Close to Hugh Read Online Free PDF Page A

actual sneer developing his lip.
    You’d think Newell would stop putting himself through this, but it’s one of his little innocences: he can’t help believing his two closest friends will someday be friends.
    “Now, what have you brought me?” Burton asks, burying his nose in the bag. “Lovely! I do relish a good Pinot—ooh, port! and it’s prim eval !—must I wait for après-ski?”
    Newell pulls the port’s cork and pours, a gentle slide into each heavy glass. “It’s an occasion, Hugh—Ansel starts his master class at the performing arts school tomorrow. Scenes from Sweeney Todd . He’s the master, I’m just a ringer, brought in to play Sweeney.”
    “I cast my pearls,” Burton says, calm after a long swallow of mahogany port. “We’re to Meet the Creatures tonight, you’ll have to come help Newell remember who’s who. And whatsie, the broken-down one they’ve brought me for Mrs. Lovett—Ivy. Ivy Suet, is it, Boy? She was a fixture at I of O.”
    “IFO?”
    “Idea of Order,” Newell says. “Experimental theatre company, big in the nineties.” Burton sneers again. “Not Suet. Ivy Sage,” Newell tells Hugh. “Nice, intelligent. Eccentric.”
    “Pudding face, that must be the connection.” Burton waves his hands in a self-forgiving swaggle.
    “Good casting for Mrs. Lovett,” Newell says.
    The port calms Hugh, too. In a high leather chair at the counter he prepares to watch the dinner show. Burton, swaddling a huge white apron over the mauve cashmere, stations himself at the other end of the long black slate counter to chop for salad, playing the humble prep cook with a running commentary and a tea cozy squashed into a porkpie hat on his head.
    Newell cooks fast and fluidly, like he does most things, relaxed and at peace; Burton boasts about the beef, organic wagyu (his choice, no surprise), and the truffle oil tater tots now sizzling away, which he made and froze last week. “Merely choux paste with riced potatoes in the batter, butbetween Hugh and I, ha ha, I dispensed with the black truffles. It’s the truffle oil that gives the true tendresse  …”
    Truffle oil, the biggest scam perpetrated on the dining public since artifical vanilla: pale chemically induced resemblance to truffles fading quickly into gasoline and damp rot. But Burton likes to be an expert. Hugh nods into his port and lets it go.
    From time to time, in the inexplicable good mood that settles over him whenever he has manoeuvred Burton and Hugh together, Newell breaks into a line of song, “…  the trouble with poet is how do you know it’s deceased? Try the priest—”
    The third time, he checks himself as Burton pokes the button on the iPod. Paul Simon fills the room instead, “The Mississippi delta was shining like a National guitar …”
    Burton stops the music. “How can that be glorified with the term Music? If you must have rock, where do I find Pink Floyd on this thing? You find it, Boy. Dark Side , now that’s an album.” In an egregious gangland grate he grinds out, “Monee-e-ey! It’s a gas …”
    Hugh watches with a schooled expression; he feels painfully old, but considerably younger than Burton. Wiping his hands on a linen towel, Newell slides the iPod to something Cuban. Burton swishes off to the washroom, in a huff.
    Exhausting, really.
    “Sad this morning,” Hugh tells Newell, while they’re alone. To explain away his glum face. “Della and I went to the funeral, the woman who killed herself and her four-year-old.”
    “I knew them,” Newell says, surprising Hugh. “I bought the Saab from Gerald, he had to import it. You knew that.”
    Hugh can’t remember if he did.
    “The kid was great. Toby.” Newell has immense capacity for sadness. More than Hugh, by a million miles. But he’s cooking now, at the apex: steaks sliding onto warmed plates, pretentious tater tots jostled and nestled, every move skillful and graceful. Newell’s hands are beautiful.
    Returning, Burton tosses