The Animators(122)

We pass a throwback theater in Alphabet City and see a movie poster for Tank Girl. “Loved that movie when I was a kid,” he says.

I say, “People used to tell my old partner she looked like Tank Girl.”

“Lucky her.”

“Yeah.”

“You hungry?”

We fall in together. He lets me be. Doesn’t pass pointed looks at the drafting table, heaped in a shifting tide of bills and papers and Post-its. Is perfectly content to let me watch TV in my underpants while he writes, researches, makes calls. Lets me leave work wherever I leave it. Only once did he try to push the career issue, suggesting that I start a Twitter account. In response, I drew him a picture of the Twitter bird getting fisted by the hammy, hairy hand of Truth.

“Noted,” Danny said. He folded the picture and put it in his pocket. Later I found it tacked on his bulletin board.

We move in together, into the bottom level of a house in Bay Ridge. I am surprised to find myself comfortable. It’s the first place that has felt like home since the studio. I am settled, and strangely itch-free.

“I had seen you before, you know,” he tells me. “You were with Mel Vaught. At some Animacon thing. You all were doing stuff for Nashville Combat.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Oh no. I noticed you, for sure. But I was too scared to talk to you.”

“Why in God’s name were you too scared to talk to me?”

“Every time I saw you, you were surrounded by, I dunno. Light. And people. And noise. I just thought, there’s no way. There’s no way I could ever slip into that woman’s orbit.”

“Really?”

“Of course.” He puts his arms around me. “You’re all light and noise.”

“I’m not,” I say, and he pulls me in, muffling my voice into his shirt. “I’m the most alone person I know.”

—

A few months after Danny and I move in together, An Uncensored History of Modern Cartooning is released. It’s a big oral history of animation during the past thirty years, filled with process and technique and gossip. It receives positive reviews in the Times and Kirkus: informative, though perhaps more salacious than necessary due to the many anonymous, let-the-shitfly quotes within. Glynnis Havermeyer is a co-editor. She called Donnie early on to see if she could interview me.

I made a fart noise. “Not on your life. Tell her to suck it.”

“You don’t want a chance to give your voice?” Donnie asked me. “We should probably consider this a warning. If you don’t talk, people will gladly talk for you. You and Mel are going to figure pretty heavily into this book.”

I told her I didn’t care.

She sighed. “Well, forewarned is forearmed, I guess.”

Forewarned I am, but it doesn’t do much good. The week the book comes out, I find myself pinned to the wall with needling stares at work. I spot a copy sitting on the coffee table at the studio before Tatum whisks it out of sight. Everyone’s got a copy in their bag, whispers about it over drinks. I block it all out—a practice at which I have become fucking super—but am caught off guard when I walk into our apartment to find Danny lying on the couch reading it, marking his place with his finger, looking up at me expectantly.

I know the book’s general spin on Vaught and Kisses, more or less. Mel Vaught, brilliant addict/erratic cutup/blabbity bloo, gone from this world, leaving her quirky, lesser partner to while away as a shut-in, getting tubby and running out into traffic without her pants. Beyond that, I don’t care to know the details.

Later that night, when we’re cleaning up after dinner, Danny asks me, “Do you miss her?”

I nod. Hope what I’m not saying will be enough to create that space of wordlessness people are supposed to recognize as the forbidden zone, that deep well of hurt human decency demands you not touch when speaking about the dead.

But Danny presses. “You don’t talk much about her.”

“Yeah. Well.” I shrug. Turn my back. Pretend to scrub the counter.

Danny sits at the kitchen table and looks at me, hands on his knees. All big, sincere eyes. Waiting. He knows I’m shortchanging him.

“What. What do you want me to tell you,” I say. “What would you like to know that’s not in that book?”

“Wasn’t going to mention the book. Wasn’t even going to bring it up.”

“Come on. I saw you reading it.” It’s louder than I mean for it to be. “You might as well. How many hillbilly cough-syrup jokes did they let slide through editing? Or is that too gauche to include in a book of that caliber?”

He rubs his face and sighs. “Jesus, Sharon.”

It’s a fight. We don’t have many, and we don’t have them that well, going back and forth on an uneasy sort of equilibrium. Sometimes our happiness does not lessen the feeling of sand running out from underneath my shoes, me constantly changing positions in order to stay on land. We’re not even comfortable enough with each other to argue. When we’re upset, we hit a wall. No one makes a move. Just thick, world-ending silence.

“I wish you’d let me in a little more,” he says. “My girlfriend’s a superstar and I have close to no idea about that part of her life. I don’t feel like I know Sharon the cartoonist.”