The Animators(123)

“Dude. Do you really want to?”

He clears his throat. “I don’t want to feel like an intruder when I’m asking you questions about yourself. It feels like you had this entire life before I met you that I’ll never have access to. I mean, your best friend died and you almost never talk about it.”

I turn away from him. Go to work vigorously rinsing forks, water full blast. “That’s not my life now.”

“That’s not the point. It feels like you’re trying to keep something from me. It’s always kind of felt like that. What don’t you want me to know?”

“Could we not keep going in circles about this? There’s nothing I don’t want you to know.”

He comes behind me and shuts the faucet off. “Okay. Let’s talk about the damn book. It says things about you that are really disquieting, Sharon. And considering the fact that we are sharing our lives with each other, it worries me some.”

“I don’t plan to read it,” I say.

“Maybe you should take a look.”

He holds it out to me. I heave a sigh. Take it from him with two fingers.


Sharon Kisses laughs like a goat. And when she’s on a panel, she always wears a push-up bra. It’s like two terrified honeydews peeking out of a wrinkled Costco bag.



“Why are you shocked? You see that every night.”

He rolls his eyes. Turns the page.

Page 343:


You think she’s the stable one? Sharon’s totally bizarre. There’s a reason their cartoons are so, you know. Visceral. Maybe she was stable in comparison to Vaught, but that’s not really saying much. She’s super-impulsive, too. She used to. Well. How do I put this. Couple in random places? The worst I heard about was her having stand-up sex with a guy in a carousel in this, like, abandoned amusement park in New Jersey. Just picture that for a second. Like, sex during which you can hear the retching of a crackhead from the old Tilt-A-Whirl. It’s not hard to see connections, is it? Like, you have to be really unhinged to make the sorts of things they made.



I grunt, throw the sponge I’ve been using in the sink. “That’s Fenton,” I tell Danny, “and he’s a grade-A dick. Just an incredibly nasty guy Mel managed to piss off, one way or another, so now he’s out for blood. He used to work for Glynnis. Now he’s a cultural critic for some blog. He should also get a fucking medal for most ticlike usage of the word like. That’s millennial journalistic integrity at its best.” I turn to the fridge and haul a bottle of Ketel One out of the freezer. “Besides, this is New York. I’ve heard of sex in worse places.”

I’m dumping the vodka into a tumbler of orange juice when Danny reaches out, gently takes hold of my wrist. “That doesn’t bother me,” he says. “If watching Irrefutable Love didn’t make me jealous, you think that would?” He flips the page, points. “Right there.”


I don’t think many people understand what that was like for her. Sharon and Mel had each other. No spouses, no partners of note, no close family members. They were each other’s family. Of course she’s not the same person. When something like that happens to you, you move a little slower, a little more cautiously. That’s what you do when you’ve been wounded. I think stopping work, for her, is a protective mechanism. If this is what you do, it’s part of who you are. It’s as natural as walking or breathing. I definitely got the sense that Mel was the one who had the big ideas, and Sharon was the one who kind of kept things moving.



I wince before I remember that Danny is watching me.


Who wouldn’t be just totally lost after something like that? No one knows if she’ll ever draw again. It would surprise me, in fact, if she did.



I have to stop and put the book down, it hurts so bad. Oh God. Please, let this be Brecky on a bad day. Just Brecky running her mouth, ruminating, and not Donnie. Please not Donnie. Because that would finally do it. That would lay the last, lethal hairline fracture on my heart.

I close the book and hand it back to Danny, careful not to look at him. Pick up the screwdriver, now slightly warm. “When I got up this morning,” I say, “I wouldn’t have given two fucks about somebody flapping their jaws in some stupid book. But now that it’s ruined my day, someone’s getting the boots.”

“This is something you love,” Danny says quietly. “Sharon. Look at me. You think I don’t know that this was your life, before we met? You think I don’t see you not drawing anymore? I see it. It’s an omission, and I can see it. I can see the gap, in you.”

I shrug.

“If you’ve given up something you love so much,” he says, “and you haven’t said a single solitary word about it, I take that as a sign that something is very wrong. It makes me worry about what might be happening to you on the inside. It makes me worry that you might regret what you’re doing with your life right now, later. How that regret might spread to other parts of your life.”

He goes quiet. The silence in the room is unbearable.

I say, “What. You wanna hear more Penthouse Forum stories about me fucking in the abandoned Funlands? Is that it?”

He leaves the room.

Danny’s right. He knows nothing. I’ve kept it all from him—the terrifyingly fossilized middle of me that used to spread and contract like a living thing, when I sat down to work. About Mel. My memories are disintegrating, slurring together. I watch an interview of us online from years ago, both of us college-sprung and round-faced, babies, and I hear her say the words, “I’m Mel Vaught,” and it raises the hairs on the back of my neck. I’m forgetting the sound of her voice. The way she coughed. Her footfalls. All sensory evidence that she’d even been a person, evaporating. A part of me can’t help but crawl deeper inside in response. I can’t take another part of myself grinding to a halt.