At their mountain hideaway, to which, for a pleasant few weeks, magazines sent reporters to profile them and transcribe Paul’s one-liners, they were attempting to write an original romantic comedy. (“We want to push each other creatively,” Pam told Good Housekeeping. “Pam, for example,” Paul said, “has taken to pushing me creatively down the stairs.”) Despite several months of pushing, however, they remained nowhere with the script until, one Monday morning, the FedEx truck arrived with a copy of their latest profile in L.A. Weekly. Pam saw the headline of the article, “TWO’S COMPANY,” and was thunderstruck. “Two’s Company”: perfect title! “The thing we know best is the romance of marriage,” she declared. “The world doesn’t need another gag about a girl with come in her hair. The world doesn’t need another drama about adultery. What would be truly original, at this cultural moment, would be a straight-up celebration of monogamy. To create a couple who are so funny together, so right for each other, that you’re rooting for the marriage from the very first frame.”
Paul, who was frowning unhappily at the photograph that accompanied the profile, said that he agreed with her — mostly. His only tiny worry was that a too perfect couple might come across as more cutesy than ha-ha funny. As possibly even outright irritating. He also wondered what to make of the fact that the funniest married movie couple he could think of offhand, Nick and Nora Charles, were hopeless drunks. “Just, you know, wondering,” he said.
Pam said she didn’t see why Paul was being so pissy. To prove him wrong, she went to her study, which was a den of deep-pile silk rugs and pillows the size of armchairs, to create some scenes of a marriage that was both perfect and hilarious. Paul’s own office contained a four-drawer file cabinet and a folding chair. He went out to the pool and dutifully opened a notebook for one of the three pilots that he and Pam were contractually obligated to develop. In this one, called “Playing House,” two great-looking high-school seniors get married after their parents, who are friends, are killed together in a helicopter crash, and the newlyweds have to learn how to behave like grownups with big mansions and millions of dollars and how to cope with being C.E.O.s of the family businesses even though they’re still just eighteen and applying to colleges. Paul, for whom first drafts tended to be a torment, had uncharacteristically looked forward to writing the scene in which the two kids lie in bed in their middle-aged pajamas and lament the shrivelment of their sex drive; but now he didn’t see the humor in it. He felt compelled, instead, to go and lock himself in the guesthouse bathroom with a head shot of the twenty-year-old actress, Tracy Gill, whom he was hoping to cast in the pilot’s lead female role, and when he emerged from the guesthouse, nearly an hour later, his mood extremely sour, he went straight to his vintage yellow BMW roadster and gunned its extravagantly polluting engine and steered it toward the city.
Paul’s childhood had been the stuff of comedy. His father was ordained as a Presbyterian minister but left the Church to work in human resources at Raytheon and devote his leisure time to sports betting and solitary drinking while Paul’s mother found Jesus, moved to Colorado, and started a second family with an Air Force colonel whom Paul, as an adolescent, dreamed of murdering with a hatchet. At boarding school, he took to wearing all black and smoking black Sobranies, and he helped form a literary comedy troupe that played scenes like the tsar’s near-execution of Dostoyevsky for slapstick. Paul’s favorite role was a cheerful Jehovah’s Witness who kept tapping on Sylvia Plath’s kitchen door while she was trying to kill herself; he also liked to play Sartre’s alter ego, Roquentin, and stare at a tree root until its disgusting raw existence made him barf.
When Pam discovered Paul, in their second week of college, he was a gaunt loner who was almost as disdainful of girls as he was of alcohol and sports. On his dinner tray, the night she plunked her own tray down beside it, were three dishes of jello cubes, one dish of vanilla pudding, two glasses of Pepsi, and one flagrant turkey cutlet. Pam’s opening line was “Are you sure you should eat that cutlet?” By Thanksgiving, she was well on her way to having civilized him. She took him home to Durham and introduced him to her plump, jolly parents. Her father had co-written the standard college intro text in macroeconomics, and every time the family needed another million dollars he put out a new edition. (“This is my private mint,” he snickered, showing Paul his home office.) The father gave him tutorials in wine appreciation, the mother taught him to say the family motto in Latin—“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”—and every night, in Pam’s bedroom, which the parents had winkingly forbidden Paul to enter after 10 P.M. (“There’ll be hell to pay, young man, if you so much as lay a finger on our daughter!”), Pam unstoppered the carnal energies that had long been building up in the steel-clad cooker of Paul’s New England psyche. Prior to Paul, Pam herself had been naked only with a French exchange student, whose thick accent and single-minded pursuit of sex later became the basis for the amusing character of Pierre on her and Paul’s hit TV series, but she was such a well-loved child that she was neither surprised nor frightened when the strange, intense Yankee she’d picked out for herself became obsessively devoted to her; she took it as her due.
Which was, perhaps, Paul felt, as he drove his roadster down the 101, both the excellent and comforting thing about Pam and the root of his problem now: her lack of doubt. The funniest lines in their work, the lines with that satisfying crackle of sadism, were mostly his, but he was aware that it was Pam’s confidence and Pam’s higher tolerance for cliché that had won them their big contracts. And now, because she wasn’t engineered for doubt, Pam seemed to think it didn’t matter that she’d gained fifteen pounds since moving to the mountains and that she was thumping around the house with the adipose aquiver in her freckled upper arms; she certainly seemed not to care that they hadn’t had sex since before Labor Day; and she’d been pointedly deaf to certain urgent personal-grooming and postural hints that Paul had dropped during their photo shoot for L.A. Weekly. Indeed, the person he now imagined murdering with a hatchet was that paper’s photo editor, who, Paul was certain, had deliberately selected a shot in which Pam looked like Jackie Gleason, in order to punish her for her complacency and to ridicule Paul for his too sincere avowal, in a paragraph not three inches from Pam’s splotchy face, that everything good in his life he owed to her.
He felt trapped and isolated by the freakish particulars of a romance that Pam, even now, was endeavoring to celebrate in a film script. He wished that he could call up some other woman, but it seemed to him unlikely that there was a single attractive female in all of Southern California who had not been nauseated by his and Pam’s repeated public declarations of their delight in each other. And so, arriving at the little office of Mathburger Productions, he simply took what he had driven down for — an old, lovingly preserved folder of his high-school scripts, and a Tracy Gill career-compilation video that his assistant had put together and that Paul was hoping might include a few scenes that Gill now regretted having shot.
Pam, meanwhile, was laughing out loud while writing her pages. These pages concerned a slightly neurotic but charming couple, Sam and Paula, who arrive in Maui for a week’s vacation. Paula, whom Pam described as “extremely attractive in a thinking man’s way,” has managed to convince herself, despite turning the heads of the resort’s buff male staffers, that she is old and dowdy and losing her appeal, and a deftly handled series of comic misunderstandings quickly persuades her that Sam is flirting with a brainless bombshell, Kimbo, whom, in reality, he couldn’t care less about.