by Erin Somers
I wondered what that might be like and couldn’t really get there. Money would have to lose its value completely for me before I went out and bought what looked like three identical Porsches with slightly different headlights. Hugo opened the door to one and climbed in.
“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
I leaned in the driver’s-side window. It was a tough-guy car, black with a red interior. A too-literal interpretation of cool.
“My first: 1974.” He ran his hands over the wheel. “I was twenty-two. It was summertime. I had just made some money touring colleges. Did Carson. Then the album came out and after that it started. I don’t know if you know what it’s like for a kid who grew up in New York City to buy his first car. It’s a big deal. It’s how you know you’re finally on your way.”
“Finally? But you were twenty-two.”
He put his hand on the gearshift, adjusted the rearview mirror. I tried to picture him as he saw himself, mean and lean in 1974. He would have been out in LA then, long shaggy hair, fringed vest. Open shirt showcasing a necklace of spiritual significance. An ankh or an om or a chunk of turquoise. The hot wind blowing and the sound of sirens. A pretty girl in the front seat, his hand on her leg. One of those rare moments of kismet when the lights turn green down the whole stretch of boulevard. I could see how losing that, you might mourn for it. You might walk around the rest of your life missing it.
“I guess it always feels like finally, doesn’t it?” he said. “No matter how old you are, it always feels like it was a long time coming.”
He had half forgotten whom he was talking to. That’s what it seemed like. He stared out through the windshield at something in the distance, something not even in the room. I didn’t know anything about embittered victory or getting back at my father by purchasing a car. If those were actually the things he was talking about.
I said, “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You will.”
He shook off his revelry and climbed out, turned himself fully to the task of selecting a car. This involved looking at me closely, a full-body appraisal, as if it was crucial to make a good match here. I had wrangled my hair and changed into some cutoffs and a loose linen sweater. The sweater had a laddered hole in one arm that Audrey had told me made it more chic. I wore low-top sneakers with no socks and a couple of rings and a couple of earrings in each ear. I had not felt self-conscious when I got dressed, but now I did. Now that I was going to be compared to a car I wished I had at least selected a shirt with intact elbows.
I pointed at a yellow Lamborghini. “How about that one? With the mean face.”
He scoffed. “That makes no sense.”
He paced the aisles, bypassed a gold Bentley, bypassed an elegant old Rolls with its glinting winged hood ornament, bypassed a Ford truck, clunky but cute.
“There she is,” he said at last, and led me to a cream-colored MG convertible.
“That one?” I said.
I was a little disappointed that he’d equate me with this car. There were sexy cars in that room. Cars that opened in hilarious and wildly impractical ways. Cars with soul.
Hugo laughed. “What, are you mad? It’s a great car! Understated. Plus, what an interior.”
It was true, the inside was nice. Soft tan leather puckered around strategic rivets. The seat belts were aircraft-style, the lacquer buckles held the angular MG logo.
“And in great shape, considering.”
I glared at him. He added, “Convertibles are fun! America loves convertibles.”
“Whatever,” I mumbled. “Objects are meaningless.”
Removing the car from the hangar proved an operation. He had to Tetris it out of its spot, and, while the engine idled, operate a control panel, walking alongside the door as it slid on its aluminum track.
“It’s finicky,” he shouted to me over the grinding of gears. He said it joyfully, like he was glad to own such a large, temperamental door.
Finally we were in the open air, following an access road around the curve of the property to where it met back up with the main drive. The gate swung wide and a psychological weight lifted. We could go anywhere or nowhere. Was this the romance Hugo had mentioned or just the human distaste for captivity? Either way we were free.
By day, Greenwich backcountry was all fieldstone walls and light through leaves, tall wooden fences, and mansions set way back from the road. Above, a riot of blue and white sky. The MG rode smoothly and had a certain plucky bravery on the hills.
“See?” said Hugo.
He drove fast, recklessly, and with skill. We stopped for gas at a Shell on the Post Road and I could feel people’s eyes. I could feel their heads in passing cars, swiveling to look. It wasn’t me they were looking at. It was Hugo, or it was the classic car, or it was both. I wondered if this made me visible or doubly invisible. If standing next to something worth looking at meant people would look at me, too.
Hugo went into the convenience store and came back out unwrapping a pack of gum. The gum craving was worse in the car, he told me. If he had known all those years ago when he started smoking that he would end up chewing gum for the rest of his life like an asshole teenager he wouldn’t have started in the first place. He’d almost take the cancer instead.
Back on the road we listened to Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small. Hugo had a rig—an adapter that plugged into the cigarette lighter—to send the album from his phone to the car radio via airwaves. It worked passably. Sometimes we lost the signal and were subjected to a staticky scramble, but mostly we were able to hear him. I thought of the album art. It was Steve, wearing every prop imaginable: nose and glasses, balloon hat, bunny ears, arrow through the head. Young and handsome, still brunette. I remembered his chest hair.
He was doing the one about being mad at his mother. She’s 102 years old, the bit went. “And the other day she wanted to borrow ten dollars for some food. I said, hey, I work for a living. So I lent her the money, I had one of my secretaries take it down. She calls me up, tells me she can’t pay me back for a while. I said what is this bullshit.” And so on.
I said to Hugo, “Don’t you ever listen to NPR or anything? Just for texture?”
He shook his head. “Why? To hear about politics? Famine, drought? Female genital mutilation? The public school system in the Bronx?” He made a face. “No, thanks.”
As we sped downtown, Logan called. Without thinking, I picked up. Hugo leaned forward to turn down the stereo. We said hi and both waited, listening. I could tell he was in his room because I heard no other sounds. He lived in a brand-new condo in north Brooklyn with a view of the East River out one window and Newtown Creek out the other. He got both of them, Manhattan and Queens, the sacred and the profane, and he was way up on the twelfth floor, so he didn’t hear a whisper of street noise. Not the whoosh of a street cleaner, or a truck rolling over a loose manhole cover, or an idiot shouting at another idiot. Nothing. His parents bought him the condo, as an investment of course, but he paid the maintenance fees.
“You’re alive,” he said finally.
“I am,” I said.
We both waited again. “And?”
“I went out of town,” I said. “I should have told you.”
“You went out of town,” he repeated with a note of awe. “Where?”
“To Connecticut with my boss. My former boss. Hugo, I mean. It’s a long story. Actually, currently, the two of us are in a car.”
“Great,” said Logan. “Tell him I say hello.”
I turned to Hugo. “A guy says hi.”
Hugo raised his eyebrows.
“I was worried,” said Logan. “Did you see my texts?”
I took a breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the roof thing last night.”
“There will be other roofs,” said Logan. “There will always be roofs. There will be roofs, there will be roofs.”
“Suppose so. Otherwise we’d die of exposure.”
“Are you involved with Hugo?”<
br />
“Would it matter?”
I wanted him to say it did, to care enough to try to stop me. Even though what we had wasn’t that great, even though it usually made me feel bad.
Hugo had slowed to a crawl to look for a parking spot. We’d reached the main shopping district, a wide avenue lined with stores that sloped down to the train station. A train had just arrived. Even at this distance I could hear its soft scream, and it occurred to me that I could leave now. If I wanted to, I could be on that platform in five minutes waiting for the next southbound to Grand Central. I could be sliding into a sticky seat and feeling the deep relief of a bullet dodged.
“Would it matter?” said Logan. “Not relative to world events, no.”
“Okay then.”
“Have you slept with him?”
Hugo had stopped on a side street and was clambering out to open my door. The car was so low that the curb was a step up.
“Not yet,” I said. “I mean no. Just no.”
“Good,” said Logan. “Bye.”
Which I took to mean good-bye.
I hung up. It had ended that fast. Had it ended? I was pretty sure it had ended. I stood there feeling dizzy until Hugo took my elbow to guide me up Greenwich Avenue.
“The young man from the roof thing?”
“Yeah.”
“And how was it, up there on the roof? Precipitous, one imagines.”
He was just going to continue with the witty banter and I was grateful. Banter I could do. It was his sympathy I didn’t think I could face, the thought that I had come here and made him feel bad for me. If anything, I was supposed to feel bad for him. He was the one who had reached the end of something momentous. He was the one who found himself on the other side of it, in the uncharted afterward that for some reason included me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t they kind of all the same? Parties? You stand there talking to someone and then that person goes away and another person comes up.”
“They’re not all the same,” said Hugo. “I used to go to Studio 54. One night there was a lynx there.”
“A lynx?”
“Like the big silver cat.”
“I know what a lynx is.”
“It was sad, actually. It seemed really upset. It was pacing its cage. I think the lights were bothering it. And the music. Elizabeth Taylor kept trying to feed it gummy bears.”
“What is this story?” I said. “Are you fucking with me?”
“I can’t be sure,” said Hugo. “After a while someone went and got Ian Schrager to come deal with it. He was the guy that dealt with things. Did you know he was pardoned by Barack Obama?”
“Nothing you’re saying makes sense to me,” I said.
“What does he do anyway?”
“Do?”
“The roof kid. Guy. Man.”
“Oh,” I said. “He designs apps.”
“Apps.” He smirked. “An app designer. And how did you meet?”
We’d met on an app five months ago. Not one that Logan had made. Another one, one that everyone used. I didn’t want to bring up apps again because I knew how it sounded. It sounded like my whole life was app based, and maybe it was.
“We met at a bar,” I said.
“A story for the grandkids,” said Hugo. “Here we are.”
We’d stopped in front of an unmarked storefront of white brick. He held the door for me and we went in. Inside, the boutique was spare. White walls, plain pine floors. Two or three racks held three or four garments. A salesgirl greeted Hugo by kissing him on both cheeks.
“Booboo,” she said affectionately.
I studied his face. “Booboo?”
“This was Allison’s favorite store,” he explained.
“Oh, from TV. Your wife.”
The salesgirl clapped her hands. “Drinks! Perrier, cappuccino, what are we having, champagne?”
Hugo said, “Let’s make an occasion of it.”
It was 2 p.m. and I had eaten a single fried egg. My hangover had surpassed comic and become philosophical. All was equal.
“Why not?” I said.
The salesgirl brought Moët on a silver tray and proposed a toast to world peace. I noticed for the first time that she had a slight Eastern European accent and that she was unhinged.
“Now what brings you in today?” she said when we’d drained our glasses.
Hugo pointed at me. “She’s in charge.”
“I need a dress,” I said. “For a party.”
“Ah, the party, of course. The famous party. Will there be a Ferris wheel this year?”
“It was a carousel,” said Hugo. He turned to me. “We had a carousel one year. But no. No gimmicks this time around. I’m afraid I’m too old for gimmicks.”
“It’s true, Booboo,” said the salesgirl sadly. “You’re already a corpse who is dead in its grave.” She poked him playfully with a long peach-lacquered fingernail. “But a handsome corpse.”
She said to me, almost shouting, “And you. You’ll be the first lady of this party. You need something elegant but with vuv.”
“Verve?” I said.
“No, vuv.”
“Verve.”
“Vuv.”
It wasn’t a word. I gave up. “Yeah okay, something with vuv. No cutouts or anything like that. That stuff makes me feel stupid.”
The bell on the door tinkled and a couple entered. The man was in his sixties, about Hugo’s age. He looked like Hugo, actually, the civilian version. More wrinkled, a bit flabbier. They wore the same style of sport coat.
“Hugo Best,” he cried. “Stay Up with Hugo Best!”
Hugo smiled his late-night smile. “It’s me.”
“I love you with that guy. The other guy, the bald one.”
“Bony,” said Hugo.
“Bony!” said the man. “Bony Suarez! Great back and forth between you two.”
“Thank you,” said Hugo.
They shook hands and the man exhorted his wife to find something Hugo could sign. She dug through her purse, pulling out a long grocery-store receipt like a magician’s trick scarf. A moment later she produced a ballpoint pen.
“Are you sure you don’t need this?” said Hugo. “There’s a coupon for Häagen-Dazs at the bottom here. Dollar off, not bad.”
“We don’t need it,” the woman said seriously.
Hugo signed, H scribble B scribble, and handed it to the man. He folded it carefully and put it into his pocket.
“It’s a shame what they did to you,” said the man. “Pushing you out like that.”
“I wasn’t pushed out,” said Hugo. “I retired.”
“They shouldn’t push fellas out,” he persisted. “On account of what? Ratings? It’s a goddamn shame. They shouldn’t push fellas out.”
“I wasn’t pushed out,” Hugo said again.
The salesgirl was hanging things up for me in the dressing room. I hadn’t told her my size, and she’d had the discretion not to ask in front of Hugo. It occurred to me that our situation wasn’t unusual, that all up and down Greenwich Avenue the robber barons of Fairfield County were out dress shopping with their young girlfriends.
“Is this your wife?” asked the wife. She looked at me, at my torn sweater and filthy sneakers. I hadn’t even thought to bring my purse; I was holding my wallet in one hand. The zipper was broken and a loyalty card for a soup place near the office poked out.
“I thought you were married to that Brazilian model,” she said to Hugo.
“No,” said her husband. “The woman from the funny TV show. The Brazilian model was the first wife.”
“I was never married to a Brazilian model,” said Hugo. “My first wife was a schoolteacher.”
“I’m his concubine,” I said.
“It’s like a prostitute,” the man explained to his wife. “From olden times.”
To the salesgirl I said, “I think we’re ready.”
She was standing by to lead us to the fitting room. Her face was comp
letely blank. Blank of judgment, blank of sympathy. Her heels clicked as she led us away.
“I’m a big fan,” the man called after us. “Don’t misunderstand me!”
Back in the dressing rooms, Hugo sat down on a low white stool, rubbing his palms on his thighs.
“What an asshole,” I said.
“Just a fan. Sometimes it goes like that.”
He was trying for philosophical, but his posture gave him away. His knees fell apart too sloppily. His head hung too low on a neck that seemed barely up for it.
Alone in the fitting room, I heard my phone ring. Logan again. I didn’t like how we’d left it—I hadn’t been nice, and, somewhat justifiably, neither had he. But the reason I’d been mean was Hugo was there. I’d said those things mostly for his benefit. I couldn’t see telling Logan this, not in a fitting room with Hugo three feet away on the other side of a curtain. I didn’t pick up.
I tried on the dresses. I went out to show him when I had one on. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do. Someone in this situation would present their body in the ridiculous red cocktail dress. Someone in this situation would need to be zipped up.
When he was done he spun me around and held me at arm’s length. “You’re frowning,” he said. “The dress or the roof guy?”
I faltered, looked down at my feet. “The dress.”
He took my hand and squeezed it gently. “Oh, sweetheart, don’t be upset. The world’s full of dresses.”
He helped me unzip again. His knuckles grazed my lower back, maybe on purpose. I thought about what sex with him might be like. Would he make jokes the entire time? What would I do if he did? Probably laugh.
We landed on something more simple. Cream-colored silk with a plunging back. I chose the dress out of partial loyalty to the car. When I emerged from the fitting room he took the hanger from me.
“I’ll get it,” he said.
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Are you kidding?”
I couldn’t afford the dress, not now when I was unemployed, not ever, really. It would take me months of painfully small installments to pay off my credit card.
But I made myself say, “Not at all.”
“I’m not bragging here, I’m just stating a fact, but I’m incredibly rich.”