Romantic Comedy(63)
I had decided ahead of time that I’d change every article of clothing, even my underwear and bra, or especially my underwear and bra. I did so inside a stall, standing on top of my sneakers while trying to avoid setting my socked feet against the bare floor. After I was wearing my favorite and most flattering black T-shirt and cropped jeans, as my last act of transformation, I bent to peel off my socks and stepped into black sandals. My feet weren’t horrifically sweaty, nor were they daisy fresh. I’d cleanse them with disinfectant wipes in the car, I decided, and wished that being aware of my own ridiculousness could somehow decrease my ridiculousness.
There was nothing left to do except go see Noah. I regarded myself once more in the gas station mirror and thought, as I hadn’t for years, of what my mother had said after I’d repeated Elliot’s line about confusing the romance of comedy with the romance of romance. First she’d said, “What a pretentious turd.” Then she’d said, “I promise that someday you’ll find the love you deserve, but it might not be when or how you’re expecting it.”
As I left the bathroom and passed the refrigerators of soda and iced tea and bottled water behind their clear glass doors, I squinted in uncertainty—could it be?—and then, under my mask, I couldn’t help laughing. It wasn’t that loud, but it was unmistakable: Through the store’s sound system, a Muzak version of “Making Love in July” was playing.
* * *
—
It was true that as I entered Topanga Canyon, I quickly felt as if I were in the middle of nowhere, in a way that was beautiful and might, under other circumstances, have been calming. The winding two-lane road appeared far more rural than a place less than an hour from downtown L.A. had any right to. It led me past the craggy Santa Monica mountains on one side and steeply sloping descents on the other, past thickets of chaparral and sandstone outcroppings and the occasional house built into the tree-filled hillsides. Turning south, I caught my first glimpse of the hazy turquoise of the Pacific Ocean. It disappeared and reappeared as the road curved.
After fifteen minutes, I made a sharp right. I was by this point not sure my heart could beat any faster without it qualifying as a medical event. There was then the stone wall, the gate, and the driveway behind it, which rose up a hill of scrub and trees in such a way that it hid the house. I was so nervous that when I braked and tried to ease up to the intercom at the gate, I missed by about five feet. I backed out and tried again. Extending my left arm out the window, I pressed a silver button, and Noah’s voice—as opposed to the voice of some manservant—said, “Hi there, Sally. Gate’s opening now.” Atop stone columns flanking the gate, I noticed video cameras, and I felt the same uneasiness I had when Noah had mentioned paparazzi in the grocery store parking lot. The gate opened, and I drove onto the property.
I’d ascended perhaps 150 feet when the land leveled off and the house appeared, the same sprawling stucco hacienda I’d seen online. The real-life fact of it reminded me of encountering one of the famous Monet paintings of water lilies at the Met after studying it in an art history class. Indeed—it did exist. I was still a hundred feet from the house, and a male figure was approaching the car in jeans and a teal T-shirt and a black mask, and my heart was an exploding firecracker. Even with a mask on, even from this distance, Noah was shockingly handsome.
I braked again when we were ten feet apart—Noah fucking fake-surfer Making-Love-in-July Brewster and me, Sally Milz—and my window was still open from speaking into the intercom, and my decidedly inglorious first words were “Should I be wearing a mask?”
From behind his mask, he said, “Should I not be wearing one?” Above his mask, his eyes crinkled in a way I was pretty sure meant he was smiling, and he said, “Welcome to California.”
“Should I park here or pull up by the garage?” I asked.
“You should park here because you’ve been in that car for way, way too long.” He pulled his mask down to his chin. “And I should take this off because starting now, we’re in a pod together.” He unhooked the straps from his ears and stuffed the mask into a back pocket, and the reveal of his face—well, it wasn’t as if I needed confirmation that he was very attractive, but if I did, his blue eyes were intense, and his lips were slightly puffy and framed by laugh lines, and his thick eyebrows and stubble were light brown. And, though this was hard to fathom, there was some openness in his expression and bearing that made him seem palpably, disorientingly pleased that I’d arrived.
I turned off the engine, made brief and panicked eye contact with myself in the rearview mirror, and got out, and Noah was right there, zero feet away, and our bodies were smashed together and our arms were wrapped around each other. Because he was a few inches taller, my face was pressed to his partially stubbly neck, and the feel and smell of his skin and his stubble and his whole clothed body against mine was the nicest feeling I had ever felt. It all was both comforting and exciting in a combination I hadn’t previously known existed, and we stayed like that for a long time.
And then, finally, because I was me and compelled to break the moment even as I wondered if we were about to begin kissing passionately, I pulled away and looked up at him and said, “Your directions were excellent.”
“Do you need a bathroom or some water or anything?”
“I’m okay because I stopped before I got to Topanga.” I appreciated not only his considerateness but also the unromanticness of acknowledging pee. I extended one leg. “I changed into my fancy shoes.”