“I’m here to help,” I said, and I suddenly felt cringingly awkward. I had no idea if the awkwardness had originated with me, or with the arrival of Autumn and the assistant, whose name I was now 87 percent certain was Madison, or with the fact that Noah had recently grabbed my face. Both Autumn and maybe-Madison wore very tight black jeans, angular black shirts, and pointy black boots. I was abruptly conscious that I was wearing gray sweatpants, a black sweatshirt, light green running socks, and no shoes. Noah was somewhere in the middle of their style and my slovenliness, in jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved brown T-shirt with a refrigerator on it.
Before the three of them left, Noah waved from the doorway. “See you at the table read,” he said.
WEDNESDAY, 4:43 A.M.
When Danny returned, he looked exhausted but gave off a happy energy. Before I could ask, he said, “All’s well in Bellyville.”
“Glad to hear it.” Since my editing session with Noah, I’d spent two and a half hours working on the Cheesemonger sketch. After he’d left, I’d felt churned up, presumably from his celebrity aura, and I hadn’t tried to go back to sleep. I currently had four pages of the sketch, which weren’t very good, and the overstimulation that had gripped me at 2 A.M. was long gone. I reached for the pages of the Danny Horst Rule sketch sitting on my desk and held them out to Danny. “Will you help me with your dialogue?”
“Man, Sally, have some self-respect.”
“I’m trying to turn in three separate sketches,” I said.
“That’s on you. Do you think it would be weird if Belly and I break a glass at our wedding? She suggested it.”
“Do you want to?”
He shrugged. Though he rarely mentioned it, a widely known part of Danny’s origin story was that he’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish enclave in New Jersey. As the oldest boy of seven siblings, he’d attended a yeshiva through high school and had been expected to become a rabbi like his dad. But he’d secretly watched comedians on cable from the age of twelve on, and he’d left his community after his first year at a rabbinical college, when he moved into a homeless shelter for young adults that, by coincidence, was about a mile from the TNO studio. Seven years later, Danny was still estranged from all of his family except a brother, which he joked was a reasonable price to pay for getting to eat fried shrimp. And he was far from the only person at TNO who’d endured misfortune; tragedy, of course, often begat comedy.
Danny had taken the pages from me, and he read them so quickly that if I didn’t know him, I’d have thought he was skimming. “This is brutal,” he said. “In an awesome way.” He took a pen off his desk and began filling in the spaces I’d left blank. When he’d finished, he said, “It’s definitely better if I’m the second cop who comes in, not the first.”
“Because it increases the tension of when will you appear?”
He nodded.
“I wonder if Noah would be willing to be the first cop instead of the guy on the date,” I said. “But he was so negative about the sketch in the pitch meeting that I don’t even want to ask.”
“Yeah, that was a real slap-down from him in Nigel’s office.”
I thought of telling Danny about my recent encounter with Noah, but how would I tell it? I wasn’t sure. Instead, I said, “Thanks for noticing.”
Danny smirked as he handed back the pages. He said, “Chuckles, everyone noticed.”
WEDNESDAY, 2:57 P.M.
In the interlude between turning in my sketches and the table read, I took a cab home, fell asleep for an hour, woke, showered, and walked to the Seventy-ninth Street subway station. As I stood on the platform waiting, I read the texts that had come in during my nap, which included two from my college roommate, Denise, the pediatrician, who lived in Austin. Responding to my question about if Viv’s ophthalmologist could ask her out, Denise had written:
Doctor should not ask her out. But I don’t know specific laws or rules. I know it is different with psychologist/psychiatrist where it might be unethical.
Then: Is this for a sketch or real life?
Real life, I typed back. Can my friend ask the dr out?
From Henrietta, to both Viv and me, there was a photo of a bag of coffee-flavored potato chips, along with a text: Did we know these exist?
When I reached the seventeenth floor of 66, Henrietta and Viv were sitting on the couch of my office, and Danny was at his desk. Viv tilted the potato chip bag in my direction, and I took one, which looked like a regular potato chip topped with a dusting of cinnamon. I bit off a tiny amount as Danny said, “It’s not the worst thing ever.”
I swallowed. “Or is it?”
Danny reached out and took a few more, stuffed them in his mouth, and said while chewing, “They’re wrong but weirdly compelling.”
Henrietta said, “Like Log Cabin Republicans.”
“Or that monkey in Japan who was caught trying to fuck a deer,” Viv added.
As we all walked down the hall to the conference room, I said to Viv, “My college roommate said Dr. Eyeballs isn’t supposed to ask you out, but I asked if you can ask him. I’m waiting to hear.”
Viv grimaced. “Yeah, I don’t really do that.”
“What’s it like to be so beautiful you never have to make the first move?”
She laughed. “Advantageous yet burdensome. Also, in my case, complicated by America’s ongoing misogynoir.”
The conference room was full as we entered, with most seats taken around the pushed-together tables in the center, as well as around the perimeter of the room. There were even more staff members at read-throughs than at pitch meetings, including from hair and makeup, wardrobe, set design, and the music department. Spread over the tables were scripts of the sketches and, because we’d be there for three hours, bottled waters and scattered platters of sandwiches, salad, cut-up fruit, chips （presumably not coffee-flavored）， and cookies. Whether you considered this meal breakfast, lunch, or dinner depended on how late you’d been up the night before.
Danny, Viv, and Henrietta all took seats at the table that had been saved for them. I took a second-perimeter seat, my back to the windows that overlooked muffled honking traffic and muffled frolicking tourists seventeen stories below. Noah Brewster was in the middle of the tables’ south side, to the left of Nigel, who always narrated the stage directions in all the sketches. The worse the sketch was being received, the faster he read.
It happened that I was about twenty feet from Noah but directly in front of him, and when we made eye contact, he smiled and I felt a wild surge inside me, though I wasn’t sure if it was panic, excitement, or something else. He was painfully handsome, yes, but I had already known that. I reflexively looked away, as if we were strangers who’d accidentally locked eyes on the subway. Then I realized that looking away had been rude and odd, because we weren’t subway strangers. We were, if only for this week, colleagues, and part of my job was to make him comfortable. I quickly looked back, saw that his smile had been replaced with a more quizzical expression, and forced a smile of my own. When I did, he raised a hand and waved. Then a cast member named Bailey, TNO’s first nonbinary performer, leaned in from Noah’s left and said something, and Noah turned toward them and replied, and they both laughed.