“Do their grandkids come here? Have you met them?”
“They don’t usually come here, but I have met them. It’s a boy and girl who are close in age to my nephews.”
I swept one hand horizontally, taking it all in, and said, “Well, you have a very nice backyard.”
“The truth is that Topanga isn’t the ideal place to be in terms of wildfires, but otherwise it’s pretty great. And things have been okay this summer.” Our eyes met, and he said, “Should I have mentioned the wildfire thing before you drove halfway across the country?”
“Wildfires sound terrifying, but I’m not sure that would have stopped me.”
We reentered the kitchen, which segued into an entire second, or maybe third, sitting room, with a white couch and two white chairs facing a flat-screen television. I gestured toward it. “Is that where you watch TNO?”
“Every Saturday without exception.” As we returned to the front of the house, he said, “I bought the place in 2014 but didn’t move in until 2016 because of renovations. I guess the renovating would have been a pain if I’d been in a hurry, but since I’m really interested in architecture, I found the whole process fun.”
I couldn’t bring myself to inquire more—this interest still seemed affected in a way he generally wasn’t—but I managed not to make some snotty joke about it, so wasn’t that a wash, or even a minor victory?
We entered a corridor off which were three bedrooms, all of them so large and airy that I assumed the first was his, and experienced a silent titillation at the sight of the bed, until he said, “This is the room my sister prefers when she’s here.” I then assumed the second was his—like the first, it had a king-sized bed with a big white coverlet and a few Western-seeming leather throw pillows—and I then assumed the third was his. But in the third, he said, “I thought I’d give this one to you. I think it’s the best because it’s on the end, but if you really want privacy, we can set you up in the pool house.” He was looking at me with an attentive and searching expression, and I wondered if we’d come to opposite conclusions after discussing the bedroom thing on the phone—if he’d thought I’d been sincerely requesting space instead of just trying to give him an out. And, seriously, when would we kiss? What if we waited too long and missed the window of opportunity, and I ended up not only coming up with jokes for his appearance on a late-night talk show but accidentally ghostwriting his entire memoir?
Or what if instead of waiting for him to kiss me, I kissed him first? If he rebuffed me, the bad news would be that I’d need to jump in my car and drive back to Kansas City immediately, but the good news would be that it would be such a vividly humiliating experience that surely I’d derive personal and professional inspiration from it for years to come.
But once again, I did nothing. I simply said, “Oh, I don’t need to sleep in the pool house.”
We crossed again through the entry hall, and then we were definitely in the master suite: twice as large as the guest bedrooms, with its own sitting area—it seemed so predictable as to almost not be worth noting that the bedroom was bigger than my entire apartment in New York—and the adjacent bathroom featured double sinks in a quartz countertop and an enormous quartz shower and a huge, oval, freestanding bathtub. As in the guest rooms, this bed was tidily made with a white coverlet, but, on the bureau and bedside tables, there were personal objects—an iPad and a legal notepad and a heavy-looking cylindrical silver clock with a lit-up face of shifting light-and dark-brown geometrical shapes. There really wasn’t much clutter, though; either he was a tidy person or Margit or Glenn cleaned up after him, or both.
It occurred to me to point at the bed and say, “Is that where the magic happens?” But I managed to suppress this unhelpful impulse as well and instead said, “I feel like something is missing in here.”
We were standing with our backs to the bathroom door, just inside the bedroom, and he glanced at me with an alert expression.
“An Indigo Girls poster,” I said.
He laughed. “I guess people buy posters online now, right? I used to go to a music store at the mall and page through those giant plastic racks.”
“Same,” I said. “And then get an Orange Julius.”
I felt conscious of having come to the end of the tour, conscious of being in his bedroom, conscious of the intimacy of our conversation. Even as I was exquisitely aware of his nearness, I also was thinking in an abstract way about how I had been one kind of person up until my divorce, a resigned and constrained person. Then I had been another kind of person for the last decade, a cynical and compartmentalized person. Was there any reason I couldn’t now become a third kind of person, made more confident by experience and braver by the current reminder of how fragile and tenuous all our lives had been all along? And still Noah’s head was turned to look at me, and my head was turned to look at him.
He smiled at me in a way I had never before been smiled at, a smile of such tenderness and openness and warmth. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied.
We still were making eye contact as I brushed the back of my right hand against the back of his left one, and then our fingers intertwined a little. This, his complicity, bolstered me, and I stepped around so that I was facing him. The shift made it easier to properly hold hands, not just on the one side but, almost without my realizing it, on the other side, too. “So,” I said, and I really did feel like I might disrupt the space-time continuum with the hugeness of what seemed to be about to happen. I had never initiated a first kiss with someone I cared about, and I had never initiated a first kiss while sober.
“So,” he said, still smiling.
I took one more step toward him—again, the closeness of him, the mammalian smell of him, made me swoony—and then I stood on my tiptoes and leaned in and pressed my mouth against his.
There was, of course, a part of my mind narrating the action, declaring, It’s happening! Holy shit, it’s happening! But as we kept kissing, as we alternated between pursing our lips and pulling back and smiling and setting our hands on each other’s shoulders and backs, as his tongue slipped forward and touched mine, my inner narrator receded, or went somewhere else. And then there was just the sheer physical pleasure and excitement of my mouth touching his mouth and the skin on my hands and arms and face and neck touching the skin on his hands and arms and face and neck and the rest of my clothed body pressed to the rest of his clothed body. It felt like a relief, like something I’d been waiting for since TNO and much of the world had shut down in March, and also like something I’d been waiting for since he’d shown me his tattoos in 2018, and also like something I’d been waiting for my whole life. And it felt like an astonishing miracle. If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I’d never stop wanting more of it.
And then he pulled his head a full foot back, and also took a step back, though his hands were still cupping my jaw on either side and his expression was still tender. “I have something to show you,” he said.