“What’s a song you think is legitimately, non-cheesily romantic?”
“At the risk of being predictable, there’s an Indigo Girls song called ‘Dairy Queen.’？”
“But isn’t that about a relationship that doesn’t work out?”
“Romance doesn’t require a happy ending.” Though I didn’t convey it, I was surprised that he knew the song. Fans liked it, but it was no “Closer to Fine.”
“Right,” Noah said. “But you have to admit it’s easier not to be cheesy when you’re writing about lost love. Are your romantic comedies going to end sadly and that’s their twist?”
I laughed. “I don’t know how they end because I haven’t finished writing one yet.”
He was looking at me with intense curiosity, which wasn’t a way I was often looked at. Then he said, “Have you ever been in love?”
“Well—” I paused. “I’ve actually been married.” He glanced down at my left hand, the hand in which I held my drink, so I switched the glass to the other hand and wiggled my bare left fingers. “And divorced,” I added. “I’m a brassy divorcée. I had a starter marriage in my early twenties, right after college.”
“Does that explain why you’re not a fan of songs about people who stayed married through all the ups and downs?” He took a sip of his club soda. “Or am I being facile?”
“Well, I definitely don’t think divorces are inherently tragic. I saw my own as a personal failure, but it also was a huge relief. I’d never have had this career if I’d stayed married.”
“In the beginning, when you and your husband were first together, did you feel like, ‘Am I in heaven’？”
I laughed. “No.” He laughed, too, a surprised-seeming laugh, and I said, “I think I’ve sort of been in love. Just not with my husband.”
Noah was still regarding me with an expression that was both amused and strangely rapt, as if he found me riveting. This was the problem with celebrities, that they could deploy their charisma at will, and you basked in its glow, and then they shifted it away from you and the world reverted to being cold. “How does sort of in love work?” he asked.
Elliot had been at the after-party at the big French restaurant—he was far too ambitious to skip it—but he wasn’t at the after-after-party; he’d stopped attending them when he got married. “It’s pathetic,” I said, “but there was someone at TNO who I thought was my soulmate. We never dated. We were just friends, but I thought we were comedy soulmates and life soulmates. The pathetic part is that he didn’t feel that way about me.”
“I can’t tell,” Noah said. “Are you saying ‘soulmates’ ironically?”
“Embarrassingly enough, I’m saying it unironically.”
“And are you still into him?”
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “This was years ago.” There was a brief pause—over the bar’s other conversations and the background music, which at that moment was a seventies rock classic, I heard the clacking sound of a new pool game—and I said, “Judging by your songs, I imagine you’ve been in love hundreds of times.”
He shook his head. “Hardly.”
“Do you still pine for people from your past?”
“I almost wish I did. I’ve never been in a relationship I thought could last forever, and when I look back, they seem even more doomed in retrospect. I wonder if I was deluding myself that the other person and I had anything in common. I guess if I start talking about attachment theory right now, I’ll sound like I’ve been in a little too much therapy.” He held up his glass. “But it definitely helps with staying sober.”
“If it sounds like I haven’t been in enough therapy, it’s because I’ve chosen Midwestern repression instead.”
He laughed.
I said, “Plus the time-honored method of channeling my neuroses into my writing.”
“Another legitimate path, though not mutually exclusive from therapy.”
“I think I know what attachment theory is from reading articles. It’s replicating the dynamics of the family you grew up in?”
He nodded and set his drink on the bar. “I remember turning thirty and I’d just won this big award in the music industry—”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t be modest.”
He grinned. “The Grammy for Album of the Year. Thank you for offering me that opportunity.”
“If I won a Grammy for Album of the Year, I’d carry it with me at all times, including now. It’s a little statue of a record player, right?”
“Except that you have won Emmys, so that doesn’t really check out. Unless they’re in there?” He nodded down toward my fanny pack.
Had he googled me? I didn’t have much of an Internet presence—though I’d created social media accounts in order to follow other people, I’d literally never posted anything—but this was one of the few facts that would pop up if someone did a search. I patted my fanny pack. “If there was room for them, I would. As you were saying—you’d turned thirty, you’d won a Grammy, and…？”
“Just that I thought I was on the cusp of figuring it all out. I’d had my early success, then I’d had a sophomore-slump album, then I’d redeemed myself critically—I mean, this feels like a misguided way of looking at it now, but it was what I believed at the time. I also thought I was on the cusp of getting married and having kids. For my thirtieth birthday, I’d gone to Costa Rica to surf with some friends. One night I happened to watch the sunset by myself from a balcony in the villa where we were staying, and I was really confident that there was some code I’d cracked. But six years have passed since then, I’m still not married, and I feel a lot more confused about everything—the state of the world, the direction of my life, how much I should use my so-called platform. Comparable to the cheesy versus not cheesy line, where’s the divide when you’re a celebrity who wants to be involved but you know plenty of people would just say, ‘Shut up and play your guitar’？”
“When you thought you were on the cusp of getting married,” I said, “was it to someone in particular?”
He shook his head and smiled. “You think that could have been part of the problem?”
“For what it’s worth, when I was in high school—at my big crappy public school—a math teacher once said at assembly that the point of life is to find the thing you’re good at and enjoy doing, and to do it for other people. Can you imagine having the audacity to declare what the point of life is? But I never forgot it, and I’m not so sure he was wrong.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“It might sound silly, but I think of—” I paused. Even after two and a half drinks, this felt like a lot to reveal to a person I barely knew. But I kept going. I said, “I think of TNO as the love of my life.” Unaccountably, my eyes filled with tears. And then I realized it wasn’t because I thought what I was saying was sad. It was because it was true, and not sad at all.