from: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
to: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:24 PM
subject: Actually
Were you trying to seduce me?
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:33 PM
subject: Actually
I’m nervous right now because it seems like there’s a right and wrong answer to your question, and I’m not sure which is which. So I’m just going to be honest because I’ve heard there’s no point in having a pandemic pen pal if you’re not honest.
I would say I was definitely trying to impress you and I was not trying to seduce you.
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 10:58 PM
subject: Actually
Where’d you go?
from: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
to: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
date: Jul 25, 2020, 11:19 PM
subject: Actually
Wrong answer, huh?
from: Sally Milz <[email protected]>
to: Noah Brewster <[email protected]>
date: Jul 26, 2020, 12:25 AM
subject: Actually
Okay, here’s the story of my marriage: As a middle class white girl, I can’t claim I was out of place at Duke from a socioeconomic standpoint （this is how all juicy and romantic stories begin, right?）， but I was a bad fit for the fraternity-sorority/country club vibe of the campus. I almost never went to parties and barely had friends until I joined the staff of the student newspaper my sophomore year. First I was one of the copy editors, and eventually I was the copy chief. This meant I stayed late, read practically every article that was filed, and was fairly invisible in a way that suited me. （Nigel says that TNO isn’t a place for perfectionists or lone wolves, and because I’m naturally both, working there has taught me to fight those tendencies.）
Anyway, the sports editor of the newspaper my senior year was a guy named Mike. He’d also worked his way up, so we’d interacted tons of times （while I copyedited his articles about, say, men’s tennis） without really getting to know each other. At a staff happy hour on Halloween, a columnist named Derrick got falling down drunk, and Mike and I ended up walking him back to his dorm room and putting him to bed. It was only maybe eight o’clock on a Friday, and campus was filled with people in all kinds of crazy costumes planning all kinds of wild nights, but both Mike and I were worried that Derrick was going to throw up, choke on it, and die, so we parked ourselves in his room, with the lights low, to keep an eye on him. We sat on the floor and talked for a few hours, until we decided it was safe to leave. I honestly don’t think we’d have gotten together if not for babysitting Derrick （though I think this is true for plenty of relationships, that they’re random at least as often as they’re inevitable）， but we quickly became a serious couple （in every sense）。 Mike was applying to law schools then, and he ended up deciding on Chapel Hill, which is just 20 minutes from Duke. He was （is? Because he’s still alive, if not still part of my life） from Charlotte, NC, and it was already understood that when he finished law school, he’d go back there.
In the spring of our senior year, we decided to get married. Neither of us was being pressured by our parents—his parents actually were religious, but not in a way where they’d have been upset if we lived together without getting married. My mom said that she had concerns because people can change a lot in their twenties and Mike and I might evolve out of wanting to be a couple, but that she also thought I had the right to make my own decisions. We got married at the Durham County Courthouse the Friday after our graduation, in front of Mike’s parents and brother, my mom and Jerry, and two of our friends from the newspaper. That Monday, I started my job as a writer at an in-house newsletter for a gigantic medical device company （AdlerWilliams）。
When I look back, I simultaneously think it’s fine that Mike and I got married, no animals were injured, etc., AND it seems like we did it for terrible reasons—at best, in order to cross off what we perceived as the biggest item on the to-do list of adulthood, at worst, because we were scared of life after college. Or maybe those are the same thing, or maybe I just mean I was scared. In theory, I wanted to move to New York or LA and write for TV, but I didn’t know anyone in the industry and I was too chicken to go to one of those cities alone. I suppose I wanted to absolve myself of responsibility for my own happiness—I could blame Mike for trapping me in NC.
Every July, while working at AdlerWilliams, as a secret annual rite that no one besides Mike knew about, I submitted a sketch packet to TNO. The first time I ever did this, the head writer, who was then Ollie Toubey, called me eight weeks later and said something like “We can’t make you an offer right now, but you’re talented and we encourage you to apply again.” It was a three-minute conversation that was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I kept applying and being rejected for the next few years （and not hearing directly from anyone again）， during which time Mike graduated from law school, we moved to Charlotte, and I got a new job as a writer at a magazine for a high-end credit card （Luxuries Monthly? Perhaps you subscribe? Against your will?）。 And then in late September 2009, on a Monday, I got a call from Ollie saying, “Can you come to the TNO office tomorrow to interview?” And I said, “Oh, wow, this is amazing, but I live in North Carolina.” And Ollie said, “Cool, can you come to the TNO office tomorrow to interview?” I spent $880 on the ticket, which was the most I’d ever spent on anything. And I made a reservation at the Holiday Inn Express at the Newark airport, but I went straight from getting off the plane to the 66 building, so I was dragging my suitcase. I interviewed with Ollie and his deputy, Ursula, and they were the smartest and funniest people I’d ever met, then they told me to wait outside Nigel’s office to meet him. I waited for seven hours, which as you might know is unremarkable—Henrietta had to wait outside his office for three days （the day I was there, he was taking a helicopter in from the Hamptons）。 I finally met him at ten o’clock at night, we had a very anodyne exchange that felt like it was over before it began, and I spent most of it describing working for Luxuries and for AdlerWilliams’s newsletter （which was called Heartbeats）。 I assumed that he couldn’t have found me more boring. I left his office after about eight minutes and sat in the hall again, and Ollie and Ursula went into his office for an even shorter time than I’d been in there then came back out, led me to Ollie’s office, and said, “Can you start tomorrow?” Even now, I don’t have the words to express how shocked and thrilled and overwhelmed and disbelieving I was. It was like swimming in the ocean and feeling something shift under you and the next thing you know, a gigantic magical sea creature that you never knew existed is rising out of the water with you on its back.
After this, outside 66, my suitcase and I got in a cab to the Holiday Inn Express, and I was shaking with excitement as I called Mike and told him the news. In this very subdued voice, he says, “It’s too bad you can’t do it,” and I’m like, “Why can’t I do it?” and he says, “Because we live in Charlotte.”