The Animators(121)

“What color of nail polish is that?” I ask her.

She grimaces. “I dunno. Purple something. Purple Rain, I think?”

I slap the steering wheel. “God damn. I knew it.”

“What.”

“It’s— Nothing. Probably too weird to explain.”

“Sometimes I think I don’t see enough of you,” she says. “And then other times I think it’s just enough.” She retrieves a plastic bag from her pocket, pulls out a swab, pinches my cheek. “Say ah,” she commands.

I open up. She takes a quick, triumphant swipe. “There. That’s all you had to do, angel baby.” She drops the swab into a plastic cup, puts the cup in a Ziploc bag. “Well,” she sighs. Leans against the car.

“Well,” I say.

“At least now we’ll know.”

“Certainty’s not a bad thing.”

“We’ll never get it from Mom,” Shauna says. “Between you and me, I think she’s goin senile.”

“If I turn out to be a bastard, will you buy me a Grand Slam breakfast?”

—

A week later, I get the text from her:

Lab says…you are officially a Kisses. Sorry?



—

When Teddy gets married, I send him a wedding gift—a watercolor skyline of Louisville, painted by an artist in New York. It is a softer Louisville than the one we drew for Irrefutable Love, that jagged lifeline struggling against the sky, the Ohio River gray and indifferent beside. This Louisville glows with the water, the view curving the bend of Interstate 64 as it stretches, out and out, into the west.

I am beginning to understand what I did to Teddy, what he was trying to tell me, when I look at Mel’s sketches. Finding yourself in a world someone else has made is a theft that is difficult to put into words—the magnitude of your life, smeared to their order, your voice impersonated or, worse, winked out altogether.

I know what Mel and I did with memory. We ran our endurance dry with our life stories, trying to reproduce them, translate them, make them manageable enough to coexist with. We made them smaller, disfiguring them with our surgeries. We were young. We did not know what we were doing.

I am protected by my forgetting: What I can recollect is subject to my own personal slash-and-burn, my inability to lay off. It is not in me to be able to leave well enough alone. Thank God I forget. Thank God.

I want to tell Teddy that I had no alternative. I had to make what I made to survive, to move forward with my life without the shadow of that goddamned trunk hanging over me. But now I’m aware enough of the cost for it to keep me from sleeping at night.

All I write on the card is this: Congratulations. I am so happy for you.

—

This is the year I meet Danny.

It happens at Animacon. He’s just moved to New York from Los Angeles to write and work PR for a media blog. ReAnimator has just launched its list of the top thirty adult animated films of all time. Nashville Combat is number 12, Irrefutable Love is number 7; he’s assigned to write a story about it, and me. When I meet him, he’s eating. He lifts his hand, a wad of bagel in his cheek, and he says, “Good morning, Sharon Kisses. Are you ready to be interviewed?”

I’m a good five minutes into the interview before I realize Danny is cute. Sort of medium height, substantial five-o’clock shadow, big brown eyes (even in distraction, I am still forever a sucker for the kind of moony, chocolaty eyes you can fall ass over cranium into). Nice hands. Sweet little teeth. And those five minutes ultimately work for me, because it means a window of coherence before my hormones descend and scramble my shit to pieces. A first impression in which I actually, unknowingly, have some game without getting in my own way. Snapping off some solid one-liners, some thoughtful ruminations about Brecky’s stupid Civil War show.

I ask Danny out to a bar afterward with me and Tatum and Ryan and some of the old crowd. On the way there, as we cut through the squirrels chattering in Washington Square Park, I elbow him and say, “You know what they call those where I’m from?”

“No.”

“Limb chicken.”

He guffaws, and I discover what will be my kryptonite with Danny: When he shifts from neutral to amused, his face transforms. Something lights from within, his spine straightens, neck snaps back, and he lets rip: “Heh heh.” And it feels like an accomplishment, the ultimate payoff. I like what I do to him. I feel myself leap to attention between my legs.

I spend the rest of the night trying to make him do it again. I watch his face, watching the way he watches me when I’m dancing with Surly Cathie—hands deep in pockets, face serious, searching. I can’t remember the last time someone looked at me so closely.

At the end of the evening, when the group splinters, I take his hand. Tell him, “My place’s this way.”

He says, “Okay.”

We spend the following month cocooned together.

Making him come is even better than making him laugh. When he’s inside me, I take his face in my hands and I have him look at me, so I won’t forget what it feels like to be watched.

It’s the first time I’ve been inseparable from someone since Teddy; a honeymoon rush. It helps that Danny is so easy to be around. He’s worked PR long enough to have adapted aspects of his job as primary mode of operation. As a result, he is the most informed person I know—about the news, about celebrities, about stocks. He is ravenous for information. He knows the public story of Vaught and Kisses, things about me that I have not told him. Yet he does not insist on having his way with the conversation.