Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  He sat back against the squeaking red booth with his arms crossed. “That’s interesting. I didn’t know you were like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Earnest. A do-gooder. I’m wary of do-gooders. They’re holier-than-thou. They have other motives. Even the Red Cross is out there misappropriating funds. Burning up money. Do you know what most of the donated money goes to at these so-called charity organizations? The salaries of the people who run them.”

  “People would like you for it,” I said. “It would help make amends.”

  “I don’t need to make amends. I’ve made amends.”

  “All right,” I said. “Just a suggestion.”

  He ran his hands through his hair. It was tousled from the doctor’s handiwork. She’d pushed it out of the way and it had stayed half standing up. His staples made a crooked path across his forehead. He looked like rakish Frankenstein.

  I didn’t understand, he told me. The extent of his commitments. It was easy when you were young to be romantic, have ideals. You didn’t have responsibilities. You weren’t tired. You didn’t have to tithe a certain percentage of your income to Phillips Exeter Academy. You didn’t have houses. You didn’t have to pay people all over the globe to take care of those houses. To go turn on the water every once in a while so the pipes wouldn’t burst. You didn’t have employees: The concept was laughable. You didn’t have a staff, hundreds relying on you to keep the massive, ludicrous operation afloat so that they, in turn, could take care of their houses and educate their kids.

  I had lost the thread. It had become a sprawling complaint about the upkeep of his empire. None of the things he mentioned seemed relatable to me—caretaker salaries, winterizing the chalet. I had mentioned promoting good work, not joining the Peace Corps. Not going into the woods to live deliberately.

  The more you had, he was saying, the more people wanted to take it away. Just look at the Kitty Rosenthal thing. Look at how much everyone loved it. The press was gleeful. Beyond gleeful. Salivating. Turned on. And the way they treated him, like he was sick. Like he had planned the whole thing. Like he was some kind of predatory figure, instead of what he really was, which was a dupe. Too open and trusting, maybe even a little stupid, but definitely not the coldhearted villain they made him out to be.

  “This,” he said. He patted his side, his stab wound. “This is the perfect example of what people will do to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The person who did it was someone I had helped over the years.”

  “The fan? You’d tried to help the fan?”

  “I knew her. We had a relationship, kind of. I’d given her money. Not a ton, but some. She wanted more. They always want more.”

  “Spencer didn’t tell me that you knew each other.”

  “Spencer doesn’t know,” said Hugo. “We decided he didn’t have to. It’s a grisly thing that happened, what, twenty, twenty-five years before he was born? There are some things kids shouldn’t know.”

  “So she was a girlfriend?”

  He shook his head. “Just a girl I knew.”

  “And she went to jail?”

  “She’s out now. For a long time. She moved to Canada when she got out. Which, why bother? Might as well just stay in.” He paused. “I’m over it, if you haven’t noticed. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t walk around afraid of getting stabbed. I don’t have dreams about it or any of that. I didn’t flinch when you approached me at Birds & the Bees.”

  I waited for him to smile, but he was serious.

  “I approached you?” I said. “You approached me.”

  I wasn’t crazy. He’d been waiting for me in the hallway, not the other way around. He’d been studying the pictures of comics with his hands in his pockets. He’d been nose to nose with a portrait of Shecky Greene.

  “Are you sure?” He sipped his coffee. “Whatever. Whoever. The point is, I didn’t think you had a knife. I didn’t worry about it.”

  I almost laughed. As an example of his resilience it made no sense. I’d been onstage. How could I have known he was there? Or did he think I would stab him just because? Did he think I had a knife at the ready in case any opportunities arose? In case any likely victims crossed my path? His idea of who posed bodily menace to whom was upside down and infuriating. It made me want to stab him.

  I reached for a butter knife resting on a folded paper napkin.

  “How should I hold it?” I said. “Overhand like this? Or underhand, more like this?”

  “Whichever feels more natural,” he said. “Every assailant has to decide for herself.”

  “Overhand then.”

  I took a couple of experimental jabs in his direction.

  He said, “You couldn’t break the skin with that thing.”

  “I could.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “I could if I got you in the right place. In the throat. In that belly of yours.”

  “You couldn’t. Look at your arms.”

  He reached forward across the table and squeezed my bicep harder than he had to. I dropped the knife. It clattered against my saucer and the waitress looked over.

  “See?” he said, sitting back. He forced a smile. “Weak. Just like I thought.”

  He got up and paid the check, and we left, stopping near the door so he could spoon pastel mints into my hands. He did too many, intentionally, as a joke, so I had to hold my hands together to carry out the chalky mound. I tried to be charmed by it, to let the gag transport me, but I didn’t feel amused. I felt that I was carrying too many mints and nothing more. Outside there was nowhere to put them but the ground. I laid them down near the curb like I would a baby chick. Something deserved to be treated delicately, even if it wasn’t me.

  * * *

  My head pounded and light sparked at the edges of my vision. Hugo wanted to go for a swim. He was still keyed up, bouncing around the dark kitchen, popping the cap off a bottle of Advil and shaking some out for me. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, he told me. Not a chance. He thought the pool might help.

  “Look at it,” he said. “So cool and green.”

  I was keyed up, too—I’d had two cups of coffee. But the pool seemed like a bad idea. Hugo had a concussion. He’d lost blood. I didn’t want him to die on my watch. I’d become, forever, a witness. The person present when Hugo Best died.

  I said, “I don’t think you should. I keep picturing you floating facedown, silhouetted by the pool lights. Cops peering over the edge and snapping pictures.”

  He said, “You’re thinking of the opening of Sunset Boulevard.”

  He started getting undressed, sliding his feet out of his loafers, headed for his belt buckle next. He was going to do it. He was going to get fully nude right there in the kitchen, without permission or preamble.

  “I have to go to sleep,” I said.

  He stopped, belt undone. I got a glimpse of the top of his briefs, the logo there. “Okay. Long, strange day. Maybe tomorrow.”

  I went upstairs to the guest bedroom, changed into the Exeter T-shirt. Went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I checked my forehead, unchanged, and the bruise on my hip, a purple and red splotch the size of my fist, chaffed rough by my jeans.

  In the hallway I encountered Spencer, leaning against the door to his room. Light seeped out from behind him, like maybe he’d been waiting up. He wore sweats and a T-shirt.

  “What happened to your head?” he said.

  “We pretty much hit an opossum.”

  It was less taxing than explaining that we hadn’t hit an opossum, the opossum lived on, but that we had gotten hurt anyway. In some ways the opossum bested us, it put us in the hospital just by sitting in the road, and in other ways it brought us together. When I looked at it, I’d seen pure animal evil. I had a feeling I’d be thinking about the opossum for a long time.

  “I have one here, too,” I said.

  I pulled up the shirt so he could see the bruise on my hip. I didn’t know what I w
as doing. Yes, I did. I knew exactly. But I also knew it was stupid.

  He reached out and touched it with the tips of three fingers. His touch was hot. He let his hand drift slightly to the lace of my underwear, where it cut across my hip. He let it drift lower, under the waistband. He pulled it out and let it snap back against my bruise.

  “Ow,” I said, though it hadn’t hurt.

  “Do you want to come inside?” he said.

  He sounded like an adult at the end of a date, someone I’d meet on an app, only he was seventeen and he meant his childhood bedroom. Where his backpack was, his Xbox, his history textbook with its oil-painting cover and warped pages.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  I wanted to think that this was the moment that marked the real difference between Hugo and me. He had said yes and I had said no, which should have made me superior. But really if the circumstances had been different, if we weren’t in Hugo’s house, if I wasn’t so put off by Spencer’s eagerness, by his transient child’s bedroom, maybe I would have. I had blundered into the right choice. It still counted, but barely. When Audrey and I had discussed it on Friday, we hadn’t considered that the object of my repulsion might be me.

  “You bitch,” said Spencer.

  He said it tiredly, though. Without brio. He sounded like his dad as he said it, delivering some uninspired line on the show. Like he really didn’t want to, but there it was on the cue card. Occasionally, Hugo would make an aside after a line like that. Jesus, who writes this stuff, or similar, and the audience would laugh. I waited for Spencer to do something like that, something to break the fourth wall. But no, he had really called me a bitch.

  I let the shirt fall back down over my hip. “Good night, Spencer.”

  Back in the guest bedroom, I closed the door. I stood in the dark until I heard a faint splash from the yard and went out onto the balcony. Hugo was naked in the pool. His body slid yellow-green through the water. He had a fluid breaststroke that had nothing to do with his usual physicality. He ducked his head under and I thought of the amount of blood on his neck, face, and forearms, in his hair and ears. Now it was in the water.

  It filled me with anguish, it was so unfair. These rich people fucked up their pool every single day. I remember thinking: If I had a pool I’d treat it so much better.

  Monday

  * * *

  Hugo woke me while there was still mist on the field and we played tennis. I was groggy, he was, too, and we rallied instead of playing for points, breaking often, not really talking.

  His head looked fine, except for the Band-Aid covering his staples. Mine was worse, a purple-green knot, off center, that tugged the skin of my forehead taut. I felt the need to hold the whole apparatus still while I played, like I had a stack of books balanced up there. Every time Hugo caught sight of it he winced.

  I hadn’t slept well. I’d still been awake when Hugo came inside from his swim. I could hear him running the kitchen faucet, switching off lights, coming upstairs. He paused outside my door, just for a second, cleared his throat faintly, and moved on. I lay there wondering about that throat clear until an uneasy sleep took me, the kind of sleep where you keep waking up and trying to reconcile the room you’re in with the room you’re used to. Where your brain keeps telling you the exit isn’t where it should be, that it’s been moved on you or deleted altogether.

  We played for an hour, maybe more, and then we stopped. The sun coming up over the trees had started baking the moisture out of the grass. It smelled like chlorophyll and the great outdoors. My sweat stung faintly on the surface of my skin. It was all the alcohol I’d been drinking, squeezing its way out of me, and I was glad. It made me feel clean.

  “You’re better than you let on yesterday,” said Hugo.

  We were walking back across the field.

  I told him I could sometimes do things better when I wasn’t trying, was that strange? He said no, not at all. Some people were that way. I was just probably not terrific at handling pressure, hence the throwing up before performing. I agreed and told him that’s why I’d die instantly in a survival situation like a natural disaster or a pogrom. He said hmm. I regretted bringing up pogroms before we had coffee.

  He went in and made us omelets. There was food in the house now. Noam had restocked the essentials plus a bunch of Noam stuff like pluots and Tuscan kale. I changed into my suit and went for a swim. I could sense Hugo watching me through the plate glass. I floated on my back and looked up and tried to relax into being watched. The sky was still streaked with pink and the pool was green and the trees were black. Everything was quiet except the lap of the water over my stomach and bruised hip, and the sound of the grass shushing itself.

  I had never really considered the morning anything other than a crucible. I’d had an hour commute: JMZ to Delancey, BDFM to Rockefeller Center. Then a street block and an avenue block to the office. Once a month or more something would go wrong, a signal problem, an unexplained delay. The platform would grow fuller and hotter, the people pressing in against each other, against the stairwell and sticky pillars. On those days, I clutched my iced coffee or did my deep breathing, tried not to think of bodies thrown onto tracks and decapitated, tried not to touch anyone or be touched. Without fail, someone would be playing an accordion.

  Once on the train, the car would be so packed I’d end up in the very middle with nothing to hold on to, straining with my fingertips to steady myself on the ceiling while a businessman breathed deeply into my armpit. Kids would come by selling candy and telling made-up stories about their basketball team, but you absolutely could not buy from them. If you did, you opened the door to considering their lives, why they might be selling candy on the subway in the first place, and your own inability to help kids like them in any meaningful way. At that point, futility would overtake you.

  By the time I made it to work I’d have the same frizzy hair and rumpled clothes as everyone else in Manhattan. Only certain elevators went up to our floor, so there was another waiting period as the whole crowded elevator bank watched the LED screen—the brass plate of light-up numbers had been pried up and replaced the first year I worked there—descend from twenty-six to one, sometimes lingering mysteriously on a floor for minutes on end.

  Up in the office three discrete crises would already be under way, the clock ticking down to our daily deadline. A broken copier, an obscure prop that needed to be sourced. A bit that Hugo deemed not good enough, not ready yet, that had to be rewritten. I went where they wanted, came when they called me. That was how the morning passed. Not quite in a panic, but panic-adjacent, a cousin of panic with eerie physical similarities.

  In the afternoon there was an exhale. The show taped at four, finished at five, and in that hour there was nothing more the writing staff could do. Not for that day’s episode. What would happen would happen. We’d work on the next day’s show, the next several days’ shows, calm for a couple of hours at least. In the morning we’d wake up, cold sweat, mounting fear, to do it all over again.

  But drifting in Hugo’s pool, I saw it didn’t have to be that way. The morning could be mellow, a time for exercise and birdsong. You could plant a wall of trees between you and the world and go for a life-affirming swim. All it took was a handful of seeds and a plot of land worth millions.

  Hugo came out with two plates, set them down on the table, went back in for silverware. I climbed out of the pool and he tossed me a big white towel. We sat down to eat. He’d put goat cheese in the omelets, and toasted rye bread. The coffee had come out ink black and velvety. He conceded that Spencer might have been right about the Chemex.

  I felt smugly satisfied. Had we done it? Had we hit our stride? Was this what we’d be like together? Civil, serene, mutually appreciative of breakfast. It was a nice idea, if nothing else.

  Hugo said. “The Sunday paper’s still floating around somewhere if you want it.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  The best thing to do with the Sunday pa
per was throw it out wholesale if you felt like it, without so much as glancing at the crossword. That’s when you knew you’d arrived at self-actualization.

  Hugo had done a good job with the eggs. The omelet was fluffy, flecked with herbs. There was no reason for him to know how to cook eggs well, no reason for him to have any normal-person skills at all, so it impressed me that he did. We had our conversation about comedy then, the one he’d promised me. He asked me to name the ten best living comedians, present company excluded. I thought a minute, chewed my toast, and told him.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t say Don Rickles.”

  “You said living.”

  He paused, breathing in. The pool made its quiet sound. Celebrity deaths: There were so many of them. They buzzed across the screen of your phone and were gone. If you were as big as Don Rickles, as big as Hugo, you got a nice obituary, a couple of tributes from people who knew you. A picture of your face appeared at the Oscars for half a second. Then nothing for the rest of time.

  “I forgot he was dead,” said Hugo. “Living or dead then.”

  I thought a minute, drank my coffee, and told him.

  “You still didn’t say Don Rickles.”

  “Maybe I don’t like him that much. Wasn’t he a dick?”

  “Publicly, yeah, that was the joke. Privately, not at all. Also, you rank Chappelle too high.”

  “You would say that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you calling me racist?”

  I was, a little bit. “No.”

  “Because, if you remember, Richard Pryor is my favorite comedian ever.”

  It was possible to like a black comedian and still be racist, but I decided to let it go.

  “Forget it. It’s probably generational.”

  “So you’re calling me old then.”

  I laughed. “I guess.”

  He picked at a piece of crust with his fork. “I notice I didn’t make your list.”

  “You said present company excluded.”