“Yeah, somehow I haven’t gotten around to reading that. But if we charter a flight, you skip the terminal and security, which I assume are the germ hotspots.”
“I got the Fifty Shades books for some quick research for a sketch, and the next thing I knew I’d consumed fifteen hundred pages about Ben Wa balls and riding crops.” I hesitated. I didn’t know how much it cost to charter a flight, but it seemed like a destabilizing way to start things with Noah. I said, “A private plane sounds a little, uh, intense. But visiting you sounds great.”
“You don’t have to decide about the plane now. If you end up flying commercial, just promise me you’ll wear a KN95.”
“Do you know what people like me call flying commercial?” I said. “We call it flying.”
“Yeah, I guess I asked for that.”
This conversation had started after midnight, and we were then on the phone for two and a half hours more, discussing how the kids of one of his side project band members were sewing masks for residents of nursing homes; and how while walking Sugar that evening I’d passed a slim white woman in a T-shirt that said Good Vibes Only, and how that seemed like a thing a slim white woman shouldn’t be wearing at this particular cultural moment; and how I was reading a novel set in Communist Romania; and how he was reading a book of nonfiction about the future of artificial intelligence but the truth was that he read it only at night and rarely got through more than a few pages before falling asleep; and how the previous week, he had started writing a new song for the first time since he’d had Covid and it hadn’t gone incredibly well but also hadn’t been a disaster; and about how in the Indigo Girls’ “Dairy Queen,” there was a lyric I’d never been clear on because it kind of sounded like “to hold you” but it also kind of sounded like “to haunt you” and if you looked it up online it said hold, but I wanted it to be haunt; and about the Dairy Queen chain and how he’d never been to one, and I said that was because he’d never lived in the Midwest; and about how I’d never been to In-N-Out Burger, and he said that was because I’d never lived in California. By then, it was almost three-thirty my time and I felt like the teenager I’d never been, drugged on lust and conversation. Just before we hung up, I said, “Usually I hate talking on the phone, but I don’t hate talking on the phone to you.”
“I’ll try not to let that go to my head.” He sounded very happy, and I felt a squeezing around my heart. Wasn’t this all too good to be true? For the last week, whenever I hadn’t actively been writing an email to or reading an email from Noah, as I’d scrambled eggs or dragged the trash and recycling bins to the curb, I’d often pulled my phone from my pocket and reread both the messages he’d sent me and the ones I’d sent him, especially if I was waiting for a response; more than once I read all the emails, in order, in their entirety. I also had continuously composed future emails in my head and assessed almost any experience I was having—not, admittedly, that I was having many—through the filter of whether they’d be worth describing to Noah. And now we’d spoken and it hadn’t ruined everything!
He added, “Can I call you again tomorrow night?”
“You definitely can,” I said.
“Can I email you seven times before I call you tomorrow night?”
“I’m hoping you will.”
This was when he said, “I almost suggested facetiming now instead of calling. What are your feelings about facetime?”
“It depends on the face in question.” After a pause, I said, “In your case, I’m pro.”
He laughed. “What a relief.” Then he said, “Good night, Sally. This was very fun.”
“I agree,” I said. “Good night, Noah.”
But he didn’t email the next day; instead, at noon my time, he texted, Hope it’s OK I just ordered these for you, followed by a screenshot of a pink pillow that said Good Vibes Please in white cursive, followed by another screenshot of an orange pillow that said Good Vibes Welcome with an image of a sun below the words, followed by another text that said It was hard to decide so I got both.
I texted back, That’s an incredible coincidence because I just ordered this for you, and sent a screenshot of a distressed wooden sign that said In this house, we keep it real, we give hugs, and we dance badly.
He texted back, Truly amazing because for your kitchen I just ordered, followed by a screenshot of a different distressed wooden sign that said ’Bout to Stir Up Some Shit and featured an image of a whisk. And then we texted for three hours and then we talked again that night from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. central. At 9:50 P.M. I had applied foundation and mascara and lip gloss, then I had wiped the lip gloss off, then I had reapplied it. At ten, the notification of a facetime call had appeared on my phone, but before I could see him, it had disappeared, and a regular call had come through.
Four hours later, at the end of that conversation, he said, “I just wanted to mention that I, well—I shaved my head. I don’t have long hair anymore.”
I thought of Henrietta kneeling beside me in my TNO office, waking me up as I lay on the couch to tell me about Noah’s wig. Twenty-seven months had passed since then, which didn’t seem like enough to account for how irretrievable that moment now felt.
I tried to sound casual as I said, “Cool.”
“I didn’t want you to be shocked if we facetime tomorrow.”
“I’d like to think I’m harder to shock than that.”
“Just since some people say my hair is, you know—” He paused, and when he continued, he seemed embarrassed for the first time that I could recall. “Like my trademark.”
Again, I tried to sound light but sincere, and not at all mocking, as I said, “Aren’t your songwriting and guitar playing your trademark?”
The next night, especially for the first minute or two, it was shocking and thrilling to see Noah on the screen of my phone. He looked both a little different and still joltingly, unreasonably handsome. His head was indeed shaved, with a few millimeters of stubble that was darker than the blond locks of yore but matched the stubble on his cheeks. He looked paler or more tired than in online images, which of course I’d inspected many times in the last week, meaning he looked like he wasn’t wearing makeup and hadn’t otherwise been professionally styled, and it was a pure and reflexive joy to gaze at this version of him: this private, real person. His piercing blue eyes were alert, and his expression was amused, and he was wearing an olive-green T-shirt and sitting in a low white armchair, and simultaneously, I wished I could dive into the screen and throw my arms around him, and I was self-conscious at the knowledge that he could see me, and I kept glancing at my tiny, grainy reflection in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. “This is so weird!” I blurted out.
He smiled. “In what way?”
“Do you not think so?” Quickly, I added, “Not because of your haircut. Your haircut looks great. I guess in the last two nights, I just got used to your disembodied voice.”
“Is a disembodied voice better or worse than a digital consciousness?”