Presumably, after accepting Noah’s invitation to visit, I ought to have been wonderstruck by the human capacity for connection even during the darkest times. And I was! But also I was preoccupied with how and when to address the disheveled and hairy state into which I’d descended during the pandemic. During our first phone conversation, he’d said that maybe the next day, we could facetime, and the minute we’d hung up, even though it was after three in the morning, I’d zealously tweezed my eyebrows and bleached the hair above my upper lip with the same possibly toxic cream I’d been using since middle school. But the following night, he’d called again rather than facetiming, meaning that I’d been denied the opportunity to pretend I was spontaneous and denuded and spontaneously denuded.
When we’d agreed that I was really, actually going to drive to California, I’d immediately begun strategizing about how I could arrive at his house （at Noah’s house! The house of Noah Brewster!） after two thirteen-hour days on the road looking and smelling as unbeastly as possible. I planned to touch up my eyebrows and shave my legs, armpits, and bikini line in the morning, at the hotel in Albuquerque. And while of course I’d shower before leaving New Mexico, I’d devoted extensive thought to whether, upon reaching Los Angeles, I ought to find a place to shower again before getting to Noah—a truck stop? A hotel room? A friend’s empty apartment?
But I’d decided not to introduce another logistical or social variable; I was telling no one I knew who lived there that I was visiting. Instead, before reaching Noah’s house, I would stop at a gas station, which was just about all that was open in California at this point in the shutdown, to brush my teeth and perhaps apply a fresh coat of deodorant over my flop sweat.
All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me. But more pronounced than my anxiety about whether Noah would think I was cute enough to smooch—even now, when it was plausible that he was so lonely that all he required was a warm body and a pulse—was my fear that it didn’t matter how I looked because I’d misunderstood and this was not in fact a really, really inconvenient booty call.
I hadn’t yet responded to Noah’s texts from a minute before when another came through: When we talk tonight there’s something we should discuss
Oh shit, I thought, and immediately my brain began supplying possibilities: I’m celibate. I’m gay. I have Covid again. I’ve invited you here to ghostwrite my jokes for an upcoming Zoom appearance on a late-night talk show.
And then one last text that wasn’t exactly reassuring: It’s nothing bad
* * *
—
On the night that I had emailed Noah my number, he’d called a minute later. Perhaps this efficiency shouldn’t have provided enough time for me to get nervous, but my heart was thudding and I wondered as I said “Hi” if that one tiny syllable would reveal that my voice was shaking.
“Hey, Sally.” Noah sounded relaxed and confident, like a man who stood on stages singing to adoring crowds, a man widely agreed upon by the American public to be exceptionally handsome. “Are you in your childhood bedroom right now? With all the Indigo Girls posters?”
“Sadly, I never had any,” I said. “That would have been much cooler than the poster I did have with the Thoreau quote about lives of quiet desperation. Oh, and I also had an Audrey Hepburn poster to signify that I was classy and feminine.” Because this wasn’t the conversation I’d been expecting—I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but not this—I could feel myself become marginally less nervous. “What posters did you have?”
“Just to be boringly predictable, mostly musicians. Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground, the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. You are very classy and feminine, by the way.”
“Is Nevermind the one with the pool and the baby penis?”
“I think it’s supposed to be a condemnation of capitalism because the baby is reaching for a dollar bill, but maybe same difference.”
“There really isn’t much of my old stuff here anymore,” I said. “There’s the wicker furniture, but no graduation caps or stuffed animals or earring trees. No identifying markers of my teenage self.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “White wicker?”
“The bed frame, the bedside table, and the desk are all wicker, and there’s a wicker armchair, which is where I’m sitting. I assume you’re also sitting in a white wicker armchair?”
“Of course,” he said. “Always.”
This time, I laughed.
“I’m in my study,” he said. “Does that make me sound intellectual?”
“Are you smoking a pipe and wearing a monocle?”
“And a velvet jacket,” he said. “Truthfully, the main thing I study in my study is the TV screen. My bedroom is where I read.”
“Reading and watching TV are both noble activities,” I said. “That’s important to remember.”
“Especially watching TV on Saturday nights at eleven-thirty, right?”
“Do you not have a TV in your bedroom?”
He laughed. “No, I have one there, too. And one in the sitting room off the kitchen.”
After I’d received Noah’s second email—the one that mentioned he was in L.A. and that, like his first email, did not make it seem as if he was reaching out for a business-related reason—I’d googled Noah Brewster Los Angeles house. Of course I had; I wasn’t brain-dead. As per the Internet: located in Topanga Canyon, purchased in 2014 for nine million dollars and then renovated down to the studs, a six-bedroom / eight-bathroom Spanish hacienda on ten acres with a pool, pool house, and freestanding recording studio built in 2016. A men’s magazine had run photos of him taken in the studio as well as next to and in the pool—one shot showed him standing in the shallow end wearing a drenched white T-shirt that clung gratifyingly to the muscles in his arms and abdomen—while a shelter magazine had an online spread of the interior of the house accompanied by a long conversation between him and a British architect.
After I’d googled Noah Brewster Los Angeles house, the Internet suggested that I also google Noah Brewster net worth, and who was I to decline? The answer, which may have been accurate or completely wrong, was ninety-five million dollars.
On the phone, there was a brief silence, then Noah said, “So I think you should come visit me. And I think we should hang out and keep talking about all the things we’ve been talking about over email. What do you think of that?”
“Okay.”
“Wait, do you think I’m kidding?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t kidding, either. And as luck would have it, my schedule is pretty open now.”
He laughed. “So is mine. So how about, I don’t know, tomorrow? The next day? You’ll probably make fun of me for this, but one option is for my P.A. to arrange a plane to bring you.”
“That sounds very Fifty Shades of Grey.”