I’d ascended perhaps 150 feet when the land leveled off and the house appeared, the same sprawling stucco hacienda I’d seen online. The real-life fact of it reminded me of encountering one of the famous Monet paintings of water lilies at the Met after studying it in an art history class. Indeed—it did exist. I was still a hundred feet from the house, and a male figure was approaching the car in jeans and a teal T-shirt and a black mask, and my heart was an exploding firecracker. Even with a mask on, even from this distance, Noah was shockingly handsome.
I braked again when we were ten feet apart—Noah fucking fake-surfer Making-Love-in-July Brewster and me, Sally Milz—and my window was still open from speaking into the intercom, and my decidedly inglorious first words were “Should I be wearing a mask?”
From behind his mask, he said, “Should I not be wearing one?” Above his mask, his eyes crinkled in a way I was pretty sure meant he was smiling, and he said, “Welcome to California.”
“Should I park here or pull up by the garage?” I asked.
“You should park here because you’ve been in that car for way, way too long.” He pulled his mask down to his chin. “And I should take this off because starting now, we’re in a pod together.” He unhooked the straps from his ears and stuffed the mask into a back pocket, and the reveal of his face—well, it wasn’t as if I needed confirmation that he was very attractive, but if I did, his blue eyes were intense, and his lips were slightly puffy and framed by laugh lines, and his thick eyebrows and stubble were light brown. And, though this was hard to fathom, there was some openness in his expression and bearing that made him seem palpably, disorientingly pleased that I’d arrived.
I turned off the engine, made brief and panicked eye contact with myself in the rearview mirror, and got out, and Noah was right there, zero feet away, and our bodies were smashed together and our arms were wrapped around each other. Because he was a few inches taller, my face was pressed to his partially stubbly neck, and the feel and smell of his skin and his stubble and his whole clothed body against mine was the nicest feeling I had ever felt. It all was both comforting and exciting in a combination I hadn’t previously known existed, and we stayed like that for a long time.
And then, finally, because I was me and compelled to break the moment even as I wondered if we were about to begin kissing passionately, I pulled away and looked up at him and said, “Your directions were excellent.”
“Do you need a bathroom or some water or anything?”
“I’m okay because I stopped before I got to Topanga.” I appreciated not only his considerateness but also the unromanticness of acknowledging pee. I extended one leg. “I changed into my fancy shoes.”
“Those are great fancy shoes.” He tilted his head toward the house. “How about if I show you around? Just leave your stuff in the car for now.”
“I have something for you.” The driver’s side door was still open, and I was careful not to retrieve his gift by bending from the waist and sticking my butt up at him, but by sitting down again in the seat and leaning over to grab the gray paper bag. When I’d reemerged, I handed it to him. I felt conscious of an ongoing, full-body shakiness.
“How exciting,” he said.
“You might want to keep your expectations in check.”
He grinned. “Oh, it’s far too late for that.” He reached into the bag and, one by one, extracted and opened each individually paper-wrapped key chain I’d purchased along the way. After the first, he said, “I’ve always longed for a key chain in the shape of New Mexico.” As he opened the second, he added, “And I’ve also always longed for a Texas cowboy hat key chain. Oh, and an Arizona cactus.” The remaining ones were a retro Kansas license plate with stalks of wheat and an Oklahoma state bird; I had, of course, thought of Nigel while purchasing it.
I said, “There’s nothing for Missouri because I was over the Kansas border about five minutes after leaving the house.”
“The funny thing is I never wanted a Missouri key chain,” he said. “I have a new regard for Missouri. Don’t get me wrong. But their key chains just aren’t my style.” He’d unwrapped them all by this point, and he said, “Thank you. I love them.”
“I wanted to get you something I was confident you didn’t already have.”
He set his palm on my bare forearm, and I thought of the line from “Making Love in July” that went, “Did you feel it, too / my hand brushed against you.” I thought of first hearing the song almost twenty years before, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and thinking it was silly and not having the faintest inkling of who Noah Brewster would eventually become to me. Also, when were we going to start kissing passionately? He said, “They’re perfect.”
Inside the house, we found ourselves in a high-ceilinged entry hall with white stucco walls and, as in the pictures I’d seen online, a floor of terra-cotta brick tiles interspersed with blue-and-white ceramic tiles. An interior arched doorway that opened onto a large living room confirmed that the aesthetic was Casually Fancy Southwestern and The Color White. As he led me through the living room, the dining room, and the study, almost all the rugs and couches and chairs were white—the furniture’s fabric was often linen, with a couple cowhide ottomans thrown in—and almost all the tables looked expensively rough-hewn. Standing in the doorway of the study, I pointed at the desk and said, “Is that where you sat when you were emailing me? Where the magic happens?”
He laughed. “Some of the time.”
There was a kind of instrument room, not to be confused with the freestanding recording studio, that was mostly empty except for a grand piano and bench, four guitars on stands against a wall, and a large （white） armless chair in one corner. The kitchen was also large and open, with a massive wooden island and a stainless steel refrigerator and a stainless steel range and an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that revealed a long rectangular pool set in a patio of terra-cotta tiles. We stepped onto the patio, where Adirondack chairs circled a firepit. Beyond the pool, the land fell away into a valley then rose again into mountains, above which the pale blue sky was clear and expansive.
“Where are we right now in relation to the ocean?” I asked.
He jabbed his thumb over one shoulder. “It’s that way.”
“Nice view,” I said. “And it smells even better than the inside of my car.”
He laughed. “It’s the eucalyptus.”
“Do you actually swim, or is the pool more decorative? It’s kind of Zen.”
“Interesting you should ask. Much like with cooking, I’ve gone swimming more in the last few months than in the previous few years. I started out doing laps for exercise but now, just for fun, I float around on inflatables that I used to put out for parties but never used on my own.”
“Where are your butler and chambermaid right now? Are they watching us on closed-circuit TV?”
He laughed. “I hope not. No, Glenn and Margit go see their grandkids on the weekends, and they usually stay overnight. Their daughter lives in Torrance.”