Then we lay on the inflatables, and I almost fell asleep, with the sunny blue Topanga sky above us and the green hills around us and a sort of natural ambient buzzing in the air. I wasn’t, of course, totally un-self-conscious about how I looked in a bathing suit, but I was only about 17 percent as self-conscious as I’d have anticipated. First because of all the sex we’d had and second because, as per Viv’s pep talk, I was staying for just three more days, until Thursday at noon, so really, wouldn’t it have been a waste of time to fret about my thighs or belly?
After that, he showed me his studio: the live room, which held another grand piano and a drum set in addition to a dozen guitars of various shapes and sizes stored on stands; the control room, with a vast mixing console like the one in the control room at TNO; and the isolation booth, with its foam-covered walls and standing mic. Back in the live room, he picked up an acoustic guitar and tuned it and then, while looking at me, began playing a song I soon recognized as “Revolution” by the Beatles. He kept playing as we talked about something else, and I felt a tidal wave in my stomach, this reminder of the thing he could do exceptionally well and easily and the strange preciousness of his doing it when no one was around except me.
He stopped playing and said, “It’s weird we’ve never discussed this, but do you play any instruments?”
I shook my head. “I wish.”
He began to play another song and said, “You know this one?”
It took me a moment, then I said, “?‘Sultans of Swing’?”
He nodded, closed his eyes, and sang. I thought about the embarrassment I had experienced watching him rehearse his songs at TNO, and it seemed in retrospect to have been a kind of foreknowledge but also a kind of misunderstanding. I didn’t feel embarrassed in his studio; I felt admiration. And my embarrassment from before now seemed like a protectiveness.
“Last one,” he said, and he segued into “Ain’t No Sunshine”—the title was revealed in the first line—and his eyes were closed again and he was belting it out unabashedly, and I wondered then if there was always a loneliness to loving a very talented person because their talent was only of them, not of both of you, and then I thought, Jesus Christ, do I love Noah? I only got here yesterday! And then I thought, was there anyone who would ever feel lonely because of my talent? Was I as talented as Noah? I was competent, but nobody would want to stand still and just watch me. If you were a writer, you could be impressive in a cerebral sort of way, but if you were a musician, you got to be viscerally magical.
As casually as he’d reached for the guitar, he put it back, and grabbed my hand.
We returned to the main house and ate the dinner Margit had made, though we didn’t see Margit until we were halfway through eating, when she came to check if we needed anything and then came back to clear the plates. (Was it reprehensible that a couple in their sixties worked for Noah in this way? Was it fine? Was it my responsibility to decide?)
Then, in Noah’s bedroom, we watched a futuristic movie about astronauts, but halfway through we began messing around and the movie was still playing on the wall-mounted screen as he peeled off my jeans and underwear and kissed the insides of my thighs, so my consciousness was split between the surreal ecstasy of his mouth on me while my eyes were closed and the characters saying things like “But the commander has no idea that the electromagnetic currents from the storm damaged the satellite!”
I woke the next morning, and moved from Noah’s bed to the one in the guest room (with a long and, I hoped, surreptitious stop in the bathroom between) not at 4:15 but at 5:27, which seemed like progress. The next morning I woke and moved at 5:55. On the fourth morning, I woke at 6:10, went to the guest bathroom, then returned to his bed, and when I did, he sleepily scooted toward me and wrapped me in his arms.
This was the day I had planned to depart, a plan I’d never mentioned to Noah, a plan that seemed, from the vantage point of his bed and his arms, to be ridiculous.
* * *
—
A rhythm asserted itself: outrageously delicious yet healthy meals prepared by Margit and eaten outside; Noah’s trainer every other morning, which was when I attended to the Sisyphean task of body hair removal, except with a razor blade and tweezers instead of a boulder; responding to emails or, in Noah’s case, to phone calls after lunch; driving to various trails in the late afternoon to hike and sometimes swimming on our return; watching movies before bed; and random but regular intervals of sex that was sometimes fun and lighthearted, almost joking, and sometimes passionate and serious, like we were the futuristic astronauts who’d made it back from our mission successfully and could finally take off our space suits and go at it with our earthly flesh.
It was somewhere in this stretch that I remembered the Mad Libs and convinced him to let us finish it, and my favorite line from our collaboration was “Forsooth!” I said, “California is truly the most axiomatic and piquant bellybutton I’ve ever square danced!” It was also during this stretch that I was reading by the pool one afternoon while Noah was inside on the phone with his manager discussing a livestream show that would be filmed in September at a concert hall with no audience. The conversation went on for a long time, and at some point, I became aware of a mild but persistent longing. And then I thought, I miss him.
It was on the ninth day of my visit, while we were lying naked in his bed at 11:40 A.M., that he patted the hamster on my right bicep and said, “That’s still the greatest tattoo of all time.” I was flat on my back and he was on his side, facing me.
“It really encapsulates my badass lifestyle, doesn’t it?” I touched the inside of his left forearm, the music notes on a staff. I now knew, as I had not when the glimpses of and proximity to his skin had tormented me at TNO, that he’d gotten the “Blackbird” notes after his first album came out, the crow after his bandmate Christopher had died, and the Celtic knot after his first year of sobriety. I said, “Do you think you’re done or not done with body art?”
“Probably done. What about you?”
“Also probably done, unless I form an unexpected attachment to a guinea pig or a raccoon.”
He laughed, and I said, “I have a question for you. You know over email when I asked if you were trying to seduce me during your song rehearsal at TNO? When you said no, I kind of interpreted it as you saying, no, you weren’t interested in me.”
He shook his head rapidly. “I knew I was walking the knife’s edge with that one. In the emails, I mean. And I blew it, didn’t I? It was the word seduce that confused me—I think of that as being sleazy, like what a scoundrel does to an innocent young woman in a nineteenth-century novel. I didn’t understand what you were asking. If you had just said, ‘Do you like me?’ I could have said, ‘I sure do.’?”
I laughed. “What if I had said, ‘Do you like me in a wholesome, non-scoundrel-ish way?’?”
“No.” He was shaking his head again. “It was never wholesome. But I didn’t know if it was safe then to convey that.”