“Thank you, Sally,” Nigel said. Nodding toward the writer next to me, he said, “Patrick?”
As Patrick started with an idea about Trump melting down his gold toilet to make teeth fillings, I watched Noah Brewster’s cheesily handsome surfer face watching Patrick, and I continued to watch Noah’s face, off and on, for almost three hours because that was how long pitch meetings lasted. Before Nigel released us, he asked Noah, as he asked all hosts, if he had any sketch ideas of his own. By this point, I had come to the conclusion that Noah was not, in fact, a ding-dong. He smiled and laughed often but didn’t seem to be trying too hard, as some hosts did, to prove that he was funny. And his requests for clarification had come to seem confident in a way that, in spite of my lingering annoyance about his response to my Danny Horst Rule pitch, I respected.
Once again looking around the room, Noah said, “Hearing all this has made me even more excited about the week ahead. A little terrified, but mostly excited. I’m psyched to roll with your ideas and I don’t have a big agenda. I’ll admit there’s an idea I’ve been noodling over, kind of trying to write it myself, and I’ll have to decide before the table read if it should or shouldn’t see the light of day, but, in terms of your sketches, I’m down for any of it.”
You mean any of it other than pretending to date a woman less attractive than you, I thought. I was wondering if his aversion was somehow tied to having dated so many models in real life when I heard a long, low belch and immediately became aware of an unpleasant odor, a noxious version of a breakfast burrito. I snapped my head in the direction of Danny, and he pursed his lips and widened his eyes in a ridiculous way—as if to say, Oops!—and I scowled. Burping was part of life, yes, but could he not have held it in for the last thirty seconds of a three-hour meeting?
Patrick, who was the writer sitting between Danny and me, leaned toward me. He murmured, “That was you, right?”
MONDAY, 4:47 P.M.
I was responding to emails when Danny entered our office carrying a can of Red Bull. “Yo, Chuckles,” he said as he sat backwards on his desk chair and rolled toward me. The room was narrow enough that the only way to fit a couch was for both of our desks to be against the same wall. Gesturing at my computer screen, he said, “How’s the great American screenplay coming along?”
“I wish,” I said. “I’m telling my agent I don’t want to write a”—I held up my fingers in air quotes—“？‘humorous animated short for an organic douche company.’？”
“How much does it pay? Because maybe I want to write a humorous animated short for an organic douche company.”
“Ten thousand, but also douching is bad, and I assume the organic part is bullshit. Your vagina is a self-cleaning organ.”
“Maybe your vagina is a self-cleaning organ. But yeah, ten grand is a nonstarter. I don’t sell out for less than six figures.” I suspected Danny earned close to what I did. He’d been hired as the youngest-ever host of News Desk, TNO’s satirical show-within-the-show, and he wrote and occasionally appeared in other sketches, meaning that, as a second-year cast member who wrote, he probably earned the same amount as a ninth-year writer who never appeared onscreen. This was currently $12,000 an episode, or $252,000 a year—not a huge amount for a TV job where you pulled several all-nighters a week, and obscene compared to, say, a fourth-grade teacher’s salary. Even if Danny didn’t yet earn more than I did from TNO, he’d recently begun appearing in movies, whereas I used my summers off for the considerably less lucrative activities of reading novels and traveling.
“Okay, I need your advice,” Danny said. “Annabel is freaking out because she just found out our signs are incompatible. Belly’s a Pisces and I’m a Sagittarius.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t even believe you’ve lasted this long.”
“I get that it’s ridiculous to you, but she takes this shit very seriously.”
“Did she not know when your birthday is until now?”
“She had a session with her astrologist yesterday, who told her even though our connection is authentic, our communication styles are inharmonious and I’m not the person to walk beside her on her healing journey.”
I bit my lip, and Danny added, “It’s okay, you can laugh. But I still fucking love her.”
“What about your healing journey?”
Danny made an aw-shucks face. “I’m all healed, Chuckles.”
My resentment about their relationship and the sketch I’d just pitched notwithstanding, I found Danny’s unbridled love for Annabel sweet. Their sincerity and spontaneity and sheer optimism all seemed so misguided, so destined to fail, that how could anyone, including a cynic like me, not root for them? Getting engaged after seven weeks was only the latest in their dramatic and very public declarations of love. After a week together, they had traveled to Paris for a make-out session in front of the Eiffel Tower, and after two weeks they’d gotten matching tongue piercings, and all of this had been documented on social media then breathlessly described by celebrity journalists.
In general, Danny’s emotional openness made me hopeful about either Gen Z, males, or maybe both. A year and a half prior, I had been less than thrilled when I learned that I was being moved from the office I shared with Viv to an office with Danny, who was then new to TNO. I hadn’t yearned for this proximity to Danny, who’d found success as a stand-up comic with bits so steeped in irony that I couldn’t always tell what the joke was, which then made me feel extremely old. Relatedly and even more unsettlingly, I wondered if the office change was intended to send a message to me. TNO and Nigel specifically were notorious for indirection, with people often literally not knowing they’d been hired or fired. Was putting me in a crappy office with a new twenty-four-year-old dude a way of nudging me toward the exit without telling me to leave? For the first few weeks of the 2016 season, Danny and I had barely spoken, as he worked a lot in the office of the dedicated News Desk writers, whose names were Roy and Hank, and quickly became the most visible new cast member. Then, five weeks into the season, it was election night—a Tuesday, so we were at the office, ostensibly writing, though no one was getting any work done. Around 11:30 P.M., just after Florida was called for Trump, following North Carolina and Ohio, with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania looking bad, Danny and I were walking toward our office at the same time from opposite directions, got within a couple feet of each other, made eye contact, both began sobbing, and threw ourselves into each other’s arms. It was shortly after Trump’s inauguration, as our democracy started to unravel, that Danny took to calling me Chuckles. This was short for chuckle slut, which was the term for women who slept with comedians, and Danny bestowed the nickname after I told him I’d never once slept with a comedian.
Almost eighteen months later, I said to him, “Maybe Annabel just needs a day or two to absorb what the astrologist said. Like, she was thrown by it, but she’ll realize it’s not that big a deal.”
“I wish people could change signs,” Danny said. “I’d totally convert to Scorpio for her.”