Romantic Comedy(88)
He sang, “Ain’t it funny how we lose one day / And a lifetime slips away,” and in the third verse, after the lines “It was good for a time / I am told,” he pressed his lips against the harmonica and closed his eyes as the instrument’s magnificently nasal, twangy sound filled the air and Charlotte Larsen whooped and clapped.
The odd part was that, although I had listened to the song hundreds of times, and seen the Indigo Girls perform it, I had always focused on what I thought of as the spectacularly devastating lines about a relationship that hadn’t lasted. I’d hardly noticed that the song ended with the lines “Hey, I love you more and more / Oh, I love you more and more”—with those lines in the present tense. Watching Noah as he sang them, as he watched me—his eyes were open again—I wondered if I’d always understood the song a little wrong, or possibly if I’d always understood life a little wrong. Wondering this was not a bad thing; it was a beautiful, unexpected relief.
He bent his head once more to blow on the harmonica while rapidly strumming the guitar strings then slowed down, ending with a last elongated flourish. Lifting his head, he said, “Sally, I do love you more and more. And this is me talking—Noah—not the Indigo Girls, though I bet the Indigo Girls would love you, too, if they knew you.”
Because there were only six of us, I can’t say the applause was deafening. But it was certainly enthusiastic as I stood, walked toward Noah, and kissed him. I whispered into his ear, “That was a perfect grand gesture.”
An hour later, as I was pulling out of the driveway to pick up a few last things from the grocery store for Jerry before we left the next morning, the neighbor on the other side of the house waved at me to stop. When I rolled down the window, she said, “Is Jerry learning to play guitar? Because he sounds wonderful.”
EPILOGUE
April 2023
Because TNO airs live, it comes on at 8:30 P.M. on the West Coast, around the time Noah and I are finishing dinner during a night at home. The first time we watched it together after I left the show, I felt tense and territorial, and I was pretty sure I could guess who’d written which sketches, and I had strong opinions about how they could have been improved. Viv was still on maternity leave for the 2020 season premiere, but Henrietta was back, and I wanted to text both of them right after the ceremonial goodnights and also wanted to leave them alone—to let Viv sleep, or breastfeed, or whatever else she was doing, and to let Henrietta head to the after-party and not feel her phone vibrating. I suppose I was trying to protect myself from feeling ignored. My heart swelled when, as the credits were still rolling, a text arrived from Viv to Henrietta and me: I miss you bitches
Simultaneously, Henrietta and I replied, Same!
As the weeks and months passed, my feelings of tension, territoriality, and homesickness while watching dissipated. I can’t claim to be impartial these days, but the impulse to critique has mostly been replaced by a more relaxed nostalgia. Danny, who now shares an office with his News Desk co-writer, Roy, sometimes texts me threatening to write a sketch called The Sally Milz Rule.
In the summer of 2021, Noah returned to touring in a modified way, and I’ve gone with him for some shows, including when he performed in Kansas City and also in D.C., where I met his parents. He had described them accurately—palpably affluent, not especially nice—though the good news was that he had also described his sister accurately, and Vicky and I have become close. But usually when Noah travels, I stay put in Topanga.
The first feature for which I wrote the script is now in preproduction and scheduled to be filmed in L.A. in the summer. It isn’t, after all my talk, a romantic comedy. Instead, it’s a buddy movie starring Viv and Henrietta as the ex-wives of two Silicon Valley billionaires. Though their characters were both heavily involved with the founding of the start-up that made their ex-husbands rich, they’ve received little money or credit, and they team up to correct the record and seek justice. The working title is Tech Sis, though already I’ve had several multi-hour discussions with the studio executives about why they think, and why I don’t agree, that it should be Tech Sisters, or even more preposterously, Tech Sises. Nigel is one of the producers.
After Noah and I left Kansas City in 2020, I returned two weeks later （on Delta Air Lines, not a private jet） to check on Jerry. That November, I flew again to Kansas City （on a private jet, not Delta Air Lines） and, as planned, Jerry and Sugar flew back with me to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving and stayed until March, setting up camp in the pool house. This was a pattern we repeated in 2021, and in 2022, they came and just stayed. Which is to say that whether you consider beagles to be small or medium-sized, that’s the kind of dog that Noah now lives with. Sometimes in the late afternoon, Jerry and I do chair yoga by the pool, though we also regularly do water aerobics. It turns out California agrees with him.
In July 2021, Noah and I got married. On a Friday morning, we went together to get the license, which cost eighty-five dollars, and I provided the date of the dissolution of my previous marriage. Though there are, I learned, paparazzi that lurk at various L.A. courthouses hoping to catch high-profile people on this very errand, there is also such a thing as a confidential marriage license in California—it’s not designed to accommodate celebrities but rather the convenient result of a law from the 1800s meant to allow already-cohabiting couples to marry without public shame. This was the kind of license we obtained, then we drove immediately to a hotel in Montecito, where we’d rented a private villa overlooking the coast. On the villa’s lawn, the hotel’s general manager officiated at a ceremony with no other witnesses.