Romantic Comedy(54)
All of that said, I’m a person to exactly the same degree you’re a person. I’m not a mannequin who stands on a stage and plays the guitar. Maybe my feelings, hopes, and worries aren’t identical to yours, but I hope I don’t need to convince you that I have feelings, hopes, and worries. The biggest bummer about your last email is the implication that I’m using you. I thought our emailing was mutual…mutually fun…and in the last few days when I have told you how into it I am, I was trying to compliment you, not make you feel like you are obligated to amuse me. Aren’t we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?
from: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
to: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:15 PM
subject: Actually
1） You HAVE been in therapy, haven’t you? That’s an asshole’s way of saying I appreciate your very calm response to my half-crazy （75% crazy?） email that I have felt remorseful about ever since hitting Send. （Send is capitalized for a different reason from why Sentence 1 was capitalized in the first email I sent you—but maybe those will also be stories for another day?）
2） This is a weird question but do you remember when you were rehearsing the song Ambiguous at TNO and I sat near the stage and listened? And if you do remember, would you say you were serenading me?
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:21 PM
subject: Actually
I remember that perfectly. And I’m happy to answer your question but what do you mean by serenading?
from: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
to: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:24 PM
subject: Actually
Were you trying to seduce me?
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:33 PM
subject: Actually
I’m nervous right now because it seems like there’s a right and wrong answer to your question, and I’m not sure which is which. So I’m just going to be honest because I’ve heard there’s no point in having a pandemic pen pal if you’re not honest.
I would say I was definitely trying to impress you and I was not trying to seduce you.
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:58 PM
subject: Actually
Where’d you go?
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 11:19 PM
subject: Actually
Wrong answer, huh?
from: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
to: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
date: Jul 26, 2020, 12:25 AM
subject: Actually
Okay, here’s the story of my marriage: As a middle class white girl, I can’t claim I was out of place at Duke from a socioeconomic standpoint （this is how all juicy and romantic stories begin, right?）， but I was a bad fit for the fraternity-sorority/country club vibe of the campus. I almost never went to parties and barely had friends until I joined the staff of the student newspaper my sophomore year. First I was one of the copy editors, and eventually I was the copy chief. This meant I stayed late, read practically every article that was filed, and was fairly invisible in a way that suited me. （Nigel says that TNO isn’t a place for perfectionists or lone wolves, and because I’m naturally both, working there has taught me to fight those tendencies.）
Anyway, the sports editor of the newspaper my senior year was a guy named Mike. He’d also worked his way up, so we’d interacted tons of times （while I copyedited his articles about, say, men’s tennis） without really getting to know each other. At a staff happy hour on Halloween, a columnist named Derrick got falling down drunk, and Mike and I ended up walking him back to his dorm room and putting him to bed. It was only maybe eight o’clock on a Friday, and campus was filled with people in all kinds of crazy costumes planning all kinds of wild nights, but both Mike and I were worried that Derrick was going to throw up, choke on it, and die, so we parked ourselves in his room, with the lights low, to keep an eye on him. We sat on the floor and talked for a few hours, until we decided it was safe to leave. I honestly don’t think we’d have gotten together if not for babysitting Derrick （though I think this is true for plenty of relationships, that they’re random at least as often as they’re inevitable）， but we quickly became a serious couple （in every sense）。 Mike was applying to law schools then, and he ended up deciding on Chapel Hill, which is just 20 minutes from Duke. He was （is? Because he’s still alive, if not still part of my life） from Charlotte, NC, and it was already understood that when he finished law school, he’d go back there.
In the spring of our senior year, we decided to get married. Neither of us was being pressured by our parents—his parents actually were religious, but not in a way where they’d have been upset if we lived together without getting married. My mom said that she had concerns because people can change a lot in their twenties and Mike and I might evolve out of wanting to be a couple, but that she also thought I had the right to make my own decisions. We got married at the Durham County Courthouse the Friday after our graduation, in front of Mike’s parents and brother, my mom and Jerry, and two of our friends from the newspaper. That Monday, I started my job as a writer at an in-house newsletter for a gigantic medical device company （AdlerWilliams）。