Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “Forget the pig,” I said. “The pig won’t go to waste. Everyone will take some home. Their families will be grateful. Ted McGuire will take some to Linda.”

  “I don’t want to go in there,” he said. “The idea of sending all those kids home.”

  I understood. He’d have to offer an explanation, be dry about it. Pretend he didn’t care. He’d have to make a joke.

  “Then let’s not,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  He finished his drink and poured two more fingers.

  “Duck Soup,” he said.

  I opened the umbrella, blue and white, wide as a second tent.

  “Duck Soup,” I agreed. As if I knew what that meant, as if that’s what I had been saying all along.

  * * *

  Duck Soup was a yacht docked in Greenwich harbor, named for the Marx Brothers classic. I had seen the movie a long time ago. I didn’t remember much about it except that Groucho becomes the improbable leader of a small, failing country, and possibly it’s racist. And of course, the famous mirror scene, where one character pretends to be another’s reflection, perfectly imitating every move. The illusion is so effective that eventually the viewer loses track of who is reflecting whom.

  Hugo texted Cal to take us to the marina, and he pulled the hulking black SUV around front. We hunched under the big umbrella, skirting the house to meet him. The lawn was drenched now, warm and muddy, and my bare feet sank in. I didn’t bother to grab my shoes or say good-bye to Julian. I caught a flash of him as we passed and he looked fine. He was laughing anyway, and drinking, which is about as much as a person can ask for. I knew I would see him again. One way or another, and likely sooner than I expected.

  It was cold in the car, so Hugo turned on the seat warmers. My back and legs became hot, right on the threshold of unbearable and pleasant. Hugo sulked with one foot up on the seat in front of him, unwrapping a stick of gum from a pack in the ashtray. I remembered our ride out here. It hit me like a long-repressed memory, though it had only been on Friday.

  Cal parked in the marina and pulled out a newspaper. He was confident we wouldn’t be long. This was no kind of night to be on a boat, even one that was docked. He wanted to know what kind of sick crackers go on a boat on a night like this.

  The hail had given way to rain and the dock was waterlogged, slick. White hulls rose on either side, creaking as they pitched in the rough water. Hugo walked swiftly down this corridor, yanking me along with an arm looped through mine. We had forgotten the umbrella in the car, and the rain made translucent dots on my dress.

  Duck Soup was indistinguishable from the others. It sat between Bernadette and My Way, all three of them Alpine white and sheer as cliffs rising out of the water. Hugo helped me aboard and led me to the cabin, reciting pertinent features. The boat was long, I gathered. The boat could move fast. The boat had various amenities. He kept calling it “her.” He named some of the famous people who had ridden on her and the places they’d gone. This mogul to the Hamptons, this rap collective to Miami, this now-disgraced politician right through the eye of a tropical storm and all the way to Turks and Caicos.

  Belowdecks the churn of the bay felt less pronounced. In a central salon he turned on the lights and stood back to watch my reaction. The room had dark wood paneling and modern maroon couches. It was cozy and luxurious, in perfect taste like all his possessions.

  “Wow,” I said, though I was getting tired of being impressed.

  “I’ll make us some drinks. Choose an album.”

  He ducked into the galley. Naturally the boat would be stocked for the eventuality of a last-minute pleasure cruise. Everything he wanted was anticipated and planned for, there already like built-in shelving. If he wanted a change of scene, his boat awaited. If he wanted a cocktail, he had only to reach out his arm.

  A long shelf held hundreds of CDs. I went looking for something moody, maybe some Coltrane for a rainy night, and found that they were all comedy albums. Hundreds of them in jewel cases, alphabetized.

  “Of course,” I said aloud.

  In the Bs I found Hugo’s own albums, four of them from his early career. I pulled out Second Best, the one that had gone gold and hung on the rec room wall. There was Hugo with his gag gun. He looked young, my age maybe, on the brink of thirty.

  I popped the disc out of its case and put it on. Hugo’s early work had been political, angry. I could hear in his cadence and intensity the influence of Lenny Bruce. You dig, man? and that sort of thing.

  Hugo returned with our drinks and set them down on the coffee table. I sat cross-legged on the floor. The maroon couches rose and fell, and through the salon windows I could see Bernadette doing the same.

  On the stereo, young Hugo was doing the bit about baby Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon had been orchestrating cover-ups since infancy, it went. Baby Richard Nixon had his guys bug the delivery room where he was born. Baby Richard Nixon had transcripts of very telling conversations between the OB-GYN and the RN on duty. And so on.

  “Turn this off. It’s embarrassing.”

  “No it’s not,” I said. “It’s good.”

  “Turn it off,” he repeated, more firmly. The boat yawed and the drinks slid off the table and spilled on the rug. He knelt to right the glasses.

  “June.” He softened. “Please.”

  The audience was laughing and applauding. I reached up and turned it off.

  He’d sunk to the floor, with his back against a sofa. The boat was large, but the inside had a compact feel, a feel of the world in miniature. Sitting there on the floor we could have been two kids in a fort.

  “I can’t stand to listen to that stuff anymore,” he said. “It makes me feel like an old cliché. It makes me too conscious of my mistakes.”

  “Which cliché?” I asked. “Which mistakes?”

  “Oh, just all of them.”

  Women for one, he said. Young women. The same thing you always heard: a string of infidelities unspooling toward infinity in both directions. Kitty Rosenthal, but not just her. She was the one people knew about. A stand-in for all the Kitty Rosenthals. She just showed how reckless he’d gotten, how brazen. How desperate he was to explode his marriage.

  Allison had known. Of course she had. She knew who he was when she married him. And besides that there was plenty to tip her off. He’d been discreet at first, and then less discreet when it became clear that she was just going to ignore it. If she asked him where he’d been he’d tell her the dentist. Every time, no matter what time of day it was, ad absurdum. It became a joke between them. A dark, cruel in-joke, sexually charged, and not exactly funny.

  They didn’t see that much of each other anyway. She spent half the year in LA shooting her sitcom. She preferred it to New York, the sameness of the weather and low-carb options, the infinity pools that linked up seamlessly to the horizon. Spencer had been born in the city, but mostly raised in Malibu. Hugo would visit them a few times a year, or they would visit him, or they would all meet up on vacation in Aspen. Toward the end, the stretches between visits got longer, the visits themselves shorter. The Kitty Rosenthal situation—the public humiliation, the reporters waiting for Allison near school pickup, outside of yoga, in the parking lot of Whole Foods—was a good excuse to kill what was already dying on its own.

  “I think she enjoyed playing the scorned woman when the time finally came,” he said. “She enjoyed the dark sunglasses.”

  She gave an hour-long primetime interview, dabbing at her eyelashes with a tissue, invoking God and her fans and her stellar costars, her TV family who also happened to be her best friends. She hammed it up. But she deserved her moment and more for what she’d endured. He only wishes they’d both done better by Spencer. He was seven at the time and took it badly. Even though they were an unconventional family to begin with, even though they spent most of their time apart. Spencer blamed Hugo, still did. His resentment had grown, acquiring depth and nuance, and would continue to grow as he became an adult.

>   And it wasn’t just Spencer. Hugo had other kids, too. He had two daughters from his first marriage who wouldn’t speak to him, who hadn’t for years. Smart girls older than me who’d done all kinds of things. Racked up academic achievements, become professionals, had babies, refused his money. That they’d become whole people was a miracle that had nothing to do with him. Their upbringing had been in the 1980s, a decade he’d spent systematically alienating their mother, shredding his nasal passages with high-quality cocaine, and flying out west for meetings about Airplane knockoffs that ultimately never made it to preproduction.

  And all of this would have been fine. All of this would have been permissible if the work had been worth it. Performers, artists, were given leeway for a certain amount of personal weakness, a certain amount of ego. The idea was that their genius justified their bad behavior, that on the cosmic balance sheet their contributions came out ahead of their indiscretions.

  “Problem is,” said Hugo, “that mine haven’t.”

  He looked down into the glass he was holding, as if he could wish it full again.

  “That jackass in the dress shop was right, you know. They pushed me out. They wanted to bring in fresh blood, someone young, and Laura agreed with them. She could have fought, for me, with me. But she didn’t. She talked me into ending it. She was right, too. They probably should have done it years ago. Now she’s going to produce Stay Up with this new kid. Stay Up with Eric Marshall. Does it sound right to you? It doesn’t sound right to me.”

  He pointed to the cover of Second Best, still lying out near the CD player.

  “That guy would hate me. He’d think I was a panderer and a sellout. A prick.”

  I was silent. Hugo looked at my face. “This is the part where you’re supposed to disagree.”

  I couldn’t disagree. But I could inch toward him across the space that rose and fell like someone breathing. I could rest my hand on his still-firm bicep. I could give myself over to whatever compromise lay ahead.

  * * *

  In the master bedroom, we stripped to our underwear without touching each other. Out the cabin’s portholes: rain-slashed darkness.

  Hugo smiled at me apologetically and turned his back as he yanked off his pants. He hung his suit carefully on the back of a chair, pants folded into a tidy column.

  I pretended to look at the floor. Under his clothes, Hugo wore a kind of support garment, a black Lycra leotard for men that held in his pecs and stomach and did God knows what to his dick. He hadn’t been wearing it the night before when he’d gotten undressed in the kitchen. At least I didn’t think so. That meant he put it on for special occasions only—the party or his TV interview. When he peeled it off, his flesh found its natural sag.

  I undid the three buttons on the back of my dress and let it fall to the floor. I assumed a half-reclining pose on the red and gold bedspread. Hugo was still struggling with his shapewear. The crotch had snagged on the finely wrought toe of his wingtip—why had he left his shoes on?—and he was stumbling around near the bed in slack white briefs. He had a big man’s lack of grace, and the list of Duck Soup wasn’t helping.

  At last he yanked the garment free and tossed it across the room. He watched its trajectory with slumped shoulders, absolutely miserable. But we were here now, beyond the reveal of his girdle, no reason not to press on.

  He stood by the bed, fingered the fabric of my underwear.

  “Lovely,” he said.

  This close I could see a dusky flesh-brown line along his jaw. He was still made up from his E! News interview. His staples were showing through at his hairline and the cakey foundation made his face poreless and plasticine. Between the shapewear and the makeup it was going to be like fucking my maiden aunt. All at once I was flushed with misgiving. Misgiving and also pity. Fame had destroyed him, bred in him pathetic, masculine vanity. He had chosen it, sure. But a long time ago and without knowing it would lead to this: to be turned into a hack, a rouged-up joke, and finally cast out.

  His briefs were graying at the waistband and I looked away as I slid them down. I took his dick in my mouth and felt an absurd stab of pride when he started to get hard. There were things I didn’t want to be thinking about. I didn’t want to be having a montage of my time at the show play in my head. I didn’t want to see myself sandbagging the theater, shaking Hugo’s hand, standing outside with Julian during the first snow of the year. I didn’t want to see myself answering phones, playing Thursday Bingo. I certainly didn’t want to see myself collating scripts for the writers. That’s what I was thinking about while I sucked Hugo Best’s dick: collating.

  His eyes were closed and he kept a hand on my head the whole time, kneading lightly with his fingers. When he came he made a small choking noise and gripped the back of my neck with a violence that surprised me.

  After it was over he moved to cover himself up with a sheet.

  He said without malice, “Was it everything you dreamed of?”

  He lay against the headboard now, depleted. It was one of those moments that almost couldn’t be endured. I felt like jumping up to pace the room, picking something up and putting it down, making a joke, or being mean just to get a reaction. Anything so I wouldn’t have to be pinned there feeling it. But I was pinned—I had climbed on the bed, too, and he’d thrown an arm across my chest.

  So I stared at the ceiling of the boat, maybe the first boat ceiling I’d ever really stared at, and felt terrible and said, “Not really.”

  Rolling over to look at him, I noticed the raised scars on his sternum and rib cage. The light was dim, emanating from bulbs hidden in the walls. The scars were the only gritty things in this perfectly nice room. I’d left South Carolina because it was too slick and easy there, its manners covering a multitude of sins. I left because I longed for something authentic, to be poor, to experience life without a syrup coating. And now that I had gotten it, now that I’d been broke in New York for more than a decade, I could see that it was also untenable. It ground you down. You couldn’t live well and you couldn’t live badly. Since they both meant nothing, I concluded, you might as well be rich. You might as well take the good life, leave your principles on the table, do whatever you had to do.

  I ran my finger along the scar on his sternum. “Why did Vivian do it?”

  “You figured it out,” he said. “How’d you know?”

  “The way you talked about it. Something was off. And then Julian thought to Google it. It’s on the Internet, you know.”

  He sat up on one elbow to look at me.

  “I know. I’m shocked Spencer has never looked for it. You didn’t tell Spencer, did you?”

  “I didn’t tell him. But maybe he trusts you, is why. Maybe he likes you more than you think.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. Anyway, the facts he has are all true. The blood, the cab, all of it. It just wasn’t a stranger. It was his aunt who did it. Put a kitchen knife in her car. Drove to the Comedy Store to hurt me. I didn’t want him to know that.”

  I revised my picture of what happened. I imagined his sister, jittery in her car, replaying years of grievances in her mind. The kitchen knife, her resolve. The sound it must have made: a wet crunch. Had she planned where to hit him so he’d survive? Or had she meant to kill him and failed? And why did I need to know anyway, right now, at this moment? Why did I want him to be human again, the victim?

  “So why’d she do it?”

  “I guess she was mad.”

  “You guess?”

  “Okay, she was mad.”

  “But why?”

  It was about money. His family saw him on TV. He’d been on Carson and was touring, but he wasn’t actually that famous. They thought he was more successful than he was. They thought he owed them something. He helped out when he could. His mom had cancer and he paid for the treatment. He bought her wigs. Different colors and styles so she could experiment.

  “The wigs weren’t a big deal,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m bringing them up.”<
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  When they fell behind in the rent, he paid it off. He took them on small vacations. Nothing fancy, but places he could manage. Fort Lauderdale, the Finger Lakes. They got bolder and asked for more. They wanted a house. They got mad when he couldn’t swing it or didn’t want to. They got mad when he ignored their calls.

  Vivian especially felt slighted. When he left for California she still had three years of high school. His parents had been adamant that Hugo go to college, but with Vivian, they didn’t push it. After graduation she lived at home and worked as a waitress. She wanted to act. She was smart and pretty. She had red hair like their mother. Maybe she was talented. Hugo didn’t really know. Anyway, she couldn’t get a foothold. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t help her more. He did help her, some. He put her in touch with people he knew in New York. But he was preoccupied with his career, and anyway he couldn’t make someone hire his sister. Or he could later—later he could force almost anything through—but not early on.

  He resolved to cut them off. Actually he tried a couple of times. He had a soft spot for his mother, who was magnetic and funny. His dad had accrued some debt and she convinced Hugo to bail him out. The second time, Laura helped him stay firm. Make no mistake, she said. They will ruin you. They would loot your house if they could. They would strip it for copper wire. She was right, as she was about most things, but it wasn’t easy to hear.

  The next time Vivian asked for something, Hugo said no. She was moving to Los Angeles and she wanted him to rent her an apartment. Only until she got on her feet, she said. Then she’d take over the payments. As an isolated request it would have been reasonable. But he’d already paid for acting classes, headshots, teeth whitening, audition clothes, a voice coach, a professional reel. He’d paid to have her low hairline redrawn farther up her skull. Who knew what that procedure entailed? It cost twelve hundred bucks.