Romantic Comedy(41)
“When you thought you were on the cusp of getting married,” I said, “was it to someone in particular?”
He shook his head and smiled. “You think that could have been part of the problem?”
“For what it’s worth, when I was in high school—at my big crappy public school—a math teacher once said at assembly that the point of life is to find the thing you’re good at and enjoy doing, and to do it for other people. Can you imagine having the audacity to declare what the point of life is? But I never forgot it, and I’m not so sure he was wrong.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“It might sound silly, but I think of—” I paused. Even after two and a half drinks, this felt like a lot to reveal to a person I barely knew. But I kept going. I said, “I think of TNO as the love of my life.” Unaccountably, my eyes filled with tears. And then I realized it wasn’t because I thought what I was saying was sad. It was because it was true, and not sad at all.
“Oh, yeah,” Noah said immediately. “I feel that way about my music.”
“We’re so lucky,” I said. “Don’t you think? Most people don’t have that. I know, everywhere other than New York, if you have a good job and a spouse and kids and a house and a car, those are the markers of maturity and stability and completeness. And you eat your dinner at seven P.M. and go to bed at ten, and go for vigorous jogs on the weekend. If you’re into that, great. But there are lots of other ways to put a life together.”
“Do you know that Thoreau line ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’？”
“Not only do I know it,” I said, “but in high school, I had a poster with famous quotes on it, and that was one of them!” I’d spoken with such excitement that I had spit a very tiny amount of saliva onto his right cheek. He did not wipe it away; he beamed back at me, and though I couldn’t prove it and certainly wasn’t going to ask, I suspected not that he didn’t know I’d spit on him but that he didn’t want me to be embarrassed or truly didn’t care, that he didn’t find me at all disgusting. Even after six days, his easygoing warmth was so unexpected, and so endearing. “Just to be clear,” I said, “I do lead a life of quiet desperation. I wouldn’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t, or anyone who isn’t filled with ambivalence, because I assume they’d be incredibly shallow. But I’m sure I’d be ten times more quietly desperate if I were living in the suburbs with a two-car garage.”
“Do you know you don’t want any of that? The marriage or kids?”
It occurred to me to say, “With you or someone else?” but what if he thought I was serious? Instead, I said, “I don’t know for certain, but I’m not sitting around waiting for either one. And I bet not settling down when you were thirty has made you a better musician. And continuing to feel confusion has, too, probably. I just can’t see how anyone who thinks they have everything sorted out and have come out on top could write very good songs. Or, for that matter, very good comedy sketches or very good screenplays.”
“Maybe you should be a therapist.” He lifted his glass from the bar, took a sip, swallowed, and said, “By the way, I don’t believe in the Danny Horst Rule. I thought your sketch was funny and I’m sorry it got cut, but the rule itself—personally, I’ve definitely dated—you know—”
I didn’t try to conceal my amusement. “Women less attractive than you?” I suggested.
“That’s not what I was going to say. But non-celebrities.”
“You’ve dated them in a serious way?”
“Of course. It’s not like the only relationships I’ve been in are the ones that have been reported in gossip columns. But you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you go out with another celebrity, it’s like Danny and Annabel, where you’re under this distorting microscope. You have the advantage of understanding each other’s worlds firsthand, but the disadvantage of both having really complicated schedules. Whereas if you date someone who isn’t another celebrity, you feel like you’re always asking them to accommodate you. Plus, it’s easy for them to feel insecure. You’re looking at me with a very mocking expression right now. I realize these are privileged problems.”
“I think you think I’m looking at you with a mocking expression because I’m a writer for TNO.”
“I guess that might be an occupational hazard.” And then something happened that later was hard for me to explain to myself, hard to understand. As when he’d cupped my chin in my office, it might have been nothing. His expression became both very tender and very amused, as if there were an excellent inside joke between us, and he tilted his head to the right and looked at me with a focused kind of sweetness and warmth. Then he again set his glass on the bar and leaned forward incrementally, and I thought, Oh my God, is he going to kiss me? Because Noah Brewster cannot kiss me here, in front of my co-workers, in a setting that isn’t really private because nowhere is private in the age of cellphones, in a world in which he is him and I am me. And because if he kisses me, what will happen next?
Also incrementally, I took a step back. “All your insights about love and romance,” I said. “Did you get them from dating twenty-two-year-old models?”