Romantic Comedy(37)

A producer and a wardrobe assistant both congratulated me on my sketches, and I thanked them perfunctorily. I knocked on Danny’s door and opened it without waiting for a response. He was sitting in front of the mirror removing makeup with a wipe.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“How do you think?”

“If you don’t want to go to the after-party, we could go get pizza or whatever.”

In the mirror, we made eye contact, and he smiled grimly. “No offense, but you’re giving such intense vibes right now of ‘Honey, I know you didn’t get invited to prom, but wouldn’t it be way more fun to stay in and bake cookies with Dad and me?’？”

“I do have a delicious recipe for snickerdoodles,” I said, and he didn’t laugh.

He said, “I’m gonna go home, smoke some weed, and try to sleep.”

“Will you text me tomorrow and let me know how you are?” We had never previously communicated on our day off.

“Okay, Mom,” he said.

Before I left his dressing room, I patted him on the shoulder.

Cast members, unlike writers, were each provided with a car and driver to get to the after-parties—more specifically, with a gigantic black Cadillac Escalade SUV—and I’d arranged to ride along with Henrietta and her wife, Lisa. Before I met them in Henrietta’s dressing room, which was just a few doors from Danny’s, I needed to stop by the seventeenth floor, drop off my scripts, and get the black nylon fanny pack I used as a purse. When I entered the office, an enormous bouquet of flowers sat in the center of my desk, dark and light pink roses and frosted-looking greenery. As I lifted the large square vase from the open cardboard box, I thought that if this was Noah’s way of thanking me for helping him with his sketch （four days, and also a lifetime, before）， it was both excessive and extraordinarily gracious.

But when I pulled the note from the clear plastic fork in the bouquet’s center and unfolded it, it read:

Sally, please forgive me. xoxo Annabel

SUNDAY, 1:51 A.M.

That week’s official after-party, before the after-after party or any parties after that, was at a huge fancy old-school French restaurant. It featured a slightly trendy bar on the lower level—not a bar that a twenty-three-year-old who lived in Bushwick would consider trendy, but one that, say, a thirty-six-year-old who lived on the Upper West Side might. Every official after-party was a weird blend of quasi-mandatory work event, necessary emotional release, celebrity scene, and 1:30 A.M. dinner.

Almost immediately after arriving, Henrietta, Lisa, and I went through the buffet—Henrietta had once told me this was the one meal of the week when she ate in a completely unrestrained way—then we sat in a big round booth already occupied by Viv; Dr. Theo; Bailey; Bailey’s partner, Sterling; Oliver; Oliver’s manager, whose name I didn’t know; Oliver’s ex-girlfriend Bettina; and Oliver’s cousin, whose name I also didn’t know. Even as the cast members and I debriefed about the show—who’d messed up their lines, who’d broken character, which sketches had been received more or less enthusiastically than we’d expected—I wondered what Dr. Theo made of being at this place, at this hour, surrounded by people a minimum of a decade and a half younger than he was. In person, he was as handsome as the online photo I’d seen or maybe more so: medium height, slim, with closely cut salt-and-pepper hair and warm brown eyes. He seemed simultaneously calm and hard to read. Viv was on his left, and I was on his right, and as the debriefing continued, I said, “I hope the inside baseball isn’t boring you to death.”

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s fun to see behind the curtain.”

“You’re an ophthalmologist, right?” I said.

“I am.”

“What’s that like?”

He laughed. “It’s good.”

I laughed, too. “I guess you already know this, but people’s eyes are important to them.”

“I do know that,” he said. “And it’s true.”

“Although I always forget to do that thing where you’re supposed to look twenty feet away from your computer screen for twenty seconds every twenty minutes. Are you from New York?”

He shook his head. “I’ve lived here since right after med school, but I grew up in St. Louis.”

“Wait, really? I’m from Kansas City.”

We turned to look at each other—we both were holding forks over our plates—and he said, “Well, hey.”

“Do you get back home much? I just go a couple times a year.”

“I go for the holidays. My parents and sisters are still there, and my nieces and nephews. As a matter of fact, my oldest niece is now at NYU, but the rest of my family is there.”

“Viv went to NYU,” I said. “As you probably know.”

From Dr. Theo’s other side, Viv said, “Viv went where?”

“Viv went to NYU,” I said. “Where, if I’m not mistaken, she was an econ major and the star of the student improv group.”

To Dr. Theo, Viv said, “Sally moonlights as my publicist. I don’t know if she mentioned that.”

“It’s not a job,” I said. “It’s a calling.” But even as we joked around, my gaze was drawn across the expanse of the restaurant’s dining room to where Noah sat in a booth exactly like ours with Nigel, Elliot, Autumn, Noah’s sister, one of the guitarists who’d performed with him, and both of the goateed guys I’d seen in his dressing room. They all were speaking animatedly, and I thought how relieved Noah must feel that the show had gone well. I wondered if I’d end up saying goodbye to him. I could approach him, of course, but did I really have anything to say?