching intently at the dish that was kept in a corner of the studio. Dorrie sat in her rocking chair with a cup of tea. The kitten ate, washed, and jumped to Dorrie's lap, where she purred a while, then slept. Dorrie had asked Hugo once why he named her Daisy, and he had said, “I should have thought it would be obvious.” She had given up trying to figure that out.

Dorrie sat a long time, not thinking, dozing a little. The fall sunshine was warm through the window; the room smelled pleasantly of clay and the bunch of chrysanthemums on her worktable. All around her were the hard-baked bowls and mugs and dishes waiting to be glazed, the new pitchers with their gracefully bulging bellies and their beveled handles. The studio, now, was full of Alex. His old jeans hung from a doorknob along with the binoculars he'd used to watch the Canada geese on the pond. The wicker chair he always sat in was pulled up to a window, some books piled on the floor next to it. An old
New York Review
was spread out under the bowl of cat food. Slowly, in his gentle, inexorable way, he was infiltrating her life. If she was free of Hugo, she and Alex could get married. She could have her own child. Was it as simple as that? Yes, she thought it was—that easy. She sat there with the cat on her lap, gripping the pink letter, until she heard Hugo's school bus up the road, and then she ripped the letter quickly in two, and then in four, and stuffed the pieces deep into the pocket of her smock.

Hugo was sitting in algebra class when the idea came to him. It was a Tuesday, the worst day of the week. On Tuesdays he had gym (that was bad enough; he hated gym) but the way the class periods were arranged around those humiliating, endless forty minutes meant that he arrived at the science lab just as Nina was leaving it. Invariably, no matter how he dawdled in the hall, he passed her in the doorway. Invariably, she smiled at him and said, “Hi, Hugo”—the old intimate smile, the old Nina-voice, but different now, moved to a level of artifice, as if their summer friendship had been a rehearsal for a play that would be put on in the fall. A very bad play, badly acted. Hugo hated it, and didn't understand it. He wanted her back. He thought he had never needed anything so much; nothing, in his whole needy lifetime, compared to the way he needed Nina to be his friend.

After bio lab was algebra, his favorite class. At least it kept him alert, even though it was at the end of the day. He was always tired, got up late, went to bed early, yawned all day, and in his other classes he was in constant danger of falling asleep. But in algebra, as soon as Mrs. Feinberg started writing the quadratic equation on the blackboard, he woke up, and his pencil got going. This was what he liked: finding out what
a
was, performing his lightning calculations and watching them work out—groping through a dark forest toward the light. He couldn't think of anyone but Nina to whom he could say that the rest of school was boring and simple-minded and too easy to bother with.

The day he got his idea was an October Tuesday. There was a substitute in algebra class, a cool little man named Mr. McGee, who didn't actually teach but assigned them a mimeographed page of easy equations to solve while he sat up at the desk marking papers. Hugo got bored, looked up from his work, and watched Mr. McGee biting his cuticles, digging wax out of his ears, playing with his moustache, surreptitiously picking his nose. He raised his head and met Hugo's gaze. “Anyone who doesn't finish those problems by the end of this period will have to tangle with me personally.”

Hugo bent his head over his paper and thought about Nina. He had been absorbed for several days in the problem of how to get back at Dorrie and get Nina back: that was the way he put it to himself, liking the way the two objectives echoed each other. Sometimes he thought getting back at Dorrie wasn't quite what he meant: to challenge her, maybe, was more like it. To make her tell him the truth. He wanted desperately to know the truth, every bit of it, all the little crannies of truth that made up his life, his mother's life, his father's. He thought, This way, I don't exist, I'm no one, there is no Hugo.

But having Nina back was part of it too. He had never been so happy, never so complete—so true—as when he was hanging around with Nina. It seemed, when he thought about it, like something he had made up, some going-to-sleep fantasy. Had he really spent the entire summer with her? Had there really been those long, lazy days by the pond, over at the Verranos', out in the boat? Had Nina really sung him her songs and told him her dreams and assured him he was her best friend ever, that the two of them were indeed a breed apart, special people who belonged together? Had he really, all summer, been close enough to kiss her?

He should have, that was the trouble. Or was it? He didn't know, but he had come to the opinion that, if he had been more romantic, more aggressive, more mature about things, maybe he wouldn't have lost her. All that time he had been hovering timorously over her, wondering if he should kiss her, if she would like it or hate it—hell, he should have been all over her, that was probably what she wanted, someone masterful, and he had blown his chance by being a cowardly wimp. That was it, it had to be. He should go out and get drunk sometime and do it—just grab her. He remembered how the wine at the Garners' had made him feel, and was imagining for the hundredth time what it might be like to kiss Nina when it came to him:
Do it
. Get drunk at the Garners' with Nina. Break into their house while they were away. Take Nina with him; she would do it, she'd like that kind of adventure, look at the way she'd gone through Dorrie's stuff. Get a bottle of wine out of that cupboard. They could drink it in the sun room, sprawl out on the floor, watch a little TV, Nina in his arms.