by Erin Somers
“People always ask that.”
“And?”
“There are sprinklers. But like I said, these aren’t the only copies. It’s mostly just for whatever.”
“For whatever?”
Spencer shifted uncomfortably. “For his hobby. His collection. Whatever you want to call it.”
I held up the tape. “Let’s watch this. Is there a TV down here?”
There was, and a small blue couch with passing resemblance to the one on the studio set. I found it hard not to question where everything had come from and how it had gotten there. Spencer put the tape into a VCR and we sat down on opposite ends. My bathing suit had not fully dried. I felt aware suddenly of my bare midriff. I tented my towel over my knees and wrapped my arms around my waist.
The episode started and Bony’s voice rang out flat and close in the low-ceilinged room: “Stay up, America.” I had chosen the tape at random, but it turned out to be the Christmas special from 1998. I remembered it well, even after all this time. There was a big cut-crystal bowl of eggnog on Hugo’s desk. He entered with a Santa sack of objects he’d taken from the office and handed them out to people in the first row. A stapler, a bag of Utz pretzels, a three-hole punch.
The tension that existed between Spencer and me in the pool hadn’t dissipated. He inched closer until he was sitting right next to me. He let his arm graze mine and goose bumps prickled my skin. I considered my options. I was mad at Hugo. He was off with Laura at the country club, basking in white guilt, deploying old jokes even as they talked over bad news. Drinking Arnold Palmer. He’d brought me here for a fun weekend and absconded. Left me in his house to entertain myself.
Now his son wanted to kiss me. I could tell. I sensed from him the full-body tension of acute interest. He wasn’t looking at me, but he was alert to me. He breathed rapidly, laughed nervously. I should have walked out already, but I hadn’t. The old physical versus mental divide. It was a shame your body contained your mind and not the other way around. Your mind would walk out of the room every time, if it was able, dragging your body along with it.
A flurry of fake snow began to fall on screen. Hugo ladled himself a viscous cup of eggnog and sat drinking it in his chair. Spencer had his arm up on the back of the couch behind me. I felt his fingers in my hair, on the nape of my neck. He pulled the string of my bikini top, untying it in one swift motion. I caught it before it fell, and held it to me as I stood up, the towel sliding off my legs.
He made a round-eyed, innocent face. “What?”
Bony and the band played “Little Drummer Boy.” I looked at the screen and back at Spencer. The dissonance made me light-headed.
“Is there any popcorn?” I said.
“You can go check.”
I left the bunker and climbed two flights of stairs to the kitchen. We both knew I was not going to hunt for Pop Secret. I was not going to stand in front of the microwave for three minutes while it popped. I was not going to pour it into a bowl and, still in my bathing suit, carry it back underground to the bomb shelter screening room. We were not going to eat it side-by-side on the blue couch while a studio audience from twenty years ago heeded the applause sign.
I sat down at the counter. I could feel Spencer directly below me. I pictured his arms, how they’d been shaved for swimming and the hair was growing back in bristly, transparent filaments. I pictured his face, two celebrities mashed into one with good results. Nothing was not going to happen, I thought. Whatever it was would pull me along in its wake. I stood there some more and watched the pool darken as a scrim of clouds covered the sun. Then I went upstairs and got dressed.
* * *
When Hugo and Laura came home at two, they found us at the island, eating grilled cheese sandwiches like siblings. The pool cleaner had returned to suck up the remnants of Spencer’s party—the leaves and waterlogged Doritos, the floating cigarette butts—and we watched him as we chewed. He had dreads and wore expensive cherry-red headphones. He wielded the hose with what seemed like style but may have just been experience.
Laura put her bag down on the counter, smiling. Hugo looked grim and unwell, his mouth pressed into a bloodless line.
“How were the nitrates?” I asked. “Get your fill?”
“I’m good for twelve months,” she said.
Spencer beckoned Laura over to his phone. He was high. After I’d left him in the basement he’d made his way out to the patio and packed a moody bowl, gazing out at the pool like it was open ocean.
“Check this out,” he said.
It was a video of a mountain goat climbing vertically up a cliff, licking at a seam of salt. One of its curled horns pressed up against the rock face. Its darting tongue looked obscene.
“That’s you,” said Spencer. “You crave that mineral.”
“Who? Me?” said Laura.
“Yeah. With the nitrates.”
“But I don’t like the nitrates. The nitrates are bad. I don’t understand.”
She looked at me for help. I shook my head.
“You crave that mineral,” Spencer said again, and cracked up.
Hugo took a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator and popped it open.
“Diet soda is full of toxins,” Laura told him. “The aspartame accumulates in your joints.”
“That sounds made up,” I said.
Hugo ignored her. “Are we playing tennis or not?”
Laura turned to Spencer and me. “What do you think, guys?”
Spencer looked at me and I looked away. I had decided that going forward there would be no covert glances, no loaded dialogue or physical contact. In fact, him on the other side of a net, separated by yards of clay, sounded great to me.
“Let’s play,” I said. “Why not?”
We made a sorry foursome. I had refused any more borrowed garments and played in cutoffs, the flat soles of my sneakers slapping the clay. Everyone else had changed clothes, Hugo and Laura into pristine whites, and Spencer into a neon-green tank top and a pair of mesh basketball shorts from his bottomless collection.
As promised, Hugo and I were on one side against Laura and Spencer. Spencer fixed himself a gin and tonic before we started. He played holding it in his off hand, splashing all over the court when he attempted to hit a ball. He’d made me one, too, but I knew better than to drink it. Hugo narrowed his eyes when he’d handed it to me, sweating and overfull, garnished with a lime.
I set it in the slatted shade of a bench and picked up a racket. I’d taken tennis lessons for years at the run-down yacht club in my hometown. The court there was fissured and dusted with pine straw from the trees overhead. It was hot all the time, too hot for tennis. No one cared that I never got better, not me and not my instructor. She was getting paid either way and I was just trying to please my parents, who thought children should learn tennis for social reasons. To get an advantage in some vague, upper-middle-class future.
In a way they had been right. The day had finally come when knowing how to play tennis would have been useful. But my skills did not, as Laura had suggested, come right back. When it was my turn to serve I waited for muscle memory to kick in, but the racket felt like a prop. On my second try I managed to hit the white tape at the top of the net and the ball trickled over. It struck the ground, rolled four inches, and stopped.
Hugo said, “I thought you took lessons.”
“When I was twelve.”
Already his face was red from exertion. He was the only one of us playing in earnest. Spencer was louche and giggly, Laura subdued. Hugo was beating them easily. Even I had scored, almost by accident, a volley so soft it floated, which Spencer nevertheless missed.
“Nice one, Spence,” Laura said every time he managed to hit the ball.
It seemed to vindicate Hugo to be winning and also to make him mad. Every time he got one past Laura he sniffed righteously and said nothing. Whatever had gone on between them at lunch, this was an odd coda. The addition of a stoned teenager and a puzzled guest, the addition o
f sport, only muddled things further.
The afternoon was gray, but a bright gray with the intensity of a light box. The fluorescent ball through the strange atmosphere was captivating. Soon Spencer and I, and finally even Laura, stopped trying to hit it, and just watched as Hugo gave it one last grunting whack and it cleared the net and bounced off toward the fence.
“None of you are trying,” he shouted as he spiked down his racket.
The three of us stood there with our arms limp at our sides. Laura picked up the racket from where it had landed. Her white-blond ponytail made her look younger and older at the same time. Her forehead was lined and age spotted in places. I thought of what her life had been: decades of managing the kind of man who raged at her via tennis.
Why did she continue to do it? There was no way she needed the money anymore. Was it that she’d helped save his life? That was the kind of trauma that bonded people forever. Or was it that she’d molded him, a kid from Queens? Taught him what shoes to wear, how to credibly sample wine while the waiter stood by tapping his foot? Discouraged him from letting aspartame build up in his elbows?
She and Hugo were a codependent couple but celibate. If they actually were celibate. Laura’s appearance gave away nothing about her sexuality. She seemed hyperevolved, like she got mineral injections instead of fucking. But those were the people you could never tell about. The ones who turned out to be the most inventive, the most depraved. It was no wonder Hugo’s actual wives didn’t stick around. Laura filled every role—colleague, lover, confidant—with irksome competence.
“This was supposed to be a family activity,” Hugo said. He wasn’t shouting anymore.
I said, “Family?”
We all looked at each other. Spencer laughed. Laura opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again. Hugo snatched his racket from her and stalked off toward the house.
I walked back with Laura across the field, Spencer ambling behind us. The grass was dry and minutely longer than the day before. Itchy on the ankles. I sensed that with infinite resources I could easily lose my mind about the grass. I, too, could get a lawn disease. It would take no time at all. Poverty was sanity’s best enforcer, it turned out. A crazed billionaire lurked in all of us, ready to have the lawn mowed on the hour.
Laura strode along in my periphery. Sweat had plastered a curl of hair to her cheek. I suspected she would not let things go without comment, and I was right.
She motioned behind us with her tennis racket. “Sorry you had to witness that back there.”
“No,” I said. “It was fine.”
“You have to understand how upset he is. He doesn’t handle things like this well.”
“Things like what?”
“Change. Getting older. Recognizing endings.”
“Mixed doubles,” I offered.
She laughed softly. “Exactly. Anything, anything.”
I admitted it had been a little weird that I had been there at all, witnessing what seemed like a personal conflict between the two of them. I spoke carefully. She had an easy authority that inspired respect without demanding it. I wondered when she had last been condescended to, and what had become of the person who’d done it.
Laura smirked. “Actually, that part wasn’t weird. It’s not the first time he’s brought around someone . . . from the staff before. I’ve gotten used to it. I’m sure Spencer has, too.”
She pronounced from the staff so that its meaning was unmistakable. I laughed, surprised. Of course, everyone’s behavior so far had indicated that he brought young women here often. Ana and Spencer had integrated my presence instantly. But I had thought, or anyway wanted to think, that they liked me.
“I meant for me,” I said. “It was weird for me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right. For you. Well, sure.”
We had reached the pool. We stopped in front of the deep end. Spencer overtook us, and, shucking off his shirt, jumped in. He stayed down there awhile, hovering near the bottom. He had an impressive lung capacity. His dark, slick hair floated kelplike above his head. I imagined how our voices must have sounded to him down there: distant, stripped of malice. Harmless and melodic as wind chimes.
Laura and I stood regarding each other. She was tan and stylish, in her sixties, but looked a decade younger. Her appearance was without fault. I wanted badly to land an insult like she had, to prove that I, too, was complex enough to possess a cruel streak.
“You guys are too old for all this, don’t you think?” I said.
“Huh?”
“This ‘will they/won’t they.’ It’s a little adolescent.”
She made a dismissive gesture, a brush of her hand. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes I do,” I said. “It’s not so hard to tell what’s going on.”
Spencer came up and went back down again. He swam the short length of the pool, flipped deftly underwater, swam back to the other wall. He continued back and forth like a metronome, without coming up for breath.
“No you don’t,” she said. “You strike me as a person who doesn’t know very much about the world.”
Hugo flashed by the kitchen windows in his whites. A chorus of cicadas rose from the grass like applause. I waited until it died back down to respond.
I did know something about the world, I told her. Everyone did. Except maybe those dudes Plato talked about, turned around backward, looking at the shadows. But even they weren’t actually wrong.
She stared at me. “Are you talking about the allegory of the cave?”
“Yeah. That.”
“They were wrong, the prisoners. That was the whole point. That they were wrong. Their perceptions were limited. They thought the shadows were everything. All of life. They didn’t have the rest of the information.”
“I thought the whole point was who’s to say? Who’s to say whose perceptions are right?”
“No.” She was getting frustrated. “An objective reality exists. The world isn’t made up of just shadows on the wall of a cave.”
“Maybe it is,” I said.
She said, “Look around. Are we in a cave right now?”
I looked left and right. We were very obviously not in a cave. We were standing next to a swimming pool in high spring. I was staring at a hydrangea bush, its conical blooms a saturated blue.
“There might be one nearby,” I said.
Spencer splashed to the surface. His wet head bobbed near our feet. He blew his nose into his palm. Twice, three times.
“What are you guys talking about?”
She said, “Nothing,” at the same time I said, “Spelunking.”
Laura shook her head. “Listen, it’s fine that you’re here. It’s good. He needs a distraction this weekend, God knows. So enjoy yourself. Post photos, text your friends. It’ll be a nice memory for you when you’re my age. But don’t get confused about what it means. Because it doesn’t mean anything. Not to him anyway. So it’s better if you don’t have any illusions about that. He’s not going to do anything for you. He’s not going to change your life. Trust me, it hasn’t even occurred to him.”
There were a lot of reasons to suck up to Laura. She’d been my boss until two days ago. She could give me a job if she wanted to, somewhere down the line. But people kept telling me how to feel around Hugo, and it made me want to do the opposite.
“You’re wrong,” I said to Laura.
“What?”
“You’re wrong about him. He’s not as shallow as you think he is.”
She laughed. “He’s exactly as shallow as I think he is. I’ve known him for forty years. You’ve hung out with him for two days. Part of the time you were sleeping. Presumably.”
Spencer lifted himself out of the pool. I thought he was going to intervene, but he only shook the water out of his ears and kept going. He walked into the house, shorts slicked to his legs. I saw him open the refrigerator and take out a jar of pickles.
“Look at that,” she said. “We ma
de Spencer uncomfortable.”
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “I think he’s just hungry.”
She laughed and her posture relaxed a little.
“Women should not fight like this,” she said. “We should support each other. Build each other up. We have enough working against us as it is.”
Laura wasn’t exactly a gold-star feminist. She’d had a great career, sure, made a name for herself in one of the most hostile, male-dominated industries in the world. But in the mid-2000s, during the Kitty Rosenthal controversy, she’d stood by Hugo, refusing to drop him as a client. She’d raised questions about Kitty Rosenthal’s past. Her shoplifting arrest, her bad grades.
She’d even defended him, in People magazine. I remembered reading it. Hugo had done so much, she said. He was the source of a lot of joy. Banning someone forever for one incident, ruining his career, closing the gates to him and never letting him back in, was about as hypocritical as it got. If we, as a culture, didn’t believe in rehabilitation, in the ability of people to change, what basis did we have for a justice system? Why were we bothering to incarcerate people instead of just executing them outright?
Growth was possible, she said. For Hugo personally and the industry at large. Hugo was going to rehab for his substance abuse issues and sex addiction. After that he’d go to therapy, and she believed he’d learn from it. She believed he’d emerge a better person.
“Okay, sure,” I said to Laura. “Let’s get along.”
She surprised me by leaning in for a hug. Our second wooden hug of the day. Her attempts at warmth seemed like first-generation AI. Uncanny valley territory, still some kinks to work out.
“I’m only thinking of you,” she said. “Your best interest.”
Nothing could have been more false. I was secondary to whatever was going on between her and Hugo. I was a footnote, wrought in tiny font, superfluous and soon forgotten.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You should email me when you’re back in the city. Maybe I can help you find your next job. I know a few people.”