fic: GAG REEL (rpf) (1/3)
G A G
R E E L
rpf. live from new york -- it’s saturday night! a subjective history ten years in the making: onstage, backstage, behind-the-scenes, and at times, utterly and completely unseen; try and discern the pattern. kristen wiig/bill hader. 31,192 words.
notes: i . . . don't even. this honestly started as a single scene and somehow ballooned and bloated to this disaster. idk, i am a weak human. i blame entirely that recent episode of snl maya rudolph hosted and the glory that was this:
people breaking on snl is my favorite thing! and then i watched a lot of interviews and these two are the worst, ok! actually, a huge part of this fic was lifted from a lot of shit these idiots said in interviews, so if you want receipts, feel free to ask (if you are as crazy as i, and my cohorts, am). certain timelines and events have been fudged chronologically speaking, and as always: this is fiction! not truth! and last but not least, THIS IS FOR YOU JORDAN. i am glad we always seem to share the weirdest and most awesome brain waves, the end.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during nine-to-five hours.
Hunter S. Thompson
“I’m sorry, I’m bothering you,” he said, and his face was blank and sad.
“You’re not, Scott. Really not. I’m just talking. It’s my way, I’m sorry, I don’t mean anything I say,” Mina said. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m making fun of me.”
Dana Spiotta
T h e
C O L D
O P E N
M A Y
2 0 1 4
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
Her first time hosting the show coincides with his last appearance as a cast member on the show.
That’s called symmetry, she thinks.
And for the record, her monologue was Andy’s idea. Not her idea, and certainly not Bill’s. But then again, Andy once wanted to make a Digital Short devoted to her and Bill engaging in saloon-style old-timey porn set to jangling piano music (false: he wanted to make, what he referred to as, a pornographic music video retrospective entitled “Pegging (The Other Great American Pastime),” a request shot down by them both -- Kristen with a firm no, and Bill with a hysterical laugh that might not have been him shooting it down at all, come to think of it), so his designs for her monologue aren’t that big of surprise.
She’d accuse him of playing matchmaker, but she’s pretty sure that Andy is 99.8% positive that such a match has already been made.
But the monologue --
“Bill’s leaving too,” he pointed out earlier that week. “You two can ride off into the sunset that rests in the shadow of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Or the shadow of Lorne Michaels.”
Which, okay. Point taken, Samberg.
For the show, Jason agreed to come back, as did Will. The entire week was like some bizarre exercise in deja vu: the same people (more or less -- there were a couple new additions and a lot of missing parties) working at the same job, writing, for better or worse, a lot of the same jokes.
But her monologue --
it’s embarrassing. It’s also embarrassing how well it goes over.
In the middle of her monologue -- after her requisite, “it’s great to be back,” and the even more expected recap of her professional career and/or the film she has coming out in a week -- Bill interrupts her from the back of the audience. He was originally going to don a fake beard, depressed-house-building-Gosling-in-The-Notebook style, but they all figured co-opting the dialogue was an obvious enough stunt.
Her monologue is embarrassing, okay.
“Kristen!” he shouts from behind the audience. He shouts her name again, but even when they tried it in rehearsal earlier, the twin syllables in her name don’t ring quite as great as “Stella.”
For her part, Kristen adopts a look of surprise that she quickly changes into one of hurt and disdain. “No!” she gasps.
“Yes!” is his line as he approaches the stage.
“Why didn’t you write me?!” she shrieks. “I waited for you! For one whole televised season!” She turns away. “But now it’s too late.”
“I wrote you twenty-two letters. I wrote you every episode for one televised season.”
She turns back. “You wrote me?”
“Yes . . . it wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!”
He leaps up onto the stage then, and she leaps into her arms. At which point the heavens, or at the very least the localized sprinkler system just above their heads, opens up in a downpour.
Meanwhile Justin Timberlake, appearing out nowhere, sings, inexplicably, the chorus from En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go (Love).”
They cut to Lorne Michaels backstage watching the monitor, shaking his head. He turns to Kenan. “She did this same [BLEEP] with me yesterday,” he says. “Me too,” Kenan says. “Yeah . . . ” Andy says as he creeps up behind them.
The rain stops, and the both of them are soaking wet onstage. He’s supposed to put her down, but instead he shifts her weight a little, and she leaves her arms looped around his neck. She can feel him laughing, that silent thing he does when he knows he’s supposed to be keeping a straight face but has wholly and completely failed. She thinks it’s funny that the longer he has been on the show the worse he has gotten at corpsing during a live show.
The problem is that he’s contagious though. He laughs, and you want to laugh with him.
She pushes a wet strand of hair off her face.
“We have a great show for you tonight!” she shouts, and it’s at that point that she finally starts to laugh.
A general, and well-tread, rule of comedy is the rule of threes: the comic triple.
Three is the smallest number of points that form a pattern.
Comedians, much like any other storyteller, work to exploit audience expectations by throwing the audience off track with an unexpected third element -- thereby making the audience laugh.
“I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.”
A comic triple, the rule of three.
That last, surprise, punch to the gut.
An effective funny line can be said to work like a train wreck.
You know where the train has been, you think you know where it’s headed, but then.
But then it all goes off track.
That unexpected slip of the banana peel underfoot. The unexpected cab in the intersection. The unannounced house guest. The eavesdropper in the doorway. The wrong telephone number dialed, a miscommunication, a Freudian slip.
The unexpected as the hilarious.
The unexpected with the lasting impact.
N O V E M B E R
2 0 0 5
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
This starts in the fall of 2005.
Bill was the first person she met.
She’s not sure if Lorne sent him down, or if there was some sort of Saturday Night Live welcome wagon in place, but he was waiting for her down at the front desk. She recognized him. She could remember his face from when Lorne briefly introduced her to everyone, but she also could remember his face from her own TV screen.
She can’t remember what she first thought of him, what she did with that first real glimpse of him, but she will return to this later, skew and twist it into a different kind of memory, the sort that fits the present. She will say that she thought he was handsome. And maybe she did, in that first moment, but it’s hard to remember. She remembers her nerves, the clammy palms, how even though it was November and the morning was cold her sweater stuck sweaty to her spine. How she was starting to wonder if she would always associate 30 Rockefeller Plaza with extreme nausea.
But Bill was there. Bill was wearing a red zip-up sweatshirt and his hair needed combed. She remembers that about him. She remembers that clearly. It’s just that too much time has passed, he’s become too much a part of herself and she can’t separate out a time when she could have looked upon him with objectivity and thought: that’s Bill, and he is blah blah blah this. He is nice and he is attractive and he seems like a funny guy.
She doesn’t remember ever thinking that. The thought strikes her as too benign, too rote, for the person she wants to think she has always known him as.
But her first day of work, there he was, waiting at the front desk, so she walked up to him.
His eyes were wide and almost crazy, too bright, well-matched by his own energetic and almost frantic excitement. She didn’t know then if he was excited to be there or excited she was there or if that was just how he naturally was.
It’s just how he naturally is.
“You’re Kristen! From the Groundlings!”
“Kristen from the Groundlings,” she said sincerely and with a nod.
“Bill,” he said, and extended a hand.
“Bill from SNL,” she said. He laughed.
He lead her to the bank of elevators. He punched a button and told her they were going to head to security and get her badge and stuff handled.
“You just get here from LA?”
She nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and then laughed, almost nervous sounding. “Literally. I got in at like 3 AM this morning?”
He whistled low and the elevator doors chimed open. They stood in silence for a beat too long.
“You been here awhile?” she asked.
“A month.”
“A month,” she repeated, her eyes going wide. “I meant, you know, out front. Waiting. For me.” She laughed, and so did he.
“I wasn’t there long, don’t worry about it.”
The elevator doors slid shut. She glanced over at him quickly and found him looking at her, a puzzling, beguiling kind of smile just starting to spread on his face.
“You like it here?” she asked.
His grin grew bigger, huge and almost terrifying, and she found herself smiling despite herself and her nerves.
“I love it.” He paused. “You will too. I don’t know you, but you will too.”
The doors opened.
The less said of those early days, the better.
Looking back, it seems impossible to believe she was that person: constantly nervous, her quiet demeanor and cynicism a mask for the constant state of awe she found herself in.
It seems hard to believe this city, and the people in it, were ever strangers to her. But they were, they all were, that first year.
This was the year when she listened to too much Leonard Cohen on vinyl, the record player a relic from Los Angeles and Arizona before that and New York before any and all of that (but not the city; the city was fresh and the city lacked any preexisting ties for her; the record player belonged to her Before New York as much as she had come to now belong to the city). This was the year when she lived in that incredibly shitty studio apartment in the still shitty part of Hell’s Kitchen, the year she tried to walk to work each day, the year when Hayes, her husband, was still in Los Angeles. This was the year he kept telling her that he was coming, that he needed a job first, he needed an audition -- the year when she quit believing him and when she quit believing he believed in her.
It was a year of firsts, and if she has learned anything, she has learned this: there is nothing quite like the start. There is nothing quite like that nervous, fizzling excitement that seems to reach out and touch each and everything it finds: the old record player, the shitty apartment, the commute on foot, the absence of her husband. It all felt brilliant and marvelous in a way that was diluted over time but never completely lost, as the beginning shifted into something more like routine.
This was the year of possibility. Her level of success would rise over time, but she didn’t know that. She had no way of knowing that, and nothing would ever quite match that first year, and how promise seemed to hover thick over her and the streets she walked, how it seemed to rest in wait behind each and every surface, each opportunity, each person, she encountered.
This was the year she met Bill: the year of the possible and the year of too much Leonard Cohen.
It was the year she romanticized quite unlike any other.
The nerves never do fully die down, but like everyone she has ever met and who has offered her unsolicited advice had said, it gets more manageable.
She is never fully sure which she was more nervous about: the first table read or her first show. She’s not sure if she was more afraid of her coworkers or the audience.
But both went fine -- better than fine, even.
At the first table read Bill had handed her a script and he said: “I wrote this for us.” And then he shrugged. Like it was nothing. Like he wrote scripts for everyone; like helping her to fit in, to get her footing, was natural, a thing he didn’t even question.
So she read the part of Judy Garland to his Vincent Price and everyone laughed and that first night, her first show, they did it again in front of a live audience.
They laughed, too.
M A R C H
2 0 0 6
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
The four of them are fast friends.
The four of them -- Bill and Andy and Jason and her -- all started more or less around the same time, and that more or less similar start date coupled with their more or less baptism by fire on the show lends itself to an almost surprisingly quick and intimate friendship.
It’s like the four of them (okay, five, if you count Will, and Will totally counts himself) are this marauding band of new kids bringing their own weird spin to the show.
She never thought of them as exclusive. She never thought much of anything at all about how they could be perceived until she looked at them from an outside perspective.
She never thought much at all until she looked at them as Hayes did.
She realized it first at the after party held that spring the night Natalie Portman hosted. It was the first after party Hayes ever attended with her, and the club was loud and Kristen was drunk. They all were drunk. They all were drunk and everything they said was the funniest thing said by human beings probably ever, or at least it had seemed that way at the time.
And Kristen had assumed that if she was laughing and Bill was laughing and Will and Andy and Jason were laughing too, then Hayes must have been as well.
She was wrong.
The things they laughed about Hayes had no way of knowing about; these things had happened outside his presence, outside of his relationship to her.
They fought that night in the cab -- not over the club or the after party or the way Bill’s laugh would cut right through the crowd and the percussive beat of the same remix played over and over again or how Bill was always the first to laugh at whatever Kristen said and how Kristen would sometimes touch his arm and how he always seemed to know when Kristen needed another drink and how he seemed to know, preternaturally even, how to make her laugh the hardest.
They fought instead about the new job Hayes had taken in New York.
They fought because he said, “I am only doing this for you, you know,” and Kristen had frowned, drunk, and then started to laugh. But it was a different laugh than from before, and if Hayes recognized that, he didn’t say anything, but he became angrier after she began to laugh. He might have just been angry that she laughed at him. He might have been angry because there had been nothing cold, nothing mean and cynical, to her laugh earlier that night, and it had been another man who had earned that better, more heartfelt laugh.
“God, you’re a dick,” she said, and then they just quit talking.
M A Y
2 0 0 6
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
Fast forward to the end of their first season.
Fast forward to budget cuts leading into the fall of 2006. The finale had aired that past weekend, and that Monday -- the start of summer, the start of hiatus -- Kristen heads into the office.
She thinks, as she rides the elevator up, that it feels a lot like the last day of school, the end of the semester. Everyone dispersed to wherever it is they’ll spend the next couple months, and she comes back to the office that Monday simply because it felt natural to come here. It felt natural to leave her apartment that morning, to pick up a cup of coffee from that corner deli equidistant between her apartment and Rockefeller Center.
And maybe, perhaps, most natural of all, she now finds that she belongs more at that small desk in that even smaller office than she ever did or ever could belong to that apartment just beyond Ninth Avenue.
When the elevator doors chime open she finds their floor mostly abandoned.
Mostly abandoned, but not completely. She snatches a Diet Coke from the fridge and finds, feet kicked up and CNN playing too loud on the television on the wall, that Bill sits alone, rifling through a stack of papers with curious intent.
She goes to her office instead of his and watches him without comment, his fingers flying over the papers in his lap, organizing them into piles on his desk and the filing cabinet, the order inherent, she assumes, only to him. Because that’s a thing she now knows of him: he is a classic model of order in chaos -- his workspace always in a state of dishevelment, no pattern to be gleamed from an initial glance.
This is the end of their first year working together, and Kristen doesn’t know when they stopped being strangers to each other. It happened almost insidiously, without notice.
This is the end of their first year, the same year Bill married Maggie that spring and started renting that somewhat nice place on the lower East Side.
“It’d fucking suck if I lost this gig, man,” he says after exchanged pleasantries (“morning,” and “ugh,” her and him, respectively) and Kristen sits down. He’s slumped over at his desk and Kristen is sprawled out at Jason’s abandoned desk.
She tosses the baseball Jason keeps on his desk at Bill. He catches it one-handed without even looking at her or the ball.
“So you’re believing the rumors?”
He looks at her and points at her with the ball.
“Rumors are meant to be trusted.”
“That’s not a thing.” She slurps at the remains of her Diet Coke and bites down on the straw, shakes the can a little even though she knows it’s empty. “That’s a thing for the gullible.”
He tosses the ball up and catches it. “I’m a child at heart,” he says sarcastically, “I’ll believe anything.”
She throws her empty can toward the recycle bin, the straw still hanging out of her mouth, and she misses the shot by an embarrassingly large margin. Bill watches and then cocks his head towards her.
“Good shot, MJ.”
She stands up. “Blow me, Sasquatch,” she teases, the straw still in her mouth, which she removes haughtily between two fingers like a really long, really plastic cigarette. He rubs at his chin and the substantial amount of stubble that has grown in. He scowls at her.
“You’re being cranky,” she says. “And boring. And I don’t like you when you’re cranky and boring. I’m peacing out of this joint.” She sticks the flattened straw back between her teeth and flashes him the peace sign and pounds her chest. “Word to your mother.”
She can hear him laughing behind her as she leaves his office for her own.
They don’t lose their jobs.
They return in the fall.
N O V E M B E R
2 0 0 7
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
Fast-forward again: their third season, the fall of 2007.
Fast-forward to when things begin to tilt and change.
The only problem with that concept, the idea that there is a point you can skip to and say, “this is where things began to change, yes, I remember this,” is that it never actually works that way. Change is a gradual, insidious thing; it creeps along, and if there is a goal to be met, Change reaches it without you ever being quite aware it had been inching along towards that finish line the entire time.
But in this story we are going to pretend this point exists. In this story we are going to say: they met in 2005 and things began to change in 2007. Things began to change after two years, which isn’t to say that things were constant, that things were stable throughout those first two years. They weren’t. Anything, any relationship, where another person is involved, any time you tether your own happiness and your life to another -- be it romantically, be it intentionally, be it with any awareness whatsover -- stability never lasts for long.
So maybe they were stable for two years.
So maybe she had just married Hayes and after she married Hayes, Bill married Maggie, and they did these things as separate people. She married Hayes before she knew Bill, and Bill intended to marry Maggie before he met Kristen.
And so maybe two years after they met, two years into this story, is the point when things began to tilt and change. Maybe two years in is when they began to act with the other in mind.
Another problem with this concept: that’s a lie.
Her first table read, he handed her a script and he said: “I wrote this for us.”
A casualty of the live performance lifestyle is modesty.
Nudity is basically a given.
It’s like a byproduct of a theater lifestyle dominated by quick costume changes, far too many of which involving unimaginative spandex -- unimaginative in the sense there’s nothing left to ponder anatomically and nothing left you can feasibly wear underneath.
Brian Williams is hosting that night, and both she and Bill are in back-to-back sketches.
So he’s seen her naked.
So she’s backstage, doing the quickest of all quick changes. She’s topless and wearing this tiny G-string thing as steps into costume, jerking the leotard up her body. And there are rules, granted unspoken rules, but rules all the same. The same kind of unspoken rules that govern stage kissing and staged sex scenes (not that she has a ton of experience in that particular realm as of yet, but she can imagine with the same level of ease he can imagine her body through this skin-clinging layer of orange spandex).
When she slides her arms into the sleeves, when she looks up, her eye meets Bill’s. Bill has broken Rule Numero Uno: you avert your gaze during a quick change. It’s just what you do.
He has the manners to blush just a little, appear slightly embarrassed, but he doesn’t look away. His eyes linger on her face for a beat, a small crooked smile threatening as he pans down the rest of her body and all that orange spandex. He’s dressed similarly, but she’s finding it hard to look at him, finding it hard to square whatever weird squirming feeling roiling in her gut.
But instead of looking away, he’s looking at her openly, and it’s 2007, not 2005 or 2006, and maybe things have tilted and changed that much. Maybe she recognizes that pull in the pit of her stomach as an acknowledgement of this.
Maybe that’s when he starts seeing something else in her.
Bill breaks Rule Numero Dos at the after party:
He all but brings up the fact he saw her naked.
He finds her off to the side at the party, Kristen content to people-watch as she sucks down a whiskey on the rocks with a straw. It’s the sort of club that serves as a restaurant during the day, the walls a dark cherry, the floors dark, the furnishings heavy and velvet and that deep bled-out shade out red: a steakhouse moonlighting as a nightclub.
“So this is where the wallflowers are hiding out,” he says to her. She smirks up at him, her lips fitted around her straw as she swallows.
Kristen leans back against the wall and watches Bill finish off his beer. She can hear Amy somewhere in the crowd screeching for someone to “fucking fuck off you fucking fuck,” and she can’t figure out if Amy is joking or not.
Bill places his empty bottle down on one of the tables pushed aside near her. A tall stack of chairs is next to her and she leans her body against that, past the point of tipsy, and angles her body to face him as he leans his side against the dark wood-paneled wall.
She can still hear Amy screeching and she can hear familiar laughter, but she can’t see any of it. It’s as though her and Bill are completely removed from the party and she finds that she likes that. She likes to think they’re hidden, back in the corner where the club is just the remains of a middling overpriced steakhouse. She likes the way he’s looking at her too, no hint of embarrassment, just something incredibly open and intimate, and she’s too drunk to be surprised by how it feels like their relationship has just turned on a dime.
She holds her drink up to him. “Still thirsty?” she asks, and then starts to laugh. He shakes his head, his face creased in silent laughter. They’re standing close enough that his toes are almost touching hers. That’s too close, is what she is supposed to think, but instead she’s taking another sip of her whiskey and she’s listening for Amy to shout again and she’s thinking that there’s no such thing as close enough.
“So what’s this all about?” he finally says. Kristen frowns in confusion as she watches him gesture at first his own side, and then hers. It dawns on her suddenly what he means and she can’t stop laughing.
“My tattoo?” she asks, and laughs harder.
His eyes are all glassy and he nods, and god, he must be totally and completely bombed. Jason’s yelling now, somewhere in the crowd, but just like every time Jason yells, what he is saying is completely indecipherable.
And okay, she must be bombed too, because she’s lifting her shirt up, because in that moment showing rather than explaining makes perfect sense -- in that moment a lot of things are making sense that have no business going together -- and he’s touching her. His whole hand can cover the expanse of her ribcage, and his fingers are ghosting over the inked script and along the bottom band of her bra and she shivers a little, and Amy is yelling again, “fucking motherfuckers fucking thinking they fucking know how to fucking act,” and Jason is laugh-yelling, and Bill is watching her mouth instead of looking her in the eye and all she can think about is how far or how close the bathroom is from where they are standing and how easy, how incredibly easy, it would be to drag him in there with her.
And then suddenly he is barreling into her, jarring her back against the stacked chairs, and his hand drops away in surprise as Samberg shouts, “Look who I found oh my god!”
Andy’s head pops up over Bill’s left shoulder while a bearded Shia LaBeouf appears over Bill’s right shoulder.
And that’s that. There is no third rule that is broken -- not that night.
D E C E M B E R
2 0 0 7
K e n n y w o o d ;
They spend a week that winter together in Pennsylvania pretending to be husband and wife.
When SNL breaks for the holidays, she goes with Bill to Kennywood to shoot Adventureland. It’s absolutely freezing, yet they’re all dressed for summer. The theme park is closed, the blustery wind cutting through the bare trees and the empty park making it seem that much sadder and that much untouched by the last decade or two.
Greg only needs the two of them on set for a couple of days. If she wanted, Kristen could fit all her lines on a single index card. Bill’s the one with the more comedic and more pronounced presence, her married counterpart to him diminutive and reserved. But Greg likes to let them go for it, run and improvise until the scene goes stale. It becomes a game for her, seeing how many times she can trip Bill up with an unexpected non sequitur delivered in her character’s flat affect.
They accumulate hours of footage this way, the bulk of which goes unused.
“I feel like we’re wasting his time,” she hisses to Bill at one point in between takes. She shivers under the coat wardrobe gave her when Greg called cut and she tries to get circulation back into her numb fingers.
Bill starts to laugh but then stops, either deciding he’s too cold or too tired or whatever, and says, “Don’t worry about it, he loves it.”
She doesn’t know how he knows this, but she takes his word for it.
Kristen had first met Greg Mottola when she flew up to Pittsburgh with Bill. She knew that Bill had worked with Greg previously, and that Bill liked Greg, but she had been nervous all the same.
Greg shook her hand.
“It is so great to meet you,” Greg said. “I think you are just . . . the funniest. And the way Bill talks about you all the time -- I was excited,” he laughed then, self-conscious, and Kristen blushed.
“Here’s hoping I don’t disappoint!” she half-joked.
“Impossible,” he had said, and then he looked at Bill.
Their first day of filming, she reaches up and scratches at his mustache.
“You should keep it,” she says and laughs.
“Yeah?” his mouth quirks up under the fake mustache and her fingers. “Glue it on every morning, just slap it on, and venture out to face the day.”
Kristen laughs harder. “No way you’re man enough to grow your own.”
“No way,” he agrees. Bill reaches up, and his fingers brush over hers over the fake mustache (god, their lives are ridiculous, right). “It’d never be this plush.”
She listens to a lot of Joni Mitchell while they’re in Pennsylvania that week, and Bill looks over at her from the couch in the trailer they share as Joni starts into “This Flight Tonight” for the gazillionth time that afternoon with a look of exasperation, an expression only heightened by his fake mustache.
“Is this whole Joni thing a character thing?” he asks her.
She pushes her feathered hair off her face and shakes her head.
“It’s a Joni thing, dude.”
And when they are in Kennywood together it’s a Joni-thing and later that season back in New York it will be a Patti Smith-thing and she’ll listen to “Summer Cannibals” over and over again and a year from then it will become a Janis Joplin-thing and in the far, far distant future, when they make another movie together, when they each play one half of the same pair, it will be a Bob Dylan-thing, but by then he will almost know what to expect from her.
They return to New York before the midseason break is over.
“Oh my god you two went on vacation together that is so cute,” Amy says that Monday with that impish grin of hers.
And then she winks.
M A R C H
2 0 0 8
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
She is so tired her eyelids feel scratchy.
“It’s not going to be a good show this week,” she mutters. He throws a pen at her. She swats in its general direction but it still hits her in the shoulder and rolls down into the crack of the couch cushions.
“Don’t say that.”
She holds the notebook she was scrawling in over her face and stretches her legs out along the couch, kicking him in the thigh. Bill grabs both her ankles and hauls her legs up into his lap, placing his laptop on her legs.
“I thought you were going to give me a foot massage,” she teases, her voice flat. Kristen lets her eyes slant closed for just a second. She can hear him typing, and then he’s not, the room silent.
“Be good, and you might get lucky,” he says, in some kind of weird, pseudo-foreign Casanova voice.
She laughs low in her throat. “If I had a dollar every time you told me that . . . ”
“You’d be a prostitute.”
She laughs, and his hand locks around one of her bare ankles.
“Stay. Still. Stop moving. You’re the worst . . . tray table I’ve ever used.”
“Mmmm, such sweet nothings.”
She listens to him type some more, her notebook still shading her face, and she thinks she might take a nap, just a little one, like fifteen minutes.
He stops typing again, jabs at the backspace key.
“This is the pits,” he says and she starts shaking with silent laughing. “The fucking worst. Stay still.”
His hand is back on her ankle again. Last time she checked, it was three-thirty, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, whatever, and god, she’s just tired, and normally things get funnier this late at night, this early in morning, but that’s just not happening here at all. She’s tired, and he must be too, because she can feel his fingers on her ankle, making these weird, totally unconscious patterns, and it feels kinda good. He must be tired, because he only touches her like that when he’s too stupid or drunk or tired or . . . she doesn’t know what the fourth thing is but it’s something way worse than the other three, something they talk about in romance novels, something like overcome, and that’s terrible. He only touches her like that when he’s too one-of-those-four-things to know any better.
His laptop is really warm against her legs and his hand is really warm against her ankle. He yawns noisily.
“Tell me something interesting,” he says. “Like, really fascinating.”
“Does it need to be funny?” she mumbles.
“No,” he says. “We have proven here tonight that we are utterly and completely incapable of even the basest levels of humor.”
She snorts. “Ummm,” she says. “Like something I did today?”
He laughs a little. “I’ve been with you all day.”
She yawns. “Not this morning,” she says. She drops the notebook onto the floor, and the room’s too bright. She blinks against it and looks over at him. His head is resting on the back of the couch, his arm stretched out toward her, his eyes half-lidded.
“I had a dream this morning,” she says, and clears her throat a little. “I woke up at, like, five, and I don’t know why because I didn’t go to bed until, like, three. But I woke up, and when I went back to sleep I had this dream. And I know: talking about your dreams is the lowest form of discourse blah blah blah.” She pauses. “That’s a thing people say, right?”
“Right,” he says. He yawns again, but he’s still watching her. “But we’re the lowest kind of people right now,” he says, his voice all matching low and rumbly.
She shoots a finger-gun at him. “Exactly. But I had this dream, and I was wandering in the desert, like, out west, you know? And I was really thirsty and I was wearing rain boots, but only rain boots -- ”
“I like this dream,” he says.
“No you don’t. But I’m in the desert, and I’m walking along like it’s no big deal, like I’m not lost, I like the desert, apparently. And I met this man while I was in the desert -- ”
“Liking this dream even more.”
“Hate to disappoint, but I didn’t bang the desert man. He had eight arms though.”
“Eight arms?”
“Yeah, and I kept calling him The Octopus, and he told me something, something I thought was so important, and I’ve been trying to remember all day, but I can’t. I even looked in my dream dictionary journal thing when I got up hoping that’d jumpstart my brain, and nope, no help.”
Bill’s face cracks in a wide smile and the only word for how he looks at her is endearing. His fingers have slid up from her ankle to her shin under the cuff of her jeans.
“You have a dream journal?” he asks, sounding almost drunk.
“Yeah of course I do.”
His smile grows. “And what did the literature have to say on the matter?”
He’s moved the laptop off her legs and onto the small table next to the couch. Kristen’s legs are still in his lap, but his whole body slumps over, the arm slung over the back of the couch now slung over her stomach, his side pressed against her thigh, his head still pressed back against the couch cushion but right over her hip. His hand is still hot against her shin, and without thinking, she rolls her body into his a little.
He’s looking at her expectantly, like he really cares, like dream journals are fascinating, like her dreams are important, and that’s dumb. He shouldn’t do that. But then, he shouldn’t do a lot of things, and neither should she, yet here they are.
“It means,” she says, in what she thinks sounds like a scholarly voice, “that when you dream of an octopus you are entangled in a difficult matter, and your judgment might be clouded. That, however, did not help me remember what the octopus had to say.”
He studies her for a beat. “How stoned were you last night?”
“I was not!” She goes to cuff him, but instead just winds up dragging her fingers through his hair. He sighs heavily, so she does it again. His head drops down to her hip.
“Fifteen minute nap?” she murmurs, her eyes already closed. She moves her fingers through his hair again.
“Fifteen minutes.” They lull into silence, and she’s sure he’s asleep, until she hears his voice, muffled and quiet.
“It wasn’t really an octopus though,” he says against her hip. She can feel the words as much as hear them. “It was a man with too many arms.”
“Okay,” she says.
“You looked up the wrong thing.”
“They didn’t have an eight-armed man in the book.”
“Bummer.”
She yawns and curls into him a little more.
“Fifteen minutes,” she repeats.
“Yeah, fifteen,” he says, but he already sounds half-asleep.
They fall asleep together. A lot. Especially the weeks when the show’s not coming together all that well and it’s already Wednesday and the things they’re finding funny aren’t the things the rest of the world (or their host) would likely enjoy.
They’re both the sort of people who can fall asleep anywhere and everywhere. And they do.
Andy has so many bizarre and incriminating photos of the two of them. He calls it Goodnight Moon: A Collection of Narcoleptic Photographs. And honestly, that’s what they look like: a pair of narcoleptics. There’s a photo of the two of them at the big table, papers all around them, and Bill’s asleep sitting up, his head hanging back and his mouth wide open and Kristen is collapsed over, limp against his arm, drooling on his shoulder. There’s another where he’s asleep right in the middle of the floor of her dressing room on his stomach, and with Kristen’s body, they form a cross, a T: her back is slumped against the couch, her head on the center cushion, but her legs are draped over his back.
There’s another where they’re in the hall and Bill’s asleep sitting up, his back against the wall, and Kristen’s head is in his lap, his hand unmoving in her hair. Another where she’s sprawled out gracelessly on his couch in his dressing room, and he’s on the floor, twisted funny, his head on her stomach, his legs parallel to the length of the couch.
Another where they actually fell asleep under the big table, their feet sticking out, all Wicked Witch of the East, Wizard of Oz-style, both their hands folded over their stomachs like they rehearsed this or like they’re embalmed dead bodies or something, his cheek against her shoulder, her head tipped towards his.
“They’re like baby cats,” Jason says, laughing, when Andy shows them the photographs one night after a show.
“Oh my god, are you drooling on me?” Bill asks, pointing at a picture where she is most definitely drooling on him.
Kristen shrugs.
“You didn’t mind at the time.”
Everyone laughs at the funny photos, the weird positions they have contorted their bodies into, how grotesque their faces look mid-REM cycle, but no one comments on some of the photos. Some of the photos are like a punch to the gut. Some of the photos are just way too . . . intimate. There are so many pictures where she and Bill are together on a couch, either his or hers, and it’s always the same position: her back is along the back of the couch and Bill is facing her and their bodies are pressed so tight together, his arms around her, holding her, her face buried under his chin, against his chest.
Her eyes flit up to Bill’s face when the second of such a photo comes up on Andy’s laptop, but she can’t really read his face. She can tell though that the genuine humor a moment ago has been zapped away and he’s pretending now. Andy doesn’t seem to notice anything and keeps a running commentary of insults and loud laughter running.
The third time a photo like that pops up, Kristen laughs nervously.
She’s thinking of an empty amusement park and she’s thinking of mid-ranked steakhouses with mediocre DJs and she’s thinking that she knows too many things, too many intimate details about this man. She knows that he talks in his sleep, but never fully formed words, and that his neck smells like expensive aftershave, and she hadn’t expected that, and he smells like a man and like soap too, and that when he gets tired or drunk or just so fully amused he can’t stop laughing his eyes go mismatched and wonky, and that he hates it when people talk about their dogs like they’re human children and that she can’t even talk to him about Star Wars anymore because she lacks the requisite knowledge for such an intellectual nerd-based discussion and she knows that he knows that things aren’t right with Hayes but he’s not going to be the one that brings that up but he will be the one who holds her at four A.M. on a Tuesday night when she’s so tired that her face has gone sad and honest and she knows that he knows her well enough to know what she looks like when she’s gone sad and honest and she knows that he’s too good of a person to ever do anything with her sadness or her honesty but hold her and tell her half-formed words and snippets of sound in his sleep.
Things have tilted and they have changed, and if the balance stays equal, if they stay centered and even, she thinks there is nothing there for her to acknowledge as wrong.
“You two look like little Gollums, Jesus,” Jason says, and Bill laughs.
She thinks there’s nothing there to acknowledge as wrong at all.
O C T O B E R
2 0 0 8
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
That Friday Kristen comes into work wearing one of Bill’s striped sweaters. It’s huge on her, swallows her up, the neckline too wide, the hem down at the tops of her thighs.
She has a lot of his sweaters. She’s not sure when she started snagging them, but some late nights, those Tuesday nights when it’s already become Wednesday morning, she’d sometimes slip one on when she got cold and would forget about it, would wear it home.
She’s pretty sure she’s abducted at least five of his sweaters in this fashion.
Anne Hathaway is hosting that week. They’re rehearsing the soup kitchen scene, and Bill, their faux priest, is leaning in the faux doorway, awaiting his entrance.
They’re waiting for the prop guy, and some problem with the lighting to be resolved, so they’re all just milling around on stage, tending vaguely to their respective marks.
“I like your sweater, Kristen,” Anne says, out of nowhere.
Kristen’s head pops up, her hand immobile in the little bag of carrots she’s been snacking on. She can’t decide if Anne seriously likes this old dude sweater or if she’s just messing with her.
“Where’d you get it?” Anne asks.
Kristen eyes her warily and then takes a loud bite of a carrot stick, and she really doesn’t know why she says it.
“Bill’s closet,” she says. Anne’s eyes, which are already super huge, go a little wider.
“You gotta stop stealing my shit,” Bill says lazily from the doorway. Kristen looks over at him as she takes another bite of a carrot. He looks amused though, like he’s repressing a grin, so she takes another loud, dramatic bite.
“Stop buying such comfy sweaters. Stop leaving them were I can find them.”
“You’re like a little vulture, hungry for some used spun wool.”
“The Sweater Scavenger,” she says ominously, her hands raised and fingers curled like talons, except for the fact she still has a bag of carrots clasped in one hand. Four spill out onto the floor and roll away.
They both start laughing. Anne looks even more confused, and behind her Kenan is shaking his head.
“You two disgust me,” he jokes.
So she throws a carrot stick in his general direction.
D E C E M B E R
2 0 0 8
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
By mid-December, Hayes is no longer speaking to her.
The week leading up to Thanksgiving they had fought bitterly. They fought up until her mother arrived, and even then each comment one made to the other was a hidden barb, just another way to drive home how disgusted and disappointed they each were with the other.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was the worst of it.
Kristen had been washing dishes in their small apartment and her mother had gone to lie down. Hayes cleared the table. By the time they both left the kitchen Kristen had broken three glasses and a plate when she slammed the dishwasher shut.
She cried about the broken glasses and the broken plate and Hayes had not apologized -- not for the glasses or the plate or for making her cry, for making her break them in the first place.
Kristen didn’t apologize either.
Not for making him hiss that way at her, not for making him feel that she no longer loved him, not anymore, not for anything.
Hayes had said to her that Monday: I don’t know why we even bother Jesus fuck you don’t love me you obviously don’t even fucking love me anymore.
That Wednesday he had said: I came here for you I did everything for you and you don’t even have any room left for me there’s no fucking room just tell me his name just tell me his fucking name.
And then she slammed the dishwasher shut. And then the three glasses and the plate broke and they both went quiet. And then she broke the quiet too and then she said: shut the fuck up shut the fuck up I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about god fucking damnit.
Despite that, despite that entire week, despite the way Kristen’s mother looked at the both of them, her pity and her disdain shifting between parties seemingly at whim, they held on for the better part of the month of December. She held on.
They fight again towards the middle of the month. She bought the Christmas tree by herself one afternoon, a small collapsable fake thing, and a box full of ornaments she picked up at an overpriced boutique near Rockefeller Plaza. She bought New York ornaments, expensive and tacky little things made of blown glass -- bright yellow taxis, a miniature of the Rockefeller tree, the Empire State Building done up in lights. She bought them on her way to work one morning and Bill made her show him her purchases and he accused her of being kitschy and she thought that was an accusation she could live with so she listened to the Charlie Brown Christmas CD while she hung her New York ornaments by herself on her fake collapsable Christmas tree.
They fight about the dishwasher, no broken dishes this time.
The dishwasher overflows, and she can’t get the super on the phone and Hayes keeps storming around the apartment, cursing the entire building and the MIA super and the dishwasher and New York City and everyone and everything, everyone and everything but Kristen herself. It hits her then, when she’s rummaging in the closet for a mop she’s not even sure she owns, that this has been over for so long. This marriage, this relationship, is over, and she can hear Hayes leaving a voicemail for the super peppered with expletives, and standing there in front of the pantry she feels stupid and old and like she’s just played the worst hand ever and the dealer is raking all her chips in and she’s going home empty-handed.
Her marriage is over. It’s been over since Thanksgiving, since before that, since a long, long time, and she has only been clinging to it out of stubbornness and something that tastes a lot like fear.
By the SNL Christmas show she knows her marriage has ended.
By then she has said, I can’t do this anymore, and Hayes had said, fine fine I knew it it’s fine. He said it like she was a stranger who had asked how he was doing and his answer was fine, he’s fine, he knew it, it’s over, he’s fine.
He left.
He called her that Monday morning with his lawyer’s contact information and told her that he would be by during the week to get his stuff.
He reminded her that the super still needed to fix the dishwasher, and in a way, that was that.
She comes in to work that same Monday looking tired. She’s got her glasses on and her hair is messy, pulled back, loose strands falling in her face. The guys are all milling around in the hallway, crowded around Jorma and Andy and a video camera. They glance up quickly as she passes and she waves small and then heads to her desk and sort of collapses into her chair.
Later that morning, Bill comes in with a giant muffin and places it in front of her.
“What’s that?”
“A lemon poppyseed muffin,” he says, completely serious.
“I mean, why are you giving me a lemon poppyseed muffin?”
He shrugs and then perches on the side of her desk, his arms crossed. “A benevolent act of kindness and friendship.”
“And redundancy,” she says, with a small smile.
He shrugs again. “You looked like you could use a pick-me-up,” he says, but he says it carefully, like he’s slowly needling at her. She knows that he knows her well enough at this point. He knows that she goes quiet sometimes, that she can be terrible and moody and want to stow herself away sometimes.
She nods. “Yeah,” she says, and then, “no. Yeah,” and she picks at the top of the muffin and pops a piece in her mouth. “Thank you,” she says, her mouth full.
“You’re welcome,” he says, mimicking her garbled voice. He watches her as she picks at another bite. “What’s going on?” he finally asks.
The other desk in the office (Will’s) is empty, and Kristen looks away and worries her bottom lip.
“Shut the door,” she says. “I mean, everyone will probably know, like, five minutes after this, drones and and and and Germans or listening devices in the walls, but whatever, close it.”
He barely has to move off her desk to reach the door, but he shuts the door, and when he turns back to face her, he’s not even trying to hide his concern.
“What’s up?” he asks.
She looks at the muffin. It is pretty fucking delicious. Well done on that front. She takes another nibble and then she takes a deep breath, smiles all weak and funny-looking. Of all the things the two of them have been open about, their respective marriages have never really ranked among those things.
(Those things: past sexual exploits and bizarre fears -- sometimes tied to sexual exploits -- and even more bizarre habits and embarrassing film preferences and slightly grounded worries about the futures tied to their careers and all the people they have come to hate at Studio 8H and all the weird annoying quirks they possess, and so on and so forth, but never Maggie and never Hayes).
“I . . . ” she says, her hands clasped in her lap, and she finally looks up at him. He’s looking at her so seriously, and that makes her feel weird, but a good kind of weird. The kind of weird where it feels like your heart is being squeezed but not in a death-intended, cardiac arrest kind of way. “I’m getting a divorce,” she finally spits out. “Or, like, he’s divorcing me, and I’m, uh, being divorced. Merry Christmas, me!” she adds weakly, her arms raised awkwardly.
“Oh.”
It’s all he says at first, and there’s a tangible amount of relief to him that catches her a little off guard.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry,” and he says it like he means it, so she nods. “Are you -- are you okay?”
For some reason that makes her laugh. Not, like, a real laugh, but the sort of laugh you make when you’re not sure what else to say or what else to exactly do with all the emotions you’ve got churning inside. She hasn’t really cried about this, not like, full-on-broke-down-this-doesn’t-fit-any-of-those-Ben-and-Jerry’s-chowing-female-cliches cried, since any of this started. She cried when she broke the dishes and she cried when Hayes left, but she didn’t cry that morning when he told her, sounding all faraway and strange to her, that he had a lawyer now and that he’d come take his stuff from her. She doesn’t want to cry now, not in front of Bill (that’s too weird that’s just too weird that’s terrible), but she can’t seem to stop laughing.
“Yeah,” she finally says. “I’m fine.” And she is fine? In a weird way? It’s kind of like the worst is over, that the one thing she’s been dreading for awhile has finally come to pass, and Hayes has finally confronted her, and now he’s actually left her. “I mean, it’s weird. I was married, and now I’m not going to be. And I have to start apartment hunting now. And oh god. I’m single again.”
Bill smirks. “I am sure every rock outfit we book on the show will be greatly appreciative of that change in status.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, feigning outrage. He picks at the muffin he gave her and she bats at his hand but he steals a bite anyway.
“Oh, come on,” he says with his mouth full. “Every time we have a halfway decent rock group on the show they are all about you, dude. All about you. ‘Oh, Kristen, you’re so funny, want to come check out my collection of guitar picks?’”
She laughs hard. “That has never happened.”
“It totally has. Dave Grohl is basically in love with you.” She shakes her head and holds her hands up in protest of her innocence.
“You’re just too cool for the rest of us,” he says, his smile full-blown as he hops off the side of her desk.
He swings the door open and then points at her, his face mock serious.
“We’re going drinking tonight, K-Dubs.”
“It’s Monday,” she points out sagely. “Everyone’s going to be cooped in writing.”
“Write drunk, edit sober,” he calls to her as he steps through the doorway. “Hemingway!”
“I’m not going drinking tonight!” she calls back.
They go drinking that night.
They get drunk.
They get the worst kind of drunk, the self-loathing kind, or at least that’s the case with her. He gets drunk too, but there’s an air of the chaperone to him -- like he’s on stand-by in case she goes into total Kelly Clarkson belting mode on him or something. She tells herself she’s not that sad, and the thing is, the more she drinks, the more she finds she means it. The more she starts to worry that Hayes was right, that he was right about everything. That she really doesn’t have the room in her to love him. That’s she’s either too empty or too full for that.
That there’s someone else.
Bill chose some dive bar over on West 44th and they headed over around eleven. The place is stocked with what she assumes are regulars, all hunched over the same at the bar, all with half-empty pints of beer. The music, Springsteen and Waits, is loud enough that they have to lean in close to talk, her voice raspy already. She sort of hates that they never have the show’s after parties at places like this. It’s always some swanky club or sushi place or, like, whatever restaurant some Food Network “celebrity” just opened.
“Have you ever had a Presbyterian?” she asks him. The legs of the table are uneven and the table wobbles when she leans her weight on her elbows, her head inclined towards him.
His blinks at her. “You mean, like, biblically?” he asks, genuinely confused.
“No,” she laughs. “The drink. The drink!”
She orders them a round and they down them quickly, Bill wincing over the tart ginger taste, so she lets him pick the next round. And the round after that.
It’s around one A.M. when the conversation starts to slow, when the Styx cover band takes the tiny stage at the back of the bar, and she finds herself watching him as he watches her.
“You’re good?” he murmurs, his eyes heavy. She nods. She peels the rest of the label off her beer bottle and then looks him square in the face.
“This had nothing to do with you,” she says to Bill, the worst kind of non sequitur.
His eyes go wide for a beat too long, the sort of moment where time goes suspended, hanging in the air, and then he recovers.
His mouth goes tight, his cheekbones and jaw too sharp and mean-looking, and he says to her:
“Why would this have had anything to do with me?”
C O N T I N U E D :
P . 2 | P . 3
R E E L
rpf. live from new york -- it’s saturday night! a subjective history ten years in the making: onstage, backstage, behind-the-scenes, and at times, utterly and completely unseen; try and discern the pattern. kristen wiig/bill hader. 31,192 words.
notes: i . . . don't even. this honestly started as a single scene and somehow ballooned and bloated to this disaster. idk, i am a weak human. i blame entirely that recent episode of snl maya rudolph hosted and the glory that was this:
people breaking on snl is my favorite thing! and then i watched a lot of interviews and these two are the worst, ok! actually, a huge part of this fic was lifted from a lot of shit these idiots said in interviews, so if you want receipts, feel free to ask (if you are as crazy as i, and my cohorts, am). certain timelines and events have been fudged chronologically speaking, and as always: this is fiction! not truth! and last but not least, THIS IS FOR YOU JORDAN. i am glad we always seem to share the weirdest and most awesome brain waves, the end.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during nine-to-five hours.
Hunter S. Thompson
“I’m sorry, I’m bothering you,” he said, and his face was blank and sad.
“You’re not, Scott. Really not. I’m just talking. It’s my way, I’m sorry, I don’t mean anything I say,” Mina said. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m making fun of me.”
Dana Spiotta
T h e
C O L D
O P E N
M A Y
2 0 1 4
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
Her first time hosting the show coincides with his last appearance as a cast member on the show.
That’s called symmetry, she thinks.
And for the record, her monologue was Andy’s idea. Not her idea, and certainly not Bill’s. But then again, Andy once wanted to make a Digital Short devoted to her and Bill engaging in saloon-style old-timey porn set to jangling piano music (false: he wanted to make, what he referred to as, a pornographic music video retrospective entitled “Pegging (The Other Great American Pastime),” a request shot down by them both -- Kristen with a firm no, and Bill with a hysterical laugh that might not have been him shooting it down at all, come to think of it), so his designs for her monologue aren’t that big of surprise.
She’d accuse him of playing matchmaker, but she’s pretty sure that Andy is 99.8% positive that such a match has already been made.
But the monologue --
“Bill’s leaving too,” he pointed out earlier that week. “You two can ride off into the sunset that rests in the shadow of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Or the shadow of Lorne Michaels.”
Which, okay. Point taken, Samberg.
For the show, Jason agreed to come back, as did Will. The entire week was like some bizarre exercise in deja vu: the same people (more or less -- there were a couple new additions and a lot of missing parties) working at the same job, writing, for better or worse, a lot of the same jokes.
But her monologue --
it’s embarrassing. It’s also embarrassing how well it goes over.
In the middle of her monologue -- after her requisite, “it’s great to be back,” and the even more expected recap of her professional career and/or the film she has coming out in a week -- Bill interrupts her from the back of the audience. He was originally going to don a fake beard, depressed-house-building-Gosling-in-The-Notebook style, but they all figured co-opting the dialogue was an obvious enough stunt.
Her monologue is embarrassing, okay.
“Kristen!” he shouts from behind the audience. He shouts her name again, but even when they tried it in rehearsal earlier, the twin syllables in her name don’t ring quite as great as “Stella.”
For her part, Kristen adopts a look of surprise that she quickly changes into one of hurt and disdain. “No!” she gasps.
“Yes!” is his line as he approaches the stage.
“Why didn’t you write me?!” she shrieks. “I waited for you! For one whole televised season!” She turns away. “But now it’s too late.”
“I wrote you twenty-two letters. I wrote you every episode for one televised season.”
She turns back. “You wrote me?”
“Yes . . . it wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!”
He leaps up onto the stage then, and she leaps into her arms. At which point the heavens, or at the very least the localized sprinkler system just above their heads, opens up in a downpour.
Meanwhile Justin Timberlake, appearing out nowhere, sings, inexplicably, the chorus from En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go (Love).”
They cut to Lorne Michaels backstage watching the monitor, shaking his head. He turns to Kenan. “She did this same [BLEEP] with me yesterday,” he says. “Me too,” Kenan says. “Yeah . . . ” Andy says as he creeps up behind them.
The rain stops, and the both of them are soaking wet onstage. He’s supposed to put her down, but instead he shifts her weight a little, and she leaves her arms looped around his neck. She can feel him laughing, that silent thing he does when he knows he’s supposed to be keeping a straight face but has wholly and completely failed. She thinks it’s funny that the longer he has been on the show the worse he has gotten at corpsing during a live show.
The problem is that he’s contagious though. He laughs, and you want to laugh with him.
She pushes a wet strand of hair off her face.
“We have a great show for you tonight!” she shouts, and it’s at that point that she finally starts to laugh.
A general, and well-tread, rule of comedy is the rule of threes: the comic triple.
Three is the smallest number of points that form a pattern.
Comedians, much like any other storyteller, work to exploit audience expectations by throwing the audience off track with an unexpected third element -- thereby making the audience laugh.
“I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.”
A comic triple, the rule of three.
That last, surprise, punch to the gut.
An effective funny line can be said to work like a train wreck.
You know where the train has been, you think you know where it’s headed, but then.
But then it all goes off track.
That unexpected slip of the banana peel underfoot. The unexpected cab in the intersection. The unannounced house guest. The eavesdropper in the doorway. The wrong telephone number dialed, a miscommunication, a Freudian slip.
The unexpected as the hilarious.
The unexpected with the lasting impact.
N O V E M B E R
2 0 0 5
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
This starts in the fall of 2005.
Bill was the first person she met.
She’s not sure if Lorne sent him down, or if there was some sort of Saturday Night Live welcome wagon in place, but he was waiting for her down at the front desk. She recognized him. She could remember his face from when Lorne briefly introduced her to everyone, but she also could remember his face from her own TV screen.
She can’t remember what she first thought of him, what she did with that first real glimpse of him, but she will return to this later, skew and twist it into a different kind of memory, the sort that fits the present. She will say that she thought he was handsome. And maybe she did, in that first moment, but it’s hard to remember. She remembers her nerves, the clammy palms, how even though it was November and the morning was cold her sweater stuck sweaty to her spine. How she was starting to wonder if she would always associate 30 Rockefeller Plaza with extreme nausea.
But Bill was there. Bill was wearing a red zip-up sweatshirt and his hair needed combed. She remembers that about him. She remembers that clearly. It’s just that too much time has passed, he’s become too much a part of herself and she can’t separate out a time when she could have looked upon him with objectivity and thought: that’s Bill, and he is blah blah blah this. He is nice and he is attractive and he seems like a funny guy.
She doesn’t remember ever thinking that. The thought strikes her as too benign, too rote, for the person she wants to think she has always known him as.
But her first day of work, there he was, waiting at the front desk, so she walked up to him.
His eyes were wide and almost crazy, too bright, well-matched by his own energetic and almost frantic excitement. She didn’t know then if he was excited to be there or excited she was there or if that was just how he naturally was.
It’s just how he naturally is.
“You’re Kristen! From the Groundlings!”
“Kristen from the Groundlings,” she said sincerely and with a nod.
“Bill,” he said, and extended a hand.
“Bill from SNL,” she said. He laughed.
He lead her to the bank of elevators. He punched a button and told her they were going to head to security and get her badge and stuff handled.
“You just get here from LA?”
She nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and then laughed, almost nervous sounding. “Literally. I got in at like 3 AM this morning?”
He whistled low and the elevator doors chimed open. They stood in silence for a beat too long.
“You been here awhile?” she asked.
“A month.”
“A month,” she repeated, her eyes going wide. “I meant, you know, out front. Waiting. For me.” She laughed, and so did he.
“I wasn’t there long, don’t worry about it.”
The elevator doors slid shut. She glanced over at him quickly and found him looking at her, a puzzling, beguiling kind of smile just starting to spread on his face.
“You like it here?” she asked.
His grin grew bigger, huge and almost terrifying, and she found herself smiling despite herself and her nerves.
“I love it.” He paused. “You will too. I don’t know you, but you will too.”
The doors opened.
The less said of those early days, the better.
Looking back, it seems impossible to believe she was that person: constantly nervous, her quiet demeanor and cynicism a mask for the constant state of awe she found herself in.
It seems hard to believe this city, and the people in it, were ever strangers to her. But they were, they all were, that first year.
This was the year when she listened to too much Leonard Cohen on vinyl, the record player a relic from Los Angeles and Arizona before that and New York before any and all of that (but not the city; the city was fresh and the city lacked any preexisting ties for her; the record player belonged to her Before New York as much as she had come to now belong to the city). This was the year when she lived in that incredibly shitty studio apartment in the still shitty part of Hell’s Kitchen, the year she tried to walk to work each day, the year when Hayes, her husband, was still in Los Angeles. This was the year he kept telling her that he was coming, that he needed a job first, he needed an audition -- the year when she quit believing him and when she quit believing he believed in her.
It was a year of firsts, and if she has learned anything, she has learned this: there is nothing quite like the start. There is nothing quite like that nervous, fizzling excitement that seems to reach out and touch each and everything it finds: the old record player, the shitty apartment, the commute on foot, the absence of her husband. It all felt brilliant and marvelous in a way that was diluted over time but never completely lost, as the beginning shifted into something more like routine.
This was the year of possibility. Her level of success would rise over time, but she didn’t know that. She had no way of knowing that, and nothing would ever quite match that first year, and how promise seemed to hover thick over her and the streets she walked, how it seemed to rest in wait behind each and every surface, each opportunity, each person, she encountered.
This was the year she met Bill: the year of the possible and the year of too much Leonard Cohen.
It was the year she romanticized quite unlike any other.
The nerves never do fully die down, but like everyone she has ever met and who has offered her unsolicited advice had said, it gets more manageable.
She is never fully sure which she was more nervous about: the first table read or her first show. She’s not sure if she was more afraid of her coworkers or the audience.
But both went fine -- better than fine, even.
At the first table read Bill had handed her a script and he said: “I wrote this for us.” And then he shrugged. Like it was nothing. Like he wrote scripts for everyone; like helping her to fit in, to get her footing, was natural, a thing he didn’t even question.
So she read the part of Judy Garland to his Vincent Price and everyone laughed and that first night, her first show, they did it again in front of a live audience.
They laughed, too.
M A R C H
2 0 0 6
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
The four of them are fast friends.
The four of them -- Bill and Andy and Jason and her -- all started more or less around the same time, and that more or less similar start date coupled with their more or less baptism by fire on the show lends itself to an almost surprisingly quick and intimate friendship.
It’s like the four of them (okay, five, if you count Will, and Will totally counts himself) are this marauding band of new kids bringing their own weird spin to the show.
She never thought of them as exclusive. She never thought much of anything at all about how they could be perceived until she looked at them from an outside perspective.
She never thought much at all until she looked at them as Hayes did.
She realized it first at the after party held that spring the night Natalie Portman hosted. It was the first after party Hayes ever attended with her, and the club was loud and Kristen was drunk. They all were drunk. They all were drunk and everything they said was the funniest thing said by human beings probably ever, or at least it had seemed that way at the time.
And Kristen had assumed that if she was laughing and Bill was laughing and Will and Andy and Jason were laughing too, then Hayes must have been as well.
She was wrong.
The things they laughed about Hayes had no way of knowing about; these things had happened outside his presence, outside of his relationship to her.
They fought that night in the cab -- not over the club or the after party or the way Bill’s laugh would cut right through the crowd and the percussive beat of the same remix played over and over again or how Bill was always the first to laugh at whatever Kristen said and how Kristen would sometimes touch his arm and how he always seemed to know when Kristen needed another drink and how he seemed to know, preternaturally even, how to make her laugh the hardest.
They fought instead about the new job Hayes had taken in New York.
They fought because he said, “I am only doing this for you, you know,” and Kristen had frowned, drunk, and then started to laugh. But it was a different laugh than from before, and if Hayes recognized that, he didn’t say anything, but he became angrier after she began to laugh. He might have just been angry that she laughed at him. He might have been angry because there had been nothing cold, nothing mean and cynical, to her laugh earlier that night, and it had been another man who had earned that better, more heartfelt laugh.
“God, you’re a dick,” she said, and then they just quit talking.
M A Y
2 0 0 6
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
Fast forward to the end of their first season.
Fast forward to budget cuts leading into the fall of 2006. The finale had aired that past weekend, and that Monday -- the start of summer, the start of hiatus -- Kristen heads into the office.
She thinks, as she rides the elevator up, that it feels a lot like the last day of school, the end of the semester. Everyone dispersed to wherever it is they’ll spend the next couple months, and she comes back to the office that Monday simply because it felt natural to come here. It felt natural to leave her apartment that morning, to pick up a cup of coffee from that corner deli equidistant between her apartment and Rockefeller Center.
And maybe, perhaps, most natural of all, she now finds that she belongs more at that small desk in that even smaller office than she ever did or ever could belong to that apartment just beyond Ninth Avenue.
When the elevator doors chime open she finds their floor mostly abandoned.
Mostly abandoned, but not completely. She snatches a Diet Coke from the fridge and finds, feet kicked up and CNN playing too loud on the television on the wall, that Bill sits alone, rifling through a stack of papers with curious intent.
She goes to her office instead of his and watches him without comment, his fingers flying over the papers in his lap, organizing them into piles on his desk and the filing cabinet, the order inherent, she assumes, only to him. Because that’s a thing she now knows of him: he is a classic model of order in chaos -- his workspace always in a state of dishevelment, no pattern to be gleamed from an initial glance.
This is the end of their first year working together, and Kristen doesn’t know when they stopped being strangers to each other. It happened almost insidiously, without notice.
This is the end of their first year, the same year Bill married Maggie that spring and started renting that somewhat nice place on the lower East Side.
“It’d fucking suck if I lost this gig, man,” he says after exchanged pleasantries (“morning,” and “ugh,” her and him, respectively) and Kristen sits down. He’s slumped over at his desk and Kristen is sprawled out at Jason’s abandoned desk.
She tosses the baseball Jason keeps on his desk at Bill. He catches it one-handed without even looking at her or the ball.
“So you’re believing the rumors?”
He looks at her and points at her with the ball.
“Rumors are meant to be trusted.”
“That’s not a thing.” She slurps at the remains of her Diet Coke and bites down on the straw, shakes the can a little even though she knows it’s empty. “That’s a thing for the gullible.”
He tosses the ball up and catches it. “I’m a child at heart,” he says sarcastically, “I’ll believe anything.”
She throws her empty can toward the recycle bin, the straw still hanging out of her mouth, and she misses the shot by an embarrassingly large margin. Bill watches and then cocks his head towards her.
“Good shot, MJ.”
She stands up. “Blow me, Sasquatch,” she teases, the straw still in her mouth, which she removes haughtily between two fingers like a really long, really plastic cigarette. He rubs at his chin and the substantial amount of stubble that has grown in. He scowls at her.
“You’re being cranky,” she says. “And boring. And I don’t like you when you’re cranky and boring. I’m peacing out of this joint.” She sticks the flattened straw back between her teeth and flashes him the peace sign and pounds her chest. “Word to your mother.”
She can hear him laughing behind her as she leaves his office for her own.
They don’t lose their jobs.
They return in the fall.
N O V E M B E R
2 0 0 7
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
Fast-forward again: their third season, the fall of 2007.
Fast-forward to when things begin to tilt and change.
The only problem with that concept, the idea that there is a point you can skip to and say, “this is where things began to change, yes, I remember this,” is that it never actually works that way. Change is a gradual, insidious thing; it creeps along, and if there is a goal to be met, Change reaches it without you ever being quite aware it had been inching along towards that finish line the entire time.
But in this story we are going to pretend this point exists. In this story we are going to say: they met in 2005 and things began to change in 2007. Things began to change after two years, which isn’t to say that things were constant, that things were stable throughout those first two years. They weren’t. Anything, any relationship, where another person is involved, any time you tether your own happiness and your life to another -- be it romantically, be it intentionally, be it with any awareness whatsover -- stability never lasts for long.
So maybe they were stable for two years.
So maybe she had just married Hayes and after she married Hayes, Bill married Maggie, and they did these things as separate people. She married Hayes before she knew Bill, and Bill intended to marry Maggie before he met Kristen.
And so maybe two years after they met, two years into this story, is the point when things began to tilt and change. Maybe two years in is when they began to act with the other in mind.
Another problem with this concept: that’s a lie.
Her first table read, he handed her a script and he said: “I wrote this for us.”
A casualty of the live performance lifestyle is modesty.
Nudity is basically a given.
It’s like a byproduct of a theater lifestyle dominated by quick costume changes, far too many of which involving unimaginative spandex -- unimaginative in the sense there’s nothing left to ponder anatomically and nothing left you can feasibly wear underneath.
Brian Williams is hosting that night, and both she and Bill are in back-to-back sketches.
So he’s seen her naked.
So she’s backstage, doing the quickest of all quick changes. She’s topless and wearing this tiny G-string thing as steps into costume, jerking the leotard up her body. And there are rules, granted unspoken rules, but rules all the same. The same kind of unspoken rules that govern stage kissing and staged sex scenes (not that she has a ton of experience in that particular realm as of yet, but she can imagine with the same level of ease he can imagine her body through this skin-clinging layer of orange spandex).
When she slides her arms into the sleeves, when she looks up, her eye meets Bill’s. Bill has broken Rule Numero Uno: you avert your gaze during a quick change. It’s just what you do.
He has the manners to blush just a little, appear slightly embarrassed, but he doesn’t look away. His eyes linger on her face for a beat, a small crooked smile threatening as he pans down the rest of her body and all that orange spandex. He’s dressed similarly, but she’s finding it hard to look at him, finding it hard to square whatever weird squirming feeling roiling in her gut.
But instead of looking away, he’s looking at her openly, and it’s 2007, not 2005 or 2006, and maybe things have tilted and changed that much. Maybe she recognizes that pull in the pit of her stomach as an acknowledgement of this.
Maybe that’s when he starts seeing something else in her.
Bill breaks Rule Numero Dos at the after party:
He all but brings up the fact he saw her naked.
He finds her off to the side at the party, Kristen content to people-watch as she sucks down a whiskey on the rocks with a straw. It’s the sort of club that serves as a restaurant during the day, the walls a dark cherry, the floors dark, the furnishings heavy and velvet and that deep bled-out shade out red: a steakhouse moonlighting as a nightclub.
“So this is where the wallflowers are hiding out,” he says to her. She smirks up at him, her lips fitted around her straw as she swallows.
Kristen leans back against the wall and watches Bill finish off his beer. She can hear Amy somewhere in the crowd screeching for someone to “fucking fuck off you fucking fuck,” and she can’t figure out if Amy is joking or not.
Bill places his empty bottle down on one of the tables pushed aside near her. A tall stack of chairs is next to her and she leans her body against that, past the point of tipsy, and angles her body to face him as he leans his side against the dark wood-paneled wall.
She can still hear Amy screeching and she can hear familiar laughter, but she can’t see any of it. It’s as though her and Bill are completely removed from the party and she finds that she likes that. She likes to think they’re hidden, back in the corner where the club is just the remains of a middling overpriced steakhouse. She likes the way he’s looking at her too, no hint of embarrassment, just something incredibly open and intimate, and she’s too drunk to be surprised by how it feels like their relationship has just turned on a dime.
She holds her drink up to him. “Still thirsty?” she asks, and then starts to laugh. He shakes his head, his face creased in silent laughter. They’re standing close enough that his toes are almost touching hers. That’s too close, is what she is supposed to think, but instead she’s taking another sip of her whiskey and she’s listening for Amy to shout again and she’s thinking that there’s no such thing as close enough.
“So what’s this all about?” he finally says. Kristen frowns in confusion as she watches him gesture at first his own side, and then hers. It dawns on her suddenly what he means and she can’t stop laughing.
“My tattoo?” she asks, and laughs harder.
His eyes are all glassy and he nods, and god, he must be totally and completely bombed. Jason’s yelling now, somewhere in the crowd, but just like every time Jason yells, what he is saying is completely indecipherable.
And okay, she must be bombed too, because she’s lifting her shirt up, because in that moment showing rather than explaining makes perfect sense -- in that moment a lot of things are making sense that have no business going together -- and he’s touching her. His whole hand can cover the expanse of her ribcage, and his fingers are ghosting over the inked script and along the bottom band of her bra and she shivers a little, and Amy is yelling again, “fucking motherfuckers fucking thinking they fucking know how to fucking act,” and Jason is laugh-yelling, and Bill is watching her mouth instead of looking her in the eye and all she can think about is how far or how close the bathroom is from where they are standing and how easy, how incredibly easy, it would be to drag him in there with her.
And then suddenly he is barreling into her, jarring her back against the stacked chairs, and his hand drops away in surprise as Samberg shouts, “Look who I found oh my god!”
Andy’s head pops up over Bill’s left shoulder while a bearded Shia LaBeouf appears over Bill’s right shoulder.
And that’s that. There is no third rule that is broken -- not that night.
D E C E M B E R
2 0 0 7
K e n n y w o o d ;
They spend a week that winter together in Pennsylvania pretending to be husband and wife.
When SNL breaks for the holidays, she goes with Bill to Kennywood to shoot Adventureland. It’s absolutely freezing, yet they’re all dressed for summer. The theme park is closed, the blustery wind cutting through the bare trees and the empty park making it seem that much sadder and that much untouched by the last decade or two.
Greg only needs the two of them on set for a couple of days. If she wanted, Kristen could fit all her lines on a single index card. Bill’s the one with the more comedic and more pronounced presence, her married counterpart to him diminutive and reserved. But Greg likes to let them go for it, run and improvise until the scene goes stale. It becomes a game for her, seeing how many times she can trip Bill up with an unexpected non sequitur delivered in her character’s flat affect.
They accumulate hours of footage this way, the bulk of which goes unused.
“I feel like we’re wasting his time,” she hisses to Bill at one point in between takes. She shivers under the coat wardrobe gave her when Greg called cut and she tries to get circulation back into her numb fingers.
Bill starts to laugh but then stops, either deciding he’s too cold or too tired or whatever, and says, “Don’t worry about it, he loves it.”
She doesn’t know how he knows this, but she takes his word for it.
Kristen had first met Greg Mottola when she flew up to Pittsburgh with Bill. She knew that Bill had worked with Greg previously, and that Bill liked Greg, but she had been nervous all the same.
Greg shook her hand.
“It is so great to meet you,” Greg said. “I think you are just . . . the funniest. And the way Bill talks about you all the time -- I was excited,” he laughed then, self-conscious, and Kristen blushed.
“Here’s hoping I don’t disappoint!” she half-joked.
“Impossible,” he had said, and then he looked at Bill.
Their first day of filming, she reaches up and scratches at his mustache.
“You should keep it,” she says and laughs.
“Yeah?” his mouth quirks up under the fake mustache and her fingers. “Glue it on every morning, just slap it on, and venture out to face the day.”
Kristen laughs harder. “No way you’re man enough to grow your own.”
“No way,” he agrees. Bill reaches up, and his fingers brush over hers over the fake mustache (god, their lives are ridiculous, right). “It’d never be this plush.”
She listens to a lot of Joni Mitchell while they’re in Pennsylvania that week, and Bill looks over at her from the couch in the trailer they share as Joni starts into “This Flight Tonight” for the gazillionth time that afternoon with a look of exasperation, an expression only heightened by his fake mustache.
“Is this whole Joni thing a character thing?” he asks her.
She pushes her feathered hair off her face and shakes her head.
“It’s a Joni thing, dude.”
And when they are in Kennywood together it’s a Joni-thing and later that season back in New York it will be a Patti Smith-thing and she’ll listen to “Summer Cannibals” over and over again and a year from then it will become a Janis Joplin-thing and in the far, far distant future, when they make another movie together, when they each play one half of the same pair, it will be a Bob Dylan-thing, but by then he will almost know what to expect from her.
They return to New York before the midseason break is over.
“Oh my god you two went on vacation together that is so cute,” Amy says that Monday with that impish grin of hers.
And then she winks.
M A R C H
2 0 0 8
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
She is so tired her eyelids feel scratchy.
“It’s not going to be a good show this week,” she mutters. He throws a pen at her. She swats in its general direction but it still hits her in the shoulder and rolls down into the crack of the couch cushions.
“Don’t say that.”
She holds the notebook she was scrawling in over her face and stretches her legs out along the couch, kicking him in the thigh. Bill grabs both her ankles and hauls her legs up into his lap, placing his laptop on her legs.
“I thought you were going to give me a foot massage,” she teases, her voice flat. Kristen lets her eyes slant closed for just a second. She can hear him typing, and then he’s not, the room silent.
“Be good, and you might get lucky,” he says, in some kind of weird, pseudo-foreign Casanova voice.
She laughs low in her throat. “If I had a dollar every time you told me that . . . ”
“You’d be a prostitute.”
She laughs, and his hand locks around one of her bare ankles.
“Stay. Still. Stop moving. You’re the worst . . . tray table I’ve ever used.”
“Mmmm, such sweet nothings.”
She listens to him type some more, her notebook still shading her face, and she thinks she might take a nap, just a little one, like fifteen minutes.
He stops typing again, jabs at the backspace key.
“This is the pits,” he says and she starts shaking with silent laughing. “The fucking worst. Stay still.”
His hand is back on her ankle again. Last time she checked, it was three-thirty, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, whatever, and god, she’s just tired, and normally things get funnier this late at night, this early in morning, but that’s just not happening here at all. She’s tired, and he must be too, because she can feel his fingers on her ankle, making these weird, totally unconscious patterns, and it feels kinda good. He must be tired, because he only touches her like that when he’s too stupid or drunk or tired or . . . she doesn’t know what the fourth thing is but it’s something way worse than the other three, something they talk about in romance novels, something like overcome, and that’s terrible. He only touches her like that when he’s too one-of-those-four-things to know any better.
His laptop is really warm against her legs and his hand is really warm against her ankle. He yawns noisily.
“Tell me something interesting,” he says. “Like, really fascinating.”
“Does it need to be funny?” she mumbles.
“No,” he says. “We have proven here tonight that we are utterly and completely incapable of even the basest levels of humor.”
She snorts. “Ummm,” she says. “Like something I did today?”
He laughs a little. “I’ve been with you all day.”
She yawns. “Not this morning,” she says. She drops the notebook onto the floor, and the room’s too bright. She blinks against it and looks over at him. His head is resting on the back of the couch, his arm stretched out toward her, his eyes half-lidded.
“I had a dream this morning,” she says, and clears her throat a little. “I woke up at, like, five, and I don’t know why because I didn’t go to bed until, like, three. But I woke up, and when I went back to sleep I had this dream. And I know: talking about your dreams is the lowest form of discourse blah blah blah.” She pauses. “That’s a thing people say, right?”
“Right,” he says. He yawns again, but he’s still watching her. “But we’re the lowest kind of people right now,” he says, his voice all matching low and rumbly.
She shoots a finger-gun at him. “Exactly. But I had this dream, and I was wandering in the desert, like, out west, you know? And I was really thirsty and I was wearing rain boots, but only rain boots -- ”
“I like this dream,” he says.
“No you don’t. But I’m in the desert, and I’m walking along like it’s no big deal, like I’m not lost, I like the desert, apparently. And I met this man while I was in the desert -- ”
“Liking this dream even more.”
“Hate to disappoint, but I didn’t bang the desert man. He had eight arms though.”
“Eight arms?”
“Yeah, and I kept calling him The Octopus, and he told me something, something I thought was so important, and I’ve been trying to remember all day, but I can’t. I even looked in my dream dictionary journal thing when I got up hoping that’d jumpstart my brain, and nope, no help.”
Bill’s face cracks in a wide smile and the only word for how he looks at her is endearing. His fingers have slid up from her ankle to her shin under the cuff of her jeans.
“You have a dream journal?” he asks, sounding almost drunk.
“Yeah of course I do.”
His smile grows. “And what did the literature have to say on the matter?”
He’s moved the laptop off her legs and onto the small table next to the couch. Kristen’s legs are still in his lap, but his whole body slumps over, the arm slung over the back of the couch now slung over her stomach, his side pressed against her thigh, his head still pressed back against the couch cushion but right over her hip. His hand is still hot against her shin, and without thinking, she rolls her body into his a little.
He’s looking at her expectantly, like he really cares, like dream journals are fascinating, like her dreams are important, and that’s dumb. He shouldn’t do that. But then, he shouldn’t do a lot of things, and neither should she, yet here they are.
“It means,” she says, in what she thinks sounds like a scholarly voice, “that when you dream of an octopus you are entangled in a difficult matter, and your judgment might be clouded. That, however, did not help me remember what the octopus had to say.”
He studies her for a beat. “How stoned were you last night?”
“I was not!” She goes to cuff him, but instead just winds up dragging her fingers through his hair. He sighs heavily, so she does it again. His head drops down to her hip.
“Fifteen minute nap?” she murmurs, her eyes already closed. She moves her fingers through his hair again.
“Fifteen minutes.” They lull into silence, and she’s sure he’s asleep, until she hears his voice, muffled and quiet.
“It wasn’t really an octopus though,” he says against her hip. She can feel the words as much as hear them. “It was a man with too many arms.”
“Okay,” she says.
“You looked up the wrong thing.”
“They didn’t have an eight-armed man in the book.”
“Bummer.”
She yawns and curls into him a little more.
“Fifteen minutes,” she repeats.
“Yeah, fifteen,” he says, but he already sounds half-asleep.
They fall asleep together. A lot. Especially the weeks when the show’s not coming together all that well and it’s already Wednesday and the things they’re finding funny aren’t the things the rest of the world (or their host) would likely enjoy.
They’re both the sort of people who can fall asleep anywhere and everywhere. And they do.
Andy has so many bizarre and incriminating photos of the two of them. He calls it Goodnight Moon: A Collection of Narcoleptic Photographs. And honestly, that’s what they look like: a pair of narcoleptics. There’s a photo of the two of them at the big table, papers all around them, and Bill’s asleep sitting up, his head hanging back and his mouth wide open and Kristen is collapsed over, limp against his arm, drooling on his shoulder. There’s another where he’s asleep right in the middle of the floor of her dressing room on his stomach, and with Kristen’s body, they form a cross, a T: her back is slumped against the couch, her head on the center cushion, but her legs are draped over his back.
There’s another where they’re in the hall and Bill’s asleep sitting up, his back against the wall, and Kristen’s head is in his lap, his hand unmoving in her hair. Another where she’s sprawled out gracelessly on his couch in his dressing room, and he’s on the floor, twisted funny, his head on her stomach, his legs parallel to the length of the couch.
Another where they actually fell asleep under the big table, their feet sticking out, all Wicked Witch of the East, Wizard of Oz-style, both their hands folded over their stomachs like they rehearsed this or like they’re embalmed dead bodies or something, his cheek against her shoulder, her head tipped towards his.
“They’re like baby cats,” Jason says, laughing, when Andy shows them the photographs one night after a show.
“Oh my god, are you drooling on me?” Bill asks, pointing at a picture where she is most definitely drooling on him.
Kristen shrugs.
“You didn’t mind at the time.”
Everyone laughs at the funny photos, the weird positions they have contorted their bodies into, how grotesque their faces look mid-REM cycle, but no one comments on some of the photos. Some of the photos are like a punch to the gut. Some of the photos are just way too . . . intimate. There are so many pictures where she and Bill are together on a couch, either his or hers, and it’s always the same position: her back is along the back of the couch and Bill is facing her and their bodies are pressed so tight together, his arms around her, holding her, her face buried under his chin, against his chest.
Her eyes flit up to Bill’s face when the second of such a photo comes up on Andy’s laptop, but she can’t really read his face. She can tell though that the genuine humor a moment ago has been zapped away and he’s pretending now. Andy doesn’t seem to notice anything and keeps a running commentary of insults and loud laughter running.
The third time a photo like that pops up, Kristen laughs nervously.
She’s thinking of an empty amusement park and she’s thinking of mid-ranked steakhouses with mediocre DJs and she’s thinking that she knows too many things, too many intimate details about this man. She knows that he talks in his sleep, but never fully formed words, and that his neck smells like expensive aftershave, and she hadn’t expected that, and he smells like a man and like soap too, and that when he gets tired or drunk or just so fully amused he can’t stop laughing his eyes go mismatched and wonky, and that he hates it when people talk about their dogs like they’re human children and that she can’t even talk to him about Star Wars anymore because she lacks the requisite knowledge for such an intellectual nerd-based discussion and she knows that he knows that things aren’t right with Hayes but he’s not going to be the one that brings that up but he will be the one who holds her at four A.M. on a Tuesday night when she’s so tired that her face has gone sad and honest and she knows that he knows her well enough to know what she looks like when she’s gone sad and honest and she knows that he’s too good of a person to ever do anything with her sadness or her honesty but hold her and tell her half-formed words and snippets of sound in his sleep.
Things have tilted and they have changed, and if the balance stays equal, if they stay centered and even, she thinks there is nothing there for her to acknowledge as wrong.
“You two look like little Gollums, Jesus,” Jason says, and Bill laughs.
She thinks there’s nothing there to acknowledge as wrong at all.
O C T O B E R
2 0 0 8
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
That Friday Kristen comes into work wearing one of Bill’s striped sweaters. It’s huge on her, swallows her up, the neckline too wide, the hem down at the tops of her thighs.
She has a lot of his sweaters. She’s not sure when she started snagging them, but some late nights, those Tuesday nights when it’s already become Wednesday morning, she’d sometimes slip one on when she got cold and would forget about it, would wear it home.
She’s pretty sure she’s abducted at least five of his sweaters in this fashion.
Anne Hathaway is hosting that week. They’re rehearsing the soup kitchen scene, and Bill, their faux priest, is leaning in the faux doorway, awaiting his entrance.
They’re waiting for the prop guy, and some problem with the lighting to be resolved, so they’re all just milling around on stage, tending vaguely to their respective marks.
“I like your sweater, Kristen,” Anne says, out of nowhere.
Kristen’s head pops up, her hand immobile in the little bag of carrots she’s been snacking on. She can’t decide if Anne seriously likes this old dude sweater or if she’s just messing with her.
“Where’d you get it?” Anne asks.
Kristen eyes her warily and then takes a loud bite of a carrot stick, and she really doesn’t know why she says it.
“Bill’s closet,” she says. Anne’s eyes, which are already super huge, go a little wider.
“You gotta stop stealing my shit,” Bill says lazily from the doorway. Kristen looks over at him as she takes another bite of a carrot. He looks amused though, like he’s repressing a grin, so she takes another loud, dramatic bite.
“Stop buying such comfy sweaters. Stop leaving them were I can find them.”
“You’re like a little vulture, hungry for some used spun wool.”
“The Sweater Scavenger,” she says ominously, her hands raised and fingers curled like talons, except for the fact she still has a bag of carrots clasped in one hand. Four spill out onto the floor and roll away.
They both start laughing. Anne looks even more confused, and behind her Kenan is shaking his head.
“You two disgust me,” he jokes.
So she throws a carrot stick in his general direction.
D E C E M B E R
2 0 0 8
N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;
By mid-December, Hayes is no longer speaking to her.
The week leading up to Thanksgiving they had fought bitterly. They fought up until her mother arrived, and even then each comment one made to the other was a hidden barb, just another way to drive home how disgusted and disappointed they each were with the other.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was the worst of it.
Kristen had been washing dishes in their small apartment and her mother had gone to lie down. Hayes cleared the table. By the time they both left the kitchen Kristen had broken three glasses and a plate when she slammed the dishwasher shut.
She cried about the broken glasses and the broken plate and Hayes had not apologized -- not for the glasses or the plate or for making her cry, for making her break them in the first place.
Kristen didn’t apologize either.
Not for making him hiss that way at her, not for making him feel that she no longer loved him, not anymore, not for anything.
Hayes had said to her that Monday: I don’t know why we even bother Jesus fuck you don’t love me you obviously don’t even fucking love me anymore.
That Wednesday he had said: I came here for you I did everything for you and you don’t even have any room left for me there’s no fucking room just tell me his name just tell me his fucking name.
And then she slammed the dishwasher shut. And then the three glasses and the plate broke and they both went quiet. And then she broke the quiet too and then she said: shut the fuck up shut the fuck up I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about god fucking damnit.
Despite that, despite that entire week, despite the way Kristen’s mother looked at the both of them, her pity and her disdain shifting between parties seemingly at whim, they held on for the better part of the month of December. She held on.
They fight again towards the middle of the month. She bought the Christmas tree by herself one afternoon, a small collapsable fake thing, and a box full of ornaments she picked up at an overpriced boutique near Rockefeller Plaza. She bought New York ornaments, expensive and tacky little things made of blown glass -- bright yellow taxis, a miniature of the Rockefeller tree, the Empire State Building done up in lights. She bought them on her way to work one morning and Bill made her show him her purchases and he accused her of being kitschy and she thought that was an accusation she could live with so she listened to the Charlie Brown Christmas CD while she hung her New York ornaments by herself on her fake collapsable Christmas tree.
They fight about the dishwasher, no broken dishes this time.
The dishwasher overflows, and she can’t get the super on the phone and Hayes keeps storming around the apartment, cursing the entire building and the MIA super and the dishwasher and New York City and everyone and everything, everyone and everything but Kristen herself. It hits her then, when she’s rummaging in the closet for a mop she’s not even sure she owns, that this has been over for so long. This marriage, this relationship, is over, and she can hear Hayes leaving a voicemail for the super peppered with expletives, and standing there in front of the pantry she feels stupid and old and like she’s just played the worst hand ever and the dealer is raking all her chips in and she’s going home empty-handed.
Her marriage is over. It’s been over since Thanksgiving, since before that, since a long, long time, and she has only been clinging to it out of stubbornness and something that tastes a lot like fear.
By the SNL Christmas show she knows her marriage has ended.
By then she has said, I can’t do this anymore, and Hayes had said, fine fine I knew it it’s fine. He said it like she was a stranger who had asked how he was doing and his answer was fine, he’s fine, he knew it, it’s over, he’s fine.
He left.
He called her that Monday morning with his lawyer’s contact information and told her that he would be by during the week to get his stuff.
He reminded her that the super still needed to fix the dishwasher, and in a way, that was that.
She comes in to work that same Monday looking tired. She’s got her glasses on and her hair is messy, pulled back, loose strands falling in her face. The guys are all milling around in the hallway, crowded around Jorma and Andy and a video camera. They glance up quickly as she passes and she waves small and then heads to her desk and sort of collapses into her chair.
Later that morning, Bill comes in with a giant muffin and places it in front of her.
“What’s that?”
“A lemon poppyseed muffin,” he says, completely serious.
“I mean, why are you giving me a lemon poppyseed muffin?”
He shrugs and then perches on the side of her desk, his arms crossed. “A benevolent act of kindness and friendship.”
“And redundancy,” she says, with a small smile.
He shrugs again. “You looked like you could use a pick-me-up,” he says, but he says it carefully, like he’s slowly needling at her. She knows that he knows her well enough at this point. He knows that she goes quiet sometimes, that she can be terrible and moody and want to stow herself away sometimes.
She nods. “Yeah,” she says, and then, “no. Yeah,” and she picks at the top of the muffin and pops a piece in her mouth. “Thank you,” she says, her mouth full.
“You’re welcome,” he says, mimicking her garbled voice. He watches her as she picks at another bite. “What’s going on?” he finally asks.
The other desk in the office (Will’s) is empty, and Kristen looks away and worries her bottom lip.
“Shut the door,” she says. “I mean, everyone will probably know, like, five minutes after this, drones and and and and Germans or listening devices in the walls, but whatever, close it.”
He barely has to move off her desk to reach the door, but he shuts the door, and when he turns back to face her, he’s not even trying to hide his concern.
“What’s up?” he asks.
She looks at the muffin. It is pretty fucking delicious. Well done on that front. She takes another nibble and then she takes a deep breath, smiles all weak and funny-looking. Of all the things the two of them have been open about, their respective marriages have never really ranked among those things.
(Those things: past sexual exploits and bizarre fears -- sometimes tied to sexual exploits -- and even more bizarre habits and embarrassing film preferences and slightly grounded worries about the futures tied to their careers and all the people they have come to hate at Studio 8H and all the weird annoying quirks they possess, and so on and so forth, but never Maggie and never Hayes).
“I . . . ” she says, her hands clasped in her lap, and she finally looks up at him. He’s looking at her so seriously, and that makes her feel weird, but a good kind of weird. The kind of weird where it feels like your heart is being squeezed but not in a death-intended, cardiac arrest kind of way. “I’m getting a divorce,” she finally spits out. “Or, like, he’s divorcing me, and I’m, uh, being divorced. Merry Christmas, me!” she adds weakly, her arms raised awkwardly.
“Oh.”
It’s all he says at first, and there’s a tangible amount of relief to him that catches her a little off guard.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry,” and he says it like he means it, so she nods. “Are you -- are you okay?”
For some reason that makes her laugh. Not, like, a real laugh, but the sort of laugh you make when you’re not sure what else to say or what else to exactly do with all the emotions you’ve got churning inside. She hasn’t really cried about this, not like, full-on-broke-down-this-doesn’t-fit-any-of-those-Ben-and-Jerry’s-chowing-female-cliches cried, since any of this started. She cried when she broke the dishes and she cried when Hayes left, but she didn’t cry that morning when he told her, sounding all faraway and strange to her, that he had a lawyer now and that he’d come take his stuff from her. She doesn’t want to cry now, not in front of Bill (that’s too weird that’s just too weird that’s terrible), but she can’t seem to stop laughing.
“Yeah,” she finally says. “I’m fine.” And she is fine? In a weird way? It’s kind of like the worst is over, that the one thing she’s been dreading for awhile has finally come to pass, and Hayes has finally confronted her, and now he’s actually left her. “I mean, it’s weird. I was married, and now I’m not going to be. And I have to start apartment hunting now. And oh god. I’m single again.”
Bill smirks. “I am sure every rock outfit we book on the show will be greatly appreciative of that change in status.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, feigning outrage. He picks at the muffin he gave her and she bats at his hand but he steals a bite anyway.
“Oh, come on,” he says with his mouth full. “Every time we have a halfway decent rock group on the show they are all about you, dude. All about you. ‘Oh, Kristen, you’re so funny, want to come check out my collection of guitar picks?’”
She laughs hard. “That has never happened.”
“It totally has. Dave Grohl is basically in love with you.” She shakes her head and holds her hands up in protest of her innocence.
“You’re just too cool for the rest of us,” he says, his smile full-blown as he hops off the side of her desk.
He swings the door open and then points at her, his face mock serious.
“We’re going drinking tonight, K-Dubs.”
“It’s Monday,” she points out sagely. “Everyone’s going to be cooped in writing.”
“Write drunk, edit sober,” he calls to her as he steps through the doorway. “Hemingway!”
“I’m not going drinking tonight!” she calls back.
They go drinking that night.
They get drunk.
They get the worst kind of drunk, the self-loathing kind, or at least that’s the case with her. He gets drunk too, but there’s an air of the chaperone to him -- like he’s on stand-by in case she goes into total Kelly Clarkson belting mode on him or something. She tells herself she’s not that sad, and the thing is, the more she drinks, the more she finds she means it. The more she starts to worry that Hayes was right, that he was right about everything. That she really doesn’t have the room in her to love him. That’s she’s either too empty or too full for that.
That there’s someone else.
Bill chose some dive bar over on West 44th and they headed over around eleven. The place is stocked with what she assumes are regulars, all hunched over the same at the bar, all with half-empty pints of beer. The music, Springsteen and Waits, is loud enough that they have to lean in close to talk, her voice raspy already. She sort of hates that they never have the show’s after parties at places like this. It’s always some swanky club or sushi place or, like, whatever restaurant some Food Network “celebrity” just opened.
“Have you ever had a Presbyterian?” she asks him. The legs of the table are uneven and the table wobbles when she leans her weight on her elbows, her head inclined towards him.
His blinks at her. “You mean, like, biblically?” he asks, genuinely confused.
“No,” she laughs. “The drink. The drink!”
She orders them a round and they down them quickly, Bill wincing over the tart ginger taste, so she lets him pick the next round. And the round after that.
It’s around one A.M. when the conversation starts to slow, when the Styx cover band takes the tiny stage at the back of the bar, and she finds herself watching him as he watches her.
“You’re good?” he murmurs, his eyes heavy. She nods. She peels the rest of the label off her beer bottle and then looks him square in the face.
“This had nothing to do with you,” she says to Bill, the worst kind of non sequitur.
His eyes go wide for a beat too long, the sort of moment where time goes suspended, hanging in the air, and then he recovers.
His mouth goes tight, his cheekbones and jaw too sharp and mean-looking, and he says to her:
“Why would this have had anything to do with me?”
C O N T I N U E D :
P . 2 | P . 3