Hugo woke me while there was still mist on the field and we played tennis. I was groggy, he was, too, and we rallied instead of playing for points, breaking often, not really talking.
His head looked fine, except for the Band-Aid covering his staples. Mine was worse, a purple-green knot, off center, that tugged the skin of my forehead taut. I felt the need to hold the whole apparatus still while I played, like I had a stack of books balanced up there. Every time Hugo caught sight of it he winced.
I hadn’t slept well. I’d still been awake when Hugo came inside from his swim. I could hear him running the kitchen faucet, switching off lights, coming upstairs. He paused outside my door, just for a second, cleared his throat faintly, and moved on. I lay there wondering about that throat clear until an uneasy sleep took me, the kind of sleep where you keep waking up and trying to reconcile the room you’re in with the room you’re used to. Where your brain keeps telling you the exit isn’t where it should be, that it’s been moved on you or deleted altogether.
We played for an hour, maybe more, and then we stopped. The sun coming up over the trees had started baking the moisture out of the grass. It smelled like chlorophyll and the great outdoors. My sweat stung faintly on the surface of my skin. It was all the alcohol I’d been drinking, squeezing its way out of me, and I was glad. It made me feel clean.
“You’re better than you let on yesterday,” said Hugo.
We were walking back across the field.
I told him I could sometimes do things better when I wasn’t trying, was that strange? He said no, not at all. Some people were that way. I was just probably not terrific at handling pressure, hence the throwing up before performing. I agreed and told him that’s why I’d die instantly in a survival situation like a natural disaster or a pogrom. He said hmm. I regretted bringing up pogroms before we had coffee.
He went in and made us omelets. There was food in the house now. Noam had restocked the essentials plus a bunch of Noam stuff like pluots and Tuscan kale. I changed into my suit and went for a swim. I could sense Hugo watching me through the plate glass. I floated on my back and looked up and tried to relax into being watched. The sky was still streaked with pink and the pool was green and the trees were black. Everything was quiet except the lap of the water over my stomach and bruised hip, and the sound of the grass shushing itself.
I had never really considered the morning anything other than a crucible. I’d had an hour commute: JMZ to Delancey, BDFM to Rockefeller Center. Then a street block and an avenue block to the office. Once a month or more something would go wrong, a signal problem, an unexplained delay. The platform would grow fuller and hotter, the people pressing in against each other, against the stairwell and sticky pillars. On those days, I clutched my iced coffee or did my deep breathing, tried not to think of bodies thrown onto tracks and decapitated, tried not to touch anyone or be touched. Without fail, someone would be playing an accordion.
Once on the train, the car would be so packed I’d end up in the very middle with nothing to hold on to, straining with my fingertips to steady myself on the ceiling while a businessman breathed deeply into my armpit. Kids would come by selling candy and telling made-up stories about their basketball team, but you absolutely could not buy from them. If you did, you opened the door to considering their lives, why they might be selling candy on the subway in the first place, and your own inability to help kids like them in any meaningful way. At that point, futility would overtake you.
By the time I made it to work I’d have the same frizzy hair and rumpled clothes as everyone else in Manhattan. Only certain elevators went up to our floor, so there was another waiting period as the whole crowded elevator bank watched the LED screen—the brass plate of light-up numbers had been pried up and replaced the first year I worked there—descend from twenty-six to one, sometimes lingering mysteriously on a floor for minutes on end.
Up in the office three discrete crises would already be under way, the clock ticking down to our daily deadline. A broken copier, an obscure prop that needed to be sourced. A bit that Hugo deemed not good enough, not ready yet, that had to be rewritten. I went where they wanted, came when they called me. That was how the morning passed. Not quite in a panic, but panic-adjacent, a cousin of panic with eerie physical similarities.
In the afternoon there was an exhale. The show taped at four, finished at five, and in that hour there was nothing more the writing staff could do. Not for that day’s episode. What would happen would happen. We’d work on the next day’s show, the next several days’ shows, calm for a couple of hours at least. In the morning we’d wake up, cold sweat, mounting fear, to do it all over again.
But drifting in Hugo’s pool, I saw it didn’t have to be that way. The morning could be mellow, a time for exercise and birdsong. You could plant a wall of trees between you and the world and go for a life-affirming swim. All it took was a handful of seeds and a plot of land worth millions.
Hugo came out with two plates, set them down on the table, went back in for silverware. I climbed out of the pool and he tossed me a big white towel. We sat down to eat. He’d put goat cheese in the omelets, and toasted rye bread. The coffee had come out ink black and velvety. He conceded that Spencer might have been right about the Chemex.
I felt smugly satisfied. Had we done it? Had we hit our stride? Was this what we’d be like together? Civil, serene, mutually appreciative of breakfast. It was a nice idea, if nothing else.
Hugo said. “The Sunday paper’s still floating around somewhere if you want it.”
“I’ll pass,” I said.
The best thing to do with the Sunday paper was throw it out wholesale if you felt like it, without so much as glancing at the crossword. That’s when you knew you’d arrived at self-actualization.
Hugo had done a good job with the eggs. The omelet was fluffy, flecked with herbs. There was no reason for him to know how to cook eggs well, no reason for him to have any normal-person skills at all, so it impressed me that he did. We had our conversation about comedy then, the one he’d promised me. He asked me to name the ten best living comedians, present company excluded. I thought a minute, chewed my toast, and told him.
“Wow,” he said.
“What?”
“You didn’t say Don Rickles.”
“You said living.”
He paused, breathing in. The pool made its quiet sound. Celebrity deaths: There were so many of them. They buzzed across the screen of your phone and were gone. If you were as big as Don Rickles, as big as Hugo, you got a nice obituary, a couple of tributes from people who knew you. A picture of your face appeared at the Oscars for half a second. Then nothing for the rest of time.
“I forgot he was dead,” said Hugo. “Living or dead then.”
I thought a minute, drank my coffee, and told him.
“You still didn’t say Don Rickles.”
“Maybe I don’t like him that much. Wasn’t he a dick?”
“Publicly, yeah, that was the joke. Privately, not at all. Also, you rank Chappelle too high.”
“You would say that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you calling me racist?”
I was, a little bit. “No.”
“Because, if you remember, Richard Pryor is my favorite comedian ever.”
It was possible to like a black comedian and still be racist, but I decided to let it go.
“Forget it. It’s probably generational.”
“So you’re calling me old then.”
I laughed. “I guess.”
He picked at a piece of crust with his fork. “I notice I didn’t make your list.”
“You said present company excluded.”
“Yeah, but if you felt strongly enough you could have made an argument.”
“I think you’re funny,” I said. “I thought that was obvious.”
I looked at him to determine if he was appreciative. I couldn’t tell. His need for reinforcement had no bottom. Any compliment would only continue to fall endlessly through space, like a rock thrown into a well that never makes a splash.
“Don Rickles wasn’t even that old,” he said.
“Are you kidding? He was in his nineties. Is that not old?”
“Was he? I guess he was.”
“He was always good when he came on the show,” I said. “I liked you two together.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
We sat back and looked at the pool. I had killed the mood by mentioning mortality. The only way back was to get Hugo talking about himself again.
“What about you?” I said. “Who’s in your top ten?”
He drank his coffee and told me.
“Lotta white men,” I said.
He said, “That’s who did comedy until recently. And yes, I know the problem is endemic. And yes, I know the culture rewards women’s tits and men’s wits. And yes, I know when you look back at a lot of early stand-up it’s about how women are nags who withhold sex. I know all that shit, okay? I’m on your side. I still like George Carlin, though. He’s really funny. And Robin Williams, and yes, Don Rickles, and the other guys I named. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t. I even like Woody Allen. I know I’m not supposed to. I know he’s ‘problematic.’ Right? That’s what you guys say? Problematic? But what about that one he does with the moose?”
He did a Woody Allen impression. I guess it was inevitable. He did the one about shooting a moose and driving to a costume party with it strapped to his fender. The moose woke up in the Holland Tunnel, it went. There’s a law in New York City about driving with a moose on your fender Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. And so on. Hugo was a competent mimic, not a master, but he could do almost anyone and you’d get the picture.
“Well done,” I said.
“Do you have a Woody Allen?” he asked.
“No.”
“Of course you do. Everyone does.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “Try.”
“Okay, but you’ll regret it.”
I tried. I did a line from Annie Hall: Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”
It sounded like a birdcall, the way I did it, and also managed to be anti-Semitic.
“Jesus, you weren’t kidding,” said Hugo, laughing. “Never do that again.”
“I told you,” I said.
He laughed some more. I was happy he was having fun, even if it was at my expense.
“Can’t you do any impressions?”
None, I told him. Not Christopher Walken. Not Sean Connery. Not even Borat. I didn’t understand how people were able to do them at all. I didn’t know how to hear a sound and translate it into a sound I made myself. I was missing that wiring, the funny voices wiring. It was one of the things that held me back as a comedian.
“You seem to think you have a lot of things holding you back,” he said.
“I do!”
He paused. “I’m problematic, too, aren’t I?”
“Is that rhetorical?”
“No, I really want to know.”
“Not to a Woody Allen degree. Not to a Cosby degree. But kinda.”
“Kitty Rosenthal?”
“Yeah.”
“I had no idea how young she was. That’s the truth. June, look at me.” He made long, meaningful eye contact with me. “I promise you.”
“I believe you,” I said, even though I didn’t really.
I believed that he believed what he was saying. He had been high on drugs and power. He probably hadn’t thought to ask Kitty Rosenthal her age or chose not to see through her lie about Barnard. He had probably laughed about it in the dark, loud club, and poured her more Grey Goose. It had been easy, I was sure. I had seen for myself the night before how easy it could be. But whatever actually happened had been overwritten by his public story about it, told and retold to lawyers and reporters, until it felt real, until he bought it himself.
“Do your Woody Allen again,” he said.
“You said not to.”
“Come on.”
I did it again. It came out completely different but still catastrophic. High in parts, low in others. Hugo’s shoulders shook as he looked out on the pool. He was problematic, but I’d have done it all day to keep him laughing like that. I’d have done it till my voice went hoarse.
“We should go get dressed,” said Hugo at last. “The caterers will be here soon.”
He made no move to get up.
“Why don’t we bag it?” I said.
“Bag it?”
“Yeah, bag it. Call it off. Call up the caterers and whoever else and eat the deposit. I’ll even make the calls if you want.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “You’re rich. You can do whatever you want with impunity. Isn’t that what we’ve learned?”
“You don’t understand. We do it every year. People will be disappointed.”
He had the most dysfunctional relationship to “people” I’d ever witnessed. He owed them and they owed him. No one could ever pay the other off. Not fully. He had to be the person they expected and they had to keep admiring him. And if either stopped, then what? He’d sink back into obscurity like the rest of us and have to think about the mail and the weather and his relationships and how to be good.
I wanted his fame and hated that I wanted it. I thought I deserved it. Some remote part of me even thought I’d get it. One day, eventually, with zero supporting evidence. I knew fame was dumb and empty. Hugo did, too, probably. He must have. Everyone did. And yet.
I thought if I could convince Hugo that none of it mattered, then I might believe it, too. If I could talk him out of caring, I’d stop, too. If he could be better than it, then I could, too. We could sit there for one afternoon, free as the dolphins, while the sun sparkled down on the water and the clouds passed through so slowly we didn’t notice their passing, until we looked up, finally, and found a whole new sky.
I said, “Who cares what people think? Let them be disappointed. Like who, anyway? Paul McCartney?”
“He’s not coming this year. He’s on tour.”
“Well, there you go. The third best Beatle won’t even be there, so why bother?”
“And the first best member of Wings. What would we do if I canceled the party? What would we do all day?”
“Whatever people do. Go to Home Depot. Get some shelf brackets, some mums in a pot, a door hinge. Go to the mall; is there a mall around here?”
“There’s a mall in Stamford, yeah.”
The thought of Hugo walking around a mall made me sad. The all-absorbing din, the smell of soft pretzels. The image of him contemplating a hat in the window of Lids or wandering, bewildered, into a Hollister.
“Or we could stay home and be bored,” I said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“Does boredom sound nice? Not really.”
“We could turn off our phones and just sit here.”
“Millennials glamorize boredom because you’ve never truly experienced it. And because you have a lot of time left. You try growing up in a world with three TV channels and no Internet and see if you ever elect to be bored again.”
“Okay,” I said. “All thrills, no boredom. We’ll play that game where you stab the knife between your fingers risking grave injury.”
“Mumblety-peg,” he said.
He finished his coffee, thinking. He seemed on the verge of agreeing to it. He was still sitting like that when two guys in white polos and khakis rounded the house and waved their arms at us. They were from Fairfield Rental Center and they wanted to know where the tent should go.
Hugo’s chair scraped the patio as he stood. “Sorry. We’ll have to play mumblety-peg another day.”
He shook their hands and asked after Kent, the owner of the rental place, a friend of his. They talked about Kent for a minute—he’d just had a pool put in at his place, stay tuned for epic pool parties—and went out to the field to decide where the tent should go. I watched them pace off its dimensions before stacking our plates to carry them inside.
In the kitchen, another rental center guy was hefting a rack of wineglasses.
“How’s Kent?” I said.
He just looked at me as I brushed past him.
A small city bloomed on the property. Its industry was party. Its citizens smoked cigarettes and wore the uniforms of the service industry. Everyone knew what to do without being told and operations slid on the smooth casters of money.
After more deliberation, the rental center crew unfurled a big white tent, pounded stakes into the ground, secured the legs in a high-pitched whirring of drills. They set up foldout tables and rickety white rental chairs and a parquet dance floor and risers for a band, and then they left and a second, separate crew came through, snapping open tablecloths and arranging purple and white hydrangeas in square vases of chunky glass. The hydrangeas were meant to resemble the ones in the yard, everything summery and harmonious, and they completely did. They looked great.
The gardener mowed the grass again, eliminating the millimeter that had irritated me the day before, and sheared the bushes by some infinitesimal degree. The pool guy returned. He wore his headphones as he dipped in his gray hose, bobbing his head to the beat. I wondered what he made of cleaning the same pool three days in a row, if he felt like Sisyphus, if he was losing his mind, but I didn’t ask.
I watched all this from the guest bedroom. Or anyway, I monitored the progress. In between I flipped cable channels on the giant TV and read the news on my phone. I felt like I was in a hotel room. The news I read, even the bad news, affected me the same way it would in a Hilton DoubleTree in an unfamiliar city. The anonymity and high-thread-count sheets made the headlines too remote to care about.
Spencer popped his head in, hair tousled from sleep. If he was resentful about the night before, he didn’t show it. He stuck around and watched a few minutes of a home improvement show—a Dallas couple was renovating their kitchen—before pronouncing it “played.” He motioned me onto the balcony as more workers dragged a smoker beyond the tent and started cooking meat. A guy in a chef’s jacket and toque prodded the red-brown contents with tongs.
“A whole pig,” said Spencer. “They cook it so tender it falls right off the bone. Then you can tear it apart with your fingers.”
The weather was undecided again. One minute it was overcast, the next sunny. I wondered what would happen if it rained, if there was a contingency plan, a rain date, or if everyone would just cram into the house, ash cigarettes in the succulents, track mud all over the living room floor, get too drunk and steady themselves on priceless works of art. The wind blew and smoke enclouded the pool.
“I guess I didn’t realize it was going to be such a big deal,” I said.
“We tried to tell you.”
“What are we supposed to do while they’re setting up?”
“Is there something you want to do?” He leaned back against the railing of the balcony. It sounded like an offer.
I thought about what people did on Memorial Day. What were the people I knew doing? Hiking, probably. Dipping kayak paddles into cold, clear water. Going to the beach. Audrey would be at a barbecue in Brooklyn, my parents out on the Feldmans’ boat. Logan, I didn’t know. Maybe he’d be at the same party as Audrey, maybe he didn’t celebrate for some esoteric reason he’d love to explain to me. I told Spencer I couldn’t think of anything to do in that house that we hadn’t already done. He smirked and said that he could.
A moment later we smelled the pig, rich and bitter, carbon and fat. “Let’s go get some lunch,” he said.
Downstairs we found the kitchen transformed. Caterers wiped down glasses and unpacked phyllo dough, white logs of mozz, Carr’s crackers. Sliced citrus and squeezed filling out of pastry bags. They were immoderate with parchment paper, tearing it off in great translucent sheets, saying excuse me and behind you to Spencer and me, carrying hot pans high above their heads. Someone iced champagne. That was his whole job as far as I could tell. To shovel ice from here to there, uncrate champagne bottles, wipe them down with rags, and put them in the ice. It looked like he’d be there awhile. There was that much champagne.
I attempted to open the refrigerator, but a blond lady in an apron shook her head.
“Something key is chilling in there,” she told me, but she wouldn’t say what.
I returned to Spencer empty-handed and he went in himself. He came back with a plate of tiny smoked salmon sandwiches, triangular and studded with capers, and a bottle of champagne. They let him have whatever he wanted because he was young and rich, famous for being born, because his abs were visible through the gaping arm holes of his tank top, and because no one had ever said no to him thus far and they weren’t going to be the first.
We took our spoils down to the basement rec room and ate on the red vinyl banquette. I put the plate between us—a pungent, smoked fish buffer. We hadn’t grabbed glasses and we drank directly from the champagne bottle, passing it back and forth. I’d showered by then, and done my best to cover the bump on my head with makeup. I couldn’t hide its elevation, though, or the stretching effect it had on the top half of my face. Spencer squinted at it in the weak light of the rec room.
“That bad?” I said.
“It’s not the best,” said Spencer.
He lifted the cold bottle of champagne and held it against my head. It was either his way of making amends or just his latest attempt to fuck me. There was a third option, too, that we were friends now, but that seemed unlikely. Condensation dripped down the sides of the bottle and he took it away.
“I’m leaving this afternoon, by the way,” he said.
“What? You’re not staying for the party? But the pig. The meat so tender you can blah-blah-blah.”
“There’s a week left of school. I have to get back.”
“It’s whatever.”
He passed me the champagne bottle and our fingers touched. I moved back an inch. We were underground again, I noticed, just like we had been the day before. It gave our interactions a feeling of end of the world. Like nothing mattered anymore and we were duty bound to procreate.
“Are we gonna talk about what happened yesterday?” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, maybe you feel weird.”
He laughed.
“Okay, we won’t talk about it.”
He took the bottle back, making an elaborate show of not touching me.
“What will you do next week when school ends?” I asked. “Will you come back here?”
He shook his head. He was meeting his mom in Thailand. They were traveling a bit after her movie wrapped. She did work with kids in Cambodia. She’d helped set up a school. And then on to LA for the rest of the summer. He had a bunch of friends out there, people he’d grown up with. The last week of August he’d return to school. I pictured him and his mother in first class. They’d each take an Ambien and pull down matching eye masks. She seemed like the type of woman who applied products to her face throughout the flight to keep it hydrated. I was willing to bet that when Spencer was with her he was that way, too.
“What about your dad?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to spend any time with him this summer?”
“That’s kind of not our arrangement.”
“Why not?”
“Honestly? He’s not that interested. I mean, does he seem interested to you?”
He didn’t seem interested. He seemed tired and baffled and overwhelmed. He seemed mainly interested in himself and poor at hiding it. I surprised myself by feeling bad for Spencer. He was a child of privilege and, like Ana had said, needed my compassion like he needed another car. But I felt bad anyway. There were benefits to having parents who cared about you immensely, even if you felt suffocated by their caring.
“You stay with him,” said Spencer. “You’re having fun here.”
I had not been having fun, not consistently, though I knew what he meant. It had been a kind of tourism for me. Now I was at the part of the vacation where I contemplated packing everything up and moving there.
“I can’t stay with him,” I said.
“Why? What do you have to go back to?”
I thought of my apartment, the spill of mail, the crying baby upstairs, Rocco’s rotting feet, iguanas crawling all over each other in the window of Just Pets, Lars at his peephole watching us come and go, okay spring rolls from Okay Thai, the L train shutdown again for repairs, accepting a connection request on LinkedIn, my regular call with my parents on Sunday nights, trudging twelve blocks to a passable grocery store, overdraft fees, changing the font on my résumé, someone’s phlegmy cough at Birds & the Bees, and dating again now that Logan was out of the picture.
“I told you that I’m seeing someone,” I said.
“Oh yeah. The baloney app guy.” He laughed and passed me the champagne. “Does that mean you’re going to keep seeing him?”
I took a sip. The bottom fourth of the bottle had grown warm and flat.
“Probably not.”
Saying it out loud made it final. I felt sadness and a fragment of relief. Sadness for the unceremonious way it had ended. Relief at not having to defend the weekend to Logan, or make how I’d treated him fit together with my conception of myself as a mostly decent person. Now whatever I did at least I wouldn’t hurt anyone but me.
“I need to look for a job,” I said.
“My dad could help you with that. Isn’t that why you came here in the first place?”
“That’s insulting.”
“Is it?” he said.
Was it? I stood up and brushed the crumbs off my lap. There was one mini-sandwich left.
“It’s all yours,” I said.
He made a face. “You have it.”
“What if I don’t want it?”
“You do,” he said. He picked up the sandwich and thrust it at me. “I know you do.”
“I don’t. I had too much already.”
“Stop being stupid and take it.”
It seemed like we were talking about something more than the sandwich. I almost ate it just to end the exchange, but it looked soggy and unappealing. I didn’t like the damp, pink way the lox were hanging out over the bread. I especially didn’t want it because Spencer wanted me to want it. That made it even more disgusting to me.
“No one has to eat it,” I said.
“Someone should!”
I wanted to laugh but he sounded distraught. Or as close as he came to distraught, which was distraught dialed down to 0.001 percent. It would make him good in movies someday, I thought, his complete understatement of harrowing emotions. That was what they said looked best on the big screen: a super handsome face kept super still.
“No one has to eat it,” I said.
Gently, I took the sandwich from him and put it back on the plate. We both looked around for something else to talk about. I studied the framed album on the wall. Hugo’s dated sideburns and the joke shop gun.
“What’s this room all about anyway?” I said. “It doesn’t go with the rest of the house.”
“He put it in after the fact, at the height of the show. My mom hates it so much. It’s kind of hilarious. She says it’s the most Queens thing you could ever possibly do, putting a room like this in a house like this. She wanted a workout room instead.” He turned around and knocked on the wall behind us. “It’s not even real brick. They used to have parties down here when I was little. There’s a working spotlight and everything. My dad’s comedian friends would tell jokes.” He stood up, stretching. “I’m sure everyone found it embarrassing but him.”
I picked up the bottle, empty now, the plate with its lone creepy sandwich. “I’m sorry you’re missing the party. It seems like it’ll be a good time.”
“It’ll suck. Bunch of old saddies getting wasted.”
A porthole had opened between us, but now it was closing and I was mostly glad. For the next couple of hours we could return to harmless flirtation and shared skepticism of his father. We’d come close to crossing a line, but we hadn’t, and I counted that, cautiously, as a win.
“He’ll be okay,” I said. “Your dad. He’s got friends. He’s got Bony. I’ll check in. I’ll come for visits. Before you know it he’ll be on to the next project.”
“Yeah, like what?” said Spencer.
“Maybe he’ll do one of those shows where he plays himself but famous actors play everyone else in his life.”
“Do we need more of those shows? Be honest.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said again.
We came up from the basement to Hugo standing in the kitchen. He was all cleaned up with product in his hair, the jacket of his summer suit slung over the back of a bar stool. He smelled like aftershave. He started picking canapés off a tray and dropping them into his mouth one by one. The blond lady was letting him. He wanted to know what we kids had been doing down there in the basement for so long.
“Endlessly fucking,” said Spencer, and then, “I have to go pack.”
He went upstairs.
I said, “He’s kidding.”
“I know,” said Hugo.
It bothered me how quickly he said it. He was still chewing, looking for the next thing to put into his mouth.
“But we could have been,” I said.
“I guess.”
He didn’t care. He wasn’t jealous. I watched him eat in silence. Half the caterers were watching, too.
He swallowed. “Casey Caruso is on her way. Remember? The people from E?”
“Is there something you want me to do while they’re here?”
“No, no. Just telling you is all. You can use Jan if you can catch her before she goes.”
“Use Jan how? Who’s Jan?”
“The hair girl.” He touched his hair with his fingertips. It had been trimmed, cleaned up at the temples. His eyebrows had been groomed. He had makeup on, too; the gash on his forehead had disappeared beneath a layer of putty. “Jan. The girl who just did my hair.”
I wasn’t going to use Jan. I wasn’t going to run out into the driveway shouting Jan, Jan, is one of you Jan? I wasn’t going to drag her back into the house with her shears and bottles of mousse and instruct her to get to work on my head.
“I don’t want to hold Jan up,” I said.
“It’s your call,” he said. “But you do know I pay Jan, right? It’s not an inconvenience. Jan is compensated for her time.”
Every conversation was about money. Even the ones about something else. He could hand me a York Peppermint Pattie with a price tag of fifty cents and this would require hashing out. We’d both pretend we didn’t care, that the fifty cents meant nothing. But I’d feel insulted or that I owed him. And he’d feel like a lord dispensing candy from his mount. This was the chasm that yawned between us. My pride, his ego. Jokes could help cross it sometimes, but not always.
“I don’t want Jan,” I told him again.
He looked at my hair a bit too thoughtfully, nose scrunched. No one likes to have her hair looked at like that.
“Ugh,” I said.
I caved and went to go get Jan.
Casey Caruso arrived in a fuchsia sheath dress with a protective sheet of plastic affixed to her head. I watched Hugo lead her and a producer around the grounds. Her improvised head wrap came undone in the wind and one end flapped behind her like a flag.
On the patio, two guys from the crew wrangled cable. Hugo had liberated some sliders from the caterers, and they ate them while regarding the white tent through sunglasses, each with one foot up on an apple box.
Jan did my hair, angrily. At one point I realized she had scissors out and was trimming it without my permission. She had a gender reveal party to go to that afternoon, she told me. Her sister’s baby. They were going to pop a balloon, and if pink confetti came out it was a girl, and if blue confetti came out it was a boy. Now she was going to miss the balloon popping.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “Could someone tape it for you?”
She roughed up my head with texturizer, slapping around near my ears. “It won’t be the same.”
Afterward I went into the guest bathroom and put on the cream-colored dress. It was featherlight, angelic, nicer than anything I owned. I couldn’t wear a bra with it, which I hadn’t realized, and it made me feel sort of nude. In another context I might have liked feeling that way. I reapplied makeup to the lump on my forehead. The swelling had gone down some, but its 3-D quality was still a problem, as was the way it yanked my right eyebrow up toward my hairline.
By the time I walked downstairs, the interview had started. A PA stopped me in the kitchen and put a finger to his lips. We were on a set now. The caterers had been sent out for a smoke and everything was quiet except for the sound of Casey Caruso, seated in a Danish armchair, asking Hugo what he would do next, now that he was free to do anything he wanted.
“Well,” said Hugo. “I haven’t really decided. I was thinking a long vacation. Maybe the Côte d’Azur. Or Havana.”
“Ooh, Cuba,” she said. “Do you know how to salsa, Hugo?”
Hugo said, big smile, laugh from Casey, “You could teach me.”
Casey Caruso clasped her hands in front of her and tilted her head to the side. Her hair had held up all right. It was multilayered blond and brown. It looked like a lot of thinking went into each individual piece, and also not that much like real hair. Hugo sat across from her in one of the armchairs. He looked relaxed, handsome, amused, like he had been on vacation for months already. A fresh layer of makeup had been added to the fissure in his forehead. Except for the odd texture, you couldn’t see it at all.
“Have you ever considered a role outside of the spotlight?” she said.
“I’m glad you asked, Casey,” said Hugo.
He looked up past the camera and caught my eye.
“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I can do to give back. I think established comedians have a responsibility to amplify the kind of voices we don’t hear from as much in comedy. Which is to say, not white men. Women, people of color, differently abled people, people from diverse economic backgrounds. You know, comedy favors the wealthy, just like all the arts. Because when you’re young and still figuring it out, doing open mics, working some entry-level job, whatever, you can lean on your parents. People raised in lower income households don’t have that luxury.”
Casey Caruso nodded along to everything he said.
“As you might know, Casey, I come from a working-class background myself. My father was a mechanic and my mother was a housewife. So I had no advantages on that front. None. They couldn’t help pay my rent or anything like that. I have experienced firsthand just how difficult things can be for young comedians, and I’m a straight, white man, which makes things how much easier? Forty percent? Would you say forty percent, Casey?”
“I’d say so. Forty percent easier sounds about right,” said Casey. “What form might it take, this amplification you’re talking about?”
“Well, one thing it would be great to do is promote projects by people who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily get a chance. For instance, there’s never been a better time for women in comedy.”
He named some female comedians on the rise. They were pushing boundaries, he said. They had schooled the world on the question of whether or not women are funny.
“They are,” Hugo concluded. He looked at me again, eyes twinkling. “I think we can lay that one to rest. Anyway, it would be great to help break out talent like that. Give some deserving young woman a chance she might not normally get.”
Casey Caruso beamed. “It sounds like you’re putting your producer hat on.”
“You know, Casey, I may be. I very well may be.”
The interview ended and I walked outside. The catering staff slouched around drinking soda, crimped bow ties hanging out of their pockets. All of Hugo’s answers seemed prepared in advance, especially the one about inclusivity. He’d mocked it the night before, dismissed it, then stolen it from me to make himself look good. Another way of thinking about it, I guess, was he’d learned it from me.
I sat in the party tent and took off my shoes. The plastic windows and wet green yard outside made me feel submerged. I wanted Hugo to find me like that, alone in the tent, like the last guest left in the dining room of a cruise ship. A cruise ship that was taking on water. But he didn’t come out. Maybe they had more to shoot. Maybe they were just chatting, letting fly about Richie what’s-his-face. What a fool he was and how scandalously small.
A bartender came in, a woman about my age, and stood at her post. She was wearing a caterer’s white shirt and black pants and had her hair in a tidy bun.
She said to me, “Do you need something?”
I did. I needed a job, a ride home, to go put on my real clothes. I needed to pay my student loans. I needed a haircut at a reasonable price from a place that knew what to do with my hair texture. I needed to call my parents and hear a mind-numbing story about something rude that was said in the deli line at Publix supermarket. I needed them to float me two grand, just until just until just until. I needed a stiff drink.
“Surprise me,” I said.
By three o’clock the weather had worsened. The backyard, pool, and white tent were suffused in a fine drizzle. A jazz trio arrived in ponchos and started setting up. I carried my cocktail into the house when it got too chilly. Guests would be arriving soon, and I wanted to see Hugo before he was swept up in the jocularity. The backslapping and cigar lighting, the side hugs and cheek kissing.
He wasn’t anywhere, though. Not upstairs, not downstairs. I loitered in the kitchen waiting for him to show up until the blond lady shooed me away. When it was clear I wouldn’t find him, I went to the front of the house. There was a white Barcelona chair near the door, and I sat watching for the cars of Hugo’s friends. The high heels stepping out onto gravel, the madcap sprints around the house to the party.
An Uber let out two young women, girls really, tall, thin, dressed for the discotheque in crop tops and lace-up pants. The first of the deluge, I thought. He shows up and they just materialize. But then they didn’t. It was fifteen minutes before another car pulled in, a Land Rover that produced a barrel-chested guy in khakis and a checked shirt. He wore a tan visor with a corporate logo, hedge fund swag it looked like, and vaped manically as he made his way around the house. Hugo didn’t come out to meet him, or the girls before him, or the next people that arrived, an elegant older couple who struck me as European and at the wrong party entirely. He couldn’t hide forever, though—manners wouldn’t allow it—so I waited.
I was a veteran of waiting, a pro. I could have put it on my résumé. Being a page had been all waiting. Waiting to open the house, to seat the audience. Waiting through Gary Scary’s routine, Bony’s routine, waiting some more through the familiar rhythms of the show.
My work at reception had been mostly waiting, too. Years of it. For the phone to ring, for the mail to arrive, for people to come out from the office and collect their guests. Waiting to be remembered by the staff members, and waiting to establish a rapport with them.
Occasionally, there was a break from the waiting. An errand of some kind, a document to copy and distribute. Then I got to saunter as slowly as I wanted through the hallways peeking into offices. And sometimes Julian stopped by for a chat. He’d talk to me about what was going on in the writers’ room. The projects that week, the feuds, who was up and who was down, Gil’s mood, Hugo’s. He’d pump me for information. He was mainly interested in what people were saying about him, which was usually nothing. Sometimes I made things up to mess with him. “Gil mentioned you chew too loudly,” I told him once, and Julian blanched.
I often wondered if the waiting would come to nothing. I feared that I’d turn thirty at the reception desk, that the office manager would remember and arrange a party for me like she had when I turned twenty-seven and twenty-eight and twenty-nine. That everyone would sign a card. I feared that years would pass, even more years than had already passed, and I’d still be wearing a headset and consulting my laminated sheet of extensions. I feared the day would come when I just gave up and moved on to the next job, a job that carried me fractionally closer to a career, but never all the way. I feared I’d creep forward like that, enacting Zeno’s paradox deep into my forties. And then what?
It didn’t happen. Two writers burned out and quit unexpectedly. Two women. One spot went to an outside hire, Layla, and the other to Julian. Julian put in a word for me and I interviewed for the writers’ assistant job. The first time I sat down with Gil, we were interrupted by his phone buzzing a Times alert. My own phone was off.
A mass shooting at Chicago O’Hare, nineteen dead, six of them children. The monologue would have to be rewritten on the fly with the tone calibrated. They’d have to consult Hugo about how he wanted to handle it. More news would probably break during the taping—the identity of the shooter, his online radicalization and otherwise clean record, his wild-eyed mug shot, and the administration’s hollow statement—dating it before it even aired.
A writer named Tony popped his head in the door. “You’re needed.”
Gil nodded at him. He was already standing up. To me he said, “Are you sure you want this job?”
“Definitely,” I said too quickly, and Gil shook his head.
We rescheduled for a couple of days later, and that time Gil was in a buoyant mood, eating a burrito over his laptop. I watched him take a piece of green pepper off the space bar and pop it into his mouth. A megafamous pop star had been on the night before and ratings had rebounded slightly. In a few months we’d get word we were canceled, but that day he felt good. He hired me.
The strangest part of the wait was the moment it ended. By that point it was such a well-worn groove. You couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t quite trust it. Thought at any minute you’d be thrust back. But space was made, in the shift between stasis and motion. And into that space seeped hope. You would not always be waiting. Something had to happen eventually.
My phone buzzed on my lap and I fumbled to pick it up. It was Julian. I’d forgotten that I’d told him to come here.
“You sound weird,” he said. “I’m outside. There’s a guy with a clipboard. Do I need to be on a list or something? Did you put me on a list?”
I hadn’t thought to put Julian on a list. I hadn’t thought there’d be a list. In spite of what I’d been told, I’d envisioned a large barbecue. No barbecue I’d ever been to had a list.
“I’ll come out,” I said.
I went outside and half jogged through the drizzle. My heels sank into the gravel. The gate was open and a security guard stood waiting to check in cars. He had the hood of his windbreaker up. The paper on his clipboard was getting wet. I reached the gate and saw Julian’s Volvo parked on the shoulder. Inside, he sat perfectly still.
“You can let him in,” I said to the guy.
A long conversation followed about who I was. He looked around in disbelief. I could hear music playing from Julian’s car, a Talking Heads song. The day before I wanted him there, but now I could see that inviting him was a mistake. He already seemed out of place. The Volvo had a missing hubcap and a battered side mirror. Someone had tried to peel the Harvard sticker off the back window and left a streaky mess.
A black sedan pulled up behind Julian’s car. The driver tapped the horn.
“You know what?” said the guard. “I don’t really care.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He waved Julian through. The Volvo’s tires kicked up gravel. I got into the front seat and said hi and he said hi and we both laughed.
Julian said, “What are you wearing?”
“A dress,” I said.
He himself was wearing the blazer he’d had on the one time I’d gone to his apartment. He’d had the foresight to take the hammer and sickle pin off the lapel.
Julian said, almost happily, “I regret coming here so much.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
We had done something stupid and were now being forced to ride out the consequences. The dread was exhilarating. A second guy dressed in all black pointed out where to park. The caterer’s van was there, and only a few other cars. Even the MG had been stowed back in the hangar to await repairs.
“I fucking brought something,” Julian said.
“What?”
“I brought cookies.”
He pulled out a white bakery bag splotched in places with grease and showed me the contents. It was those dusty sandwich cookies with red jelly inside from an Italian bakery.
“Definitely don’t bring that in,” I said.
It was good manners to bring a food item, he told me. It was de rigueur. Plus, he’d made a special trip to Little Italy. He’d gotten up early to do it. It had been a mob scene down there, tourists everywhere. He thought it might have been San Gennaro.
“San Gennaro’s in the fall,” I said.
“No one knows exactly when it is.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “I’m bringing them.”
He located an umbrella under the backseat—a five-dollar bodega umbrella with two broken spokes—and attempted to hold it over us as we made our way to the backyard.
Out on the patio, the rain was melting the ice in the huge chrome champagne bucket and a caterer was looking around for someone to help him move it. Julian grabbed one side and they heaved it into the tent. We paused for a minute, waiting for our eyes to adjust. Julian set his crumpled bag of cookies next to a multitiered cupcake stand on the buffet table. It looked like trash.
“There’s something on your head,” he said. “What is it?”
“A bruise.”
“He didn’t . . . He didn’t hit you, did he?”
“Nothing like that. Wildlife mishap. Possum in the road.”
He was quiet, maybe trying to determine whether he should press harder. I could sense him deciding, feeling around for where the boundaries were. We were far outside the code we’d established. I’d ridden in his car; he’d seen me in a party dress. We’d talked on the phone twice now. Then he seemed to give up.
“This is neither the time nor the place,” he said. “But it’s opossum.”
“I’m aware.”
He turned and took stock of the tent, the parquet dance floor, the fairy lights shimmering around the perimeter, the white linen tablecloths lifting and lowering in the wind. The musicians were drinking pilsners, laughing softly among themselves. There were a handful of guests, the ones I’d seen arrive and five or six others. The girls who’d come in the Uber were standing with the hedge fund guy, who continued to vape. The end of his pen glowed blue. One table was occupied by scattered guests who’d left buffer seats between them. The older couple I’d seen before took turns righting a vase that kept falling over, until the woman said, “Enough,” and set it on the ground.
Over at the bar, a man in a yellow raincoat and fishing hat was asking a lot of questions. I heard the bartender repeat, “I don’t know,” several times. The man held his palms up and motioned around the tent.
“Now what?” said Julian.
Julian and I had gotten drunk together before, mostly during our page year, mostly at TGI Fridays. On particularly hard days, Julian could be persuaded to open a tab with his father’s credit card. His dad only ever mentioned it to Julian if the bill was truly obscene. It was easy to spend Julian’s dad’s money, easier still to rack up a tab at Fridays, which had bad food at bad prices—a Midtown hallmark.
We’d drink our sloshing drinks, eat the fruit garnishes, order appetizers, and commiserate about whatever it was that day that had been so awful. A guy who’d gotten handsy, a pigeon in the atrium. The kind of thing that never rose above the level of workplace anecdote. And when we’d had enough to drink, when the guardrails of inhibition were down, we’d move on to our real topic: ourselves. Our opinions, our takes. What we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Which comedians were good, which were bad, whose career we’d take, given the chance, whose we’d leave. It was at Fridays that I first heard about Mates. Maybe it was at Fridays that Julian had come up with it.
The tent shimmied in the wind and we got drinks. The man in the raincoat was still at the bar, sipping an Old Fashioned garnished with a curlicue of orange rind.
“You two,” he said. “Where is everyone? Where is Hugo? What exactly is going on here?”
It was obvious what was going on. The rain pounding the tent made it obvious. The wind gusting in to knock over the chunky glass vases. The tablecloths, wet now, and covered in a spill of purple flowers.
Julian said, “Maybe a miscommunication about the date?”
“I don’t think so,” said the man. “It’s been held on the same day, Memorial Day, every year for twenty years. I should know. I live right across the street. Maybe you saw the place on the way in? Looks like an old villa?” He held out his hand. “Edward McGuire,” he said. “Ted.”
Handshakes and introductions, and then Ted went on. “I don’t get it. I can remember other years that it rained. A certain percentage of Memorial Days it’s gonna rain, right? It rained three years ago and everyone just came in the tent until it stopped. No big deal. It was even kind of fun. Cozy. Like camping with two hundred of your closest friends. So if it’s not the weather, then what is it?”
He paused like we might actually think of an answer.
“An off year,” I said finally.
Ted McGuire sipped his Old Fashioned and watched the storm through the door of the tent. A table on the patio blew over, bringing a chair with it, and none of us made a move to do anything about it. “Who did you kids say you were again?”
It was a fair question, but I didn’t want to mention the show to Ted McGuire. I didn’t want to hear his condolences about it ending, or his theories as to why. He seemed full of theories. Ted McGuire must have been good at something to secure a giant fake villa in Greenwich, Connecticut, but I doubted his talents extended to media criticism. At some point he’d taken off the fishing hat and his hair was squashed down evenly on all sides of his head. He looked like one of the Three Stooges.
“I’m Hugo’s German tutor,” I said.
“And I’m her German tutor,” said Julian, pointing at me.
Ted didn’t know what to do with that. “That’s . . . huh. Hugo’s learning German? But if you’re a German tutor,” he said to me, “why do you need . . .” He patted the pockets of his raincoat, searching for his phone. “You know what? I should really call Linda and tell her not to bother coming by. She won’t be happy if she treks all the way over here for nothing. Will you excuse me?”
He put on his hat, pulled his hood up over it, drained his drink, and walked out into the rain to make the call. We turned back to the bartender. To thank us for getting rid of Ted McGuire, she opened the nice scotch. Julian told her he’d only ever had it once, at his cousin’s wedding at the Rainbow Room.
She said, “Mazel tov.”
He said, “It was six years ago.”
She said, “Could you legally drink then?”
He said, “Maybe. What are you, a cop?”
I couldn’t believe it: Julian was flirting. I’d never seen it before. I knew he dated. He was on the apps like everyone and sometimes he mentioned his girlfriend from college, who worked at a nonprofit and was engaged to a tech bro. But I’d never witnessed any evidence of sexual interest in another person. I didn’t think his laser focus allowed for it.
I left him to it and went to the mouth of the tent to watch for Hugo. Rain lashed the house and I pictured it gone, underwater, blown away. The same images sometimes came to me in the city. I’d be walking to the subway after work and see the streets empty and crumbling. Whitecaps on Broadway, trees bent to ninety degrees. Barnacles climbing the buildings like vines. New York will always be there, was something people said to justify leaving it. But it wouldn’t be, not always. Maybe it would in my lifetime, but one day it would cease to stand. It would sink into the rising ocean or it’d go another way. Fire, ice, locusts, class warfare, the bomb. Or excess; that’s what brought down Rome. Like picturing my parents dead when I was little, the thought left me bereft.
Spencer opened the sliding glass door. He stood on the threshold, the strap of a duffel bag slung diagonally across his chest. We looked at each other through the rain that came down in loud splashing sheets. It was like seeing him through a fish tank. A whole universe swam between us, creatures adrift on strange, shifting currents.
As a good-bye, I didn’t mind it. It was better than a lingering full-body hug or any words we might have exchanged. We’d said what we had to say, about his father anyway. Another conversation would just be a reprisal. It was unlikely we’d see each other again, but we would probably follow each other on social media. The idea depressed me and I resolved not to do it even as I acknowledged that I probably would. In the abstract, I’d have rather lost touch with Spencer, the better to forget all the weekend’s worst details, but in the concrete, I was curious about his vacations.
Spencer cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted something I couldn’t hear. I shook my head. He shouted it again, but it was just formless boy sound, a sonic blur that didn’t resolve into anything like words. I shook my head and waved. His face was a smudge on the other side of the weather. He turned around—navy jacket, stuffed maroon duffel, ubiquitous black Yankees cap—and waving absently over his shoulder, walked into the house.
Julian appeared next to me. “Who are you waving to? Was that Spencer?”
“Yeah.”
“The wilds of boarding school,” I said. “From whence he came.”
“Is he a little shitheel, Spencer?”
Julian already seemed tipsy. His top button was undone and his hair had fallen partway over one eye. I didn’t feel like launching into a long description of Spencer’s character. I didn’t feel like I could explain it anyway, not so Julian would understand.
“Kinda. You know the type.”
“We’ll see him in a writers’ room in four or five years.”
“Nah,” I said. “We’ll see him on TV.”
“I want a tour of the house,” said Julian.
“What about your girlfriend?” I said.
I motioned back behind us toward the bartender.
“She doesn’t get off until the end of this thing. If this thing is a thing.”
I looked around the tent. The European couple rose to leave. Ted McGuire was still stomping around the yard. His yellow form streaked past a window. The jazz trio struck up Miles Davis’s “So What?” and even I could hear their sarcasm.
“It might not be a thing.”
“Let’s go,” said Julian.
He handed me the busted umbrella, gave the bartender a sheepish smile, and took off across the yard. He held his glass in one hand and used the other as a lid for his whiskey. I opened the umbrella, arranged the fabric over the broken spokes as best I could, and made a run for the kitchen doors.
Inside, the catering staff lounged against the appliances, ignoring us. Trays of hors d’oeuvres sat on the island, daubed and skewered, artfully arranged, ready to be passed. I ate a doll-sized potato pancake, looking the blond lady right in the eyes. She opened her mouth to say something, but then she didn’t.
Julian was panting. “Do I take off my shoes?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter.”
He looked at me, pained, and bent to untie them. “They’re wet. And a little muddy.”
I took a certain comfort in Julian’s social unease. It reminded me of my parents, their desire to comport themselves perfectly in all social situations and the immense strain this caused them, effectively preventing it. I was like that, too. I had pulled off downward mobility, but the stifling sense of decorum remained. You could live paycheck to paycheck, no assets, no cushion, cover your bills with a kind of credit line three-card monte, and still you beat your brains out over whether or not to take your shoes off in a well-appointed living room.
I took mine off. We lined them up by the door, his brown suede desert boots, my low heels. Julian had also taken his socks off, arguing that they were just as wet. We both gazed down at our bare toes on Hugo’s hardwood floor, something I never expected to see.
Ana came in and handed me the cordless phone.
“For you,” she said, and walked away.
Julian said, “Someone called you here? On a landline?”
“I have no idea,” I said, and into the phone, “Hello?”
It was Roman. “June,” he said. “Listen. I called to talk about what happened in the hot tub the other day. You were right that we shouldn’t have had Heaven in there.”
“Well that’s . . . Really?” I said.
“Hell no, I’m kidding. I called because I can’t make it tonight and I want you to tell Hugo.”
Julian mouthed to me, Who is it?
I covered the receiver. “Roman Doyle.”
His lips parted slowly and stuck like that. Julian had been one of Roman’s favorite targets. Roman called him an Ivy League snowflake, a Jewish American princess. Asked him to recite his Torah portion. Found out his father worked on Wall Street and terrorized him with it. And when people complained to HR, which Julian did, which a lot of us did, Roman issued a semiapology and Hugo stepped in to smooth the whole thing over. We didn’t want to become one of those PC writers’ rooms, did we? One of those trigger warning rooms? Where you couldn’t even joke about something as anodyne as rosacea or obesity or having a limp without someone running out in tears?
I said to Roman, “Why not tell Hugo yourself?”
A long silence. I could hear in the background the bark of a sports announcer narrating a game. Julian was shaking his head slowly.
“I just can’t,” said Roman. “It’s a bummer.”
“A bummer?”
“Yeah, it sucks too bad. Dealing with him right now.”
“Why aren’t you coming anyway?”
“Go to the window,” he said.
I turned around to face the yard. The light outside was yellow-brown. Chunks of hail pelted the tent and pinged the kitchen door. The swimming pool frothed like a hot spring.
“Biblical business,” said Roman. “End times. Ellen feels weird about it. Superstitious. She wants to stay home and read the tarot.”
“Sorry, I meant Gypsy. Ellen was her name before. Back in Texas. She never felt like it had anything in particular to do with her. The name Ellen. Unlike Gypsy, which fits her perfectly. It wasn’t until she started calling herself Gypsy that she really came into her own.”
“But the word gypsy . . .” I started to say.
“Can you not this one time?”
“Fine.”
“There are a lot of people there, though, right? So he probably won’t even notice that I’m not there.”
“Not a lot, no,” I said. “Not very many at all.”
He was quiet again. “How bad? Fifty not a lot, or zero not a lot?”
“Closer to zero than fifty.”
“No Laura? No Bony? No finance dudes wearing, like, vests? No neighbors? That guy Ed or Ted isn’t there who lives across the street in that horrible Italianate place? He’s always showing up at Hugo’s parties.”
“Ted is here,” I said. “Ted and basically no one else. Hugo had a fight with Laura yesterday. I don’t know where Bony is. He chose today not to be a sidekick.”
“Shit. Should I come? I have to come, don’t I?”
It was probably useless, unless he was going to phone tree all of Hugo’s other friends. All the famous comedians and hedge fund guys and golf buddies and hot women half his age. The whole dusty Rolodex, because you knew he had one, with a cloudy black lid and heavy off-white card stock, purchased for him by an assistant in the eighties and still kicking around the house somewhere.
“Don’t come,” I said. “It won’t help.”
It would only make the problem more pronounced, I told him. Underline it. Roman should call him tomorrow and make amends, take him out to lunch or to the strip club or to the sketchy massage parlor. Tell him Ellen/Gypsy distrusted hail.
“We don’t go to strip clubs together,” said Roman.
“Sure,” I said. “Maybe you can ask him yourself if he’s okay, while the two of you eat your crab salads or get your happy endings.”
“You’re being gross,” said Roman.
I felt a rush of anger. He was the gross one. A big, seeping blemish on the face of the show. I was tempted to tell him how much the staff hated him, but I knew he’d only laugh. We weren’t even a staff anymore, just a loose association of people bound by a failed cause. Plus, he hated us right back. The way we voted and the things we read, our educations and the causes we cared about. It would please Roman to know that I’d once seen Gil spit into the gutter on Forty-eighth Street after saying his name. I could see him repeating that one to his hot tub friends. I could see them laughing about it under the brims of their hats.
What’s more, he was a shoddy guardian of Hugo’s well-being. They all were: him, Laura, and Bony, too. They were falling away now that they didn’t need him anymore. Now that he wasn’t in a position to do anything for them. I couldn’t believe how obvious it was.
“I think we’re done here,” I said.
“Will you tell him I called?” said Roman.
“If you want.”
“Tell him Heaven got sick. That’s a valid excuse.”
“I’m not saying that.”
We hung up and I put the phone down on an end table.
“Should I even ask?” said Julian.
“There’s not that much to tell,” I said.
Only that I’d gone to his house, drunk his booze, smoked his weed, saw where his daughter was born. Only that I’d tried to understand his wife and failed. Tried to understand him and failed.
“Roman can’t come.”
“Good,” said Julian.
I gave him the tour I had given myself on Saturday morning. The furniture, the art, the wine cellar and basement comedy club. He walked onto the stage and said something into the mic, but it wasn’t on. His voice sounded quiet and without resonance. What he said was: This place gives me the creeps.
I took him down another level and into the bunker, flipped on the light. He thought it was impressive. He’d hated the comedy club—it felt like a mausoleum, he said—but this room he got. He walked the rows, studying the stickers and pointing out his favorite shows. He liked the ones from the early days that experimented with form. He liked that they risked total failure from the ground up. His favorite episode, maybe ever, was one from the nineties where they’d found another guy named Hugo Best living in the Keys and gone down and shot the show in his living room. Hugo wasn’t even in that episode; the other guy had hosted. His best friend, Graham, had done Bony’s job, playing the show in and out of commercial with Jimmy Buffett covers. He’d done a good job, the other Hugo. Such a good job that it made you wonder why any schmo off the street couldn’t be a talk show host. Which had been the point.
“Then Hugo quit making shows like that,” said Julian.
He stopped in front of a row of tapes, stretched his arms to their full length. “For instance, this whole section could go right in the trash.”
It was the last shelf chronologically, the most recent run of shows going back a year. Last week’s tapes had not made it there yet, by whatever means they’d arrive, and there was room left for them. There was room, too, for more tapes. The previous week’s would slot in and there’d still be a foot of bare shelving. The whole shelf below it sat empty, and the whole shelf below that. They’d be empty forever unless Hugo took up taxidermy and filled them up with bug-eyed squirrels and geese in flight.
“What was the date of our first show?” asked Julian. “As pages?”
We found the relevant month and year and tried to puzzle it out. We narrowed it down to one or two days. Neither of us could remember which day of the week it had been.
“Who was even on?” I said.
“It was that grande dame. The one who’s still got nice breasts.”
“That’s right.”
I remembered it only dimly. Much more real to me was the physical memory of standing up for so many hours. Tingling pain pulsed up and down my hamstrings. My feet felt huge and archless, two bags of blood jammed into sneakers. The fatigue was mixed with a crazy adrenaline, the adrenaline fueled by marrow-level certainty that I would make a mistake. So I missed the actress, her prepared witticism, her youthful cleavage, her story about her tomato plants or grandchildren or the movie she’d done as a girl with Alfred Hitchcock. Or I’d seen it and not seen it. Which is what happened with the show more or less permanently and faster than I expected. It became the backdrop to my more immediate concerns. Which was to say, a job.
I reached for the shelf and pulled out the video in the range of our first day and handed it to Julian. It left a conspicuous gap, which I covered by spreading the tapes out more loosely.
“Take it,” I said.
“Are you nuts?” said Julian. “He’ll notice.”
“He won’t. But if he does, they’re digitized. His assistant will make another copy.”
“I think you’ve gotten too comfortable in this house.”
“It means more to you than it does to him, so the moral thing to do is actually to take it.”
“You’ve lost it,” he said. “You’re Robin Hooding.”
“Take it. You came all the way out here.”
He held it in front of him, running his thumb over the label. Then he tucked it under his arm. “Fuck it. What the hell.”
We left the bunker and went back upstairs. I kept expecting to run into Hugo. I wondered how I’d explain Julian’s presence. I had invited him on impulse and promptly forgotten about it, and now he was here in the house, barefoot and dripping, committing a theft I had goaded him into. The main hazards of this life were one’s own impulses: rogue, slippery, and plainly demonic.
Hugo wasn’t on the second floor either. Spencer’s room looked different. The mound of clothes had been loaded into his duffel and spirited away to New Hampshire. The bed had been made, probably by Ana, and the room smelled like cleaning product. The guest room had been cleaned up, too, my presence mostly erased. My tote bag had been tidied and tucked in a corner, my glasses on the nightstand returned to their case.
At the end of the hall Hugo’s door was open. I had a momentary premonition we’d go in and find him dead. Inert on his bed or blue faced and swinging, finished off by a belt of premium leather. But the room was empty and unhaunted, except for the Stella, looming like the great and powerful Oz, made spookier by the shadows of raindrops streaming down the window and the odd quality of light.
I paused on the threshold—I had a nervous feeling about being in there, like we were about to get caught—but Julian went to the window. Tentatively, I followed.
Outside, the tops of the pines bent toward the house and then away. The wind on the roof of the tent made a muffled rustling. Something metal had torn loose and rung at intervals against a tent pole.
With a glance at the door, Julian went into the walk-in closet in the corner of the room. I followed him, asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was looking for pinstripes. I think he expected a row of identical suits, lined up like superhero costumes. But there weren’t any. Just shirts and pants, shoes stowed in cubbies, a stack of cashmere sweaters on an upper shelf, and the smell of cedar. The pinstriped suits had been kept in the wardrobe department in the city on a series of flimsy wheeled racks, and now they would go I didn’t know where. One to the Smithsonian, one to a charity auction, a couple to Hugo, and several more to the Dumpster.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’re overstepping.”
“Overstepping? You made me steal something earlier.”
“I was younger then,” I said.
“We all were. Just let me look for a minute.”
He opened a shallow drawer and started rifling through socks. It hadn’t taken much to embolden Julian. One scotch and a petty theft. I didn’t know what he thought he was going to find. Maybe he wanted a talisman, something charged with Hugo’s success that he could carry around for luck. Cuff links, a coin, a money clip. I remembered what Hugo had said at the diner. The more you had, the more people wanted to take from you.
He held up a silk tie, flipped it over to study the label. “Classy guy.”
“Do you want to hear a secret about Hugo?” I said.
Julian said, “Always.”
“He was stabbed, back in the seventies. It’s a big, mysterious thing. A semisecret. Spencer told me about it. It happened at a comedy club, apparently, outside of one, and Laura saved his life. I asked Hugo, but he was cagey with the details. It happened, though. He was definitely stabbed.”
Julian shook a cigar box, opened it up, and smelled the inside. “Oh yeah, by his sister, right?”
“What?”
“His sister, Vivian. Do you think he’d notice if I took one of these?” He held up a cigar. “Or is stealing more than one thing overkill?”
I stared at him.
He said, “You’re right. Probably overkill. Just one thing makes narrative sense. Two is too much. Weakens the symbolism.”
He put it back into the box, put the box back into the drawer, moved on to shoes, studying brands, knocking shoe trees together.
“What do you mean his sister did it? How do you know about it?”
“I don’t know. It’s out there. I read about it in one of the books, I think. Not sure which one. The unauthorized biography, probably. It’s one of those open secret things. Everyone knows about it and talks about it. So not a secret at all is what I’m getting at.”
“It wasn’t in his memoir.”
“Of course not. He hates talking about it.”
“But it’s not on the Internet either.”
“You sure about that? Did you look?”
He brought out his phone. It hadn’t occurred to me to look. An episode like that I thought I’d know about. And if it was on the Internet, why wouldn’t Spencer know about it, too? Did he blindly trust what his father told him, or did he, like me, assume he already knew everything there was to know about Hugo Best? I waited, overwhelmed by the cedar smell, by the wool and leather smell, by the closeness of the space.
Julian said, “Yeah, right here. You just didn’t look, did you?”
“I didn’t look.”
“ ‘In 1978, Hugo Best was stabbed by his sister, aspiring actress Vivian Bechkowiak, outside the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. He was treated at Good Samaritan Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard for multiple stab wounds and penetrating abdominal trauma, and held for observation for six days.’ See?”
He held up his phone to show me the article he was reading. “Granted this site is called celebrityinjuries.com, so grain of salt. But those are pretty much the facts, I think.”
I sat down on the floor. The closet was carpeted, beige, thick pile. I ran my hand over it. Julian sat down across from me, still holding a dress shoe. Hugo could tell me whatever he wanted, conceal whatever he wanted. That was his right. So why did I feel blindsided by the omission?
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?” I said. “He told me other things.”
Julian perked up. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
Now that I thought about it, he hadn’t really told me that much. Facts about wine. His preferences in comedians. A story about Studio 54 that seemed untrue. Some broad strokes about his history with Laura.
“You’re withholding,” said Julian. “Don’t withhold.”
“I’m not withholding.”
“Have you hooked up with him?”
“Don’t say hooked up. You sound like an eighth-grader.”
“I’m just curious if his—”
“Julian.”
“But he’s good at fucking, right? You can tell he’s good. Actually, I could see it going either way.” He paused. “At least tell me what you’re getting in return.”
“Getting?”
“It’s a quid pro quo thing, is it not? I mean, no offense.”
I thought about it. I hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it kind of was. Hugo hadn’t spelled it out; he didn’t have to. It was obvious, inherent. Like the foundation of a house. You didn’t ever see or think about it, but it propped the whole thing up. Though I had pretended otherwise, the two of us spending even one minute together outside of work could never be anything but transactional. And I had known that. I’d known it all along and even enjoyed it, enjoyed the feeling of transgression, the illicit thrill. The yeasty buzz it gave me to be using my young-womanness at last shrewdly, at last toward some quantifiable gain, at last with a modicum of control.
“I guess it is,” I said.
“Right. So what are you getting?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like we signed a contract. Are these things usually explicit?”
Julian said, “You didn’t pin him down on anything concrete? You’re not going to end up with anything. I would have pinned him down. I would have made him say what I was getting.”
I laughed, imagining Julian bartering with Hugo in advance of some sex act. Cutting a deal, getting him to throw in extras. What was sex worth anyway, in the favor economy? Mentorship? A useful introduction? A job? And how did it break down? Did full penetration earn you more? Could you save up a bunch of credits from smaller stuff, hand jobs, light groping, and bank them toward a bigger payoff? Or were you supposed to hold out on the sex, dangle it, until you got what you wanted? I voiced a few of these aloud.
Julian said, “You don’t make a very good opportunist.”
I shook my head. It didn’t come naturally to me. I lacked the grit. Maybe it was why I hadn’t succeeded in my career. I didn’t have what it took to go out and take what I wanted through manipulation or force. I wasn’t cold-blooded.
I thought again of Hugo’s sister.
“What if she had a good reason?” I said. “Vivian. She must have had a reason. People don’t stab without a reason.”
“Sure they do,” said Julian. “Things happen for no reason all the time. They canceled the show for no reason.”
“They had a reason. You know they did. Don’t connect this to the show. It’s completely unrelated.”
He said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t really think about anything else.”
His face collapsed and he started to cry. I was startled. The first time we had ever hung out together one-on-one and he was showing me the whole range. Earlier he’d flirted, now he sobbed. I reached out and patted his arm, the one still cradling Hugo’s patent leather shoe. He cried harder.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re gonna be great.”
He was Harvard educated, medium rich, brilliant, if you could stand him. He would get another job so fast it had basically already happened. But he wasn’t crying about his job prospects, I realized. He was crying for the loss of an idea. The idea of the show and working for the show. The show as temple, the show as religion. He hadn’t been jaded before and now he was. He’d believed before and now he didn’t. He was new before and now he was scarred. And what a loss. Seriously, if I thought about it, what a loss. A boy who had dreamed of opening monologues and canned laughter under a triptych of Wayne Gretzky action shots was now just another wounded adult weeping in a stranger’s closet.
I pried the shoe out of his hands and put it back where it belonged.
“But I’m not done looking,” said Julian.
“We’re done,” I said.
We turned off the light in Hugo’s room and went back downstairs. Everyone who’d been in the tent was now in the kitchen. The musicians had their feet up on their hard black cases. Ted McGuire had taken his coat off and cornered Ana near the fridge. The two young girls were sitting on the island: one was braiding the other’s hair. The place had the feel of a doomsday party. The air of cheer that accompanied worst fears confirmed. The bartender made gin and tonics and handed one to each of us. I still didn’t like gin, but I drank it anyway.
She asked who we were and Julian said a couple of nobodies. Everyone laughed. He seemed better. He was using his pillaged videotape as a coaster. I guess he’d cried it out. I was jealous. He’d shown up, had some good booze, gotten closure. Now he could go back to the city and find a way forward. Let the years condense what had happened into a hard, bright story to be told at dinner parties. But where was my catharsis?
The clock over the stove read six, two hours after the party’s appointed start time. Ana stretched plastic wrap over the hors d’oeuvres and cheeses. She told us that a few other people had called with their regrets. Hugo’s lawyer and his assistant. The director Brett Ratner. It was the weather, they said. Such a weird, grim night.
We drank our gin and watched the wind undo a lot of expensive landscaping. At one point a car pulled into the driveway, headlights shining dully in the rain. Ana jumped up to greet whoever it was, but by that time the car had already pulled back out.
“Not enough cars,” she explained solemnly.
The guy in the chef’s jacket cleared his throat. “So what should we do with the pig?”
I pictured them taking it outside the gate and rolling it onto the curb. Discarding it the way you did an old futon in the city. I pictured it lying there with an apple in its mouth. I pictured its eyes, like the opossum’s, dead and reflective.
She motioned outside. He sat alone in the tent. Through the plate glass, I could see him there in his summer suit, legs stretched out in front of him, frowning into a drink.
“How long has he been out there?”
“I don’t know. Forty minutes, an hour.”
“He’s the one that sent us in here,” said the bartender.
Ana handed me a striped golf umbrella and said, “You go rescue him now.”
I made a run for it from the kitchen’s sliding doors. Under my bare feet, the pool deck was gritty and unexpectedly warm. I crossed the stretch of wet grass and Hugo rose to greet me.
“No one came,” he said.
“Look at the weather.”
“Not even Bony Suarez. I made that fuck’s career.”
I lowered the golf umbrella. “I came,” I said. “Is that worth anything?”
I actually wanted to know. Hugo looked at me for the first time.
“You look nice,” he said.
“Thanks, Jan does good work. She trimmed it a little.”
“That’s her secret. She always trims it a little. That’s the Jan magic.” He rubbed the shoulder of my dress with his thumb. “This is pretty.”
His attention still did things to me. I suspected it would even if my jumbled feelings resolved into hatred. My crush on him had been cultivated over a lifetime, and only grown more complex. He was a person to me now, and a person who could help me if he chose to. If he liked me enough. The setting only made it more pronounced. The lush backyard that went on forever, the house, not a museum but almost, which I could see lit up like a lantern through the flapping entrance of the tent.
“We can’t stay out here,” I said. “We’ll get killed by lightning bolts. I’m holding an umbrella. That’s a textbook don’t.”
“Did I see Julian in there?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take my chances out here.”
“I invited him,” I said. “It was a bad idea. I’m sorry. I did it yesterday after we played tennis. I was feeling vulnerable or something. I don’t know. He’s under strict orders not to mention Mates, if that helps at all.”
“You don’t have to apologize for inviting your friend. You thought it was a party.” There was a bottle on the table next to him and he refilled his glass. “They cooked a whole pig. An animal died.”
“Forget the pig,” I said. “The pig won’t go to waste. Everyone will take some home. Their families will be grateful. Ted McGuire will take some to Linda.”
“I don’t want to go in there,” he said. “The idea of sending all those kids home.”
I understood. He’d have to offer an explanation, be dry about it. Pretend he didn’t care. He’d have to make a joke.
“Then let’s not,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
He finished his drink and poured two more fingers.
“Duck Soup,” he said.
I opened the umbrella, blue and white, wide as a second tent.
“Duck Soup,” I agreed. As if I knew what that meant, as if that’s what I had been saying all along.
Duck Soup was a yacht docked in Greenwich harbor, named for the Marx Brothers classic. I had seen the movie a long time ago. I didn’t remember much about it except that Groucho becomes the improbable leader of a small, failing country, and possibly it’s racist. And of course, the famous mirror scene, where one character pretends to be another’s reflection, perfectly imitating every move. The illusion is so effective that eventually the viewer loses track of who is reflecting whom.
Hugo texted Cal to take us to the marina, and he pulled the hulking black SUV around front. We hunched under the big umbrella, skirting the house to meet him. The lawn was drenched now, warm and muddy, and my bare feet sank in. I didn’t bother to grab my shoes or say good-bye to Julian. I caught a flash of him as we passed and he looked fine. He was laughing anyway, and drinking, which is about as much as a person can ask for. I knew I would see him again. One way or another, and likely sooner than I expected.
It was cold in the car, so Hugo turned on the seat warmers. My back and legs became hot, right on the threshold of unbearable and pleasant. Hugo sulked with one foot up on the seat in front of him, unwrapping a stick of gum from a pack in the ashtray. I remembered our ride out here. It hit me like a long-repressed memory, though it had only been on Friday.
Cal parked in the marina and pulled out a newspaper. He was confident we wouldn’t be long. This was no kind of night to be on a boat, even one that was docked. He wanted to know what kind of sick crackers go on a boat on a night like this.
The hail had given way to rain and the dock was waterlogged, slick. White hulls rose on either side, creaking as they pitched in the rough water. Hugo walked swiftly down this corridor, yanking me along with an arm looped through mine. We had forgotten the umbrella in the car, and the rain made translucent dots on my dress.
Duck Soup was indistinguishable from the others. It sat between Bernadette and My Way, all three of them Alpine white and sheer as cliffs rising out of the water. Hugo helped me aboard and led me to the cabin, reciting pertinent features. The boat was long, I gathered. The boat could move fast. The boat had various amenities. He kept calling it “her.” He named some of the famous people who had ridden on her and the places they’d gone. This mogul to the Hamptons, this rap collective to Miami, this now-disgraced politician right through the eye of a tropical storm and all the way to Turks and Caicos.
Belowdecks the churn of the bay felt less pronounced. In a central salon he turned on the lights and stood back to watch my reaction. The room had dark wood paneling and modern maroon couches. It was cozy and luxurious, in perfect taste like all his possessions.
“Wow,” I said, though I was getting tired of being impressed.
“I’ll make us some drinks. Choose an album.”
He ducked into the galley. Naturally the boat would be stocked for the eventuality of a last-minute pleasure cruise. Everything he wanted was anticipated and planned for, there already like built-in shelving. If he wanted a change of scene, his boat awaited. If he wanted a cocktail, he had only to reach out his arm.
A long shelf held hundreds of CDs. I went looking for something moody, maybe some Coltrane for a rainy night, and found that they were all comedy albums. Hundreds of them in jewel cases, alphabetized.
“Of course,” I said aloud.
In the Bs I found Hugo’s own albums, four of them from his early career. I pulled out Second Best, the one that had gone gold and hung on the rec room wall. There was Hugo with his gag gun. He looked young, my age maybe, on the brink of thirty.
I popped the disc out of its case and put it on. Hugo’s early work had been political, angry. I could hear in his cadence and intensity the influence of Lenny Bruce. You dig, man? and that sort of thing.
Hugo returned with our drinks and set them down on the coffee table. I sat cross-legged on the floor. The maroon couches rose and fell, and through the salon windows I could see Bernadette doing the same.
On the stereo, young Hugo was doing the bit about baby Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon had been orchestrating cover-ups since infancy, it went. Baby Richard Nixon had his guys bug the delivery room where he was born. Baby Richard Nixon had transcripts of very telling conversations between the OB-GYN and the RN on duty. And so on.
“Turn this off. It’s embarrassing.”
“No it’s not,” I said. “It’s good.”
“Turn it off,” he repeated, more firmly. The boat yawed and the drinks slid off the table and spilled on the rug. He knelt to right the glasses.
“June.” He softened. “Please.”
The audience was laughing and applauding. I reached up and turned it off.
He’d sunk to the floor, with his back against a sofa. The boat was large, but the inside had a compact feel, a feel of the world in miniature. Sitting there on the floor we could have been two kids in a fort.
“I can’t stand to listen to that stuff anymore,” he said. “It makes me feel like an old cliché. It makes me too conscious of my mistakes.”
“Which cliché?” I asked. “Which mistakes?”
“Oh, just all of them.”
Women for one, he said. Young women. The same thing you always heard: a string of infidelities unspooling toward infinity in both directions. Kitty Rosenthal, but not just her. She was the one people knew about. A stand-in for all the Kitty Rosenthals. She just showed how reckless he’d gotten, how brazen. How desperate he was to explode his marriage.
Allison had known. Of course she had. She knew who he was when she married him. And besides that there was plenty to tip her off. He’d been discreet at first, and then less discreet when it became clear that she was just going to ignore it. If she asked him where he’d been he’d tell her the dentist. Every time, no matter what time of day it was, ad absurdum. It became a joke between them. A dark, cruel in-joke, sexually charged, and not exactly funny.
They didn’t see that much of each other anyway. She spent half the year in LA shooting her sitcom. She preferred it to New York, the sameness of the weather and low-carb options, the infinity pools that linked up seamlessly to the horizon. Spencer had been born in the city, but mostly raised in Malibu. Hugo would visit them a few times a year, or they would visit him, or they would all meet up on vacation in Aspen. Toward the end, the stretches between visits got longer, the visits themselves shorter. The Kitty Rosenthal situation—the public humiliation, the reporters waiting for Allison near school pickup, outside of yoga, in the parking lot of Whole Foods—was a good excuse to kill what was already dying on its own.
“I think she enjoyed playing the scorned woman when the time finally came,” he said. “She enjoyed the dark sunglasses.”
She gave an hour-long primetime interview, dabbing at her eyelashes with a tissue, invoking God and her fans and her stellar costars, her TV family who also happened to be her best friends. She hammed it up. But she deserved her moment and more for what she’d endured. He only wishes they’d both done better by Spencer. He was seven at the time and took it badly. Even though they were an unconventional family to begin with, even though they spent most of their time apart. Spencer blamed Hugo, still did. His resentment had grown, acquiring depth and nuance, and would continue to grow as he became an adult.
And it wasn’t just Spencer. Hugo had other kids, too. He had two daughters from his first marriage who wouldn’t speak to him, who hadn’t for years. Smart girls older than me who’d done all kinds of things. Racked up academic achievements, become professionals, had babies, refused his money. That they’d become whole people was a miracle that had nothing to do with him. Their upbringing had been in the 1980s, a decade he’d spent systematically alienating their mother, shredding his nasal passages with high-quality cocaine, and flying out west for meetings about Airplane knockoffs that ultimately never made it to preproduction.
And all of this would have been fine. All of this would have been permissible if the work had been worth it. Performers, artists, were given leeway for a certain amount of personal weakness, a certain amount of ego. The idea was that their genius justified their bad behavior, that on the cosmic balance sheet their contributions came out ahead of their indiscretions.
“Problem is,” said Hugo, “that mine haven’t.”
He looked down into the glass he was holding, as if he could wish it full again.
“That jackass in the dress shop was right, you know. They pushed me out. They wanted to bring in fresh blood, someone young, and Laura agreed with them. She could have fought, for me, with me. But she didn’t. She talked me into ending it. She was right, too. They probably should have done it years ago. Now she’s going to produce Stay Up with this new kid. Stay Up with Eric Marshall. Does it sound right to you? It doesn’t sound right to me.”
He pointed to the cover of Second Best, still lying out near the CD player.
“That guy would hate me. He’d think I was a panderer and a sellout. A prick.”
I was silent. Hugo looked at my face. “This is the part where you’re supposed to disagree.”
I couldn’t disagree. But I could inch toward him across the space that rose and fell like someone breathing. I could rest my hand on his still-firm bicep. I could give myself over to whatever compromise lay ahead.
In the master bedroom, we stripped to our underwear without touching each other. Out the cabin’s portholes: rain-slashed darkness.
Hugo smiled at me apologetically and turned his back as he yanked off his pants. He hung his suit carefully on the back of a chair, pants folded into a tidy column.
I pretended to look at the floor. Under his clothes, Hugo wore a kind of support garment, a black Lycra leotard for men that held in his pecs and stomach and did God knows what to his dick. He hadn’t been wearing it the night before when he’d gotten undressed in the kitchen. At least I didn’t think so. That meant he put it on for special occasions only—the party or his TV interview. When he peeled it off, his flesh found its natural sag.
I undid the three buttons on the back of my dress and let it fall to the floor. I assumed a half-reclining pose on the red and gold bedspread. Hugo was still struggling with his shapewear. The crotch had snagged on the finely wrought toe of his wingtip—why had he left his shoes on?—and he was stumbling around near the bed in slack white briefs. He had a big man’s lack of grace, and the list of Duck Soup wasn’t helping.
At last he yanked the garment free and tossed it across the room. He watched its trajectory with slumped shoulders, absolutely miserable. But we were here now, beyond the reveal of his girdle, no reason not to press on.
He stood by the bed, fingered the fabric of my underwear.
“Lovely,” he said.
This close I could see a dusky flesh-brown line along his jaw. He was still made up from his E! News interview. His staples were showing through at his hairline and the cakey foundation made his face poreless and plasticine. Between the shapewear and the makeup it was going to be like fucking my maiden aunt. All at once I was flushed with misgiving. Misgiving and also pity. Fame had destroyed him, bred in him pathetic, masculine vanity. He had chosen it, sure. But a long time ago and without knowing it would lead to this: to be turned into a hack, a rouged-up joke, and finally cast out.
His briefs were graying at the waistband and I looked away as I slid them down. I took his dick in my mouth and felt an absurd stab of pride when he started to get hard. There were things I didn’t want to be thinking about. I didn’t want to be having a montage of my time at the show play in my head. I didn’t want to see myself sandbagging the theater, shaking Hugo’s hand, standing outside with Julian during the first snow of the year. I didn’t want to see myself answering phones, playing Thursday Bingo. I certainly didn’t want to see myself collating scripts for the writers. That’s what I was thinking about while I sucked Hugo Best’s dick: collating.
His eyes were closed and he kept a hand on my head the whole time, kneading lightly with his fingers. When he came he made a small choking noise and gripped the back of my neck with a violence that surprised me.
After it was over he moved to cover himself up with a sheet.
He said without malice, “Was it everything you dreamed of?”
He lay against the headboard now, depleted. It was one of those moments that almost couldn’t be endured. I felt like jumping up to pace the room, picking something up and putting it down, making a joke, or being mean just to get a reaction. Anything so I wouldn’t have to be pinned there feeling it. But I was pinned—I had climbed on the bed, too, and he’d thrown an arm across my chest.
So I stared at the ceiling of the boat, maybe the first boat ceiling I’d ever really stared at, and felt terrible and said, “Not really.”
Rolling over to look at him, I noticed the raised scars on his sternum and rib cage. The light was dim, emanating from bulbs hidden in the walls. The scars were the only gritty things in this perfectly nice room. I’d left South Carolina because it was too slick and easy there, its manners covering a multitude of sins. I left because I longed for something authentic, to be poor, to experience life without a syrup coating. And now that I had gotten it, now that I’d been broke in New York for more than a decade, I could see that it was also untenable. It ground you down. You couldn’t live well and you couldn’t live badly. Since they both meant nothing, I concluded, you might as well be rich. You might as well take the good life, leave your principles on the table, do whatever you had to do.
I ran my finger along the scar on his sternum. “Why did Vivian do it?”
“You figured it out,” he said. “How’d you know?”
“The way you talked about it. Something was off. And then Julian thought to Google it. It’s on the Internet, you know.”
He sat up on one elbow to look at me.
“I know. I’m shocked Spencer has never looked for it. You didn’t tell Spencer, did you?”
“I didn’t tell him. But maybe he trusts you, is why. Maybe he likes you more than you think.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Anyway, the facts he has are all true. The blood, the cab, all of it. It just wasn’t a stranger. It was his aunt who did it. Put a kitchen knife in her car. Drove to the Comedy Store to hurt me. I didn’t want him to know that.”
I revised my picture of what happened. I imagined his sister, jittery in her car, replaying years of grievances in her mind. The kitchen knife, her resolve. The sound it must have made: a wet crunch. Had she planned where to hit him so he’d survive? Or had she meant to kill him and failed? And why did I need to know anyway, right now, at this moment? Why did I want him to be human again, the victim?
“So why’d she do it?”
“I guess she was mad.”
“You guess?”
“Okay, she was mad.”
“But why?”
It was about money. His family saw him on TV. He’d been on Carson and was touring, but he wasn’t actually that famous. They thought he was more successful than he was. They thought he owed them something. He helped out when he could. His mom had cancer and he paid for the treatment. He bought her wigs. Different colors and styles so she could experiment.
“The wigs weren’t a big deal,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m bringing them up.”
When they fell behind in the rent, he paid it off. He took them on small vacations. Nothing fancy, but places he could manage. Fort Lauderdale, the Finger Lakes. They got bolder and asked for more. They wanted a house. They got mad when he couldn’t swing it or didn’t want to. They got mad when he ignored their calls.
Vivian especially felt slighted. When he left for California she still had three years of high school. His parents had been adamant that Hugo go to college, but with Vivian, they didn’t push it. After graduation she lived at home and worked as a waitress. She wanted to act. She was smart and pretty. She had red hair like their mother. Maybe she was talented. Hugo didn’t really know. Anyway, she couldn’t get a foothold. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t help her more. He did help her, some. He put her in touch with people he knew in New York. But he was preoccupied with his career, and anyway he couldn’t make someone hire his sister. Or he could later—later he could force almost anything through—but not early on.
He resolved to cut them off. Actually he tried a couple of times. He had a soft spot for his mother, who was magnetic and funny. His dad had accrued some debt and she convinced Hugo to bail him out. The second time, Laura helped him stay firm. Make no mistake, she said. They will ruin you. They would loot your house if they could. They would strip it for copper wire. She was right, as she was about most things, but it wasn’t easy to hear.
The next time Vivian asked for something, Hugo said no. She was moving to Los Angeles and she wanted him to rent her an apartment. Only until she got on her feet, she said. Then she’d take over the payments. As an isolated request it would have been reasonable. But he’d already paid for acting classes, headshots, teeth whitening, audition clothes, a voice coach, a professional reel. He’d paid to have her low hairline redrawn farther up her skull. Who knew what that procedure entailed? It cost twelve hundred bucks.
He told her no. She’d have to get the money some other way. She’d have to save up until she had enough, just like everyone else. He reminded her that he moved out there on a Greyhound bus with a single duffel bag. He stayed at a crappy motel until he figured things out. The kind of motel where people brought a prostitute or killed themselves.
He was harsh, he admitted, maybe too harsh. He didn’t hear from her for a while, didn’t hear from any of them, so he figured she got the message. He thought she was embarrassed and needed some time to get over it. He was on the road eight months of the year anyway. The next time he saw her was in LA.
“You know the end of the story,” he said. “She’d been calling again. Or someone had. Calling and hanging up. Laura answered once and told her to cut it out. But I didn’t think she was going to show up with a knife. That still blows me away. It was so surreal I have trouble believing my memories of it.”
When he first saw her out there on the sidewalk he was happy. She wore jeans and sneakers, a yellow T-shirt, a ponytail. She looked younger than she was, like a high school kid. He forgot, in that moment, to be wary of her. He forgot to find her presence strange. He said something to her. He said her name. She came toward him across the sidewalk. She was walking awkwardly, holding something. The rest was vague. His brain was protecting itself from the rest. He’d laughed for some reason, he could remember that. Laughed and felt insulted. The pain he could not remember.
“I was in the hospital for a week. She just missed my lung.”
“She went to jail,” I said.
“Only for a year. My lawyer leaned on the DA to get it knocked down to a misdemeanor. Battery causing serious bodily injury. I didn’t want to testify. I wanted it to be over. My career was on the rise. I didn’t want to be best known for getting stabbed by my crazy sister.”
He looked pained, describing her that way.
I said, “Where is she now?”
“She lives in Calgary. I don’t know what she does for a living. Every couple years she messages me on social media and my assistant blocks her. I hope she’s made a bearable life for herself. It was tragic, but I can’t see the point in thinking too hard about it anymore.”
“I bought them a house eventually. In Florida. They won on that front, I guess. They’re both dead now. My dad passed six years ago, my mom a year after that.”
The boat creaked against the dock. He had a faraway look on his face. I was sorry I’d brought it up.
“You mentioned you have a brother,” he said. “What does he do?”
“Russell, yeah. He’s a musician in Austin. He plays the guitar.”
“Is he any good?”
“If you like that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing would that be?”
“Bad music.”
He chuckled. “Different industry. You’re probably safe.”
Even if Russell was a comedian, even if I was someday successful enough to snub him, it was hard to imagine him exacting his bloody revenge. He was in a jam band. He rode his bike everywhere. When I visited him the year before he took me out to the desert at night to look at stars through his telescope. He hung out at a vegan burrito place and knew every single person who came in. I worried that he would adopt too many stray dogs and let them ruin his house. Not that he would stab me.
“I don’t want to talk about Russell,” I said.
We had sex then and we didn’t use a condom. He hated condoms, he told me, never used them, and didn’t have one on him anyway. I’d been off the pill for a while. With Logan I was waiting to go back on it, using condoms, being careful, until I determined it would last. Hugo entered me, skin-on-skin, and I felt horrified and a little excited. What if I had his baby? I thought, and a fully realized life sprang up in front of me like turning the page of a pop-up book. A house to my specifications complete with a child’s nursery, a little laser-cut lawn out front waving in the breeze. We could get the windshield fixed on the MG and it could be my car. Really mine. The baby couldn’t ride in it, of course, so I’d need another one, too. We’d need to go visit the hangar again for something safe. We’d get Cal to install a rear-facing car seat. Even if we divorced I’d be okay. I’d have the best insurance ever—ten fingers, ten toes, with blue eyes that looked just like Hugo’s. And whatever I chose to do with my life, I could do it at my own pace.
I don’t know how he got it up twice. That was more impressive to me than any of the features of the boat. Maybe he’d taken something. If he had, I hadn’t seen him. It would have been when he ducked into the galley to get us drinks. It would have been working its way through his bloodstream as we listened to his record.
I’ve often gone over it since, trying to determine whether the sex was good or bad. It was neither, I think. It was fleshy and tender and I did most of the work. I didn’t have an orgasm, which I attributed to the Art Garfunkel factor, the inability to relax in the presence of a celebrity. The closest I got was a feeling of bleak triumph at having so successfully collapsed the distance between Hugo and myself that he was actually in my body. I couldn’t have gotten any closer without eating him.
When it was over, something had changed between us. There wasn’t another lounging period. He got up and started dressing. I had only been wearing two articles of clothing. I found these and put them on and was dressed instantly. I located the bathroom, peed self-consciously, aware that he could hear it. My hair was tangled, from the moisture and the mattress, and my face stricken. We had fucked and it wasn’t enough. It had been fun only if fun meant no one had gotten injured. It hadn’t solved the problem of what I was going to do next. And certainly it hadn’t told me anything about who I was or what my life meant now that Hugo would not be at the center of it. I felt stupid for thinking it would.
“Cal can take you back to the house,” Hugo said when I came out. “And later, whenever you want, to the train station.”
“What about you?” I said.
He wanted to spend the night alone on the boat. He needed to commune with Poseidon, he said, and looked at me in surprise, as if he just remembered that jokes existed.
He showed me to the deck of Duck Soup, hugged me briskly without getting too close. I hopped off myself, unassisted. The temperature had dropped and the rain had ended. I wanted not to look back, I wanted not to be that type of person, but I did and I was. He was still standing there in his summer suit. He’d put his jacket on and everything. He had his hands in his pockets and he shrugged at me, the shrug he did on TV. I shrugged back, same shrug, and then turned around and walked to the parking lot, barefoot, trying not to get a splinter.
Cal kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he drove me back. He offered to stop for fries if I was hungry. I told him my problem was amorphous and existential. You couldn’t just throw fries at it.
“I doubt that,” he said. “But okay.”
He had on an R & B station and he turned it up. After a weekend of too much talk, the corny hooks and autotuned voices were a revelation. He explained that the singer we were listening to had just come out as polyamorous. He’d held a press conference and declared that he saw romantic potential in all people. He felt ready to embrace a loving relationship with everyone on the planet, he said, everyone at once. Haters, of course, excluded.
“Isn’t that a beautiful thought?” Cal demanded.
“Beautiful,” I agreed. “If ridiculous.”
At the house, he idled while I ran in for my bag. There was no reason to prolong the inevitable. There was no reason to look around for Ana or take a pensive moment out by the pool. I told myself I’d be back without really believing it. A thought to get me through while I checked under the bed, walked back down the hall, collected my shoes where I’d left them by the sliding glass door. The kitchen was quiet. The staff had packed up and departed, returned the rented glasses to their crates. The liquor bottles clumped together on the island looked like the city skyline and offered the same fickle comfort. I was tempted to pour a drink for the train just to be picturesque, but I decided not to. I still had the whole ride in front of me, plus all I’d have to confront when I surfaced—the cupcake stands and luxury watch stores, the four-dollar bottled water at Hudson News. Sober I could soldier through it, drunk it seemed insurmountable.
I got my chance to take the train home late Monday evening. It was the 10:12, not even the last train. We were too early, but I told Cal to go, there were probably things he wanted to do with his night besides sit around in downtown Greenwich staring into a darkened lacrosse store.
I waited on the platform instead, found a jacket in my bag. The wait wasn’t even that bad. It was a matter of believing that the train would come for me, holding out hope, however misguidedly. When it did come, I was relieved. That, at least, had worked out.
There weren’t many passengers on the train and the few I saw were drinking. A man in a suit sitting by himself sipped from a flask. Two kids holed up near the bathroom had forties of malt liquor duct taped to both their hands. All four of their hands, I guess. I remembered that nauseating game, Edward Fortyhands. Playing it on a train was a variation I’d never seen before. It inevitably made you puke, and I couldn’t imagine wanting to puke like that—in motion, far from home, and powerless to help yourself. The idea of it made me lonely.
I found a seat in a car that was totally empty. Alone in my cream party dress I felt like a spurned bride, or maybe, more accurately, a bride who’d fled. I don’t know what happened to the dress I’d come in. I hadn’t been able to find it in my bag or the guest bedroom. I had lost it over the course of the weekend. It was gone forever.
I never saw Hugo again, though part of me wanted to. I never heard from him either, not by phone, not by email. I didn’t give him my number, but there were ways. People on staff had it. A contact sheet existed somewhere with everyone’s phone number and email address. I knew because I’d made it. I’d spent hours out of body with boredom filling in those white boxes.
I could have called him myself. At first I was waiting to see if I was pregnant. But then I didn’t even after I knew I wasn’t. I also could have contacted him through Spencer, at least to see how he was doing. Spencer and I connected online like I knew we would. He had six hundred thousand followers on Instagram for his pictures of prep school and ski trips and Scotty and his abs. I had 119 for my pictures of misspelled signage. Sometimes Spencer would throw me a like or leave a comment, and I hated how much it delighted me. It was inappropriate, but that wasn’t why I didn’t ask him to put me in touch with his dad.
I didn’t do it because Audrey said not to. Audrey said wait, he’ll come to you, think about the power imbalance. She said don’t you think he owes you an apology? But what it actually came down to was manners. I couldn’t impose more than I already had. I couldn’t stand up and demand a role in his complicated life. He didn’t belong to me; he wasn’t mine. I had no more right than the pizza guy.
A calendar year passed and it was spring again, almost summer, right on the line between the two. And that’s when Hugo died. He’d let his health slip, put on some weight. He hadn’t gotten a sitcom deal or traveled to Oaxaca or Cape Town. He hadn’t ridden the ridgelike dunes of the Sahara on the back of a camel. He hadn’t climbed mountains or started a foundation for sick kids or helped break talent from underrepresented communities. He hadn’t found another woman to marry, get him into yoga, make him lay off the scotch, the wine, the gum, the pie. He spent most of his time alone.
Ana found him in his basement comedy club having a heart attack. He’d moved an elliptical trainer down there, set up a little gym. Hand weights, some foam rollers. He’d been trying to get back into shape, newly trying, like that day was the first time. He’d fallen off the elliptical and onto the floor. He made it to the hospital, the one we went to together, but died shortly after. He had smoked for all those years before the gum, done drugs. Lived broadly, not cleanly.
The funeral was open to the public, and I went. I rode with Julian in his dented Volvo. Gil was there, too, Laura, the other writers. Spencer and I successfully ignored each other, or I ignored him and he had too much going on to notice me. Otherwise it was a minireunion. Everyone was sad, but happy to see each other, find out what people were up to, or in my case, not up to. Gil was the show runner for a new sitcom on a streaming site and he’d brought Julian and some of the others on as writers. Laura had successfully revived the show. In its first year, Stay Up with Eric Marshall was second in the ratings, the cool alternative, a hit with eighteen to thirty-fours. They all vowed to help me, especially Laura, who smacked her forehead and called herself terrible and said she owed me an email back.
We went out for coffee afterward at a diner on the highway. Not the same diner Hugo and I went to after the hospital, but it might as well have been. It had the same acidic coffee, the same glass case of stale pies. I was tempted to stay on the fringes like I always did, keep to the end of the table, whisper my observations to myself or one other person. But I didn’t. I sat in the middle, next to Gil and across from Julian. When everyone started telling Hugo stories I told one, too. I told them about how he did stand-up at Frogger’s and then led a forty-person scream-along to “The Weight.” How he signed autographs until it couldn’t have been fun anymore. How the pizza guy cried he was so touched. That part was an exaggeration, but it could have been true. It was true in spirit.
Everyone laughed at the funny parts, looked sad at the sad parts, and then the focus shifted to Laura’s story about a road trip they’d taken in their twenties to one of Hugo’s gigs. It was nothing to them, what had happened that weekend. It was a three-minute anecdote recounted at a diner, while a waitress went around and refilled our water glasses.
I couldn’t really bring it into focus. Not for a long time. Up too close, things went soft at the edges or multiplied. But later I’d tell it to myself as a joke. Have you heard the one about the dead comedian, I’d begin. His funeral was held on the first unequivocal day of summer. The green of the trees was not to be believed. His kid, drowning in his father’s famous pinstripes, was so high he almost fell into the hole, and his longtime sidekick looked on, face shattered like a windshield hit with a baseball bat. Meanwhile, the priest did the bit about the ashes and dust. Thou art dust, it went, and unto dust thou shalt return. And so on.
When my train from Greenwich reached Grand Central that night, I gathered my bag and wove through the crowd to catch the subway home. In the main terminal, I stopped to look up at the ceiling, a staggering shade of blue, dotted with constellations. I had read that this was an inverted view of the night sky, that it was supposed to reflect the perspective of God looking down from above. I stood there searching for a while until I found Orion and Pegasus and the others. It wasn’t hard. The stars were connected with gold lines, so that anyone could tell what they were supposed to be, so that even an idiot could figure it out.