My original idea for the pilot was to tell the history of “Konstantine” by Something Corporate, a fan-favorite song that, for years, the band refused to play at concerts. It was the cornerstone of every playlist I made in high school.
“The song is nine minutes and thirty seconds long,” Mitch, my boss and the station’s newly hired head of podcast development, barely took his eyes off the CNN news ticker long enough to protest. He didn’t bother turning off the TV when I came into his glass-walled office, only muted it.
“So? That makes it more interesting. How did a nine-minute song that was only released in Japan become a fan favorite? This was 2003, the early days of the internet. I could make this fascinating.”
“To exactly four people, and you’re one of them. So your audience is three people. Bring me something with commercial appeal and I’ll think about it.”
My second pitch was to profile “Candy” by Mandy Moore. What’s more commercial than a bubblegum pop hit with a tie-in to the number-one show on television? What nineties kid doesn’t remember that lime-green VW Beetle?
“Yes!” Mitch boomed. “My wife loves This is Us. Now, how do we get the talent?”
“Leave it to me! I have plenty of music contacts from Z100,” I told him as I backed out of his office before he could change his mind.
With Mitch’s yellow light, I reached out to Mandy Moore’s manager. When I didn’t hear back, I tried her agent and her publicist, too. But after a month of silence, despite weekly follow ups, I have to admit they’re not going to return my inquiry. Turns out Z100 has plenty of music contacts, but I have none. Which leaves me back at square one.
“Would coffee help?” David asks.
It’s a rhetorical question. He’s already filling the carafe with water to pour into the coffee maker and pulling down my favorite BC mug from the cabinet. I could, of course, make my own coffee. But David’s a light sleeper and our beloved Capresso grind-and-brew sounds like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. So this has become our morning ritual. After five months here, I cherish the little routines we’ve built together. Falling asleep in the warm, protective circle of his arms every night and cooking dinner together while we talk about our days—fine, technically he cooks while assigning me the impossible to mess up tasks like chopping onions or peeling carrots, but I always do the dishes—far outweigh the occasional domestic spat. I’m starting to get used to, maybe even enjoy, someone taking care of me.
As the coffee brews, he leans against the counter. “I think I’ve figured out what I was doing wrong with the pizza crust,” David announces. He’s been trying to hack the at-home version of our favorite prosciutto and arugula pizza from a little pizzeria in the West Village for months. “How about I give it another whack tonight and we can start that Netflix series my brother was telling us about. Maybe it could be a light at the end of the tunnel after dealing with Mitch all day,” he suggests.
“That sounds amazing, but I can’t. I’m grabbing drinks with my friends tonight.”
I don’t need to specify who I mean when I say my friends. I have work friends—people I brave the Sweetgreen line and trade bits of office gossip with—and I’m happy to double-date with David’s college friends from NYU, but I’m always relieved when their wives or girlfriends don’t follow up on their promises that we have to make plans to hang out without the boys. “My friends” will always refer to Finn, Priya, and Theo.
David gets along with them well enough, but not so much that he’s part of the group. Not that there was much of a group to be part of when we started dating. That was the year Finn and I weren’t speaking. But even so, we have too much shared history for someone new to catch up. When David joins us, we’re constantly having to stop and explain that Elise is Priya’s monstrous ex-boss, the one who laid her off at Refinery29, or that one time Finn cajoled us into playing beer pong with gin and tonics and none of us have touched gin since, or that Theo’s mother was in a terrible art house movie in the eighties, a contemporary remake of Madame Butterfly called Ms. Butterfly, and we laugh hysterically whenever anyone says the word “butterfly” in any context.
“Is it someone’s birthday?” David asks.
“No?”
“Oh, I just thought . . .” He trails off. “Never mind me. Pre-coffee brain.” He pours a splash of half-and-half into my coffee and sets it down on the counter in front of me.
Even though he didn’t mean anything by it, his comment bristles. The implication that we need a reason to get together. But if I’m honest, it’s been a while since we’ve had plans as a foursome.
“No occasion, really. Just catching up.”
“Well, can you pencil me in for tomorrow night?” he asks.
“Tomorrow night? I thought you were going to your brother’s apartment to watch the game.” David’s brothers and a few of their childhood friends have a fantasy football league they take way too seriously. They get together on Thursdays to watch whatever game is on and talk strategy. David is their de facto statistician. At the end of the season, whoever loses has to fulfill a silly bet, which is how David ended up sitting for the SATs last spring. He actually enjoyed brushing up for it, going so far as to buy a stack of test prep books. I teased him mercilessly when he brought SAT Prep for Dummies to bed with him, but he was the one laughing when his score went up by twenty points since he took the test in high school.
“I can skip this week,” he tells me. “I’d much rather spend time with you.”
I stand on the footrest of my stool and lean over the kitchen island to catch his lips with my own. “Yes,” I tell him. “Don’t pencil me in. Use pen.”
* * *
? ? ?
?That night, I’m the first to arrive at Rolf’s. In December, there’s a line around the block, but in mid-November, it’s me and a skeleton crew of regulars.
The regulars at a Christmas-themed bar are a quirky bunch: women in their sixties who look straight out of the SNL mom-jeans sketch with feathered hairstyles and sweatshirts with applique flowers. They gossip at length about their husbands while throwing back glasses of merlot and eating from party-sized bags of Lay’s potato chips they’re inexplicably allowed to bring in, even though Rolf’s is also a German restaurant.
I claim a stool in the middle of the bar—close enough to eavesdrop, but far enough away not to seem nosy—and order a warm spiked apple cider. I watch the bartender, a bored-looking kid in his early twenties, fix my drink in a goblet the size of my head.