Romantic Comedy, page 2
Once again looking around the room, Noah said, “Hearing all this has made me even more excited about the week ahead. A little terrified, but mostly excited. I’m psyched to roll with your ideas and I don’t have a big agenda. I’ll admit there’s an idea I’ve been noodling over, kind of trying to write it myself, and I’ll have to decide before the table read if it should or shouldn’t see the light of day, but, in terms of your sketches, I’m down for any of it.”
You mean any of it other than pretending to date a woman less attractive than you, I thought. I was wondering if his aversion was somehow tied to having dated so many models in real life when I heard a long, low belch and immediately became aware of an unpleasant odor, a noxious version of a breakfast burrito. I snapped my head in the direction of Danny, and he pursed his lips and widened his eyes in a ridiculous way—as if to say, Oops!—and I scowled. Burping was part of life, yes, but could he not have held it in for the last thirty seconds of a three-hour meeting?
Patrick, who was the writer sitting between Danny and me, leaned toward me. He murmured, “That was you, right?”
Monday, 4:47 p.m.
I was responding to emails when Danny entered our office carrying a can of Red Bull. “Yo, Chuckles,” he said as he sat backwards on his desk chair and rolled toward me. The room was narrow enough that the only way to fit a couch was for both of our desks to be against the same wall. Gesturing at my computer screen, he said, “How’s the great American screenplay coming along?”
“I wish,” I said. “I’m telling my agent I don’t want to write a”—I held up my fingers in air quotes—“ ‘humorous animated short for an organic douche company.’ ”
“How much does it pay? Because maybe I want to write a humorous animated short for an organic douche company.”
“Ten thousand, but also douching is bad, and I assume the organic part is bullshit. Your vagina is a self-cleaning organ.”
“Maybe your vagina is a self-cleaning organ. But yeah, ten grand is a nonstarter. I don’t sell out for less than six figures.” I suspected Danny earned close to what I did. He’d been hired as the youngest-ever host of News Desk, TNO’s satirical show-within-the-show, and he wrote and occasionally appeared in other sketches, meaning that, as a second-year cast member who wrote, he probably earned the same amount as a ninth-year writer who never appeared onscreen. This was currently $12,000 an episode, or $252,000 a year—not a huge amount for a TV job where you pulled several all-nighters a week, and obscene compared to, say, a fourth-grade teacher’s salary. Even if Danny didn’t yet earn more than I did from TNO, he’d recently begun appearing in movies, whereas I used my summers off for the considerably less lucrative activities of reading novels and traveling.
“Okay, I need your advice,” Danny said. “Annabel is freaking out because she just found out our signs are incompatible. Belly’s a Pisces and I’m a Sagittarius.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t even believe you’ve lasted this long.”
“I get that it’s ridiculous to you, but she takes this shit very seriously.”
“Did she not know when your birthday is until now?”
“She had a session with her astrologist yesterday, who told her even though our connection is authentic, our communication styles are inharmonious and I’m not the person to walk beside her on her healing journey.”
I bit my lip, and Danny added, “It’s okay, you can laugh. But I still fucking love her.”
“What about your healing journey?”
Danny made an aw-shucks face. “I’m all healed, Chuckles.”
My resentment about their relationship and the sketch I’d just pitched notwithstanding, I found Danny’s unbridled love for Annabel sweet. Their sincerity and spontaneity and sheer optimism all seemed so misguided, so destined to fail, that how could anyone, including a cynic like me, not root for them? Getting engaged after seven weeks was only the latest in their dramatic and very public declarations of love. After a week together, they had traveled to Paris for a make-out session in front of the Eiffel Tower, and after two weeks they’d gotten matching tongue piercings, and all of this had been documented on social media then breathlessly described by celebrity journalists.
In general, Danny’s emotional openness made me hopeful about either Gen Z, males, or maybe both. A year and a half prior, I had been less than thrilled when I learned that I was being moved from the office I shared with Viv to an office with Danny, who was then new to TNO. I hadn’t yearned for this proximity to Danny, who’d found success as a stand-up comic with bits so steeped in irony that I couldn’t always tell what the joke was, which then made me feel extremely old. Relatedly and even more unsettlingly, I wondered if the office change was intended to send a message to me. TNO and Nigel specifically were notorious for indirection, with people often literally not knowing they’d been hired or fired. Was putting me in a crappy office with a new twenty-four-year-old dude a way of nudging me toward the exit without telling me to leave? For the first few weeks of the 2016 season, Danny and I had barely spoken, as he worked a lot in the office of the dedicated News Desk writers, whose names were Roy and Hank, and quickly became the most visible new cast member. Then, five weeks into the season, it was election night—a Tuesday, so we were at the office, ostensibly writing, though no one was getting any work done. Around 11:30 p.m., just after Florida was called for Trump, following North Carolina and Ohio, with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania looking bad, Danny and I were walking toward our office at the same time from opposite directions, got within a couple feet of each other, made eye contact, both began sobbing, and threw ourselves into each other’s arms. It was shortly after Trump’s inauguration, as our democracy started to unravel, that Danny took to calling me Chuckles. This was short for chuckle slut, which was the term for women who slept with comedians, and Danny bestowed the nickname after I told him I’d never once slept with a comedian.
Almost eighteen months later, I said to him, “Maybe Annabel just needs a day or two to absorb what the astrologist said. Like, she was thrown by it, but she’ll realize it’s not that big a deal.”
“I wish people could change signs,” Danny said. “I’d totally convert to Scorpio for her.”
“I think she’ll come around,” I said.
He nodded toward my computer screen. “It’s very demeaning that you think my vagina needs cleaning. It shouldn’t smell floral when I’m getting oral.” He grinned. “I’ll invoice you for the ten grand.”
Monday, 7:32 p.m.
Mondays were the only days during a TNO workweek when I got home at a remotely normal hour, and I tried to use them to continue recovering from the previous week if there’d been a show—from October to May, shows typically aired three weeks in a row then we got two or three weeks off—and to brace myself for the week ahead. I’d walked the forty minutes from the TNO offices in Midtown to my apartment on the Upper West Side, picking up Thai takeout near my building. I ate pad see ew from the container while sitting at my kitchen counter and talking on speakerphone to my seventy-nine-year-old stepfather, Jerry. My mother had died three years prior, devastating both Jerry and me in ways we couldn’t really express. Four months after the funeral, I’d convinced Jerry to get a beagle named Sugar, who brought him so much happiness that I considered her presence in his life to be my crowning achievement. Plus, she gave us something to chat about every Sunday or Monday instead of our feelings.
“She was a very good girl getting her nails cut today,” Jerry said jovially, then dropped his voice to a whisper—presumably because Sugar was nearby and he didn’t want to offend her—and said, “She really wasn’t. It took two attendants to hold her because she was wiggling so much.”
“Was she whimpering, too?”
“Like a baby,” he said. Jerry and Sugar lived in Kansas City, in the house I’d grown up in. I tried to visit twice a year, though since my mother’s death I hadn’t been able to bring myself to go for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I’d either stayed in New York or traveled far away, once to the Seychelles with Viv and once, with Viv and also that time with Henrietta, to Mexico City. Jerry spent the holidays with his sister.
“I saw on the Internet that your host this week is also the musical guest,” Jerry said. “That sounds awfully tiring.” My mother and I had debriefed about each show on Sunday afternoons, and in her absence, Jerry had, on Sunday afternoons, taken to emailing me two formally written paragraphs sharing his feedback. The kindness of this impulse almost made up for the fact that, apart from appreciating Sugar’s antics, Jerry didn’t have much of a sense of humor and wasn’t familiar with almost any of the pop cultural phenomena or people that TNO satirized. Though he and my mother had been in the studio audience twice, he’d never have even watched it on TV if I didn’t write for it.
“You’ve probably heard Noah Brewster’s songs playing in the background in a restaurant or department store,” I said. “And I’m sure it is really tiring to host and be the musical guest, but he gets to promote his new album.”
“I meant to tell you,” Jerry said. “I ran into Mrs. Macklin at Hy-Vee, and she said to give you her best. She said Amy just had another baby, which I believe is her third.”
Who’s Mrs. Macklin? I thought. Who’s Amy? Then I remembered a high school classmate named Amy Macklin, a girl I’d worked with on the student newspaper. (I’d been the copy editor, not a reporter, because reporting would have required interacting with other humans in a way I couldn’t then have managed.) I said, “Good for Amy.” A third child inspired in me more gratitude for my own circumstances than envy for Amy’s.
Jerry described a tapas restaurant he’d eaten at the previous Friday with his sister and her husband, which had featured a garbanzo-bean-and-spinach dish he thought I’d like (though I didn’t perceive myself as having a special relationship with garbanzo beans, Jerry’s belief that I did arose from the fact that when I was staying with him, I often bought hummus). Then we circled back to Sugar. A family with two daughters had moved in next door the month before, and Sugar had taken to sitting on Jerry’s back deck, facing the other house, and barking, as if to summon the sisters. “I think she likes it when they tell her how adorable she is,” Jerry said.
“Who wouldn’t?” I said, and Jerry laughed.
“All right then,” he said. “Be careful on the subway, honey.” This was how he always ended our conversations.
After I’d hung up, I refrigerated the leftovers and took a shower. I still rented the seven-hundred-square-foot apartment I’d moved into almost ten years before, when I’d arrived in New York. The difference was that for the first two years, I’d had a roommate who slept in the real bedroom while I slept in a shoddily built loft above the living room, where the ceiling was four feet from the mattress. It was hard to say in retrospect if I hadn’t had sex during those two years because I was me, because I was adjusting to my divorce, or because there simply wasn’t space.
When I emerged from the shower, I put on the huge T-shirt I slept in, brushed my teeth, rubbed cheap lotion on my legs and expensive lotion on my face, then retrieved my phone from the pocket of the jeans I’d left on the bathroom floor and got into bed. Four texts were waiting, three of them from Viv.
The first: I still look like a zombie
The second: You think I should skip dinner?
The third was a close-up photo of her right eye, the white part of which had a red and blurry-edged dot slightly bigger than her pupil. In a sketch during the live show the previous Saturday, a cast member named Gregor had thrown, of all things, an oven mitt that had been intended to lightly hit Viv’s chest but had somehow struck her eye. She’d noticed the blotch when removing her makeup after the show but it hadn’t hurt and she’d attended the after-parties that lasted long into Sunday morning. When the blotch hadn’t gone away by Monday, she’d seen TNO’s set nurse, who recommended Viv make an appointment with an ophthalmologist just to be safe.
I texted back, Take a pic where I can see your whole face
A few seconds later, another photo arrived of Viv’s entire and very pretty face, in this moment unsmiling and preoccupied-looking, with both her eyebrows raised. Viv was Black and thirty-one, five years younger than I. I knew that both she and Henrietta, who was white and thirty-two, used preemptive antiaging measures like Botox and chemical peels. At the same time, Viv appeared in a recurring sketch where she played a famously well-preserved middle-aged TV host talking to her reflection in her dressing room mirror, uttering with pleasure the phrase “Black don’t crack.”
It really doesn’t look that bad, I texted. I’d decide about dinner based on how you feel
Still doesn’t hurt, Viv replied. But
She sent the female zombie emoji, green skinned and holding out curled fingers.
No you look fine, I wrote.
By which I mean great!
I think ok to go to dinner or ok to skip but you don’t need to skip to spare anyone
On Monday nights around eleven o’clock, Nigel always took that week’s host and a few cast members to dinner at a fancy restaurant. The only writer ever included was the head writer, which I actually didn’t mind because even after nine years, I was more comfortable having fleeting rather than sustained encounters with Nigel. Many people in- and outside of TNO were obsessed with the man who’d created the show in 1981 and produced it ever since. Born Norman Piekarkski in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1947, Nigel Petersen was indisputably the comedy kingmaker of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, and it was often said that your relationship with your father was revealed by the relationship you had, or thought you had, with Nigel. But I’d long believed that being quietly competent would serve me better than trying to curry favor with him directly. For my entire first year, I hadn’t even been sure he knew my name, and then at the after-party following the season finale, he’d said in his surprisingly soft and understated voice, “The field trip sketch was very funny, Sally.” These eight words were possibly the greatest compliment of my life, which might have revealed that I had daddy issues if I hadn’t already been well aware I had daddy issues. The following year, we’d interacted more because I had many more sketches on air, but we spoke only when he was giving notes on them. Our annual superfluous exchange came after he’d complimented with similar brevity a sketch I’d set at a Kansas City barbecue restaurant, when I’d dared not just to mumble thank you but to follow up by saying, “I know you’re from Oklahoma. Do you think of that as the Midwest or the South?”
Again in his soft and understated voice, he said, “According to the census, it’s the South.” That was that for the 2010–2011 season.
Did you make appointment with eye dr, I texted Viv.
Tomorrow at 11 AM, she texted back.
Oh great, I replied.
Go tonight!
Have fun!
She replied with a winking emoji, and I opened the other text that had arrived while I was in the shower. It was from Gene, the guy I’d been hooking up with off and on for the last eight months: Hey Sally how’s it going?
It occurred to me to invite him over—it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, I’d just washed my hair and the rest of myself—and then I thought I’d rather go to sleep early. I almost never saw Gene during show weeks; even when I knew by Wednesday that I’d have no sketches on the live show, I was expected to attend Thursday rewrites, which could go until nine or ten, and it was all just so mentally consuming that I found it easier to give myself over to TNO’s rhythms. It was perhaps the one workplace in America where people who had spouses and kids were not only in the minority but were looked at with vague pity, because how could anyone possibly manage that, too?
Also, though we had decent sex, I didn’t like Gene that much. He was a financial analyst who’d early on mentioned that the University of Florida’s business school, which he’d attended, was ranked among the top fifteen in the country. Though I’d never previously wondered about the University of Florida’s business school ranking, of course this had prompted me to look it up and discover the claim was off by about ten. Far more alarmingly, he’d once used the word snowflake to disparage a co-worker who regularly took sick days because of migraines. While it was possible he meant the term apolitically, the meaning he apparently did intend wasn’t much better. And I hadn’t called him on it because I feared doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I’d have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn’t kill me if we went back to my apartment.
If, on the plus side, Gene wasn’t homicidal, he wasn’t particularly cute, either. He was of medium height and build, with light brown hair, and there was something so generic about him that he could have played an extra in any TNO sketch set in an office. He was unobjectionable in the way that a person you sat next to on an airplane was usually unobjectionable; unlike with an airplane seatmate, though, most of what we did was get each other off. In the months this had been going on, he’d asked me exactly two questions. The first was if I’d ever tried butter coffee (no), and the second was if I’d ever been to Rockaway Beach (also no).
None of Gene’s predecessors had been particularly inquisitive, but they’d asked enough that I’d given a fake job, which I never had to do with Gene. I’d told other guys I’d “dated” that I was a writer for the newsletter of a medical device company, which had been one of my jobs before TNO. Though I wasn’t much of a liar generally, I feared the guys I hooked up with would be overly interested if I mentioned my real employer. In a best-case scenario, they’d merely want tickets to the live show, but in a worst-case scenario, they’d be aspiring improv performers. Or maybe the real worst-case scenario was that they’d know me in a way I didn’t want to be known by them. Even I wasn’t sure if my in-person self (a mild-mannered woman of average intelligence and attractiveness) or my scripts (willfully raging sketches about sexism and bodily functions) reflected my real self—or if I had a real self, or if anyone did. But I suspected that much of my writing emerged from this tension or lack of integration; I believed the perceptions undergirding my sketches arose from my being invisible or at least underestimated, including being mistaken for someone nicer than I was. Since childhood, I’d often felt like a spy or an anthropologist, and I was fine with others at TNO knowing who I really was only because they, too, were, at their core, spies and anthropologists and weirdos.
