“Well, yeah,” I said. “Basically.” I was seated with my back against the west wall of Nigel’s office, about ten feet from Noah, and many of my co-workers were between us.
Noah’s voice remained cheerfully diplomatic as he said, “I’ve always thought it works better when the host is making fun of himself—or herself—instead of mocking other people, so I’m inclined to pass on this one.”
That self-deprecation was a winning strategy wasn’t wrong. But declaring this early and this publicly that he didn’t want to participate in any particular sketch was both unnecessary and irritating; Nigel always gave hosts veto power. In fact, I was irritated enough that I decided to pitch as my second idea the one I’d been on the fence about, which I’d been on the fence about because I wondered if it was insulting to Noah Brewster.
“Fair enough,” I said in a tone intended to be just as diplomatic as his; I knew I had to tread carefully. “And if you really want to make fun of yourself, I have some good news. My next idea is that obviously you have tons and tons of fans, and one of the reasons they love you is for how romantic your music is. Since romance and cheesiness go hand in hand, I wonder about a sketch where you play a cheesemonger and the cheeses you’re selling correspond to your songs. So you can show a customer some Brie and be like, ‘This has a silky flavor with delicious raspberry hints, perfect for making love in July.’ Or ‘The saltwater flavor of this Gruyère is reminiscent of the breezes at Lighthouse Beach.’?”
“This velvety taste goes down on me very smoothly,” said Danny. As it happened, someone else riffing on your idea was higher praise than an outright compliment.
Noah wasn’t visibly insulted, though he again seemed more puzzled than amused. He said, “So it’s like descriptions of wine but for cheese?”
“You can think on it,” I said. My third idea, the one I’d submit for the read-through but wouldn’t mention at this meeting because of the two-pitch limit, was for Noah to be a guest judge in a Blabbermouth. Blabbermouth was a recurring sketch I wrote based on the singing competition show American Lungs, which aired on the same network as TNO but was shot in L.A. It featured three famous musician judges who coached the contestants, and the part I parodied—I’d borrowed this directly from real life—was not only that the two male judges spent a great deal of time telling the female judge she talked too much when giving feedback to contestants, but that the male judges spent far more time telling the female judge she talked too much than she spent talking. Most galling to me on the real show was that instead of refuting the accusation, the female judge would good-naturedly respond, “Y’all, I know! What can I say? I’m a blabbermouth.”
“Thank you, Sally,” Nigel said. Nodding toward the writer next to me, he said, “Patrick?”
As Patrick started with an idea about Trump melting down his gold toilet to make teeth fillings, I watched Noah Brewster’s cheesily handsome surfer face watching Patrick, and I continued to watch Noah’s face, off and on, for almost three hours because that was how long pitch meetings lasted. Before Nigel released us, he asked Noah, as he asked all hosts, if he had any sketch ideas of his own. By this point, I had come to the conclusion that Noah was not, in fact, a ding-dong. He smiled and laughed often but didn’t seem to be trying too hard, as some hosts did, to prove that he was funny. And his requests for clarification had come to seem confident in a way that, in spite of my lingering annoyance about his response to my Danny Horst Rule pitch, I respected.
Once again looking around the room, Noah said, “Hearing all this has made me even more excited about the week ahead. A little terrified, but mostly excited. I’m psyched to roll with your ideas and I don’t have a big agenda. I’ll admit there’s an idea I’ve been noodling over, kind of trying to write it myself, and I’ll have to decide before the table read if it should or shouldn’t see the light of day, but, in terms of your sketches, I’m down for any of it.”
You mean any of it other than pretending to date a woman less attractive than you, I thought. I was wondering if his aversion was somehow tied to having dated so many models in real life when I heard a long, low belch and immediately became aware of an unpleasant odor, a noxious version of a breakfast burrito. I snapped my head in the direction of Danny, and he pursed his lips and widened his eyes in a ridiculous way—as if to say, Oops!—and I scowled. Burping was part of life, yes, but could he not have held it in for the last thirty seconds of a three-hour meeting?
Patrick, who was the writer sitting between Danny and me, leaned toward me. He murmured, “That was you, right?”
MONDAY, 4:47 P.M.
I was responding to emails when Danny entered our office carrying a can of Red Bull. “Yo, Chuckles,” he said as he sat backwards on his desk chair and rolled toward me. The room was narrow enough that the only way to fit a couch was for both of our desks to be against the same wall. Gesturing at my computer screen, he said, “How’s the great American screenplay coming along?”
“I wish,” I said. “I’m telling my agent I don’t want to write a”—I held up my fingers in air quotes—“?‘humorous animated short for an organic douche company.’?”
“How much does it pay? Because maybe I want to write a humorous animated short for an organic douche company.”
“Ten thousand, but also douching is bad, and I assume the organic part is bullshit. Your vagina is a self-cleaning organ.”
“Maybe your vagina is a self-cleaning organ. But yeah, ten grand is a nonstarter. I don’t sell out for less than six figures.” I suspected Danny earned close to what I did. He’d been hired as the youngest-ever host of News Desk, TNO’s satirical show-within-the-show, and he wrote and occasionally appeared in other sketches, meaning that, as a second-year cast member who wrote, he probably earned the same amount as a ninth-year writer who never appeared onscreen. This was currently $12,000 an episode, or $252,000 a year—not a huge amount for a TV job where you pulled several all-nighters a week, and obscene compared to, say, a fourth-grade teacher’s salary. Even if Danny didn’t yet earn more than I did from TNO, he’d recently begun appearing in movies, whereas I used my summers off for the considerably less lucrative activities of reading novels and traveling.
“Okay, I need your advice,” Danny said. “Annabel is freaking out because she just found out our signs are incompatible. Belly’s a Pisces and I’m a Sagittarius.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t even believe you’ve lasted this long.”
“I get that it’s ridiculous to you, but she takes this shit very seriously.”
“Did she not know when your birthday is until now?”
“She had a session with her astrologist yesterday, who told her even though our connection is authentic, our communication styles are inharmonious and I’m not the person to walk beside her on her healing journey.”
I bit my lip, and Danny added, “It’s okay, you can laugh. But I still fucking love her.”