Romantic Comedy, page 23
With my thumb and pointer finger, I flicked his left bicep. “I almost resent how good you are at saying the perfect thing.”
“Really, perfect? Phew.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Who’s the last person you were involved with?”
“Before Covid, there was a guy I never quite dated but, you know, met up with. Like friends with benefits, except we weren’t friends.”
“I bet he was smitten with you.”
“He definitely wasn’t. And I definitely wasn’t smitten with him. It was a holding pattern for both of us. The last time I saw him was in 2019, in September or October. Then we weren’t in touch for a few months, and I texted him, and he texted back that he had a girlfriend but wished me the best of luck.” Noah’s head was still raised, and I rolled my eyes. “And that’s the story of how I was dumped by my mediocre fuck buddy.”
“That sends chills down my spine.”
“Which part?”
“Being called a mediocre fuck buddy, for one thing. Poor guy.”
“You’re not a mediocre fuck buddy. You’re a stellar fuck buddy.”
I was slightly surprised that Noah didn’t laugh or even seem pleased.
“Anyway,” I said, “the dynamic between Gene and me was completely different from our dynamic. He and I never really talked about anything. And not because we had such an animal attraction that we tore off each other’s clothes the minute we were together. Our conversations were just pointless and uninteresting. They were about how it was crazy that Christmas was almost here, or could you believe that thunderstorm the other day? And also—” I paused. “I lied to him about my job. And I’d done that before, lied to other guys. I said I was still a medical newsletter writer because I didn’t want to talk to them about TNO or be asked for tickets. After the text where Gene told me he had a girlfriend, he sent another text saying, By the way it’s cool you’re a writer for TNO. I asked how he knew, and he said he’d seen a fleece jacket with the TNO logo at my apartment and assumed I’d bought it at the gift shop in the 66 Building, but later he’d also seen a mug that Henrietta had made for my birthday one year that had a picture of me, her, and Viv on it. So then he googled me.” I was quiet, and Noah looked at me.
“How’d you feel about that?”
“Remorseful. Not because he deserved better, although of course he did, but because who was I really pulling one over on? What was I achieving by sleeping with someone I didn’t want to tell the most basic information about my life?”
“Before seeing Louisiana,” Noah said, “I hadn’t had sex for almost a year. In 2019, I went on a bunch of first dates, and a couple second dates, but I felt like I knew beforehand how they’d play out and it just wasn’t worth the energy. If you’re our age and single, dating kind of has to be an act of reckless optimism, right? The triumph of hope over experience?”
“Did you really not have sex for almost a year?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not judging you, I’m just surprised.”
“Because I’m a guy?”
“Partly.”
“Do you buy into the idea of all men as constantly horny? I thought the younger TNO staffers were teaching you that gender stereotypes are nonsense.”
“I don’t know if you know this, but you’re also a celebrity. A good-looking celebrity. Don’t women throw their bras at you onstage?”
“I don’t think that happens in real life.”
“Never? Not even once or twice?”
He smiled sheepishly. “Maybe once or twice.” Then he burrowed into me. “I am constantly horny for you, in case that’s not clear.”
* * *
—
Margit and Glenn came back in the afternoon, and even though I knew they weren’t Noah’s parents, I felt a little like they were, and I wanted their approval. They appeared to be in their sixties—Margit was petite and dark-haired, and Glenn was tall—and I further realized that I’d half expected them to have on uniforms like the servants in a British period drama. Instead, they were wearing shorts and T-shirts, and when Noah introduced me in the kitchen, they greeted me in a friendly but brief way, and then Noah told Margit that we hadn’t eaten the salmon the night before so it would probably be good to have it for dinner. Equally casually, Noah said to me, “Do you want Glenn to vacuum your car?”
“Oh,” I said. “No, that’s okay.”
“If you change your mind, just give him the keys.”
Then we went out to the pool and splashed around and treaded water for a while and stood in the shallow end pressed against each other, making out—did Margit, whom I had the vague impression was still in the kitchen, care? Had she seen a version of this many times?—and Noah said, “I think it’s very important for you to be kissed a lot while you’re in a swimming pool because I hear that Martin Biersch was negligent on that front.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
Then we lay on the inflatables, and I almost fell asleep, with the sunny blue Topanga sky above us and the green hills around us and a sort of natural ambient buzzing in the air. I wasn’t, of course, totally un-self-conscious about how I looked in a bathing suit, but I was only about 17 percent as self-conscious as I’d have anticipated. First because of all the sex we’d had and second because, as per Viv’s pep talk, I was staying for just three more days, until Thursday at noon, so really, wouldn’t it have been a waste of time to fret about my thighs or belly?
After that, he showed me his studio: the live room, which held another grand piano and a drum set in addition to a dozen guitars of various shapes and sizes stored on stands; the control room, with a vast mixing console like the one in the control room at TNO; and the isolation booth, with its foam-covered walls and standing mic. Back in the live room, he picked up an acoustic guitar and tuned it and then, while looking at me, began playing a song I soon recognized as “Revolution” by the Beatles. He kept playing as we talked about something else, and I felt a tidal wave in my stomach, this reminder of the thing he could do exceptionally well and easily and the strange preciousness of his doing it when no one was around except me.
He stopped playing and said, “It’s weird we’ve never discussed this, but do you play any instruments?”
I shook my head. “I wish.”
He began to play another song and said, “You know this one?”
It took me a moment, then I said, “ ‘Sultans of Swing’?”
He nodded, closed his eyes, and sang. I thought about the embarrassment I had experienced watching him rehearse his songs at TNO, and it seemed in retrospect to have been a kind of foreknowledge but also a kind of misunderstanding. I didn’t feel embarrassed in his studio; I felt admiration. And my embarrassment from before now seemed like a protectiveness.
“Last one,” he said, and he segued into “Ain’t No Sunshine”—the title was revealed in the first line—and his eyes were closed again and he was belting it out unabashedly, and I wondered then if there was always a loneliness to loving a very talented person because their talent was only of them, not of both of you, and then I thought, Jesus Christ, do I love Noah? I only got here yesterday! And then I thought, was there anyone who would ever feel lonely because of my talent? Was I as talented as Noah? I was competent, but nobody would want to stand still and just watch me. If you were a writer, you could be impressive in a cerebral sort of way, but if you were a musician, you got to be viscerally magical.
As casually as he’d reached for the guitar, he put it back, and grabbed my hand.
We returned to the main house and ate the dinner Margit had made, though we didn’t see Margit until we were halfway through eating, when she came to check if we needed anything and then came back to clear the plates. (Was it reprehensible that a couple in their sixties worked for Noah in this way? Was it fine? Was it my responsibility to decide?)
Then, in Noah’s bedroom, we watched a futuristic movie about astronauts, but halfway through we began messing around and the movie was still playing on the wall-mounted screen as he peeled off my jeans and underwear and kissed the insides of my thighs, so my consciousness was split between the surreal ecstasy of his mouth on me while my eyes were closed and the characters saying things like “But the commander has no idea that the electromagnetic currents from the storm damaged the satellite!”
I woke the next morning, and moved from Noah’s bed to the one in the guest room (with a long and, I hoped, surreptitious stop in the bathroom between) not at 4:15 but at 5:27, which seemed like progress. The next morning I woke and moved at 5:55. On the fourth morning, I woke at 6:10, went to the guest bathroom, then returned to his bed, and when I did, he sleepily scooted toward me and wrapped me in his arms.
This was the day I had planned to depart, a plan I’d never mentioned to Noah, a plan that seemed, from the vantage point of his bed and his arms, to be ridiculous.
* * *
—
A rhythm asserted itself: outrageously delicious yet healthy meals prepared by Margit and eaten outside; Noah’s trainer every other morning, which was when I attended to the Sisyphean task of body hair removal, except with a razor blade and tweezers instead of a boulder; responding to emails or, in Noah’s case, to phone calls after lunch; driving to various trails in the late afternoon to hike and sometimes swimming on our return; watching movies before bed; and random but regular intervals of sex that was sometimes fun and lighthearted, almost joking, and sometimes passionate and serious, like we were the futuristic astronauts who’d made it back from our mission successfully and could finally take off our space suits and go at it with our earthly flesh.
It was somewhere in this stretch that I remembered the Mad Libs and convinced him to let us finish it, and my favorite line from our collaboration was “Forsooth!” I said, “California is truly the most axiomatic and piquant bellybutton I’ve ever square danced!” It was also during this stretch that I was reading by the pool one afternoon while Noah was inside on the phone with his manager discussing a livestream show that would be filmed in September at a concert hall with no audience. The conversation went on for a long time, and at some point, I became aware of a mild but persistent longing. And then I thought, I miss him.
It was on the ninth day of my visit, while we were lying naked in his bed at 11:40 a.m., that he patted the hamster on my right bicep and said, “That’s still the greatest tattoo of all time.” I was flat on my back and he was on his side, facing me.
“It really encapsulates my badass lifestyle, doesn’t it?” I touched the inside of his left forearm, the music notes on a staff. I now knew, as I had not when the glimpses of and proximity to his skin had tormented me at TNO, that he’d gotten the “Blackbird” notes after his first album came out, the crow after his bandmate Christopher had died, and the Celtic knot after his first year of sobriety. I said, “Do you think you’re done or not done with body art?”
“Probably done. What about you?”
“Also probably done, unless I form an unexpected attachment to a guinea pig or a raccoon.”
He laughed, and I said, “I have a question for you. You know over email when I asked if you were trying to seduce me during your song rehearsal at TNO? When you said no, I kind of interpreted it as you saying, no, you weren’t interested in me.”
He shook his head rapidly. “I knew I was walking the knife’s edge with that one. In the emails, I mean. And I blew it, didn’t I? It was the word seduce that confused me—I think of that as being sleazy, like what a scoundrel does to an innocent young woman in a nineteenth-century novel. I didn’t understand what you were asking. If you had just said, ‘Do you like me?’ I could have said, ‘I sure do.’ ”
I laughed. “What if I had said, ‘Do you like me in a wholesome, non-scoundrel-ish way?’ ”
“No.” He was shaking his head again. “It was never wholesome. But I didn’t know if it was safe then to convey that.”
“Couldn’t you tell that ‘Do you like me?’ was basically what I was asking when I had that email freakout? And you were like, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing, but it’s fun, huh?’ ” I poked a finger against his chest. “I needed more affirmation than that.”
“After you dressed me down with the stuff about how I’m not a toxic narcissist but only barely, I did know I’d fucked up, but I wasn’t sure how.”
“But then I apologized.”
“Did you?” Noah was regarding me dubiously.
“I expressed remorse!” I might, even then, have been reluctant to let it slip that I had practically memorized our emails, except that his recall of them seemed similarly detailed. And he was correct that I hadn’t actually written the words I’m sorry.
“I’m very happy to give you affirmation,” he said. “I want to give you affirmation. But if I don’t give you enough, you should ask for it.”
“Isn’t asking for affirmation—I don’t know—needy?”
He looked perplexed. “Isn’t the point of something like this that the other person tries to meet your needs, and you try to meet theirs?”
I was quiet for a few seconds before saying, “Is this what they teach in therapy? Because it’s blowing my mind.”
He laughed. “I have an idea. Instead of going back to New York in September, what if you quit TNO and stay here? Isn’t L.A. better if you want to pivot to screenwriting?”
I raised one arm to gesture around the room. “This is very fun. But it’s not real.”
“In what way is it not real?”
“Having sex all the time while barely interacting with any other human beings.”
“It should be real.” He raised his head and propped it on his left hand, his elbow just below the pillow. Our faces were a few inches apart.
I looked at a wood beam in the ceiling. “I have to tell you something. I felt so overwhelmed about staying with you that I told myself after I got here I’d only stay three days. I’ve been acting all breezy, like I’m not intimidated by this whole situation, but the truth is that I’m a super-anxious person. That’s how it’s not real.”
Kindly, he said, “Do you think I didn’t realize you’re anxious?”
“Wait, really?”
“It seems like you’ve found ways to manage it that work for you. And, I mean, coming from a recovery background, three days is impressive. Most of us just take it one day at a time.” I didn’t say anything, and he added, “Isn’t the goal to live with our demons, not to expect them to go away?”
“Also,” I said then stopped.
“Also,” he repeated.
“Sometimes when I speak, I feel like I’m writing dialogue for the character of myself. I’m impersonating a normal human when really I’m a confused freak.”
He laughed. “We’re all confused freaks. It’s just that most of us aren’t professional writers.” We made eye contact, and he said, “It seems like you’re describing what everyone does in all sorts of situations. Fake it ’til you make it. How do you think I felt the first time I performed at a big awards show? While a virgin, might I remind you.” He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. “In fact, we’re even, because I’ve been pretending I’m not intimidated by being around someone much smarter than I am.”
“That’s very gentlemanly of you,” I said. “But come on.”
“You’re so terrifyingly, awesomely perceptive. That thing about writing dialogue for the character of yourself, that’s so clever. I wish I had thought of it years ago, so in interviews I could have pretended I was playing the part of a musician promoting an album.”
Wasn’t this more than I’d ever imagined I could wish for, that a kind, thoughtful, smoking-hot man would think I was terrifyingly, awesomely perceptive? That he understood how neurotic I was, and didn’t seem to mind? That he saw neediness not as annoying but as normal? Hadn’t it all seemed so unlikely that I’d genuinely made peace with never finding someone like Noah except perhaps in the pages of a screenplay I wrote?
He reached out and smoothed back my hair, which was something he did a lot. He said, “None of that means that what’s happening between us isn’t real.”
* * *
—
We’d gone for a hike in Temescal Canyon, walking a loop of just under four miles, and it was late afternoon as we returned to the trailhead. We both wore baseball caps, and Noah wore a backpack that contained our water bottles and the wrappers from the same brand of protein bars he’d sent to me in Kansas City. We’d eaten the bars while sitting on a boulder near an outcropping apparently known as Skull Rock, from which we could see Santa Monica Bay. Gesturing at the view, I’d said, “It’s so painful being reminded that the smugness of people who live in California is justified.”
As we approached the trailhead, we were discussing Noah’s wish to get a dog, and he said, “Do you think a golden retriever would mean my WASPy parents successfully brainwashed me after all?”
“What about a beagle?” I said. “To renounce your WASPiness and also because they’re objectively the best dogs.”
He took my hand. “Beagles are the best small dog. I’ll grant you that.”
“But they’re not small dogs. I mean, I’m sure no beagle thinks that. Small dogs are Pomeranians or Chihuahuas.”
“Doesn’t it depend on the beagle?” We’d reached the parking lot, and we were walking toward Noah’s car, which was a silver Lexus hybrid SUV.
“Sugar weighs twenty-five pounds,” I said. “Twenty-five pounds of beautiful, lustrous, formidable canine that could never fit in someone’s purse.”
“I’m not disagreeing that Sugar—” Noah began, but he was interrupted by a male voice saying with some urgency, “Hey, Noah!”
