The Animators(120)

Caroline gives me another close, inscrutable look, and again I feel like a toddler. But she says, “Are you kidding me? She adored you. She didn’t think of your problems as bullshit. She felt like they were her problems, too. She referred to you constantly. I felt like I knew you, even though we’d never met. She even drew you. You know that? Not just those.” She points to my bag, where I stashed the folder. “When she was doodling, on takeout menus, the TV Guide. Your face came out.”

“Really?”

Caroline’s forehead wrinkles. “Sharon, have you sat down and watched that last scene in Nashville Combat lately? The part they showed at the service?”

I shake my head.

“Watch it again.”

Being with Caroline is both sweet and painful, a weird, hazy event that could only occur in the portion of my life that I have come to refer to as after. It is a glimpse into an alternate reality, into a Mel I might have recognized but who would have been a stranger to me—my partner, gone total, unquestioned adult. It is a chance to savor grieving with another person; for the rest of our lives, we’ll have to do this by ourselves.

And because Caroline is a person who elicits others to follow—a quality that would have been interesting to see Mel operating from under—I match her drink for drink. It grows later. Arms linked, we climb onto the sidewalk and prop each other up until one of Caroline’s car service guys, someone she also knows by name, cruises up, and she deposits me gently in the backseat with a dry, hard kiss on my cheek.

—

Still drunk, I dig Nashville Combat out of the back of my closet and put it into the DVD player.

Mel’s drawn me hot—breasts round, hair liquid black, mouth red and wide. Luminous in a way I could never, in real life, hope to be.

I make a sound when I realize it. Better than reading Mel’s face was reading her work. Mel would only draw someone she loved that way, with that sense of skin-glow so difficult to capture, the hours melting into each other as you poured your whole being into the sketch. What she loved was always embedded there, immovable as line or shape or color.

It was her weight, her burden, that had tethered her to the chair, to her board, to make what I was seeing right now. My body runs ice-cold with the knowledge of all I didn’t see, the things I had never known.

—

Shauna calls me on a Friday night. “What are you doing.”

I’m lying on the couch in my underpants watching 60 Minutes. “I’m at home,” I say.

“Let’s meet up.”

“Cool. You got vacation time coming up?”

“I mean now. Like, right now. Like in a couple of hours.”

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“I’m fine. Why?”

“You sound weird. Like you’re out of breath.”

“We’re getting a divorce,” she says. “Finally. Me and Brandon. Like I filed the papers today. Like I kicked his lazy ass to the curb tonight.”

I sit up. “Really? Dude. I’m sorry. That’s rough.”

“No it ain’t,” she says. “I’m happy as hell. Let’s meet up. Right now. I’m serious. I’m in the car. I’m driving up. I just passed Huntington.”

“Seriously? Where the fuck are your kids?”

“They’re with Mom. God. What kind of mother you think I am? Listen, I been thinking about this and we’re never gonna get a straight answer out of her, so I think we should just get you a paternity test. Okay?”

“What time is it?” It’s been a long day. We drafted show episodes with a roomful of writers and sent the first schematics to Korea. It was also the first day I went into work wearing jeans. When I got the tilted-head-prickle-eye from Brecky, I told her, “This is how it’s gonna be, dude. I am what I am.”

“It don’t seem like you want to,” Shauna says, sounding hurt. I hear rushing behind her. The low-level murmur of the radio dialed low. She really is on I-64. I’ll bet she swipes the good car in the divorce settlement. She’ll bitch at him until he bends like a straw. “Don’t you wonder? Don’t you want to know?”

“I have a job now,” I say. “Like a job I have to show up to. I can’t just leave New York whenever I want.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“It’s Fox. I gotta go in.”

“Are you in front of a computer? Go check and see what the halfway point is between New York and Faulkner. I got a friend who’s a nurse who’ll run the lab tests. All I need’s a cheek swab. Come on. Let’s see if you’ve won the lottery and you’re not a Kisses.”

I end up renting a car and driving down. Our agreed-upon halfway point is just past Columbia, Maryland, off Interstate 68, at an all-night Love’s with an attached Denny’s. When I pull up, Shauna’s already there, leaning against a Chevy HHR, smoking a cigarette, looking slickly tan under the parking lot lights. She sees me pull in, runs over to the driver’s side, and knocks the window hard with her left hand. Her wedding ring has been replaced with a massive ruby and cubic-zirconia wrap, a weird triangle-swoop stone on a wide band. Her nails are purple.

I roll down the window. She leans in, grinning, and juts her hip out. I see a couple of truckers give her the once-over. “Hi, baby,” she says.