Romantic Comedy(4)
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
“You’ve probably heard Noah Brewster’s songs playing in the background in a restaurant or department store,” I said. “And I’m sure it is really tiring to host and be the musical guest, but he gets to promote his new album.”
“I meant to tell you,” Jerry said. “I ran into Mrs. Macklin at Hy-Vee, and she said to give you her best. She said Amy just had another baby, which I believe is her third.”
Who’s Mrs. Macklin? I thought. Who’s Amy? Then I remembered a high school classmate named Amy Macklin, a girl I’d worked with on the student newspaper. (I’d been the copy editor, not a reporter, because reporting would have required interacting with other humans in a way I couldn’t then have managed.) I said, “Good for Amy.” A third child inspired in me more gratitude for my own circumstances than envy for Amy’s.
Jerry described a tapas restaurant he’d eaten at the previous Friday with his sister and her husband, which had featured a garbanzo-bean-and-spinach dish he thought I’d like (though I didn’t perceive myself as having a special relationship with garbanzo beans, Jerry’s belief that I did arose from the fact that when I was staying with him, I often bought hummus). Then we circled back to Sugar. A family with two daughters had moved in next door the month before, and Sugar had taken to sitting on Jerry’s back deck, facing the other house, and barking, as if to summon the sisters. “I think she likes it when they tell her how adorable she is,” Jerry said.
“Who wouldn’t?” I said, and Jerry laughed.
“All right then,” he said. “Be careful on the subway, honey.” This was how he always ended our conversations.
After I’d hung up, I refrigerated the leftovers and took a shower. I still rented the seven-hundred-square-foot apartment I’d moved into almost ten years before, when I’d arrived in New York. The difference was that for the first two years, I’d had a roommate who slept in the real bedroom while I slept in a shoddily built loft above the living room, where the ceiling was four feet from the mattress. It was hard to say in retrospect if I hadn’t had sex during those two years because I was me, because I was adjusting to my divorce, or because there simply wasn’t space.
When I emerged from the shower, I put on the huge T-shirt I slept in, brushed my teeth, rubbed cheap lotion on my legs and expensive lotion on my face, then retrieved my phone from the pocket of the jeans I’d left on the bathroom floor and got into bed. Four texts were waiting, three of them from Viv.
The first: I still look like a zombie
The second: You think I should skip dinner?
The third was a close-up photo of her right eye, the white part of which had a red and blurry-edged dot slightly bigger than her pupil. In a sketch during the live show the previous Saturday, a cast member named Gregor had thrown, of all things, an oven mitt that had been intended to lightly hit Viv’s chest but had somehow struck her eye. She’d noticed the blotch when removing her makeup after the show but it hadn’t hurt and she’d attended the after-parties that lasted long into Sunday morning. When the blotch hadn’t gone away by Monday, she’d seen TNO’s set nurse, who recommended Viv make an appointment with an ophthalmologist just to be safe.
I texted back, Take a pic where I can see your whole face
A few seconds later, another photo arrived of Viv’s entire and very pretty face, in this moment unsmiling and preoccupied-looking, with both her eyebrows raised. Viv was Black and thirty-one, five years younger than I. I knew that both she and Henrietta, who was white and thirty-two, used preemptive antiaging measures like Botox and chemical peels. At the same time, Viv appeared in a recurring sketch where she played a famously well-preserved middle-aged TV host talking to her reflection in her dressing room mirror, uttering with pleasure the phrase “Black don’t crack.”
It really doesn’t look that bad, I texted. I’d decide about dinner based on how you feel
Still doesn’t hurt, Viv replied. But
She sent the female zombie emoji, green skinned and holding out curled fingers.
No you look fine, I wrote.
By which I mean great!
I think ok to go to dinner or ok to skip but you don’t need to skip to spare anyone
On Monday nights around eleven o’clock, Nigel always took that week’s host and a few cast members to dinner at a fancy restaurant. The only writer ever included was the head writer, which I actually didn’t mind because even after nine years, I was more comfortable having fleeting rather than sustained encounters with Nigel. Many people in- and outside of TNO were obsessed with the man who’d created the show in 1981 and produced it ever since. Born Norman Piekarkski in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1947, Nigel Petersen was indisputably the comedy kingmaker of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, and it was often said that your relationship with your father was revealed by the relationship you had, or thought you had, with Nigel. But I’d long believed that being quietly competent would serve me better than trying to curry favor with him directly. For my entire first year, I hadn’t even been sure he knew my name, and then at the after-party following the season finale, he’d said in his surprisingly soft and understated voice, “The field trip sketch was very funny, Sally.” These eight words were possibly the greatest compliment of my life, which might have revealed that I had daddy issues if I hadn’t already been well aware I had daddy issues. The following year, we’d interacted more because I had many more sketches on air, but we spoke only when he was giving notes on them. Our annual superfluous exchange came after he’d complimented with similar brevity a sketch I’d set at a Kansas City barbecue restaurant, when I’d dared not just to mumble thank you but to follow up by saying, “I know you’re from Oklahoma. Do you think of that as the Midwest or the South?”
Again in his soft and understated voice, he said, “According to the census, it’s the South.” That was that for the 2010–2011 season.
Did you make appointment with eye dr, I texted Viv.
Tomorrow at 11 AM, she texted back.
Oh great, I replied.
Go tonight!
Have fun!
She replied with a winking emoji, and I opened the other text that had arrived while I was in the shower. It was from Gene, the guy I’d been hooking up with off and on for the last eight months: Hey Sally how’s it going?
It occurred to me to invite him over—it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, I’d just washed my hair and the rest of myself—and then I thought I’d rather go to sleep early. I almost never saw Gene during show weeks; even when I knew by Wednesday that I’d have no sketches on the live show, I was expected to attend Thursday rewrites, which could go until nine or ten, and it was all just so mentally consuming that I found it easier to give myself over to TNO’s rhythms. It was perhaps the one workplace in America where people who had spouses and kids were not only in the minority but were looked at with vague pity, because how could anyone possibly manage that, too?