I woke up in a bedroom with the neutral colors and untouched feel of guest territory. I took that and my outfit—an oversized T-shirt and red mesh shorts—as a sign that no sex had occurred.
Then the nausea came crashing in, and with it the previous night’s events. The second bottle of wine and beginnings of a third. The drunken déjà vu of watching the telecast we’d shot earlier that day. The chaste hug good night at the guest-bedroom door.
I plugged in my phone and it vibrated to life with texts from Logan. Where are you? I’m two blocks away. Are you here? Hello? I guess you’re not coming. Very fucking cool. And then, hours later, at 3 a.m., Are you okay? I didn’t know how to respond. I should have called him the previous night, he deserved at least that, but I didn’t have a good explanation then and I still didn’t. I left the phone on the nightstand and got out of bed.
When I stood, the room wavered uncertainly.
“I feel the exact same way,” I said to the room.
Mornings in a strange house always required courage. It was the light coming at me from an unfamiliar angle. It was the dread of encounters to come. The tremulous, half-remembered route back to the kitchen. The fumbled greetings and borrowed towels.
Still, there was only so much girding one could do. I let my instincts guide me out of the room and back downstairs.
In the kitchen, a teenage boy sat at the island eating cereal and looking at his phone. He was tall and wore a black Yankees cap with a flat, unbent brim.
“A Gorgon,” he said mildly, mouth full.
I touched my hair. “In a good way, though?”
He shook his head. “That’s my T-shirt.”
I looked down. Maroon on gray: Phillips Exeter Academy.
“Hugo lent it to me. Your . . . I guess . . . dad?”
He swallowed. “I’m Spencer.”
Spencer rose to set his bowl in the sink. I didn’t know what had made me assume that Hugo lived alone, that the previous night we’d been the only two souls rattling around that big house. Now that I thought about it, there had been a protracted, public divorce. A couple of them, actually. Hugo’s face looking pink and bloated on the cover of the Post with a cheesy pun for a headline: “More Like Hugo Worst” or something. Of course there would be remaindered sons slouching around in tank tops. Of course there would be housekeepers and cooks on the premises, and a gardener, too, just now bringing a lawn mower growling to life.
I leaned into the counter, rested my brow in the cradle of my hand. My head ached so bad it was almost amusing.
“Wine?” asked Spencer.
“Goddamn tannins,” I said.
Spencer nodded as if he knew from hangovers, as if his liver weren’t a flawless sieve, gamely filtering out whatever substances he got into up at Phillips Exeter Academy.
“My dad isn’t into leaving his bedroom before noon. But I talked to him last night. He said”—Spencer adopted a mock solicitous tone—“tell her to please enjoy the grounds, and don’t mind all the people running around. They’re just getting ready for the party.”
“The party?”
“On Monday? He didn’t tell you much, did he? For all your talking.”
Teenagers could still wound me. They could still make me blush.
“We were talking big picture,” I said. “Macro stuff. Not trivia like, ‘Do you have a son?’ or, ‘Will there be any parties here this weekend?’ ”
Spencer picked the red and white acne on his chin. His age wasn’t clear to me. But he’d been through puberty, that much I could tell. His arms in his stupid tank top recalled the butterfly, the tang of chlorine. Teens really had the attraction/repulsion paradox in hand.
“Listen, is there any coffee?” I said. “It’s getting dire.”
“Calm down,” said Spencer. “I got you.”
He hunted for coffee in the cabinets, pulling out cereal boxes. Finally he gave up and called for the housekeeper. Ana was a small, round Mexican woman of indeterminate age, dressed like an office factotum in fitted black pants, a button-up that gapped slightly at the chest, and a ponytail streaked blond. Instantly, she located the coffee in the freezer. She stood by with her hands on her hips while Spencer made coffee in the Chemex, before giving in to her impulse toward efficiency and frying me an egg.
“You don’t have to . . .” I sputtered weakly at intervals. It was disingenuous. I wanted the egg even more than I wanted the coffee. I ate with humiliating appetite while both of them watched.
“How is school?” Ana asked Spencer.
Spencer shrugged. “What do you think? It’s a triple-X fuckfest.”
Ana shook her head. “Are you getting As?”
“Grades are patriarchal, Ana. I reject them as a measure of my intelligence.”
“So you’re getting Ds. Does your dad know?”
“Does he know that grades are patriarchal? I’m not sure. We’d have to ask him.”
Ana sponged down the spotless countertop around my plate. I looked for ways to contribute to this back-and-forth, but they intimidated me. Their bantering ire was a closed system; I was just an interloper transported here to eat an egg.
“You’re in tenth grade? Eleventh?” I asked.
“I’m seventeen,” said Spencer, sneaking a look at me. “I’ll be a senior this fall. How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“I remember that age,” he said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Greatest time of my life. You should cherish it.”
“Strange. Doesn’t feel that way.”
“Maybe not now, but one day you’ll look back on twenty-nine and wonder how you ever could have been so footloose and fancy-free.”
I was too hungover to laugh. I was sure if I did I’d throw up. I put a hand on my stomach. “You’re funny.”
Ana rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell him that. He needs encouragement like he needs another car.”
“I have four,” said Spencer. “But the thing is: only four.”
“He doesn’t care what I think,” I said to Ana. “Who am I?”
Neither of them responded to this with any curiosity. They seemed to find nothing unusual about my presence at all. They hadn’t even asked my name. I knew Hugo liked younger women, the whole world did, thanks to Kitty Rosenthal, but their attitudes suggested that this was ordinary to them. Another weekend, another stranger in the kitchen.
Spencer took out his phone and commenced pecking at the screen. Ana began to replace everything he had taken out of the cabinets. I gathered I was dismissed.
“I’m going to look around,” I said.
“Do you want headphones for the guided tour?” said Spencer.
He didn’t bother to look up to see if I had gotten the joke.
The house had a sprawling layout, horizontal as well as vertical. Rooms were lofted over other rooms, blond wood staircases hovered without railings. The art was large and impersonal. Smeary ombré canvases took up whole walls, seven-figure minimalist boxes. Next to them, the scatter of framed photographs seemed small and hokey as proofs: an action shot of Spencer at a swim meet, one of Hugo on his wedding day in a tuxedo with no bride in sight. It must have been a picture from his first wedding, because Hugo was young and smiling, with a daisy stuck through his buttonhole.
A glass balcony off the guest bedroom upstairs yielded views of the property. I went out into the whip of the wind for a look. Below me, a man with a vacuum was cleaning the tiled swimming pool. He stood on its shores, raking the green, shirred surface with a hose. The water already looked clean enough to drink. Further on, I could see a steel airplane hangar, a fenced-in clay tennis court, and at the rim of everything, a row of dense, privacy-preserving pines.
Across the hall in a room that must have been Spencer’s, a layer of T-shirts and sneakers covered the floor like an adolescent loam. Two different styles of Exeter water bottles sat on the desk, one aluminum, the other plastic. A model airplane swinging near the window was the only trace of boyhood. This side of the house had the poorer view. The window looked out on the gravel driveway and the impassive face of the gray gate. It struck me that Spencer might not consider this his home so much as a place to occasionally empty the entire contents of his backpack and throw himself, exhausted, into bed.
The rest of the doors on the hallway were closed and I didn’t start opening them. Hugo was behind one of them, and I was afraid of stumbling in on him sleeping or nude or otherwise undignified. Newly awake and blowing his nose. Stooping to climb into a pair of khakis.
I went back downstairs and poked around until I found the door that led to the basement. A wine cellar off to one side smelled of cardboard and cork. A dozen or so boxes sat open, half unpacked. The urge to steal hit me softly, almost academically. An impulse left over from youth and rarely acted on: I wouldn’t but I could.
Behind another door I found the rec room, the house’s only concession to bad taste. The space had been converted into a ’90s-style comedy club. There was a microphone set up in front of a brick wall and three low tables with chairs. A red leatherette banquette rimmed the room. From the doorway I could see a framed gold record from Hugo’s early career, his sophomore effort, Second Best. On the cover, Hugo stood in a circle of yellow light wearing a brown corduroy jacket with wide seventies lapels. He held a mic loosely in front of him and looked off to his right, half smiling. In his other hand was a joke shop gun, a black plastic pistol with a red flag protruding from it that said BANG in a comic book font.
I wondered what purpose that room served. Whether Hugo stood in front of his friends and family and did his act for fun. Whether captive audiences of party guests tittered politely at his jokes. The place didn’t even feel real. It felt like an exhibit, like I’d turn around and find a wax statue of Hugo lurking in the shadows, life-sized and just short of realistic. I couldn’t imagine it was part of the architect’s vision.
Back in the kitchen, light streamed in from every direction. Hugo was there in a paisley bathrobe, what a certain type of decadent might call a dressing gown. Spencer still texted at the counter, though he’d retreated to a more remote stool. I felt the same trepidation I had earlier that morning, the same self-doubt.
I sat down at the counter. “You didn’t tell me about a party.”
Hugo had his hands in the pockets of his robe. The wattage of his blue eyes had just begun to dim.
“It’s a Memorial Day party,” he said. “We do it every year. Maybe it’s a retirement party, too.”
“I thought you already had a party. With the crab bites and the champagne. The band.”
“That was a work party. Can’t really let loose at one of those. This one is for friends. Anyway, last time I checked there wasn’t an upward limit on how many parties you can have for yourself.”
“There is,” I said. “The limit is one.”
“It’ll be fun. It’s an event, this party. We go large. One year we had a Dixieland jazz band. One year we did a Havana theme. Spencer had a puff of my cigar. Right, Spence? You puked.” He addressed me. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?”
“George,” I said.
Hugo frowned. “Paul. Paul McCartney was at one. He was in this kitchen.”
I looked around pointlessly, as if I might still find him holding a glass under the icemaker.
Hugo said, “It’s been remodeled since then. Remember that, Spence?”
“Yeah. We got a garbage disposal.”
“I meant the time we had Paul over.” Hugo shook his head. “Nothing impresses this guy.”
“Wings sucks,” said Spencer.
I found myself defending Wings. “They have some okay songs. The thing is that you can’t compare them to the Beatles.”
Spencer said, “I was kidding. I’ve never heard Wings. I only said that to piss off my dad.”
Hugo took the bait. “What do people your age know about music? No one even plays instruments anymore. No one even sings. They make sounds into a microphone and an engineer turns it into a robot baby voice that hits the right notes. What ever happened to authenticity? What ever happened to a guy onstage with a guitar? Now it’s about having a provocative haircut, and, I don’t know, taking selfies.”
Spencer and I exchanged a look.
Hugo let out a breath. “God, I need a cup of coffee.”
He started opening cabinets, taking out cereal boxes.
“The freezer,” I said. “Do you guys actually live here or what?”
Hugo stood by the stove while the kettle heated up. Outside, the pool guy wound up his hose. The water cast palm-sized amoebas of light on the stainless steel appliances.
“See this thing?” said Hugo. He pointed at the Chemex. “This is not an improvement on a regular coffeemaker.”
“It makes better coffee,” said Spencer.
“No,” said Hugo. He picked it up and held it close to his face. “It’s a glass jug. In an hourglass shape. You’re not going to convince me a jug is better.”
“It is, though,” insisted Spencer. He turned to me. “Back me up.”
I looked from one to the other. It was odd to see them together in the same room, odd to see Hugo’s progeny at all. His genes repeated, maybe improved on, refracted through another person and pummeled by adolescence.
“Some people think it is,” I said.
“But it’s a pain in the ass,” said Hugo. “Heating up water. Pouring it over manually.”
“It’s one extra step,” said Spencer.
“The thing with the pods, that thing I liked.”
Spencer said, “There’s a whole channel in the Pacific that’s full of those pods. A floating landmass of them. Fish can’t get through. Birds try to eat them and choke. The dolphins are screwed. Those pods are ruining the whole ecosystem.”
“Is that true?” said Hugo.
“Probably,” said Spencer.
“I thought your generation was into technology.” He gestured at Spencer’s phone on the counter, pinging away. “Getting things done fast.”
“We’re into things that are good,” said Spencer.
I got the feeling they could bicker this way all day. It was like the acting exercise where you did a whole argument making nonsense sounds. The topic didn’t even matter.
“This party,” I said. “Who’s coming anyway?”
“Some old guys like me. Comedy people. Golf buddies. A few actresses maybe. Models.”
“Models!” I said.
“Bony will be there, so that’s one person you’ll know.”
I thought of what I had packed that I might want to wear in the presence of models. The only dress I’d brought was the one I’d worn the day before. It was black with small bright flowers and smelled like a bowling alley concession stand. It was a dress for doing stand-up at Birds & the Bees and going home alone.
“I don’t have anything to wear to this party. All I have is the dress I came in, which I was wearing yesterday at a bar where you get a free hot dog with every drink. Drink three drinks, eat three hot dogs. Drink six drinks, eat six hot dogs. Nine drinks, nine hot dogs. You get the point.” I wondered if I sounded as crazy to them as I did to myself. “So we need to do something about that. Unless I should wear this?”
We all looked at me. The red shorts reached my knees; the whole ensemble erased all sex characteristics I’d once had.
“I like that outfit,” said Spencer. “You look like Scotty’s little brother.”
“Who is Scotty?”
“Don’t worry about it. A buddy of mine.”
Hugo held his hands open, as if to say solutions are all around us, solutions are there for the taking. “We’ll go get a dress then.”
The hangar out back was filled with cars. Hugo’s collection was famous. For a while he’d hosted a second show on cable about rare and exotic cars. He traveled the country looking for them, talking to owners and experts. He had a cohost, Jazz, a feckless blonde whose role was to know nothing whatsoever about cars. They were always dressing Jazz up in coveralls, handing her a wrench. She’d voice her opinions and all the men would chuckle. This one’s a pretty color. What makes this one so fast, the pistons? Convertibles should be cheaper than regular cars—they use less metal.
But Jazz, Hugo told me, was precisely the problem with Car Hunt. It got so it was barely even about the cars. It became all about Jazz and her adorable blunders and malapropisms.
“She was Amelia Bedelia with implants,” he said as we crossed the field.
The grass was shorn and spongy, wet with dew.
“They wanted us to be this comic duo. Like Lucy and Desi, or—” He stopped walking, waved his arms around. “I can’t think of a second example that applies here, but you get what I’m saying. They wanted a romcom basically. They wanted to appeal to women. That’s not how I initially pitched it. That wasn’t it at all.”
Hugo left after a couple of seasons and Jazz stayed on as the host. It became Car Hunt with Jazz Sherman. She built a following as the antiauthority of the car world. She got a NASCAR tie-in, won a couple of minor Emmys, the kind they don’t present at the televised ceremony. You could buy a shirt with her face on it at Walmart. People actually wanted to wear Jazz’s face around like that.
It was fine, though, said Hugo. That he had parted ways with Car Hunt. It was for the best. Because he didn’t really see the point of looking at a car on TV anyway. As far as he was concerned, a car wasn’t even a car until it was moving. It was the sum of the engine and the body and the road, the people inside, the scenery streaming past. This idea, the romance of the machine, had nearly been ruined for him by it.
“By it?” I said. “By what?”
“Car Hunt!” said Hugo.
We arrived at the hangar and Hugo let us in through a side door. Fluorescent lights buzzed on over polished concrete floors. The cars were arranged into rows. Aisle after aisle of candy colors and interesting matte finishes. A draft from nowhere carried the oil change smell of a Jiffy Lube. I could tell he was proud by the way he stood, farmerish, with his hands on his hips, surveying all that was his.
“How many are there?” I said.
He wasn’t sure, he told me. Hundreds. Cal kept an inventory, but he didn’t check it that often. There were motorcycles, too, a whole black and chrome patch of them, and a biplane, cherry red with cream-colored wings.
“I’m afraid of it,” he said. “The one time we took it out it was utterly insane. Like flying a child’s wagon through a thunderstorm. You know the kind of wagon I mean. Those rickety metal ones. A Radio Flyer?”
He had started pacing the rows.
“So you just buy a car whenever you want to?” I said.
“Pretty much.”
I wondered what that might be like and couldn’t really get there. Money would have to lose its value completely for me before I went out and bought what looked like three identical Porsches with slightly different headlights. Hugo opened the door to one and climbed in.
“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
I leaned in the driver’s-side window. It was a tough-guy car, black with a red interior. A too-literal interpretation of cool.
“My first: 1974.” He ran his hands over the wheel. “I was twenty-two. It was summertime. I had just made some money touring colleges. Did Carson. Then the album came out and after that it started. I don’t know if you know what it’s like for a kid who grew up in New York City to buy his first car. It’s a big deal. It’s how you know you’re finally on your way.”
“Finally? But you were twenty-two.”
He put his hand on the gearshift, adjusted the rearview mirror. I tried to picture him as he saw himself, mean and lean in 1974. He would have been out in LA then, long shaggy hair, fringed vest. Open shirt showcasing a necklace of spiritual significance. An ankh or an om or a chunk of turquoise. The hot wind blowing and the sound of sirens. A pretty girl in the front seat, his hand on her leg. One of those rare moments of kismet when the lights turn green down the whole stretch of boulevard. I could see how losing that, you might mourn for it. You might walk around the rest of your life missing it.
“I guess it always feels like finally, doesn’t it?” he said. “No matter how old you are, it always feels like it was a long time coming.”
He had half forgotten whom he was talking to. That’s what it seemed like. He stared out through the windshield at something in the distance, something not even in the room. I didn’t know anything about embittered victory or getting back at my father by purchasing a car. If those were actually the things he was talking about.
I said, “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You will.”
He shook off his revelry and climbed out, turned himself fully to the task of selecting a car. This involved looking at me closely, a full-body appraisal, as if it was crucial to make a good match here. I had wrangled my hair and changed into some cutoffs and a loose linen sweater. The sweater had a laddered hole in one arm that Audrey had told me made it more chic. I wore low-top sneakers with no socks and a couple of rings and a couple of earrings in each ear. I had not felt self-conscious when I got dressed, but now I did. Now that I was going to be compared to a car I wished I had at least selected a shirt with intact elbows.
I pointed at a yellow Lamborghini. “How about that one? With the mean face.”
He scoffed. “That makes no sense.”
He paced the aisles, bypassed a gold Bentley, bypassed an elegant old Rolls with its glinting winged hood ornament, bypassed a Ford truck, clunky but cute.
“There she is,” he said at last, and led me to a cream-colored MG convertible.
“That one?” I said.
I was a little disappointed that he’d equate me with this car. There were sexy cars in that room. Cars that opened in hilarious and wildly impractical ways. Cars with soul.
Hugo laughed. “What, are you mad? It’s a great car! Understated. Plus, what an interior.”
It was true, the inside was nice. Soft tan leather puckered around strategic rivets. The seat belts were aircraft-style, the lacquer buckles held the angular MG logo.
“And in great shape, considering.”
I glared at him. He added, “Convertibles are fun! America loves convertibles.”
“Whatever,” I mumbled. “Objects are meaningless.”
Removing the car from the hangar proved an operation. He had to Tetris it out of its spot, and, while the engine idled, operate a control panel, walking alongside the door as it slid on its aluminum track.
“It’s finicky,” he shouted to me over the grinding of gears. He said it joyfully, like he was glad to own such a large, temperamental door.
Finally we were in the open air, following an access road around the curve of the property to where it met back up with the main drive. The gate swung wide and a psychological weight lifted. We could go anywhere or nowhere. Was this the romance Hugo had mentioned or just the human distaste for captivity? Either way we were free.
By day, Greenwich backcountry was all fieldstone walls and light through leaves, tall wooden fences, and mansions set way back from the road. Above, a riot of blue and white sky. The MG rode smoothly and had a certain plucky bravery on the hills.
“See?” said Hugo.
He drove fast, recklessly, and with skill. We stopped for gas at a Shell on the Post Road and I could feel people’s eyes. I could feel their heads in passing cars, swiveling to look. It wasn’t me they were looking at. It was Hugo, or it was the classic car, or it was both. I wondered if this made me visible or doubly invisible. If standing next to something worth looking at meant people would look at me, too.
Hugo went into the convenience store and came back out unwrapping a pack of gum. The gum craving was worse in the car, he told me. If he had known all those years ago when he started smoking that he would end up chewing gum for the rest of his life like an asshole teenager he wouldn’t have started in the first place. He’d almost take the cancer instead.
Back on the road we listened to Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small. Hugo had a rig—an adapter that plugged into the cigarette lighter—to send the album from his phone to the car radio via airwaves. It worked passably. Sometimes we lost the signal and were subjected to a staticky scramble, but mostly we were able to hear him. I thought of the album art. It was Steve, wearing every prop imaginable: nose and glasses, balloon hat, bunny ears, arrow through the head. Young and handsome, still brunette. I remembered his chest hair.
He was doing the one about being mad at his mother. She’s 102 years old, the bit went. “And the other day she wanted to borrow ten dollars for some food. I said, hey, I work for a living. So I lent her the money, I had one of my secretaries take it down. She calls me up, tells me she can’t pay me back for a while. I said what is this bullshit.” And so on.
I said to Hugo, “Don’t you ever listen to NPR or anything? Just for texture?”
He shook his head. “Why? To hear about politics? Famine, drought? Female genital mutilation? The public school system in the Bronx?” He made a face. “No, thanks.”
As we sped downtown, Logan called. Without thinking, I picked up. Hugo leaned forward to turn down the stereo. We said hi and both waited, listening. I could tell he was in his room because I heard no other sounds. He lived in a brand-new condo in north Brooklyn with a view of the East River out one window and Newtown Creek out the other. He got both of them, Manhattan and Queens, the sacred and the profane, and he was way up on the twelfth floor, so he didn’t hear a whisper of street noise. Not the whoosh of a street cleaner, or a truck rolling over a loose manhole cover, or an idiot shouting at another idiot. Nothing. His parents bought him the condo, as an investment of course, but he paid the maintenance fees.
“You’re alive,” he said finally.
“I am,” I said.
We both waited again. “And?”
“I went out of town,” I said. “I should have told you.”
“You went out of town,” he repeated with a note of awe. “Where?”
“To Connecticut with my boss. My former boss. Hugo, I mean. It’s a long story. Actually, currently, the two of us are in a car.”
“Great,” said Logan. “Tell him I say hello.”
I turned to Hugo. “A guy says hi.”
Hugo raised his eyebrows.
“I was worried,” said Logan. “Did you see my texts?”
I took a breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the roof thing last night.”
“There will be other roofs,” said Logan. “There will always be roofs. There will be roofs, there will be roofs.”
“Suppose so. Otherwise we’d die of exposure.”
“Are you involved with Hugo?”
“Would it matter?”
I wanted him to say it did, to care enough to try to stop me. Even though what we had wasn’t that great, even though it usually made me feel bad.
Hugo had slowed to a crawl to look for a parking spot. We’d reached the main shopping district, a wide avenue lined with stores that sloped down to the train station. A train had just arrived. Even at this distance I could hear its soft scream, and it occurred to me that I could leave now. If I wanted to, I could be on that platform in five minutes waiting for the next southbound to Grand Central. I could be sliding into a sticky seat and feeling the deep relief of a bullet dodged.
“Would it matter?” said Logan. “Not relative to world events, no.”
“Okay then.”
“Have you slept with him?”
Hugo had stopped on a side street and was clambering out to open my door. The car was so low that the curb was a step up.
“Not yet,” I said. “I mean no. Just no.”
“Good,” said Logan. “Bye.”
Which I took to mean good-bye.
I hung up. It had ended that fast. Had it ended? I was pretty sure it had ended. I stood there feeling dizzy until Hugo took my elbow to guide me up Greenwich Avenue.
“The young man from the roof thing?”
“Yeah.”
“And how was it, up there on the roof? Precipitous, one imagines.”
He was just going to continue with the witty banter and I was grateful. Banter I could do. It was his sympathy I didn’t think I could face, the thought that I had come here and made him feel bad for me. If anything, I was supposed to feel bad for him. He was the one who had reached the end of something momentous. He was the one who found himself on the other side of it, in the uncharted afterward that for some reason included me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t they kind of all the same? Parties? You stand there talking to someone and then that person goes away and another person comes up.”
“They’re not all the same,” said Hugo. “I used to go to Studio 54. One night there was a lynx there.”
“A lynx?”
“Like the big silver cat.”
“I know what a lynx is.”
“It was sad, actually. It seemed really upset. It was pacing its cage. I think the lights were bothering it. And the music. Elizabeth Taylor kept trying to feed it gummy bears.”
“What is this story?” I said. “Are you fucking with me?”
“I can’t be sure,” said Hugo. “After a while someone went and got Ian Schrager to come deal with it. He was the guy that dealt with things. Did you know he was pardoned by Barack Obama?”
“Nothing you’re saying makes sense to me,” I said.
“What does he do anyway?”
“Do?”
“The roof kid. Guy. Man.”
“Oh,” I said. “He designs apps.”
“Apps.” He smirked. “An app designer. And how did you meet?”
We’d met on an app five months ago. Not one that Logan had made. Another one, one that everyone used. I didn’t want to bring up apps again because I knew how it sounded. It sounded like my whole life was app based, and maybe it was.
“We met at a bar,” I said.
“A story for the grandkids,” said Hugo. “Here we are.”
We’d stopped in front of an unmarked storefront of white brick. He held the door for me and we went in. Inside, the boutique was spare. White walls, plain pine floors. Two or three racks held three or four garments. A salesgirl greeted Hugo by kissing him on both cheeks.
“Booboo,” she said affectionately.
I studied his face. “Booboo?”
“This was Allison’s favorite store,” he explained.
“Oh, from TV. Your wife.”
The salesgirl clapped her hands. “Drinks! Perrier, cappuccino, what are we having, champagne?”
Hugo said, “Let’s make an occasion of it.”
It was 2 p.m. and I had eaten a single fried egg. My hangover had surpassed comic and become philosophical. All was equal.
“Why not?” I said.
The salesgirl brought Moët on a silver tray and proposed a toast to world peace. I noticed for the first time that she had a slight Eastern European accent and that she was unhinged.
“Now what brings you in today?” she said when we’d drained our glasses.
Hugo pointed at me. “She’s in charge.”
“I need a dress,” I said. “For a party.”
“Ah, the party, of course. The famous party. Will there be a Ferris wheel this year?”
“It was a carousel,” said Hugo. He turned to me. “We had a carousel one year. But no. No gimmicks this time around. I’m afraid I’m too old for gimmicks.”
“It’s true, Booboo,” said the salesgirl sadly. “You’re already a corpse who is dead in its grave.” She poked him playfully with a long peach-lacquered fingernail. “But a handsome corpse.”
She said to me, almost shouting, “And you. You’ll be the first lady of this party. You need something elegant but with vuv.”
“No, vuv.”
“Verve.”
“Vuv.”
It wasn’t a word. I gave up. “Yeah okay, something with vuv. No cutouts or anything like that. That stuff makes me feel stupid.”
The bell on the door tinkled and a couple entered. The man was in his sixties, about Hugo’s age. He looked like Hugo, actually, the civilian version. More wrinkled, a bit flabbier. They wore the same style of sport coat.
“Hugo Best,” he cried. “Stay Up with Hugo Best!”
Hugo smiled his late-night smile. “It’s me.”
“I love you with that guy. The other guy, the bald one.”
“Bony,” said Hugo.
“Bony!” said the man. “Bony Suarez! Great back and forth between you two.”
“Thank you,” said Hugo.
They shook hands and the man exhorted his wife to find something Hugo could sign. She dug through her purse, pulling out a long grocery-store receipt like a magician’s trick scarf. A moment later she produced a ballpoint pen.
“Are you sure you don’t need this?” said Hugo. “There’s a coupon for Häagen-Dazs at the bottom here. Dollar off, not bad.”
“We don’t need it,” the woman said seriously.
Hugo signed, H scribble B scribble, and handed it to the man. He folded it carefully and put it into his pocket.
“It’s a shame what they did to you,” said the man. “Pushing you out like that.”
“I wasn’t pushed out,” said Hugo. “I retired.”
“They shouldn’t push fellas out,” he persisted. “On account of what? Ratings? It’s a goddamn shame. They shouldn’t push fellas out.”
“I wasn’t pushed out,” Hugo said again.
The salesgirl was hanging things up for me in the dressing room. I hadn’t told her my size, and she’d had the discretion not to ask in front of Hugo. It occurred to me that our situation wasn’t unusual, that all up and down Greenwich Avenue the robber barons of Fairfield County were out dress shopping with their young girlfriends.
“Is this your wife?” asked the wife. She looked at me, at my torn sweater and filthy sneakers. I hadn’t even thought to bring my purse; I was holding my wallet in one hand. The zipper was broken and a loyalty card for a soup place near the office poked out.
“I thought you were married to that Brazilian model,” she said to Hugo.
“No,” said her husband. “The woman from the funny TV show. The Brazilian model was the first wife.”
“I was never married to a Brazilian model,” said Hugo. “My first wife was a schoolteacher.”
“I’m his concubine,” I said.
“It’s like a prostitute,” the man explained to his wife. “From olden times.”
To the salesgirl I said, “I think we’re ready.”
She was standing by to lead us to the fitting room. Her face was completely blank. Blank of judgment, blank of sympathy. Her heels clicked as she led us away.
“I’m a big fan,” the man called after us. “Don’t misunderstand me!”
Back in the dressing rooms, Hugo sat down on a low white stool, rubbing his palms on his thighs.
“What an asshole,” I said.
“Just a fan. Sometimes it goes like that.”
He was trying for philosophical, but his posture gave him away. His knees fell apart too sloppily. His head hung too low on a neck that seemed barely up for it.
Alone in the fitting room, I heard my phone ring. Logan again. I didn’t like how we’d left it—I hadn’t been nice, and, somewhat justifiably, neither had he. But the reason I’d been mean was Hugo was there. I’d said those things mostly for his benefit. I couldn’t see telling Logan this, not in a fitting room with Hugo three feet away on the other side of a curtain. I didn’t pick up.
I tried on the dresses. I went out to show him when I had one on. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do. Someone in this situation would present their body in the ridiculous red cocktail dress. Someone in this situation would need to be zipped up.
When he was done he spun me around and held me at arm’s length. “You’re frowning,” he said. “The dress or the roof guy?”
I faltered, looked down at my feet. “The dress.”
He took my hand and squeezed it gently. “Oh, sweetheart, don’t be upset. The world’s full of dresses.”
He helped me unzip again. His knuckles grazed my lower back, maybe on purpose. I thought about what sex with him might be like. Would he make jokes the entire time? What would I do if he did? Probably laugh.
We landed on something more simple. Cream-colored silk with a plunging back. I chose the dress out of partial loyalty to the car. When I emerged from the fitting room he took the hanger from me.
“I’ll get it,” he said.
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Are you kidding?”
I couldn’t afford the dress, not now when I was unemployed, not ever, really. It would take me months of painfully small installments to pay off my credit card.
But I made myself say, “Not at all.”
“I’m not bragging here, I’m just stating a fact, but I’m incredibly rich.”
We were standing at the counter now. The older couple had gone and it was just us in the store. He glanced at the salesgirl to corroborate.
“He is,” she said. “Grotesquely so. He owns half of Vail.”
“She means Aspen,” said Hugo. “And she’s exaggerating.”
I said, “I know you’re rich. I saw the garage. I know about residuals.”
“So why not?”
I was afraid I’d like it too much, was why not. I was afraid that it was for me, this life of nice cars, and nice dresses, and nice houses paid for by an older man.
“I just can’t. It’s against my principles.”
Hugo looked hurt. He put away his wallet. “You fourth wavers.”
The salesgirl wrapped the dress in tissue, slid it into a white bag with silver satin handles. She and Hugo exchanged an air kiss.
“You take care of our Booboo,” she said to me, slipping the bag over my arm.
We were driving again. We listened to Nichols and May, the telephone sketch, where Mike Nichols is the caller, down to his last dime, and Elaine May the recalcitrant operator. The adapter wasn’t working well and fragments of rap music kept jangling in, breaking up the chatter. Between that and the engine noise, I could barely make out what they were saying.
Hugo shook his head. “Gadgets,” he said, and switched it off.
We rode in silence. I tried to think of what to say and I could see him thinking, too. I wanted to ask him if the guy in the store was right, if he’d been fired. The version the writing staff had been told was that it was mutual all around. The ratings had gotten bad, sure, but Hugo had wanted out for a while.
“It’s no one’s fault,” Gil told us when he broke the news. It was the first week back after New Year’s. His face looked puffy from whatever he’d done over the holiday, strained from the careful containment of his misery. He had a new plum sweater on that seemed like a Christmas gift. His beard had been freshly trimmed. “This is part of it. Shows end, shows begin. Shows begin, shows end. Turn, turn, turn. We all knew it was coming anyway, right? It was just a matter of when.”
But we hadn’t. I hadn’t. Or I had, in the remote part of my mind where I stored sensible, unappealing information. So I was surprised, and I wasn’t the only one. We were in the conference room, some standing, some in chairs. We’d been gathered informally. Julian stood up abruptly and left the room. Layla, another writer I was friendly with, put her head down on the table. Others were joking about it already, revving up the irony machine for the long haul. We’d finish at the end of May, Gil told us. He hoped we’d all stay and see it through, but he understood if we didn’t want to.
“Do what you have to do,” he said. “Take care of yourselves. And don’t hold it against Hugo. Hold it against the network or hold it against nobody or, I don’t care, hold it against me. We can put names in a hat later and all choose someone to hold it against. Just don’t hold it against Hugo. None of us would even be in this room if it wasn’t for him.”
I didn’t hold it against Hugo, but I did wonder. What if he had been funnier? What if he had gotten better ratings? What if he’d tried, really tried, to improve the show in its last months? A good faith effort, that’s what had been missing. Probably it wouldn’t have changed anything and the show would have ended just the same. But it would have been heartening to see him fighting, even futilely, instead of how he’d gone out: irritable and tired, exasperated but mostly acquiescent.
We came to our turnoff, and Hugo kept going.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s drop in on Roman. He’s got a house in Westport. Big place, right on the water. You’ll like it.”
Roman Doyle was a shock jock who sometimes came on the show. That he hadn’t been at the wrap party the day before was unusual. He had a talent for sniffing out show-related activities, attaching himself to the staff, staying too long. If he hadn’t been invited to the party, it was probably deliberate, someone doing all of us a favor. Personally, I’d looked forward to never seeing him again. I told Hugo so.
“Roman’s great,” he said. “What do you have against Roman?”
It wasn’t just me. The whole staff dreaded his appearances. He wasn’t funny, not in the way we valued. He wasn’t clever or goofy or dry. He had no finesse, no mastery beyond provocation. He would do one thing in rehearsal and a completely different thing during taping. He’d even managed to offend Gil once. Gil, who was consummately laid-back, who made an effort to be that way. Something Roman said about all female tennis players having penises. All of them? Gil had gone around shouting. All of them?
“He’s unpredictable,” I said. “And he’s . . .”
“What?”
We got on the highway. Everything in this area, all the green-and-white townships and fine brick schools, existed in relation to the highway. It laid out two stark options: back to the city or far away.
“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go see Roman.”
Roman lived in a groomed and gabled house on the water. Hugo buzzed and the gate slid open on a manicured lawn with mulch around every tree. I was disappointed by the gray restraint of the place. Where were the garish classical touches, the marble nymphs and cherubs in repose? Even shock jocks had taste these days. You had to go to Los Angeles to see anything truly vulgar anymore.
A handful of cars were parked in the driveway. A BMW, a pickup truck so big and round it looked inflated. Roman was waiting for us on his front steps, drinking a Budweiser out of a bottle. He was stocky with reddish brown hair and a waxed handlebar mustache that curled up at the ends. He wore a Knicks jersey, tux pants, and soccer sandals. To my knowledge he always dressed like this, even to go on television. He liked to sit on the blue couch wagging his hairy toes at the audience, while the cameramen rolled their eyes.
“Great car,” he said as we climbed out, and Hugo looked at me pointedly.
They shook hands. Roman shook my hand, too, saying, “I remember you. You’re the girl writer who sits there judging.”
Days he came on the show, Roman hung out with the writers. Gil tolerated it because he was a friend of Hugo’s and because he got the show good ratings. Somewhere out in America, whole towns split their sides over Roman Doyle. Where those towns were was a mystery to me. Once, he’d horned in on our staff lunch, taking a seat at the conference table to eat his falafel and listen to people punch up monologue jokes. I shrank from this kind of working lunch. I couldn’t bear the pell-mell of it, the giddy, crumb-spraying laughter. Roman must have noticed.
I shrugged. “I don’t participate. I’m the writers’ assistant. I help out. Take notes. Sort out releases. Go where I’m needed. Was, I guess. Was the writers’ assistant.”
“Can I give you some advice?” he said.
I knew what his advice would be. That I should speak up and make myself heard. That this business was no place for the circumspect. I had the kind of face that invited advice: youthful, impressed, faintly humiliated. I’d heard the lecture before.
“If you have to.”
Hugo pointed at Roman’s beer. “Can we have one of those before you start dispensing wisdom?”
Roman led us inside. The living room was wide open, with exposed beams and a second-floor landing that wrapped around three sides. The centerpiece was a grandly rugged stone fireplace. Someone had decorated the house like a ski lodge. Navajo textiles were mounted on the walls, antlers above the mantel. It was another grown-up theme park. Impeccable, sterile, and well staffed.
In the kitchen, a housekeeper got us drinks.
“Do you want something other than a beer?” Roman asked me. “You seem like the fancy type.”
“Do I?” I said.
“Actually, you seem like you fancy yourself the fancy type, but really aren’t,” said Roman.
I looked at Hugo. He smiled like I was receiving a lighthearted ribbing. I couldn’t tell, maybe I was.
“We’ve never spoken before,” I said.
“I’m perceptive,” said Roman. “You have an expensive education, don’t you?”
I wondered what about my appearance or my bearing made him think that. In reality the class divide swung far the other way. The housekeeper had poured my beer into a tall tapered glass and handed me a coaster cut from a geode.
“I went to college,” I said. “It cost the usual amount.”
“I knew it. Gender studies?”
I had been an English major, which embarrassed me. Telling people only ever elicited a snide remark about Jane Austen. That or they’d lecture me about liberal arts as a waste of money. How I should have learned a trade instead, or skipped college altogether. The founder of Facebook didn’t finish college, they liked to say. As if I should go back and do that.
“You’re right,” I said. “Gender’s a construct. How’d you know?”
“I can spot a castrating bitch a mile away.”
It was all so hackneyed, so tired. I wondered if Roman was smarter than he seemed, if he was doing some kind of knowing self-parody. How could he be serious? He couldn’t be serious. I glanced at Hugo again to see if he planned to do anything. He leaned back against the countertop, enjoying himself.
“Is he joking?” I said finally. “I honestly can’t tell.”
“He is and he isn’t,” said Hugo.
Roman rattled his mostly empty bottle. “This guy gets it.”
I found the bathroom and stared at six mounted arrowheads as I peed. The bathroom was always where I asked myself what I was doing there. Maybe because I had to look at myself in the mirror. My hair was wild from the convertible ride and my eyes tired. This time I did look in the medicine cabinet and found a huge translucent container of generic-brand Tums. That cheered me up a little.
Hugo and Roman had gone out to the deck and joined a small gathering. Hugo sat on a rattan couch with maybe ten people clustered around him. They held foam koozies that said I’m the Asshole, the name of Roman’s Sirius Radio show. I noticed a lot of them were wearing hats. Trucker hats or camouflage hats or those straw cowboy hats that curl up at the sides.
A woman about my age with long dyed black hair and a sleeve of tattoos came over and introduced herself. Her leather leggings made her walk stiff and squeaky.
“Gypsy,” she said. “Roman’s wife.”
She shifted the toddler on her hip, a little girl with pretty copper curls, and we shook hands. I hadn’t known Roman was married, or that he had a kid. The thought that someone could stand him intrigued me.
“You have a nice house,” I said, and she said thanks, it was a bitch to keep clean.
The people around Hugo found seats and it turned into a Q and A.
A woman in a straw cowboy hat asked, “I’ve always wondered: Where do you get your jokes?”
Hugo caught my eye and gave the same hammy shrug he had given Bony in the bar the day before. Only now it was for me.
“Well, they begin as ideas,” he said. “Notions, I guess.”
The woman in the hat shook her head impatiently. “But what I mean is, where do you get the notions?”
“I’m confused by the word notions,” said another woman. “How are they different than ideas?”
“Forget notions,” said Hugo. “Notions isn’t right. I mean you just have impressions, perceptions. And you train your brain over a number of years to process them a certain way. To structure them as jokes. Or filter them through your outlook.”
I went to the railing and looked out on the yard. Dense blue-green sod unrolled to the water’s edge. There was a weeping willow kneeling so its skirts touched the water, and a dark wooden swing set with a yellow slide. A motorboat rocked gently against a floating dock. Far across the Sound, too far to see, Long Island stuck out like a finger. Good views were wasted on the rich.
“So how is he doing?”
Roman had appeared, passing me a joint. I took a drag and coughed for a long time, until he thumped me on the back with his palm.
“He’s fine,” I said finally. “Why?”
“He doesn’t seem down?”
I tried to think. So far we’d eaten crackers and watched his TV show, ridden in a car and bought a dress. All of it fell within the scope of normal behavior. I thought of him on the street in front of Birds & the Bees, listing on his heels, inviting me out to his house after a ten-minute set in a hostile room.
“Maybe he seemed a little wistful yesterday, back in the city.”
“Wistful?”
“Yeah, sweetly regretful. With twinges of longing. Like a Frenchman or something.” I became aware of how high I was. “Missing a woman he lost, a lover, but he was the one to drive her away in the first place.”
Roman frowned at me doubtfully. “But has he said anything to indicate that he’s taking it hard? The show ending?”
“We watched it together last night and he seemed okay. Calm.”
“Regular calm or eerie calm?”
I didn’t know. In person, I could barely read his true feelings better than when I had watched him on TV. He was basically the same slick product as always. A cereal box, a MacBook Air. His fame stood between us and I couldn’t see around it. It occluded him from view. I felt proud of myself for locating the word occluded.
“You know we’re the only species that has fame,” I said. “Think about it. Dogs don’t have it. Rabbits don’t have it. Even dolphins don’t have it, and they’re supposed to be really smart. You won’t find dolphins idolizing one specific dolphin. Going around imitating one dolphin who can swim in a particularly compelling way. So why does fame even exist? It must serve an evolutionary purpose. Some advantage it gives us as a species. It helps us self-select or something. I think about that a lot.”
Roman took a drag of the joint. His cheeks collapsed inward as he sucked. I saw lines on his face, the slight sag of jawline that would one day become jowl. I pictured him old, sitting on one of the rattan couches with a blanket over his legs, hooked up to an IV, unable to stand without the help of a nurse. Maybe he’s not so bad, I thought.
“Is he putting it in your ass?” he asked me, his voice pinched from the weed.
There was the Roman I recognized. My dad listened to his show sometimes in the car, never remembering the station, spinning the dial until he found it. It was always the same brand of bigotry lite. Roman and his sidekicks snickering about a woman athlete, a woman politician, a woman pop star. Every three years or so he said something to cause a mainstream controversy, but mostly he failed to astonish. You couldn’t shock the American populace anymore. Not in the perpetual eleventh hour. Too much had already happened.
I took another hit and coughed mightily. Everyone there, the whole cluster of hat people, swiveled to watch.
“Is she okay?” asked a man near Hugo wearing shorts made to look like the American flag. One leg stars, one leg stripes.
“She’s just being dramatic,” said Roman.
They all turned back around. “So what’s next?” a woman asked Hugo. A streaky, bright orange tan made her age impossible to guess. “Now that you can do absolutely anything you want?”
“A nice long vacation,” said Hugo. “Maybe Florence. Or Macau.”
“But there must be something you wanted to do that you never got to.”
Hugo shook his head. “I truly haven’t thought about it. There was nothing else I wanted to do. Ever. Stay Up was it.”
“You know what you should do,” said the guy in the flag shorts. “One of those shows where you’re you but a bunch of actors play your friends. And a more beautiful woman plays your wife.” He glanced over at me. “More beautiful than your real wife I mean. I love those shows.”
Everyone murmured in agreement. Those shows were good.
Roman tried to pass me the joint again but I shook my head.
“Do you want that advice I was going to give you before?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Go home,” said Roman. “Don’t get involved. Find another way to get what you want. Whatever it is you want.”
“I don’t want anything,” I said.
“What are you doing then?”
That question again. I thought about it, looking out on the Sound. There was Hugo’s magnetism, his charisma. But it wasn’t just that. I’d spent my childhood yearning for him, the last however many years working for him. I needed to find out what all that time meant, and what it meant now that it was over. I thought Hugo might reveal it to me, or the weekend might. Because surely it hadn’t meant nothing.
This wasn’t a sentiment I could express to Roman Doyle. What had Roman ever yearned for? Floor seats for the NBA play-offs? A pair of real-life hot twins to make out in front of him? An endless supply of Monster Energy drink?
“You know how all your life you’ve wanted a whole lot of Monster Energy drink?” I said.
I gave up and told him basically the same thing I’d told Audrey: I was spending the weekend at someone’s country house. I was enjoying the use of a swimming pool. Or at least the proximity of a swimming pool. I didn’t have any motives. I just wanted to see what would happen next.
“And what do you think will happen?” he said.
“Probably nothing. Nothing is what usually happens.”
“Nothing is not going to happen,” he said quietly. “Not with Hugo.”
We stared at each other while I tried to sort out the negatives. Even high I could tell that this time he wasn’t joking. I thanked him for the warning, but really I was annoyed. He was what? Concerned about my safety? He licked his fingers and used them to extinguish the joint, then turned back to face the party.
“Who wants to go in the hot tub?” he said.
It was not strictly true that there was nothing else Hugo wanted to do. He’d wanted his show to move up an hour to 11:30, the Tonight Show slot. He had almost gotten it, too. Ten years earlier, the host who was on at 11:30 announced he was retiring early, after a coronary. He’d had his chest sawed open, he told the audience, and he’d glimpsed the saw. Well if not the saw, the towel covering the saw. Well if not the towel, a towel.
Either way, it had scared him. It had made him reassess the direction of his life. He wanted to spend more time with his family, he said. He wanted to spend so much time with them that they came to loathe him for his foibles. At the moment they liked him, which indicated they didn’t know him very well. He was confident the network would be able to fill his shoes. There were tons of great comedians out there, some of them on this very network, and they weren’t such big shoes after all, were they? A predictable pan down revealed he was wearing giant red clown shoes.
“Oh right,” he said as the audience laughed.
Negotiations began for his replacement. Jockeying. It was in the news, impossible not to follow. Later there was a book about it, an oral history, and I read that, too. The network made up a short list and Hugo was at the top. He was the natural choice. He’d been doing Stay Up for fifteen years, and had often guest hosted at 11:30. He had carved out an audience of college students, stoners, insomniacs, weirdos, young marrieds, lonely people. Their desirability to advertisers had increased over the years with their spending power. They would make the jump to the new slot, some of them at least. And as for new viewers, they’d find in Hugo a variation on the familiar: a big, handsome white guy, medium funny, with a good head of hair.
There was one other serious contender. He was Hugo’s opposite in every way: a Christian, a family man so wholesome he didn’t even curse, a veteran of the improv scene not above donning a wig. You could tell by looking at him that he liked camping and he’d be the one to set up the tent. His following skewed to conservative middle-aged moms. He sold out stadiums full of them. He had the irksome name of Jeremiah McCabe. Somehow, he was also really funny.
Still, Hugo was poised to win. They made him an offer. Thirty million, plus his dream job. He could stay in the theater if he wanted, have the set overhauled, rethink the space, or upgrade to a new one. Whatever he wanted. All he had to do was sign the paperwork.
Instead, he took his Mercedes out of the garage on Seventieth and Amsterdam and crashed it into a guardrail on the Henry Hudson. They found a bag of coke in his pocket and a Chapin junior in his front seat. This was Kitty Rosenthal. She was locally famous already for being the daughter of the New York County DA and for getting caught shoplifting from the Ricky’s on Sixth Avenue in her field hockey uniform. She’d taken some self-tanner and a couple of exfoliating face masks, then, at the police station, laughed and claimed it was all performance art. The incident lived on as a citywide in-joke. It was a popular Halloween costume that year, a field hockey uniform and handcuffs, and for a period there, maybe four to six months, mentioning it to anyone would earn you a quick, cheap laugh.
Kitty Rosenthal was not wearing her field hockey uniform that night with Hugo. She was wearing a rose-gold Herve Leger bandage dress that retailed for $1,090 at Saks Fifth Avenue. Hugo could not really be blamed for thinking she was older, or at least that’s what he told the press. They’d met at a club in the Meatpacking District and she’d said she was twenty-two, a classics major at Barnard named Francesca. All of this was in the tabloids, including Hugo’s mug shot. In it he looked raw and red, pupils dilated, chapped lips parted as if to explain himself.
“I had no idea she was sixteen. I’m not insane,” he told a reporter before his lawyer made him stop giving interviews.
The DA, Rosenthal, wanted to get Hugo on intent to sell, but the bag of drugs was laughably tiny and Hugo had no priors. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor was the best they could do, plus a DWI.
Hugo got probation, community service, a fine. He did his community service up in Harlem. Mentored an at-risk teen, played pickup hoops and took the kid out for soul food afterward. The pictures from that time—Hugo in a T-shirt and baseball cap; Hugo with his arm around his Little Brother; Hugo digging into a yellow mound of mac and cheese—did a lot for his image.
He went to rehab and that helped, too. It helped him look contrite, anyway. But of course he lost the 11:30 slot. There was an old-fashioned idea in late night that you had to be a certain type to sit in Johnny’s chair. That type didn’t do drugs or haunt the Meatpacking District or get behind the wheel under the influence. That type definitely didn’t mix with teenagers.
Jeremiah McCabe went ahead and grew his hair out long and Jesusy. Wavy tendrils framed his face. His suits were custom-made to accommodate his wide shoulders and trim torso. In the promos you could see his pecs through his shirt. And he did things his way, not at all how Hugo would have. He started each show with a list of puns he liked. He had an a cappella group instead of a band. He invited a different precocious kid on every week to demonstrate a talent, and this was presented without irony, as something you were really supposed to enjoy.
The biggest surprise was that they let Hugo keep doing Stay Up. They didn’t have to: His contract almost certainly included a morality clause. But money persuaded and so did lawyers. And audiences liked their celebrities squeaky clean first, but failing that, redemption could play, too. Redemption could always play.
It all mostly blew over, except that it ended his marriage to Spencer’s mother. Except that it dogged him forever. Came up in profiles, served as a constant footnote to his work. Hung in the air over every interview he gave. What had he done with that girl in the mid-2000s or what was he about to do? Made people question, once again, if you could like the art but not the artist. If you could like the artist but not the man. If you could like the man but not the way he treated women. Not the way he comported himself in New York City between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. on a weeknight in November.
The network’s gamble paid off. Hugo’s first show back was his highest rated in years. Viewers tuned in for a mea culpa and he gave them one. The network higher-ups were worried he’d do it sarcastically, make a joke of it. But he did it straight, and straight into the camera. I’d watched it from the common room of my college dorm. Sophomore year, scratchy furniture. “Mistakes,” he said. “I’ve made a few.” I found I half believed him.
Now he sat in a deck chair indulging Roman’s friends. I could see the gray-blond top of his head from the window of the master bedroom, where Gypsy had taken me to lend me a bathing suit. The toddler had followed us there, bumping up the stairs backward on her butt.
“I probably have something that will fit you,” said Gypsy, rummaging in a drawer.
I couldn’t see how. She was maybe five-five, four inches shorter than me, with breast implants hovering in the vicinity of her collarbone. She started pulling out tiny swatches of neon fabric and holding them up to the light. Her nails were black and each contained a tiny golden arrow, the star sign for Sagittarius.
Hugo got up and went into the house. I waited for him to reappear in the yard on his way out to the dock. I wanted to watch him crossing the green lawn. Gazing out on the water and searching the horizon. I thought it would tell me about his state of mind. But he returned to the deck a moment later holding a ramekin of olives and a fresh beer.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The room was as devoid of Roman’s personality as the rest of the house. Its color scheme was navy and white.
“What’s that?” I said, indicating a minifridge next to the bed.
“It’s a refrigerator,” said Gypsy.
I crouched down to look. It had a clear glass door and I could see bottled drinks lined up neatly. Coconut water, kombucha. The bottom shelf held an assortment of yogurt cups in chia, flax, and cacao nib.
“You guys eat yogurt up here?”
She laughed. “Sometimes. You want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“We put that here when I gave birth to Heaven so the doula wouldn’t have to keep going downstairs to get drinks.” She shrugged. “Kinda genius. And then we liked it so we kept it.”
I looked around the room. The path to eccentricity was winding. One day you were making practical adjustments to facilitate a home birth, the next you’d adopted bedside yogurt as a permanent lifestyle.
“You gave birth here?”
“Right there,” she said, pointing at where my bare feet sank into the patterned area rug. Theirs was a shoes-off household.
“We put down a tarp,” she added quickly.
“I’m surprised Roman went for a home birth. It seems like the kind of thing he would find . . .”
“What?”
In the silence, Heaven hopped a stuffed pig around the perimeter of the room, making oinking sounds. It changed the room somehow, knowing a person had been born there.
“I don’t know. Crunchy. Hippieish. Progressive.”
Gypsy regarded me coolly. “It wasn’t Roman’s choice. In the end, he got into it. He was the one to catch her as she came out.”
It was so hard to picture I thought she might be joking. Incense haze and primal, feminine smells. Roman kneeling on the ground while a midwife in hemp pants uncapped essential oils. The baby in his hands, a screaming ball of blood. An honest-to-God miracle delivered into the hands of a boor in a Knicks jersey.
“He’s different in real life than he is on TV, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “I can see that.”
But I couldn’t, not really. To me he seemed the same.
“It’s a persona,” she said. “The obnoxious thing. Just like with Hugo.”
In theory, it made sense that there would be some separation between the two. That the real guy would have depths the TV persona didn’t. But I felt sure there were people out there who were exactly what they seemed to be, people you could pin down immediately. For instance, the moment they grabbed your ass in the workplace, which was something Roman had done to me.
I had been on my way to the snack machine to buy some peanut butter crackers, a task so mundane I’d forgotten the existence of my body. When he touched me, I froze. Over my shoulder I glimpsed his face, expressionless, like he was the one getting the crackers. After the grab was mostly over, he let his thumb linger on the underside of my ass cheek. Then he walked away without saying anything.
I wanted to know how Gypsy accounted for that. How did real-life ass grabbing fit in with her idea of personas and hidden complexities? I was high enough to ask.
“He was already in character?” she suggested.
I laughed at the idea of Roman as a method actor, committed by his art to the worst possible version of himself. Gypsy laughed, too. Her indifference to her husband’s actions seemed genuine.
I glanced again at the window to see if Hugo had gone down to the dock yet. He was still there, drinking beer and listening politely to the tan woman.
“How did you guys meet anyway?” I asked.
She had worked in radio, too, she said. She’d been in sales. Her job had sent her to a trade conference in Cabo, where Roman was the keynote speaker.
“We met in the lobby of the hotel. He was sitting there alone. I just walked up to him.”
She wasn’t normally like that, she said. Brash or aggressive. But she had gotten a feeling that something was meant to happen. She came from a long line of women who were a little bit psychic, so when she got those feelings she tended to trust them. If you thought about it, what reason was there for a girl from Texas to have chosen radio of all things to get interested in? What made her go out and get a communications degree unless it was all leading to something bigger? What made her boss send her to that particular conference? What made her walk into the hotel lobby instead of going out for tacos with her colleagues?
“The universe tells you when to pay attention,” she said. “Maybe it’s stupid, but I believe it.”
She made a credible witch, the way she looked. Her long black hair and razor talons. The glitter on her eyelids that made her blink heavily. One of her tattoos was a spider, another a moon with a purple aura. A thorny stem climbed her arm and bloomed into a dark yellow rose at her shoulder.
I said, “If you’re psychic, can you read my palm?”
“I stopped doing that. You wouldn’t like what I’d see.”
I looked down at my palms. They were medium-sized and ordinary. The three creases in the center made an M. They gave nothing away. “I might.”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t. People are always offended by what I see. It makes them mad. In general, people are unprepared for honesty.”
It echoed one of Roman’s favorite ideas, that critics didn’t like the things he said—the racism, the sexism, the baseline cruelty—because all of it rang true. I had forgotten for a second that she was married to him.
“Tell me something that will make me get it,” I said. “About Roman.”
“He’s a Pisces with Leo rising; that should tell you everything.” She paused. “If the fridge didn’t do it, I don’t know what will.”
She held up a one-piece bathing suit with a tiger on it, orange on a black background with an obscene reaching tongue. She turned it around so I could see the deep U of its back. It was a confusion of predators: the whole thing shimmered like snakeskin.
“I think it’s you,” she said.
I laughed again, then realized she was serious, then wondered if she could be right. Was it really me somehow? Was my essence captured by the yawning jaws and yellow fangs of a dead-eyed tiger? Everywhere I caught glimpses of the person I could be if only I were a completely different person.
As expected, the suit hung a little too loose in the chest and came up a little too high on the leg. I went back downstairs, the tiger’s mouth half-covered by my cutoffs. I had reservations about wearing that suit in front of Hugo. I didn’t want to lose whatever slim margin of mystique I had. I didn’t want to seem ridiculous. But when he saw me, Hugo laughed.
“This is what I’m like,” I said, relieved. “A lewd bathing suit person.”
The hot tub was a sunken octagon laid into the smooth boards of the deck. Roman had already peeled back the thick vinyl cover. Four people sat in its rumbling depths with their hats still on. They held their koozies out of the froth. Hugo was back on the couch, doing a bit for everybody, the one about the depraved troop of acrobats. It was a shaggy dog story, all in the telling, different every time. The punch line was that it was upper-class people acting this way. Pissing in each other’s mouths, shoving their genitals into USB ports, and so on.
I slipped into the hot tub between a woman in a pink bikini and the guy in the flag shorts. They were trunks, it turned out, or else shorts he had decided to get wet. Roman, across from me, watched my descent. With his jersey off he was annoyingly buff. He even had abs. He held his beer deliberately, so his biceps popped.
“Hey, tiger,” he said.
I remembered that I hated hot tubs. Especially hot tubs with this many people in them. With five of us in there it was about at capacity, everyone trying not to bump slippery knees. I felt a foot slither against mine, and looked up to see Roman smiling. Someone had turned on a radio. An ad played, a woman’s voice listing items you might want to buy at the grocery store for your summer kickoff party. Charcoal and beer and shitloads of beef. She didn’t really say shitloads.
Gypsy came out on the deck carrying Heaven. The toddler wore a bathing suit, skirted and frilled at the shoulders, red fish against teal water. It made her eyes look bluer, her hair more red.
Roman set his beer down on the deck behind him before reaching for her with wet arms. “Give her here.”
Gypsy passed her into the hot tub and onto Roman’s lap. She smacked at the surface of the water with her tiny palms. Roman kissed her cheek, cooed in her ear. It wasn’t a good idea to put a baby in a hot tub, but I knew better than to say so.
“It’s good for her,” said Roman, as if he’d read my mind. “She likes it.”
My high had ceased to move through my veins, settling into my jaw, making it inert. The other people in the hot tub carried on a conversation, but I found it impossible to participate. I had nothing to add about the latest superhero movie. I had nothing to add about the best clubs in the Hamptons. I had nothing to add about the New York Yankees, except that they were a bunch of millionaire mercenaries and that the abstraction of baseball, how far apart everyone stood from each other and the arcane, lopsided rules—three strikes but four balls?—made it all about as comprehensible to me as particle physics. I didn’t say any of that, but I did think it, and I must have smiled, because Roman jabbed my shin with his foot and said, “What?”
“Huh? Nothing,” I said. “I was thinking about something funny.”
Everyone shut up and looked at me. Hugo smiled over the lip of his beer. I thought of the beautiful cream MG sitting in the driveway like a child we’d let down. Someone would have to drive it home.
“Definitely not,” I said.
“You were judging again,” said Roman.
“No, I was . . .” I took a breath. “I was thinking about the rules of baseball. How dumb they are. Three strikes but four balls? It’s about as comprehensible as particle physics.”
They all stared at me, and then away. At the speckled rim of the hot tub, the streaky white clouds overhead, the fine blue expanse of the Sound. I should have left it there, it wasn’t going to translate, but for some reason I pressed on.
“It all seems so improvised. Like someone was making it up as they went along.” I heard myself doing a voice, a sort of blue-collar Brooklyn accent. How it applied to what I was saying was not clear to me. “And there’ll be, uh, nine innings. Not ten, but nine. And the guys will stand one here, one here, one here. The one with the stick will stand there. No girls. If girls want to play they have to use a different ball.”
We all sat in silence, contemplating the low thrum of the hot tub jets until the guy in the flag shorts cleared his throat. “You’re a comedian?”
“No,” I said.
“What he’s getting at is that you’re not very funny,” said Roman.
This people laughed at, shifting nervously in the foam.
“I agree with you,” I said.
I hoisted myself out of the tub as gracefully as I could. The suit streamed water. It had grown even looser and hung limply off my front. A new fold had appeared in the tiger’s face, dragging its mouth downward.
“That fucking baby shouldn’t be in a hot tub,” I said. “Anyone could tell you that.”
I passed Hugo on the way back inside and he looked away. My wet feet slapped the boards of the deck.
Hugo tried to convince me to drive back, but I said no. My brain still felt stepped on from the weed. Like a giant was toeing the frontal lobe.
“Oh come on,” said Roman.
We all stood in the driveway. Gypsy laughed into her phone on the front lawn while Heaven ran around, peeking under bushes. I had changed back into my normal clothes. The tiger suit I’d left dripping from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. I hoped to never think about it again.
“It’s actually really easy,” said Hugo.
He was talking about driving stick. They both thought it was a good time for me to learn.
“It tells you what to do,” said Roman.
“It?”
“The car. The vibrations, the noises.” He turned to Hugo. “Maybe she shouldn’t drive.”
“Are you not okay to drive?” I said to Hugo. “Is that what’s going on? We could call a car.”
“We are not calling a car,” said Hugo. “There is absolutely no need. I had one-point-five beers. Two-point-five at most. I just think you should learn to drive stick. It’s a good life skill. What if there’s an emergency someday?”
“An emergency I have to drive out of in a stick shift?”
“You never know,” said Hugo.
“Have you ever heard of state-dependent learning?” I said.
They looked at me blankly.
“If I learn to drive stick shift high, I might only ever know how to do it high. I might have to smoke pot every time I want to drive stick. Or, you know, eat an edible. I think we can all agree that’s absurd.”
“This is a waste of time,” said Roman.
I didn’t want to wreck Hugo’s car, was the real issue. I felt it had been entrusted to me in some way. I didn’t want to wreck the car, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to create a situation where we were standing by a smoldering ruin, blowing for sobriety, while people slowed down to gawk. I didn’t want to immediately ram into Roman’s BMW parked behind the MG because I had it in the wrong gear. And I didn’t want to hit the oversized pickup truck that I assumed belonged to one of the people in the hot tub. I didn’t want those people to get out of the hot tub. Ever. I wanted them to die in there.
“I don’t feel comfortable,” was how I put it.
“There it is,” said Roman. “The comfort card.”
Gypsy held her hand over her phone and shouted, “Leave her alone.”
This settled it, though I didn’t know why. We got in and buckled up. Hugo would drive.
“I’m fine,” he said to me again. “Anyway, I’m sorry to tell you this, but at any given moment most people on the road are drunk.”
“Is that true?” I said.
“Let’s hope not.”
He started the car.
“Thanks for having me,” I said to Roman.
Roman said, “You’re welcome.”
It was the most civil exchange we’d ever had.
Hugo started the car and made a careful K-turn. “You okay?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s a short drive, right? It’ll probably be fine.”
“No, because of the hot tub.”
I shrugged. “Oh that. I don’t care what those people think. I don’t care if they think I’m funny.”
Actually, it was the opposite. I did care. I preferred that everyone found me funny. It was the only thing that felt good. I suspected Hugo knew this and was the same way. I suspected that his need exceeded even my own, that it was dense and lightless as a black hole, more dire for having been fed.
“Good,” said Hugo. “You know you were right about one thing. That baby should not have been in the hot tub. She was being cooked like veal.”
“Do they boil veal?”
“An imperfect analogy.”
As we drove away I could see Roman in the rearview mirror standing on his front steps. He looked like one of the bobbleheads we used to keep on the reception desk at work. Big head, small body. When he held up a hand to wave, there was a toylike solemnity to it. Hugo and I both raised our hands without looking back.
Back at the house, teenagers had commandeered the pool. Hugo and I stood in the kitchen watching them. A teak table held smudged glasses, an ashtray overflowing with butts, a bottle of Crown Royal and its empty purple bag. There were four of them: Spencer, another boy, and two girls. The boys were goofing around, splashing, holding each other underwater. The girls wore bikinis. The blonde lay smoking on the diving board. The brunette was draped across a swan-shaped pool float, one arm thrown around the swan’s neck and the other dragging in the water. Spencer was still fully dressed in the same outfit I had seen him in that morning. His soaked tank top stuck to his chest and the brim of his black baseball cap dripped water.
“I guess you want me to discipline him,” said Hugo.
He’d concentrated intensely the whole way home, gripping the wheel with both hands, chewing gum two pieces at a time. He hadn’t put on a comedy album. He hadn’t even spoken. Now he looked drained, like someone had slowly poured the life-giving goo out of him, left a trail of it along 95.
“Me?” I said.
“It’s not as simple as it looks. I go out there in front of Spencer’s friends and I, what?”
“Ground him?” I suggested.
“I’ve tried. It doesn’t take. Spencer doesn’t respect me. You think he asks my permission to do things?”
“So get his mom to ground him then. Allison.”
“Allison’s shooting a movie in Thailand. A street-racing movie. Can you imagine? What time is it there?” He looked at his watch. “Five in the morning. Even if I could get through, what would I say? Hi, it’s me, I can’t control our son. He hates me just like you do.”
“I don’t think he hates you. I think he . . .”
I caught myself before I said pities you.
“What?”
“He’s seventeen,” I said. “I think he’s seventeen.”
Spencer had gotten out to retrieve the liquor bottle. The girl on the diving board sat up and flicked her cigarette at him. It arced high and landed in the deep end.
“They just cleaned it this morning,” said Hugo.
“Why don’t you go out there and ask him to wrap it up. Be chill about it. Hey, it’s me, your fun-filled, easygoing dad. How about putting away the bong for the night . . .”
“Bong?” said Hugo.
I pointed to the far end of the pool where a red, blown-glass bong sat on the rim of a concrete planter. “Sorry.”
Hugo sank back onto a stool. His shirt pooched out stiffly over his belly. One sleeve had come half unrolled. He looked older to me than he ever had, less outside of time. Shaped by the fourth dimension like the rest of us. I thought of his doppelgänger in the store, Hugo’s show of not being bothered by him. Maybe he believed he wasn’t, but years of dealing with fans must have taken their toll.
“He gets bad grades,” said Hugo. “He’s on scholastic probation. We’re giving him the best education in the world and he doesn’t even care. He’s not stupid, he just thinks it doesn’t matter. And he’s right, actually. He’ll get into college based on who we are and how much money we donate and he’ll get bad grades there, too. When he’s sick of it he’ll drop out and we’ll help him do the next thing. So on, ad infinitum.”
Spencer was eating now from a bag of Doritos, alternating drafts from the whiskey bottle. Whiskey, chip, whiskey, chip.
“Will you go out there and do it?” he said. “I just don’t have it in me.”
I didn’t know anything about parenting a teenager. My life in New York was child-free. I saw kids as a part of the urban terroir, interesting landscape features in bright sneakers and jean jackets, but mostly I didn’t think about them. Other than Spencer that morning, I couldn’t think of the last one I had even spoken to. We lived downstairs from a baby and occasionally I cooed at her in the hallway, but that hardly counted. Did the same threats still work on today’s kids that had worked on me? Revoking privileges, taking away screen time? Or were they as cynical as everyone else these days, weary heirs to an unimpressed age?
“All right,” I said. “No big deal. I’ll take care of it.”
I crossed to the sliding glass door and let myself out. Spencer sat on the diving board now, legs swinging. The blonde had joined the brunette on the float and the other boy was pulling them around by the swan’s orange beak.
“June,” Spencer called. “Have a drink.”
I put my hands on my hips, felt silly, let them fall to my sides. “You have to wrap this up.”
Spencer laughed.
The blond girl raised her head from the float. “Spencer, is that your mom?”
“Yeah,” said Spencer. “That’s her all right.”
I said, “I’m not his mom. How old do I look to you?”
She said, “I can never tell old people’s ages.”
She sat up further, pressing down on the other girl’s stomach for leverage. The float bucked and the swan nodded its head. Small waves lapped at the side of the pool.
“If you’re not his mom, why are you telling him what to do?” she said.
“I’m a friend of his dad’s. It doesn’t matter. The point is, you guys need to clean up and go home. Not you.” I pointed at Spencer. “You need to stay.”
“Why should we listen to you?” said the blonde. Her hair was in a sloppy topknot and she wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, though the sun had dipped behind the trees.
“Spencer . . .” I said.
Spencer stopped swinging his legs. “No, I want to hear your reason. For why we should listen to you.”
They’d made me nervous until then, especially the blond girl who was pretty, mean, and mostly nude. But all at once I stopped caring. We were acting our ages and it struck me as theatrical and a little corny. I was an adult because I had aged into it. That was all. The same thing would happen to them.
“There’s no real reason. Your dad asked me to say something is why.”
The sliding glass door opened and closed behind me. Hugo said, “Everything okay out here?”
He’d retucked his shirt and freshly rolled the cuffs.
“Hey, Scotty,” he called to Spencer’s friend. “What’s good?”
Scotty looked amused. “Hey, Mr. Best.”
“Been watching our Yankees?”
Spencer climbed off the diving board. Scotty did a circuit around the deck, picking up empties. I realized I’d been manipulated.
“Am I the bad cop?” I said to Hugo.
Hugo shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it?”
Spencer came over, wringing out his tank top. “Is Noam coming to cook dinner?”
“I don’t think so,” said Hugo. “Wouldn’t he be here by now?”
They both looked at me.
“I don’t know who Noam is,” I said.
“He’s Israeli,” said Spencer, as if that helped. “Well, what are we gonna eat?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” said Hugo. “Any ideas?”
The other kids walked up, wrapped in towels or stepping into shorts. They looked at me hopefully like I was going to solve this problem. Oddly, it made me want to.
“Let’s just order a pizza,” I said.
I thought maybe I was an adult after all, if being an adult meant having the fortitude to reach for the most obvious solution. Hugo smiled at me like I’d passed a test.
“There you go,” he said.
After Spencer and his friends went back inside, after Ana materialized to sweep cigarette butts into a garbage bag and sponge down the teak tables, after the pizza place we’d chosen had been relitigated three times, I walked out front to call in our order. The sprinklers came on while I was on the phone, black plastic heads that rose out of the ground. They ticked and whirled, casting low jets of water over the grass.
There was no reason to water that lawn. We’d had a wet spring. Many consecutive days of rain as the show wound down. The theater flooded and the pages were sent out in their windbreakers to sandbag the atrium. Upstairs in the office, we felt like people must have felt not before or after the flood, but during. The people of the deluge. The ones who Noah left for dead. Everyone made ark jokes until it became insufferable and Gil wrote on the whiteboard: No Ark Jokes.
We didn’t go outside during that period. Not for coffee, not for lunch. The network had turned on us, then the elements. Gil developed circles under his eyes. He kept leaving meetings to take calls from his wife. Hugo came in late and holed up in his office. His assistants were afraid to knock on the door. We started drinking early, usually during the taping. Our last ever, special edition game of Thursday bingo, no one even played. We poured bourbon into Dixie cups and stared down at our cards. Phoned-in interview was a square. Gallows humor was a square. Affected nostalgia was a square.
One day it stopped raining and within half an hour the sky was clear. A rainbow stretched over Lower Manhattan. The city sparkled as it dried, a moment of grace. We were annoyed, betrayed. Our suffering was undermined. There were days left yet until the final show. It had seemed that we were projecting the bad weather, beaming it out, or at least that our suffering was universal. But it took only five minutes for people in shorts to start emerging from buildings, five minutes for the sandals and shades, the sundresses in floral prints. We knew our shiva had ended and we’d have to start feeling different. Resigned or angry, fatalistic or cheerful. Anything but crushed, which couldn’t be maintained in the long term.
I didn’t know why people watered their lawns at dusk. It reminded me of my childhood, of summertime, of dads out there still in work clothes hosing down the grass. Hitching up their khakis as they crouched to adjust sprinklers. My brother and I used to ride our bikes down our street at that time of night and it would be an avenue of spray. The mist coated our faces as we pedaled.
I looked it up after I got off the phone with the pizza place: Why dusk? In the middle of the day, the water evaporated too quickly. And too late at night it didn’t evaporate fast enough. It clung to the blades and caused lawn disease. That was the first Google result anyway. Lawn disease. It sounded to me like a euphemism for something else, like the name a polite person might use for what ailed the very rich.
The pizza took forty minutes to arrive. An electronic chime told us the delivery guy was at the gate. His car was visible in black and white on the screen next to the door. I watched his blurry approach, watched him take the steps in one leap and mash the doorbell. He seemed surprised when I opened. He had a skinny neck and wore the polo shirt of the restaurant. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
“You called in an order for Hugo Best?”
“Is that not plausible?”
“No offense.”
“You work at a pizza place.”
“Hey, it’s fancy pizzas,” he said. “Anyway, this is just my day job.”
We looked at each other. I knew what was coming. He waited another beat to say it.
“Really, I’m a comedian. Actually . . .”
He handed me the pizzas and reached into his back pocket for a flyer.
“Here. Maybe you could give this to Hugo?”
I balanced the pizzas on one arm and took it from him. It was for a comedy night at a bar in town, the same kind of glossy, cheaply produced flyer they handed out everywhere. I myself had handed them out more times than I could count. It was part of the deal when you were low on the bill or part of a showcase. No-names had to help scare up an audience. I had spent some of the worst afternoons of my life that way, standing on street corners, thrusting unwanted literature into the hands of passersby shaking their heads.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Five minutes down the road. Frogger’s, you know the place?”
“I don’t know it,” I said.
“It’s not bad there,” he said. “Ladies drink for free on Tuesdays.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“The drinks are cheap every night. Tell Hugo I promise he won’t be disappointed. No, wait. Tell him something funnier. Tell him . . . hm.” He leaned against the doorjamb, thinking. “Okay, tell him—maybe you want to go get a pen to write this down?”
“I’m not getting a pen.”
“All right, just tell him to come. Will you tell him?”
His persistence was sweet and stupid. It reminded me of Julian. The pizza boxes had started to burn my forearm. I set them down on the floor of the foyer and told him he should do something else with his life while there was still time. If it was at all possible, if there was another career he was considering, another thing he had aptitude for, he should do that instead. The entertainment business was a bad life. Unstable, low odds, unimaginably degrading. It was beneath him. I didn’t know anything about him, but I could tell for sure that it was beneath him because it was beneath everyone.
He was silent for a second. Then he pointed at the pizza boxes. “You shouldn’t put food on the ground like that.”
“No, you’re right,” I said. I picked them back up.
“There’s something very, very wrong about it. Plenty of people don’t have food and you go and put it on the ground.”
“I said you’re right.”
I had to laugh. He was back on the flyer. He’d probably hyped himself up on the way over, expecting Hugo to come to the door. Instead he’d gotten me, an obvious poor person who would put food on the ground.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it to him.”
The kids took their plates down to the basement and Hugo opened a bottle of wine. I tore into a veggie slice, relieved. I hadn’t eaten since Ana’s egg and I was shaky with hunger.
In between bites, I told Hugo about the pizza guy.
“He was really tenacious.” I studied the flyer. “It’s got an eight-bit frog on it. Maybe they have arcade games. Have you been there?”
Hugo wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I have not been,” he said slowly, “to a place called Frogger’s.”
When all that was left of the pizza was errant mushrooms and cheese hardening in the bottom of the box, I said to Hugo, “Now what?”
He said, “What would you do if this was your place?”
I glanced around, trying to picture it. I imagined a broom leaning perilously close to the door next to a crummy old Schwinn, and that made me laugh.
“Enslave my enemies in the comedy club you’ve got down there,” I said. “Brick them in to die.”
“What enemies could you possibly have? Julian?”
“No, Julian’s my friend. We were pages together. He helped me get my job. But he’d be thrilled to hear you know his name.”
“Of course I know Julian’s name. Julian makes sure people know his name. He broadcasts desperation like the radio tower in the RKO logo.”
“He’s not so bad,” I said. “He’s sort of endearing once you get used to him.”
“Sure.”
“No, he is. Let me see what I can tell you about him to make you see that he’s okay. I had to drop something off at his place one time on the weekend and he lives in just one room in the West Village. This tiny studio. How stupid is that? He could have a bigger place in Brooklyn, but he told me he likes it. It makes him feel like a woodland creature. He insisted I stay for tea and he gave me a book about Lyndon Johnson. Not lent. Gave. I’ll read it one day, too, when I have exhausted every other entertainment option. He was wearing this vintage Communist Party lapel pin on his blazer. I forgot to mention he was wearing a blazer. In his own house.”
Hugo seemed bored. “Sounds obnoxious.”
“No, because it’s totally sincere. Okay, how about this: He’s got a car, an old maroon Volvo. He parks it on the street, and he told me the thing he likes best about it is having to move it all the time. He actually looks forward to getting out of bed in the morning three days a week, moving it across the street, sitting there while the street cleaner goes by, and then moving it back again. He eats a bagel and reads the newspaper. The print newspaper. He’s got this idea that being a real New Yorker means suffering for every convenience anyone else would take for granted.”
“Are you in love with him? You sound like you’re in love with him.”
“Well yeah, but just the normal amount,” I said. “Nothing serious.”
“It seems like he’s not cut out for the writers’ room,” said Hugo.
He was probably right. Writers’ contracts were renewed every thirteen weeks. Every thirteen weeks you had to worry about whether or not you’d be fired. Some people were able to take this in stride. Others were not. Julian was destroyed by it. His contract came up twice during his time as a staff writer. Both times he’d been pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
The first time it happened, he started campaigning for himself four weeks out. Pitching more than usual, becoming manically participatory. He stopped by the offices of the senior writers and got them to weigh in on the odds of his renewal. He showed up with obscure confections for the staff. Montreal-style bagels, macaroons. He made sure everyone knew who had brought them. The more he worried, the worse his joke writing got.
A week out his hands were shaking.
His office mate, Layla, came in one morning and found him asleep under his desk. He’d spent the night there, she told me. He’d been too keyed up to go home. Or else he’d gone home and been too keyed up to stay. She couldn’t really get a straight story. But the anxiety prevented him from being anywhere but work. That was the gist. He smelled terrible.
The next time it was even worse. He ran himself down so thoroughly he got pneumonia. He left work in the middle of the day for a chest X-ray and had the audacity to come back. Gil found him in his office, flushed and coughing, brainstorming a list of games for Alec Baldwin. Don’t be an idiot, Gil told him. People die of pneumonia all the time.
Hugo probably didn’t know any of this. He was insulated from office happenings by a trio of assistants who orbited him like satellites. Communication with him went through Gil, or through Gil and Laura, or through Gil, Laura, and the assistants. A game of telephone that inevitably distorted the message. But I guess he’d had enough interactions with Julian to pin him down. Julian was that openly neurotic. That known and that knowable. I envied it.
I said, “What do you want to do? What do you do when you’re alone here?”
Hugo shrugged. “Drink. Watch bad TV or an old movie. Google myself. Same as anybody.”
“That’s kind of funny,” I said. “As something to do. I’ll look you up and you look me up.”
We took out our phones, tapped at the screens.
“First five results,” said Hugo. He looked down and let out a low whistle. “Are you sure you want to hear these?”
“Give me the worst.”
“One: ‘June Bloom, Bloom and Associates Realtors. A fifty-five-year-old resident of Boca Raton with twenty-three years of full-time experience in real estate.’ Two: ‘Vancouver teacher June Bloom diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, an underrecognized tissue disorder.’ Three: It’s Boca June again. She also coaches a local girls’ basketball team. Busy lady. Four: Your IMDB page, thank God. You got a writing credit for the roast. Five: A humor piece about food you wrote for—I’m clicking through—some dated-looking website. No pictures or anything. Just text.”
“It’s not dated. It’s an antiaesthetic.”
“No paying, thank you very much.”
Hugo set his phone down on the counter. “Which joke was yours at the roast?”
Back in fall, the network had pressured Hugo to sit for a cable channel roast. He’d been fourth in the ratings for two years in a row, fourth of four, and they were trying anything to raise his profile. Nearly everyone on staff had been against the roast, including Hugo. In the writers’ room, Gil had remarked on how grotesque and unfunny these things had become. Except for Bony, none of Hugo’s real friends even wanted to participate. But the network prevailed in the end, and the writers were asked to contribute jokes. Hugo sat in the seat of honor in a tux. He was a good sport, too. He smiled the whole time, though his smile looked false to me. Like he held a piece of chalk on his tongue, like he’d been forced to hide it there, and it would be awhile before he could spit it out.
“The one about your pinstriped suit,” I said. “About it being hoisted battle torn above Fort McHenry.”
I’d given it to Julian and Julian had given it to Gil. It had been delivered by a pop star who’d just left his boy band to go solo. He seemed confused, as if he’d wandered into the wrong studio. His emphasis had been odd and he’d stumbled over battle torn. He’d pronounced it “battletron,” like the name of a nonexistent video game.
“Not bad,” said Hugo.
I shrugged. It was only the crowning achievement of my career.
“Do me,” said Hugo, nodding at my phone.
Hugo had the expected Internet presence. No Boca Realtors shared his name. I could go twenty pages deep and still not run out of think pieces, news items, video clips, all about him.
“One: your Wikipedia page. Two: your IMDB page. Three: network website. Four: Twenty-five years of Stay Up with Hugo Best in pictures. Five . . .” I hesitated.
“Go ahead,” said Hugo.
“ ‘Anatomy of a Downward Spiral: How Hugo Best Tanked His Career.’ ”
“Click through. I want to hear what it says.”
“Aren’t you supposed to not look at these things?”
Hugo raised an eyebrow. “You think I can’t take it?”
“I don’t know. That guy in the boutique today seemed to bug you.”
“Him? He didn’t bug me.”
“He did a little.”
“I’ve been doing this my entire life. You think I give a shit about some old-timer in a dress shop?”
I knew I wasn’t wrong. He’d minded. But I clicked through anyway. The site took a second to load. Spencer and Scotty trooped back into the kitchen without the girls. Scotty opened the freezer and retrieved a pint of ice cream.
“What are you doing?” Spencer said to me.
“I’m about to read this hit piece out loud to your dad.”
Spencer came around and peered at my screen, resting his hands on my shoulders. “Definitely don’t read that one.”
Scotty jammed a spoon into the mint chip. “Is that the downward spiral one from yesterday?”
“Even Scotty’s read it,” said Hugo.
“What do you mean, even Scotty?” said Spencer. “Scotty’s well informed. Scotty wants to be a journalism major.” He began to knead my trapezius muscle.
Hugo looked at Scotty. “Is that true?”
“Hell yeah, dude. Fourth estate,” said Scotty around a mouthful of ice cream. His eyes were bloodshot and he seemed on the verge of laughter.
“Bravo,” said Hugo. I thought he might turn to his son and remark on Scotty’s ambition. Instead he said to me, “Read it.”
“It’s like four thousand words long,” I muttered, scrolling down. “All right, here we go. ‘Anatomy of a Downward Spiral: How Hugo Best Tanked His Career. Late-night stalwart Stay Up with Hugo Best exits the airwaves this week with the conclusion of its twenty-fifth season. Once a ratings juggernaut, Stay Up struggled in recent years to maintain its audience. Was it the fractured TV landscape that finished off Best, or was it, as incoming Stay Up host Eric Marshall implied earlier this week, his inability to take advantage of the current zeitgeist—” I stopped. “This is mean.”
Spencer moved on to my neck and Hugo frowned at me. I wriggled forward in my seat until Spencer dropped his hands.
“Play the video,” said Hugo.
“How do you know there’s video?” I said.
We looked at each other. Over his shoulder I could see the pool and the backyard lit up by the pool lights. It would have been a good time for something distracting and magical to happen—a dryad emerging from the woods, a fawn bending her supple neck to drink from the pool—but all was still. Hugo had read the piece. Of course he had.
I played the clip. Eric Marshall was giving an interview in a suit and skinny tie. I always felt I knew Eric, though he was five or six years older than me and we had never met. He had grown up in South Carolina, too, in a place called Batesburg-Leesville, tracker and dip country, a cracker crumb on the state’s broad shirtfront. My own town on the coast was metropolitan by comparison. It had a couple of movie theaters, a sushi place. In his stand-up, Eric talked about growing up in central South Carolina, how everyone assumed that it was hell for him, a brainy biracial kid with two Yankee parents. But in fact, the town had treated him with the same sense of ownership and reverence that they would a local attraction. For instance, a quarry. Hey, been out to see the quarry? Damnedest thing, the quarry. We don’t know how it got here or exactly what it’s for, but it’s ours, by God. It’s ours.
Eric sat with his hands resting on his knees. He was answering a question about being a black guy hosting a network talk show.
“You’re the first,” said the interviewer.
“Come on,” said Eric. “Arsenio Hall? Okay, technically you’re right for a very obscure reason, which has to do with Paramount not being a network and the affiliates wanting to effectively—I can’t believe I’m being this boring on TV—program over Pat Sajak, who had a talk show on at the time.”
“Who could blame them?”
“Pat Sajak is Wheel of Fortune. Taking him out of that context and giving him a talk show was a bizarre idea. No disrespect to Wheel Wheel’s an American institution. It’s like the Liberty Bell. In a hundred years, schoolchildren will be singing songs about it.”
“I want to switch gears for a minute and ask you about Hugo Best,” said the interviewer.
“Obviously I’m a huge admirer. There would be no Stay Up without Hugo. He invented it. I loved his self-awareness, the way he made fun of his playboy image. How he’d fix a martini for his guest and fill the glass with ten or fifteen olives, until it was overflowing. Or wear a smoking jacket onstage and take it off halfway through the show to reveal a second smoking jacket underneath. Those are classic bits. At the same time, I think viewers today may be looking for something a little different. I think they want someone to engage with the political moment a bit more.”
“He’s not critical enough, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’ll put it this way: The world has changed. I don’t think anyone would deny that. The medium has to continue to evolve to meet it. Otherwise why would anyone keep watching?”
The video ended, and the only sound was Scotty scraping away at the sides of the ice cream carton. Female laughter drifted upstairs from the basement rec room.
“It wasn’t all bad,” I said finally.
“It was backhanded,” said Spencer.
“There were some compliments in there, too,” I said. “He’s a decent guy, Eric Marshall. A funny guy. He’s trying to get people to watch the show. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”
“What are you, in love with him?” said Spencer.
Hugo smiled meanly. “Just the normal amount. Anyway, it’s perfectly natural for young men to want to kill their fathers.” He glanced at Spencer. “So to speak.”
“And fuck their mothers,” added Scotty, accidentally spitting a hardened lump of ice cream onto the floor. He scooped it up with his hand and popped it back in his mouth.
“Is it about time for Scotty to head home?” asked Hugo.
“Nah,” said Spencer.
I thought that Hugo had made his point and we could move on to other things. I started to slip my phone into my pocket.
“We’re not done. Read on,” said Hugo.
“For real? I get it. Whatever you’re trying to prove. I get it. You can take criticism. You don’t care what people think. Fine. Why are we doing this? I could tell you what it says without even reading it.”
“Oh?” said Hugo. He made a gesture like I should continue. “By all means.”
I shifted in my seat. The right thing to do was demur. If I backed down I looked cowardly. If I didn’t back down, offense was almost guaranteed. I thought of how Julian would react if I told him what I was about to do. How he’d yank his glasses off his face, clean them irritably. Never tell people what you really think of them. Never. Even if they say they want you to. Even if they beg. Then again, Hugo hated Julian.
“It’s a breakdown of every mistake you’ve ever made in your career,” I said. “Probably with special emphasis on your personal indiscretions. Your arrest, et cetera.”
“He got community service,” said Spencer. “It was really not a big deal.”
I shrugged. “I’m guessing it also maps the decline of the quality of the show. How it had gotten stale. Lost its edge. How it hadn’t really been funny in ten years. How you seemed to give up after you lost eleven thirty, to not want to try anything, to not want to offend. Or lists all the ways you sold out. For instance, the time George W. Bush came on the show after he’d started a war under false pretenses. Just completely lied about WMDs. And everyone watching thought you were going to let him have it, but you didn’t, did you? You sat for him while he sketched you. You got him to sign it. You asked him what Dick Cheney’s favorite movie was and he said he didn’t know, but maybe it was Rudy. He sure did like Rudy himself. You did everything short of tousling his hair.”
I paused for a minute, remembering. I was omitting that the George W. Bush episode had been oddly charming. The president’s innocence had been irresistible. The twinkling eyes, the lipless, simian grin. Hugo was indulgent with him, even gentle. He’d held the drawing up to the camera and it, too, was sweet. He’d captured something about Hugo, a downturn of the mouth, a worried crease at the bridge of his nose. The drawing wasn’t good, but Bush’s perception of him was. He’d seen Hugo’s longing and low-grade despair and he’d been able to render it, if crudely, on the page.
I went on. “Probably it finishes with a dissection of why the show ended. It seems thorough, so maybe there’s a chart of the ratings. A zigzag trending downward, flatlining over the last two years. Maybe they got an anonymous source to say that retirement wasn’t your idea. That it wasn’t voluntary, per se. These aren’t my opinions, of course.”
“Of course.”
“It’s just a dumb article on the Internet. Some quote-unquote content. They have to put up something so they can have ads there.”
“Much like television.”
“Much like television. The ads on this one are”—I looked back down at my screen—“a memory foam pillow and one of those meal-delivery services for lazy people.”
“They’ve got you pegged,” said Hugo.
I sat back in my chair and Hugo sat back in his.
“How’d I do? Could I write for the Internet?”
“You’re not cruel enough and you know your topic too well.”
“You missed the thing about Laura,” said Scotty. He opened the freezer to replace the pint.
“Just throw it out,” Hugo said to him. “It’s completely freezer burned.”
“I might want it the next time I’m here,” said Scotty.
“What thing about Laura?” I said.
“We’ll get more,” said Hugo. “We’ll get you any flavor you want. Just tell Ana.”
Scotty put the pint in the freezer and shut the door. “It doesn’t hurt to have a backup. In case it falls through with Ana.”
Hugo turned to Spencer. “You should be more like Scotty. He’s a new breed of ultraperson.”
We all looked at Scotty. He was skinny with a mop of floppy brown hair and a geeky, limb-swinging confidence. One second ago we had witnessed him spit food onto the floor and shovel it back into his mouth.
“Please,” said Spencer. “Scotty’s as normal as it gets. He had a bear named Bear when he was little. He’s on the soccer team. He loves his parents so much.”
“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.
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.