Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “That fucking baby shouldn’t be in a hot tub,” I said. “Anyone could tell you that.”

  I passed Hugo on the way back inside and he looked away. My wet feet slapped the boards of the deck.

  * * *

  Hugo tried to convince me to drive back, but I said no. My brain still felt stepped on from the weed. Like a giant was toeing the frontal lobe.

  “Oh come on,” said Roman.

  We all stood in the driveway. Gypsy laughed into her phone on the front lawn while Heaven ran around, peeking under bushes. I had changed back into my normal clothes. The tiger suit I’d left dripping from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. I hoped to never think about it again.

  “It’s actually really easy,” said Hugo.

  He was talking about driving stick. They both thought it was a good time for me to learn.

  “It tells you what to do,” said Roman.

  “It?”

  “The car. The vibrations, the noises.” He turned to Hugo. “Maybe she shouldn’t drive.”

  “Are you not okay to drive?” I said to Hugo. “Is that what’s going on? We could call a car.”

  “We are not calling a car,” said Hugo. “There is absolutely no need. I had one-point-five beers. Two-point-five at most. I just think you should learn to drive stick. It’s a good life skill. What if there’s an emergency someday?”

  “An emergency I have to drive out of in a stick shift?”

  “You never know,” said Hugo.

  “Have you ever heard of state-dependent learning?” I said.

  They looked at me blankly.

  “If I learn to drive stick shift high, I might only ever know how to do it high. I might have to smoke pot every time I want to drive stick. Or, you know, eat an edible. I think we can all agree that’s absurd.”

  “This is a waste of time,” said Roman.

  I didn’t want to wreck Hugo’s car, was the real issue. I felt it had been entrusted to me in some way. I didn’t want to wreck the car, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to create a situation where we were standing by a smoldering ruin, blowing for sobriety, while people slowed down to gawk. I didn’t want to immediately ram into Roman’s BMW parked behind the MG because I had it in the wrong gear. And I didn’t want to hit the oversized pickup truck that I assumed belonged to one of the people in the hot tub. I didn’t want those people to get out of the hot tub. Ever. I wanted them to die in there.

  “I don’t feel comfortable,” was how I put it.

  “There it is,” said Roman. “The comfort card.”

  Gypsy held her hand over her phone and shouted, “Leave her alone.”

  This settled it, though I didn’t know why. We got in and buckled up. Hugo would drive.

  “I’m fine,” he said to me again. “Anyway, I’m sorry to tell you this, but at any given moment most people on the road are drunk.”

  “Is that true?” I said.

  “Let’s hope not.”

  He started the car.

  “Thanks for having me,” I said to Roman.

  Roman said, “You’re welcome.”

  It was the most civil exchange we’d ever had.

  Hugo started the car and made a careful K-turn. “You okay?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s a short drive, right? It’ll probably be fine.”

  “No, because of the hot tub.”

  I shrugged. “Oh that. I don’t care what those people think. I don’t care if they think I’m funny.”

  Actually, it was the opposite. I did care. I preferred that everyone found me funny. It was the only thing that felt good. I suspected Hugo knew this and was the same way. I suspected that his need exceeded even my own, that it was dense and lightless as a black hole, more dire for having been fed.

  “Good,” said Hugo. “You know you were right about one thing. That baby should not have been in the hot tub. She was being cooked like veal.”

  “Do they boil veal?”

  “An imperfect analogy.”

  As we drove away I could see Roman in the rearview mirror standing on his front steps. He looked like one of the bobbleheads we used to keep on the reception desk at work. Big head, small body. When he held up a hand to wave, there was a toylike solemnity to it. Hugo and I both raised our hands without looking back.

  * * *

  Back at the house, teenagers had commandeered the pool. Hugo and I stood in the kitchen watching them. A teak table held smudged glasses, an ashtray overflowing with butts, a bottle of Crown Royal and its empty purple bag. There were four of them: Spencer, another boy, and two girls. The boys were goofing around, splashing, holding each other underwater. The girls wore bikinis. The blonde lay smoking on the diving board. The brunette was draped across a swan-shaped pool float, one arm thrown around the swan’s neck and the other dragging in the water. Spencer was still fully dressed in the same outfit I had seen him in that morning. His soaked tank top stuck to his chest and the brim of his black baseball cap dripped water.

  “I guess you want me to discipline him,” said Hugo.

  He’d concentrated intensely the whole way home, gripping the wheel with both hands, chewing gum two pieces at a time. He hadn’t put on a comedy album. He hadn’t even spoken. Now he looked drained, like someone had slowly poured the life-giving goo out of him, left a trail of it along 95.

  “Me?” I said.

  “It’s not as simple as it looks. I go out there in front of Spencer’s friends and I, what?”

  “Ground him?” I suggested.

  “I’ve tried. It doesn’t take. Spencer doesn’t respect me. You think he asks my permission to do things?”

  “So get his mom to ground him then. Allison.”

  “Allison’s shooting a movie in Thailand. A street-racing movie. Can you imagine? What time is it there?” He looked at his watch. “Five in the morning. Even if I could get through, what would I say? Hi, it’s me, I can’t control our son. He hates me just like you do.”

  “I don’t think he hates you. I think he . . .”

  I caught myself before I said pities you.

  “What?”

  “He’s seventeen,” I said. “I think he’s seventeen.”

  Spencer had gotten out to retrieve the liquor bottle. The girl on the diving board sat up and flicked her cigarette at him. It arced high and landed in the deep end.

  “They just cleaned it this morning,” said Hugo.

  “Why don’t you go out there and ask him to wrap it up. Be chill about it. Hey, it’s me, your fun-filled, easygoing dad. How about putting away the bong for the night . . .”

  “Bong?” said Hugo.

  I pointed to the far end of the pool where a red, blown-glass bong sat on the rim of a concrete planter. “Sorry.”

  Hugo sank back onto a stool. His shirt pooched out stiffly over his belly. One sleeve had come half unrolled. He looked older to me than he ever had, less outside of time. Shaped by the fourth dimension like the rest of us. I thought of his doppelgänger in the store, Hugo’s show of not being bothered by him. Maybe he believed he wasn’t, but years of dealing with fans must have taken their toll.

  “He gets bad grades,” said Hugo. “He’s on scholastic probation. We’re giving him the best education in the world and he doesn’t even care. He’s not stupid, he just thinks it doesn’t matter. And he’s right, actually. He’ll get into college based on who we are and how much money we donate and he’ll get bad grades there, too. When he’s sick of it he’ll drop out and we’ll help him do the next thing. So on, ad infinitum.”

  Spencer was eating now from a bag of Doritos, alternating drafts from the whiskey bottle. Whiskey, chip, whiskey, chip.

  “Will you go out there and do it?” he said. “I just don’t have it in me.”

  I didn’t know anything about parenting a teenager. My life in New York was child-free. I saw kids as a part of the urban terroir, interesting landscape features in bright sneakers and jean jackets, but mostly I didn’t think abo
ut them. Other than Spencer that morning, I couldn’t think of the last one I had even spoken to. We lived downstairs from a baby and occasionally I cooed at her in the hallway, but that hardly counted. Did the same threats still work on today’s kids that had worked on me? Revoking privileges, taking away screen time? Or were they as cynical as everyone else these days, weary heirs to an unimpressed age?

  “All right,” I said. “No big deal. I’ll take care of it.”

  I crossed to the sliding glass door and let myself out. Spencer sat on the diving board now, legs swinging. The blonde had joined the brunette on the float and the other boy was pulling them around by the swan’s orange beak.

  “June,” Spencer called. “Have a drink.”

  I put my hands on my hips, felt silly, let them fall to my sides. “You have to wrap this up.”

  Spencer laughed.

  The blond girl raised her head from the float. “Spencer, is that your mom?”

  “Yeah,” said Spencer. “That’s her all right.”

  I said, “I’m not his mom. How old do I look to you?”

  She said, “I can never tell old people’s ages.”

  She sat up further, pressing down on the other girl’s stomach for leverage. The float bucked and the swan nodded its head. Small waves lapped at the side of the pool.

  “If you’re not his mom, why are you telling him what to do?” she said.

  “I’m a friend of his dad’s. It doesn’t matter. The point is, you guys need to clean up and go home. Not you.” I pointed at Spencer. “You need to stay.”

  “Why should we listen to you?” said the blonde. Her hair was in a sloppy topknot and she wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, though the sun had dipped behind the trees.

  “Spencer . . .” I said.

  Spencer stopped swinging his legs. “No, I want to hear your reason. For why we should listen to you.”

  They’d made me nervous until then, especially the blond girl who was pretty, mean, and mostly nude. But all at once I stopped caring. We were acting our ages and it struck me as theatrical and a little corny. I was an adult because I had aged into it. That was all. The same thing would happen to them.

  “There’s no real reason. Your dad asked me to say something is why.”

  The sliding glass door opened and closed behind me. Hugo said, “Everything okay out here?”

  He’d retucked his shirt and freshly rolled the cuffs.

  “Hey, Scotty,” he called to Spencer’s friend. “What’s good?”

  Scotty looked amused. “Hey, Mr. Best.”

  “Been watching our Yankees?”

  Spencer climbed off the diving board. Scotty did a circuit around the deck, picking up empties. I realized I’d been manipulated.

  “Am I the bad cop?” I said to Hugo.

  Hugo shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  Spencer came over, wringing out his tank top. “Is Noam coming to cook dinner?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Hugo. “Wouldn’t he be here by now?”

  They both looked at me.

  “I don’t know who Noam is,” I said.

  “He’s Israeli,” said Spencer, as if that helped. “Well, what are we gonna eat?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” said Hugo. “Any ideas?”

  The other kids walked up, wrapped in towels or stepping into shorts. They looked at me hopefully like I was going to solve this problem. Oddly, it made me want to.

  “Let’s just order a pizza,” I said.

  I thought maybe I was an adult after all, if being an adult meant having the fortitude to reach for the most obvious solution. Hugo smiled at me like I’d passed a test.

  “There you go,” he said.

  * * *

  After Spencer and his friends went back inside, after Ana materialized to sweep cigarette butts into a garbage bag and sponge down the teak tables, after the pizza place we’d chosen had been relitigated three times, I walked out front to call in our order. The sprinklers came on while I was on the phone, black plastic heads that rose out of the ground. They ticked and whirled, casting low jets of water over the grass.

  There was no reason to water that lawn. We’d had a wet spring. Many consecutive days of rain as the show wound down. The theater flooded and the pages were sent out in their windbreakers to sandbag the atrium. Upstairs in the office, we felt like people must have felt not before or after the flood, but during. The people of the deluge. The ones who Noah left for dead. Everyone made ark jokes until it became insufferable and Gil wrote on the whiteboard: No Ark Jokes.

  We didn’t go outside during that period. Not for coffee, not for lunch. The network had turned on us, then the elements. Gil developed circles under his eyes. He kept leaving meetings to take calls from his wife. Hugo came in late and holed up in his office. His assistants were afraid to knock on the door. We started drinking early, usually during the taping. Our last ever, special edition game of Thursday bingo, no one even played. We poured bourbon into Dixie cups and stared down at our cards. Phoned-in interview was a square. Gallows humor was a square. Affected nostalgia was a square.

  One day it stopped raining and within half an hour the sky was clear. A rainbow stretched over Lower Manhattan. The city sparkled as it dried, a moment of grace. We were annoyed, betrayed. Our suffering was undermined. There were days left yet until the final show. It had seemed that we were projecting the bad weather, beaming it out, or at least that our suffering was universal. But it took only five minutes for people in shorts to start emerging from buildings, five minutes for the sandals and shades, the sundresses in floral prints. We knew our shiva had ended and we’d have to start feeling different. Resigned or angry, fatalistic or cheerful. Anything but crushed, which couldn’t be maintained in the long term.

  I didn’t know why people watered their lawns at dusk. It reminded me of my childhood, of summertime, of dads out there still in work clothes hosing down the grass. Hitching up their khakis as they crouched to adjust sprinklers. My brother and I used to ride our bikes down our street at that time of night and it would be an avenue of spray. The mist coated our faces as we pedaled.

  I looked it up after I got off the phone with the pizza place: Why dusk? In the middle of the day, the water evaporated too quickly. And too late at night it didn’t evaporate fast enough. It clung to the blades and caused lawn disease. That was the first Google result anyway. Lawn disease. It sounded to me like a euphemism for something else, like the name a polite person might use for what ailed the very rich.

  The pizza took forty minutes to arrive. An electronic chime told us the delivery guy was at the gate. His car was visible in black and white on the screen next to the door. I watched his blurry approach, watched him take the steps in one leap and mash the doorbell. He seemed surprised when I opened. He had a skinny neck and wore the polo shirt of the restaurant. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

  “You called in an order for Hugo Best?”

  “Is that not plausible?”

  “No offense.”

  “You work at a pizza place.”

  “Hey, it’s fancy pizzas,” he said. “Anyway, this is just my day job.”

  We looked at each other. I knew what was coming. He waited another beat to say it.

  “Really, I’m a comedian. Actually . . .”

  He handed me the pizzas and reached into his back pocket for a flyer.

  “Here. Maybe you could give this to Hugo?”

  I balanced the pizzas on one arm and took it from him. It was for a comedy night at a bar in town, the same kind of glossy, cheaply produced flyer they handed out everywhere. I myself had handed them out more times than I could count. It was part of the deal when you were low on the bill or part of a showcase. No-names had to help scare up an audience. I had spent some of the worst afternoons of my life that way, standing on street corners, thrusting unwanted literature into the hands of passersby shaking their heads.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Five minutes
down the road. Frogger’s, you know the place?”

  “I don’t know it,” I said.

  “It’s not bad there,” he said. “Ladies drink for free on Tuesdays.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “The drinks are cheap every night. Tell Hugo I promise he won’t be disappointed. No, wait. Tell him something funnier. Tell him . . . hm.” He leaned against the doorjamb, thinking. “Okay, tell him—maybe you want to go get a pen to write this down?”

  “I’m not getting a pen.”

  “All right, just tell him to come. Will you tell him?”

  His persistence was sweet and stupid. It reminded me of Julian. The pizza boxes had started to burn my forearm. I set them down on the floor of the foyer and told him he should do something else with his life while there was still time. If it was at all possible, if there was another career he was considering, another thing he had aptitude for, he should do that instead. The entertainment business was a bad life. Unstable, low odds, unimaginably degrading. It was beneath him. I didn’t know anything about him, but I could tell for sure that it was beneath him because it was beneath everyone.

  He was silent for a second. Then he pointed at the pizza boxes. “You shouldn’t put food on the ground like that.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. I picked them back up.

  “There’s something very, very wrong about it. Plenty of people don’t have food and you go and put it on the ground.”

  “I said you’re right.”

  “So will you give it to him?”

  I had to laugh. He was back on the flyer. He’d probably hyped himself up on the way over, expecting Hugo to come to the door. Instead he’d gotten me, an obvious poor person who would put food on the ground.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it to him.”

  * * *

  The kids took their plates down to the basement and Hugo opened a bottle of wine. I tore into a veggie slice, relieved. I hadn’t eaten since Ana’s egg and I was shaky with hunger.