Romantic Comedy, page 27
I had thought that the presence of a doctor in the house would feel reassuring, and it hadn’t. And that was even before I said, “How worried should I be?” and, a little impatiently, though maybe he was just tired, Dr. Fischer said, “He’s in his eighties. It would be highly irresponsible for me to make any promises.”
* * *
—
The next few days were a blur, a sort of inverse of the fun blur after my arrival at Noah’s house. The way the pulse oximeter worked was that I affixed it to Jerry’s pointer finger and confirmed that the number showing the oxygen level in his blood was above 90; if it wasn’t, he was supposed to go to the hospital.
At Target, in addition to buying the pulse oximeter, a jumbo pack of tissue boxes, and several jugs of Gatorade, Noah had bought a so-called bedside commode (it was gray with armrests that made it grimly throne-like); a so-called bedside urinal (a sideways-slanting plastic thermos with a glow-in-the-dark cap); and a medical shower chair (a lot like a regular plastic-and-aluminum chair except with a wider seat and suction cups on the bottoms of the legs). At some point on that endlessly long first day back in Kansas City, after Jerry ate a quarter of a scrambled egg I’d made, Noah and I together got him into the shower, and, while Noah wore a mask, running shorts, and nothing else and Jerry wore nothing at all, Noah bathed him and I changed his bedding. As I did, I played the Indigo Girls on my phone at a low volume, so that I could distract myself and have company at the same time that I could hear Noah and Jerry in the shower and help if they needed me.
When Jerry was resettled in fresh sheets, I went outside, crossed the front yard, and rang the Larsen family’s doorbell. Then, so as not to be standing overly close when the door opened, I turned and descended the three steps back to the walkway. Both Charlotte and her husband, Keith, came outside, and I thanked them profusely for letting Sugar stay with them for the day. They said it had been the highlight of the pandemic for their daughters. Keith went to get Sugar while Charlotte asked how Jerry was doing, and when Sugar bounded out to me, seeing her mournful eyes and wagging tail—it was two-thirds black and one-third white, at the end—almost made me weep. Instead, I lifted Sugar into my arms and thanked them again.
“Let us know if you need anything,” Keith said, and I turned back toward Jerry’s house.
“Sally, sorry if this is a weird question,” Charlotte said then, and I paused, and Keith said, “Not now, Char,” and Charlotte said, “But are you dating Noah Brewster?”
“Oh.” I hesitated.
Charlotte was in her midthirties and worked as a buyer for an electronic goods company, and it was the Larsens’ older daughter, Stella, who was eleven, who thought she’d caused the pandemic by telling her mother she traveled too much. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“It’s just that he’s my favorite favorite singer. For real, since I was a teenager.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. It seemed safe to assume that revealing Noah was inside Jerry’s house, about twenty feet away, would complicate rather than simplify matters.
“I know you meet lots of famous people with your job, but those pictures—was that really you?”
“Charlotte, let her go,” Keith said.
“I do know Noah,” I said. “Have a good night!”
When we entered Jerry’s bedroom, Sugar leapt onto his bed and licked his face, which seemed maybe medically inadvisable. But then, his voice weak, Jerry said, “There’s my good girl.”
* * *
—
That night, when I told Noah that I was going to sleep on the floor in Jerry’s room, he said, “With a mask on? Won’t you sleep terribly?”
“Presumably,” I said, and went to find an ancient sleeping bag in the basement. Noah slept in my bed with the wicker headboard.
On the second afternoon, someone from Dr. Fischer’s office called to say that Jerry’s Covid test was positive, and offered me the opportunity to speak with Dr. Fischer after he finished seeing patients, but instead I called my pediatrician college roommate, Denise. Although the advice Denise gave echoed Dr. Fischer’s recommendations, I had learned my lesson, and instead of asking how worried I should be, I said, “It’s completely plausible that he’ll recover, right?”
Immediately, she said, “Oh, sure.”
The second night, I slept again on the floor of Jerry’s room and on the third night, I slept in my old bed with Noah. In contrast to in California, our physical contact was minimal and chaste.
During this time, Jerry continued to have a fever, to report a sore throat, and to mostly sleep and still seem exhausted when he woke, but, with our encouragement, he ate small amounts of bananas and applesauce and chicken broth and toast. He didn’t seem to have lost his sense of taste or smell, he didn’t vomit, and, once we got the rhythms of the bedside urinal and commode established, he no longer went to the bathroom in the bed. I was usually the one who emptied the bedside urinal, which he used solo after I’d helped him sit up, and Noah was usually the one who helped him onto the commode.
As the days passed, Noah and I increasingly took turns doing things other than taking care of Jerry. I binge-watched a fantasy drama full of dragons and gore, and Noah worked out in the backyard, apparently while facetiming with Bobby, and he went for runs in the neighborhood. On one of his almost-daily outings to Target, he purchased a legal notepad and a guitar that I’d find him playing on the deck, while intermittently pausing to make notes on the pages, as Sugar sunbathed at his feet. “Kansas City is really creatively inspiring, huh?” I said the first time I came upon this scenario, which was on our fifth day at Jerry’s house. “Kind of like Paris in the 1930s.” I’d just carried a soup bowl from Jerry’s bedroom to the kitchen sink, seen Noah out the window, and slid open the glass and screen doors.
Noah smiled. “Kansas City did produce you.”
I stepped onto the deck, and Sugar immediately rolled into belly rub position. Noah was sitting in a folding lawn chair with gray webbing, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses that he removed. It was eleven in the morning and eighty degrees, which by Midwest summer standards wasn’t bad.
“My mom died of stomach cancer so it was, you know, very messy,” I said as I crouched to pet Sugar. “I’ve been through a variation of this. But sometimes I still can’t believe how undignified and sad life is.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, “but I’m sure it makes a huge difference to Jerry that you’re here.” We both were quiet, and the whisking and tapping of a nearby sprinkler became noticeable. “I wish I could make this easier for you,” Noah added.
“You have,” I said. “In about a million ways. Have you ever been around a super-sick person before?”
“There was a producer, this beloved guy named Billy Rodriguez, who died in 2010 of glioblastoma. I’d worked with him on all my albums except one. I wasn’t directly cleaning up after him, so to speak, but I saw him a bunch of times in the hospital and once in hospice and yeah—it’s rough.”
“If you want to go back to L.A., I hope you know it’s okay. I don’t want you to feel trapped here.”
“Do you want me to go back to L.A.?”
“No.”
Again, we were quiet, and Sugar wagged her tail against the deck and the sprinkler went tck, tck, tck. Was it my imagination, or was there a head and a pair of shoulders in the Larsens’ second-floor bathroom window, a figure watching us? Which was as likely to be Charlotte as one of her daughters.
“I don’t want to go back to L.A.,” Noah said. “I do eventually. But not now.”
* * *
—
That afternoon, courtesy of Viv and Henrietta, an enormous box arrived from a gourmet grocery store in New York: dried fruit and fancy coffee and cheeses wrapped in gel packs and many kinds of crackers and cookies. I was moved, and almost certain Noah would eat none of it. That night, he made us pan-seared salmon for dinner, and as we were cleaning up in the kitchen, I said, “So I have a question.”
Noah raised his eyebrows.
“Do you still want to be my boyfriend—or whatever—now that you’ve given my stepdad a shower?”
He laughed. “I’d love to be your boyfriend or whatever. I do have a condition, though.”
Nervousness surged through me.
“If something upsets you,” he said, “it’s fine if you need to pause the conversation or go in the other room, but I don’t want you to blow everything up, because it’s too stressful to live like that.”
“Blow everything up meaning what?”
“Meaning check into a hotel. Or throw a bomb about me dating models so we don’t talk for two years.”
I swallowed. “I think that’s fair,” I said. “Do you know the movie term lampshading?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s when something in the plot or the logic of a film doesn’t quite make sense and the screenplay has the characters acknowledge it without resolving it. It’s a trick to reassure the audience that you’re not trying to trick them.”
“Okay.” He looked puzzled.
“I want us to stay together,” I said. “I want to be your girlfriend. And I know that if I am, your professional identity will overshadow my professional identity and Internet trolls will criticize how I look and say they can’t believe you’re with me. I can work on not caring about those things or not paying attention to them, but I can’t keep them from happening.”
“If this helps, I can remind you that Internet trolls are Internet trolls.”
“I’m going to lampshade it because I don’t know how to resolve it. But you’re worth the risk. Even I know that giving up would be a huge mistake.”
“Oh, yeah?” He was grinning. “Even you?”
“This might come out wrong, but I haven’t been sure until now if you know how to be a normal person. For a celebrity, you’re amazing. But I didn’t know if you knew how to pick up takeout or live without assistants or stay in a crappy little house with wall-to-wall carpet. And I don’t think you’ve been trying to prove yourself, but if you had, it’s clear that you’re actually a lot better at being a normal person than I am.”
“I’m always trying to prove myself to you.” He made a wry face. “But maybe I’m lucky that you underestimate me so it’s not that hard.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask—do people recognize you at Target?”
“I don’t think so. I’m a middle-aged bald dude wearing a baseball cap and a mask.”
“I think it’s only a matter of time before the mom next door realizes you’re here, if she hasn’t already. Apparently, she’s a superfan.” I pointed toward the window facing the side of the Larsens’ house.
“Did she say something?” Noah seemed unruffled.
“That she’s a superfan.” I rolled my eyes. “She’s a nice person, and I don’t think she’ll alert the media or anything like that, but I might have to develop some skills for running interference for you.”
“If people ask you for stuff from me, you can always ignore them or else refer them to Leah and let her handle it.”
“I don’t long to be your secretary, but you’re not worried that I’d ignore something important?”
“People tend to be persistent when it’s important. And they shouldn’t be reaching out through you anyway. Regarding the neighbor—”
“Charlotte.”
“Regarding Charlotte, I’m happy to meet her. I can’t be all things to all people, but the family who took care of Sugar? I’m glad to.”
“That’s very nice, and I hope you don’t come to regret it.” I’d been wiping the kitchen table, and I squeezed the rag over the sink. “Anyway,” I said, “for as long as I live, I’ll always remember that you went and bought Jerry a bedside commode.”
“Don’t forget the shower chair.”
“And the shower chair. And the portable urinal with the glow-in-the-dark cap.”
“The funny thing,” he said, “is that when you were staying at that hotel in Santa Monica, I was brainstorming about how to win you back. I was thinking about how in romantic comedies, don’t they usually end with one of the people hurrying to be reunited with the other and publicly declaring their love? Like at a party or an airport? I didn’t know I just had to buy a urinal at Target.”
“The term for that is a grand gesture.”
“I was wondering if you’d like it or hate it if I came to your hotel and, well, serenaded you. In front of other people, I mean, like from the sidewalk.”
“Good question. I think maybe I’d aspire to hate it but secretly love it.”
“Why would it be better to hate it? Because it’s cheesy?”
“Well,” I said, “I once heard a smart person point out that it’s hard to determine where the dividing line is between cheesiness and acceptable emotional extravagance.”
He grinned again. “I didn’t tell you at the time, but I know exactly where the line is. When it’s happening to other people, it’s cheesy. When it’s happening to you, it’s wonderful.”
* * *
—
I got into bed a few minutes after he did that night, wearing a T-shirt and underwear, and immediately, before I’d turned out the light, he pulled me toward him, toward his warm, muscled, bread-and-forest-smelling chest—he was wearing only boxer briefs—and it was a joy to be close to him again, so much of our skin touching. When he was on top of me, I set my hands on either side of his head, my palms against the stubble, and said, “I’ve been meaning to say this since I first got to your house, but you’re actually even better looking with your head shaved.”
He smiled a little. “Actually?” he said. “Am I?”
“It’s true, though. Your hair before—it was okay, but there was something very teenage heartthrob about it. Now you look like an adult man. In the same way that I think meeting in our late thirties made us more interesting to each other, I think you’re even more attractive now than you were twenty years ago.”
He averted his eyes for a few seconds then looked back at me. “I have a confession,” he said. “I sometimes wore hair pieces before. When I was hosting TNO, that wasn’t all my real hair.”
“Well, TNO is the world headquarters of wig wearing, so welcome to the club.” I felt conscious of not wanting to embarrass him but also not wanting to feign astonishment—not wanting to lie to him, even about something small.
“I wouldn’t say I wore a full-on wig. I just had some help.” He seemed uncharacteristically abashed. “Do you think that’s cringey?”
I shook my head. “I’m very familiar with people in the public eye doing stuff like this. And I don’t just mean on camera. But the exact way you are right now, in this moment—you couldn’t look any better.” I paused. “Given how much has been written and said about how good you look for the last two decades, do you like being told that or does it seem boring?”
With his face a few inches from mine, he smiled. “Do I like when the woman I love tells me that I look good? Yes, Sally. I like when you tell me that.”
* * *
—
Jerry’s progress could be measured by the distance he ventured from his bed: first to use the toilet in his bathroom; two days later, downstairs to the kitchen in his seersucker bathrobe; the day after that, onto the deck. He announced he wanted a hot dog for lunch one day, and while the two of us waited in the kitchen for it to boil, he said, “I hope the male nurse isn’t too expensive.”
I squinted. “Do you mean Noah?”
“Who’s Noah?” Jerry asked.
“My friend. Or, uh, my boyfriend? The guy staying in our house.”
Jerry looked equanimous, and not all that interested, as he said, “I thought his name was David.”
* * *
—
In the selfie Viv sent Henrietta and me from the hospital, she was wearing a blue mask and a green hospital gown, her eyes were wide open, and she was making a peace sign.
Contractions 3 min apart cervix dilated to 5 cm, she wrote.
Then: Gloria the doula is my new BFF
Then: Epidural heavenly
OMG!! I texted. How are you feeling?
Then Henrietta’s reply came through and it was a picture of Lisa, who’d planned a home birth, reclining bare-breasted against the interior wall of an inflatable pool, looking blissed out, holding an actual baby—a tiny, huge-cheeked, closed-eyed, naked little creature.
From Henrietta: Amazing and also…meet Olivia Rose
From Viv: WTF?!!!
Viv: Meaning congratulations you overachievers
Viv: But when did Lisa squeeze that out?!?
Henrietta: 8 lbs 1 oz, born 7:46 A.M. this morning
Henrietta: Mom, Mommy, and Olivia all on cloud nine
Henrietta: You’ll do great Viv
Me: H so happy for you and Lisa!!
Me: Vivvy hope you can feel all the love coming toward you
Me: I know Theo and Gloria will take such good care of you
Then Henrietta texted just me: Don’t want to say this to Viv but Lisa’s labor so messy it was like a food fight
