Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “There’s not that much to tell,” I said.

  Only that I’d gone to his house, drunk his booze, smoked his weed, saw where his daughter was born. Only that I’d tried to understand his wife and failed. Tried to understand him and failed.

  “Roman can’t come.”

  “Good,” said Julian.

  I gave him the tour I had given myself on Saturday morning. The furniture, the art, the wine cellar and basement comedy club. He walked onto the stage and said something into the mic, but it wasn’t on. His voice sounded quiet and without resonance. What he said was: This place gives me the creeps.

  I took him down another level and into the bunker, flipped on the light. He thought it was impressive. He’d hated the comedy club—it felt like a mausoleum, he said—but this room he got. He walked the rows, studying the stickers and pointing out his favorite shows. He liked the ones from the early days that experimented with form. He liked that they risked total failure from the ground up. His favorite episode, maybe ever, was one from the nineties where they’d found another guy named Hugo Best living in the Keys and gone down and shot the show in his living room. Hugo wasn’t even in that episode; the other guy had hosted. His best friend, Graham, had done Bony’s job, playing the show in and out of commercial with Jimmy Buffett covers. He’d done a good job, the other Hugo. Such a good job that it made you wonder why any schmo off the street couldn’t be a talk show host. Which had been the point.

  “Then Hugo quit making shows like that,” said Julian.

  He stopped in front of a row of tapes, stretched his arms to their full length. “For instance, this whole section could go right in the trash.”

  It was the last shelf chronologically, the most recent run of shows going back a year. Last week’s tapes had not made it there yet, by whatever means they’d arrive, and there was room left for them. There was room, too, for more tapes. The previous week’s would slot in and there’d still be a foot of bare shelving. The whole shelf below it sat empty, and the whole shelf below that. They’d be empty forever unless Hugo took up taxidermy and filled them up with bug-eyed squirrels and geese in flight.

  “What was the date of our first show?” asked Julian. “As pages?”

  We found the relevant month and year and tried to puzzle it out. We narrowed it down to one or two days. Neither of us could remember which day of the week it had been.

  “Who was even on?” I said.

  “It was that grande dame. The one who’s still got nice breasts.”

  “That’s right.”

  I remembered it only dimly. Much more real to me was the physical memory of standing up for so many hours. Tingling pain pulsed up and down my hamstrings. My feet felt huge and archless, two bags of blood jammed into sneakers. The fatigue was mixed with a crazy adrenaline, the adrenaline fueled by marrow-level certainty that I would make a mistake. So I missed the actress, her prepared witticism, her youthful cleavage, her story about her tomato plants or grandchildren or the movie she’d done as a girl with Alfred Hitchcock. Or I’d seen it and not seen it. Which is what happened with the show more or less permanently and faster than I expected. It became the backdrop to my more immediate concerns. Which was to say, a job.

  I reached for the shelf and pulled out the video in the range of our first day and handed it to Julian. It left a conspicuous gap, which I covered by spreading the tapes out more loosely.

  “Take it,” I said.

  “Are you nuts?” said Julian. “He’ll notice.”

  “He won’t. But if he does, they’re digitized. His assistant will make another copy.”

  “I think you’ve gotten too comfortable in this house.”

  “It means more to you than it does to him, so the moral thing to do is actually to take it.”

  “You’ve lost it,” he said. “You’re Robin Hooding.”

  “Take it. You came all the way out here.”

  He held it in front of him, running his thumb over the label. Then he tucked it under his arm. “Fuck it. What the hell.”

  We left the bunker and went back upstairs. I kept expecting to run into Hugo. I wondered how I’d explain Julian’s presence. I had invited him on impulse and promptly forgotten about it, and now he was here in the house, barefoot and dripping, committing a theft I had goaded him into. The main hazards of this life were one’s own impulses: rogue, slippery, and plainly demonic.

  Hugo wasn’t on the second floor either. Spencer’s room looked different. The mound of clothes had been loaded into his duffel and spirited away to New Hampshire. The bed had been made, probably by Ana, and the room smelled like cleaning product. The guest room had been cleaned up, too, my presence mostly erased. My tote bag had been tidied and tucked in a corner, my glasses on the nightstand returned to their case.

  At the end of the hall Hugo’s door was open. I had a momentary premonition we’d go in and find him dead. Inert on his bed or blue faced and swinging, finished off by a belt of premium leather. But the room was empty and unhaunted, except for the Stella, looming like the great and powerful Oz, made spookier by the shadows of raindrops streaming down the window and the odd quality of light.

  I paused on the threshold—I had a nervous feeling about being in there, like we were about to get caught—but Julian went to the window. Tentatively, I followed.

  Outside, the tops of the pines bent toward the house and then away. The wind on the roof of the tent made a muffled rustling. Something metal had torn loose and rung at intervals against a tent pole.

  With a glance at the door, Julian went into the walk-in closet in the corner of the room. I followed him, asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was looking for pinstripes. I think he expected a row of identical suits, lined up like superhero costumes. But there weren’t any. Just shirts and pants, shoes stowed in cubbies, a stack of cashmere sweaters on an upper shelf, and the smell of cedar. The pinstriped suits had been kept in the wardrobe department in the city on a series of flimsy wheeled racks, and now they would go I didn’t know where. One to the Smithsonian, one to a charity auction, a couple to Hugo, and several more to the Dumpster.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “We’re overstepping.”

  “Overstepping? You made me steal something earlier.”

  He rattled his videotape.

  “I was younger then,” I said.

  “We all were. Just let me look for a minute.”

  He opened a shallow drawer and started rifling through socks. It hadn’t taken much to embolden Julian. One scotch and a petty theft. I didn’t know what he thought he was going to find. Maybe he wanted a talisman, something charged with Hugo’s success that he could carry around for luck. Cuff links, a coin, a money clip. I remembered what Hugo had said at the diner. The more you had, the more people wanted to take from you.

  He held up a silk tie, flipped it over to study the label. “Classy guy.”

  “Do you want to hear a secret about Hugo?” I said.

  Julian said, “Always.”

  “He was stabbed, back in the seventies. It’s a big, mysterious thing. A semisecret. Spencer told me about it. It happened at a comedy club, apparently, outside of one, and Laura saved his life. I asked Hugo, but he was cagey with the details. It happened, though. He was definitely stabbed.”

  Julian shook a cigar box, opened it up, and smelled the inside. “Oh yeah, by his sister, right?”

  “What?”

  “His sister, Vivian. Do you think he’d notice if I took one of these?” He held up a cigar. “Or is stealing more than one thing overkill?”

  I stared at him.

  He said, “You’re right. Probably overkill. Just one thing makes narrative sense. Two is too much. Weakens the symbolism.”

  He put it back into the box, put the box back into the drawer, moved on to shoes, studying brands, knocking shoe trees together.

  “What do you mean his sister did it? How do you know about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s out there. I read about it
in one of the books, I think. Not sure which one. The unauthorized biography, probably. It’s one of those open secret things. Everyone knows about it and talks about it. So not a secret at all is what I’m getting at.”

  “It wasn’t in his memoir.”

  “Of course not. He hates talking about it.”

  “But it’s not on the Internet either.”

  “You sure about that? Did you look?”

  He brought out his phone. It hadn’t occurred to me to look. An episode like that I thought I’d know about. And if it was on the Internet, why wouldn’t Spencer know about it, too? Did he blindly trust what his father told him, or did he, like me, assume he already knew everything there was to know about Hugo Best? I waited, overwhelmed by the cedar smell, by the wool and leather smell, by the closeness of the space.

  Julian said, “Yeah, right here. You just didn’t look, did you?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  “ ‘In 1978, Hugo Best was stabbed by his sister, aspiring actress Vivian Bechkowiak, outside the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. He was treated at Good Samaritan Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard for multiple stab wounds and penetrating abdominal trauma, and held for observation for six days.’ See?”

  He held up his phone to show me the article he was reading. “Granted this site is called celebrityinjuries.com, so grain of salt. But those are pretty much the facts, I think.”

  I sat down on the floor. The closet was carpeted, beige, thick pile. I ran my hand over it. Julian sat down across from me, still holding a dress shoe. Hugo could tell me whatever he wanted, conceal whatever he wanted. That was his right. So why did I feel blindsided by the omission?

  “Why wouldn’t he tell me?” I said. “He told me other things.”

  Julian perked up. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Now that I thought about it, he hadn’t really told me that much. Facts about wine. His preferences in comedians. A story about Studio 54 that seemed untrue. Some broad strokes about his history with Laura.

  “You’re withholding,” said Julian. “Don’t withhold.”

  “I’m not withholding.”

  “Have you hooked up with him?”

  “Don’t say hooked up. You sound like an eighth-grader.”

  “I’m just curious if his—”

  “Julian.”

  “But he’s good at fucking, right? You can tell he’s good. Actually, I could see it going either way.” He paused. “At least tell me what you’re getting in return.”

  “Getting?”

  “It’s a quid pro quo thing, is it not? I mean, no offense.”

  I thought about it. I hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it kind of was. Hugo hadn’t spelled it out; he didn’t have to. It was obvious, inherent. Like the foundation of a house. You didn’t ever see or think about it, but it propped the whole thing up. Though I had pretended otherwise, the two of us spending even one minute together outside of work could never be anything but transactional. And I had known that. I’d known it all along and even enjoyed it, enjoyed the feeling of transgression, the illicit thrill. The yeasty buzz it gave me to be using my young-womanness at last shrewdly, at last toward some quantifiable gain, at last with a modicum of control.

  “I guess it is,” I said.

  “Right. So what are you getting?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like we signed a contract. Are these things usually explicit?”

  Julian said, “You didn’t pin him down on anything concrete? You’re not going to end up with anything. I would have pinned him down. I would have made him say what I was getting.”

  I laughed, imagining Julian bartering with Hugo in advance of some sex act. Cutting a deal, getting him to throw in extras. What was sex worth anyway, in the favor economy? Mentorship? A useful introduction? A job? And how did it break down? Did full penetration earn you more? Could you save up a bunch of credits from smaller stuff, hand jobs, light groping, and bank them toward a bigger payoff? Or were you supposed to hold out on the sex, dangle it, until you got what you wanted? I voiced a few of these aloud.

  Julian said, “You don’t make a very good opportunist.”

  I shook my head. It didn’t come naturally to me. I lacked the grit. Maybe it was why I hadn’t succeeded in my career. I didn’t have what it took to go out and take what I wanted through manipulation or force. I wasn’t cold-blooded.

  I thought again of Hugo’s sister.

  “What if she had a good reason?” I said. “Vivian. She must have had a reason. People don’t stab without a reason.”

  “Sure they do,” said Julian. “Things happen for no reason all the time. They canceled the show for no reason.”

  “They had a reason. You know they did. Don’t connect this to the show. It’s completely unrelated.”

  He said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t really think about anything else.”

  His face collapsed and he started to cry. I was startled. The first time we had ever hung out together one-on-one and he was showing me the whole range. Earlier he’d flirted, now he sobbed. I reached out and patted his arm, the one still cradling Hugo’s patent leather shoe. He cried harder.

  “Come on,” I said. “You’re gonna be great.”

  He was Harvard educated, medium rich, brilliant, if you could stand him. He would get another job so fast it had basically already happened. But he wasn’t crying about his job prospects, I realized. He was crying for the loss of an idea. The idea of the show and working for the show. The show as temple, the show as religion. He hadn’t been jaded before and now he was. He’d believed before and now he didn’t. He was new before and now he was scarred. And what a loss. Seriously, if I thought about it, what a loss. A boy who had dreamed of opening monologues and canned laughter under a triptych of Wayne Gretzky action shots was now just another wounded adult weeping in a stranger’s closet.

  I pried the shoe out of his hands and put it back where it belonged.

  “But I’m not done looking,” said Julian.

  “We’re done,” I said.

  We turned off the light in Hugo’s room and went back downstairs. Everyone who’d been in the tent was now in the kitchen. The musicians had their feet up on their hard black cases. Ted McGuire had taken his coat off and cornered Ana near the fridge. The two young girls were sitting on the island: one was braiding the other’s hair. The place had the feel of a doomsday party. The air of cheer that accompanied worst fears confirmed. The bartender made gin and tonics and handed one to each of us. I still didn’t like gin, but I drank it anyway.

  She asked who we were and Julian said a couple of nobodies. Everyone laughed. He seemed better. He was using his pillaged videotape as a coaster. I guess he’d cried it out. I was jealous. He’d shown up, had some good booze, gotten closure. Now he could go back to the city and find a way forward. Let the years condense what had happened into a hard, bright story to be told at dinner parties. But where was my catharsis?

  The clock over the stove read six, two hours after the party’s appointed start time. Ana stretched plastic wrap over the hors d’oeuvres and cheeses. She told us that a few other people had called with their regrets. Hugo’s lawyer and his assistant. The director Brett Ratner. It was the weather, they said. Such a weird, grim night.

  We drank our gin and watched the wind undo a lot of expensive landscaping. At one point a car pulled into the driveway, headlights shining dully in the rain. Ana jumped up to greet whoever it was, but by that time the car had already pulled back out.

  “Not enough cars,” she explained solemnly.

  The guy in the chef’s jacket cleared his throat. “So what should we do with the pig?”

  I pictured them taking it outside the gate and rolling it onto the curb. Discarding it the way you did an old futon in the city. I pictured it lying there with an apple in its mouth. I pictured its eyes, like the opossum’s, dead and reflective.

  “Where’s Hugo?” I asked Ana.

  She motioned outsi
de. He sat alone in the tent. Through the plate glass, I could see him there in his summer suit, legs stretched out in front of him, frowning into a drink.

  “How long has he been out there?”

  “I don’t know. Forty minutes, an hour.”

  “He’s the one that sent us in here,” said the bartender.

  Ana handed me a striped golf umbrella and said, “You go rescue him now.”

  I made a run for it from the kitchen’s sliding doors. Under my bare feet, the pool deck was gritty and unexpectedly warm. I crossed the stretch of wet grass and Hugo rose to greet me.

  “No one came,” he said.

  “Look at the weather.”

  “Not even Bony Suarez. I made that fuck’s career.”

  I lowered the golf umbrella. “I came,” I said. “Is that worth anything?”

  I actually wanted to know. Hugo looked at me for the first time.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “Thanks, Jan does good work. She trimmed it a little.”

  “That’s her secret. She always trims it a little. That’s the Jan magic.” He rubbed the shoulder of my dress with his thumb. “This is pretty.”

  His attention still did things to me. I suspected it would even if my jumbled feelings resolved into hatred. My crush on him had been cultivated over a lifetime, and only grown more complex. He was a person to me now, and a person who could help me if he chose to. If he liked me enough. The setting only made it more pronounced. The lush backyard that went on forever, the house, not a museum but almost, which I could see lit up like a lantern through the flapping entrance of the tent.

  “We can’t stay out here,” I said. “We’ll get killed by lightning bolts. I’m holding an umbrella. That’s a textbook don’t.”

  “Did I see Julian in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll take my chances out here.”

  “I invited him,” I said. “It was a bad idea. I’m sorry. I did it yesterday after we played tennis. I was feeling vulnerable or something. I don’t know. He’s under strict orders not to mention Mates, if that helps at all.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for inviting your friend. You thought it was a party.” There was a bottle on the table next to him and he refilled his glass. “They cooked a whole pig. An animal died.”