Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  He told her no. She’d have to get the money some other way. She’d have to save up until she had enough, just like everyone else. He reminded her that he moved out there on a Greyhound bus with a single duffel bag. He stayed at a crappy motel until he figured things out. The kind of motel where people brought a prostitute or killed themselves.

  He was harsh, he admitted, maybe too harsh. He didn’t hear from her for a while, didn’t hear from any of them, so he figured she got the message. He thought she was embarrassed and needed some time to get over it. He was on the road eight months of the year anyway. The next time he saw her was in LA.

  “You know the end of the story,” he said. “She’d been calling again. Or someone had. Calling and hanging up. Laura answered once and told her to cut it out. But I didn’t think she was going to show up with a knife. That still blows me away. It was so surreal I have trouble believing my memories of it.”

  When he first saw her out there on the sidewalk he was happy. She wore jeans and sneakers, a yellow T-shirt, a ponytail. She looked younger than she was, like a high school kid. He forgot, in that moment, to be wary of her. He forgot to find her presence strange. He said something to her. He said her name. She came toward him across the sidewalk. She was walking awkwardly, holding something. The rest was vague. His brain was protecting itself from the rest. He’d laughed for some reason, he could remember that. Laughed and felt insulted. The pain he could not remember.

  “I was in the hospital for a week. She just missed my lung.”

  “She went to jail,” I said.

  “Only for a year. My lawyer leaned on the DA to get it knocked down to a misdemeanor. Battery causing serious bodily injury. I didn’t want to testify. I wanted it to be over. My career was on the rise. I didn’t want to be best known for getting stabbed by my crazy sister.”

  He looked pained, describing her that way.

  I said, “Where is she now?”

  “She lives in Calgary. I don’t know what she does for a living. Every couple years she messages me on social media and my assistant blocks her. I hope she’s made a bearable life for herself. It was tragic, but I can’t see the point in thinking too hard about it anymore.”

  “And your parents?”

  “I bought them a house eventually. In Florida. They won on that front, I guess. They’re both dead now. My dad passed six years ago, my mom a year after that.”

  The boat creaked against the dock. He had a faraway look on his face. I was sorry I’d brought it up.

  “You mentioned you have a brother,” he said. “What does he do?”

  “Russell, yeah. He’s a musician in Austin. He plays the guitar.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “If you like that kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing would that be?”

  “Bad music.”

  He chuckled. “Different industry. You’re probably safe.”

  Even if Russell was a comedian, even if I was someday successful enough to snub him, it was hard to imagine him exacting his bloody revenge. He was in a jam band. He rode his bike everywhere. When I visited him the year before he took me out to the desert at night to look at stars through his telescope. He hung out at a vegan burrito place and knew every single person who came in. I worried that he would adopt too many stray dogs and let them ruin his house. Not that he would stab me.

  “I don’t want to talk about Russell,” I said.

  We had sex then and we didn’t use a condom. He hated condoms, he told me, never used them, and didn’t have one on him anyway. I’d been off the pill for a while. With Logan I was waiting to go back on it, using condoms, being careful, until I determined it would last. Hugo entered me, skin-on-skin, and I felt horrified and a little excited. What if I had his baby? I thought, and a fully realized life sprang up in front of me like turning the page of a pop-up book. A house to my specifications complete with a child’s nursery, a little laser-cut lawn out front waving in the breeze. We could get the windshield fixed on the MG and it could be my car. Really mine. The baby couldn’t ride in it, of course, so I’d need another one, too. We’d need to go visit the hangar again for something safe. We’d get Cal to install a rear-facing car seat. Even if we divorced I’d be okay. I’d have the best insurance ever—ten fingers, ten toes, with blue eyes that looked just like Hugo’s. And whatever I chose to do with my life, I could do it at my own pace.

  I don’t know how he got it up twice. That was more impressive to me than any of the features of the boat. Maybe he’d taken something. If he had, I hadn’t seen him. It would have been when he ducked into the galley to get us drinks. It would have been working its way through his bloodstream as we listened to his record.

  I’ve often gone over it since, trying to determine whether the sex was good or bad. It was neither, I think. It was fleshy and tender and I did most of the work. I didn’t have an orgasm, which I attributed to the Art Garfunkel factor, the inability to relax in the presence of a celebrity. The closest I got was a feeling of bleak triumph at having so successfully collapsed the distance between Hugo and myself that he was actually in my body. I couldn’t have gotten any closer without eating him.

  When it was over, something had changed between us. There wasn’t another lounging period. He got up and started dressing. I had only been wearing two articles of clothing. I found these and put them on and was dressed instantly. I located the bathroom, peed self-consciously, aware that he could hear it. My hair was tangled, from the moisture and the mattress, and my face stricken. We had fucked and it wasn’t enough. It had been fun only if fun meant no one had gotten injured. It hadn’t solved the problem of what I was going to do next. And certainly it hadn’t told me anything about who I was or what my life meant now that Hugo would not be at the center of it. I felt stupid for thinking it would.

  “Cal can take you back to the house,” Hugo said when I came out. “And later, whenever you want, to the train station.”

  “What about you?” I said.

  He wanted to spend the night alone on the boat. He needed to commune with Poseidon, he said, and looked at me in surprise, as if he just remembered that jokes existed.

  He showed me to the deck of Duck Soup, hugged me briskly without getting too close. I hopped off myself, unassisted. The temperature had dropped and the rain had ended. I wanted not to look back, I wanted not to be that type of person, but I did and I was. He was still standing there in his summer suit. He’d put his jacket on and everything. He had his hands in his pockets and he shrugged at me, the shrug he did on TV. I shrugged back, same shrug, and then turned around and walked to the parking lot, barefoot, trying not to get a splinter.

  * * *

  Cal kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he drove me back. He offered to stop for fries if I was hungry. I told him my problem was amorphous and existential. You couldn’t just throw fries at it.

  “I doubt that,” he said. “But okay.”

  He had on an R & B station and he turned it up. After a weekend of too much talk, the corny hooks and autotuned voices were a revelation. He explained that the singer we were listening to had just come out as polyamorous. He’d held a press conference and declared that he saw romantic potential in all people. He felt ready to embrace a loving relationship with everyone on the planet, he said, everyone at once. Haters, of course, excluded.

  “Isn’t that a beautiful thought?” Cal demanded.

  “Beautiful,” I agreed. “If ridiculous.”

  At the house, he idled while I ran in for my bag. There was no reason to prolong the inevitable. There was no reason to look around for Ana or take a pensive moment out by the pool. I told myself I’d be back without really believing it. A thought to get me through while I checked under the bed, walked back down the hall, collected my shoes where I’d left them by the sliding glass door. The kitchen was quiet. The staff had packed up and departed, returned the rented glasses to their crates. The liquor bottles clumped together on the island looked lik
e the city skyline and offered the same fickle comfort. I was tempted to pour a drink for the train just to be picturesque, but I decided not to. I still had the whole ride in front of me, plus all I’d have to confront when I surfaced—the cupcake stands and luxury watch stores, the four-dollar bottled water at Hudson News. Sober I could soldier through it, drunk it seemed insurmountable.

  I got my chance to take the train home late Monday evening. It was the 10:12, not even the last train. We were too early, but I told Cal to go, there were probably things he wanted to do with his night besides sit around in downtown Greenwich staring into a darkened lacrosse store.

  I waited on the platform instead, found a jacket in my bag. The wait wasn’t even that bad. It was a matter of believing that the train would come for me, holding out hope, however misguidedly. When it did come, I was relieved. That, at least, had worked out.

  There weren’t many passengers on the train and the few I saw were drinking. A man in a suit sitting by himself sipped from a flask. Two kids holed up near the bathroom had forties of malt liquor duct taped to both their hands. All four of their hands, I guess. I remembered that nauseating game, Edward Fortyhands. Playing it on a train was a variation I’d never seen before. It inevitably made you puke, and I couldn’t imagine wanting to puke like that—in motion, far from home, and powerless to help yourself. The idea of it made me lonely.

  I found a seat in a car that was totally empty. Alone in my cream party dress I felt like a spurned bride, or maybe, more accurately, a bride who’d fled. I don’t know what happened to the dress I’d come in. I hadn’t been able to find it in my bag or the guest bedroom. I had lost it over the course of the weekend. It was gone forever.

  * * *

  I never saw Hugo again, though part of me wanted to. I never heard from him either, not by phone, not by email. I didn’t give him my number, but there were ways. People on staff had it. A contact sheet existed somewhere with everyone’s phone number and email address. I knew because I’d made it. I’d spent hours out of body with boredom filling in those white boxes.

  I could have called him myself. At first I was waiting to see if I was pregnant. But then I didn’t even after I knew I wasn’t. I also could have contacted him through Spencer, at least to see how he was doing. Spencer and I connected online like I knew we would. He had six hundred thousand followers on Instagram for his pictures of prep school and ski trips and Scotty and his abs. I had 119 for my pictures of misspelled signage. Sometimes Spencer would throw me a like or leave a comment, and I hated how much it delighted me. It was inappropriate, but that wasn’t why I didn’t ask him to put me in touch with his dad.

  I didn’t do it because Audrey said not to. Audrey said wait, he’ll come to you, think about the power imbalance. She said don’t you think he owes you an apology? But what it actually came down to was manners. I couldn’t impose more than I already had. I couldn’t stand up and demand a role in his complicated life. He didn’t belong to me; he wasn’t mine. I had no more right than the pizza guy.

  A calendar year passed and it was spring again, almost summer, right on the line between the two. And that’s when Hugo died. He’d let his health slip, put on some weight. He hadn’t gotten a sitcom deal or traveled to Oaxaca or Cape Town. He hadn’t ridden the ridgelike dunes of the Sahara on the back of a camel. He hadn’t climbed mountains or started a foundation for sick kids or helped break talent from underrepresented communities. He hadn’t found another woman to marry, get him into yoga, make him lay off the scotch, the wine, the gum, the pie. He spent most of his time alone.

  Ana found him in his basement comedy club having a heart attack. He’d moved an elliptical trainer down there, set up a little gym. Hand weights, some foam rollers. He’d been trying to get back into shape, newly trying, like that day was the first time. He’d fallen off the elliptical and onto the floor. He made it to the hospital, the one we went to together, but died shortly after. He had smoked for all those years before the gum, done drugs. Lived broadly, not cleanly.

  The funeral was open to the public, and I went. I rode with Julian in his dented Volvo. Gil was there, too, Laura, the other writers. Spencer and I successfully ignored each other, or I ignored him and he had too much going on to notice me. Otherwise it was a minireunion. Everyone was sad, but happy to see each other, find out what people were up to, or in my case, not up to. Gil was the show runner for a new sitcom on a streaming site and he’d brought Julian and some of the others on as writers. Laura had successfully revived the show. In its first year, Stay Up with Eric Marshall was second in the ratings, the cool alternative, a hit with eighteen to thirty-fours. They all vowed to help me, especially Laura, who smacked her forehead and called herself terrible and said she owed me an email back.

  We went out for coffee afterward at a diner on the highway. Not the same diner Hugo and I went to after the hospital, but it might as well have been. It had the same acidic coffee, the same glass case of stale pies. I was tempted to stay on the fringes like I always did, keep to the end of the table, whisper my observations to myself or one other person. But I didn’t. I sat in the middle, next to Gil and across from Julian. When everyone started telling Hugo stories I told one, too. I told them about how he did stand-up at Frogger’s and then led a forty-person scream-along to “The Weight.” How he signed autographs until it couldn’t have been fun anymore. How the pizza guy cried he was so touched. That part was an exaggeration, but it could have been true. It was true in spirit.

  Everyone laughed at the funny parts, looked sad at the sad parts, and then the focus shifted to Laura’s story about a road trip they’d taken in their twenties to one of Hugo’s gigs. It was nothing to them, what had happened that weekend. It was a three-minute anecdote recounted at a diner, while a waitress went around and refilled our water glasses.

  I couldn’t really bring it into focus. Not for a long time. Up too close, things went soft at the edges or multiplied. But later I’d tell it to myself as a joke. Have you heard the one about the dead comedian, I’d begin. His funeral was held on the first unequivocal day of summer. The green of the trees was not to be believed. His kid, drowning in his father’s famous pinstripes, was so high he almost fell into the hole, and his longtime sidekick looked on, face shattered like a windshield hit with a baseball bat. Meanwhile, the priest did the bit about the ashes and dust. Thou art dust, it went, and unto dust thou shalt return. And so on.

  * * *

  When my train from Greenwich reached Grand Central that night, I gathered my bag and wove through the crowd to catch the subway home. In the main terminal, I stopped to look up at the ceiling, a staggering shade of blue, dotted with constellations. I had read that this was an inverted view of the night sky, that it was supposed to reflect the perspective of God looking down from above. I stood there searching for a while until I found Orion and Pegasus and the others. It wasn’t hard. The stars were connected with gold lines, so that anyone could tell what they were supposed to be, so that even an idiot could figure it out.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Thanks first of all to Esther Newberg and Zoe Sandler, my brilliant agents at ICM, for their guidance and continual reassurance. Thanks to everyone at Scribner, especially my editor, Daniel Loedel, who understood the book immediately and made it so much better.

  I’m grateful to the Millay Colony and the NYC Center for Fiction for the space and resources to write.

  Thank you, Lee Ellenberg, for answering my questions about working in late night.

  Thanks to my mother, Shelley Somers, and my sisters, Bailey, Molly, and Taylor Somers, who are also my best friends. Thanks to the Liebermans.

  Thanks to my husband, Josh Lieberman, for his love and support, for taking care of our young daughter so I could write, and for reading the book at every stage and making suggestions, occasionally good ones. Thanks to Josh, too, for the use of Mates, a riff we’ve been doing together for ten years that I’m somehow still laughing at. I can’t belie
ve it made it into print.

  Finally, I want to thank my father, Bill Somers, who died just a few months shy of the publication of this book. I only ever cultivated a sense of humor to try to amuse him, so if I am at all funny, he’s why. He taught me that humor has a lot of functions, not least of which is sticking it to people, but it also makes a good bulwark against despair. Thanks, Dad.

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  Stay Up with Hugo Best

  Erin Somers

  This reading group guide for Stay Up with Hugo Best includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. June doesn’t give her roommate, Audrey, a serious answer as to why she accepts Hugo’s spontaneous weekend invitation (for “fun” and because there’s a pool at the house), but her thoughts in the moment about Hugo’s smile give us a clue. Why do you think June goes to Connecticut? If you were in June’s shoes, would you have accepted Hugo’s invitation?

  2. Over the course of the weekend, June tells a number of lies: how she and her boyfriend met, what her major was in college, that she doesn’t care if people find her funny, etc. In some cases, we know from her inner thoughts that these lies are intended to subvert the preconceived notions that June, in her cynical way, suspects that other people have about her. In other cases, June is lying to herself as much as to others. Identify an instance where June isn’t being totally honest with herself. Why do you think she is avoiding this truth in particular?

  3. On Saturday Hugo cracks a joke to June after overhearing a tense phone conversation she has with her boyfriend in the car. Relieved, June thinks, “Banter I could do. It was [Hugo’s] sympathy I didn’t think I could face, the thought that I had come here and made him feel bad for me” (page 64). Why is June so loathe to accept Hugo’s sympathy? What does this scene reveal to us about the role banter, and more generally humor and comedy, play in her life?