The Animators(119)

She closes her eyes briefly. Her liner and shadow are perfect, drawn with a natural, knowing hand. Her lids are quivering. “I didn’t feel good holding on to these. You are their rightful owner. They belong to you.”

I shake my head. Restack the pages into the folder, splay my hands on top. “Do you not get this? If Mel had wanted me to know about these, she would have said so.”

Caroline covers her mouth, seems to massage her jaw for a moment. “I get it,” she says. “I get it now. I’m sorry.”

She suddenly puts her face in her hands and vigorously rubs, making a growling noise, then looks up, wild-eyed. “Fuck,” she says.

I stare at her.

“This is so uncomfortable.” She holds up her hands. “Wow. I think I’ve fucked up here. Agreed? So I vote for a do-over. What do you say?”

The weird, spastic suddenness of this—it has an echo of Mel, something of her skinny ghost in its makings. It touches off the same thaw mechanism. I go from twat to docile, involuntarily, in three seconds.

Caroline smacks the bar. “You know what? I need another drink. My drink needs a drink. Let’s get you something. Just one. Okay? Martin!”

The bartender appears from the back.

“Martin, would you mind dumping some whiskey into Sharon’s coke? Just fill it up to the top.”

The bartender laughs, but he hauls a bottle of Jack over and begins to do as Caroline says. She sighs, relaxes her back, lets herself slump a bit. Okay. I can see why you liked her, Mel.

“All right,” I say, making sure to frown. “I could have one. I guess.”

—

When the after-work crowd trickles in five hours later, we stumble into a booth. Caroline furtively cups an e-cigarette and watches me inhale a basket of chicken fingers and french fries. We are thoroughly, intensely drunk. I force myself to do a heel-toe-heel walk on the way to the bathroom to avoid falling down. The air feels like pudding.

“I get the shitfaced hungries,” I tell her.

She tilts her head back, smiling. “Those are the best kind of hungries.”

I offer her a chicken finger, holding it out to her. She declines.

“Mel used to get those, too,” she says.

“Yeah, man. She could put it away.”

“She could.” Caroline drapes one arm across the length of the booth. She has rolled up her sleeves. “Though she was trying to watch it. She was worried about her blood pressure.”

“She was?”

Caroline nods, looking down to screw a new filter onto her e-cig. “She was. Something her doctor told her. I told her cutting out the coke would probably be even better for her blood pressure. But what do I know?”

It’s tough to swallow my mouthful. Doctor’s visit? Coke? What the fuck was going on with her? What was I not seeing?

I can’t bring myself to ask. I pick at my fries. Say, “Sorry for being such a bitch earlier. You didn’t deserve that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I eat another fry, chewing tastelessly, before asking, “So why’d you two break up?”

Caroline gazes at the ceiling and narrows one eye, as if taking aim at something. She has unraveled, through the course of the day: her hair loose, blouse untucked. There are lines around her eyes and mouth, an increased webbing at her neck, but in spite of—or because of—these new layers, it occurs to me that Caroline Palik is a complete knockout.

“I cared for Mel very deeply,” she says finally. “I was willing to put up with a lot of things to be with her. Things I wouldn’t have tolerated, really, in anyone else. I’ll be honest, there were some really late nights, there was some unpredictable behavior. There were more substances than I was comfortable with.”

“I thought she’d slowed down with a lot of that stuff,” I say.

Caroline gives me a close, unreadable look. I go quiet, feeling foolish. Behind us, a large, down-coated group comes in from the cold, laughing, stomping their feet. It has begun to snow.

“Was that it?” I ask.

She grimaces. Fiddles with the band of her watch. “This is going to sound strange,” she says.

I shrug.

“There was this quality of—what would you call it. Distraction? It felt as if, sometimes, she was only thirty percent there. And then, other times, it felt like there was something else in the room with us. Just sort of hanging there. And it seemed like she was okay with that. Like it was normal for her. But I could never get comfortable with it. And it’s a hard thing to call someone out on, you know? Like, Mel, please take this ghost out of the room. Couldn’t very well tell her that, right? It would have sounded ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous now.

“And when I saw the project she was working on,” she says, “it, well. Kind of made sense, a bit.”

I think of Mel’s storyboard. The sketches of me. I feel my throat constrict. I am culpable here. And this is Caroline’s kind way of telling me that she also thinks I am culpable.

“We never dated,” I insist. “Really. I know that might be hard to believe, because she dated half the women in New York. But it’s true.”

“Oh, I know,” she says. “I know.” She puts her hand on top of mine and squeezes hard.

I study my fries, no longer hungry. When I come to, I am talking. “I feel guilty. Like someone more thoughtful than me would have been able to see what she needed and given it to her. And the last couple of years were all about me, you know? My stroke, my family, my breakup, my bullshit. And I was constantly worried that she thought I—wasn’t good. Or as good as she was. I’m such an asshole.”