Romantic Comedy, page 19
“Sadly, I never had any,” I said. “That would have been much cooler than the poster I did have with the Thoreau quote about lives of quiet desperation. Oh, and I also had an Audrey Hepburn poster to signify that I was classy and feminine.” Because this wasn’t the conversation I’d been expecting—I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but not this—I could feel myself become marginally less nervous. “What posters did you have?”
“Just to be boringly predictable, mostly musicians. Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground, the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. You are very classy and feminine, by the way.”
“Is Nevermind the one with the pool and the baby penis?”
“I think it’s supposed to be a condemnation of capitalism because the baby is reaching for a dollar bill, but maybe same difference.”
“There really isn’t much of my old stuff here anymore,” I said. “There’s the wicker furniture, but no graduation caps or stuffed animals or earring trees. No identifying markers of my teenage self.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “White wicker?”
“The bed frame, the bedside table, and the desk are all wicker, and there’s a wicker armchair, which is where I’m sitting. I assume you’re also sitting in a white wicker armchair?”
“Of course,” he said. “Always.”
This time, I laughed.
“I’m in my study,” he said. “Does that make me sound intellectual?”
“Are you smoking a pipe and wearing a monocle?”
“And a velvet jacket,” he said. “Truthfully, the main thing I study in my study is the TV screen. My bedroom is where I read.”
“Reading and watching TV are both noble activities,” I said. “That’s important to remember.”
“Especially watching TV on Saturday nights at eleven-thirty, right?”
“Do you not have a TV in your bedroom?”
He laughed. “No, I have one there, too. And one in the sitting room off the kitchen.”
After I’d received Noah’s second email—the one that mentioned he was in L.A. and that, like his first email, did not make it seem as if he was reaching out for a business-related reason—I’d googled Noah Brewster Los Angeles house. Of course I had; I wasn’t brain-dead. As per the Internet: located in Topanga Canyon, purchased in 2014 for nine million dollars and then renovated down to the studs, a six-bedroom / eight-bathroom Spanish hacienda on ten acres with a pool, pool house, and freestanding recording studio built in 2016. A men’s magazine had run photos of him taken in the studio as well as next to and in the pool—one shot showed him standing in the shallow end wearing a drenched white T-shirt that clung gratifyingly to the muscles in his arms and abdomen—while a shelter magazine had an online spread of the interior of the house accompanied by a long conversation between him and a British architect.
After I’d googled Noah Brewster Los Angeles house, the Internet suggested that I also google Noah Brewster net worth, and who was I to decline? The answer, which may have been accurate or completely wrong, was ninety-five million dollars.
On the phone, there was a brief silence, then Noah said, “So I think you should come visit me. And I think we should hang out and keep talking about all the things we’ve been talking about over email. What do you think of that?”
“Okay.”
“Wait, do you think I’m kidding?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t kidding, either. And as luck would have it, my schedule is pretty open now.”
He laughed. “So is mine. So how about, I don’t know, tomorrow? The next day? You’ll probably make fun of me for this, but one option is for my P.A. to arrange a plane to bring you.”
“That sounds very Fifty Shades of Grey.”
“Yeah, somehow I haven’t gotten around to reading that. But if we charter a flight, you skip the terminal and security, which I assume are the germ hotspots.”
“I got the Fifty Shades books for some quick research for a sketch, and the next thing I knew I’d consumed fifteen hundred pages about Ben Wa balls and riding crops.” I hesitated. I didn’t know how much it cost to charter a flight, but it seemed like a destabilizing way to start things with Noah. I said, “A private plane sounds a little, uh, intense. But visiting you sounds great.”
“You don’t have to decide about the plane now. If you end up flying commercial, just promise me you’ll wear a KN95.”
“Do you know what people like me call flying commercial?” I said. “We call it flying.”
“Yeah, I guess I asked for that.”
This conversation had started after midnight, and we were then on the phone for two and a half hours more, discussing how the kids of one of his side project band members were sewing masks for residents of nursing homes; and how while walking Sugar that evening I’d passed a slim white woman in a T-shirt that said Good Vibes Only, and how that seemed like a thing a slim white woman shouldn’t be wearing at this particular cultural moment; and how I was reading a novel set in Communist Romania; and how he was reading a book of nonfiction about the future of artificial intelligence but the truth was that he read it only at night and rarely got through more than a few pages before falling asleep; and how the previous week, he had started writing a new song for the first time since he’d had Covid and it hadn’t gone incredibly well but also hadn’t been a disaster; and about how in the Indigo Girls’ “Dairy Queen,” there was a lyric I’d never been clear on because it kind of sounded like “to hold you” but it also kind of sounded like “to haunt you” and if you looked it up online it said hold, but I wanted it to be haunt; and about the Dairy Queen chain and how he’d never been to one, and I said that was because he’d never lived in the Midwest; and about how I’d never been to In-N-Out Burger, and he said that was because I’d never lived in California. By then, it was almost three-thirty my time and I felt like the teenager I’d never been, drugged on lust and conversation. Just before we hung up, I said, “Usually I hate talking on the phone, but I don’t hate talking on the phone to you.”
“I’ll try not to let that go to my head.” He sounded very happy, and I felt a squeezing around my heart. Wasn’t this all too good to be true? For the last week, whenever I hadn’t actively been writing an email to or reading an email from Noah, as I’d scrambled eggs or dragged the trash and recycling bins to the curb, I’d often pulled my phone from my pocket and reread both the messages he’d sent me and the ones I’d sent him, especially if I was waiting for a response; more than once I read all the emails, in order, in their entirety. I also had continuously composed future emails in my head and assessed almost any experience I was having—not, admittedly, that I was having many—through the filter of whether they’d be worth describing to Noah. And now we’d spoken and it hadn’t ruined everything!
He added, “Can I call you again tomorrow night?”
“You definitely can,” I said.
“Can I email you seven times before I call you tomorrow night?”
“I’m hoping you will.”
This was when he said, “I almost suggested facetiming now instead of calling. What are your feelings about facetime?”
“It depends on the face in question.” After a pause, I said, “In your case, I’m pro.”
He laughed. “What a relief.” Then he said, “Good night, Sally. This was very fun.”
“I agree,” I said. “Good night, Noah.”
But he didn’t email the next day; instead, at noon my time, he texted, Hope it’s OK I just ordered these for you, followed by a screenshot of a pink pillow that said Good Vibes Please in white cursive, followed by another screenshot of an orange pillow that said Good Vibes Welcome with an image of a sun below the words, followed by another text that said It was hard to decide so I got both.
I texted back, That’s an incredible coincidence because I just ordered this for you, and sent a screenshot of a distressed wooden sign that said In this house, we keep it real, we give hugs, and we dance badly.
He texted back, Truly amazing because for your kitchen I just ordered, followed by a screenshot of a different distressed wooden sign that said ’Bout to Stir Up Some Shit and featured an image of a whisk. And then we texted for three hours and then we talked again that night from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. central. At 9:50 p.m. I had applied foundation and mascara and lip gloss, then I had wiped the lip gloss off, then I had reapplied it. At ten, the notification of a facetime call had appeared on my phone, but before I could see him, it had disappeared, and a regular call had come through.
Four hours later, at the end of that conversation, he said, “I just wanted to mention that I, well—I shaved my head. I don’t have long hair anymore.”
I thought of Henrietta kneeling beside me in my TNO office, waking me up as I lay on the couch to tell me about Noah’s wig. Twenty-seven months had passed since then, which didn’t seem like enough to account for how irretrievable that moment now felt.
I tried to sound casual as I said, “Cool.”
“I didn’t want you to be shocked if we facetime tomorrow.”
“I’d like to think I’m harder to shock than that.”
“Just since some people say my hair is, you know—” He paused, and when he continued, he seemed embarrassed for the first time that I could recall. “Like my trademark.”
Again, I tried to sound light but sincere, and not at all mocking, as I said, “Aren’t your songwriting and guitar playing your trademark?”
The next night, especially for the first minute or two, it was shocking and thrilling to see Noah on the screen of my phone. He looked both a little different and still joltingly, unreasonably handsome. His head was indeed shaved, with a few millimeters of stubble that was darker than the blond locks of yore but matched the stubble on his cheeks. He looked paler or more tired than in online images, which of course I’d inspected many times in the last week, meaning he looked like he wasn’t wearing makeup and hadn’t otherwise been professionally styled, and it was a pure and reflexive joy to gaze at this version of him: this private, real person. His piercing blue eyes were alert, and his expression was amused, and he was wearing an olive-green T-shirt and sitting in a low white armchair, and simultaneously, I wished I could dive into the screen and throw my arms around him, and I was self-conscious at the knowledge that he could see me, and I kept glancing at my tiny, grainy reflection in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. “This is so weird!” I blurted out.
He smiled. “In what way?”
“Do you not think so?” Quickly, I added, “Not because of your haircut. Your haircut looks great. I guess in the last two nights, I just got used to your disembodied voice.”
“Is a disembodied voice better or worse than a digital consciousness?”
“Well,” I said, “they’re not dissimilar.”
Then we discussed the book he was slowly reading about AI, and about how old we’d been when we’d acquired our first cellphones, and within fifteen minutes, I was much calmer. The next night it took only a few minutes to get over the shock of Noah’s attractiveness, and the night after that I wondered if we were in the vicinity of phone sex—I’d already reversed the camera to show him my bedroom, he’d asked several rather silly questions about what kind of sheets I had and the positioning of my pillows—but I couldn’t have facetime phone sex with Noah Brewster, or at least I couldn’t sober, and I’d never drunk anything other than water while talking to him because it seemed unnecessary and maybe even inconsiderate. So instead, after we’d mutually pondered whether thread count made any real difference, I said, “What if I drive out to visit you instead of flying?”
“Seriously? Isn’t that a million miles?”
“It’s sixteen hundred.”
“I don’t want to do anything to discourage you, but wouldn’t that be unnecessarily hellish?”
“I think it might be good for me. I could commune with my thoughts while the landscape poetically whips past.”
“Is driving alone safe? Sorry if that’s sexist, but—”
“Now you can send me a formal apology and sign it Best.” Then I added, “It’s not sexist. I think it would be safe enough.”
“You’d have to text me a lot about where you are. I’m worried that my Sally radar might get spotty in some of those western states.”
I could feel—and, in miniature, see—myself smiling goofily. Maybe I was a sucker, or maybe he had a little too much practice, but he was so disarmingly sweet. “How about if I attach a transmitting antenna to the top of my car?” I said. “Or to the top of my head?”
“That’s a great plan, and then I can even track when you pop into a convenience store in, like, rural Utah.”
“Don’t judge me when I buy Doritos.”
“Doritos are the best. So when can you leave?”
I had thought in our first phone conversation that some clarification would occur, some explicit acknowledgment that our contact was romantic, or presumed to be until proven otherwise. It hadn’t. The dynamic between us was flirty and not explicit in any sense. And couldn’t I have raised the subject as easily as he could? Except that didn’t I have more to lose? Instead, we both kept chatting warmly. Why wouldn’t this be the romance of romance? and I’m really attracted to you, and I have been since that pitch meeting in Nigel’s office—if I was looking for confirmation, those lines from his emails were my strongest evidence. And those were lines I liked very much, lines I had reread many times even after memorizing them. But also: I would say I was definitely trying to impress you and I was not trying to seduce you.
“So that I know how to pack,” I said, “how long do you envision me staying?”
“As long as you want,” he said.
And then, instead of actually resolving the question, I said, “Are you the kind of Airbnb host who leaves out their framed family photos and their half-empty yogurt in the refrigerator or do you make it immaculate before your guests arrive?”
He laughed. “For you, I’ll make it immaculate because I want you to give me five stars.”
The next morning, I texted, What if I leave KC morning of Aug 1 and get to you evening of Aug 2?
You leaving KC morning of Aug 1 and getting to me evening of Aug 2 is a fantastic idea, he texted back.
On July 31, a FedEx package arrived at Jerry’s house: the twelve-count case of protein bars, an eleven-by-sixteen-inch spiral-bound road atlas, and a gray T-shirt that said California in a yellow 1980s font. In the accompanying note, he’d written, Sally, I can’t wait to see you! Your pen pal, Noah. I had never seen his handwriting, and even that seemed touching, and filled me with yearning: the way the S in Sally connected from its base to the a, the unadorned capital I, the straight unlooped line jutting down from the y in you. But was pen pal intended to be read as an inside joke or a reference to our platonic status?
That night, we ended our conversation at midnight, meaning early, and I set the alarm on my phone for 6:15 a.m. Though I’d told Jerry he didn’t need to get up in the morning, he did; in his white-and-blue seersucker bathrobe, he carried my box of protein bars and masks outside and set it on the passenger side in the front seat, then he embraced me and said, “Some states let you drive eighty, but I think a bit slower is safer.” Sugar frolicked at our feet, and I crouched to pet her. I had explained to Jerry that I was going to visit a friend in L.A. for a week or two, and his sister, my aunt Donna, whom I’d been grocery shopping for when I shopped for Jerry and me, had offered her car; she’d said since she and my uncle Richard hardly went anywhere these days, they didn’t need two.
It was strange to leave Jerry’s house; it was strange not to know how long I’d be in California; it was strange, even after five years, to live in the world without my mother; it was strange to be a person during a global pandemic. I started the engine and backed out of the driveway, waved goodbye to Jerry and Sugar from the street, and turned up the volume on the folky women satellite radio station, and a Mary Chapin Carpenter song I knew all the words to filled the car. I was both excited and melancholy as I drove south on State Line Road, through the early morning summer light, and my melancholy lifted some as I reached the Shawnee Mission Parkway and by the time I passed through Olathe, Kansas, half an hour later, it was almost completely gone, or at least eclipsed by giddiness and nervousness and sheer horniness. The highway in front of me was long and mostly flat, and I realized that I had been this excited and terrified only one other time in my life; it had been when I interviewed at TNO.
* * *
—
The Albuquerque Hampton Inn was four stories flanked by a mostly empty parking lot of bleak concrete, with the Sandia Mountains visible in the east. Sitting on the bed in my room, I ate dinner at 8:15 mountain time: two protein bars, a banana, and an orange I’d purchased earlier in the day at a gas station in the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle. The drive had gone well enough, the highway taking me across the increasingly barren state of Kansas, then a brief dip through Oklahoma, an only slightly longer jaunt in Texas, and the final hours in New Mexico: the road straight and endless; the open expanses of land on either side a mix of bleached grass, sand, and scrub; the sky big and reassuringly blue. Though I’d planned while driving to either have profound thoughts about nature and humanity or else determine the structure of “Supremely,” which was the working title of my barely existent screenplay about the Supreme Court justice, I’d mostly spaced out for long stretches. These stretches were abruptly punctuated with the impulse to grip the steering wheel when I found myself passing a truck or, far more pleasantly, by being intermittently startled at the knowledge that I might be having sex with Noah in about twenty-four hours. Mightn’t I? As promised, I texted him each time I stopped, and he always texted back immediately.
