Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “It’s all yours,” I said.

  He made a face. “You have it.”

  “What if I don’t want it?”

  “You do,” he said. He picked up the sandwich and thrust it at me. “I know you do.”

  “I don’t. I had too much already.”

  “Stop being stupid and take it.”

  It seemed like we were talking about something more than the sandwich. I almost ate it just to end the exchange, but it looked soggy and unappealing. I didn’t like the damp, pink way the lox were hanging out over the bread. I especially didn’t want it because Spencer wanted me to want it. That made it even more disgusting to me.

  “No one has to eat it,” I said.

  “Someone should!”

  I wanted to laugh but he sounded distraught. Or as close as he came to distraught, which was distraught dialed down to 0.001 percent. It would make him good in movies someday, I thought, his complete understatement of harrowing emotions. That was what they said looked best on the big screen: a super handsome face kept super still.

  “No one has to eat it,” I said.

  Gently, I took the sandwich from him and put it back on the plate. We both looked around for something else to talk about. I studied the framed album on the wall. Hugo’s dated sideburns and the joke shop gun.

  “What’s this room all about anyway?” I said. “It doesn’t go with the rest of the house.”

  “He put it in after the fact, at the height of the show. My mom hates it so much. It’s kind of hilarious. She says it’s the most Queens thing you could ever possibly do, putting a room like this in a house like this. She wanted a workout room instead.” He turned around and knocked on the wall behind us. “It’s not even real brick. They used to have parties down here when I was little. There’s a working spotlight and everything. My dad’s comedian friends would tell jokes.” He stood up, stretching. “I’m sure everyone found it embarrassing but him.”

  I picked up the bottle, empty now, the plate with its lone creepy sandwich. “I’m sorry you’re missing the party. It seems like it’ll be a good time.”

  “It’ll suck. Bunch of old saddies getting wasted.”

  A porthole had opened between us, but now it was closing and I was mostly glad. For the next couple of hours we could return to harmless flirtation and shared skepticism of his father. We’d come close to crossing a line, but we hadn’t, and I counted that, cautiously, as a win.

  “He’ll be okay,” I said. “Your dad. He’s got friends. He’s got Bony. I’ll check in. I’ll come for visits. Before you know it he’ll be on to the next project.”

  “Yeah, like what?” said Spencer.

  “Maybe he’ll do one of those shows where he plays himself but famous actors play everyone else in his life.”

  “Do we need more of those shows? Be honest.”

  “He’ll be okay,” I said again.

  * * *

  We came up from the basement to Hugo standing in the kitchen. He was all cleaned up with product in his hair, the jacket of his summer suit slung over the back of a bar stool. He smelled like aftershave. He started picking canapés off a tray and dropping them into his mouth one by one. The blond lady was letting him. He wanted to know what we kids had been doing down there in the basement for so long.

  “Endlessly fucking,” said Spencer, and then, “I have to go pack.”

  He went upstairs.

  I said, “He’s kidding.”

  “I know,” said Hugo.

  It bothered me how quickly he said it. He was still chewing, looking for the next thing to put into his mouth.

  “But we could have been,” I said.

  “I guess.”

  He didn’t care. He wasn’t jealous. I watched him eat in silence. Half the caterers were watching, too.

  He swallowed. “Casey Caruso is on her way. Remember? The people from E?”

  “Is there something you want me to do while they’re here?”

  “No, no. Just telling you is all. You can use Jan if you can catch her before she goes.”

  “Use Jan how? Who’s Jan?”

  “The hair girl.” He touched his hair with his fingertips. It had been trimmed, cleaned up at the temples. His eyebrows had been groomed. He had makeup on, too; the gash on his forehead had disappeared beneath a layer of putty. “Jan. The girl who just did my hair.”

  I wasn’t going to use Jan. I wasn’t going to run out into the driveway shouting Jan, Jan, is one of you Jan? I wasn’t going to drag her back into the house with her shears and bottles of mousse and instruct her to get to work on my head.

  “I don’t want to hold Jan up,” I said.

  “It’s your call,” he said. “But you do know I pay Jan, right? It’s not an inconvenience. Jan is compensated for her time.”

  Every conversation was about money. Even the ones about something else. He could hand me a York Peppermint Pattie with a price tag of fifty cents and this would require hashing out. We’d both pretend we didn’t care, that the fifty cents meant nothing. But I’d feel insulted or that I owed him. And he’d feel like a lord dispensing candy from his mount. This was the chasm that yawned between us. My pride, his ego. Jokes could help cross it sometimes, but not always.

  “I don’t want Jan,” I told him again.

  He looked at my hair a bit too thoughtfully, nose scrunched. No one likes to have her hair looked at like that.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  I caved and went to go get Jan.

  * * *

  Casey Caruso arrived in a fuchsia sheath dress with a protective sheet of plastic affixed to her head. I watched Hugo lead her and a producer around the grounds. Her improvised head wrap came undone in the wind and one end flapped behind her like a flag.

  On the patio, two guys from the crew wrangled cable. Hugo had liberated some sliders from the caterers, and they ate them while regarding the white tent through sunglasses, each with one foot up on an apple box.

  Jan did my hair, angrily. At one point I realized she had scissors out and was trimming it without my permission. She had a gender reveal party to go to that afternoon, she told me. Her sister’s baby. They were going to pop a balloon, and if pink confetti came out it was a girl, and if blue confetti came out it was a boy. Now she was going to miss the balloon popping.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “Could someone tape it for you?”

  She roughed up my head with texturizer, slapping around near my ears. “It won’t be the same.”

  Afterward I went into the guest bathroom and put on the cream-colored dress. It was featherlight, angelic, nicer than anything I owned. I couldn’t wear a bra with it, which I hadn’t realized, and it made me feel sort of nude. In another context I might have liked feeling that way. I reapplied makeup to the lump on my forehead. The swelling had gone down some, but its 3-D quality was still a problem, as was the way it yanked my right eyebrow up toward my hairline.

  By the time I walked downstairs, the interview had started. A PA stopped me in the kitchen and put a finger to his lips. We were on a set now. The caterers had been sent out for a smoke and everything was quiet except for the sound of Casey Caruso, seated in a Danish armchair, asking Hugo what he would do next, now that he was free to do anything he wanted.

  “Well,” said Hugo. “I haven’t really decided. I was thinking a long vacation. Maybe the Côte d’Azur. Or Havana.”

  “Ooh, Cuba,” she said. “Do you know how to salsa, Hugo?”

  Hugo said, big smile, laugh from Casey, “You could teach me.”

  Casey Caruso clasped her hands in front of her and tilted her head to the side. Her hair had held up all right. It was multilayered blond and brown. It looked like a lot of thinking went into each individual piece, and also not that much like real hair. Hugo sat across from her in one of the armchairs. He looked relaxed, handsome, amused, like he had been on vacation for months already. A fresh layer of makeup had been added to the fissure in his forehead. Except for the odd texture, you could
n’t see it at all.

  “Have you ever considered a role outside of the spotlight?” she said.

  “I’m glad you asked, Casey,” said Hugo.

  He looked up past the camera and caught my eye.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I can do to give back. I think established comedians have a responsibility to amplify the kind of voices we don’t hear from as much in comedy. Which is to say, not white men. Women, people of color, differently abled people, people from diverse economic backgrounds. You know, comedy favors the wealthy, just like all the arts. Because when you’re young and still figuring it out, doing open mics, working some entry-level job, whatever, you can lean on your parents. People raised in lower income households don’t have that luxury.”

  Casey Caruso nodded along to everything he said.

  “As you might know, Casey, I come from a working-class background myself. My father was a mechanic and my mother was a housewife. So I had no advantages on that front. None. They couldn’t help pay my rent or anything like that. I have experienced firsthand just how difficult things can be for young comedians, and I’m a straight, white man, which makes things how much easier? Forty percent? Would you say forty percent, Casey?”

  “I’d say so. Forty percent easier sounds about right,” said Casey. “What form might it take, this amplification you’re talking about?”

  “Well, one thing it would be great to do is promote projects by people who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily get a chance. For instance, there’s never been a better time for women in comedy.”

  He named some female comedians on the rise. They were pushing boundaries, he said. They had schooled the world on the question of whether or not women are funny.

  “They are,” Hugo concluded. He looked at me again, eyes twinkling. “I think we can lay that one to rest. Anyway, it would be great to help break out talent like that. Give some deserving young woman a chance she might not normally get.”

  Casey Caruso beamed. “It sounds like you’re putting your producer hat on.”

  “You know, Casey, I may be. I very well may be.”

  The interview ended and I walked outside. The catering staff slouched around drinking soda, crimped bow ties hanging out of their pockets. All of Hugo’s answers seemed prepared in advance, especially the one about inclusivity. He’d mocked it the night before, dismissed it, then stolen it from me to make himself look good. Another way of thinking about it, I guess, was he’d learned it from me.

  I sat in the party tent and took off my shoes. The plastic windows and wet green yard outside made me feel submerged. I wanted Hugo to find me like that, alone in the tent, like the last guest left in the dining room of a cruise ship. A cruise ship that was taking on water. But he didn’t come out. Maybe they had more to shoot. Maybe they were just chatting, letting fly about Richie what’s-his-face. What a fool he was and how scandalously small.

  A bartender came in, a woman about my age, and stood at her post. She was wearing a caterer’s white shirt and black pants and had her hair in a tidy bun.

  She said to me, “Do you need something?”

  I did. I needed a job, a ride home, to go put on my real clothes. I needed to pay my student loans. I needed a haircut at a reasonable price from a place that knew what to do with my hair texture. I needed to call my parents and hear a mind-numbing story about something rude that was said in the deli line at Publix supermarket. I needed them to float me two grand, just until just until just until. I needed a stiff drink.

  “Surprise me,” I said.

  * * *

  By three o’clock the weather had worsened. The backyard, pool, and white tent were suffused in a fine drizzle. A jazz trio arrived in ponchos and started setting up. I carried my cocktail into the house when it got too chilly. Guests would be arriving soon, and I wanted to see Hugo before he was swept up in the jocularity. The backslapping and cigar lighting, the side hugs and cheek kissing.

  He wasn’t anywhere, though. Not upstairs, not downstairs. I loitered in the kitchen waiting for him to show up until the blond lady shooed me away. When it was clear I wouldn’t find him, I went to the front of the house. There was a white Barcelona chair near the door, and I sat watching for the cars of Hugo’s friends. The high heels stepping out onto gravel, the madcap sprints around the house to the party.

  An Uber let out two young women, girls really, tall, thin, dressed for the discotheque in crop tops and lace-up pants. The first of the deluge, I thought. He shows up and they just materialize. But then they didn’t. It was fifteen minutes before another car pulled in, a Land Rover that produced a barrel-chested guy in khakis and a checked shirt. He wore a tan visor with a corporate logo, hedge fund swag it looked like, and vaped manically as he made his way around the house. Hugo didn’t come out to meet him, or the girls before him, or the next people that arrived, an elegant older couple who struck me as European and at the wrong party entirely. He couldn’t hide forever, though—manners wouldn’t allow it—so I waited.

  I was a veteran of waiting, a pro. I could have put it on my résumé. Being a page had been all waiting. Waiting to open the house, to seat the audience. Waiting through Gary Scary’s routine, Bony’s routine, waiting some more through the familiar rhythms of the show.

  My work at reception had been mostly waiting, too. Years of it. For the phone to ring, for the mail to arrive, for people to come out from the office and collect their guests. Waiting to be remembered by the staff members, and waiting to establish a rapport with them.

  Occasionally, there was a break from the waiting. An errand of some kind, a document to copy and distribute. Then I got to saunter as slowly as I wanted through the hallways peeking into offices. And sometimes Julian stopped by for a chat. He’d talk to me about what was going on in the writers’ room. The projects that week, the feuds, who was up and who was down, Gil’s mood, Hugo’s. He’d pump me for information. He was mainly interested in what people were saying about him, which was usually nothing. Sometimes I made things up to mess with him. “Gil mentioned you chew too loudly,” I told him once, and Julian blanched.

  I often wondered if the waiting would come to nothing. I feared that I’d turn thirty at the reception desk, that the office manager would remember and arrange a party for me like she had when I turned twenty-seven and twenty-eight and twenty-nine. That everyone would sign a card. I feared that years would pass, even more years than had already passed, and I’d still be wearing a headset and consulting my laminated sheet of extensions. I feared the day would come when I just gave up and moved on to the next job, a job that carried me fractionally closer to a career, but never all the way. I feared I’d creep forward like that, enacting Zeno’s paradox deep into my forties. And then what?

  It didn’t happen. Two writers burned out and quit unexpectedly. Two women. One spot went to an outside hire, Layla, and the other to Julian. Julian put in a word for me and I interviewed for the writers’ assistant job. The first time I sat down with Gil, we were interrupted by his phone buzzing a Times alert. My own phone was off.

  He looked down. “Shit.”

  A mass shooting at Chicago O’Hare, nineteen dead, six of them children. The monologue would have to be rewritten on the fly with the tone calibrated. They’d have to consult Hugo about how he wanted to handle it. More news would probably break during the taping—the identity of the shooter, his online radicalization and otherwise clean record, his wild-eyed mug shot, and the administration’s hollow statement—dating it before it even aired.

  A writer named Tony popped his head in the door. “You’re needed.”

  Gil nodded at him. He was already standing up. To me he said, “Are you sure you want this job?”

  “Definitely,” I said too quickly, and Gil shook his head.

  We rescheduled for a couple of days later, and that time Gil was in a buoyant mood, eating a burrito over his laptop. I watched him take a piece of green pepper off the space bar and pop it into his mouth. A megafamous
pop star had been on the night before and ratings had rebounded slightly. In a few months we’d get word we were canceled, but that day he felt good. He hired me.

  The strangest part of the wait was the moment it ended. By that point it was such a well-worn groove. You couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t quite trust it. Thought at any minute you’d be thrust back. But space was made, in the shift between stasis and motion. And into that space seeped hope. You would not always be waiting. Something had to happen eventually.

  My phone buzzed on my lap and I fumbled to pick it up. It was Julian. I’d forgotten that I’d told him to come here.

  “You sound weird,” he said. “I’m outside. There’s a guy with a clipboard. Do I need to be on a list or something? Did you put me on a list?”

  I hadn’t thought to put Julian on a list. I hadn’t thought there’d be a list. In spite of what I’d been told, I’d envisioned a large barbecue. No barbecue I’d ever been to had a list.

  “I’ll come out,” I said.

  I went outside and half jogged through the drizzle. My heels sank into the gravel. The gate was open and a security guard stood waiting to check in cars. He had the hood of his windbreaker up. The paper on his clipboard was getting wet. I reached the gate and saw Julian’s Volvo parked on the shoulder. Inside, he sat perfectly still.

  “You can let him in,” I said to the guy.

  A long conversation followed about who I was. He looked around in disbelief. I could hear music playing from Julian’s car, a Talking Heads song. The day before I wanted him there, but now I could see that inviting him was a mistake. He already seemed out of place. The Volvo had a missing hubcap and a battered side mirror. Someone had tried to peel the Harvard sticker off the back window and left a streaky mess.

  A black sedan pulled up behind Julian’s car. The driver tapped the horn.

  “You know what?” said the guard. “I don’t really care.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He waved Julian through. The Volvo’s tires kicked up gravel. I got into the front seat and said hi and he said hi and we both laughed.