Romantic Comedy(72)

I woke the next morning, and moved from Noah’s bed to the one in the guest room （with a long and, I hoped, surreptitious stop in the bathroom between） not at 4:15 but at 5:27, which seemed like progress. The next morning I woke and moved at 5:55. On the fourth morning, I woke at 6:10, went to the guest bathroom, then returned to his bed, and when I did, he sleepily scooted toward me and wrapped me in his arms.

This was the day I had planned to depart, a plan I’d never mentioned to Noah, a plan that seemed, from the vantage point of his bed and his arms, to be ridiculous.

* * *

—

A rhythm asserted itself: outrageously delicious yet healthy meals prepared by Margit and eaten outside; Noah’s trainer every other morning, which was when I attended to the Sisyphean task of body hair removal, except with a razor blade and tweezers instead of a boulder; responding to emails or, in Noah’s case, to phone calls after lunch; driving to various trails in the late afternoon to hike and sometimes swimming on our return; watching movies before bed; and random but regular intervals of sex that was sometimes fun and lighthearted, almost joking, and sometimes passionate and serious, like we were the futuristic astronauts who’d made it back from our mission successfully and could finally take off our space suits and go at it with our earthly flesh.

It was somewhere in this stretch that I remembered the Mad Libs and convinced him to let us finish it, and my favorite line from our collaboration was “Forsooth!” I said, “California is truly the most axiomatic and piquant bellybutton I’ve ever square danced!” It was also during this stretch that I was reading by the pool one afternoon while Noah was inside on the phone with his manager discussing a livestream show that would be filmed in September at a concert hall with no audience. The conversation went on for a long time, and at some point, I became aware of a mild but persistent longing. And then I thought, I miss him.

It was on the ninth day of my visit, while we were lying naked in his bed at 11:40 A.M., that he patted the hamster on my right bicep and said, “That’s still the greatest tattoo of all time.” I was flat on my back and he was on his side, facing me.

“It really encapsulates my badass lifestyle, doesn’t it?” I touched the inside of his left forearm, the music notes on a staff. I now knew, as I had not when the glimpses of and proximity to his skin had tormented me at TNO, that he’d gotten the “Blackbird” notes after his first album came out, the crow after his bandmate Christopher had died, and the Celtic knot after his first year of sobriety. I said, “Do you think you’re done or not done with body art?”

“Probably done. What about you?”

“Also probably done, unless I form an unexpected attachment to a guinea pig or a raccoon.”

He laughed, and I said, “I have a question for you. You know over email when I asked if you were trying to seduce me during your song rehearsal at TNO? When you said no, I kind of interpreted it as you saying, no, you weren’t interested in me.”

He shook his head rapidly. “I knew I was walking the knife’s edge with that one. In the emails, I mean. And I blew it, didn’t I? It was the word seduce that confused me—I think of that as being sleazy, like what a scoundrel does to an innocent young woman in a nineteenth-century novel. I didn’t understand what you were asking. If you had just said, ‘Do you like me?’ I could have said, ‘I sure do.’？”

I laughed. “What if I had said, ‘Do you like me in a wholesome, non-scoundrel-ish way?’？”

“No.” He was shaking his head again. “It was never wholesome. But I didn’t know if it was safe then to convey that.”

“Couldn’t you tell that ‘Do you like me?’ was basically what I was asking when I had that email freakout? And you were like, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing, but it’s fun, huh?’？” I poked a finger against his chest. “I needed more affirmation than that.”

“After you dressed me down with the stuff about how I’m not a toxic narcissist but only barely, I did know I’d fucked up, but I wasn’t sure how.”

“But then I apologized.”

“Did you?” Noah was regarding me dubiously.

“I expressed remorse!” I might, even then, have been reluctant to let it slip that I had practically memorized our emails, except that his recall of them seemed similarly detailed. And he was correct that I hadn’t actually written the words I’m sorry.

“I’m very happy to give you affirmation,” he said. “I want to give you affirmation. But if I don’t give you enough, you should ask for it.”

“Isn’t asking for affirmation—I don’t know—needy?”

He looked perplexed. “Isn’t the point of something like this that the other person tries to meet your needs, and you try to meet theirs?”

I was quiet for a few seconds before saying, “Is this what they teach in therapy? Because it’s blowing my mind.”

He laughed. “I have an idea. Instead of going back to New York in September, what if you quit TNO and stay here? Isn’t L.A. better if you want to pivot to screenwriting?”

I raised one arm to gesture around the room. “This is very fun. But it’s not real.”

“In what way is it not real?”

“Having sex all the time while barely interacting with any other human beings.”