Romantic Comedy(21)

Was Noah Brewster himself sad? With that hair and those big white teeth? I searched to see what year the song had been released—2013—then typed who Noah Brewster dating 2013. My precise question wasn’t answered, but an avalanche of related articles offered themselves up, including a slideshow headlined “All the Famous Women We’ve Seen Noah Brewster With,” and an essay headlined “Kissing and Telling with Noah Brewster,” which was one fan’s account of having sex with him in his hotel room after a show he’d played in Sacramento in 2009. The accompanying photo showed a pretty woman with lots of dark curly hair, wearing leggings and a zippered jacket; she was, or had in 2009 been, a nutritionist who’d attended his concert with a friend. She reported that Noah had been a considerate lover, that the Celtic tattoo on his back resonated with her because she’d spent her junior year of college in Ireland, and that her attempts to reach out to him following their night together had not been successful even though they’d had an “amazing connection.” I then read a 2016 interview with Noah in Rolling Stone, which included several facts I had somehow already known, through either his TNO bio or pop cultural osmosis: that he had attended an elite all-boys’ prep school in Washington, D.C., and was the son of a lawyer father and a mother who worked in education, who’d both initially been concerned about his decision not to attend college; that in his early twenties, after becoming famous, he’d had a period of heavy alcohol and drug use culminating in an accident in Miami when all the members of his band scaled a rising drawbridge and the drummer fell off and died, after which Noah became sober and gave a million dollars to the drummer’s girlfriend for their child’s college fund; that Noah had from 2010 to 2012 dated a model named Maribel Johnson, who was a decade his junior, was from a small town in Wisconsin, and had appeared during that time on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue; that his most recent girlfriend had been Louisiana Williams, a jewelry designer to the stars, though the viability of her profession was difficult for me to assess because she was also the heiress to, of all things, a pest control fortune; that he was deeply interested in architecture and had sought out meetings with leading architects who were “impressed” by his knowledge; and that he was involved in several charities, including one that funded residential rehab for people in the music industry who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Unstated in the article was that he clearly had an excellent publicist, or probably more than one. Having interacted with him, I believed he was genuinely nice, but the leading architects’ supposed pleasure at being sought out by a dilettante made me snicker.

By this point, I was on BestBrewstyFanBarcelona’s sixth selection, “The Bishop’s Garden.” It was about a high school boy—the lyrics pointed to but didn’t confirm its being Noah—whose classmates hooked up with girls from the neighboring school in a walled garden between the two campuses, and how the boy never participated in this ritual even though he wanted to. If the song was autobiographical, I thought, then surely the nutritionist in Sacramento and the various models had righted this past injustice. But again, the song was melancholy and evocative—it made me think of the guys I hadn’t hooked up with in high school—and it was not remotely cheesy. In fact, it was the kind of folky, poppy music I liked. If only I’d done this modicum of homework twenty-four hours earlier, I thought, I could have effortlessly answered his question about which of his songs were my three favorites. Though already, the memory of sitting side by side with him at my computer, revising his sketch in the middle of the night, felt like a dream the way life at TNO often felt like a dream: so vivid and goofy in the moment, so ephemeral once it ended.

I didn’t know when I fell asleep, but when I awakened two hours later, the light was on and the playlist was still going. I reached out to turn off both and went back to sleep. When my alarm sounded at 9 A.M.—my first rehearsal, for The Danny Horst Rule, was at 11—I immediately began scrolling through my phone.

THURSDAY, 1:06 P.M.

I had stopped by the makeup lab to approve the purple eyelashes Henrietta would wear in the Blabbermouth sketch, along with a slinky sequined purple dress still being worked on by wardrobe. Henrietta herself was elsewhere, and the person showing the eyelashes to me was Francesca Martin, who’d led the makeup department for more than two decades. As I confirmed that the lashes looked good, the cast member Oliver, who’d be playing James Comey, came in to be fitted for his prosthetic nose, which would be made just for him out of silicone.

I was heading toward the elevators—I was about to join rewrites in the writers’ room—when I got a text from Henrietta to both Viv and me: Did Dannabel break up?

Wait what, I replied.

Viv replied, Oh shit, accompanied by the broken-heart emoji.

Henrietta responded with a screenshot of an Instagram post Annabel had shared an hour before, a black-and-white photo of a topless female torso, one long-nailed, manicured hand set atop both breasts in a way that propped them up while concealing the nipples. Superimposed over the photo at a diagonal, a single sentence appeared in quasi-cursive font:

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.”

—Hermann Hesse

I’d just pressed the elevator call button when another text from Henrietta arrived: Also Herman Hesse?!

I texted back, Maybe she’s into 20th c German novelists?