Romantic Comedy, page 24
Immediately, Noah dropped my hand and said very quietly, “Keep walking.”
The parking lot was half-full, and about ten people in configurations of twos and threes were milling around. After scanning the line of cars to figure out who’d spoken, I spotted a man kneeling by a Volvo sedan. “Noah, who’s your friend?” the man said. “What’s your friend’s name?” The man looked to be in his twenties, holding a big black camera with its lens extended, and in the ensuing quiet, I could hear the shutter click repeatedly.
“Come on, man,” Noah said. “Not now.”
“You cut off your hair, right?” the man said. “Did you shave your head? When did you do that?”
Noah was walking so quickly that I’d fallen a foot or two behind him. He’d removed the keys from his shorts pocket, and there was a beep just before he climbed in the driver’s side door of the Lexus and started the engine. As I entered the passenger side, the paparazzo said to me, “Hey, what’s your name? Are you and Noah dating? How long have you known Noah?”
Noah’s jaw was clenched as he reversed out of the parking space and drove toward the exit. I glanced back toward the paparazzo, and Noah said in a low voice, “Don’t look at him.” He’d turned onto the road when, still in a tight voice, he said, “You’d think those guys would lay off with everything happening now.”
I said nothing, and when he turned his head toward me, we made eye contact for the first time in several minutes.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
We both were quiet as we passed a high school that was low and palm-tree-bedecked like a high school in a movie, and finally I said, “Are you afraid he’ll sell a picture of you holding my hand?” I could hear that my voice was weird, too, though not how Noah’s was—mine was sharp and distant. There was a warmly teasing way we’d gotten in the habit of speaking to each other, and this was its opposite.
“I hope he doesn’t for your sake,” Noah said.
“Oh, really? For my sake?”
Noah looked over again as he said, “Are you accusing me of something? Because that’s what it sounds like.”
“If I were a hot twenty-five-year-old actress, would you have dropped my hand like that?”
He squinted. “Are you serious? Did you want the guy to take our picture?”
“There was something very—” I paused. “Instinctive. About how you pulled away from me.”
“I thought you’d hate it. Yes, you. Not me. You. Because you’re a private person and I know you’ve walked red carpets a few times, but I don’t think you’re used to being ambushed in normal life like I am.”
In front of us, the ocean appeared again, turquoise beneath a cornflower sky, and the beauty of the view was an unpleasant contrast to the disagreeable energy inside the car. At least sixty seconds had passed when, taking pains to keep my tone matter-of-fact rather than resentful, I said, “There’s nothing you promised me. I’m complicit in how undefined whatever we’re doing is. I admit that. And I believe you genuinely like me, or at least you genuinely like me enough to be your secret pandemic hookup. But I don’t think I have a low enough opinion of myself to be your secret pandemic hookup.”
“Wow,” he said. “I don’t even know where to start. The fact that you could think any of that is so off base that it makes me wonder if we’ve been having completely different experiences the whole time you’ve been here. I thought we were having a great time.”
“Secret pandemic hookups and having a great time aren’t mutually exclusive.”
While looking straight ahead, he pulled the car over to a parking lane abutting a dusty upward slope dotted with sage scrub. He moved the gear shift into park before facing me, his expression bewildered and displeased. “Do you remember when I told you I was attracted to you from the moment you started talking at the pitch meeting in Nigel’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Part of the reason was that you seemed so confident, like one of the most confident women I’d ever met. One of the most confident people. You had very clear ideas for your sketches, and it was obvious that you knew you could will them into being. And you talked in this way where it seemed like you were planning to be polite and professional with me, but you assumed I wasn’t very bright, and you were prepared to overcome my lack of intelligence. I’ve worked with tons of creative people, tons of talented people, but there was something so refreshing about you, something so cool, where you just really knew who you were and how to get shit done. I had this overwhelming feeling of I want to know her. I want to be around her. Then in your office, you were incredibly kind and supportive. You’ve probably told me seven times, starting that night, what an asshole you are, but you almost never are. Or when you are, it seems like some kind of bluster. It doesn’t seem like who you really are.”
I was fascinated, silenced, and unsure where this was going. On the other side of the windshield, a big white bird I couldn’t identify swooped down and then up again.
Noah exhaled deeply. “You and I hung out in person that week at TNO and it was fun and great. Even after things went off the rails at the bar, I felt like there was a conversation we hadn’t finished, and for the next two years, I wondered how the rest of it would have gone. From the minute you responded to my first email, it was like that conversation picked up exactly where it had stopped. Emailing with you was fun and great, and then we talked on the phone, and it was fun and great, and you came here, and, yeah, it’s not effortless, there are little bumps where we need to figure out how to be around each other. But that’s just life, and having you here has been even better than fun and great. When we’re hanging out by the pool and when we’re watching a movie and above all when we’re making love, and I already know you’ll mock me for saying making love, but that’s what it is—all of that is amazing. I’ve waited my whole life to feel connected to someone in the ways I feel connected to you. I don’t even know if this registered with you, but when we were emailing, after I got worried I’d offended you by telling you to send me a pdf about your divorce, I told you that I didn’t want you to ever stop emailing me. But I wrote a different sentence first that I was too scared to send. And it was that I wanted you to be part of my life forever. I want you and my sister to get to know each other, and I want to introduce you to all my favorite people that I work with. When everything isn’t shut down, there are so many experiences I want to share with you, like taking you to this really cool restaurant in Tokyo or to my favorite park in Sydney. I think of marrying you. And to feel this way and then hear you say crap about how I’m embarrassed to hold your hand in front of some fucking paparazzo—it’s like The Danny Horst Rule wasn’t just a funny sketch idea. It’s your philosophy of life. That version of you in Nigel’s office that I fell in love with, you are that person and you do have that confidence. But at the same time, you might be the most insecure adult I’ve ever met.”
Really, I had been completely silenced. I had never been on the receiving end of this kind of—well, I didn’t even know what it was. An admonition? A declaration? An encomium? None of it was clearly wrong; much of it was heart-stoppingly flattering; a small but significant portion was humiliating.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I said.
“I love you, Sally,” he said. “For you to suggest that I’m ashamed of you—you’re not just insulting yourself. You’re insulting me.”
He loved me? He loved me! Or had he loved me five minutes earlier but changed his mind since then because of what I’d said since we’d left the parking lot? “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I think it’s easier to dismiss entrenched dating patterns when you can date anyone you want.”
He said nothing.
“Setting aside The Danny Horst Rule as a generalization,” I continued, “I guess the thing I don’t understand is that you can do better than me. You can find someone prettier.”
He was looking at me with a not-warm expression. “Is that a question I’m supposed to answer?”
“Please.”
“Will you at least acknowledge how fucked-up it is that first you accuse me of not thinking you’re attractive enough to date, and after I tell you that’s not true, you ask why I’m not dating someone better-looking?”
“You just admitted that you liked me at first because you could tell I didn’t think you were smart. What’s that Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member?”
He turned his head so he was gazing out the windshield again. “There’s a picture of the cast and crew of TNO taken every year on the main stage, right? I’m sure I’ve seen it online or in a magazine. And if I was looking at that, would I pick you out from everyone else and say, ‘That’s the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen’? If I’m being honest, no. But human beings aren’t static images. We’re dynamic and kinetic, and it’s like I said before—right away, I wanted to talk to you, and every time I’ve talked to you since I’ve always wanted to keep talking to you.”
That I didn’t feel completely uninsulted by his admission that I wasn’t the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen meant—what? That I’d nursed some private hope that he thought I was? Either because he had unusual taste or because I’d been holding on to the belief that, as with many a romantic comedy heroine, I was far more beautiful than I realized? At the same time, I didn’t feel the impulse to cling to the insult as I might have when I was younger; I appreciated his candor. I said, “Do you know what sapiosexual means?”
“No.”
“It means being attracted to someone’s brain.”
“I am attracted to your brain,” he said. “But I’m also attracted to the rest of you.” We both were quiet for a few seconds, then he said, “When you told me that thing about swearing off dating at TNO because Elliot rejected you, a part of me was like, Thank God for that. Even though your decision seems over the top, if you hadn’t made it, you’d probably be married to another writer. But now I wonder if it’s a cautionary tale about how you want to stew in your aloneness. Because, sure, I’m discreet when I’m dating someone new in order to avoid media drama, but I’m not the one who’s into secret hookups as a way of life.”
“Why would I want to stew in my aloneness?”
“Because you’re scared.”
“What am I scared of?”
“Getting hurt. Knowing another person really well and another person knowing you really well. Feelings you can’t make fun of. Interactions that go on for long enough that they maybe turn a little awkward or a little tedious instead of ending after ten minutes with a zinger.”
“If you’re referring to TNO sketches, they’re more like five minutes. Ten minutes is an eternity on TV.”
He looked at me then said, “Okay, Sally,” and turned on the ignition.
“I love you, too,” I blurted out.
“Do you?” His brow was furrowed.
“The truth is that I can’t believe you exist. I’ve never known anyone with the combination of qualities you have. You’re so deeply nice and so humble and so insightful in this very non-show-offy way. And even though your fame does fuck with my head, I really respect your creativity and talent and work ethic. Sometimes I feel silly expressing this to you because I’m the fifty-million-and-first person to say it, but I do think your songs are beautiful. And spending time with you, it is fun and great. Everything you said, I feel that, too, that I loved being around you at TNO and I loved emailing with you and I loved talking to you on the phone and I love—” I paused but then I made myself say it. “I love when we make love. It’s definitely different from anything I’ve ever experienced. And I can’t believe that we met and I get to be the person who’s eating dinner with you and hiking with you and being naked with you. For that matter, that I’m the person who just looks up and there you are in the same room with me, and, yes, you are smoking hot. And how unique and incredible you are does make me kind of karmically or existentially terrified. Because how could anyone deserve you, let alone me? But I’m also really grateful because I always wanted to feel disbelief at my own luck. At my romantic luck, I mean, not my luck related to Nigel giving me a career break.”
By this point, Noah was smiling, looking at me with that great affection—with love—and as he leaned forward and kissed me, I was struck by how forgiving he was, how he wasn’t going to make me grovel. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Okay? Since we’re in agreement about how good we are at being naked together—let’s go do that.”
“You make me want to be a better man,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
* * *
—
Back at his house, in his bed, we looked into each other’s eyes the most that we ever had, we touched each other the most tenderly, and a few times I wasn’t sure if I could maintain the eye contact, but I did. At one point, he stopped moving while he was still inside me and smiled, his face above and so close to mine. Quietly, I said, “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Then we kissed for a long time, moving together.
After, while I rested my head on his chest, he said, “You know that thing I said about if I saw a picture of the cast and crew of TNO? I feel like it came out wrong, because you are really pretty.” He squeezed my waist. “I love every part of you.”
“When I didn’t think you were smart at the pitch meeting, it was only for ten minutes,” I said. “Ever since then, I’ve thought you are.”
He laughed. “There’s a compliment I’ve wanted to give you, but I’m not sure I’ve figured out how to say it in a way that doesn’t make me sound self-centered.”
“Everyone is self-centered,” I said. “Go for it.”
“Do you remember when we were on the phone and you asked if I’m the type of Airbnb host who leaves my family photos out and my food in the refrigerator, and I said that I would make my house very clean so that you’d give me five stars?”
“Yes.”
“I realize my response wasn’t, like, TNO-quality. But I was proud of myself because, honestly, I’m not usually that quick-witted. You bring out that side of me. You know the advice about how you should always play tennis with people better than you? When I’m talking to you, I’m a funnier and smarter version of myself because you’re funny and smart.”
“Ironically,” I said, “I’ve played tennis about twice, and I’m awful at it.”
But Noah’s voice was serious as he said, “For a long time, I’ve known that the best parts of my life were the public parts. I can’t complain, because those parts have been really great, like touring in another country or being part of a ceremony at the White House. But in my romantic relationships, away from audiences and cameras—I don’t want to insult the women I’ve dated, because it takes two to have mundane conversations, but they were mundane. It was like what you said about you and that guy Gene. Either we were talking about predictable topics or talking about potentially interesting topics in a predictable way. Sometimes I’d tell myself, Well, sure, it’s hard for normal life to measure up after you hang out with the Obamas. But other times, I felt like, behind the scenes, there was this emptiness. At night, when I was going to bed, I was more relaxed when I was by myself, whether I wasn’t dating anyone or was dating someone but they weren’t there that night. I wanted to find a real partner, but I couldn’t picture who the partner would be.” He paused. My ear was over his heart, and I could hear its steady beat. “When I’m with you,” he continued, “the best, most interesting part of my life is behind the scenes. I felt this emailing you, and I even felt it in your TNO office when you were helping with my sketch. Like, no one in the world knows what we’re up to except us and it’s awesome. It’s not for social media, it’s not for a documentary about the making of an album, it’s not an anecdote to tell on a talk show. It’s just because we think it’s fun and we like each other and we like being together.”
Listening to him, it had occurred to me to say, “I’m honored that you find me more interesting than the Obamas,” but what came out of my mouth instead was “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire life.” I raised my head to look at him. “And I don’t think it’s self-centered.”
“Oh, good.” He grinned.
“Just so you know,” I said, “you weren’t wrong about me being private and hating to have my picture taken, or at least by a random dude jumping out of the bushes.”
“I did know,” he said. “Because you threatened to stay at a hotel when I mentioned there might be paparazzi at that shopping center when you were arriving. If I’m not mistaken, you also once told me you were a goblin who’d never appeared onstage at TNO.”
“Oh, right.” I brought my hand up to my face in embarrassment. “I mean, there wasn’t a second when I actually wanted to stay at a hotel. I always wanted to stay with you. I just got anxious.”
“I like that you’re private. You realize that there are women who dated me in order to get their picture in magazines, don’t you?”
This was an aspect of the situation I hadn’t considered. “I bet that was more of a fringe benefit than the main reason,” I said. “I’m sure you being charming and adorable was the main reason.”
Dryly, he said, “You might be surprised.”
“I may have a flaw or two, but I solemnly swear that I’ll never use you to try to advance my modeling career. Or to get my cannabis-infused-jams-and-jellies small business off the ground.”
He laughed. “That reminds me there are two jokes I’ve thought about making when we’re”—he patted my bare hip—“like this. Should I try them out on you?”
“You definitely should.”
“The first one, the joke part isn’t the sentiment. It’s the callback.”
I was smiling as I said, “Not to discourage you, but preemptively explaining a joke rarely enhances it.”
