The Animators(100)

It’s odd to live so sleepily, considering we spend our days being asked about Movie Sharon, heroine of Irrefutable Love—wildly, almost violently emotional. The stupid sexual decision-making, the frantic hunt for something to grasp. When people connect with that Sharon, it shocks the shit out of me. That’s me too! I’m told more than once, and I answer with Hey that’s great before realizing what I’m confirming—about them, but also about me.

“Are you okay?” Mel asks me. “Feeling all right? Tired?” She insists on using the blood pressure monitor on me every night before she goes out. When my leg acts up: “Four hands’re better than two,” she says, rolling up her sleeves, muttering around her cigarette, and we labor over my calf with Bengay until the spasms subside. Once, a production assistant from a talk show on Channel 4 comes in to find us like that, my foot planted in Mel’s lap, her brow creased over in concentration. “Uh, you’re on in fifteen,” he says.

Mel looks up. “All right.” He shuts the door. She resumes.

I watch her for a minute. “People are going to think we’re a couple,” I say.

“I got news for you. They’ve thought that for years.”

“Really? What do you tell them when they ask?”

She ashes her cigarette. “I tell them you wouldn’t put up with my bullshit for five minutes.”

But I have. And on this trip, as her nights grow later and her hangovers more painful, I do it again. Something has happened to Mel since the night of the Four Roses bottle last year; she has become thinner, sharper somehow, as if a part of her once soft has gone rawboned from exposure. I watch her get patted down in Paris, praying she threw away her one-hitter. I listen to her throw up in Amsterdam. I try to will myself numb, covered in petroleum jelly, all concern slicking off. Ignoring how my entire body still knots when she makes certain noises or when she has that webby drunk cast to her eyes. It riles her to bring it up: Someone in a bar in London looked at her drink and said something good and snarky about how Nashville Combat obviously still applies, and Mel shoved the drink at him, saying, “This is ginger ale. So why don’t you take that goddamn quizzical expression and shove it up your pooper, limey.”

After Europe, we end up in San Francisco, a city neither of us has ever visited. Irrefutable Love opens to a bigger response than we could have imagined. The theater is packed. Students, cartoonists, some weirdo Hollywood types. A few of the older guys—those whose movies Mel and I were weaned on, guys whose names popped up in my college thesis—approach us, grasp our hands, tell us well done. We are rendered speechless that night. It is the apex of our hard work and sacrifice. We know it doesn’t happen to everyone. But it’s happening to us, and we are fortunate. We keep glancing at each other in amazement, Mel suppressing a grin, eyes huge, me giggling and adjusting the pants around my belly.

I only notice in retrospect, in pictures and video, how thin Mel is around this time, how her suits hang on her. But that night in San Francisco, all we know is that, up until its end, it is the best night on the tour.

The after-party is at the home of a wealthy, druggy animator who used to work for Disney but won money in an unspeakable lawsuit. (He winks and claws his hands at us: “Check it, babies. Occupational arthritis.”) The place is a genuine mansion, a huge, creamy four-story. Ten bedrooms, more bathrooms, separate kitchens. It’s packed with strangeness. People doing coke off a gaudy purple pool table downstairs. Transvestite strippers, one named Ronalda who keeps picking me up off the floor and twirling me around. Someone’s potbellied pig is sprayed green and fed Velveeta and bologna throughout the night. I see two or three guys in suits and nice shoes smoking angel dust by an open window. The party is the biggest cliché I have ever seen. Later it will be embarrassing to explain what we were doing there.

I find myself in a quiet corner of the house trading stroke notes with a writer who tells me he was in a motorcycle accident when Mel happens by, a cup of something frothy and dark in her hand. “Sharon Kay,” she croons, “with eyes of Drano bloo-ooooo. Get it!” She sways in front of us, puts her hands on my head, leans in. Blows a raspberry into my hairline.

“What do you have there, dear.”

“Robitussin milkshake supreme.” She waggles the cup at me, eyes sort of crossed and dilated at the same time. Her breath is a thick, noxious cloud of medicine cabinet. “Gonna toast the night with some tussin. Good for what ails ya.”

“I’ll pass.”

“You’re no fun, stroke girl.”

Then something strange happens. I clear my purse from my lap, put my drink aside, smooth my pants over my thighs—I make room for her. And she plops down, slings her arm over my neck. We look at each other, then look at the writer, giving him the dumbest faces we can. “Whut,” Mel says, and he just nods and smiles like this is normal.

Mel says, “Did you know you’re talking to the most beautiful, brilliant woman at the party?”

“I do,” he says.

She lays her head on my shoulder. “I mean me.”

I smile at the writer. He’s been giving signals I once would have devoured with my front teeth—the leaning in, the unceasing eye contact. But I’m already planning to go back to the hotel, eat a sandwich, order Killer Klowns from Outer Space on demand.

“You have no idea,” Mel tells him. She leans in and gives me a hard, wet kiss on the cheek, then clambers off my lap and heads out.