I genuinely laughed. “If I hadn’t, how would I have written the sketch? Also, I’m a human being in the world. Do you think there’s any man, woman, or child who hasn’t heard ‘Making Love in July’ while lying in the chair at the dentist’s office?”
“Yeah, exactly. I mean that you haven’t listened beyond the bare minimum. You haven’t listened on purpose.” He still seemed to be good-naturedly teasing as opposed to needily grasping for a compliment.
“Also not true,” I said. “I love ‘The Bishop’s Garden’ and ‘All Regrets.’？”
He squinted a little, scrutinizing me.
“Here’s what I’ll admit,” I said. “There are two categories of pop songs I’m not crazy about, and because ‘Making Love in July,’ through no fault of its own, is in one of the categories, it biased me against you early on. I mean almost twenty years ago. But I’ve realized that I underestimated the range of your”—I paused—“your oeuvre.” I paused again. “What kind of asshole do you think uses the word oeuvre in a bar at three in the morning?”
“Just guessing but maybe an asshole who went to Harvard?”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m not one of TNO’s Harvard assholes.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Duke,” I said.
This time, his smile was more sarcastic. “As in the world-famous university in North Carolina? Do you mean that Duke?”
“I get that having gone to Duke might not sound that different from having gone to Harvard, but, trust me, the writers who went to Harvard think it is. Also didn’t you go to some fancy prep school in Washington, D.C.? Because I went to a gigantic, crappy public high school in suburban Kansas City.”
“But I never went to college at all, so that negates my fancy prep school degree. I was supposed to go to Kenyon, but instead I started busking at Metro stations. When do I get to find out the two categories of songs you hate?”
“Well, my disclaimer is that music isn’t my area of expertise.”
“Noted.”
“One category is the kind of song where it’s about a long relationship or marriage, and the lyrics are like ‘Sometimes it was so bad that we almost didn’t make it, but we’ve survived.’ I think those songs are unintentionally funny because they’re supposedly a celebration of the endurance of love or whatever, but the lyrics sound more like ‘Being married to you is hell, but let’s congratulate ourselves for gutting it out.’？”
“Hmm,” he said. “I guess I’ve never thought about that.”
“There’s a ton of them,” I said. “？‘We both were attracted to other people, you drove me crazy, I wanted to kill you. But, baby, after all these years, you’re still the one.’ That actually might be a good sketch. Even though you poisoned my cat, even though you puked on my needlepoint pillow. Have you ever been to a wedding reception where they make all the married couples stand up and then the DJ says, ‘Sit down if you’ve been married less than ten years, less than twenty years, less than thirty years?’ And the last ones standing are some ninety-year-old couple who’s been married since 1950?”
“Did you meet my backup singer Jimmy? I’ve only seen that at his wedding. I think it’s not a WASP thing.”
“I think you’re right. But there could be a freeze-frame on each couple as they’re applauded, and they do a confessional. So all the other guests are like, ‘This is so touching,’ and the ninety-year-old woman is thinking to herself, ‘For seven decades, the sound of his chewing has made me want to strangle him.’？”
“That would be funny,” Noah said. “Actually.”
Our eyes met, and I said, “Thanks, actually.”
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve never written that kind of song, partly because I’ve never been married.”
“Oh, sorry. ‘Making Love in July’ is the other kind of song I was referring to. It’s in the second category. That kind is always a man singing to a woman and it’s like, ‘Baby, you don’t know how beautiful you are. You’re so perfect, I never thought I’d find this, am I in heaven?’？”
Noah looked both amused and uncertain. “What’s wrong with ‘Baby, you’re so perfect, I never thought I’d find this, am I in heaven?’？” At an almost subliminal level, I found it gratifying that I’d tricked Noah Brewster into saying to me, while we stood a foot apart, “Baby, you’re so perfect, I never thought I’d find this, am I in heaven?”
I said, “I don’t like the You-don’t-know-how-beautiful-you-are part. It makes it seem like the love is predicated either on a lack of awareness on the woman’s part or else on her being insecure. And the woman in the songs is often both a child and a sexy enchantress. So the lyrics might as well be ‘I’m attracted to you because you conform to the standards agreed upon to be desirable at this moment in human history, but you don’t even know it and your cluelessness is what makes me feel like a real man.’？”
“That’s probably a little wordy,” he said. “But point taken. Would you say it’s similar to when the main character in a romantic comedy has flour on her nose after she made cookies and she doesn’t know it? Because I’ve heard that’s very annoying, too.”
Although I was impressed that he remembered this part of the conversation we’d had in my office, I didn’t know if he was agreeing or teasing me. I shrugged. “Didn’t I warn you about my rants?”
“And didn’t I tell you I love rants?” he said. “But I think you’re conflating the second kind of song with something that’s in a third category. Yeah, there are You-don’t-know-how-beautiful-you-are songs, but I don’t see those as automatically the same as the songs that are like, ‘I can’t believe you exist and I can’t believe we found each other.’ When one of those is done well, doesn’t it capture the most transcendent experience two people can have?” When I didn’t immediately reply, he said, “Don’t tell me you think falling in love is bullshit.”
“Well—” I thought of the oddly similar question Danny had asked just a few hours earlier. “I don’t want it to be.”
“I don’t get why you’d write scripts for romantic comedies if you think romance is cheesy nonsense.”
“That’s just it, though,” I said. “I don’t write from a point of clarity. I write out of confusion.”
“Then how about this—can you define cheese for me? Because I still haven’t figured out, after two decades, where the line is between cheese and emotional extravagance that’s acceptable. What makes a song or a movie or a moment in real life land on one side or the other? This is part of why the Cheesemonger sketch hit a nerve for me.”
I was quiet for a few seconds and finally said, “That’s a good question. But the line is subjective, right? Kind of like the Supreme Court definition of obscenity being ‘I know it when I see it.’？”