Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  Julian said, “What are you wearing?”

  “A dress,” I said.

  He himself was wearing the blazer he’d had on the one time I’d gone to his apartment. He’d had the foresight to take the hammer and sickle pin off the lapel.

  Julian said, almost happily, “I regret coming here so much.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

  We had done something stupid and were now being forced to ride out the consequences. The dread was exhilarating. A second guy dressed in all black pointed out where to park. The caterer’s van was there, and only a few other cars. Even the MG had been stowed back in the hangar to await repairs.

  “I fucking brought something,” Julian said.

  “What?”

  “I brought cookies.”

  He pulled out a white bakery bag splotched in places with grease and showed me the contents. It was those dusty sandwich cookies with red jelly inside from an Italian bakery.

  “Definitely don’t bring that in,” I said.

  It was good manners to bring a food item, he told me. It was de rigueur. Plus, he’d made a special trip to Little Italy. He’d gotten up early to do it. It had been a mob scene down there, tourists everywhere. He thought it might have been San Gennaro.

  “San Gennaro’s in the fall,” I said.

  “No one knows exactly when it is.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “I’m bringing them.”

  He located an umbrella under the backseat—a five-dollar bodega umbrella with two broken spokes—and attempted to hold it over us as we made our way to the backyard.

  Out on the patio, the rain was melting the ice in the huge chrome champagne bucket and a caterer was looking around for someone to help him move it. Julian grabbed one side and they heaved it into the tent. We paused for a minute, waiting for our eyes to adjust. Julian set his crumpled bag of cookies next to a multitiered cupcake stand on the buffet table. It looked like trash.

  “There’s something on your head,” he said. “What is it?”

  “A bruise.”

  “He didn’t . . . He didn’t hit you, did he?”

  “Nothing like that. Wildlife mishap. Possum in the road.”

  He was quiet, maybe trying to determine whether he should press harder. I could sense him deciding, feeling around for where the boundaries were. We were far outside the code we’d established. I’d ridden in his car; he’d seen me in a party dress. We’d talked on the phone twice now. Then he seemed to give up.

  “This is neither the time nor the place,” he said. “But it’s opossum.”

  “I’m aware.”

  He turned and took stock of the tent, the parquet dance floor, the fairy lights shimmering around the perimeter, the white linen tablecloths lifting and lowering in the wind. The musicians were drinking pilsners, laughing softly among themselves. There were a handful of guests, the ones I’d seen arrive and five or six others. The girls who’d come in the Uber were standing with the hedge fund guy, who continued to vape. The end of his pen glowed blue. One table was occupied by scattered guests who’d left buffer seats between them. The older couple I’d seen before took turns righting a vase that kept falling over, until the woman said, “Enough,” and set it on the ground.

  Over at the bar, a man in a yellow raincoat and fishing hat was asking a lot of questions. I heard the bartender repeat, “I don’t know,” several times. The man held his palms up and motioned around the tent.

  “Now what?” said Julian.

  Julian and I had gotten drunk together before, mostly during our page year, mostly at TGI Fridays. On particularly hard days, Julian could be persuaded to open a tab with his father’s credit card. His dad only ever mentioned it to Julian if the bill was truly obscene. It was easy to spend Julian’s dad’s money, easier still to rack up a tab at Fridays, which had bad food at bad prices—a Midtown hallmark.

  We’d drink our sloshing drinks, eat the fruit garnishes, order appetizers, and commiserate about whatever it was that day that had been so awful. A guy who’d gotten handsy, a pigeon in the atrium. The kind of thing that never rose above the level of workplace anecdote. And when we’d had enough to drink, when the guardrails of inhibition were down, we’d move on to our real topic: ourselves. Our opinions, our takes. What we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Which comedians were good, which were bad, whose career we’d take, given the chance, whose we’d leave. It was at Fridays that I first heard about Mates. Maybe it was at Fridays that Julian had come up with it.

  The tent shimmied in the wind and we got drinks. The man in the raincoat was still at the bar, sipping an Old Fashioned garnished with a curlicue of orange rind.

  “You two,” he said. “Where is everyone? Where is Hugo? What exactly is going on here?”

  It was obvious what was going on. The rain pounding the tent made it obvious. The wind gusting in to knock over the chunky glass vases. The tablecloths, wet now, and covered in a spill of purple flowers.

  Julian said, “Maybe a miscommunication about the date?”

  “I don’t think so,” said the man. “It’s been held on the same day, Memorial Day, every year for twenty years. I should know. I live right across the street. Maybe you saw the place on the way in? Looks like an old villa?” He held out his hand. “Edward McGuire,” he said. “Ted.”

  Handshakes and introductions, and then Ted went on. “I don’t get it. I can remember other years that it rained. A certain percentage of Memorial Days it’s gonna rain, right? It rained three years ago and everyone just came in the tent until it stopped. No big deal. It was even kind of fun. Cozy. Like camping with two hundred of your closest friends. So if it’s not the weather, then what is it?”

  He paused like we might actually think of an answer.

  “An off year,” I said finally.

  Ted McGuire sipped his Old Fashioned and watched the storm through the door of the tent. A table on the patio blew over, bringing a chair with it, and none of us made a move to do anything about it. “Who did you kids say you were again?”

  It was a fair question, but I didn’t want to mention the show to Ted McGuire. I didn’t want to hear his condolences about it ending, or his theories as to why. He seemed full of theories. Ted McGuire must have been good at something to secure a giant fake villa in Greenwich, Connecticut, but I doubted his talents extended to media criticism. At some point he’d taken off the fishing hat and his hair was squashed down evenly on all sides of his head. He looked like one of the Three Stooges.

  “I’m Hugo’s German tutor,” I said.

  “And I’m her German tutor,” said Julian, pointing at me.

  Ted didn’t know what to do with that. “That’s . . . huh. Hugo’s learning German? But if you’re a German tutor,” he said to me, “why do you need . . .” He patted the pockets of his raincoat, searching for his phone. “You know what? I should really call Linda and tell her not to bother coming by. She won’t be happy if she treks all the way over here for nothing. Will you excuse me?”

  He put on his hat, pulled his hood up over it, drained his drink, and walked out into the rain to make the call. We turned back to the bartender. To thank us for getting rid of Ted McGuire, she opened the nice scotch. Julian told her he’d only ever had it once, at his cousin’s wedding at the Rainbow Room.

  She said, “Mazel tov.”

  He said, “It was six years ago.”

  She said, “Could you legally drink then?”

  He said, “Maybe. What are you, a cop?”

  I couldn’t believe it: Julian was flirting. I’d never seen it before. I knew he dated. He was on the apps like everyone and sometimes he mentioned his girlfriend from college, who worked at a nonprofit and was engaged to a tech bro. But I’d never witnessed any evidence of sexual interest in another person. I didn’t think his laser focus allowed for it.

  I left him to it and went to the mouth of the tent to watch for Hugo. Rain lashed the house and I pictured it gone, underwater, blown away. The same image
s sometimes came to me in the city. I’d be walking to the subway after work and see the streets empty and crumbling. Whitecaps on Broadway, trees bent to ninety degrees. Barnacles climbing the buildings like vines. New York will always be there, was something people said to justify leaving it. But it wouldn’t be, not always. Maybe it would in my lifetime, but one day it would cease to stand. It would sink into the rising ocean or it’d go another way. Fire, ice, locusts, class warfare, the bomb. Or excess; that’s what brought down Rome. Like picturing my parents dead when I was little, the thought left me bereft.

  Spencer opened the sliding glass door. He stood on the threshold, the strap of a duffel bag slung diagonally across his chest. We looked at each other through the rain that came down in loud splashing sheets. It was like seeing him through a fish tank. A whole universe swam between us, creatures adrift on strange, shifting currents.

  As a good-bye, I didn’t mind it. It was better than a lingering full-body hug or any words we might have exchanged. We’d said what we had to say, about his father anyway. Another conversation would just be a reprisal. It was unlikely we’d see each other again, but we would probably follow each other on social media. The idea depressed me and I resolved not to do it even as I acknowledged that I probably would. In the abstract, I’d have rather lost touch with Spencer, the better to forget all the weekend’s worst details, but in the concrete, I was curious about his vacations.

  Spencer cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted something I couldn’t hear. I shook my head. He shouted it again, but it was just formless boy sound, a sonic blur that didn’t resolve into anything like words. I shook my head and waved. His face was a smudge on the other side of the weather. He turned around—navy jacket, stuffed maroon duffel, ubiquitous black Yankees cap—and waving absently over his shoulder, walked into the house.

  Julian appeared next to me. “Who are you waving to? Was that Spencer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “The wilds of boarding school,” I said. “From whence he came.”

  “Is he a little shitheel, Spencer?”

  Julian already seemed tipsy. His top button was undone and his hair had fallen partway over one eye. I didn’t feel like launching into a long description of Spencer’s character. I didn’t feel like I could explain it anyway, not so Julian would understand.

  “Kinda. You know the type.”

  “We’ll see him in a writers’ room in four or five years.”

  “Nah,” I said. “We’ll see him on TV.”

  “I want a tour of the house,” said Julian.

  “What about your girlfriend?” I said.

  I motioned back behind us toward the bartender.

  “She doesn’t get off until the end of this thing. If this thing is a thing.”

  I looked around the tent. The European couple rose to leave. Ted McGuire was still stomping around the yard. His yellow form streaked past a window. The jazz trio struck up Miles Davis’s “So What?” and even I could hear their sarcasm.

  “It might not be a thing.”

  “Let’s go,” said Julian.

  He handed me the busted umbrella, gave the bartender a sheepish smile, and took off across the yard. He held his glass in one hand and used the other as a lid for his whiskey. I opened the umbrella, arranged the fabric over the broken spokes as best I could, and made a run for the kitchen doors.

  Inside, the catering staff lounged against the appliances, ignoring us. Trays of hors d’oeuvres sat on the island, daubed and skewered, artfully arranged, ready to be passed. I ate a doll-sized potato pancake, looking the blond lady right in the eyes. She opened her mouth to say something, but then she didn’t.

  Julian was panting. “Do I take off my shoes?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  He looked at me, pained, and bent to untie them. “They’re wet. And a little muddy.”

  I took a certain comfort in Julian’s social unease. It reminded me of my parents, their desire to comport themselves perfectly in all social situations and the immense strain this caused them, effectively preventing it. I was like that, too. I had pulled off downward mobility, but the stifling sense of decorum remained. You could live paycheck to paycheck, no assets, no cushion, cover your bills with a kind of credit line three-card monte, and still you beat your brains out over whether or not to take your shoes off in a well-appointed living room.

  I took mine off. We lined them up by the door, his brown suede desert boots, my low heels. Julian had also taken his socks off, arguing that they were just as wet. We both gazed down at our bare toes on Hugo’s hardwood floor, something I never expected to see.

  Ana came in and handed me the cordless phone.

  “For you,” she said, and walked away.

  Julian said, “Someone called you here? On a landline?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, and into the phone, “Hello?”

  It was Roman. “June,” he said. “Listen. I called to talk about what happened in the hot tub the other day. You were right that we shouldn’t have had Heaven in there.”

  “Well that’s . . . Really?” I said.

  “Hell no, I’m kidding. I called because I can’t make it tonight and I want you to tell Hugo.”

  Julian mouthed to me, Who is it?

  I covered the receiver. “Roman Doyle.”

  His lips parted slowly and stuck like that. Julian had been one of Roman’s favorite targets. Roman called him an Ivy League snowflake, a Jewish American princess. Asked him to recite his Torah portion. Found out his father worked on Wall Street and terrorized him with it. And when people complained to HR, which Julian did, which a lot of us did, Roman issued a semiapology and Hugo stepped in to smooth the whole thing over. We didn’t want to become one of those PC writers’ rooms, did we? One of those trigger warning rooms? Where you couldn’t even joke about something as anodyne as rosacea or obesity or having a limp without someone running out in tears?

  I said to Roman, “Why not tell Hugo yourself?”

  A long silence. I could hear in the background the bark of a sports announcer narrating a game. Julian was shaking his head slowly.

  “I just can’t,” said Roman. “It’s a bummer.”

  “A bummer?”

  “Yeah, it sucks too bad. Dealing with him right now.”

  “Why aren’t you coming anyway?”

  “Go to the window,” he said.

  I turned around to face the yard. The light outside was yellow-brown. Chunks of hail pelted the tent and pinged the kitchen door. The swimming pool frothed like a hot spring.

  “Biblical business,” said Roman. “End times. Ellen feels weird about it. Superstitious. She wants to stay home and read the tarot.”

  “Ellen?”

  “Sorry, I meant Gypsy. Ellen was her name before. Back in Texas. She never felt like it had anything in particular to do with her. The name Ellen. Unlike Gypsy, which fits her perfectly. It wasn’t until she started calling herself Gypsy that she really came into her own.”

  “But the word gypsy . . .” I started to say.

  “Can you not this one time?”

  “Fine.”

  “There are a lot of people there, though, right? So he probably won’t even notice that I’m not there.”

  “Not a lot, no,” I said. “Not very many at all.”

  He was quiet again. “How bad? Fifty not a lot, or zero not a lot?”

  “Closer to zero than fifty.”

  “No Laura? No Bony? No finance dudes wearing, like, vests? No neighbors? That guy Ed or Ted isn’t there who lives across the street in that horrible Italianate place? He’s always showing up at Hugo’s parties.”

  “Ted is here,” I said. “Ted and basically no one else. Hugo had a fight with Laura yesterday. I don’t know where Bony is. He chose today not to be a sidekick.”

  “Shit. Should I come? I have to come, don’t I?”

  It was probably useless,
unless he was going to phone tree all of Hugo’s other friends. All the famous comedians and hedge fund guys and golf buddies and hot women half his age. The whole dusty Rolodex, because you knew he had one, with a cloudy black lid and heavy off-white card stock, purchased for him by an assistant in the eighties and still kicking around the house somewhere.

  “Don’t come,” I said. “It won’t help.”

  It would only make the problem more pronounced, I told him. Underline it. Roman should call him tomorrow and make amends, take him out to lunch or to the strip club or to the sketchy massage parlor. Tell him Ellen/Gypsy distrusted hail.

  “We don’t go to strip clubs together,” said Roman.

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe you can ask him yourself if he’s okay, while the two of you eat your crab salads or get your happy endings.”

  “You’re being gross,” said Roman.

  I felt a rush of anger. He was the gross one. A big, seeping blemish on the face of the show. I was tempted to tell him how much the staff hated him, but I knew he’d only laugh. We weren’t even a staff anymore, just a loose association of people bound by a failed cause. Plus, he hated us right back. The way we voted and the things we read, our educations and the causes we cared about. It would please Roman to know that I’d once seen Gil spit into the gutter on Forty-eighth Street after saying his name. I could see him repeating that one to his hot tub friends. I could see them laughing about it under the brims of their hats.

  What’s more, he was a shoddy guardian of Hugo’s well-being. They all were: him, Laura, and Bony, too. They were falling away now that they didn’t need him anymore. Now that he wasn’t in a position to do anything for them. I couldn’t believe how obvious it was.

  “I think we’re done here,” I said.

  “Will you tell him I called?” said Roman.

  “If you want.”

  “Tell him Heaven got sick. That’s a valid excuse.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “Oh right, your integrity.”

  We hung up and I put the phone down on an end table.

  “Should I even ask?” said Julian.