Romantic Comedy, page 21
“Those are great fancy shoes.” He tilted his head toward the house. “How about if I show you around? Just leave your stuff in the car for now.”
“I have something for you.” The driver’s side door was still open, and I was careful not to retrieve his gift by bending from the waist and sticking my butt up at him, but by sitting down again in the seat and leaning over to grab the gray paper bag. When I’d reemerged, I handed it to him. I felt conscious of an ongoing, full-body shakiness.
“How exciting,” he said.
“You might want to keep your expectations in check.”
He grinned. “Oh, it’s far too late for that.” He reached into the bag and, one by one, extracted and opened each individually paper-wrapped key chain I’d purchased along the way. After the first, he said, “I’ve always longed for a key chain in the shape of New Mexico.” As he opened the second, he added, “And I’ve also always longed for a Texas cowboy hat key chain. Oh, and an Arizona cactus.” The remaining ones were a retro Kansas license plate with stalks of wheat and an Oklahoma state bird; I had, of course, thought of Nigel while purchasing it.
I said, “There’s nothing for Missouri because I was over the Kansas border about five minutes after leaving the house.”
“The funny thing is I never wanted a Missouri key chain,” he said. “I have a new regard for Missouri. Don’t get me wrong. But their key chains just aren’t my style.” He’d unwrapped them all by this point, and he said, “Thank you. I love them.”
“I wanted to get you something I was confident you didn’t already have.”
He set his palm on my bare forearm, and I thought of the line from “Making Love in July” that went, “Did you feel it, too / my hand brushed against you.” I thought of first hearing the song almost twenty years before, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and thinking it was silly and not having the faintest inkling of who Noah Brewster would eventually become to me. Also, when were we going to start kissing passionately? He said, “They’re perfect.”
Inside the house, we found ourselves in a high-ceilinged entry hall with white stucco walls and, as in the pictures I’d seen online, a floor of terra-cotta brick tiles interspersed with blue-and-white ceramic tiles. An interior arched doorway that opened onto a large living room confirmed that the aesthetic was Casually Fancy Southwestern and The Color White. As he led me through the living room, the dining room, and the study, almost all the rugs and couches and chairs were white—the furniture’s fabric was often linen, with a couple cowhide ottomans thrown in—and almost all the tables looked expensively rough-hewn. Standing in the doorway of the study, I pointed at the desk and said, “Is that where you sat when you were emailing me? Where the magic happens?”
He laughed. “Some of the time.”
There was a kind of instrument room, not to be confused with the freestanding recording studio, that was mostly empty except for a grand piano and bench, four guitars on stands against a wall, and a large (white) armless chair in one corner. The kitchen was also large and open, with a massive wooden island and a stainless steel refrigerator and a stainless steel range and an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that revealed a long rectangular pool set in a patio of terra-cotta tiles. We stepped onto the patio, where Adirondack chairs circled a firepit. Beyond the pool, the land fell away into a valley then rose again into mountains, above which the pale blue sky was clear and expansive.
“Where are we right now in relation to the ocean?” I asked.
He jabbed his thumb over one shoulder. “It’s that way.”
“Nice view,” I said. “And it smells even better than the inside of my car.”
He laughed. “It’s the eucalyptus.”
“Do you actually swim, or is the pool more decorative? It’s kind of Zen.”
“Interesting you should ask. Much like with cooking, I’ve gone swimming more in the last few months than in the previous few years. I started out doing laps for exercise but now, just for fun, I float around on inflatables that I used to put out for parties but never used on my own.”
“Where are your butler and chambermaid right now? Are they watching us on closed-circuit TV?”
He laughed. “I hope not. No, Glenn and Margit go see their grandkids on the weekends, and they usually stay overnight. Their daughter lives in Torrance.”
“Do their grandkids come here? Have you met them?”
“They don’t usually come here, but I have met them. It’s a boy and girl who are close in age to my nephews.”
I swept one hand horizontally, taking it all in, and said, “Well, you have a very nice backyard.”
“The truth is that Topanga isn’t the ideal place to be in terms of wildfires, but otherwise it’s pretty great. And things have been okay this summer.” Our eyes met, and he said, “Should I have mentioned the wildfire thing before you drove halfway across the country?”
“Wildfires sound terrifying, but I’m not sure that would have stopped me.”
We reentered the kitchen, which segued into an entire second, or maybe third, sitting room, with a white couch and two white chairs facing a flat-screen television. I gestured toward it. “Is that where you watch TNO?”
“Every Saturday without exception.” As we returned to the front of the house, he said, “I bought the place in 2014 but didn’t move in until 2016 because of renovations. I guess the renovating would have been a pain if I’d been in a hurry, but since I’m really interested in architecture, I found the whole process fun.”
I couldn’t bring myself to inquire more—this interest still seemed affected in a way he generally wasn’t—but I managed not to make some snotty joke about it, so wasn’t that a wash, or even a minor victory?
We entered a corridor off which were three bedrooms, all of them so large and airy that I assumed the first was his, and experienced a silent titillation at the sight of the bed, until he said, “This is the room my sister prefers when she’s here.” I then assumed the second was his—like the first, it had a king-sized bed with a big white coverlet and a few Western-seeming leather throw pillows—and I then assumed the third was his. But in the third, he said, “I thought I’d give this one to you. I think it’s the best because it’s on the end, but if you really want privacy, we can set you up in the pool house.” He was looking at me with an attentive and searching expression, and I wondered if we’d come to opposite conclusions after discussing the bedroom thing on the phone—if he’d thought I’d been sincerely requesting space instead of just trying to give him an out. And, seriously, when would we kiss? What if we waited too long and missed the window of opportunity, and I ended up not only coming up with jokes for his appearance on a late-night talk show but accidentally ghostwriting his entire memoir?
Or what if instead of waiting for him to kiss me, I kissed him first? If he rebuffed me, the bad news would be that I’d need to jump in my car and drive back to Kansas City immediately, but the good news would be that it would be such a vividly humiliating experience that surely I’d derive personal and professional inspiration from it for years to come.
But once again, I did nothing. I simply said, “Oh, I don’t need to sleep in the pool house.”
We crossed again through the entry hall, and then we were definitely in the master suite: twice as large as the guest bedrooms, with its own sitting area—it seemed so predictable as to almost not be worth noting that the bedroom was bigger than my entire apartment in New York—and the adjacent bathroom featured double sinks in a quartz countertop and an enormous quartz shower and a huge, oval, freestanding bathtub. As in the guest rooms, this bed was tidily made with a white coverlet, but, on the bureau and bedside tables, there were personal objects—an iPad and a legal notepad and a heavy-looking cylindrical silver clock with a lit-up face of shifting light- and dark-brown geometrical shapes. There really wasn’t much clutter, though; either he was a tidy person or Margit or Glenn cleaned up after him, or both.
It occurred to me to point at the bed and say, “Is that where the magic happens?” But I managed to suppress this unhelpful impulse as well and instead said, “I feel like something is missing in here.”
We were standing with our backs to the bathroom door, just inside the bedroom, and he glanced at me with an alert expression.
“An Indigo Girls poster,” I said.
He laughed. “I guess people buy posters online now, right? I used to go to a music store at the mall and page through those giant plastic racks.”
“Same,” I said. “And then get an Orange Julius.”
I felt conscious of having come to the end of the tour, conscious of being in his bedroom, conscious of the intimacy of our conversation. Even as I was exquisitely aware of his nearness, I also was thinking in an abstract way about how I had been one kind of person up until my divorce, a resigned and constrained person. Then I had been another kind of person for the last decade, a cynical and compartmentalized person. Was there any reason I couldn’t now become a third kind of person, made more confident by experience and braver by the current reminder of how fragile and tenuous all our lives had been all along? And still Noah’s head was turned to look at me, and my head was turned to look at him.
He smiled at me in a way I had never before been smiled at, a smile of such tenderness and openness and warmth. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied.
We still were making eye contact as I brushed the back of my right hand against the back of his left one, and then our fingers intertwined a little. This, his complicity, bolstered me, and I stepped around so that I was facing him. The shift made it easier to properly hold hands, not just on the one side but, almost without my realizing it, on the other side, too. “So,” I said, and I really did feel like I might disrupt the space-time continuum with the hugeness of what seemed to be about to happen. I had never initiated a first kiss with someone I cared about, and I had never initiated a first kiss while sober.
“So,” he said, still smiling.
I took one more step toward him—again, the closeness of him, the mammalian smell of him, made me swoony—and then I stood on my tiptoes and leaned in and pressed my mouth against his.
There was, of course, a part of my mind narrating the action, declaring, It’s happening! Holy shit, it’s happening! But as we kept kissing, as we alternated between pursing our lips and pulling back and smiling and setting our hands on each other’s shoulders and backs, as his tongue slipped forward and touched mine, my inner narrator receded, or went somewhere else. And then there was just the sheer physical pleasure and excitement of my mouth touching his mouth and the skin on my hands and arms and face and neck touching the skin on his hands and arms and face and neck and the rest of my clothed body pressed to the rest of his clothed body. It felt like a relief, like something I’d been waiting for since TNO and much of the world had shut down in March, and also like something I’d been waiting for since he’d shown me his tattoos in 2018, and also like something I’d been waiting for my whole life. And it felt like an astonishing miracle. If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I’d never stop wanting more of it.
And then he pulled his head a full foot back, and also took a step back, though his hands were still cupping my jaw on either side and his expression was still tender. “I have something to show you,” he said.
It was because I was a comedy writer, and not because I was sexually fearless, that I was tempted to say, “Your penis?” Instead, I said, “Is it better than this?”
He laughed. “It’s in the kitchen.”
“Is it sourdough bread?”
“No, although I’ll make dinner if you’re hungry, like some salmon and a salad, or else Margit left some premade stuff for us.”
Who cares about dinner? I thought.
I said, “Is it an NDA for me to sign?”
He laughed. “Also no.” He placed a hand on the small of my back to steer me toward the bedroom door. “It’s kind of a present, but it isn’t key chains.”
Did he think I was a bad kisser? Was the kissing not supposed to have happened? Was the kissing supposed to have happened, but when it wasn’t some guy off a dating site, was it paced differently and the subsequent stuff didn’t occur as quickly? Was it weird that I didn’t know how this all worked even though I was thirty-eight years old, or did nobody know? Counting Martin Biersch, my ex-husband, two earlier guys in college, and the assortment of online serial hookups, I’d had sex with a total of nine men. If someone had told me of this figure when I was in high school, I’d have thought it sounded like an embarrassment of riches, but surely it was nothing compared to Noah’s number. Even a pop star who eschewed the term playboy had to be, by normal standards, a playboy.
Back in the kitchen, on the wood-topped island, I noticed a shiny black folder. He pulled a single sheet of paper from it, with printed words I couldn’t read, and said, “It’s something I made as a surprise. Not a song. More of an activity.”
“This is very intriguing.”
“You’ll know what it is pretty quickly. Okay.” He cleared his throat. “I need you to give me a noun.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “A noun? Like a person, place, or thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Any particular kind of noun?”
He shook his head.
“Let’s see,” I said. “How about door?”
He used a ballpoint pen to write then said, “Verb ending in -ing?”
“This is like Mad Libs. Fidgeting.”
He looked sheepish. “It is Mad Libs. But personalized for you.” He began reading. “I just drove my door from Kansas City, Missouri, to Los Angeles, California. As I drove, I was fidgeting about whether I’d—” He looked up from the page. “This is incredibly corny, huh?”
“Well, we’ve barely started. Don’t give away the punch line.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“I’m happy to. Do you need an adjective?”
His brow furrowed. “I thought this was clever before you got here, but now it seems very contrived.”
“It’s fun,” I insisted.
“I want you to think coming here was a good idea,” he said, and there was a catch in my chest, less from swooning than from being startled. “I want you to think I’m not boring, even though I don’t work at TNO.”
I could tell that he wasn’t being sarcastic, or even flirty. He was being completely unguarded and sincere, and I tried to be equally sincere as I said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but no one has ever made anything like this for me. It’s so, like, premeditatedly sweet. And I want you to think my visit was a good idea. In your room just then—” I trailed off and looked at him uncertainly.
“No, that was awesome,” he said. “That was great. To be honest, I was afraid of going too fast and I just—I want to let you get settled here and get comfortable. I don’t want you to feel pressured.”
“I’m actually pretty comfortable.”
“Don’t get me wrong, that’s definitely what I want. But I worry that I’ve spooked you in the past.”
I could feel my forehead wrinkle. “When?”
“At the bar after the after-party.”
“Oh—I was really confused that night. I almost thought—well, I wondered if you were about to kiss me, but I couldn’t believe you’d want to.”
“I was planning on asking you out. Of course I wanted to kiss you, but I wouldn’t have done it there.”
It was slightly easier to summon my courage this time. I said, “Do you want to kiss me now?”
We were standing with a corner of the island between us, and he stepped around it, leaned his face into mine, and kissed my lips. “Does that answer your question?”
I smiled as I said, “Have I mentioned that I’m very comfortable right now? And not at all spooked?”
And then we were making out in the kitchen, and this time he was a tiny bit more familiar, the taste of his mouth and skin and the feel of his body, and I was a tiny bit more relaxed, and again it was overwhelming and exhilarating. And again, after a minute or two, he stepped back, this time with his hands holding my upper arms. He nodded down once with his chin and said, “See? I just—I don’t want to jump the gun or, like, freak you out.”
I understood, as I hadn’t before, that he meant because he had an erection; even before he’d said anything, I’d been able to feel it. And I’d been delighted. Looking at him, I thought that he was so handsome, but also so endearing. “You know what?” I said. “Let’s go back to your room and jump the gun.”
* * *
—
We did not end up eating the salmon. We didn’t end up eating at all until after midnight when we went out to the kitchen with him wearing nothing and me wearing only my black T-shirt, when we both ate a handful of cashews, split a banana, and chugged water from the same huge glass that he then carried back to the bedroom.
First we’d had fast, ravenous, pulling-off-each-other’s clothes, first-time-with-each-other sex that was also there’s-a-pandemic-happening-and-we-might-be-in-the-twilight-of-humankind sex. I didn’t expect to climax and certainly not while we were in the missionary position—for Christ’s sake, it was still light out at that point and I was sober—which may have been why I did. In fact, I did before he did, and as I moaned, with his right shoulder by my mouth and his mouth by my left ear, he said in a low, quiet voice, “Oh, Sally,” and then he pulled out and ejaculated all over my stomach and I thought about how Jessa, the older daughter of my mother’s best friend, had told me when I was thirteen that when you didn’t like a guy, the disgusting things about sex were disgusting, and when you did like a guy, the disgusting things about sex were sexy. I tugged Noah onto me, and he said, “Am I too heavy?” and I said, “You’re perfect,” and we both lay still for a long time, my arms wrapped around him, his full weight on me, his face pressed against my neck, his left hand fiddling with my hair. My mind wasn’t racing; I wasn’t nervous; there was nothing other than this that I wanted.
