Romantic Comedy, page 13
“I think you’re right. But there could be a freeze-frame on each couple as they’re applauded, and they do a confessional. So all the other guests are like, ‘This is so touching,’ and the ninety-year-old woman is thinking to herself, ‘For seven decades, the sound of his chewing has made me want to strangle him.’ ”
“That would be funny,” Noah said. “Actually.”
Our eyes met, and I said, “Thanks, actually.”
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve never written that kind of song, partly because I’ve never been married.”
“Oh, sorry. ‘Making Love in July’ is the other kind of song I was referring to. It’s in the second category. That kind is always a man singing to a woman and it’s like, ‘Baby, you don’t know how beautiful you are. You’re so perfect, I never thought I’d find this, am I in heaven?’ ”
Noah looked both amused and uncertain. “What’s wrong with ‘Baby, you’re so perfect, I never thought I’d find this, am I in heaven?’ ” At an almost subliminal level, I found it gratifying that I’d tricked Noah Brewster into saying to me, while we stood a foot apart, “Baby, you’re so perfect, I never thought I’d find this, am I in heaven?”
I said, “I don’t like the You-don’t-know-how-beautiful-you-are part. It makes it seem like the love is predicated either on a lack of awareness on the woman’s part or else on her being insecure. And the woman in the songs is often both a child and a sexy enchantress. So the lyrics might as well be ‘I’m attracted to you because you conform to the standards agreed upon to be desirable at this moment in human history, but you don’t even know it and your cluelessness is what makes me feel like a real man.’ ”
“That’s probably a little wordy,” he said. “But point taken. Would you say it’s similar to when the main character in a romantic comedy has flour on her nose after she made cookies and she doesn’t know it? Because I’ve heard that’s very annoying, too.”
Although I was impressed that he remembered this part of the conversation we’d had in my office, I didn’t know if he was agreeing or teasing me. I shrugged. “Didn’t I warn you about my rants?”
“And didn’t I tell you I love rants?” he said. “But I think you’re conflating the second kind of song with something that’s in a third category. Yeah, there are You-don’t-know-how-beautiful-you-are songs, but I don’t see those as automatically the same as the songs that are like, ‘I can’t believe you exist and I can’t believe we found each other.’ When one of those is done well, doesn’t it capture the most transcendent experience two people can have?” When I didn’t immediately reply, he said, “Don’t tell me you think falling in love is bullshit.”
“Well—” I thought of the oddly similar question Danny had asked just a few hours earlier. “I don’t want it to be.”
“I don’t get why you’d write scripts for romantic comedies if you think romance is cheesy nonsense.”
“That’s just it, though,” I said. “I don’t write from a point of clarity. I write out of confusion.”
“Then how about this—can you define cheese for me? Because I still haven’t figured out, after two decades, where the line is between cheese and emotional extravagance that’s acceptable. What makes a song or a movie or a moment in real life land on one side or the other? This is part of why the Cheesemonger sketch hit a nerve for me.”
I was quiet for a few seconds and finally said, “That’s a good question. But the line is subjective, right? Kind of like the Supreme Court definition of obscenity being ‘I know it when I see it.’ ”
“What’s a song you think is legitimately, non-cheesily romantic?”
“At the risk of being predictable, there’s an Indigo Girls song called ‘Dairy Queen.’ ”
“But isn’t that about a relationship that doesn’t work out?”
“Romance doesn’t require a happy ending.” Though I didn’t convey it, I was surprised that he knew the song. Fans liked it, but it was no “Closer to Fine.”
“Right,” Noah said. “But you have to admit it’s easier not to be cheesy when you’re writing about lost love. Are your romantic comedies going to end sadly and that’s their twist?”
I laughed. “I don’t know how they end because I haven’t finished writing one yet.”
He was looking at me with intense curiosity, which wasn’t a way I was often looked at. Then he said, “Have you ever been in love?”
“Well—” I paused. “I’ve actually been married.” He glanced down at my left hand, the hand in which I held my drink, so I switched the glass to the other hand and wiggled my bare left fingers. “And divorced,” I added. “I’m a brassy divorcée. I had a starter marriage in my early twenties, right after college.”
“Does that explain why you’re not a fan of songs about people who stayed married through all the ups and downs?” He took a sip of his club soda. “Or am I being facile?”
“Well, I definitely don’t think divorces are inherently tragic. I saw my own as a personal failure, but it also was a huge relief. I’d never have had this career if I’d stayed married.”
“In the beginning, when you and your husband were first together, did you feel like, ‘Am I in heaven’?”
I laughed. “No.” He laughed, too, a surprised-seeming laugh, and I said, “I think I’ve sort of been in love. Just not with my husband.”
Noah was still regarding me with an expression that was both amused and strangely rapt, as if he found me riveting. This was the problem with celebrities, that they could deploy their charisma at will, and you basked in its glow, and then they shifted it away from you and the world reverted to being cold. “How does sort of in love work?” he asked.
Elliot had been at the after-party at the big French restaurant—he was far too ambitious to skip it—but he wasn’t at the after-after-party; he’d stopped attending them when he got married. “It’s pathetic,” I said, “but there was someone at TNO who I thought was my soulmate. We never dated. We were just friends, but I thought we were comedy soulmates and life soulmates. The pathetic part is that he didn’t feel that way about me.”
“I can’t tell,” Noah said. “Are you saying ‘soulmates’ ironically?”
“Embarrassingly enough, I’m saying it unironically.”
“And are you still into him?”
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “This was years ago.” There was a brief pause—over the bar’s other conversations and the background music, which at that moment was a seventies rock classic, I heard the clacking sound of a new pool game—and I said, “Judging by your songs, I imagine you’ve been in love hundreds of times.”
He shook his head. “Hardly.”
“Do you still pine for people from your past?”
“I almost wish I did. I’ve never been in a relationship I thought could last forever, and when I look back, they seem even more doomed in retrospect. I wonder if I was deluding myself that the other person and I had anything in common. I guess if I start talking about attachment theory right now, I’ll sound like I’ve been in a little too much therapy.” He held up his glass. “But it definitely helps with staying sober.”
“If it sounds like I haven’t been in enough therapy, it’s because I’ve chosen Midwestern repression instead.”
He laughed.
I said, “Plus the time-honored method of channeling my neuroses into my writing.”
“Another legitimate path, though not mutually exclusive from therapy.”
“I think I know what attachment theory is from reading articles. It’s replicating the dynamics of the family you grew up in?”
He nodded and set his drink on the bar. “I remember turning thirty and I’d just won this big award in the music industry—”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t be modest.”
He grinned. “The Grammy for Album of the Year. Thank you for offering me that opportunity.”
“If I won a Grammy for Album of the Year, I’d carry it with me at all times, including now. It’s a little statue of a record player, right?”
“Except that you have won Emmys, so that doesn’t really check out. Unless they’re in there?” He nodded down toward my fanny pack.
Had he googled me? I didn’t have much of an Internet presence—though I’d created social media accounts in order to follow other people, I’d literally never posted anything—but this was one of the few facts that would pop up if someone did a search. I patted my fanny pack. “If there was room for them, I would. As you were saying—you’d turned thirty, you’d won a Grammy, and…?”
“Just that I thought I was on the cusp of figuring it all out. I’d had my early success, then I’d had a sophomore-slump album, then I’d redeemed myself critically—I mean, this feels like a misguided way of looking at it now, but it was what I believed at the time. I also thought I was on the cusp of getting married and having kids. For my thirtieth birthday, I’d gone to Costa Rica to surf with some friends. One night I happened to watch the sunset by myself from a balcony in the villa where we were staying, and I was really confident that there was some code I’d cracked. But six years have passed since then, I’m still not married, and I feel a lot more confused about everything—the state of the world, the direction of my life, how much I should use my so-called platform. Comparable to the cheesy versus not cheesy line, where’s the divide when you’re a celebrity who wants to be involved but you know plenty of people would just say, ‘Shut up and play your guitar’?”
“When you thought you were on the cusp of getting married,” I said, “was it to someone in particular?”
He shook his head and smiled. “You think that could have been part of the problem?”
“For what it’s worth, when I was in high school—at my big crappy public school—a math teacher once said at assembly that the point of life is to find the thing you’re good at and enjoy doing, and to do it for other people. Can you imagine having the audacity to declare what the point of life is? But I never forgot it, and I’m not so sure he was wrong.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“It might sound silly, but I think of—” I paused. Even after two and a half drinks, this felt like a lot to reveal to a person I barely knew. But I kept going. I said, “I think of TNO as the love of my life.” Unaccountably, my eyes filled with tears. And then I realized it wasn’t because I thought what I was saying was sad. It was because it was true, and not sad at all.
“Oh, yeah,” Noah said immediately. “I feel that way about my music.”
“We’re so lucky,” I said. “Don’t you think? Most people don’t have that. I know, everywhere other than New York, if you have a good job and a spouse and kids and a house and a car, those are the markers of maturity and stability and completeness. And you eat your dinner at seven p.m. and go to bed at ten, and go for vigorous jogs on the weekend. If you’re into that, great. But there are lots of other ways to put a life together.”
“Do you know that Thoreau line ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’?”
“Not only do I know it,” I said, “but in high school, I had a poster with famous quotes on it, and that was one of them!” I’d spoken with such excitement that I had spit a very tiny amount of saliva onto his right cheek. He did not wipe it away; he beamed back at me, and though I couldn’t prove it and certainly wasn’t going to ask, I suspected not that he didn’t know I’d spit on him but that he didn’t want me to be embarrassed or truly didn’t care, that he didn’t find me at all disgusting. Even after six days, his easygoing warmth was so unexpected, and so endearing. “Just to be clear,” I said, “I do lead a life of quiet desperation. I wouldn’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t, or anyone who isn’t filled with ambivalence, because I assume they’d be incredibly shallow. But I’m sure I’d be ten times more quietly desperate if I were living in the suburbs with a two-car garage.”
“Do you know you don’t want any of that? The marriage or kids?”
It occurred to me to say, “With you or someone else?” but what if he thought I was serious? Instead, I said, “I don’t know for certain, but I’m not sitting around waiting for either one. And I bet not settling down when you were thirty has made you a better musician. And continuing to feel confusion has, too, probably. I just can’t see how anyone who thinks they have everything sorted out and have come out on top could write very good songs. Or, for that matter, very good comedy sketches or very good screenplays.”
“Maybe you should be a therapist.” He lifted his glass from the bar, took a sip, swallowed, and said, “By the way, I don’t believe in the Danny Horst Rule. I thought your sketch was funny and I’m sorry it got cut, but the rule itself—personally, I’ve definitely dated—you know—”
I didn’t try to conceal my amusement. “Women less attractive than you?” I suggested.
“That’s not what I was going to say. But non-celebrities.”
“You’ve dated them in a serious way?”
“Of course. It’s not like the only relationships I’ve been in are the ones that have been reported in gossip columns. But you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you go out with another celebrity, it’s like Danny and Annabel, where you’re under this distorting microscope. You have the advantage of understanding each other’s worlds firsthand, but the disadvantage of both having really complicated schedules. Whereas if you date someone who isn’t another celebrity, you feel like you’re always asking them to accommodate you. Plus, it’s easy for them to feel insecure. You’re looking at me with a very mocking expression right now. I realize these are privileged problems.”
“I think you think I’m looking at you with a mocking expression because I’m a writer for TNO.”
“I guess that might be an occupational hazard.” And then something happened that later was hard for me to explain to myself, hard to understand. As when he’d cupped my chin in my office, it might have been nothing. His expression became both very tender and very amused, as if there were an excellent inside joke between us, and he tilted his head to the right and looked at me with a focused kind of sweetness and warmth. Then he again set his glass on the bar and leaned forward incrementally, and I thought, Oh my God, is he going to kiss me? Because Noah Brewster cannot kiss me here, in front of my co-workers, in a setting that isn’t really private because nowhere is private in the age of cellphones, in a world in which he is him and I am me. And because if he kisses me, what will happen next?
Also incrementally, I took a step back. “All your insights about love and romance,” I said. “Did you get them from dating twenty-two-year-old models?”
He squinted with what appeared to be genuine confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
My heart was beating more quickly, and not in a swoony way. In a pre-combat way, like in rewrites when I steeled myself to argue with Elliot. I said, “I didn’t realize models were so educational.”
Noah’s expression was no longer confused. It was stony, and a few seconds elapsed before he said, “I thought we were just having a real conversation. Why would you say that to me?”
“Haven’t you dated a lot of models? Is that not factually correct?” He scowled—it was definitely the handsomest scowl I’d ever seen, and it was also, to an extent that I was only starting to absorb, horrifically regret-inducing—and I added, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Right,” he said.
“Sorry, but I did warn you that I’m an asshole.”
“Wow. That’s just—” He shook his head. “That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.”
We looked at and away from each other with a new awkwardness, a not-fun awkwardness, while the hum of the room, which had previously been almost unnoticeable, seemed to swell. On the one hand, I desperately wished I could rewind the conversation ninety seconds and un-say those things about models. On the other hand, feeling attracted to this man, experiencing his attention—it had been stressful and confusing, not just in the bar but for the last several days, and now it seemed like that stress and confusion had run their course. I could get back to my regular non-hopeful, non-tormenting life.
“If you don’t want to accept my apology,” I heard myself say, “then I guess that’s that. It was nice to meet you or whatever.” I lifted my drink toward him in some sort of farewell salute.
He seemed deeply frustrated and maybe even angry as he said, “ ‘I didn’t mean to offend you’ and ‘I told you I’m an asshole’—neither of those is an apology. I just wish—” Then he paused. Again, he shook his head. “You know what? Never mind. I guess I should be grateful that you warned me who you are before things went any further.” He tucked his hair that I knew was a wig behind his ears in a way that was oddly decisive. “So, yeah. Take care, Sally.”
And then he turned and walked away.
The Following Days
I’ll describe what happened next not chronologically, because even now the chronology is hazy to me, but in order of my awareness of the events. The first thing I was aware of was that Noah did not leave the bar immediately, but chatted briefly with a cluster of cast members, then left ten minutes later. I sought out Viv, who was talking to Dr. Theo in such a soft, intimate way that if I hadn’t been so worked up, I’d have left them alone. As I stood about fifteen feet from Noah, I watched him out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I should approach him and try to make things right; if I were drunker or more impulsive, I’d probably have attempted it, but it seemed unlikely that I’d succeed. Also, I didn’t want to overestimate the importance to him of our skirmish. Might he barely remember it by the following morning? I felt devastated and relieved when he walked away from Josh and Hakeem and Lynette, toward the exit sign at the bottom of the staircase, paused to pull out his phone and type something on it, then disappeared up the steps to the ground floor. But of course I’d already felt devastated—I’d felt that way as soon as I ruined our conversation. It was the dramatic shift in tone, the fact that I could ruin it, that allowed me to admit to myself that the dynamic between us, not just at the after-after-party but for the last six days, had had enough heft and energy to be something; it had not been nothing. If he hadn’t been famous, I’d definitely have thought he was hitting on me. Though whether we really had been about to kiss a few minutes prior—now I’d never know if I’d been shockingly correct or laughably wrong.
