“On the one hand, yes,” I said. “On the other hand, a snake is even more terrifying than a panther.”
Looking between us, Noah said, “How do animal rights activists feel about snakes?”
“Who cares?” Elliot said.
“I think people are less protective of reptiles than mammals,” I said.
“All things being equal, I’d rather not offend anyone,” Noah said.
At the same time, I said, “TNO wouldn’t be TNO if no one was offended,” and Elliot said, “Good luck with that.”
As Bob approached Elliot with a scheduling question, Noah said to me, “I have something else to run by you. The future of comedy hangs in the balance over this. You ready?”
“I hope so.”
“This is also for Choreographer. When I rip off my clothes to reveal my leather shorts and vest, someone in the makeup department asked if I want my tattoos covered with concealer. I said no because I’m playing myself, right? But then I started overthinking it and I was like, but I’m playing myself back in the year 2000, when I didn’t have any tattoos yet. So is the answer yes or no?” Before I could respond, he said, “I know this is trivial, but I got worried about breaking some comedy rule that I don’t even know exists.”
“If there’s a rule, I don’t know it, either,” I said. “But what kind of tattoos are we talking about? Do you have a gigantic dragon across your chest or something?”
He smiled. “Not yet, although the night is young. No, I have three and they’re all run-of-the-mill.”
Oh, yes, I thought. The Celtic symbol I read about in “Kissing and Telling with Noah Brewster.” Aloud, I said, “Where are they?” We were standing about three feet apart, with Bob and Elliot still nearby, and I probably sounded less relaxed than I intended to as I said, “Do you want to just show me?”
“This one, for starters.” Noah held out his left arm, pushing up the long sleeve of his T-shirt, and on the inside of his forearm, I saw an image of music notes on a staff. “Not cheesy at all, right?” he said.
“Is that from one of your songs?”
He shook his head. “It’s ‘Blackbird.’ Kind of a touchstone song for me.”
“I don’t think anyone gets points deducted for ‘Blackbird.’ And I bet that would be pretty subtle on camera.” The tattoo was a few inches in size, but the truly salient fact about his forearm was that it was perfect. Both the skin and the barely visible hair on the other side of his arm were golden, and it was muscular but not too muscular, not steroidally muscular. I could accept that my lot in life was never to get to touch an arm like that, but it was torturous to be so close to him.
“Then there’s this one,” he said, and he was turning away from me and pulling up his jeans on the right side, from the ankle. There was a crow on the back of his calf, and it was much bigger and blockier than the musical notes.
“Less subtle,” I said. “But likely off camera.”
“The last one is on my shoulder blade.” He glanced back at me. “Is that okay to show you? I don’t want to be the guy who finds pretextual reasons to start taking off his clothes. I promise that I really do want to know what you think about this.”
Again feigning relaxation, I said, “Wardrobe changes during the show are so rushed that they happen in plain sight. So not only have I seen every cast member in every state of undress, but the audiences have seen them, too.”
“In that case,” he said, and he crossed his arms and pulled his T-shirt up in the back, not over his head, but so that it was resting on his shoulders. There was indeed a Celtic knot of interlocking black lines and circles, and this tattoo was the biggest of all. Were my co-workers aware of this display? I didn’t dare look around and break the spell. By this point, there was even less than a foot between us, and the skin on Noah’s back was also painfully, gloriously golden, and also there was something oddly domestic about the moment, as if we were boyfriend and girlfriend, standing in the bathroom in the apartment we shared, and he’d asked me to look at a red mark on his back because he wondered if it was a tick bite, and also I wondered for the first time if this was pretextual. If he’d be wearing a vest, presumably it would cover his back.
Yet because it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, while still standing behind him, I reached out and pressed a fingertip against the tattoo. “You mean this?” I said.
Of course he meant this.
“Yeah,” he said.
Never had I wanted so badly to just smash myself against another person, to tear off another person’s clothes. And wasn’t he complicit, hadn’t he gotten about 13 percent of the way to naked? Or was I delusional and was he accustomed, as cast members were, to having his body exposed and handled? My fingertip was still touching his tattoo. I swallowed, unbending my other fingers, and pressed the rest of them to his perfect skin. Calmly, I said, “I wouldn’t worry about this one, either.” As I pulled my hand away, I added, “Although I do like the word pretextual. I might have to start using it.”
He yanked down his shirt and when he turned around so we were facing each other, he said, “Help yourself. My dad’s a lawyer, and I learned it from him. I hope you didn’t just lose all respect for me because of the basicness of my tattoos. I got them within a couple years of each other, quite a while ago.”
“I think I know something that will reassure you.” I was wearing an unzipped fleece jacket, which I shrugged off, then I lifted the right short sleeve of my T-shirt and angled my arm toward him, elbow out.
Peering at my bicep, he said, “Is that a…mouse?”
“In fourth grade, my class had a hamster named Barnaby who I loved so much that I told my mom I wanted a tattoo of him. She said if I promised to wait until I was twenty-one, if I still wanted it, she’d get one with me. Obviously, by the time I was twenty-one, the only reason I still wanted a hamster tattoo was to hold my mom to her end of the bargain.”
Just as I had, he reached out his fingers—they, too, were perfect, long and slim and straight—and when they brushed against my skin, I thought that if I could live inside this moment forever, I would. But he withdrew them quickly. He said, “I take it that’s why it says Mom.”
“Hers said Sally, but the amazing part is that we didn’t coordinate it. We did it separately, in different rooms, to surprise each other. And when we realized what we’d done—” I paused. This had been fifteen years before, at a place in downtown Kansas City, and afterward we’d gotten enchiladas for lunch. Because my mother hadn’t been an ostentatious or performative person, it had taken me a long time, until college really, to realize how smart and funny she was, and how generously compassionate. Whenever I described embarrassing things I’d done, she’d say, “Oh, I can imagine doing that,” or “I think most everyone feels that way.”
To Noah, I said, “When we realized that she’d gotten her hamster to say Sally and I’d gotten mine to say Mom, I started laughing and she started crying. And she wasn’t one of those moms who cry all the time. But now, I understand why she did.”