Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  When I stood, the room wavered uncertainly.

  “I feel the exact same way,” I said to the room.

  Mornings in a strange house always required courage. It was the light coming at me from an unfamiliar angle. It was the dread of encounters to come. The tremulous, half-remembered route back to the kitchen. The fumbled greetings and borrowed towels.

  Still, there was only so much girding one could do. I let my instincts guide me out of the room and back downstairs.

  In the kitchen, a teenage boy sat at the island eating cereal and looking at his phone. He was tall and wore a black Yankees cap with a flat, unbent brim.

  “A Gorgon,” he said mildly, mouth full.

  I touched my hair. “In a good way, though?”

  He shook his head. “That’s my T-shirt.”

  I looked down. Maroon on gray: Phillips Exeter Academy.

  “Hugo lent it to me. Your . . . I guess . . . dad?”

  He swallowed. “I’m Spencer.”

  Spencer rose to set his bowl in the sink. I didn’t know what had made me assume that Hugo lived alone, that the previous night we’d been the only two souls rattling around that big house. Now that I thought about it, there had been a protracted, public divorce. A couple of them, actually. Hugo’s face looking pink and bloated on the cover of the Post with a cheesy pun for a headline: “More Like Hugo Worst” or something. Of course there would be remaindered sons slouching around in tank tops. Of course there would be housekeepers and cooks on the premises, and a gardener, too, just now bringing a lawn mower growling to life.

  I leaned into the counter, rested my brow in the cradle of my hand. My head ached so bad it was almost amusing.

  “Wine?” asked Spencer.

  “Goddamn tannins,” I said.

  Spencer nodded as if he knew from hangovers, as if his liver weren’t a flawless sieve, gamely filtering out whatever substances he got into up at Phillips Exeter Academy.

  “My dad isn’t into leaving his bedroom before noon. But I talked to him last night. He said”—Spencer adopted a mock solicitous tone—“tell her to please enjoy the grounds, and don’t mind all the people running around. They’re just getting ready for the party.”

  “The party?”

  “On Monday? He didn’t tell you much, did he? For all your talking.”

  Teenagers could still wound me. They could still make me blush.

  “We were talking big picture,” I said. “Macro stuff. Not trivia like, ‘Do you have a son?’ or, ‘Will there be any parties here this weekend?’ ”

  Spencer picked the red and white acne on his chin. His age wasn’t clear to me. But he’d been through puberty, that much I could tell. His arms in his stupid tank top recalled the butterfly, the tang of chlorine. Teens really had the attraction/repulsion paradox in hand.

  “Listen, is there any coffee?” I said. “It’s getting dire.”

  “Calm down,” said Spencer. “I got you.”

  He hunted for coffee in the cabinets, pulling out cereal boxes. Finally he gave up and called for the housekeeper. Ana was a small, round Mexican woman of indeterminate age, dressed like an office factotum in fitted black pants, a button-up that gapped slightly at the chest, and a ponytail streaked blond. Instantly, she located the coffee in the freezer. She stood by with her hands on her hips while Spencer made coffee in the Chemex, before giving in to her impulse toward efficiency and frying me an egg.

  “You don’t have to . . .” I sputtered weakly at intervals. It was disingenuous. I wanted the egg even more than I wanted the coffee. I ate with humiliating appetite while both of them watched.

  “How is school?” Ana asked Spencer.

  Spencer shrugged. “What do you think? It’s a triple-X fuckfest.”

  Ana shook her head. “Are you getting As?”

  “Grades are patriarchal, Ana. I reject them as a measure of my intelligence.”

  “So you’re getting Ds. Does your dad know?”

  “Does he know that grades are patriarchal? I’m not sure. We’d have to ask him.”

  Ana sponged down the spotless countertop around my plate. I looked for ways to contribute to this back-and-forth, but they intimidated me. Their bantering ire was a closed system; I was just an interloper transported here to eat an egg.

  “You’re in tenth grade? Eleventh?” I asked.

  “I’m seventeen,” said Spencer, sneaking a look at me. “I’ll be a senior this fall. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “I remember that age,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Greatest time of my life. You should cherish it.”

  “Strange. Doesn’t feel that way.”

  “Maybe not now, but one day you’ll look back on twenty-nine and wonder how you ever could have been so footloose and fancy-free.”

  I was too hungover to laugh. I was sure if I did I’d throw up. I put a hand on my stomach. “You’re funny.”

  Ana rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell him that. He needs encouragement like he needs another car.”

  “I have four,” said Spencer. “But the thing is: only four.”

  “He doesn’t care what I think,” I said to Ana. “Who am I?”

  Neither of them responded to this with any curiosity. They seemed to find nothing unusual about my presence at all. They hadn’t even asked my name. I knew Hugo liked younger women, the whole world did, thanks to Kitty Rosenthal, but their attitudes suggested that this was ordinary to them. Another weekend, another stranger in the kitchen.

  Spencer took out his phone and commenced pecking at the screen. Ana began to replace everything he had taken out of the cabinets. I gathered I was dismissed.

  “I’m going to look around,” I said.

  “Do you want headphones for the guided tour?” said Spencer.

  He didn’t bother to look up to see if I had gotten the joke.

  * * *

  The house had a sprawling layout, horizontal as well as vertical. Rooms were lofted over other rooms, blond wood staircases hovered without railings. The art was large and impersonal. Smeary ombré canvases took up whole walls, seven-figure minimalist boxes. Next to them, the scatter of framed photographs seemed small and hokey as proofs: an action shot of Spencer at a swim meet, one of Hugo on his wedding day in a tuxedo with no bride in sight. It must have been a picture from his first wedding, because Hugo was young and smiling, with a daisy stuck through his buttonhole.

  A glass balcony off the guest bedroom upstairs yielded views of the property. I went out into the whip of the wind for a look. Below me, a man with a vacuum was cleaning the tiled swimming pool. He stood on its shores, raking the green, shirred surface with a hose. The water already looked clean enough to drink. Further on, I could see a steel airplane hangar, a fenced-in clay tennis court, and at the rim of everything, a row of dense, privacy-preserving pines.

  Across the hall in a room that must have been Spencer’s, a layer of T-shirts and sneakers covered the floor like an adolescent loam. Two different styles of Exeter water bottles sat on the desk, one aluminum, the other plastic. A model airplane swinging near the window was the only trace of boyhood. This side of the house had the poorer view. The window looked out on the gravel driveway and the impassive face of the gray gate. It struck me that Spencer might not consider this his home so much as a place to occasionally empty the entire contents of his backpack and throw himself, exhausted, into bed.

  The rest of the doors on the hallway were closed and I didn’t start opening them. Hugo was behind one of them, and I was afraid of stumbling in on him sleeping or nude or otherwise undignified. Newly awake and blowing his nose. Stooping to climb into a pair of khakis.

  I went back downstairs and poked around until I found the door that led to the basement. A wine cellar off to one side smelled of cardboard and cork. A dozen or so boxes sat open, half unpacked. The urge to steal hit me softly, almost academically. An impulse left over from youth and rarely acted on: I wouldn’t bu
t I could.

  Behind another door I found the rec room, the house’s only concession to bad taste. The space had been converted into a ’90s-style comedy club. There was a microphone set up in front of a brick wall and three low tables with chairs. A red leatherette banquette rimmed the room. From the doorway I could see a framed gold record from Hugo’s early career, his sophomore effort, Second Best. On the cover, Hugo stood in a circle of yellow light wearing a brown corduroy jacket with wide seventies lapels. He held a mic loosely in front of him and looked off to his right, half smiling. In his other hand was a joke shop gun, a black plastic pistol with a red flag protruding from it that said BANG in a comic book font.

  I wondered what purpose that room served. Whether Hugo stood in front of his friends and family and did his act for fun. Whether captive audiences of party guests tittered politely at his jokes. The place didn’t even feel real. It felt like an exhibit, like I’d turn around and find a wax statue of Hugo lurking in the shadows, life-sized and just short of realistic. I couldn’t imagine it was part of the architect’s vision.

  Back in the kitchen, light streamed in from every direction. Hugo was there in a paisley bathrobe, what a certain type of decadent might call a dressing gown. Spencer still texted at the counter, though he’d retreated to a more remote stool. I felt the same trepidation I had earlier that morning, the same self-doubt.

  I sat down at the counter. “You didn’t tell me about a party.”

  Hugo had his hands in the pockets of his robe. The wattage of his blue eyes had just begun to dim.

  “It’s a Memorial Day party,” he said. “We do it every year. Maybe it’s a retirement party, too.”

  “I thought you already had a party. With the crab bites and the champagne. The band.”

  “That was a work party. Can’t really let loose at one of those. This one is for friends. Anyway, last time I checked there wasn’t an upward limit on how many parties you can have for yourself.”

  “There is,” I said. “The limit is one.”

  “It’ll be fun. It’s an event, this party. We go large. One year we had a Dixieland jazz band. One year we did a Havana theme. Spencer had a puff of my cigar. Right, Spence? You puked.” He addressed me. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?”

  “George,” I said.

  Hugo frowned. “Paul. Paul McCartney was at one. He was in this kitchen.”

  I looked around pointlessly, as if I might still find him holding a glass under the icemaker.

  Hugo said, “It’s been remodeled since then. Remember that, Spence?”

  “Yeah. We got a garbage disposal.”

  “I meant the time we had Paul over.” Hugo shook his head. “Nothing impresses this guy.”

  “Wings sucks,” said Spencer.

  I found myself defending Wings. “They have some okay songs. The thing is that you can’t compare them to the Beatles.”

  Spencer said, “I was kidding. I’ve never heard Wings. I only said that to piss off my dad.”

  Hugo took the bait. “What do people your age know about music? No one even plays instruments anymore. No one even sings. They make sounds into a microphone and an engineer turns it into a robot baby voice that hits the right notes. What ever happened to authenticity? What ever happened to a guy onstage with a guitar? Now it’s about having a provocative haircut, and, I don’t know, taking selfies.”

  Spencer and I exchanged a look.

  Hugo let out a breath. “God, I need a cup of coffee.”

  He started opening cabinets, taking out cereal boxes.

  “The freezer,” I said. “Do you guys actually live here or what?”

  Hugo stood by the stove while the kettle heated up. Outside, the pool guy wound up his hose. The water cast palm-sized amoebas of light on the stainless steel appliances.

  “See this thing?” said Hugo. He pointed at the Chemex. “This is not an improvement on a regular coffeemaker.”

  “It makes better coffee,” said Spencer.

  “No,” said Hugo. He picked it up and held it close to his face. “It’s a glass jug. In an hourglass shape. You’re not going to convince me a jug is better.”

  “It is, though,” insisted Spencer. He turned to me. “Back me up.”

  I looked from one to the other. It was odd to see them together in the same room, odd to see Hugo’s progeny at all. His genes repeated, maybe improved on, refracted through another person and pummeled by adolescence.

  “Some people think it is,” I said.

  “But it’s a pain in the ass,” said Hugo. “Heating up water. Pouring it over manually.”

  “It’s one extra step,” said Spencer.

  “The thing with the pods, that thing I liked.”

  Spencer said, “There’s a whole channel in the Pacific that’s full of those pods. A floating landmass of them. Fish can’t get through. Birds try to eat them and choke. The dolphins are screwed. Those pods are ruining the whole ecosystem.”

  “Is that true?” said Hugo.

  “Probably,” said Spencer.

  “I thought your generation was into technology.” He gestured at Spencer’s phone on the counter, pinging away. “Getting things done fast.”

  “We’re into things that are good,” said Spencer.

  I got the feeling they could bicker this way all day. It was like the acting exercise where you did a whole argument making nonsense sounds. The topic didn’t even matter.

  “This party,” I said. “Who’s coming anyway?”

  “Some old guys like me. Comedy people. Golf buddies. A few actresses maybe. Models.”

  “Models!” I said.

  “Bony will be there, so that’s one person you’ll know.”

  I thought of what I had packed that I might want to wear in the presence of models. The only dress I’d brought was the one I’d worn the day before. It was black with small bright flowers and smelled like a bowling alley concession stand. It was a dress for doing stand-up at Birds & the Bees and going home alone.

  “I don’t have anything to wear to this party. All I have is the dress I came in, which I was wearing yesterday at a bar where you get a free hot dog with every drink. Drink three drinks, eat three hot dogs. Drink six drinks, eat six hot dogs. Nine drinks, nine hot dogs. You get the point.” I wondered if I sounded as crazy to them as I did to myself. “So we need to do something about that. Unless I should wear this?”

  We all looked at me. The red shorts reached my knees; the whole ensemble erased all sex characteristics I’d once had.

  “I like that outfit,” said Spencer. “You look like Scotty’s little brother.”

  “Who is Scotty?”

  “Don’t worry about it. A buddy of mine.”

  Hugo held his hands open, as if to say solutions are all around us, solutions are there for the taking. “We’ll go get a dress then.”

  * * *

  The hangar out back was filled with cars. Hugo’s collection was famous. For a while he’d hosted a second show on cable about rare and exotic cars. He traveled the country looking for them, talking to owners and experts. He had a cohost, Jazz, a feckless blonde whose role was to know nothing whatsoever about cars. They were always dressing Jazz up in coveralls, handing her a wrench. She’d voice her opinions and all the men would chuckle. This one’s a pretty color. What makes this one so fast, the pistons? Convertibles should be cheaper than regular cars—they use less metal.

  But Jazz, Hugo told me, was precisely the problem with Car Hunt. It got so it was barely even about the cars. It became all about Jazz and her adorable blunders and malapropisms.

  “She was Amelia Bedelia with implants,” he said as we crossed the field.

  The grass was shorn and spongy, wet with dew.

  “They wanted us to be this comic duo. Like Lucy and Desi, or—” He stopped walking, waved his arms around. “I can’t think of a second example that applies here, but you get what I’m saying. They wanted a romcom basically. They wanted to appeal to women. That’s not how I
initially pitched it. That wasn’t it at all.”

  Hugo left after a couple of seasons and Jazz stayed on as the host. It became Car Hunt with Jazz Sherman. She built a following as the antiauthority of the car world. She got a NASCAR tie-in, won a couple of minor Emmys, the kind they don’t present at the televised ceremony. You could buy a shirt with her face on it at Walmart. People actually wanted to wear Jazz’s face around like that.

  It was fine, though, said Hugo. That he had parted ways with Car Hunt. It was for the best. Because he didn’t really see the point of looking at a car on TV anyway. As far as he was concerned, a car wasn’t even a car until it was moving. It was the sum of the engine and the body and the road, the people inside, the scenery streaming past. This idea, the romance of the machine, had nearly been ruined for him by it.

  “By it?” I said. “By what?”

  “Car Hunt!” said Hugo.

  We arrived at the hangar and Hugo let us in through a side door. Fluorescent lights buzzed on over polished concrete floors. The cars were arranged into rows. Aisle after aisle of candy colors and interesting matte finishes. A draft from nowhere carried the oil change smell of a Jiffy Lube. I could tell he was proud by the way he stood, farmerish, with his hands on his hips, surveying all that was his.

  “How many are there?” I said.

  He wasn’t sure, he told me. Hundreds. Cal kept an inventory, but he didn’t check it that often. There were motorcycles, too, a whole black and chrome patch of them, and a biplane, cherry red with cream-colored wings.

  “I’m afraid of it,” he said. “The one time we took it out it was utterly insane. Like flying a child’s wagon through a thunderstorm. You know the kind of wagon I mean. Those rickety metal ones. A Radio Flyer?”

  He had started pacing the rows.

  “So you just buy a car whenever you want to?” I said.

  “Pretty much.”