Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  Plus, the puppets. I could barely bring myself to think about the puppets.

  “Can we just look at the stained glass?” said my mother. “It’s really quite impressive.”

  “Susan, Jesus,” said my father. “Stop trying to experience awe right now. It’s pathetic.”

  I laughed and instantly felt bad. My mother looked wounded.

  “So you’re just the authority on everything and the rest of us are stupid, is that it?” my father said to me.

  No, that was not it. I was a quasi authority in this one narrow, highly specific arena. Or not even a quasi authority. Just a person who knew more about it than a sixty-five-year-old retired dentist from South Carolina. I had worked at learning about it, thought about it, tried to understand what went into it. Even if he was somewhat witty for a retired dentist, which he was, I still knew more about comedy than him. It was important to me and I was trying to share it with him and he was ungrateful. Also, he needed a smaller jacket because he looked like a twelve-year-old playing Willy Loman in a middle school production of Death of a Salesman.

  “What?” he said.

  “Arthur Miller!” I shouted.

  All three nuns were watching now. I hated myself immensely.

  I turned to my mother. “Get him a smaller jacket.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  My father’s face splotched red and his mouth twisted into a faint smile. “I think we should go back to our hotel. I’m tired.”

  My mother had forgotten to take a picture of me under the marquee, so I walked them back that way. It began to drizzle but none of us, not even our lady of the sensible shoes, had thought to bring an umbrella. Back in front of the theater we ran into Laura, taking shelter under the overhang.

  “Hello again, you Blooms. Did you enjoy the show?”

  “Sure. Absolutely,” said my father. “You all are doing wonderful work.”

  “It was very special,” added my mother. “Once in a lifetime.”

  “We aim to please,” said Laura. “Weren’t those puppets something?”

  “Oh, they were,” said my mother. “That elephant. It moved so realistically.”

  “I’m thrilled you enjoyed it.”

  She insisted on taking a picture of the three of us, tiny and smudged, far below the marquee. My mother posted it on Facebook twenty minutes later. She was smiling determinedly, I was squinting with a slash of wet hair across my forehead, and my father was standing a little bit away from us like a stranger who had wandered into the frame. The sign was so large that only part of it was visible: ITH HUGO BE, it read, which was not a phrase anyone would recognize.

  I didn’t know if Laura had any concept of how unhappy we were that day. None of us had ever been that good at hiding it. My father, for one, had been frowning so deeply through the whole encounter that it looked like the skin of his face was sliding off.

  “Everyone’s great,” I told Laura. “Everyone’s the same.”

  “I loved meeting them,” she said. “It really was a treat.”

  “I loved it, too,” I managed to say.

  Hugo and Laura left when they’d finished their orange juice, backing out of the room apologetically, almost bowing. They told us to stay out of trouble, which made Spencer and me grimace in unison. Then we were alone.

  I still clutched a handful of crumbs and I wiped it into a napkin. “What was that?”

  “Couldn’t you tell? It’s a bad news lunch.”

  “The show already ended. Laura pulled the plug. What other bad news could there be?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s how they act when they have to go have a difficult conversation. Nice work on the couch, by the way. You really put everyone at ease.”

  It wasn’t my job to put everyone at ease. It was someone else’s—Hugo’s maybe—but I didn’t bother pointing this out.

  “Why are they eating breakfast and lunch so close together?” I said. “They just had breakfast, now they’re going to go have lunch? That’s not what people do.”

  Spencer laughed. “It must be really bad news.”

  “He didn’t tell me she was coming. I would have gotten dressed.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing personal. He probably just didn’t think about you.”

  “That’s nice, thanks.”

  “But as a rule, just go ahead and get dressed.”

  “Their relationship,” I said.

  “I know,” said Spencer. “Believe me.”

  “What does your mother think of the two of them?”

  I expected him to bristle at the mention of her, but he said, “It drives her nuts. Or used to. Now she doesn’t have to deal with it. She’s got a new boyfriend. He’s like, royalty? In Europe. Minor Europe. Luxembourg or somewhere. At official functions he has to wear this outfit where he carries a sword.” He thought for a minute. “Actually, it probably does still bother her. My dad and Laura. She can’t really let things go. She could win twelve Oscars and still be pissed about the one time Laura ruined Thanksgiving.”

  “Has she won an Oscar?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. Four Emmys. And a People’s Choice Award.”

  He made a face.

  “Ruined Thanksgiving how?”

  “Not even ruined. She just showed up when my dad invited her. I guess, according to my mom, she shouldn’t have accepted. She didn’t even do anything specific. She brought this loaf of bread she made herself. To my mom that was too much. Because my mom doesn’t cook and had the whole thing catered and she saw the bread as an insult or something.”

  I thought of the pastries she had brought that morning, their subtle superiority. “Maybe it was.”

  “It definitely wasn’t. It was just bread. Laura likes to bake.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Then nothing. It was tense and my mom and my dad had one of their signature fights after.”

  “What do those entail?”

  “Just normal shouting. But really unpleasant.”

  “That’s not a signature thing,” I said. “You can’t trademark shouting.”

  “You can if you’re famous.”

  He kicked at the leg of the coffee table. Swooshed the Times Magazine around with the toe of his sneaker. “So,” he said. “Do you want to go fool around in the pool?” He sat there gauging before he clarified, “You know, go for a swim.”

  He was wearing his Yankees cap again. The pot-leaf shirt was short sleeved and snug across his chest. The pool was visible from where I sat, a shade of mint so crisp it could whiten your teeth. It’d have been easy enough to say no. I didn’t even really owe him an excuse. The one word would have sufficed.

  “You go on,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”

  I went upstairs and pulled my bathing suit from the scramble of clothes in my tote. It was a black two-piece. I put it on and stood in front of the mirror. Turned to the side, sucked in. I had no idea what teenagers expected from adult bodies. The men who came into contact with mine seemed to like it. Or they didn’t bother to comment. Logan effused, in his way. It was one thing I had over him, my main sphere of power. He liked the obvious things—my ass, my smooth olive-tinged skin—and he liked small, weird things, too. The way my pinkies bent all the way back. The knobs of my hips, there if you looked.

  I felt vaguely guilty again, thinking of him. But it was too late to call him now, wasn’t it? Getting to be too late, anyway. And I could see Spencer down by the pool, kicking off his shoes and leaving them there on the deck as if he cared not at all for the objects of this world, what happened to them, or where they ended up.

  He was crouched by the edge of the pool when I got there, testing the water. He’d turned the heat on and a layer of steam floated on top.

  “You gotta make it toasty,” he explained.

  He rose and took off his hat, rubbing his forehead where it left a band of red. His hair was dark and glossy, chin length. I thought of his mother, a sitcom star whose hair got better r
eviews than her show. I was still thinking of her, of that sitcom’s twanging theme song, and her comic timing, which had been above the material, when I heard the abrupt bend and release of the diving board and looked up in time to see Spencer coming out of a lazy jackknife and entering the pool. He surfaced to tread water in the deep end. With his hat off and hair slicked out of his face he was more man than kid.

  I dipped in a toe. The water felt silky, warm as a bath. He watched as I eased down the wedge of staircase and underwater. When I opened my eyes I could see his legs, tan and muscled, moving like eggbeaters in a swirl of red-orange trunks.

  “He was stabbed, you know,” said Spencer when I surfaced.

  I wrung out a handful of hair. “Huh?”

  “Someone stabbed him. A fan.”

  “I’ve never heard about this. When?”

  “In the seventies. Seventy-six, I think.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Just some crazy person, outside a club after one of his shows. A woman. He was signing his picture for her. Out of nowhere she pulled out a knife.” He swam toward me and laid three fingers on my sternum. “She got him there.” He moved his hand to my side. “And there.” He moved his hand again, right below my breast. “And there. That one was the worst. Pretty deep between the ribs. After the third time Laura and Robert pulled her off him.”

  “Robert?”

  “The bouncer at the club. They’re still friends. My dad sends him a Christmas present every year. Sports equipment, mostly. Golf clubs, skis.”

  He hadn’t let go of my rib cage. His knuckles grazed the bottom of my bathing suit top. He was squeezing my side faintly. Squeezing and releasing.

  “I have a boyfriend,” I said.

  “No you don’t,” said Spencer.

  “I do.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Logan.”

  Spencer laughed. “Okay.”

  “For real,” I said. “It’s really Logan. He does tech stuff. He works at a company that makes apps for brands. Like Oscar Mayer needs a baloney app and he helps design it.”

  I thought he’d find it more respectable than his father had, that it would read more to him as a real profession. But he said, “What’s a baloney app?”

  “It was an example.”

  I sank lower in the water until he let go of me. His hair was drying in lank pieces around his face. Now that I had seen his mother there, I couldn’t shake her. There she was, Allison. Choice of the people, patron of local boutiques. I wondered what kind of mother she was, what the three of them had been like when they were all together. Did they have fun, or were they, like my family, unable to relax in each other’s company? Did they have the same petty argument over and over with no beginning and no end? Did they leave it unfinished every time, remembering their spot exactly, like a Monopoly board saved out overnight?

  “Anyway, you have a girlfriend.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “That blond girl from yesterday isn’t your girlfriend?”

  He laughed. “Colby? Are you serious? Both of her parents are chiropractors.”

  “Why should that matter?”

  I started swimming away and he grabbed my foot, held it out of the water, tossed it idly from hand to hand.

  “It just does. It matters. I mean, both parents?”

  “Does she talk about backs a lot? Or, you know, spines?”

  “No.”

  “Does she comment on your posture?”

  “No.”

  “Does she want to be a chiropractor herself?”

  “I don’t know. No. She wants to be a vet or an actress.”

  “So what’s the big deal? You’re seventeen years old.”

  He let my foot splash back into the water. “And?”

  “And you can date someone with kooky parents. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters at your age. It’s a period without consequences. A gimme.”

  I swam away from him, out toward the field and the dark green woods. The sky was still gray and the air felt cool on my face. I wanted to hear more about the stabbing. In all my years of following Hugo’s career, I had never read about it.

  “Where was the club?”

  “LA. On Sunset. He bled all over the sidewalk. Laura said the most shocking part was how much. She found a taxi and they went to the hospital. The seat was drenched.”

  I tried to picture it. Nighttime LA, street-lit and temperate. The crowd spilling out of the club, Hugo pausing to greet them. The woman in his arms—maybe he thought she was hugging him. The fat lag in comprehension before anyone acted. Then shouting and running, Laura cradling Hugo’s head in the back of a taxi. The blood pooling along the seams of the seat.

  “Let me guess: Your dad buys the cabby a Christmas present every year?”

  “He helped put his kid through college.”

  “And the lady who stabbed him?”

  I imagined her, for some reason, in a ratty blond wig and giant, pink-tinted sunglasses. She’d have hatched the plan in an airless yellow and brown bedroom, a cigarette burning between her lips. Maybe she was a bank teller, respectable by day, running twenties through a bill counter. Waiting for night to indulge her bizarre, violent fandom.

  “Robert held her down until the cops came.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She went to jail,” said Spencer. “She’s out now, I think. For a while she sent letters. My dad never let me read them. He threw them away. Then they stopped.” He shrugged. “Maybe she got her meds adjusted.”

  “Or died,” I said.

  We were quiet and I could hear the soft chuff of tree branches rubbing against each other in the distance. There was a possibility that he had made the story up. Maybe this was how he hazed the women who showed up here. Maybe it was his way of flirting with me. I walked backward until I hit the wall of the pool and found a tiled ledge to sit on.

  “Why isn’t any of this online? Or in his memoir?”

  “You read that? I don’t think he even read that.”

  “It seems like it would be a famous incident. A Valerie Solanas thing. People love that stuff.”

  “You’ve seen the scars. Haven’t you?”

  I tilted my head back until the rough concrete edge of the deck bit into my neck. From where I sat I could see into the empty kitchen and living room. The lights on the second floor were off, the windows reflecting the sky. I thought of Hugo propped up in bed the night before, working his way through his cheesy paperback. Spencer was asking if I’d slept with his father and I didn’t feel like telling him no. Briefly, I considered telling him yes.

  “Why’d she do it? Did she ever say?”

  “Who knows?” said Spencer. “She was nuts.”

  He dunked his head and reemerged, seal-like. “We don’t trust fans.”

  It didn’t make sense. That Hugo invited me to his house on a whim suggested the opposite. He hadn’t been reluctant. He’d even had to convince me. And what about Kitty Rosenthal? What was she if not a fan? A business associate? A sixteen-year-old friend of his?

  “I’m not a fan,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re not?”

  “I was his employee. It’s not the same. We’re colleagues, almost.”

  “Okay, sure. You’re not a fan. You don’t still own any of his albums on compact disc. You didn’t buy the re-release of Second Best in 2001. You didn’t save the free poster that came with it. You don’t still listen to it sometimes just to feel a certain way.”

  I had owned that album. I could remember getting a ride to Sam Goody to buy it. I had listened to it on my Discman that skipped every time I moved. I could remember the poster, too. It was Hugo, pinstriped and serious, standing in the middle of an empty Times Square. It said across the top: Hugo Best, Comedian. I hadn’t saved the poster. Spencer was wrong about that. By then I had recognized that it was weird for a thirteen-year-old girl to be too obsessed with a middle-aged talk show host, and modulated accordingly.

  I l
aughed. “I’m not going to stab your father.”

  “If you laugh while you say it, it makes it sound like you are.”

  I made my face as humorless as possible and repeated without inflection, “I’m not going to stab your father.”

  “That was way worse,” said Spencer. “Now I’m sure that you are.”

  “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” I said.

  We got out and draped ourselves in plush striped towels and Spencer led me back into the house. In the basement, beyond the wine cellar and comedy club, a hatch in the floor opened up to reveal a second flight of stairs. The subbasement was colder, unfinished. Spencer took the stairs at a trot and paused in front of a door at the bottom.

  “The bunker,” he said, letting us in.

  There was an octagonal room inside with metal utilitarian shelves, and a dry, carefully ventilated atmosphere. It was as bunkerlike as a room could be without containing canned goods or a chemical toilet. Instead the shelves were lined with cases, their spines stickered and dated. It was Hugo’s archive, every show he’d ever made going all the way back to the premier, preserved on clunky, degradable VHS.

  “Don’t they digitize these?”

  “They do now,” said Spencer. “Or they have been for a few years. Someone will have to go back and do the old ones someday. He likes them like this, though. Instead of just on a drive, or”—he motioned all around us, at thin air—“wherever things are stored.”

  “But how do they get here?”

  “Huh?”

  “How do they physically get here? He doesn’t take them home with him from work. He doesn’t walk out of the building in Midtown carrying them.”

  “He might. I don’t actually know.”

  “No way,” I said.

  Someone boxed them up at the office, was my best guess, one of his assistants, and shipped them there. Ana intercepted and unpacked. When Hugo came down to look—how often? Once a month? Twice? Weekly?—they’d have magically appeared for his perusal. It happened seamlessly and below his notice, the same way someone else catalogued his cars.

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Spencer. “Why?”

  I walked halfway down the aisle, pulled out a tape, and listened to the rattle of plastic inside. I felt in danger of uttering something about Marx’s theory of alienation. “What if there’s a fire?”