Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  Either way, it had scared him. It had made him reassess the direction of his life. He wanted to spend more time with his family, he said. He wanted to spend so much time with them that they came to loathe him for his foibles. At the moment they liked him, which indicated they didn’t know him very well. He was confident the network would be able to fill his shoes. There were tons of great comedians out there, some of them on this very network, and they weren’t such big shoes after all, were they? A predictable pan down revealed he was wearing giant red clown shoes.

  “Oh right,” he said as the audience laughed.

  Negotiations began for his replacement. Jockeying. It was in the news, impossible not to follow. Later there was a book about it, an oral history, and I read that, too. The network made up a short list and Hugo was at the top. He was the natural choice. He’d been doing Stay Up for fifteen years, and had often guest hosted at 11:30. He had carved out an audience of college students, stoners, insomniacs, weirdos, young marrieds, lonely people. Their desirability to advertisers had increased over the years with their spending power. They would make the jump to the new slot, some of them at least. And as for new viewers, they’d find in Hugo a variation on the familiar: a big, handsome white guy, medium funny, with a good head of hair.

  There was one other serious contender. He was Hugo’s opposite in every way: a Christian, a family man so wholesome he didn’t even curse, a veteran of the improv scene not above donning a wig. You could tell by looking at him that he liked camping and he’d be the one to set up the tent. His following skewed to conservative middle-aged moms. He sold out stadiums full of them. He had the irksome name of Jeremiah McCabe. Somehow, he was also really funny.

  Still, Hugo was poised to win. They made him an offer. Thirty million, plus his dream job. He could stay in the theater if he wanted, have the set overhauled, rethink the space, or upgrade to a new one. Whatever he wanted. All he had to do was sign the paperwork.

  Instead, he took his Mercedes out of the garage on Seventieth and Amsterdam and crashed it into a guardrail on the Henry Hudson. They found a bag of coke in his pocket and a Chapin junior in his front seat. This was Kitty Rosenthal. She was locally famous already for being the daughter of the New York County DA and for getting caught shoplifting from the Ricky’s on Sixth Avenue in her field hockey uniform. She’d taken some self-tanner and a couple of exfoliating face masks, then, at the police station, laughed and claimed it was all performance art. The incident lived on as a citywide in-joke. It was a popular Halloween costume that year, a field hockey uniform and handcuffs, and for a period there, maybe four to six months, mentioning it to anyone would earn you a quick, cheap laugh.

  Kitty Rosenthal was not wearing her field hockey uniform that night with Hugo. She was wearing a rose-gold Herve Leger bandage dress that retailed for $1,090 at Saks Fifth Avenue. Hugo could not really be blamed for thinking she was older, or at least that’s what he told the press. They’d met at a club in the Meatpacking District and she’d said she was twenty-two, a classics major at Barnard named Francesca. All of this was in the tabloids, including Hugo’s mug shot. In it he looked raw and red, pupils dilated, chapped lips parted as if to explain himself.

  “I had no idea she was sixteen. I’m not insane,” he told a reporter before his lawyer made him stop giving interviews.

  The DA, Rosenthal, wanted to get Hugo on intent to sell, but the bag of drugs was laughably tiny and Hugo had no priors. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor was the best they could do, plus a DWI.

  Hugo got probation, community service, a fine. He did his community service up in Harlem. Mentored an at-risk teen, played pickup hoops and took the kid out for soul food afterward. The pictures from that time—Hugo in a T-shirt and baseball cap; Hugo with his arm around his Little Brother; Hugo digging into a yellow mound of mac and cheese—did a lot for his image.

  He went to rehab and that helped, too. It helped him look contrite, anyway. But of course he lost the 11:30 slot. There was an old-fashioned idea in late night that you had to be a certain type to sit in Johnny’s chair. That type didn’t do drugs or haunt the Meatpacking District or get behind the wheel under the influence. That type definitely didn’t mix with teenagers.

  Jeremiah McCabe went ahead and grew his hair out long and Jesusy. Wavy tendrils framed his face. His suits were custom-made to accommodate his wide shoulders and trim torso. In the promos you could see his pecs through his shirt. And he did things his way, not at all how Hugo would have. He started each show with a list of puns he liked. He had an a cappella group instead of a band. He invited a different precocious kid on every week to demonstrate a talent, and this was presented without irony, as something you were really supposed to enjoy.

  The biggest surprise was that they let Hugo keep doing Stay Up. They didn’t have to: His contract almost certainly included a morality clause. But money persuaded and so did lawyers. And audiences liked their celebrities squeaky clean first, but failing that, redemption could play, too. Redemption could always play.

  It all mostly blew over, except that it ended his marriage to Spencer’s mother. Except that it dogged him forever. Came up in profiles, served as a constant footnote to his work. Hung in the air over every interview he gave. What had he done with that girl in the mid-2000s or what was he about to do? Made people question, once again, if you could like the art but not the artist. If you could like the artist but not the man. If you could like the man but not the way he treated women. Not the way he comported himself in New York City between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. on a weeknight in November.

  The network’s gamble paid off. Hugo’s first show back was his highest rated in years. Viewers tuned in for a mea culpa and he gave them one. The network higher-ups were worried he’d do it sarcastically, make a joke of it. But he did it straight, and straight into the camera. I’d watched it from the common room of my college dorm. Sophomore year, scratchy furniture. “Mistakes,” he said. “I’ve made a few.” I found I half believed him.

  Now he sat in a deck chair indulging Roman’s friends. I could see the gray-blond top of his head from the window of the master bedroom, where Gypsy had taken me to lend me a bathing suit. The toddler had followed us there, bumping up the stairs backward on her butt.

  “I probably have something that will fit you,” said Gypsy, rummaging in a drawer.

  I couldn’t see how. She was maybe five-five, four inches shorter than me, with breast implants hovering in the vicinity of her collarbone. She started pulling out tiny swatches of neon fabric and holding them up to the light. Her nails were black and each contained a tiny golden arrow, the star sign for Sagittarius.

  Hugo got up and went into the house. I waited for him to reappear in the yard on his way out to the dock. I wanted to watch him crossing the green lawn. Gazing out on the water and searching the horizon. I thought it would tell me about his state of mind. But he returned to the deck a moment later holding a ramekin of olives and a fresh beer.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. The room was as devoid of Roman’s personality as the rest of the house. Its color scheme was navy and white.

  “What’s that?” I said, indicating a minifridge next to the bed.

  “It’s a refrigerator,” said Gypsy.

  I crouched down to look. It had a clear glass door and I could see bottled drinks lined up neatly. Coconut water, kombucha. The bottom shelf held an assortment of yogurt cups in chia, flax, and cacao nib.

  “You guys eat yogurt up here?”

  She laughed. “Sometimes. You want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “We put that here when I gave birth to Heaven so the doula wouldn’t have to keep going downstairs to get drinks.” She shrugged. “Kinda genius. And then we liked it so we kept it.”

  I looked around the room. The path to eccentricity was winding. One day you were making practical adjustments to facilitate a home birth, the next you’d adopted bedside yogurt as a permanent lifestyle.

&nbs
p; “You gave birth here?”

  “Right there,” she said, pointing at where my bare feet sank into the patterned area rug. Theirs was a shoes-off household.

  “We put down a tarp,” she added quickly.

  “I’m surprised Roman went for a home birth. It seems like the kind of thing he would find . . .”

  “What?”

  In the silence, Heaven hopped a stuffed pig around the perimeter of the room, making oinking sounds. It changed the room somehow, knowing a person had been born there.

  “I don’t know. Crunchy. Hippieish. Progressive.”

  Gypsy regarded me coolly. “It wasn’t Roman’s choice. In the end, he got into it. He was the one to catch her as she came out.”

  It was so hard to picture I thought she might be joking. Incense haze and primal, feminine smells. Roman kneeling on the ground while a midwife in hemp pants uncapped essential oils. The baby in his hands, a screaming ball of blood. An honest-to-God miracle delivered into the hands of a boor in a Knicks jersey.

  “He’s different in real life than he is on TV, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can see that.”

  But I couldn’t, not really. To me he seemed the same.

  “It’s a persona,” she said. “The obnoxious thing. Just like with Hugo.”

  In theory, it made sense that there would be some separation between the two. That the real guy would have depths the TV persona didn’t. But I felt sure there were people out there who were exactly what they seemed to be, people you could pin down immediately. For instance, the moment they grabbed your ass in the workplace, which was something Roman had done to me.

  I had been on my way to the snack machine to buy some peanut butter crackers, a task so mundane I’d forgotten the existence of my body. When he touched me, I froze. Over my shoulder I glimpsed his face, expressionless, like he was the one getting the crackers. After the grab was mostly over, he let his thumb linger on the underside of my ass cheek. Then he walked away without saying anything.

  I wanted to know how Gypsy accounted for that. How did real-life ass grabbing fit in with her idea of personas and hidden complexities? I was high enough to ask.

  “He was already in character?” she suggested.

  I laughed at the idea of Roman as a method actor, committed by his art to the worst possible version of himself. Gypsy laughed, too. Her indifference to her husband’s actions seemed genuine.

  I glanced again at the window to see if Hugo had gone down to the dock yet. He was still there, drinking beer and listening politely to the tan woman.

  “How did you guys meet anyway?” I asked.

  She had worked in radio, too, she said. She’d been in sales. Her job had sent her to a trade conference in Cabo, where Roman was the keynote speaker.

  “We met in the lobby of the hotel. He was sitting there alone. I just walked up to him.”

  She wasn’t normally like that, she said. Brash or aggressive. But she had gotten a feeling that something was meant to happen. She came from a long line of women who were a little bit psychic, so when she got those feelings she tended to trust them. If you thought about it, what reason was there for a girl from Texas to have chosen radio of all things to get interested in? What made her go out and get a communications degree unless it was all leading to something bigger? What made her boss send her to that particular conference? What made her walk into the hotel lobby instead of going out for tacos with her colleagues?

  “The universe tells you when to pay attention,” she said. “Maybe it’s stupid, but I believe it.”

  She made a credible witch, the way she looked. Her long black hair and razor talons. The glitter on her eyelids that made her blink heavily. One of her tattoos was a spider, another a moon with a purple aura. A thorny stem climbed her arm and bloomed into a dark yellow rose at her shoulder.

  I said, “If you’re psychic, can you read my palm?”

  “I stopped doing that. You wouldn’t like what I’d see.”

  I looked down at my palms. They were medium-sized and ordinary. The three creases in the center made an M. They gave nothing away. “I might.”

  She shook her head. “You wouldn’t. People are always offended by what I see. It makes them mad. In general, people are unprepared for honesty.”

  It echoed one of Roman’s favorite ideas, that critics didn’t like the things he said—the racism, the sexism, the baseline cruelty—because all of it rang true. I had forgotten for a second that she was married to him.

  “Tell me something that will make me get it,” I said. “About Roman.”

  “He’s a Pisces with Leo rising; that should tell you everything.” She paused. “If the fridge didn’t do it, I don’t know what will.”

  She held up a one-piece bathing suit with a tiger on it, orange on a black background with an obscene reaching tongue. She turned it around so I could see the deep U of its back. It was a confusion of predators: the whole thing shimmered like snakeskin.

  “I think it’s you,” she said.

  I laughed again, then realized she was serious, then wondered if she could be right. Was it really me somehow? Was my essence captured by the yawning jaws and yellow fangs of a dead-eyed tiger? Everywhere I caught glimpses of the person I could be if only I were a completely different person.

  As expected, the suit hung a little too loose in the chest and came up a little too high on the leg. I went back downstairs, the tiger’s mouth half-covered by my cutoffs. I had reservations about wearing that suit in front of Hugo. I didn’t want to lose whatever slim margin of mystique I had. I didn’t want to seem ridiculous. But when he saw me, Hugo laughed.

  “This is what I’m like,” I said, relieved. “A lewd bathing suit person.”

  The hot tub was a sunken octagon laid into the smooth boards of the deck. Roman had already peeled back the thick vinyl cover. Four people sat in its rumbling depths with their hats still on. They held their koozies out of the froth. Hugo was back on the couch, doing a bit for everybody, the one about the depraved troop of acrobats. It was a shaggy dog story, all in the telling, different every time. The punch line was that it was upper-class people acting this way. Pissing in each other’s mouths, shoving their genitals into USB ports, and so on.

  I slipped into the hot tub between a woman in a pink bikini and the guy in the flag shorts. They were trunks, it turned out, or else shorts he had decided to get wet. Roman, across from me, watched my descent. With his jersey off he was annoyingly buff. He even had abs. He held his beer deliberately, so his biceps popped.

  “Hey, tiger,” he said.

  I remembered that I hated hot tubs. Especially hot tubs with this many people in them. With five of us in there it was about at capacity, everyone trying not to bump slippery knees. I felt a foot slither against mine, and looked up to see Roman smiling. Someone had turned on a radio. An ad played, a woman’s voice listing items you might want to buy at the grocery store for your summer kickoff party. Charcoal and beer and shitloads of beef. She didn’t really say shitloads.

  Gypsy came out on the deck carrying Heaven. The toddler wore a bathing suit, skirted and frilled at the shoulders, red fish against teal water. It made her eyes look bluer, her hair more red.

  Roman set his beer down on the deck behind him before reaching for her with wet arms. “Give her here.”

  Gypsy passed her into the hot tub and onto Roman’s lap. She smacked at the surface of the water with her tiny palms. Roman kissed her cheek, cooed in her ear. It wasn’t a good idea to put a baby in a hot tub, but I knew better than to say so.

  “It’s good for her,” said Roman, as if he’d read my mind. “She likes it.”

  My high had ceased to move through my veins, settling into my jaw, making it inert. The other people in the hot tub carried on a conversation, but I found it impossible to participate. I had nothing to add about the latest superhero movie. I had nothing to add about the best clubs in the Hamptons. I had nothing to add about the New York Yankees, e
xcept that they were a bunch of millionaire mercenaries and that the abstraction of baseball, how far apart everyone stood from each other and the arcane, lopsided rules—three strikes but four balls?—made it all about as comprehensible to me as particle physics. I didn’t say any of that, but I did think it, and I must have smiled, because Roman jabbed my shin with his foot and said, “What?”

  “Huh? Nothing,” I said. “I was thinking about something funny.”

  “Care to share?”

  Everyone shut up and looked at me. Hugo smiled over the lip of his beer. I thought of the beautiful cream MG sitting in the driveway like a child we’d let down. Someone would have to drive it home.

  “Definitely not,” I said.

  “You were judging again,” said Roman.

  “No, I was . . .” I took a breath. “I was thinking about the rules of baseball. How dumb they are. Three strikes but four balls? It’s about as comprehensible as particle physics.”

  They all stared at me, and then away. At the speckled rim of the hot tub, the streaky white clouds overhead, the fine blue expanse of the Sound. I should have left it there, it wasn’t going to translate, but for some reason I pressed on.

  “It all seems so improvised. Like someone was making it up as they went along.” I heard myself doing a voice, a sort of blue-collar Brooklyn accent. How it applied to what I was saying was not clear to me. “And there’ll be, uh, nine innings. Not ten, but nine. And the guys will stand one here, one here, one here. The one with the stick will stand there. No girls. If girls want to play they have to use a different ball.”

  We all sat in silence, contemplating the low thrum of the hot tub jets until the guy in the flag shorts cleared his throat. “You’re a comedian?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What he’s getting at is that you’re not very funny,” said Roman.

  This people laughed at, shifting nervously in the foam.

  “I agree with you,” I said.

  I hoisted myself out of the tub as gracefully as I could. The suit streamed water. It had grown even looser and hung limply off my front. A new fold had appeared in the tiger’s face, dragging its mouth downward.