Romantic Comedy(5)
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Also, though we had decent sex, I didn’t like Gene that much. He was a financial analyst who’d early on mentioned that the University of Florida’s business school, which he’d attended, was ranked among the top fifteen in the country. Though I’d never previously wondered about the University of Florida’s business school ranking, of course this had prompted me to look it up and discover the claim was off by about ten. Far more alarmingly, he’d once used the word snowflake to disparage a co-worker who regularly took sick days because of migraines. While it was possible he meant the term apolitically, the meaning he apparently did intend wasn’t much better. And I hadn’t called him on it because I feared doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I’d have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn’t kill me if we went back to my apartment.
If, on the plus side, Gene wasn’t homicidal, he wasn’t particularly cute, either. He was of medium height and build, with light brown hair, and there was something so generic about him that he could have played an extra in any TNO sketch set in an office. He was unobjectionable in the way that a person you sat next to on an airplane was usually unobjectionable; unlike with an airplane seatmate, though, most of what we did was get each other off. In the months this had been going on, he’d asked me exactly two questions. The first was if I’d ever tried butter coffee (no), and the second was if I’d ever been to Rockaway Beach (also no).
None of Gene’s predecessors had been particularly inquisitive, but they’d asked enough that I’d given a fake job, which I never had to do with Gene. I’d told other guys I’d “dated” that I was a writer for the newsletter of a medical device company, which had been one of my jobs before TNO. Though I wasn’t much of a liar generally, I feared the guys I hooked up with would be overly interested if I mentioned my real employer. In a best-case scenario, they’d merely want tickets to the live show, but in a worst-case scenario, they’d be aspiring improv performers. Or maybe the real worst-case scenario was that they’d know me in a way I didn’t want to be known by them. Even I wasn’t sure if my in-person self (a mild-mannered woman of average intelligence and attractiveness) or my scripts (willfully raging sketches about sexism and bodily functions) reflected my real self—or if I had a real self, or if anyone did. But I suspected that much of my writing emerged from this tension or lack of integration; I believed the perceptions undergirding my sketches arose from my being invisible or at least underestimated, including being mistaken for someone nicer than I was. Since childhood, I’d often felt like a spy or an anthropologist, and I was fine with others at TNO knowing who I really was only because they, too, were, at their core, spies and anthropologists and weirdos.
I’d had the arrangement I had with Gene with a series of guys, ending the previous one when I discovered an unsettling three months in that he was a married dad (I’d always imagined that being someone’s mistress would feel compromising yet glamorous, but in this case it had mostly been marked by my unwittingly catching the guy’s preschool-aged kids’ colds). Though I sometimes joked with Viv and Henrietta about being a man-eating career woman, I felt confident that I wouldn’t have found a deeper connection with Gene or his predecessors if only I’d given them more of a chance. If I’d gone out for a meal with them, or walked around Governors Island with them, if we’d been required to hang out clothed and sober, I’d have ended things immediately.
I was typing Busy this week, what about meeting up next Tues or Wed? but before I could send it, presumably when he could see the three dots of my impending reply, another text from Gene arrived, and it was a dick pic. He appeared to be at his Queens apartment, which I’d visited just once. Taken from his navel down, the picture showed him lying on gray sheets, wearing no shirt and navy-blue mesh athletic shorts that he’d pulled toward the inside of his right thigh so that his wrinkled balls tumbled out and his veiny erection sloped left and upward. Given the nature of our relationship, such a photo wasn’t out of bounds, and far from the first he’d sent, but I’d never found a way to express that they had the opposite of what I assumed was their desired effect. In fact, the personal details peripherally revealed—the mesh shorts and gray sheets, the nightstand in the background on which I could discern a plastic container of watermelon-flavored antacids and a book about the leadership principles of billionaires—were oddly poignant but alienating. They reminded me of a truth I was usually unbothered by, which was that I knew what Gene’s dick looked like, but I hardly knew him at all.
I deleted Busy this week, what about meeting up next Tues or Wed? and typed Wow!!
Right now, he replied. Thinking of you
Flattering! I replied.
Send me one? he wrote.
At dinner w/ friends, I typed back. Then I added, Busy next few weeks unfortunately but hope you’re well
At some point soon after that, I fell asleep with my phone in my hand, the better to look at it first thing upon waking the next morning.
Tuesday, 12:10 p.m.
TNO’s offices and studio, along with many other offices and studios for our network, were located in an iconic building referred to as 66—it was sixty-six floors, and when the building had been completed in 1933, such a number had been more noteworthy. As I walked there just after noon, I knew I wouldn’t set foot outside again for the next twenty-four hours.
The writers’ hall on the seventeenth floor was, as I’d anticipated, ghostly in its emptiness, and I sat at my desk and inserted my earbuds. I always listened to classical music, usually Haydn or Schubert, while writing sketches about things like dog farts, tampons, and Title IX. I worked for two and a half hours without standing or removing my earbuds and in this way generated a rough draft of the Danny Horst Rule sketch (nine pages) and then a rough draft of the Blabbermouth one (ten pages). This early on, I was more focused on getting the structures into place than coming up with jokes.
One of the legends of TNO was that most of the show was written between the hours of 5 p.m. Tuesday and, because sketches were due by noon, 11:59 a.m. Wednesday. Another of the legends was that much of the creativity of TNO’s early years had been fueled by cocaine. While both of these rumors were in fact true, I personally had never done coke in my life and didn’t do most of my own writing overnight. I stayed at the office overnight because it was when I worked with cast members on their ideas and because it was considered bad form not to, and I often did find myself feverishly revising at 11:55 a.m. on Wednesday. But I wrote first drafts much better and faster during the day, and I sometimes wondered if, the cult of the overnighter aside, most of my colleagues would have, too.
At some point in my first year, I’d realized that the all-night writing sessions were, in a different way from the sketches, largely performative. Occasionally, it really did take six hours to write a sketch, but far more often, people fucked around for five hours then wrote a sketch in forty minutes. At any point on the writers’ hall, as Tuesday turned into Wednesday, you were as likely to see someone goofing off as typing. The TNO writing staff was still three-quarters male, and they’d be wrestling or making bets or peeing in trash cans. Some writers or cast members left before midnight to do a set at a comedy club; returned to wrestle, make bets, or pee in a trash can; then started writing. But these days, I knew of only one cast member who used hard drugs at work. Far more of my co-workers wore Fitbits, drank kale juice, and meditated in their off hours, or at least claimed to.