Romantic Comedy(6)

I texted back, Take a pic where I can see your whole face

A few seconds later, another photo arrived of Viv’s entire and very pretty face, in this moment unsmiling and preoccupied-looking, with both her eyebrows raised. Viv was Black and thirty-one, five years younger than I. I knew that both she and Henrietta, who was white and thirty-two, used preemptive antiaging measures like Botox and chemical peels. At the same time, Viv appeared in a recurring sketch where she played a famously well-preserved middle-aged TV host talking to her reflection in her dressing room mirror, uttering with pleasure the phrase “Black don’t crack.”

It really doesn’t look that bad, I texted. I’d decide about dinner based on how you feel

Still doesn’t hurt, Viv replied. But

She sent the female zombie emoji, green skinned and holding out curled fingers.

No you look fine, I wrote.

By which I mean great!

I think ok to go to dinner or ok to skip but you don’t need to skip to spare anyone

On Monday nights around eleven o’clock, Nigel always took that week’s host and a few cast members to dinner at a fancy restaurant. The only writer ever included was the head writer, which I actually didn’t mind because even after nine years, I was more comfortable having fleeting rather than sustained encounters with Nigel. Many people in-and outside of TNO were obsessed with the man who’d created the show in 1981 and produced it ever since. Born Norman Piekarkski in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1947, Nigel Petersen was indisputably the comedy kingmaker of twentieth-and twenty-first-century America, and it was often said that your relationship with your father was revealed by the relationship you had, or thought you had, with Nigel. But I’d long believed that being quietly competent would serve me better than trying to curry favor with him directly. For my entire first year, I hadn’t even been sure he knew my name, and then at the after-party following the season finale, he’d said in his surprisingly soft and understated voice, “The field trip sketch was very funny, Sally.” These eight words were possibly the greatest compliment of my life, which might have revealed that I had daddy issues if I hadn’t already been well aware I had daddy issues. The following year, we’d interacted more because I had many more sketches on air, but we spoke only when he was giving notes on them. Our annual superfluous exchange came after he’d complimented with similar brevity a sketch I’d set at a Kansas City barbecue restaurant, when I’d dared not just to mumble thank you but to follow up by saying, “I know you’re from Oklahoma. Do you think of that as the Midwest or the South?”

Again in his soft and understated voice, he said, “According to the census, it’s the South.” That was that for the 2010–2011 season.

Did you make appointment with eye dr, I texted Viv.

Tomorrow at 11 AM, she texted back.

Oh great, I replied.

Go tonight!

Have fun!

She replied with a winking emoji, and I opened the other text that had arrived while I was in the shower. It was from Gene, the guy I’d been hooking up with off and on for the last eight months: Hey Sally how’s it going?

It occurred to me to invite him over—it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, I’d just washed my hair and the rest of myself—and then I thought I’d rather go to sleep early. I almost never saw Gene during show weeks; even when I knew by Wednesday that I’d have no sketches on the live show, I was expected to attend Thursday rewrites, which could go until nine or ten, and it was all just so mentally consuming that I found it easier to give myself over to TNO’s rhythms. It was perhaps the one workplace in America where people who had spouses and kids were not only in the minority but were looked at with vague pity, because how could anyone possibly manage that, too?

Also, though we had decent sex, I didn’t like Gene that much. He was a financial analyst who’d early on mentioned that the University of Florida’s business school, which he’d attended, was ranked among the top fifteen in the country. Though I’d never previously wondered about the University of Florida’s business school ranking, of course this had prompted me to look it up and discover the claim was off by about ten. Far more alarmingly, he’d once used the word snowflake to disparage a co-worker who regularly took sick days because of migraines. While it was possible he meant the term apolitically, the meaning he apparently did intend wasn’t much better. And I hadn’t called him on it because I feared doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I’d have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn’t kill me if we went back to my apartment.

If, on the plus side, Gene wasn’t homicidal, he wasn’t particularly cute, either. He was of medium height and build, with light brown hair, and there was something so generic about him that he could have played an extra in any TNO sketch set in an office. He was unobjectionable in the way that a person you sat next to on an airplane was usually unobjectionable; unlike with an airplane seatmate, though, most of what we did was get each other off. In the months this had been going on, he’d asked me exactly two questions. The first was if I’d ever tried butter coffee （no）， and the second was if I’d ever been to Rockaway Beach （also no）。

None of Gene’s predecessors had been particularly inquisitive, but they’d asked enough that I’d given a fake job, which I never had to do with Gene. I’d told other guys I’d “dated” that I was a writer for the newsletter of a medical device company, which had been one of my jobs before TNO. Though I wasn’t much of a liar generally, I feared the guys I hooked up with would be overly interested if I mentioned my real employer. In a best-case scenario, they’d merely want tickets to the live show, but in a worst-case scenario, they’d be aspiring improv performers. Or maybe the real worst-case scenario was that they’d know me in a way I didn’t want to be known by them. Even I wasn’t sure if my in-person self （a mild-mannered woman of average intelligence and attractiveness） or my scripts （willfully raging sketches about sexism and bodily functions） reflected my real self—or if I had a real self, or if anyone did. But I suspected that much of my writing emerged from this tension or lack of integration; I believed the perceptions undergirding my sketches arose from my being invisible or at least underestimated, including being mistaken for someone nicer than I was. Since childhood, I’d often felt like a spy or an anthropologist, and I was fine with others at TNO knowing who I really was only because they, too, were, at their core, spies and anthropologists and weirdos.