“What about your healing journey?”
Danny made an aw-shucks face. “I’m all healed, Chuckles.”
My resentment about their relationship and the sketch I’d just pitched notwithstanding, I found Danny’s unbridled love for Annabel sweet. Their sincerity and spontaneity and sheer optimism all seemed so misguided, so destined to fail, that how could anyone, including a cynic like me, not root for them? Getting engaged after seven weeks was only the latest in their dramatic and very public declarations of love. After a week together, they had traveled to Paris for a make-out session in front of the Eiffel Tower, and after two weeks they’d gotten matching tongue piercings, and all of this had been documented on social media then breathlessly described by celebrity journalists.
In general, Danny’s emotional openness made me hopeful about either Gen Z, males, or maybe both. A year and a half prior, I had been less than thrilled when I learned that I was being moved from the office I shared with Viv to an office with Danny, who was then new to TNO. I hadn’t yearned for this proximity to Danny, who’d found success as a stand-up comic with bits so steeped in irony that I couldn’t always tell what the joke was, which then made me feel extremely old. Relatedly and even more unsettlingly, I wondered if the office change was intended to send a message to me. TNO and Nigel specifically were notorious for indirection, with people often literally not knowing they’d been hired or fired. Was putting me in a crappy office with a new twenty-four-year-old dude a way of nudging me toward the exit without telling me to leave? For the first few weeks of the 2016 season, Danny and I had barely spoken, as he worked a lot in the office of the dedicated News Desk writers, whose names were Roy and Hank, and quickly became the most visible new cast member. Then, five weeks into the season, it was election night—a Tuesday, so we were at the office, ostensibly writing, though no one was getting any work done. Around 11:30 P.M., just after Florida was called for Trump, following North Carolina and Ohio, with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania looking bad, Danny and I were walking toward our office at the same time from opposite directions, got within a couple feet of each other, made eye contact, both began sobbing, and threw ourselves into each other’s arms. It was shortly after Trump’s inauguration, as our democracy started to unravel, that Danny took to calling me Chuckles. This was short for chuckle slut, which was the term for women who slept with comedians, and Danny bestowed the nickname after I told him I’d never once slept with a comedian.
Almost eighteen months later, I said to him, “Maybe Annabel just needs a day or two to absorb what the astrologist said. Like, she was thrown by it, but she’ll realize it’s not that big a deal.”
“I wish people could change signs,” Danny said. “I’d totally convert to Scorpio for her.”
“I think she’ll come around,” I said.
He nodded toward my computer screen. “It’s very demeaning that you think my vagina needs cleaning. It shouldn’t smell floral when I’m getting oral.” He grinned. “I’ll invoice you for the ten grand.”
MONDAY, 7:32 P.M.
Mondays were the only days during a TNO workweek when I got home at a remotely normal hour, and I tried to use them to continue recovering from the previous week if there’d been a show—from October to May, shows typically aired three weeks in a row then we got two or three weeks off—and to brace myself for the week ahead. I’d walked the forty minutes from the TNO offices in Midtown to my apartment on the Upper West Side, picking up Thai takeout near my building. I ate pad see ew from the container while sitting at my kitchen counter and talking on speakerphone to my seventy-nine-year-old stepfather, Jerry. My mother had died three years prior, devastating both Jerry and me in ways we couldn’t really express. Four months after the funeral, I’d convinced Jerry to get a beagle named Sugar, who brought him so much happiness that I considered her presence in his life to be my crowning achievement. Plus, she gave us something to chat about every Sunday or Monday instead of our feelings.
“She was a very good girl getting her nails cut today,” Jerry said jovially, then dropped his voice to a whisper—presumably because Sugar was nearby and he didn’t want to offend her—and said, “She really wasn’t. It took two attendants to hold her because she was wiggling so much.”
“Was she whimpering, too?”
“Like a baby,” he said. Jerry and Sugar lived in Kansas City, in the house I’d grown up in. I tried to visit twice a year, though since my mother’s death I hadn’t been able to bring myself to go for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I’d either stayed in New York or traveled far away, once to the Seychelles with Viv and once, with Viv and also that time with Henrietta, to Mexico City. Jerry spent the holidays with his sister.
“I saw on the Internet that your host this week is also the musical guest,” Jerry said. “That sounds awfully tiring.” My mother and I had debriefed about each show on Sunday afternoons, and in her absence, Jerry had, on Sunday afternoons, taken to emailing me two formally written paragraphs sharing his feedback. The kindness of this impulse almost made up for the fact that, apart from appreciating Sugar’s antics, Jerry didn’t have much of a sense of humor and wasn’t familiar with almost any of the pop cultural phenomena or people that TNO satirized. Though he and my mother had been in the studio audience twice, he’d never have even watched it on TV if I didn’t write for it.
“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.”