“You might want to keep your expectations in check.”
He grinned. “Oh, it’s far too late for that.” He reached into the bag and, one by one, extracted and opened each individually paper-wrapped key chain I’d purchased along the way. After the first, he said, “I’ve always longed for a key chain in the shape of New Mexico.” As he opened the second, he added, “And I’ve also always longed for a Texas cowboy hat key chain. Oh, and an Arizona cactus.” The remaining ones were a retro Kansas license plate with stalks of wheat and an Oklahoma state bird; I had, of course, thought of Nigel while purchasing it.
I said, “There’s nothing for Missouri because I was over the Kansas border about five minutes after leaving the house.”
“The funny thing is I never wanted a Missouri key chain,” he said. “I have a new regard for Missouri. Don’t get me wrong. But their key chains just aren’t my style.” He’d unwrapped them all by this point, and he said, “Thank you. I love them.”
“I wanted to get you something I was confident you didn’t already have.”
He set his palm on my bare forearm, and I thought of the line from “Making Love in July” that went, “Did you feel it, too / my hand brushed against you.” I thought of first hearing the song almost twenty years before, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and thinking it was silly and not having the faintest inkling of who Noah Brewster would eventually become to me. Also, when were we going to start kissing passionately? He said, “They’re perfect.”
Inside the house, we found ourselves in a high-ceilinged entry hall with white stucco walls and, as in the pictures I’d seen online, a floor of terra-cotta brick tiles interspersed with blue-and-white ceramic tiles. An interior arched doorway that opened onto a large living room confirmed that the aesthetic was Casually Fancy Southwestern and The Color White. As he led me through the living room, the dining room, and the study, almost all the rugs and couches and chairs were white—the furniture’s fabric was often linen, with a couple cowhide ottomans thrown in—and almost all the tables looked expensively rough-hewn. Standing in the doorway of the study, I pointed at the desk and said, “Is that where you sat when you were emailing me? Where the magic happens?”
He laughed. “Some of the time.”
There was a kind of instrument room, not to be confused with the freestanding recording studio, that was mostly empty except for a grand piano and bench, four guitars on stands against a wall, and a large (white) armless chair in one corner. The kitchen was also large and open, with a massive wooden island and a stainless steel refrigerator and a stainless steel range and an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that revealed a long rectangular pool set in a patio of terra-cotta tiles. We stepped onto the patio, where Adirondack chairs circled a firepit. Beyond the pool, the land fell away into a valley then rose again into mountains, above which the pale blue sky was clear and expansive.
“Where are we right now in relation to the ocean?” I asked.
He jabbed his thumb over one shoulder. “It’s that way.”
“Nice view,” I said. “And it smells even better than the inside of my car.”
He laughed. “It’s the eucalyptus.”
“Do you actually swim, or is the pool more decorative? It’s kind of Zen.”
“Interesting you should ask. Much like with cooking, I’ve gone swimming more in the last few months than in the previous few years. I started out doing laps for exercise but now, just for fun, I float around on inflatables that I used to put out for parties but never used on my own.”
“Where are your butler and chambermaid right now? Are they watching us on closed-circuit TV?”
He laughed. “I hope not. No, Glenn and Margit go see their grandkids on the weekends, and they usually stay overnight. Their daughter lives in Torrance.”
“Do their grandkids come here? Have you met them?”
“They don’t usually come here, but I have met them. It’s a boy and girl who are close in age to my nephews.”
I swept one hand horizontally, taking it all in, and said, “Well, you have a very nice backyard.”
“The truth is that Topanga isn’t the ideal place to be in terms of wildfires, but otherwise it’s pretty great. And things have been okay this summer.” Our eyes met, and he said, “Should I have mentioned the wildfire thing before you drove halfway across the country?”
“Wildfires sound terrifying, but I’m not sure that would have stopped me.”
We reentered the kitchen, which segued into an entire second, or maybe third, sitting room, with a white couch and two white chairs facing a flat-screen television. I gestured toward it. “Is that where you watch TNO?”
“Every Saturday without exception.” As we returned to the front of the house, he said, “I bought the place in 2014 but didn’t move in until 2016 because of renovations. I guess the renovating would have been a pain if I’d been in a hurry, but since I’m really interested in architecture, I found the whole process fun.”
I couldn’t bring myself to inquire more—this interest still seemed affected in a way he generally wasn’t—but I managed not to make some snotty joke about it, so wasn’t that a wash, or even a minor victory?
We entered a corridor off which were three bedrooms, all of them so large and airy that I assumed the first was his, and experienced a silent titillation at the sight of the bed, until he said, “This is the room my sister prefers when she’s here.” I then assumed the second was his—like the first, it had a king-sized bed with a big white coverlet and a few Western-seeming leather throw pillows—and I then assumed the third was his. But in the third, he said, “I thought I’d give this one to you. I think it’s the best because it’s on the end, but if you really want privacy, we can set you up in the pool house.” He was looking at me with an attentive and searching expression, and I wondered if we’d come to opposite conclusions after discussing the bedroom thing on the phone—if he’d thought I’d been sincerely requesting space instead of just trying to give him an out. And, seriously, when would we kiss? What if we waited too long and missed the window of opportunity, and I ended up not only coming up with jokes for his appearance on a late-night talk show but accidentally ghostwriting his entire memoir?
Or what if instead of waiting for him to kiss me, I kissed him first? If he rebuffed me, the bad news would be that I’d need to jump in my car and drive back to Kansas City immediately, but the good news would be that it would be such a vividly humiliating experience that surely I’d derive personal and professional inspiration from it for years to come.