Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “Yeah, but if you felt strongly enough you could have made an argument.”

  “I think you’re funny,” I said. “I thought that was obvious.”

  I looked at him to determine if he was appreciative. I couldn’t tell. His need for reinforcement had no bottom. Any compliment would only continue to fall endlessly through space, like a rock thrown into a well that never makes a splash.

  “Don Rickles wasn’t even that old,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? He was in his nineties. Is that not old?”

  “Was he? I guess he was.”

  “He was always good when he came on the show,” I said. “I liked you two together.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  We sat back and looked at the pool. I had killed the mood by mentioning mortality. The only way back was to get Hugo talking about himself again.

  “What about you?” I said. “Who’s in your top ten?”

  He drank his coffee and told me.

  “Lotta white men,” I said.

  He said, “That’s who did comedy until recently. And yes, I know the problem is endemic. And yes, I know the culture rewards women’s tits and men’s wits. And yes, I know when you look back at a lot of early stand-up it’s about how women are nags who withhold sex. I know all that shit, okay? I’m on your side. I still like George Carlin, though. He’s really funny. And Robin Williams, and yes, Don Rickles, and the other guys I named. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t. I even like Woody Allen. I know I’m not supposed to. I know he’s ‘problematic.’ Right? That’s what you guys say? Problematic? But what about that one he does with the moose?”

  He did a Woody Allen impression. I guess it was inevitable. He did the one about shooting a moose and driving to a costume party with it strapped to his fender. The moose woke up in the Holland Tunnel, it went. There’s a law in New York City about driving with a moose on your fender Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. And so on. Hugo was a competent mimic, not a master, but he could do almost anyone and you’d get the picture.

  “Well done,” I said.

  “Do you have a Woody Allen?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Of course you do. Everyone does.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said. “Try.”

  “Okay, but you’ll regret it.”

  I tried. I did a line from Annie Hall: Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

  It sounded like a birdcall, the way I did it, and also managed to be anti-Semitic.

  “Jesus, you weren’t kidding,” said Hugo, laughing. “Never do that again.”

  “I told you,” I said.

  He laughed some more. I was happy he was having fun, even if it was at my expense.

  “Can’t you do any impressions?”

  None, I told him. Not Christopher Walken. Not Sean Connery. Not even Borat. I didn’t understand how people were able to do them at all. I didn’t know how to hear a sound and translate it into a sound I made myself. I was missing that wiring, the funny voices wiring. It was one of the things that held me back as a comedian.

  “You seem to think you have a lot of things holding you back,” he said.

  “I do!”

  He paused. “I’m problematic, too, aren’t I?”

  “Is that rhetorical?”

  “No, I really want to know.”

  “Not to a Woody Allen degree. Not to a Cosby degree. But kinda.”

  “Kitty Rosenthal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had no idea how young she was. That’s the truth. June, look at me.” He made long, meaningful eye contact with me. “I promise you.”

  “I believe you,” I said, even though I didn’t really.

  I believed that he believed what he was saying. He had been high on drugs and power. He probably hadn’t thought to ask Kitty Rosenthal her age or chose not to see through her lie about Barnard. He had probably laughed about it in the dark, loud club, and poured her more Grey Goose. It had been easy, I was sure. I had seen for myself the night before how easy it could be. But whatever actually happened had been overwritten by his public story about it, told and retold to lawyers and reporters, until it felt real, until he bought it himself.

  “Do your Woody Allen again,” he said.

  “You said not to.”

  “Come on.”

  I did it again. It came out completely different but still catastrophic. High in parts, low in others. Hugo’s shoulders shook as he looked out on the pool. He was problematic, but I’d have done it all day to keep him laughing like that. I’d have done it till my voice went hoarse.

  “We should go get dressed,” said Hugo at last. “The caterers will be here soon.”

  He made no move to get up.

  “Why don’t we bag it?” I said.

  “Bag it?”

  “Yeah, bag it. Call it off. Call up the caterers and whoever else and eat the deposit. I’ll even make the calls if you want.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. “You’re rich. You can do whatever you want with impunity. Isn’t that what we’ve learned?”

  “You don’t understand. We do it every year. People will be disappointed.”

  He had the most dysfunctional relationship to “people” I’d ever witnessed. He owed them and they owed him. No one could ever pay the other off. Not fully. He had to be the person they expected and they had to keep admiring him. And if either stopped, then what? He’d sink back into obscurity like the rest of us and have to think about the mail and the weather and his relationships and how to be good.

  I wanted his fame and hated that I wanted it. I thought I deserved it. Some remote part of me even thought I’d get it. One day, eventually, with zero supporting evidence. I knew fame was dumb and empty. Hugo did, too, probably. He must have. Everyone did. And yet.

  I thought if I could convince Hugo that none of it mattered, then I might believe it, too. If I could talk him out of caring, I’d stop, too. If he could be better than it, then I could, too. We could sit there for one afternoon, free as the dolphins, while the sun sparkled down on the water and the clouds passed through so slowly we didn’t notice their passing, until we looked up, finally, and found a whole new sky.

  I said, “Who cares what people think? Let them be disappointed. Like who, anyway? Paul McCartney?”

  “He’s not coming this year. He’s on tour.”

  “Well, there you go. The third best Beatle won’t even be there, so why bother?”

  “And the first best member of Wings. What would we do if I canceled the party? What would we do all day?”

  “Whatever people do. Go to Home Depot. Get some shelf brackets, some mums in a pot, a door hinge. Go to the mall; is there a mall around here?”

  “There’s a mall in Stamford, yeah.”

  The thought of Hugo walking around a mall made me sad. The all-absorbing din, the smell of soft pretzels. The image of him contemplating a hat in the window of Lids or wandering, bewildered, into a Hollister.

  “Or we could stay home and be bored,” I said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

  “Does boredom sound nice? Not really.”

  “We could turn off our phones and just sit here.”

  “Millennials glamorize boredom because you’ve never truly experienced it. And because you have a lot of time left. You try growing up in a world with three TV channels and no Internet and see if you ever elect to be bored again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “All thrills, no boredom. We’ll play that game where you stab the knife between your fingers risking grave injury.”

  “Mumblety-peg,” he said.

  He finished his coffee, thinking. He seemed on the verge of agreeing to it. He was still sitting like that when two guys in white polos and khakis rounded the house and waved their arms at us
. They were from Fairfield Rental Center and they wanted to know where the tent should go.

  Hugo’s chair scraped the patio as he stood. “Sorry. We’ll have to play mumblety-peg another day.”

  He shook their hands and asked after Kent, the owner of the rental place, a friend of his. They talked about Kent for a minute—he’d just had a pool put in at his place, stay tuned for epic pool parties—and went out to the field to decide where the tent should go. I watched them pace off its dimensions before stacking our plates to carry them inside.

  In the kitchen, another rental center guy was hefting a rack of wineglasses.

  “How’s Kent?” I said.

  He just looked at me as I brushed past him.

  * * *

  A small city bloomed on the property. Its industry was party. Its citizens smoked cigarettes and wore the uniforms of the service industry. Everyone knew what to do without being told and operations slid on the smooth casters of money.

  After more deliberation, the rental center crew unfurled a big white tent, pounded stakes into the ground, secured the legs in a high-pitched whirring of drills. They set up foldout tables and rickety white rental chairs and a parquet dance floor and risers for a band, and then they left and a second, separate crew came through, snapping open tablecloths and arranging purple and white hydrangeas in square vases of chunky glass. The hydrangeas were meant to resemble the ones in the yard, everything summery and harmonious, and they completely did. They looked great.

  The gardener mowed the grass again, eliminating the millimeter that had irritated me the day before, and sheared the bushes by some infinitesimal degree. The pool guy returned. He wore his headphones as he dipped in his gray hose, bobbing his head to the beat. I wondered what he made of cleaning the same pool three days in a row, if he felt like Sisyphus, if he was losing his mind, but I didn’t ask.

  I watched all this from the guest bedroom. Or anyway, I monitored the progress. In between I flipped cable channels on the giant TV and read the news on my phone. I felt like I was in a hotel room. The news I read, even the bad news, affected me the same way it would in a Hilton DoubleTree in an unfamiliar city. The anonymity and high-thread-count sheets made the headlines too remote to care about.

  Spencer popped his head in, hair tousled from sleep. If he was resentful about the night before, he didn’t show it. He stuck around and watched a few minutes of a home improvement show—a Dallas couple was renovating their kitchen—before pronouncing it “played.” He motioned me onto the balcony as more workers dragged a smoker beyond the tent and started cooking meat. A guy in a chef’s jacket and toque prodded the red-brown contents with tongs.

  “A whole pig,” said Spencer. “They cook it so tender it falls right off the bone. Then you can tear it apart with your fingers.”

  The weather was undecided again. One minute it was overcast, the next sunny. I wondered what would happen if it rained, if there was a contingency plan, a rain date, or if everyone would just cram into the house, ash cigarettes in the succulents, track mud all over the living room floor, get too drunk and steady themselves on priceless works of art. The wind blew and smoke enclouded the pool.

  “I guess I didn’t realize it was going to be such a big deal,” I said.

  “We tried to tell you.”

  “What are we supposed to do while they’re setting up?”

  “Is there something you want to do?” He leaned back against the railing of the balcony. It sounded like an offer.

  I thought about what people did on Memorial Day. What were the people I knew doing? Hiking, probably. Dipping kayak paddles into cold, clear water. Going to the beach. Audrey would be at a barbecue in Brooklyn, my parents out on the Feldmans’ boat. Logan, I didn’t know. Maybe he’d be at the same party as Audrey, maybe he didn’t celebrate for some esoteric reason he’d love to explain to me. I told Spencer I couldn’t think of anything to do in that house that we hadn’t already done. He smirked and said that he could.

  A moment later we smelled the pig, rich and bitter, carbon and fat. “Let’s go get some lunch,” he said.

  Downstairs we found the kitchen transformed. Caterers wiped down glasses and unpacked phyllo dough, white logs of mozz, Carr’s crackers. Sliced citrus and squeezed filling out of pastry bags. They were immoderate with parchment paper, tearing it off in great translucent sheets, saying excuse me and behind you to Spencer and me, carrying hot pans high above their heads. Someone iced champagne. That was his whole job as far as I could tell. To shovel ice from here to there, uncrate champagne bottles, wipe them down with rags, and put them in the ice. It looked like he’d be there awhile. There was that much champagne.

  I attempted to open the refrigerator, but a blond lady in an apron shook her head.

  “Something key is chilling in there,” she told me, but she wouldn’t say what.

  I returned to Spencer empty-handed and he went in himself. He came back with a plate of tiny smoked salmon sandwiches, triangular and studded with capers, and a bottle of champagne. They let him have whatever he wanted because he was young and rich, famous for being born, because his abs were visible through the gaping arm holes of his tank top, and because no one had ever said no to him thus far and they weren’t going to be the first.

  We took our spoils down to the basement rec room and ate on the red vinyl banquette. I put the plate between us—a pungent, smoked fish buffer. We hadn’t grabbed glasses and we drank directly from the champagne bottle, passing it back and forth. I’d showered by then, and done my best to cover the bump on my head with makeup. I couldn’t hide its elevation, though, or the stretching effect it had on the top half of my face. Spencer squinted at it in the weak light of the rec room.

  “That bad?” I said.

  “It’s not the best,” said Spencer.

  He lifted the cold bottle of champagne and held it against my head. It was either his way of making amends or just his latest attempt to fuck me. There was a third option, too, that we were friends now, but that seemed unlikely. Condensation dripped down the sides of the bottle and he took it away.

  “I’m leaving this afternoon, by the way,” he said.

  “What? You’re not staying for the party? But the pig. The meat so tender you can blah-blah-blah.”

  “There’s a week left of school. I have to get back.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said.

  “It’s whatever.”

  He passed me the champagne bottle and our fingers touched. I moved back an inch. We were underground again, I noticed, just like we had been the day before. It gave our interactions a feeling of end of the world. Like nothing mattered anymore and we were duty bound to procreate.

  “Are we gonna talk about what happened yesterday?” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, maybe you feel weird.”

  He laughed.

  “Okay, we won’t talk about it.”

  He took the bottle back, making an elaborate show of not touching me.

  “What will you do next week when school ends?” I asked. “Will you come back here?”

  He shook his head. He was meeting his mom in Thailand. They were traveling a bit after her movie wrapped. She did work with kids in Cambodia. She’d helped set up a school. And then on to LA for the rest of the summer. He had a bunch of friends out there, people he’d grown up with. The last week of August he’d return to school. I pictured him and his mother in first class. They’d each take an Ambien and pull down matching eye masks. She seemed like the type of woman who applied products to her face throughout the flight to keep it hydrated. I was willing to bet that when Spencer was with her he was that way, too.

  “What about your dad?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to spend any time with him this summer?”

  “That’s kind of not our arrangement.”

  “Why not?”

  “Honestly? He’s not that interested. I mean, does he seem interested to
you?”

  He didn’t seem interested. He seemed tired and baffled and overwhelmed. He seemed mainly interested in himself and poor at hiding it. I surprised myself by feeling bad for Spencer. He was a child of privilege and, like Ana had said, needed my compassion like he needed another car. But I felt bad anyway. There were benefits to having parents who cared about you immensely, even if you felt suffocated by their caring.

  “You stay with him,” said Spencer. “You’re having fun here.”

  I had not been having fun, not consistently, though I knew what he meant. It had been a kind of tourism for me. Now I was at the part of the vacation where I contemplated packing everything up and moving there.

  “I can’t stay with him,” I said.

  “Why? What do you have to go back to?”

  I thought of my apartment, the spill of mail, the crying baby upstairs, Rocco’s rotting feet, iguanas crawling all over each other in the window of Just Pets, Lars at his peephole watching us come and go, okay spring rolls from Okay Thai, the L train shutdown again for repairs, accepting a connection request on LinkedIn, my regular call with my parents on Sunday nights, trudging twelve blocks to a passable grocery store, overdraft fees, changing the font on my résumé, someone’s phlegmy cough at Birds & the Bees, and dating again now that Logan was out of the picture.

  “I told you that I’m seeing someone,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. The baloney app guy.” He laughed and passed me the champagne. “Does that mean you’re going to keep seeing him?”

  I took a sip. The bottom fourth of the bottle had grown warm and flat.

  “Probably not.”

  Saying it out loud made it final. I felt sadness and a fragment of relief. Sadness for the unceremonious way it had ended. Relief at not having to defend the weekend to Logan, or make how I’d treated him fit together with my conception of myself as a mostly decent person. Now whatever I did at least I wouldn’t hurt anyone but me.

  “I need to look for a job,” I said.

  “My dad could help you with that. Isn’t that why you came here in the first place?”

  “That’s insulting.”

  “Is it?” he said.

  Was it? I stood up and brushed the crumbs off my lap. There was one mini-sandwich left.