Four hours later, at the end of that conversation, he said, “I just wanted to mention that I, well—I shaved my head. I don’t have long hair anymore.”
I thought of Henrietta kneeling beside me in my TNO office, waking me up as I lay on the couch to tell me about Noah’s wig. Twenty-seven months had passed since then, which didn’t seem like enough to account for how irretrievable that moment now felt.
I tried to sound casual as I said, “Cool.”
“I didn’t want you to be shocked if we facetime tomorrow.”
“I’d like to think I’m harder to shock than that.”
“Just since some people say my hair is, you know—” He paused, and when he continued, he seemed embarrassed for the first time that I could recall. “Like my trademark.”
Again, I tried to sound light but sincere, and not at all mocking, as I said, “Aren’t your songwriting and guitar playing your trademark?”
The next night, especially for the first minute or two, it was shocking and thrilling to see Noah on the screen of my phone. He looked both a little different and still joltingly, unreasonably handsome. His head was indeed shaved, with a few millimeters of stubble that was darker than the blond locks of yore but matched the stubble on his cheeks. He looked paler or more tired than in online images, which of course I’d inspected many times in the last week, meaning he looked like he wasn’t wearing makeup and hadn’t otherwise been professionally styled, and it was a pure and reflexive joy to gaze at this version of him: this private, real person. His piercing blue eyes were alert, and his expression was amused, and he was wearing an olive-green T-shirt and sitting in a low white armchair, and simultaneously, I wished I could dive into the screen and throw my arms around him, and I was self-conscious at the knowledge that he could see me, and I kept glancing at my tiny, grainy reflection in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. “This is so weird!” I blurted out.
He smiled. “In what way?”
“Do you not think so?” Quickly, I added, “Not because of your haircut. Your haircut looks great. I guess in the last two nights, I just got used to your disembodied voice.”
“Is a disembodied voice better or worse than a digital consciousness?”
“Well,” I said, “they’re not dissimilar.”
Then we discussed the book he was slowly reading about AI, and about how old we’d been when we’d acquired our first cellphones, and within fifteen minutes, I was much calmer. The next night it took only a few minutes to get over the shock of Noah’s attractiveness, and the night after that I wondered if we were in the vicinity of phone sex—I’d already reversed the camera to show him my bedroom, he’d asked several rather silly questions about what kind of sheets I had and the positioning of my pillows—but I couldn’t have facetime phone sex with Noah Brewster, or at least I couldn’t sober, and I’d never drunk anything other than water while talking to him because it seemed unnecessary and maybe even inconsiderate. So instead, after we’d mutually pondered whether thread count made any real difference, I said, “What if I drive out to visit you instead of flying?”
“Seriously? Isn’t that a million miles?”
“It’s sixteen hundred.”
“I don’t want to do anything to discourage you, but wouldn’t that be unnecessarily hellish?”
“I think it might be good for me. I could commune with my thoughts while the landscape poetically whips past.”
“Is driving alone safe? Sorry if that’s sexist, but—”
“Now you can send me a formal apology and sign it Best.” Then I added, “It’s not sexist. I think it would be safe enough.”
“You’d have to text me a lot about where you are. I’m worried that my Sally radar might get spotty in some of those western states.”
I could feel—and, in miniature, see—myself smiling goofily. Maybe I was a sucker, or maybe he had a little too much practice, but he was so disarmingly sweet. “How about if I attach a transmitting antenna to the top of my car?” I said. “Or to the top of my head?”
“That’s a great plan, and then I can even track when you pop into a convenience store in, like, rural Utah.”
“Don’t judge me when I buy Doritos.”
“Doritos are the best. So when can you leave?”
I had thought in our first phone conversation that some clarification would occur, some explicit acknowledgment that our contact was romantic, or presumed to be until proven otherwise. It hadn’t. The dynamic between us was flirty and not explicit in any sense. And couldn’t I have raised the subject as easily as he could? Except that didn’t I have more to lose? Instead, we both kept chatting warmly. Why wouldn’t this be the romance of romance? and I’m really attracted to you, and I have been since that pitch meeting in Nigel’s office—if I was looking for confirmation, those lines from his emails were my strongest evidence. And those were lines I liked very much, lines I had reread many times even after memorizing them. But also: I would say I was definitely trying to impress you and I was not trying to seduce you.
“So that I know how to pack,” I said, “how long do you envision me staying?”
“As long as you want,” he said.
And then, instead of actually resolving the question, I said, “Are you the kind of Airbnb host who leaves out their framed family photos and their half-empty yogurt in the refrigerator or do you make it immaculate before your guests arrive?”
He laughed. “For you, I’ll make it immaculate because I want you to give me five stars.”
The next morning, I texted, What if I leave KC morning of Aug 1 and get to you evening of Aug 2?
You leaving KC morning of Aug 1 and getting to me evening of Aug 2 is a fantastic idea, he texted back.
On July 31, a FedEx package arrived at Jerry’s house: the twelve-count case of protein bars, an eleven-by-sixteen-inch spiral-bound road atlas, and a gray T-shirt that said California in a yellow 1980s font. In the accompanying note, he’d written, Sally, I can’t wait to see you! Your pen pal, Noah. I had never seen his handwriting, and even that seemed touching, and filled me with yearning: the way the S in Sally connected from its base to the a, the unadorned capital I, the straight unlooped line jutting down from the y in you. But was pen pal intended to be read as an inside joke or a reference to our platonic status?