Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “They’re good people,” confirmed Scotty.

  “I bet he requests some completely unpredictable flavor of ice cream,” said Hugo.

  “Red bean,” said Scotty.

  Hugo threw his hands in the air. “Red bean! Outstanding!”

  The girls emerged from the basement. The blonde had put on a huge gray sweatshirt. The hood was up and the drawstrings cinched so only a small circle of her face showed.

  “How could you leave us downstairs for so long?” the brunette whined.

  “There’s no Wi-Fi down there,” said the blonde. “It’s like Guantanamo.”

  “Ladies, I’ll be honest. We totally forgot about you,” said Spencer.

  “I didn’t think of you once,” added Scotty. He pointed at the brunette. “Especially you.”

  The blonde scowled. “You guys are hilarious.”

  “What thing about Laura?” I muttered under my breath.

  The blonde gave me a bored look through the aperture of her sweatshirt. “Can we have a ride home?”

  “Sure,” said Hugo. “Go get Cal.”

  He stood to stack plates in the sink. As he passed me he said, “You can read it later if you’re so interested. The Internet belongs to everyone, as I’m sure you know. Information wants to be free.”

  * * *

  Later, Hugo and I climbed the stairs to go to sleep. For the second time he left me at the threshold of the guest room. I thought of what Roman had said earlier. Nothing is not going to happen. He’d misunderstood his friend, I thought. Or the power of inertia.

  Logan had texted again while we were eating pizza, twice. I can’t believe you, said the first. Call me, said the second. I held my phone in my hand, deciding whether or not to respond. Likely it would be the last time he tried. If I had anything to say to him, if there was anything to salvage, I would have to do it now.

  Instead I put on Spencer’s Exeter shirt and sprawled on the taupe bedding reading the full article on my phone. The tone was strident but all the facts lined up. When I finished, I got up and made my way down the darkened hall to Hugo’s room. My feet felt cold on the hardwood. Outside his door, I awaited the courage to go in. The best I could manage was a meek knock.

  “Yes?” he said.

  I cracked the door and stuck my head in. Hugo was sitting up in bed in a pair of readers and a worn navy blue T-shirt. The glasses made him look feminine and scholarly, the T-shirt, charmingly ordinary. He dog-eared his book and set it on the nightstand next to a glass of water and an uncapped bottle of Advil. I couldn’t see the title, but it was a mass market paperback, with raised lettering and yellowing pages.

  “I was just—” I said.

  “Come in.”

  The room was the biggest in the house. One wall made of glass looked out over the yard. Spencer had left the pool light on and the swan float had run aground on the staircase. It lay tipped over on its side with its head on the deck.

  Hugo patted the place next to him in bed. Tentatively, I slipped under the covers. Opposite the bed hung a huge painting I recognized as a Frank Stella. The neons of its interlocking fan shapes—the peaches, limes, and lavenders—warmed the room like an indoor sun.

  I pointed at the painting. “I like that. Can I have it?”

  “Does your place have a big enough wall?”

  The largest stretch of wall in my apartment was in the living room. Currently it held a tattered periodic table of the elements, the pull-down kind from a classroom, that had moved with us four or five times. It had a long gash from magnesium to radium that had been mended with Scotch tape.

  “I could make room,” I said.

  “In that case, I’ll bag it up for you.”

  There was a silence while we both considered the painting. I wondered at what point you got sick of a Stella, at what point it became just another thing that oppressed you. Sitting up in bed, both staring in the same direction, it felt like we were watching TV. I tried to think of a joke to make about it, but everything I came up with sounded lame in my head.

  “I read the article,” I said at last.

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “So it’s Laura’s fault?”

  “Of course not. It’s complex.”

  “But she pulled the plug. After all those years you guys spent together.”

  “It’s the business, it’s . . .”

  “Not personal, I know. Turn, turn, turn. But she decided.”

  “We decided together.”

  “But she strongly influenced the decision.”

  “Hey, you can continue to oversimplify this in the morning, if you want. But right now can we go to bed?”

  We had turned away from the painting to face each other. I thought we might finally kiss. I’d been mentally preparing myself for the possibility of sex since he’d zipped me up in the dressing room. Reminding myself that I wanted it, or sort of wanted it, or had sort of wanted it once, not that long ago.

  But the more time that passed, the more far-fetched it grew that we’d touch. Every moment compounded it. Hugo seemed to sense this, too. He laughed softly. Shaking his head, he reached over to switch off the light. In the dark, the Stella was a grayscale rainbow.

  “Good night, I guess,” I said.

  “Night,” he murmured.

  I lay there as quietly as I could until he started to snore. His body was so warm that I had to kick off the covers. I couldn’t sleep. After a while I gave up trying. I asked myself whether I was repulsed yet and found I wasn’t. I thought about texting Audrey to tell her that. I only didn’t because it seemed too feeble, the kind of brag that betrays itself right away as something else.

  I sat up on one elbow so I could see out the window. The night was clear and the stars stood out. More stars than the eye could take in. You couldn’t see them where I lived due to light pollution. New York in toto. A classic example. Gain the city but lose the whole visible universe. I readjusted so I could just make out the curved lash of a moon on the wane. Tonight it was barely there, tomorrow it would be gone altogether.

  Sunday

  * * *

  The house’s windows were screens stuck on a single, serene channel. The field channel. Sunday morning brought more of the same. Crew cut grass barely moving in the wind, needles blowing off the pines. Small birds pecked at the ground in twos and threes then lit out for the woods, brown streaks against the sky. Midmorning was overcast, outside and in. I roused to the dull scrape of a branch on glass. Hugo was gone. He’d made the bed on his side, smoothed down the blanket that was the same depthless gray as the clouds. I thought again of the architect’s vision, to pull everything together under a single umbrella of muted opulence. This time I could remember that Hugo and I hadn’t slept together.

  I went downstairs, expecting to see Spencer bent over his phone, Ana tapping her fingers on the countertop. Instead I found Laura Posner. She sat on the floor of the sunken living room with the Sunday Times spread out all around her. The magazine had slipped under the coffee table and I could make out half of its cover image, a woman frowning deeply over the latest systemic collapse.

  Hugo was there, too, shaven and seated behind Laura on the couch. He was not wearing yesterday’s robe, but a white collared shirt and jeans. Spencer sat in one of the Danish armchairs, laughing at something Laura had said. There was a plate of pastries laid out on the coffee table. Someone had put orange juice in a crystal pitcher next to a bowl of fruit salad. They looked forged from sunlight, like a family from an ad. Except if you got closer, those were pot leaves on Spencer’s shirt.

  Hugo noticed me first. “June!” He sprang to his feet. “Come in, come in. Laura brought pan au chocolat.”

  Laura rose to greet me. “How are you, June?”

  I was wearing the Exeter shirt again, and Spencer’s red shorts. Laura wore a white silk top, black bottoms that seemed neither skirt nor pants, and a necklace made from an asymmetric slash of metal. She wasn’t beautiful—her nose was
too beaky, her jaw too square—but she had a mystery about her. Dark eyes and platinum hair that fell in a thick, luminous sheaf. She gripped my shoulders in a stiff hug and I felt like Scotty’s little brother, far from home.

  “We’re going to lunch,” said Laura. “At the country club.”

  “Once a year Laura consents to eating a club sandwich,” said Hugo.

  “My annual dose of nitrates,” said Laura.

  She paused as if I was supposed to respond to this. I looked around, at a potted cactus, at the placid outdoors.

  “I like how they cut those into quarters,” I said. They stared at me. “Club sandwiches.”

  Hugo pressed on. “Laura despises the club.”

  “I do,” said Laura. “It’s stuffy in there. It smells like a vacuum cleaner and they have those bad floral drapes. Plus, it’s awfully dated, isn’t it? All the rich people in town belonging to a club together. All the rich white people.”

  She was pandering but I had no idea why.

  “You’re white,” I said.

  She cocked her head. “Well, yeah.”

  “What does a vacuum cleaner smell like?” asked Spencer.

  “Oh you know,” said Laura. “Ozone. Carpet fibers. Vacuum cleaner smell.”

  “It’s not just white people,” said Hugo. “Dan Swan’s a member.”

  “Dan Swan is white,” said Spencer.

  “But he’s got an Asian wife,” said Hugo.

  “All white people and one Asian wife, then,” said Laura. “I hate how you don’t even pay there. You just sign your name to a slip of paper and wink at the waiter.”

  Hugo turned to me. “She’s joking. You don’t really have to wink at the waiter.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I just need half an hour to get ready.”

  “Oh, it’s not . . .” said Hugo. He glanced at Laura.

  “It’s a just-the-two-of-us thing,” she said.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “You can come if you want,” she said. “But it’s going to be businessy. You’ll be bored. Wouldn’t you rather stay here with Spencer? You two could”—she looked around the room for some diversion Spencer and I could enjoy together—“watch TV. Play cards? Or, I don’t know, go for a swim? Have you been to the bunker yet?”

  “The bunker?”

  “I’ll show you,” said Spencer.

  Laura smiled. “Great. And when we get back we’ll all play tennis. Do you play tennis, June?”

  “I took lessons as a kid.”

  “It’ll come right back, I’m sure,” said Laura.

  “We’ll do mixed doubles. You can be on my team,” said Hugo.

  “If you want.” I pointed to the pastries. “Is anyone going to eat those or are they just for show?”

  “Oh, of course!” said Laura.

  We filed back around the coffee table. This time Laura took the other armchair and Hugo and I sat together on the couch. I didn’t actually want a pastry. The idea of it was sickening, the too-sweet slick of chocolate in the middle. But I thought some stage business might help, something to occupy our hands. It was the whole reason people smoked.

  I picked one up and took a bite. Phyllo dough flaked down onto my lap and the couch. Everyone looked at it, all four of us. I wondered if I was going to brush it onto the floor. Finally, I cupped one hand and nudged the crumbs into it with the other. Some of the pieces deteriorated, leaving floury grease spots on the couch.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, it’s my first time eating,” I said.

  No one laughed. I didn’t know what to do with the crumbs so I closed my fist around them.

  Laura poured orange juice and passed around the glasses.

  “How is your family?” she asked me. “Your parents?”

  My parents had come to a taping the previous fall, and I was embarrassed that she remembered. They had made a special trip of it, booking a room at the Midtown Marriott without even complaining about the price. They had been trying to come for years—they would have come my second week as a page—but I held them off. Each piece of my life compared badly to the other. My job could never live up to my parents’ expectations of big-city glamour; my parents, in the historic theater, in the sleek, bustling office building, in the streets of Manhattan, could never be anything but small and middle class.

  Before the show they insisted on seeing where I worked, so I took them up. My father was determined to shake my boss’s hand, but I never found out exactly whom he meant. Gil? Hugo? The head of the media conglomerate?

  Up in the office they looked just as I expected. They looked like each other and like the dog they left back in South Carolina. Their three faces were all becoming one: the face of a graying labradoodle with bladder trouble and an otherwise easy life. My mother wore hot-blue Mizuno running shoes for all the walking. She kept taking hand sanitizer out of her purse and dousing her palms, though I didn’t see her touch anything. My father had a halting gait, the product of a small stroke a few years prior. His herringbone sport coat, one he’d had my whole life, was now huge on him, and luffed like a sail every time we passed a vent.

  They were shrinking. I knew that this was what happened—the bones lost their mass—but it was awful to see. You grew bigger and stronger until you stopped and then the parabola began its descent back to the x-axis. It was unfair, unasked for. When I was a teenager, I used to say to my mom I didn’t ask to be born. As if this was an original thought and not the oldest retort there was. Yeah, she’d say, but if you had to ask, wouldn’t you? We’d stand there until I had weighed the hassles of the imaginary application process against the qualified splendor of this world and decided that, yes, I guess I would, okay? I probably would ask to be born.

  On the way out of the office we encountered Laura waiting for the elevator. She was dressed in one of her minimalist outfits, high priestess of a future religion.

  “It takes thousands of years,” she said to us, jiggling the already illuminated down button. “Better get comfortable.”

  None of us could ever get comfortable, my father informed her, jacket sleeves flapping. Not in this situation or in general. Laura laughed.

  After that, I had to introduce them: Jon and Susan Bloom. I had never spoken to Laura before, but not to do so would have been, to my parents, an egregious betrayal of my upbringing. We’d spend the next ten years going over what I possibly could have been thinking.

  “You must be so proud of June,” Laura said. “Working her way up from the bottom like she has.”

  “We are,” said my mother.

  “Well, cautiously optimistic,” said my father. “If not proud.”

  Laura chuckled again. “I see where you get your sense of humor,” she said to me.

  “Don’t give him too much credit,” said my mother. “June was born funny.”

  Laura said to me, “Is that true? Were you born funny?”

  “Definitely not,” I said.

  The elevator came and I prayed for it to deliver us straight to hell. At street level my parents shook Laura’s hand again. They even thanked her, though I didn’t know for what. All the way into the theater, they chattered about what a nice woman she was. Totally kind and pleasant, not at all what you’d expect.

  I had reserved us good seats, a ways back from the stage. I didn’t want either of them to interface with the warm-up comic, a guy named Gary Scary who did the same lame crowd work every single day. Where are you people from? Cool it, lady, I’ll tell the jokes. Oh wow, fraternity brothers, huh? Out on the town in the big city. Sucks you’re all gonna get arrested tonight. And so on.

  They were unprepared for how freezing the theater was. Nordic, I had told them. Oslovian. But they still suffered from it, my father especially. He huddled under his jacket the whole time, even drew his knees up under it. Since his stroke, unfamiliar situations made him childlike. His hands were blanched white and gnarled around a wrapped granola bar he was not allowed to eat during the show. It crossed my mind that it might kill h
im, that he might become the first person to ever die of exposure in the Bob Hope Amphitheater. They’d have to stop the show to call an ambulance, load him on a stretcher. Pull a sheet up over his head to spare the tourists in the back, in from Wisconsin and just trying to have a good time.

  The act that day was bad. Springsteen had canceled and instead we got a troop of puppeteers from Queens and their life-sized animal puppets. The climax was the lurching entrance of a canvas elephant that took four people to operate. It was supposed to be impressive, but I cringed. It was all so chintzy. I had built my life around a second-rate variety show. I had brought people hundreds of miles to see it.

  Afterward, we went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and had a fight under the canopy of arches. My father hadn’t enjoyed himself and told me so.

  “It would have been better,” he said, “if Hugo was even remotely funny.”

  His voice was strained. We had stopped in front of the tall, shiny pipes of the organ. All around us people were praying or taking pictures.

  “He just riffs on pop culture. I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.”

  “Yeah, that’s what jokes are about. What do you want them to be about?”

  He motioned around. “You know, things that happen to you. An experience everyone’s had. The bags of peanuts on an airplane. Why are they so small? That kind of stuff.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Observational bullshit.”

  There was a cluster of three nuns lighting candles near us. One of them looked up at me.

  “June,” said my mother.

  “Comedy is meant to challenge the culture,” I said. “That’s what it’s for.”

  “No it’s not,” he said. “It’s for making people laugh.”

  I would never admit it to him, but he was right that it hadn’t been a particularly funny show. Hugo’s face looked bloated, swollen around the eyes. The audience had laughed as much as usual, applauded as much as usual, but the jokes had been stale. Even the monologue lacked energy. The entire time, Hugo seemed to desperately want to sit down.